Читать книгу Devil's Laughter: A Tale of Paris - John Hunter A.A. - Страница 4

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The house stood hard by the Place du Tertre, high above Paris, on the edge of the Butte Montmartre; an old house, and strange, with fantastic decorations on its exterior, its lower windows always barred and shuttered, its upper windows curtained against the sunshine and the starlight; a house which was secretive and dark, drawn back from the narrow alley which led to it as though it shunned publicity and inspection.

Whispers were exchanged about the house in the Place, when the little lamps gleamed on the dining tables under the sky and contortionists and poets, artists and street songsters, collected francs from the diners. There were rumours and hints. Nobody seemed to have a precise knowledge of what happened in that gloomy building, of its occupants or their doings.

There was this or that about the house. It was, one would understand, a place dark and dreadful, charged with sinister mystery. Of what nature? Oh; well a mystery is a mystery always.

So ran the talk, like wind drifting here and there. And all the time the house stood bleak and black above Paris, crouched on the edge of the Butte like a living wicked thing which gloats.

The man who was known to his associates as Le Cagnard—they knew no other name for him—stood in the topmost room of the house and looked across Paris as the clocks proclaimed two hours after midnight. The room was in utter darkness.

Immediately below him he could see the crater of light formed by the night haunts round the Clichy, where his jackals prowled and ranged. Beyond, lower down, as though a giant had strung a dark garden with fairy lamps, were the street lights of Paris, long lines drifting to the far distance till they were lost in the pressing obscurity. A murmur of sound came up to the room above the Butte.

He was master of this house, master of the shadows which, in the night’s darkest hours slipped in and out of it, came to report, to take instructions, to hear curt praises or damning disapproval. His was the brain which had conceived the vast and awful traffic controlled from this house. By his word men and women might live or die. He was the master.

He turned from the window and seated himself at the table. Behind him was the wall, before him the door. He touched a switch and a blinding light leapt into life directly behind him, revealing that the walls of the room were heavily curtained in black, which threw no reflection towards the man seated at the table.

Le Cagnard wore a blanket-like garment of black which came up above his neck and covered the lower part of his face. On his head was a black skull cap. The intense brilliance of the light behind made of him a black and motionless silhouette in the sight of anybody standing on the opposite side of the table.

The light itself tended to blind such people. They saw only a hunched black figure, edged with flaring whiteness, a figure which spoke and gestured, but was featureless, formless, queer.

Le Cagnard pressed one of a row of bell-pushes on the table before him. After a short interval, during which he sat without moving, there was a tap on the door, and a woman entered.

By some standards she was a beautiful woman, richly dark, with splendid figure, dressed daringly, flaunting challenge in her dark eyes, a smile of mockery on her pouting, painted lips. She might, one would think, be a woman who had come to face a known peril and was determined to show her fearlessness.

She stood, hand on hip, before the table. Le Cagnard said nothing. The room was quiet. And during the silence the woman’s mien changed. Her lower lip became loose and quivering. The defiance died from her attitude. She broke the stillness at last.

“Mon Dieu! Why don’t you speak? You sit there—bathed in light and yet invisible. You sit and watch and wait... watch and wait....” She shuddered.

Le Cagnard spoke metallically. “It is about Dupont that I have summoned you here.” If he saw the woman’s hands tighten, if he saw her gaze strained and anxious, he did not heed these signs, but went on evenly. “Dupont, I understand, was your lover, Malou.”

“Was...?” she breathed the word.

“Exactly. That, no doubt, explains why your judgment was so completely obscured. You recommended Dupont to me as a valuable servant, guaranteeing, I believe, his bona fides with your life. Am I not right?”

“That is so.” The words crept from between bloodless lips. “Pierre and I——” She stopped, staring at the faceless thing in the blinding light. “I love him,” she added in a whisper. And then, loudly, in sudden overmastering terror: “What have you done to him? What have you done?”

“We found something out about Dupont. He was, to be exact, a quite admirable agent of the Sûreté. I should say that at this moment your Pierre is lying outside the fortifications near Bagnolet, either studying the stars or endeavouring to see downward into that earth to which, I believe, we all ultimately return.”

“Dead....” The word hung on the silence of the room. A little moan followed it. The shapeless creature before her uttered a command, and a man she had loved was no longer a man, but a cold, unfeeling thing of clay.

“For you,” added Le Cagnard, “there shall be mercy. I care to know nothing of your love for Dupont, but in judging you I consider it. I am given to understand that women are inclined to believe in the men they love... unless”—the words were added slowly and in a curiously changed voice—“they find them out. In this case it is I who have made the discovery. I pass it on to you, Malou. You may go, and if you wish to fall in love again do not mix your pleasures with your business.”

