One of the Italian police officers shouted to the scarlet-capped station-master to have the train stopped, but that stately official, his hands behind his back, only walked calmly in our direction to hear the voluble words which fell from the French officer's lips.
By that time the train had rounded the curve and was dropping from sight.
My heart sank within me. Once again Jeanjean had escaped!
We were making frantic inquiry regarding the two fugitives when a porter, who chanced to overhear my words, expressed a belief that they had not left by the Rome express, but for Turin by the train that had and started a quarter of an hour before.
I rushed to the booking office, and, after some inquiry of the lazy, cigar-smoking clerk, learned that two foreigners, answering the descriptions of the men I wanted, had taken tickets for London by way of the Mont Cenis Paris-Calais route. He gave me the ticket numbers.
Yes. The porter was correct. They had left by the express for Turin, and the frontier at Modane!
With Fournier and the two policemen, I went to the Questura, or Central Police Office, situated in a big, gloomy, old medieval palace—for Genoa is eminently a city of ancient palaces—and before the Chief of the Brigade Mobile, a dapper little man with bristling white hair and yellow boots, I laid information, requesting that the pair be detained at the frontier.
When I revealed the real name of the soi-disant Comte d'Esneux, the police official started, staring at me open-mouthed. Then, even as we sat in his bare, gloomy office with its heavily-barred windows—the original windows of the palace, in the days when it had also been a fortress—he spoke over the telephone with the Commissary of Police at Bardonnechia in the Alps, the last Italian station before the great Mont Cenis tunnel is entered.
After me he repeated over the wire a minute description of both men wanted, while the official at the other end wrote them down.