The long arm of Fantômas

As Ascott desired the wedding was carried out in the strictest privacy. The party reached the Mairie at an early hour. Ascott had for witnesses his man servant John, and a casual secretary from the Consulate, bound over to the closest secrecy. Moreover, the young man in question, a person of much discretion who saw how things were with half an eye, had vanished immediately after the ceremony, saying he did not care to attend the breakfast, understanding in fact that his absence would not be taken in ill part, but very much the reverse. Nini Guinon’s witnesses were her uncle, Père Moche, recruited again for the purpose, and the vagabond Bouzille, who had been fetched from a drinking shop at Ménilmontant, and dressed up for the occasion in a second-hand frock coat. The formalities at the Mairie were quickly completed, the party adjourned to hear a mass at the nearest church, and then set off for the Bois de Vincennes.

The last act of the grotesque adventure, the wedding breakfast, remained to be staged. Ascott, to Mme. Guinon’s bitter chagrin, had emphatically refused to make her acquaintance, thereby making the good woman desperately unhappy. Thus she had barely caught a glimpse of her son-in-law, when at the Mairie she authorized her daughter as a minor to pronounce a definitive and binding “Yes.” Ascott, in fact, had shown himself quite uncompromising all the morning. For this marriage, this hole and corner marriage, so to speak, in which he had systematically avoided all publicity, he had not chosen that his bride should wear the orthodox white gown sacred to such occasions. In a word, the ceremony was a gloomy, funereal function, depressing to the last degree.

“If I’m in for a bad time, if old Moche has got me in a hole, I’ll make him pay for it.”

However, Bouzille, who had kept quiet enough during the morning, began to liven up on arriving at The Orange Blossom. He smiled broadly at the regiment of bottles drawn up on a sideboard, and, like the good-natured ninny he was, having never an inkling of the preposterous situation of the bridal pair and those about them, he clapped his hands gaily, suggesting:

“Well, good folks, about time for a bit of a spree, eh? what if we cracked a bottle now before going any further?”

Ascott, for all his pre-occupation, could not help smiling; in fact, if there was any one person in the whole crew that revolted him less profoundly than the rest, it was certainly this merry-hearted tramp; the fellow was rough and brutal, but he seemed to be an honest man. On the contrary, Ascott felt greatly embarrassed at the idea of sitting down to table with his servant; in his own mind he decided there was only one thing to be done—to send the man about his business that very evening. Besides, The Orange Blossom itself was little to his taste. What a place! What a vulgar show!

Still, he must make the best of things, and taking Bouzille’s hint, Ascott called the waiter and demanded drinks. And it was no other than Fandor who stepped forward to take the rich Englishman’s order.

Fandor, with the landlord’s help—for the journalist had proved himself from the very start a most indifferent waiter—served the first course, during which not half-a-dozen words were spoken. The landlord, when he found himself in the kitchen again, alone with Fandor, could not hide his surprise.

“For the last twenty years,” he declared, “I’ve had wedding-parties here, I’ve known customers of every sort and kind, but anything like those folks yonder—never! They couldn’t be more dismal if it was a funeral they’d been at!”

Meanwhile, Ascott sat deep in thought; he was realizing the appalling folly he had been guilty of in marrying Nini Guinon.

“How could I ever for one single instant have entertained such an idea ... and put it into execution?”

But the unfortunate young man quickly called to mind that, if he had not followed the injunctions of Père Moche, the plaint lodged by the Guinon family would have taken its course, and that would have equally involved disgrace, disgrace more terrible still, more irremediable even than the grotesque marriage he had just contracted. Ascott saw clear now—he was the victim of an odious piece of blackmailing, an abominable plot. He was so worked up he felt himself prepared to do the maddest things, he meditated going straight to the Procureur de la République to denounce the whole business.... But the unhappy man, when he looked closer into this last desperate resource, realized that the situation was past cure, that no one could help him, that he was simply a victim, and a ridiculous victim at that, and that, in fact, there was something else, something more serious, which after all tied his hands and gave him pause. Nini Guinon was enceinte; he must not, he could not forget that fact. Ascott could stand no more of it; still controlling his feelings, he leant over to his wife, sitting next him, and whispered:

In a moment, as if by enchantment, all recovered their spirits; they clinked glasses, they drained bumpers, they ate with a better appetite, gaiety reigned on every face: decidedly, the English milord had done well to leave them to themselves; they would be more of a family party, more at their ease.

