It was late in the afternoon of a hot July day, the hottest day Paris had known that year (1907) and M. Coquenil, followed by a splendid white-and-brown shepherd dog, was walking down the Rue de la Cité, past the somber mass of the city hospital. Before reaching the Place Notre-Dame he stopped twice, once at a flower market that offered the grateful shade of its gnarled polenia trees just beyond the Conciergerie prison, and once under the heavy archway of the Prefecture de Police. At the flower market he bought a white carnation from a woman in green apron and wooden shoes, who looked in awe at his pale, grave face, and thrilled when he gave her a smile and friendly word. She wondered if it was true, as people said, that M. Coquenil always wore glasses with a slightly bluish tint so that no one could see his eyes.
The detective walked on, busy with pleasant thoughts. This was the hour of his triumph and justification, this made up for the cruel blow that had fallen two years before and resulted, no one understood why, in his leaving the Paris detective force at the very moment of his glory, when the whole city was praising him for the St. Germain investigation. Beau Cocono! That was the name they had given him; he could hear the night crowds shouting it in a silly couplet: Il nous faut-o
Beau Cocono-o!
And then what a change within a week! What bitterness and humiliation! M. Paul Coquenil, after scores of brilliant successes, had withdrawn from the police force for personal reasons, said the newspapers. His health was affected, some declared; he had laid by a tidy fortune and wished to enjoy it, thought others; but many shook their heads mysteriously and whispered that there was something queer in all this. Coquenil himself said nothing.
But now facts would speak for him more eloquently than any words; now, within twenty-four hours, it would be announced that he had been chosen, on the recommendation of the Paris police department, to organize the detective service of a foreign capital, with a life position at the head of this service and a much larger salary than he had ever received, a larger salary, in fact, than Paris paid to its own chief of police.
M. Coquenil had reached this point in his musings when he caught sight of a red-faced man, with a large purplish nose and a suspiciously black mustache (for his hair was gray), coming forward from the prefecture to meet him.
"Ah, Papa Tignol!" he said briskly. "How goes it?"
The old man saluted deferentially, and then, half shutting his small gray eyes, replied with an ominous chuckle, as one who enjoys bad news: "Eh, well enough, M. Paul; but I don't like that." And, lifting an unshaven chin, he pointed over his shoulder with a long, grimy thumb to the western sky.
"Always croaking!" laughed the other. "Why, it's a fine sunset, man!"
Tignol answered slowly, with objecting nod: "It's too red. And it's barred with purple!"
"Like your nose. Ha, ha!" And Coquenil's face lighted gaily. "Forgive me, Papa Tignol."