"Until midnight!"
Sigismond Trottier was a man who kept his appointments. He was not neat in his person, or punctual in his payments. He never went to church, and he did not always wash. But if he promised a page of copy to a newspaper, the page was delivered in due time. If he offered to frank a friend to the theatre, in his quality as critic, he was waiting in the vestibule at the appointed hour, ready to keep his word. If he accepted an invitation to supper, he never kept his host waiting. Invitations to dinner he invariably declined.
"A dinner-party is an anti-climax," he protested. "A man gets drunk too early, and spoils his evening."
At midnight Monsieur Trottier's evening began, and he was ready for the feast.
Mr. Heathcote received him in one of the cosiest little rooms in the café. The Englishman's first act on entering had been to light all the wax candles on the mantelpiece, which the waiters had left unlighted. This established him at once as a man who knew his Paris, and his judicious choice of wines having strengthened his position, everything was ready when Trottier's shabby olive-green coat came meekly into the radiance of the wax candles. Trottier was known at the Café de Paris, and his shabby coat commanded the reverence of the waiters. Was he not a man who, as it were, carried reputations in his pocket, who could make a head-waiter famous by a stroke of his pen?
The supper was delicate, recherché, Parisian; the wine was Johannisberger of princely quality, and a magnum of Mumms decanted in a cut-crystal pitcher appeared with the last course. The two men talked of general topics during supper. It was only when the waiters had withdrawn, and when Sigismond Trottier had thrown himself back in his chair and lighted his cigarette, that Heathcote approached the business of the evening. It was half-past one o'clock, and the roll of wheels upon the asphalte below the open window had been gradually diminishing. There was no longer the roar of the Boulevard to disturb the speakers.
"If I can be of the slightest use to you, as an embodied chronicle of Paris, command me," said Trottier. "Here I am at your service—an open book. You have only to turn my leaves."
"Do you remember a double murder—the murder of an actress and her lover—which happened ten years ago, in the forest of Saint-Germain?"
"Do I remember? Yes, as if the thing had happened last week; and for a good reason. The man who was suspected—the lover, or, as some thought, the husband, of the actress—was my familiar friend."