“What, no ideals — in the Palais de Justice?”
Quercy sighed. He gazed across his littered desk into the dancing blue eyes under quizzically tilted brows, and for a moment the lugubriousness in his own gaze was very deep and real. The sight of the tall broad-shouldered figure sprawled with such impudent grace in his shabby armchair made a mockery of the conventional stiffness of the room, just as the casual elegance of its clothing affronted the hard-worn dilapidation of the furniture; the warm bronze of the preposterously handsome face seemed to bring its own sun into the dingy room, whispering outlandish heresies of open skies and wide places where the wind blew, and because of this man the office seemed more cramped and drab and dustier than ever, and the gloom of it touched the soul of its proper occupant. It was a sensation that many other policemen had had when they came face to face with that last amazing heir to the mantle of Robin Hood, when they knew it was their turn to try to tame him and realized the immensity of the task...
“I mean,” said Inspector Quercy patiently, “that there are servants of the Republic, of whom I am one, employed here to concern themselves with crime. If you, as an individual, acquire knowledge of any crime or criminals, we shall be glad to receive your information, but we do not allow private persons to take over the duties of the police. Still less do we permit anyone to administer his own interpretation of justice, as I hear you have sometimes claimed to do. Furthermore I must warn you that here, under the Code Napoleon, you would not have the same advantage that you have enjoyed in England and America. There, you are legally innocent until you are proved guilty; here, with sufficient grounds, you may be placed on trial and required to prove yourself innocent.”
The Saint smiled.
“I appreciate the warning,” he murmured. “But the truth is, I did come here for the food, the wine, and the pretty girls. I hadn’t thought of giving you any trouble.” The devil in him couldn’t resist adding, “So far.”
“Let it remain that way, Monsieur. A vacation does everyone good.”
Simon offered a cigarette, and struck a light for them both.
“Now that I know how you feel about me,” he remarked, “I suppose I ought to thank you for not trying to pin that Rosepierre murder on me. It must have taken great restraint not to grab such a readymade scapegoat.”
He had been reading the story in a newspaper at breakfast. The body of a young man identified as Charles Rosepierre had been found murdered in the Bois de Boulogne, the spacious park adjacent to the most fashionable residential quarter of Paris. There appeared to be no clue to the murderer, or even to the motive, for he was a respectable clerk in a shipping office, vouched for by his employers as honest and hard-working and by his friends and associates as being sober and amiable and impossible to connect with any shady acquaintances. He carried very little money, but he had not been robbed. He had left the office at the usual time on the day he died, apparently with no apprehensions, and it was understood that he was going to have dinner and call later on the girl he was courting, but he had not been seen since until his body was found a few yards from one of the roads through the park. There was no hint of a jealous rival, nor did anything in his open commonplace life give any grounds to believe in a crime of passion, yet a passion of some weird kind must have been involved. For what lent the crime the eerie touch of horror that justified the space allotted to it in the press was the fact that although he had died almost instantly from a knife stab in the heart, his head had been severed from his body after he was dead, and was found where it had presumably rolled a few feet away.
“I might have thought of you,” Quercy said, without the ghost of a smile, “if Rosepierre’s body had not been found two hours before your plane landed at Orly. When he was killed and his head was being cut off, there is no doubt that you were half-way over the Atlantic.”