She drew back from him. She was rent with agony, and yet no protestation, no accusation, leapt to her lips. The man before her had confessed to the slaying of her lover, but she could not find the courage to challenge him on that confession. She reached the door, fumbled for the handle, and staggered out in the night and its darkness.

Le Cagnard waited a little while and then pressed the bell-push once more.

Others came in—a rat-like bandit from Menilmontant; a spendthrift young fellow who once had been a gentleman and still bore himself like one; a pretty girl who frequented the cafés on the Grands Boulevards; a man from Berlin, via Brussels; a woman from Vienna.

Le Cagnard listened to all they had to say, to their reports and their requests, and so learnt how his organization fared. One told of the passing of forged banknotes. Another rendered an account of dealing in illicit drugs. The Viennese woman ran a gambling hell. The man from Berlin was a confidence trickster. The girl who frequented the big cafés worked in conjunction with the bandit from Menilmontant and lured promising victims into his clutches.

The organization was immense. These units of it represented many cities. It was stretched all across Europe, a devilish thing, selling death in those places where laughter and song are popularly supposed to reign, directing crime of all kinds wherever the riches of the earth were gathered together, drawing a golden dividend from the stupidities and miseries of mankind.

And its centre-point, its controlling brain, was the crouched shape at the table in the room above Paris.

The last visitor was Jan Dekker, the Boer with the whip whom Gabrielle and Baring had met at Valentin’s. He stood in the blinding light, his immensity casting a monstrous shadow on the floor, a shadow cut off by the blackness of the wall behind him. The arrogance which had distinguished him at Valentin’s was no longer visible. He was a servant in the presence of his master.

“The affair of Dupont has been made safe,” he said.

Le Cagnard nodded. Jan Dekker went on, speaking monotonously like one who makes a report to a higher authority.

“Things are not too well at the Green Snake Cabaret. The dance girl engaged from Antwerp is not a success. The rich Americans and English and Argentines do not favour her as they should. A prettier and cleverer girl in her position would bring much money to us. She has sold but one packet of coco in the last week. I shall sack her to-morrow.”

Once more the black head nodded.

“Varasin got himself pinched in a gang fight in Villette. He had nothing on him which was dangerous. He is a fool, and if they don’t send him to Noumea I think we shall dispose of him. I have made a discovery to-night.”

“What is it?”

Dekker’s voice lost its monotonous intonation. He spoke with some enthusiasm. “A girl—so beautiful a girl—alive and magnetic, the sort of girl who could twist men to her will. I saw her at Valentin’s with two Englishmen, and strove to attract her attention with my whip; but the Englishmen, like all their kind, were stiff-necked, and they took her away.”

He paused and went on more intensely. “Tall, graceful, she wore black, with a red rose at the hip.”

Le Cagnard was leaning slightly forward.

“Her hair was like bronze, changing to gold and to copper as the lights touched it. Her eyes were grey, changing to violet. Already I have set Trevert to watch her. She would be worth thousands of francs to us as a danseuse, for she dances divinely. I heard one of the Englishmen call her Gabrielle....”

He broke off. There was something in the poise of the head before him which warned him of wrath. He had seen it before.

The shrill metallic voice lashed across at him like a whip-lash.

“Listen to me, Dekker. Forget you ever saw that girl. Send your spy to work elsewhere or your eyes shall no longer see and your brain no longer think. You may go!”

“But master....”

“Go!”

Dekker stumbled from the room.

After the Boer had gone Le Cagnard sat for a long time motionless at the table. Then he touched a switch and the blinding white light dropped into darkness. He stood by the window for a few moments looking out across Paris—under his hand. He drew back from the window and the room was quiet, with the stars winking through the glass.

There was a closed car in the courtyard beneath the tall shadow of the old house. Le Cagnard climbed into it. It was a silent coupé which glided like a wraith through the narrow streets and dropped birdlike, towards the heart of Paris. Its driver sought and arrived at a second-class block of offices in a street near the Bourse. The car ran into an underground garage, and there was left, locked up.

The little street near the Bourse ran parallel with the Rue du Quatre Septembre, and fronting on this great thoroughfare was the skyscraper edifice which, in letters of gold, announced to all the world that it housed the Société des Credits Laroche. Late though it was, there was a light burning in the private room of the financier, a not uncommon spectacle for those who passed that way in the small hours, for it was said that Laroche was a diligent worker who gave all his life to his business.

Within ten minutes of Le Cagnard having disposed of his car in the underground garage near the Bourse, Paul Laroche himself descended from the bronze gates of his great modern office, climbed into the Hispano Suiza which awaited him, and was driven home.