“Say, Père Moche,” observed Bouzille, “he don’t strike me as being much of a gallant, your niece’s husband! how’s she going to hit it off, little Nini, with a lump of wood like that, eh?”

“Don’t you trouble your head,” broke in the girl, “I know what I’ve got to do.”

Then, as everybody stopped talking to listen:

“Jabber away amongst yourselves,” she growled, “I’m going to have a talk with Père Moche.”

The talk became general, while a very animated discussion began between Nini and her reputed uncle.

“If you think it’s any fun,” began the young woman, “this marriage you’ve brought about, I tell you I’m about fed up with it already. I don’t give myself eight and forty hours before I hook it from my husband.”

Moche shrugged his shoulders:

“Nini, you’re a born fool: a bit of patience, my lass, and you’ll see Père Moche was in the right.” Then, in a lower tone: “You’re far too pretty and too clever to spend all your young days among this crowd, a parcel of rotters who’re good for nothing but talking loud and getting drunk. I’ve told you, haven’t I, I’d make you rich, I’d make a great lady of you, more than that, a queen of beauty, a queen of Paris, a queen of society! Play your cards, Nini, listen to me....”

A gleam of covetousness flashed in the girl’s eyes.

“I shall be rich?” she questioned, “I shall have the nibs?”

Moche went on:

“Rich, and better than rich, my girl; but for that don’t go and play the fool; just keep yourself in hand for another nine months. Your brat must come into the world strong and healthy; after that there’ll be something new to think about, you can trust Père Moche for that!”

And, as a fact, who and what was this man who—Fandor saw it all—had conceived so Machiavellian a scheme as that of marrying the street wench Nini Guinon to Ascott, the wealthy Englishman of the Rue Fortuny, and who, having conceived, had carried it through!

Père Moche ... Fantômas? ...? ...?

Fandor, as the result of a series of logical deductions, possibly also through giving a certain weight to the presentiments that rarely deceived him, had come to ask himself if the man of the Rue Saint-Fargeau, really too mysterious a personage, was not one of the incarnations of Fantômas himself. Since he had been watching his man, and particularly since he had seen his eyes and their expression, Fandor clung more and more closely to this opinion.

“Why,” he thought presently, “but why did not Fantômas kill me when he had this chance? that is what I cannot understand.”

But, when he examined the question more deeply, Fandor realized the fact that Fantômas’ crimes invariably had a double object—to get rid of an obnoxious adversary and at the same time to throw suspicions on the dead man that went to prove by their very nature the innocence of some accomplice of Fantômas or of Fantômas himself. Thus he pondered, all the while carrying on with the utmost awkwardness his duties as a waiter, under the wary and ever watchful eye of the landlord of The Orange Blossom.

At the same time Fandor did not allow his attention to be absorbed solely by the conversation between Moche and Nini. A short while before Ascott had left the rest of the party—it was an incident which had, in fact, contributed not a little to the rising nausea that had driven the young Englishman from the table—two of the apache gang, the same two, “Bull’s-eye” and the “Gasman” who had signalized themselves in the Silver Goblet affair and at the unpleasant interview with the Police Commissary, appearing unexpectedly within sight of the window, had been invited to join the wedding feast by the irrepressible Bouzille. The two intruders were now seated at the table, and the soi-disant waiter made a point of plying them with drink and incidentally catching up any fragments of their talk that struck him as being to the point. The apaches, in ambiguous terms, but in a fashion explicit enough for Fandor’s comprehension, were discussing recent enterprises in which the gang had been mixed up. It became very evident that a unanimous and general feeling of suspicion and ill-will towards Fantômas was growing up among the criminal confraternity. Fantômas, they muttered, used everybody for his own purposes, forced each man to risk his skin and in the end compensated nobody. In covert phrases, too, they spoke of Père Moche, who, they hinted, must know all about Fantômas, and whose task was always to pour oil on the troubled waters, who was for ever putting off till to-morrow payments that should have been made yesterday, in one word playing a double game.

“Bull’s-eye” bent over to his comrade, and in his hoarse voice asked:

“So the rendez-vous still holds good at the same place, eh?”

At that moment Fandor was obliged to go away, M. Moche was calling him; nevertheless the journalist had gathered from a remark of the “Gasman’s” that the following night there was to be a meeting of the gang on the outskirts of the city, close down by the banks of the Seine at the far end of Alfort.

