Their attics were on the top floor. He listened. The noise came from below. And, suddenly, he understood: the detectives, who had heard the two shots, were banging at the front door, as was their duty, without waiting for daybreak. Then an electric bell rang, which Lupin recognized as that in the hall:
"By Jupiter!" he said. "Pretty work! Here are these jokers coming … and just as we were about to gather the fruits of our laborious efforts! Tut, tut, Lupin, keep cool! What's expected of you? To open a safe, of which you don't know the secret, in thirty seconds. That's a mere trifle to lose your head about! Come, all you have to do is to discover the secret! How many letters are there in the word? Four?"
He went on thinking, while talking and listening to the noise outside. He double-locked the door of the outer room and then came back to the safe:
"Four ciphers… Four letters … four letters… Who can lend me a hand?.. Who can give me just a tiny hint?.. Who? Why, Lavernoux, of course! That good Lavernoux, seeing that he took the trouble to indulge in optical telegraphy at the risk of his life… Lord, what a fool I am!.. Why, of course, why, of course, that's it!.. By Jove, this is too exciting!.. Lupin, you must count ten and suppress that distracted beating of your heart. If not, it means bad work."
He counted ten and, now quite calm, knelt in front of the safe. He turned the four knobs with careful attention. Next, he examined the bunch of keys, selected one of them, then another, and attempted, in vain, to insert them in the lock:
"There's luck in odd numbers," he muttered, trying a third key. "Victory! This is the right one! Open Sesame, good old Sesame, open!"
The lock turned. The door moved on its hinges. Lupin pulled it to him, after taking out the bunch of keys:
"The millions are ours," he said. "Baron, I forgive you!"
And then he gave a single bound backward, hiccoughing with fright. His legs staggered beneath him. The keys jingled together in his fevered hand with a sinister sound. And, for twenty, for thirty seconds, despite the din that was being raised and the electric bells that kept ringing through the house, he stood there, wild-eyed, gazing at the most horrible, the most abominable sight: a woman's body, half-dressed, bent in two in the safe, crammed in, like an over-large parcel … and fair hair hanging down … and blood … clots of blood … and livid flesh, blue in places, decomposing, flaccid.
"The baroness!" he gasped. "The baroness!.. Oh, the monster!.."
He roused himself from his torpor, suddenly, to spit in the murderer's face and pound him with his heels:
"Take that, you wretch!.. Take that, you villain!.. And, with it, the scaffold, the bran-basket!.."
Meanwhile, shouts came from the upper floors in reply to the detectives' ringing. Lupin heard footsteps scurrying down the stairs. It was time to think of beating a retreat.
In reality, this did not trouble him greatly. During his conversation with the baron, the enemy's extraordinary coolness had given him the feeling that there must be a private outlet. Besides, how could the baron have begun the fight, if he were not sure of escaping the police?
Lupin went into the next room. It looked out on the garden. At the moment when the detectives were entering the house, he flung his legs over the balcony and let himself down by a rain-pipe. He walked round the building. On the opposite side was a wall lined with shrubs. He slipped in between the shrubs and the wall and at once found a little door which he easily opened with one of the keys on the bunch. All that remained for him to do was to walk across a yard and pass through the empty rooms of a lodge; and in a few moments he found himself in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Of course – and this he had reckoned on – the police had not provided for this secret outlet.
"Well, what do you think of Baron Repstein?" cried Lupin, after giving me all the details of that tragic night. "What a dirty scoundrel! And how it teaches one to distrust appearances! I swear to you, the fellow looked a thoroughly honest man!"
"But what about the millions?" I asked. "The princess's jewels?"
"They were in the safe. I remember seeing the parcel."
"Well?"
"They are there still."
"Impossible!"
"They are, upon my word! I might tell you that I was afraid of the detectives, or else plead a sudden attack of delicacy. But the truth is simpler … and more prosaic: the smell was too awful!.."
"What?"
"Yes, my dear fellow, the smell that came from that safe … from that coffin… No, I couldn't do it … my head swam… Another second and I should have been ill… Isn't it silly?.. Look, this is all I got from my expedition: the tie-pin… The bed-rock value of the pearl is thirty thousand francs… But all the same, I feel jolly well annoyed. What a sell!"
"One more question," I said. "The word that opened the safe!"
"Well?"
"How did you guess it?"
"Oh, quite easily! In fact, I am surprised that I didn't think of it sooner."
"Well, tell me."
"It was contained in the revelations telegraphed by that poor Lavernoux."
"What?"
"Just think, my dear chap, the mistakes in spelling…"
"The mistakes in spelling?"
"Why, of course! They were deliberate. Surely, you don't imagine that the agent, the private secretary of the baron – who was a company-promoter, mind you, and a racing-man – did not know English better than to spell 'necessery' with an 'e,' 'atack' with one 't,' 'ennemy' with two 'n's' and 'prudance' with an 'a'! The thing struck me at once. I put the four letters together and got 'Etna,' the name of the famous horse."
"And was that one word enough?"
"Of course! It was enough to start with, to put me on the scent of the Repstein case, of which all the papers were full, and, next, to make me guess that it was the key-word of the safe, because, on the one hand, Lavernoux knew the gruesome contents of the safe and, on the other, he was denouncing the baron. And it was in the same way that I was led to suppose that Lavernoux had a friend in the street, that they both frequented the same café, that they amused themselves by working out the problems and cryptograms in the illustrated papers and that they had contrived a way of exchanging telegrams from window to window."
"That makes it all quite simple!" I exclaimed.
"Very simple. And the incident once more shows that, in the discovery of crimes, there is something much more valuable than the examination of facts, than observations, deductions, inferences and all that stuff and nonsense. What I mean is, as I said before, intuition … intuition and intelligence… And Arsène Lupin, without boasting, is deficient in neither one nor the other!.."
II
THE WEDDING-RING
Yvonne d'Origny kissed her son and told him to be good:
"You know your grandmother d'Origny is not very fond of children. Now that she has sent for you to come and see her, you must show her what a sensible little boy you are." And, turning to the governess, "Don't forget, Fräulein, to bring him home immediately after dinner… Is monsieur still in the house?"
"Yes,
