Abruptly he changed the subject.
"Vagualame had a collaborator, a young person whom you know—Mademoiselle Berthe, called Bobinette.... Bobinette has done wrong, very wrong, but we will speak no more of her—peace to her memory—she has expiated her crime!"
"Is Bobinette dead, then?" asked Fandor.... Immediately a conviction seized him that the girl had fallen a victim to this mysterious assassin whom no one could lay hands on.
The studio clock struck ten.
The lights went out.
Fandor stood startled, in deepest darkness.
Before he could utter an exclamation, move a finger, he was swathed in a cloth, seized, bound, with the utmost brutality. Mysterious hands fixed a supple mask on his face, pressed something on his head. Dragged violently along, the cords cutting his flesh, Fandor realised his attackers were fastening him to something which held him stiffly upright. It must be one of the iron columns.
Fandor thought he heard a receding voice mutter: "As Bobinette died, so shalt thou die—through Fantômas!"
Had he heard aright? Was it some illusion of sense and brain?... Was it not he himself who had cried it? For Fandor, whose mind had been full of Vagualame, had, at the moment of attack, spontaneously thought of Fantômas.
Fandor strained at his bonds and thought of the baron.