“Not yet, Monsieur le Ministre; but he cannot escape, and it is merely an affair of a few hours.”
Then the Chief of the Detective Force told the whole story: how Detective Mondésir, on being warned by a secret agent that the Anarchist Salvat was in a tavern at Montmartre, had reached it just as the bird had flown; then how chance had again set him in presence of Salvat at a hundred paces or so from the tavern, the rascal having foolishly loitered there to watch the establishment; and afterwards how Salvat had been stealthily shadowed in the hope that they might catch him in his hiding-place with his accomplices. And, in this wise, he had been tracked to the Porte-Maillot, where, realising, no doubt, that he was pursued, he had suddenly bolted into the Bois de Boulogne. It was there that he had been hiding since two o’clock in the morning in the drizzle which had not ceased to fall. They had waited for daylight in order to organise a battue and hunt him down like some animal, whose weariness must necessarily ensure capture. And so, from one moment to another, he would be caught.
“I know the great interest you take in the arrest, Monsieur le Ministre,” added Gascogne, “and it occurred to me to ask your orders. Detective Mondésir is over there, directing the hunt. He regrets that he did not apprehend the man on the Boulevard de Rochechouart; but, all the same, the idea of following him was a capital one, and one can only reproach Mondésir with having forgotten the Bois de Boulogne in his calculations.”
Salvat arrested! That fellow Salvat whose name had filled the newspapers for three weeks past. This was a most fortunate stroke which would be talked of far and wide! In the depths of Monferrand’s fixed eyes one could divine a world of thoughts and a sudden determination to turn this incident which chance had brought him to his own personal advantage. In his own mind a link was already forming between this arrest and that African Railways interpellation which was likely to overthrow the ministry on the morrow. The first outlines of a scheme already rose before him. Was it not his good star that had sent him what he had been seeking—a means of fishing himself out of the troubled waters of the approaching crisis?
“But tell me, Monsieur Gascogne,” said he, “are you quite sure that this man Salvat committed the crime?”
“Oh! perfectly sure, Monsieur le Ministre. He’ll confess everything in the cab before he reaches the Prefecture.”
Monferrand again walked to and fro with a pensive air, and ideas came to him as he spoke on in a slow, meditative fashion. “My orders! well, my orders, they are, first, that you must act with the very greatest prudence. Yes, don’t gather a mob of promenaders together. Try to arrange things so that the arrest may pass unperceived—and if you secure a confession keep it to yourself, don’t communicate it to the newspapers. Yes, I particularly recommend that point to you, don’t take the newspapers into your confidence at all—and finally, come and tell me everything, and observe secrecy, absolute secrecy, with everybody else.”
Gascogne bowed and would have withdrawn, but Monferrand detained him to say that not a day passed without his friend Monsieur Lehmann, the Public Prosecutor, receiving letters from Anarchists who threatened to blow him up with his family; in such wise that, although he was by no means a coward, he wished his house to be guarded by plain-clothes officers. A similar watch was already kept upon the house where investigating magistrate Amadieu resided. And if the latter’s life was precious, that of Public Prosecutor Lehmann was equally so, for he was one of those political magistrates, one of those shrewd talented Israelites, who make their way in very honest fashion by invariably taking the part of the Government in office.
Then Gascogne in his turn remarked: “There is also the Barthès affair, Monsieur le Ministre—we are still waiting. Are we to arrest Barthès at that little house at Neuilly?”
One of those chances which sometimes come to the help of detectives and make people think the latter to be men of genius had revealed to him the circumstance that Barthès had found a refuge with Abbé Pierre Froment. Ever since the Anarchist terror had thrown Paris into dismay a warrant had been out against the old man, not for any precise offence, but simply because he was a suspicious character and might, therefore, have had some intercourse with the Revolutionists. However, it had been repugnant to Gascogne to arrest him at the house of a priest whom the whole district venerated as a saint; and the Minister, whom he had consulted on the point, had warmly approved of his reserve, since a member of the clergy was in question, and had undertaken to settle the affair himself.