“Where are you going?”
“You’re mighty curious, ain’t you? still, as the gentleman wants to know, we’ve arranged to meet at the Blue Chestnut—that’s plain and simple enough, what?”
“Why, yes,” the other agreed, “but as it happens, I’m going there, too.”
“Then, march on in front,” ordered the girl, “and I’ll stick behind; I don’t care to look as if I were making up to chaps about these parts.”
The man was all docility and obeyed instantly; walking a few steps ahead of the young harlot, but every now and then casting a furtive glance over his shoulder to make sure the girl was following on the same road as himself, he stumped off in the direction of the Blue Chestnut, seeming very well pleased with the beginning he had so far made. With a quick movement he swept the hair lower on his forehead and pulled out his handkerchief he had wrapped round his jaws under pretence of protecting his aching teeth against the cold.
“So much to the good,” he thought to himself; “she’s never recognized me—and I have good hopes it’ll be the same with the others.”
Who was this mysterious person who had made bold to squeeze Mlle. Nini’s waist as she was peaceably leaving the city by the Porte de Poissonnière? It was no other in actual fact than Jérôme Fandor!
For some days past the young journalist had been leading an absolutely appalling existence. Events had followed quick on each other’s heels, each more disconcerting, more overwhelming than the other. Chance and mischance had thrown him into adventures that grew more and more baffling, and seemed to him to leave no loophole for escape.
First his meeting with Elisabeth Dollon, then his connection with old Moche—a tricky scamp he felt he could not trust—then after being unjustly accused by Elisabeth, he had been odiously victimized through Fantômas’ vile machinations, bringing him under the strongest suspicion of having caused the death of three policemen. And all this, just a few hours after Parliament had acclaimed him one of the authors of the violent attack on the Minister of Justice.
Escaped by a miracle from the clutches of the police, the journalist had ever since the tragic night in M. Moche’s garret led an insufferable existence, hardly daring to go out at all, and then only at night in the most out-of-the-way districts, spending whole days hiding in slums, concealed in rag-pickers’ hovels, in constant terror of being caught. And now, to put the coping-stone on his misery had come the assassination of Désiré Ferrand, a mystery still unsolved, a crime without doubt the work of Fantômas, thought Fandor, but which no less surely would rouse the Criminal Investigation Department to renewed exertions, and render his continued evasion more than ever precarious.