“Listen, Jules!” she cried imperiously. “My brother is below, and the house is surrounded. If I stamp upon the floor you will be raided instantly. And you know there are things here you would not like the police to see—they don’t know it, but you and I do! Suppose Demidoff learned that his papers had fallen into Raoul Gregoire’s hands—eh?”
For a moment Yvette thought Charetier would have risked everything and sprung at her. But it was only for a moment. Then he collapsed. It was evident he feared Demidoff, the notorious Bolshevik agent, even more than he feared the police.
“Very well, mademoiselle,” he replied, beads of perspiration standing out upon his wide white forehead and, despite his bravado, a hunted look crept into his eyes. “You might try the ‘Chat Mort.’ There will be a meeting there at three o’clock this morning. But again I implore you not to go. You cannot get in and if you did you would never come out alive.”
“In which room do they meet?” was Yvette’s only reply.
“The one at the back, looking out upon the old courtyard,” was Charetier’s reply. “I know no more than that.”
“Thanks, Charetier,” said Yvette as she rose to go.
“But, my dear mademoiselle,” implored the innkeeper, “you will not breathe—”
Yvette cut him short.
“That’s enough, Charetier,” she said in a freezing tone. “You surely know you are safe so far as I am concerned. You have done me a great service to-night and I shall not forget.” Five minutes later Yvette and Jules were hastening to the “Chat Mort,” a tavern of a gayer night-life than the one they had just quitted. It stood on the corner of two filthy slums in the Villette Quarter and at the rear was one of those tiny courtyards which so often go with old French houses—a place given over to the storage of odds and ends of flotsam and jetsam which are hardly worth the trouble of keeping, or even stealing. Only a rickety wooden fence divided it from the horrible alley deep in mud and refuse.
They realised at once that to enter the house would be impossible. It was now long past two o’clock and the street was deserted; everything was silent as the grave, and from the closely shuttered “Chat Mort” there was not a glimmer of light. To all appearances the inhabitants were soundly asleep.