The first flash of his hand-lamp discovered to him sickening verification of his most dreadful apprehensions.
Now he saw why his dressing-gown had been requisitioned—to protect a butcher’s clothing.
After a moment he returned, shut the door, and set his back against it, as if to bar out that reeking shambles.
He was very pale, his face drawn with horror; and he was powerfully shaken with nausea.
The plot was damnably patent: Roddy proving a menace to the Pack and requiring elimination, his murder had been decreed as well as that the blame for it should be laid at Lanyard’s door. Hence the attempt to drug him, that he might not escape before police could be sent to find him there.
He could no longer doubt that De Morbihan had been left behind at the Circle of Friends of Harmony solely to detain him, if need be, and afford Smith time to finish his hideous job and set the trap for the second victim.
And the plot had succeeded despite its partial failure, despite the swift reverse chance and Lanyard’s cunning had meted out to the Pack’s agent. It was his dressing-gown that was saturate with Roddy’s blood, just as they were his gloves, pilfered from his luggage, which had measurably protected the killer’s hands, and which Lanyard had found in the next room, stripped hastily off and thrown to the floor—twin crumpled wads of bloodstained chamois-skin.
He had now little choice; he must either flee Paris and trust to his wits to save him, or else seek De Morbihan and solicit his protection, his boasted influence in high quarters.
But to give himself into the hands, to become an associate, of one who could be party to so cowardly a crime as this … Lanyard told himself he would sooner pay the guillotine the penalty. …
Consulting his watch, he found the hour to be no later than half-past four: so swiftly (truly treading upon one another’s heels) events had moved since the incident of the somnambulist.
This left at his disposal a fair two hours more of darkness: November nights are long and black in Paris; it would hardly be even moderately light before seven o’clock. But that were a respite none too long for Lanyard’s necessity; he must think swiftly in contemplation of instant action were he to extricate himself without the Pack’s knowledge and consent.
Granted, then, he must fly this stricken field of Paris. But how? De Morbihan had promised that Popinot’s creatures would guard every outlet; and Lanyard didn’t doubt him. An attempt to escape the city by any ordinary channel would be to invite either denunciation to the police on the charge of murder, or one of those fatally expeditious forms of assassination of which the Apaches are past-masters.
He must and would find another way; but his decision was frightfully hampered by lack of ready money; the few odd francs in his pocket were no store for the war-chest demanded by this emergency.
True, he had the Omber jewels; but they were not negotiable—not at least in Paris.
And the Huysman plans?
He pondered briefly the possibilities of the Huysman plans.
In his fretting, pacing softly to and fro, at each turn he passed his dressing-table, and chancing once to observe himself in its mirror, he stopped short, thunderstruck by something he thought to detect in the counterfeit presentment of his countenance, heavy with fatigue as it was, and haggard with contemplation of this appalling contretemps.
And instantly he was back beside the American, studying narrowly the contours of that livid mask. Here, then, was that resemblance which had baffled him; and now that he saw it, he could not deny that it was unflatteringly close: feature for feature the face of the murderer reproduced his face, coarsened perhaps but recognizably a replica of that Michael Lanyard who confronted him every morning in his shaving-glass, almost the only difference residing in the scrubby black moustache that shadowed the American’s upper lip.
After all, there was nothing wonderful in this; Lanyard’s type was not uncommon; he would never have thought himself a distinguished figure.
Before rising he turned out the pockets of his counterfeit. But this profited him little: the assassin had dressed for action with forethought to evade recognition in event of accident. Lanyard collected only a cheap American watch in a rolled-gold case of a sort manufactured by wholesale, a briquet, a common key that might fit any hotel door, a broken paper of Régie cigarettes, an automatic pistol, a few francs in silver—nothing whatever that would serve as a mark of identification; for though the grey clothing was tailor-made, the maker’s labels had been ripped out of its pockets, while the man’s linen and underwear alike lacked even a laundry’s hieroglyphic.
With this harvest of nothing for his pains, Lanyard turned again to the washstand and his shaving kit, mixed a stiff lather, stropped another razor to the finest edge he could manage, fetched a pair of keen scissors from his dressing-case, and went back to the murderer.
He worked rapidly, at a high pitch of excitement—as much through sheer desperation as through any appeal inherent in the scheme either to his commonsense or to his romantic bent.
In two minutes he had stripped the moustache clean away from that stupid, flaccid mask.
Unquestionably the resemblance was now most striking; the American would readily pass for Michael Lanyard.
This much accomplished, he pursued his preparations in feverish haste. In spite of this, he overlooked no detail. In less than twenty minutes he had exchanged clothing with the American in detail, even down to shirts, collars and neckties; had packed in his own pockets the several articles taken from the other, together with the jointed jimmy and a few of his personal effects, and was ready to bid adieu to himself, to that Michael Lanyard whom Paris knew.
The insentient masquerader on the floor had called himself “good-enough Smith”; he must serve now as good-enough Lanyard, at least for the Lone Wolf’s purposes; the police at all events would accept him as such. And if the memory of Michael Lanyard must
