“I have a great mind,” he announced, “to go and inform the Commissary, he lives close by.”
“You should have done that long ago!” Tom Bob said rebukingly.
Then, while the sergeant was issuing his orders, the detective sat down in the public office, lit a cigarette, and did not vouchsafe another word.
Before coming thus rudely to disturb the peace and quietness of the Alfort Commissariat, Tom Bob had been wandering up and down most part of the night in perplexity. On quitting the Palais de Justice, leaving Fuselier to make the best of his absurd plight, that ambiguous individual had realized one fact quite clearly, viz., that the magistrate had looked at him in a way that was decidedly disquieting. An extraordinary thing for him, Tom Bob’s face had blanched somewhat under the magistrate’s questioning look, but he quickly recovered his customary coolness. Stepping out on to the Boulevard du Palais, quite empty and deserted at this late hour, he hailed a passing taxi and offered the driver a handsome tip to drive him as far as the first houses of Alfort.
There the detective quitted his conveyance and plunged into the darkness of the silent lanes of the sleeping village. He entered a deserted house; and strange to say, a few moments later, it was not Tom Bob who reappeared, but Père Moche—Moche with his wig, his spectacles, his big nose, as soft and flabby as an indiarubber ball, and his red whiskers. It was Moche who was now making his way slowly and deliberately towards the building where two days before he had gone to bury the strong box containing his money and where, without his knowing it, he had imprisoned Fandor when he double locked the door behind him on his departure. It was Moche who, hidden near by, watched his friends the apaches one after another approach the house to which he knew that Juve, mistaken for Fantômas, had been brought. It was Moche who, as time went by and he sat watching how matters were going, fell to rubbing his hands in self-congratulation.
“No need,” he thought to himself, “to go myself; I should only be risking the same fate as Juve. Now, what is happening?... it is three o’clock in the morning, Juve is on his defence at this very moment, they are demanding their pay, and he cannot give it them;... I know my fine fellows—in ten minutes my sweet friend, the police-inspector, will be put to death, doomed as a Fantômas at once traitor and perjurer!”
Père Moche rose and set off at a run for the more central parts of the city. Suddenly he snatched away his wig and spectacles, pulled off his false nose and red whiskers—and, extraordinary to relate, instead of the old usurer’s ill-omened face appeared the keen, refined countenance of the American Tom Bob. In a ringing voice the latter cried in defiance of men and gods:
“Good-bye, old Moche, good-bye, Tom Bob, I thank you both for lending me your fascinating personalities and enabling me thus to triumph over my opponents. Fantômas, my boy, you’ve worked to some purpose!”
Could anyone have overheard this extraordinary soliloquy, he would assuredly have been struck with sheer amazement, for if at a pinch sundry persons had come to suppose that Père Moche bore so close an affinity with Fantômas that possibly he was Fantômas himself, none could ever think that the detective, who had come to France under official sanction with the express object of hunting down the brigand, was in fact none other than that same notorious, ever evasive criminal, now better assured than ever against capture, seeing he was actually giving chase to himself.
Fantômas stood, a solitary figure in the far-stretching plain, thinking.