“Do not discuss him, m’sieur,” replied the man under arrest. “He has placed me in your hands, and I am helpless. I suppose I shall only get what I deserve,” he added, in a low, pensive tone.
“You are reasonable, Carlier, and I’m glad to see it,” responded the commissary in a softer tone. “Your friend is an arrant blackguard to have treated his wife as he has, and to have betrayed you because you took her part. But you surely knew how unscrupulous he was, and also that he was a most dangerous character. We know of one or two of his exploits, and I may tell you that if he is caught, there are two charges of murder against him.”
“I know,” replied the thief, briefly. “Though you have arrested me, I can truly say that I have never raised a knife, or fired a revolver, or attempted to take the life of any man.”
“You will not be charged with any crime more serious than burglary, Carlier,” replied the official. “But besides the Baron’s affair to-night, there is also the robbery at the widow’s apartment in the Rue Léonce Reynaud, the theft from the Château des Grandes Vignes, out at Moret in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and the safe-breaking at Thessier’s in the Boulevard des Italiens. You were in all of them, remember.”
“M’sieur knows,” replied Adolphe with a grim smile.
“It is my duty to know, eh?” was the rather sympathetic reply, for the commissary had quickly seen that this member of the broken Bonnemain gang, which had for years given such trouble to the Sûreté, was, though a criminal and outwardly a rough scoundrel of the Apache type, yet nevertheless a man possessed of better feelings than the ordinary thief.
The treatment that Carlier had received at his friend’s hands had crushed him. He did not crave for mercy, as so many criminals did when suddenly cornered and placed under arrest. He merely regarded it as a stroke of ill-luck, and with the true sportsman-like air “faced the music.”
As a matter of fact, he was wondering at that moment what had become of little Mme. Ansell, and whether the efforts of the police to discover her would be successful. No doubt they would, for one cannot travel far in Paris if one is searched for by the Sûreté, unless one is a professional thief, and therefore knows the holes in the underworld of Parisian life in which to hide successfully.
The commissary, pointing with his stick at the movable cupboard, ordered one of the agents to search it, and then, moving from one object to another, he had everything turned upside down in search of any property which might be concealed. The cupboard and sideboard were shifted away from the wall, the chairs were examined, the pictures taken down and pulled from their frames; indeed, no stone was left unturned.