EANWHILE, Mr. John Smith was having troubles of his own, and rather enjoying them. He was sitting in a small office of the prefecture of police—police headquarters in Passaic—on the Ile de la Cite, facing M. Baudet, a grim visaged man of middle age who perfumed his whisker and smoked vile cigarettes. Mr. Smith wondered if he perfumed his whiskers to kill the odor of the cigarettes, or if he smoked the cigarettes to kill the odor of his whiskers. M. Remi was there, along with two or three other French sleuths, who glowered at Mr. Smith individually and collectively and babbled incomprehensible asides. Mr. Smith stood it for a long time: then, to M. Baudet, who seemed to be the chief:
“Well, Cap, you got me,” he remarked pleasantly. “Now would you mind telling me what it’s all about?”
Evidently this was what they had been waiting for, the prisoner to break the silence. M. Baudet stabbed him with a glance of his piercing eyes and remained silent. It was a highly effective method of his own, this silence, to reduce a man to fear and awe in the beginning. It sapped his courage and left him weak and flabby.
“If you’re going to ask any questions, begin,” Mr. Smith requested.
“I shall ask the questions, Monsieur, at the proper time.” M. Baudet’s tone was cold, incisive, steely.
“And all I have to do is to answer ’em?”
“That is all, Monsieur.”
ELL, son, we’ll better understand each other in the beginning,” Mr. Smith remarked easily. “If you don’t answer some of my questions right now, I don’t answer any of yours. In other words, it you hold me here without telling me why, I’ll get a man down here from the American Embassy and let out a scream they’ll hear all the way to Washington. In the first place, I want to know why I was pinched.”
There was a note of calm assurance in Mr. Smith’s voice, utter composure in the powerful hands which lay idly on the arms of his chair. His straight staring eyes were fixed squarely upon those of M. Baudet.
“Understand me. I’m not going to start any roughhouse or anything; but you’ve got to tell me why I’m here,” he concluded.
“You shall answer my questions, Monsieur!” A slender, manicured hand, delicate as a woman’s, tugged complacently at the perfumed beard; there was a merciless glitter in the eyes above it. “You are W. Mandeville Clarke!”
“Well, suppose I am?” queried Mr. Smith. “What has he done? Is there an order for his arrest from the United States?”
“Ah! You do not deny it! So you are M. Mandeville Clarke, alias John Smith, alias Watts Ittooyu!”
“I’m not denying anything,” Mr. Smith returned placidly. “If I’m Clarke, what have I done? Have I murdered somebody, or wrecked a train, or burned a barn, or robbed a safe?”
“You admit that you are Clarke?”
“I’m not denying it, am I? I want to know why I’m here. What’s Clarke done?”
It was most disconcerting, really, quite unprisonerlike! M. Baudet had anticipated denial. This man denied nothing—merely wanted to know. That precipitated an embarrassing situation. Why had Clarke been arrested? Why was he being held?
OUR arrest was necessary. Monsieur.” And he hoped Mr. Smith would read, some deep, underlying threat in the words.
“Why?” Mr. Smith bellowed at him suddenly, belligerently. “Who ordered it? Have I committed a crime in Paris? If not, then the order for an arrest came from the United States. Who ordered it?”
M. Baudet blinked a little, and a long silence fell. These burly Americans! What monstrous voices they had. to be sure! And how evil they could look about the eyes! Alter a little M. Baudet glanced at M. Remi blankly.
“Tell it to me now: I want to know.” Mr. Smith insisted in a voice as if he was rooting for the home team. “You can’t hold me here forever without telling me why, and if you don’t tell me you’ve got to tell the American Ambassador!”
There was a little nervous twitch in M. Baudet’s delicate hand as he tugged at the perfumed whiskers again. Here was a situation unprecedented, an American, a pig of an American, without hope or honor in his soul, bawling at him. M. Baudet, as if he was a stevedore! When he spoke his own voice was like velvet.
“We knew you to be M. Clarke almost from the first,” he said, and as he went on the velvety purr merged into frigid dramatics. “For instance, in introducing yourself at the Maison de Treville, you wrote your name, W. Mandeville Clarke, on a slip of paper: then, realizing your error, destroyed it. Here are those bits of paper, Monsieur.”
He produced them. Mr. Smith stared.