“Then Monsieur will kindly escort us to his room.”
Lanny hesitated. His father's business papers were in that room and Robbie certainly wouldn't like to have them examined by strangers. “Suppose I refuse?” he inquired.
“Then it will be necessary for us to take you.”
Lanny had the roomkey in his pocket, and of course the two men could take it from him. He knew that they could summon whatever help they needed. “All right,” he said, and led them to the room and unlocked the door.
The spokesman preceded him and the other followed, closed the door, and fastened it; then the former said: “Monsieur will kindly give me the papers which he has in his pocket.”
Ah, so they had been watching him and Uncle Jesse! Lanny had read detective novels, and knew that it was up to him to find some way to chew up these papers and swallow them. But a dozen printed leaflets would make quite a meal, and he lacked both appetite and opportunity. He took them out and handed them to the flic, who put them into his own pocket without looking at them. “You will pardon me, Monsieur” — they were always polite to well-dressed persons, Lanny had been told. Very deftly, and as inoffensively as possible, the second man made certain that Lanny didn't have any weapon on him. In so doing he discovered some letters in the youth's coat pocket, and these also were transferred to the pockets of the elder detective. Lanny ran over quickly in his mind what was in the letters: one from his mother — fortunately she had been warned, and wrote with extreme reserve. One from Rosemary, an old one, long-cherished — how fortunate the English habit of reticence! One from his eleven-year-old half-sister — that was the only real love letter.
Lanny was invited to sit down, and the younger flic stood by, never moving his eyes from him. Evidently they must be thinking they had made an important capture. The elder man set to work to search the suite; the escritoire, the bureau drawers, the suitcases — he laid the latter on the bed and went through them, putting everything of significance into one of them. This included a thirty-eight automatic and a box of cartridges — which of course would seem more significant to a French detective than to an American.
If Lanny had been in possession of a clear conscience, he might have derived enjoyment from this opportunity to watch the French police chez eux, as it were. But having a very uneasy conscience indeed, he thought he would stop this bad joke if he could. “You are likely to find a number of guns in my father's luggage,” he remarked. “That is not because he shoots people, but because he sells guns.”
“Ah! Votre père est un marchand d'armes!” One had to hear it in French to get a full sense of the flic's surprise.
“Mon père est un fabricant d'armes” replied Lanny, still more impressively. “He has made for the French government a hundred million francs' worth of arms in the past five years. If he had not done so, the boches would be in Paris now, and you would be under the sod, perhaps.”