THE CITY OF SMILES.
Paris has greatly changed since the war. The bonhomie of the boulevards, so marked a feature before the year 1914, has subsided a good deal. The inhabitants, considered collectively, are more serious.
Hopford and Johnson’s friend, Idris Llanvar, with whom Hopford was now staying, were discussing these and other matters one morning in Paris, when they were joined by Hopford’s friend who worked for Le Matin. Tall, slim, good-looking, and with the charming manner peculiar to descendants of the old French noblesse, he raised his hat as he approached, then apologized in excellent English for his unpunctuality.
“We had a fire at the office of Le Matin,” he said, “which almost prevented the paper from coming out; but thanks to the courtesy of the Journal des Débats, which afforded us facilities for printing, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour.”
He poured himself out a glass of wine from the bottle on the table—they were sitting outside a café on the Boulevard des Italiens—and continued:
“I have a proposal to make to you, Hopford, and to you, too, monsieur,” he said, turning to Idris Llanvar, “which, if it meets with your approval, may have a rather important result. I understand from my friend Hopford here that we three are to put our heads together to try to make certain discoveries which, if we succeed, will create something of a sensation when made public. I have already told Hopford I know of certain happenings in Paris which, I believe, bear directly on affairs which have occurred in London within the past year or two, and more particularly recently. Now, two friends of mine belong to the Secret Service Police of Paris, and what they don’t know concerning the movements and methods of international criminals is, as you say in England, not worth knowing. One is a man, the other a woman. They are coming to me to-night, and I hope you will both come along too, so that the five of us may discuss certain affairs. Will that suit you both?”
And so, late that night, four men and a woman, all of exceptionally keen intelligence, endowed with the peculiar attributes which go to the making of a clever police detective or a successful newspaper reporter, were gathered together in a small room in one of those quaint, low-roofed houses with which visitors to the Quartier Latin are familiar.
The woman was an odd-looking person of about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with hair cut short like a man’s, a pale face, firm lips, and dark, extremely shrewd eyes. She bore the reputation, Hopford’s friend said, of possessing more dogged perseverance than any other member of the Paris detective force. During the war, he told them, she had succeeded in bringing no less than seven spies to book without any assistance whatever, all of whom had eventually been put to death.
Hopford had finished giving the assembled party all the information he possessed concerning the two epidemics of suicide in London; the various thefts which had occurred in connection with this narrative; and other matters with which the reader is acquainted, and was lighting a fresh cigar, when the woman, after a pause, inquired:
“This Madame Vandervelt who threw herself out of the hotel window. When did that happen?”