“You were right, quite right in your supposition. But, by-the-by, why did you not come to the Ministry?”
A smile appeared on Tom Bob’s lips; with his usual phlegm he answered M. Havard:
“And pray, why should I have gone?”
The reply was so startling in its quiet unconcern that the Head of the Criminal Bureau was struck dumb for a moment. However, he quickly recovered his self-possession and answered back:
“Why, my dear sir, because ... because when a Minister sends for one, surely one ought to take the trouble to obey.”
But Tom Bob, quite unruffled, only shrugged his shoulders. Taking a cigarette from his case, he lit it without a sign of embarrassment, then:
“You think so?” he said, “well, I think the opposite! If we differ in our ideas, it is probably because you, M. Havard, are you, purely French: and I, Tom Bob, equally American.”
“Which means?”
“Which means,” concluded the detective, with his Yankee bluntness, “that having nothing to say to the Minister, I did not feel any need to go and see him, and I considered if he wanted to speak to me, that he might very well take the trouble to come as far as the Hôtel Terminus.”
Listening to this speech of the phlegmatic American, M. Havard turned first pale, then green, sorely embarrassed as he remembered they were spoken actually before the Minister’s very face. The interview was taking an unpleasant complexion and it was best to push into other matters: “Tell me, my dear Bob,” he asked by way of turning the conversation, and getting back to serious affairs, “you can guess, I take it, why I have come this morning?”