A superb limousine had drawn up at the back of the restaurant of The Orange Blossom. It was about four of the afternoon: the breakfast had resolved itself into a drunken debauch, a horrid uproar of ribald songs disturbed the quiet of the establishment. Bouzille was the noisiest of them all; the wine bottles had been left on the table at the end of the meal, in an hour’s time they had to be replaced. Ascott, heedless of the whole riot, had paid without a murmur.

Ten minutes ago Nini Guinon, at Moche’s urgent suggestion, had gone to join her husband, who had spent a strange afternoon for a bridegroom, shut up alone in a room on the first floor, anxiously awaiting, not so much the return of his wife, as the arrival of the motor-car he had ordered, eager to escape from Paris with all speed and hide himself and his intolerable situation in some remote corner of the provinces. Hardly had Nini appeared, all flushed and excited, before Ascott, looking her coldly up and down, ordered her:

“Put on your hat, we are going.”

Furious at bottom to be so treated, but scared by her husband’s manner, and also remembering old Moche’s counsels, she obeyed, muttering curses under her breath; “He shall pay me for this, come the day I can bring him to heel.”

But suddenly he started back. An explosion had rung out, half an inch more and Père Moche would have received a bullet full in the face. Luckily he had foreseen the shot and ducked in time. With amazing agility, Moche sprang at his assailant, whom he hurled to the ground, keeping him down with a knee pressed hard on the fellow’s chest.

“Brigand! scoundrel! I don’t know what stops me from killing you here and now!”

Who was this man Père Moche had mastered so adroitly? No other than Paulet, Nini Guinon’s lover, the white-faced, pale-eyed scamp who had assuredly been completely sacrificed in the old usurer’s sinister machinations. With calm ferocity the latter was now brandishing the revolver he had snatched from the apache’s hands.

“One word, one movement,” he declared, “and I blow your brains out, as you tried to blow out mine the day of the bank messenger’s death. Villain! murderer! Remember I hold your life in my hands, that I can do for you where I choose and when I choose.”

“Scoundrel!” vociferated Paulet, “you’ve robbed me of my doxy, what d’you think is to become of me now?”

“Fool! she wanted to be done with you!”

“Ah! if you hadn’t hid her away, you old rascal, if only I could have seen her!”

But Moche ordered him to hold his tongue. It needed all his strength to keep the apache down. Paulet, savage and desperate, had managed with his right hand to grasp the barrel of the revolver, and was holding it away from his body; it looked as if he might renew the struggle, perhaps floor the old man in his turn. The two wretches fought furiously for some seconds, now one, now the other momentarily getting the upper hand; the two rolled over and over in the dust. At last Moche succeeded in gripping the young apache’s throat between his powerful fingers, after forcing him to let go the revolver.

“Die, then,” yelled Moche, “die, as you won’t give in!”

Suddenly the two combatants were dragged apart. In answer to Paulet’s cry for help, someone shouted in a ringing voice: “I will.”

The someone had picked up the revolver that had been dropped in the struggle and stood with it in his hand. Dazed and dumbfounded, Paulet gazed open-mouthed at his preserver, whom he did not know. Père Moche, for his part, saw that the person who had just intervened between them in the battle was no other than the servant at the restaurant who had waited at breakfast.

Moche stared at the man, scrutinizing his face with concentrated attention; suddenly he broke into a cry:

“Fandor, in heaven’s name!” he exclaimed, “you blackguard, I didn’t recognize you before....”

At the name of Fandor, Paulet sprang up and ranged himself instinctively by the journalist’s side; while Père Moche realized the time was not come to continue the discussion. Besides which, the landlord of The Orange Blossom now came running up from the penetralia of his establishment with very natural curiosity:

“What is up now?” he demanded, “I seem to have heard an explosion, like a revolver shot.”

Mine host looked hard at the three men, standing there with torn clothes, all filthy and smothered in dust; but Fandor was ready with a plausible explanation. He gave his account with perfect self-possession:

“It’s nothing, landlord, only the customer’s car burst a tyre just now and we’ve been helping to mend it; it was a case of creeping in under the chassis, that’s how we’re a bit dirty, but a clothes brush’ll soon put that to rights!”

The landlord asked no more questions, and the four men returned quietly to the restaurant, but three of them were well aware that this tranquillity was only apparent. It was but a truce before the battle, for war seemed henceforth to be definitely declared.