Two flights up the detective found himself in a spacious corridor off which opened seven doors leading to the offices of seven judges. Seven! Strange this resemblance to the fatal corridor at the Ansonia! And stranger still that Judge Hauteville's office should be Number Six!
Coquenil moved on past palace guards in bright apparel, past sad-faced witnesses and brisk lawyers of the court in black robes with amusing white bibs at their throats. And presently he entered Judge Hauteville's private room, where an amiable greffier asked him to sit down until the judge should arrive.
There was nothing in the plain and rather businesslike furnishings of this room to suggest the somber and sordid scenes daily enacted here. On the dull leather of a long table, covered with its usual litter of papers, had been spread the criminal facts of a generation, the sinister harvest of ignorance and vice and poverty. On these battered chairs had sat and twisted hundreds of poor wretches, innocent and guilty, petty thieves, shifty-eyed scoundrels, dull brutes of murderers, and occasionally a criminal of a higher class, summoned for the preliminary examinations. Here, under the eye of a bored guard, they had passed miserable hours while the judge, smiling or frowning, hands in his pockets, strode back and forth over the shabby red-and-green carpet putting endless questions, sifting out truth from falsehood, struggling against stupidity and cunning, studying each new case as a separate problem with infinite tact and insight, never wearying, never losing his temper, coming back again and again to the essential point until more than one stubborn criminal had broken down and, from sheer exhaustion, confessed, like the assassin who finally blurted out: "Well, yes, I did it. I'd rather be guillotined than bothered like this."
Such was Judge Hauteville, cold, patient, inexorable in the pursuit of truth. And presently he arrived.
"You look serious this morning," he said, remarking Coquenil's pale face.
"Yes," nodded M. Paul, "that's how I feel," and settling himself in a chair he proceeded to relate the events of the night, ending with a frank account of his misadventure on the Champs Elysées.
The judge listened with grave attention. This was a more serious affair than he had imagined. Not only was there no longer any question of suicide, but it was obvious that they were dealing with a criminal of the most dangerous type and one possessed of extraordinary resources.
"You believe it was the assassin himself who met you?" questioned Hauteville.
"Don't you?"
"I'm not sure. You think his motive was to get the woman's address?"