The Paris Prefecture of Police is a huge, quadrangular building, containing an infinity of bare, and to tell the truth, shabby, airless rooms; yet when Senator Burton had handed in his card and the note from the President of the French Senate, he was taken rapidly down a long corridor, and ushered into a splendid apartment, of which the walls were hung with red velvet, and which might have been a reception room in an Italian Palace rather than the study of a French police official.
"Monsieur le Préfet will be back from déjeuner in a few minutes," said the man, softly closing the door.
The Senator looked round him with a feeling of keen interest and curiosity. After the weary, baffling hours of fruitless effort in which he had spent the last three days, it was more than pleasant to find himself at the fountainhead of reliable information.
Since the far-off days when, as a boy, he had been thrilled by the brilliant detective stories of which French writers, with the one outstanding exception of Poe, then had a monopoly, there had never faded from Senator Burton's mind that first vivid impression of the power, the might, the keen intelligence, and yes, of the unscrupulousness, of the Paris police.
But now, having penetrated into the inner shrine of this awe-inspiring organism, he naturally preferred to think of the secret autocratic powers, and of the almost uncanny insight of those to whom he was about to make appeal. Surely they would soon probe the mystery of John Dampier's disappearance.
The door opened suddenly, and the Paris Prefect of Police walked into the room. He was holding Senator Burton's card, and the letter of introduction with which that card had been accompanied, in his sinewy nervous looking hand.
Bowing, smiling, apologising with more earnestness than was necessary for the few moments the American Senator had had to await his presence, the Prefect motioned his guest to a chair.
"I am very pleased," he said in courtly tones, "to put myself at the disposal of a member of the American Senate. Ah, sir, your country is a wonderful country! In a sense, the parent of France—for was not America the first great nation to become a Republic?"
Senator Burton bowed, a little awkwardly, in response to this flowery sentiment.
He was telling himself that Monsieur Beaucourt was quite unlike the picture he had mentally formed, from youth upwards, of the Paris Prefect of Police.