"If necessary, yes."
"And my mother?"
"If necessary."
The decisive moment had come, not only because Coquenil's anger was stirred by this cynical avowal, but because just then there shot around the corner from the Avenue Montaigne a large red automobile which crossed the Champs Elysées slowly, past the fountain and the tulip beds, and, turning into the Avenue Gabrielle, stopped under the chestnut trees, its engines throbbing. Like a flash it came into the detective's mind that the same automobile had passed them once before some streets back. Ah, here was the intended way of escape! On the front seat were two men, strong-looking fellows, accomplices, no doubt. He must act at once while the wide street was still between them.
"I ask because—" began M. Paul with his indifferent drawl, then swiftly drawing his whistle, he sounded a danger call that cut the air in sinister alarm. The stranger sprang away, but Coquenil was on him in a bound, clutching him by the throat and pressing him back with intertwining legs for a sudden fall. The bearded man saved himself by a quick turn, and with a great heave of his shoulders broke the detective's grip, then suddenly he attacked, smiting for the neck, not with clenched fist but with the open hand held sideways in the treacherous cleaving blow that the Japanese use when they strike for the carotid. Coquenil ducked forward, saving himself, but he felt the descending hand hard as stone on his shoulders.
"He struck with his right," thought M. Paul.
At the same moment he felt his adversary's hand close on his throat and rejoiced, for he knew the deadly Jitsu reply to this. Hardening his neck muscles until they covered the delicate parts beneath like bands of steel, the detective seized his enemy's extended arm in his two hands, one at the wrist, one at the elbow, and as his trained fingers sought the painful pressure points, his two free arms started a resistless torsion movement on the captured arm. There is no escape from this movement, no enduring its excruciating pain; to a man taken at such a disadvantage one of two things may happen. He may yield, and in that case he is hurled helpless over his adversary's shoulder, or he may resist, with the result that the tendons are torn from his lacerated arm and he faints in agony.
Such was the master hold gained by M. Paul in the first minute of the struggle; long and carefully he had practiced this coup with a wrestling professional. It never failed, it could not fail, and, in savage triumph, he prolonged his victory, slowly increasing the pressure, slowly as he felt the tendons stretching, the bones cracking in this helpless right arm. A few seconds more and the end would come, a few seconds more and—then a crashing, shattering pain drove through Coquenil's lower heart region, his arms relaxed, his hands relaxed, his senses dimmed, and he sank weakly to the ground. His enemy had done an extraordinary thing, had delivered a blow not provided for in Jitsu tactics. In spite of the torsion torture, he had swung his free arm under the detective's lifted guard, not in Yokohama style but in the best manner of the old English prize ring, his clenched fist falling full on the point of the heart, full on the unguarded solar-plexus nerves which God put there for the undoing of the vainglorious fighters. And Coquenil dropped like a smitten ox with this thought humming in his darkening brain: "It was the left that spoke then."
