Fearing lest any of the trio might be lounging at the café in front of the hotel, where arriving cabs file slowly past, I dismissed the vehicle at the corner of the Rue du Havre, and approached the hotel on the opposite side of the way.
One of my chief difficulties was the entering and leaving the hotel, for I never knew whom I might meet. I had had several narrow escapes from recognition, notwithstanding every possible precaution.
At last, however, after carefully examining all who were lounging about the entrance, I managed to slip in, passing the big-moustached concierge, and ascending by the lift to my own room, utterly worn out by anxiety and fatigue.
CHAPTER XXVI
GIVES THE KEY TO THE CIPHER
Even though tired out, I slept but little that night. I tried, times without number, but in vain, to solve the secret of that cipher message—or warning, was it?—written upon the table before the "Grand Café." But neither the initial nor the word "tabac" conveyed to me any meaning whatever. One fact seemed particularly strange, namely, the reason why the ragged collector of cigar-ends should have searched for it; and, further, why the word written there should have been "tabac." Again, who was the shabby, wizen-faced individual who had watched that table with such eagerness and expectancy?
As I reflected, I became impressed by the idea that the table itself was one of those known to be a notice-board of criminals, and therefore at night it was watched by the police.
The great Goron, that past-master in the detection of crime, had, I remembered, told me that in all the quarters of Paris, from the chic Avenue des Champs Elysées to the lower parts of Montmartre, there were certain tables at certain cafés used by thieves, burglars, and other such gentry, for the exchange of messages, the dissemination of news, and the issue of warnings. Indeed, the correspondence on the café tables was found to be more rapid, far more secret, and likely to attract less notice than the insertion of paragraphs in the advertisement columns of the newspapers. Each gang of malefactors had, he told me, its own particular table in its own particular café, where any member could sit and read at his leisure the cipher notice, or warning, placed there, without risking direct communication with his associates in rascality.
Had the man whom I had so fondly loved actually allied himself with some criminal band, that he knew their means of communication, and was in possession of their cipher? It certainly seemed as though he had. But that was one of the points I intended to clear up before denouncing him to the police.
Next morning I rose early, eager for activity, but there seemed no movement in the room adjoining mine. All three took their coffee in their bedrooms, and it was not till nearly eleven o'clock that I heard Keppel in conversation with the mysterious woman who had been my travelling companion.