“But, sir ... but!” Fandor stammered, again bemused with surprise, as he sat down again, while the other insisted:
“There’s no ‘but’ about it; it is so! However, let’s leave that. You did not come to see me, I presume, for the mere pleasure of annoying me by standing? You came to tell me something. What have you to tell me?”
Fandor called up all his coolness, shut his eyes a second, pulled himself together, and now, in a calm voice, assented, without troubling further about his interlocutor’s eccentricities:
“You are right, sir: I have come to tell you something, to tell you this—I am indeed Jérôme Fandor.”
“Excuse me,” broke in Tom Bob, “but how came you to recognize me?”
“Gad! sir,” confessed Fandor, smiling innocently, “the newspapers, announcing your sensational arrival the other day, published your portrait, which no doubt they had among their stock of blocks. I knew, moreover, that you would land from the Lorraine, saw the Trans-Atlantic special come in, I followed you from the Commissary’s office which you visited, I don’t know for what reason, to this hotel, and ...”
“Very good!... Now, you came to tell me?”
“Sir,” replied Fandor, “you have challenged Fantômas to mortal combat; Fantômas, as you know, has set himself to terrorize Paris, to make war on France, on civilization itself ...”
Tom Bob interrupted again: “I have heard of his challenge to the Chamber. Proceed!”
“Good!” Fandor agreed. “But Fantômas has committed crimes you have not heard of. Yesterday a Minister was killed ...”