“How do I know I’m sitting here?” the old woman answered. “Because I know. I’ll tell you. I used to hear them quarreling. It was awful. And one night after the show I was passing Madam Bandoux’s dressing-room and I heard her screaming. And I stopped to listen, and there was poor Victor inside saying: ‘Do you detest me like that? Do you loathe me like that?’ And Madam was screaming, ‘I do ... I do.’ And then I heard Victor Ballau say in a low voice, ‘Then I’ll have to kill you.’ And that was a few days before she disappeared. They went away together after that. But nobody ever heard of Madam again. He came to America alone a little while after, taking the baby with him. But nobody ever heard about poor Madam Bandoux except there was a rumor he had married her, Victor Ballau had. And I kept my mouth shut because I was sorry for him and he was a fine man before it happened.”
“And what else do you know?” De Medici murmured.
The old woman laughed bitterly.
“He shouldn’t have killed her. He was such a nice man. But that’s the way life is. The nice people do all the bad things. And he got his reward, poor Victor did. Somebody killed him.”
De Medici arose.
“If I want to talk to you can I find you here, Fanny?” he asked.
“Yes, here. All day,” she answered.
He spent a few minutes thanking the old woman and finally closed the door of the littered basement room behind him. In the street he walked swiftly, intent on finding a cab. A few minutes later he was riding through the traffic. His eyes half shut, he was again tracing the circles of the mystery.
“From what she said,” he thought as the cab bounced slowly forward, “one thing becomes certain. Florence Bandoux is still alive. It was her purse I found in the library. Her initials. And the woman Hugo is bringing back from Rollo tonight is Florence Bandoux, alias Floria, the lady of the dagger. So far, so good. But this other thing, then. Hm, an offensive discrepancy. The attack on me. That wasn’t by Floria, then. Yes, I was right before. A sickening idea. But it was Florence trying to imitate her mother. Willing to kill me and thinking she had ... and laughing. But for whom did she laugh so insanely? Because madness was in her. Her desire to divert suspicion from her mother become a mania. Grief and terror unbalancing her mind. And in an hour of insanity this grewsome plan of imitating Floria and thus exonerating the woman she had hidden in Rollo, Maine. To be understood. Yes, easy to follow.”
An emotion shattered the sentences. He loved her. And she had tried to kill him. It didn’t matter. He still loved her, adored her. The sense of her torment and madness seemed to bring him prostrate before her.