As a matter of fact, the journalist’s condition showed no improvement. Since his interview with Tom Bob, he had had no occasion to renew acquaintance with the American detective, who, as the object of a hundred flattering attentions on the part of the Parisian population, seemed to him, all things considered, a decidedly dangerous personage to see much of, in view of the close relations maintained between him and the authorities. Fandor was now making a living by all sorts of queer odd jobs—risking his life opening carriage doors on the occasion of grand weddings at fashionable churches, of selling evening papers on the boulevards, picking up a few sous by casual labour at the Halles, just enough to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless, he would not have been over and above disquieted by his precarious situation but for the fact that public opinion had little by little come round to the preposterous belief that he, Fandor, was, if not Fantômas, at any rate one of the chief accomplices of that dangerous criminal, now a prisoner in the Santé. This easy, blockhead theory the whole police force had adopted, and every journal was proclaiming.
At a time when Fantômas, with unheard-of effrontery, was committing crime after crime, when the most appalling murders had grown so common that the public, seriously alarmed, were asking themselves if it was not best to pay Fantômas the tithes he claimed, at such a time Fandor told himself that the view which represented him as the guilty party had every chance of finding favour, just because it possessed the merit of being simple to the last degree!
“Once let them catch me,” he thought, “and it’ll be short shrift and no mercy for me!”
Accordingly, every night, while waiting events and looking confidently for the result of Tom Bob’s inquiries, Fandor would betake himself to the Bois, and there spend the night, if not in comfort, at any rate, so at least he hoped, safe from the perquisitions of the Criminal Investigation officers.
But what precisely was Tom Bob doing? On what lines was he pursuing his investigations against Fantômas? As to this, Fandor was very much in the dark. Like the general public, he had read in the newspapers of the sensational discovery of the bank collector’s body which the American detective had succeeded in making in Elisabeth Dollon’s flat. Fandor, like everybody else, more perhaps than most, for he knew the difficulties that beset police researches, had felt a profound admiration for the astuteness the American had given proof of on that occasion.
“No doubt,” Fandor said to himself, “I put him on the scent when I told him about Moche, but all said and done, I had no information to give him of a sort to lead him to the discovery of the victim. The line of reasoning that took him to Elisabeth’s, that brought about the finding of the ‘wall that bleeds,’ after rousing his suspicions of Paulet, this reasoning was purely his own and it is marvellous in all respects.”
He had even added in his self-communings:
“If my fine fellow goes on as he has begun, I verily believe Fantômas will have found his match!”
It was the sole gleam of hope still left to Jérôme Fandor.
“Ho there! my man.”