Lanyard kept himself in hand with considerable difficulty.
“But you?” he asked. “Where do you come in?”
Wertheimer lounged back in his chair and laughed quietly. “Need you ask? Must I recall to you the foundations of my prosperity? You had the name of it glib enough on your tongue the other night in the rue Chaptal. … When you’ve done your work, you’ll come to me and split the proceeds fairly—and as long as you do that, never a word will pass my lips!”
“Blackmail … !”
“Oh, if you insist! Odd, how I dislike that word!”
Abruptly the adventurer got to his feet. “By God!” he cried, “I’d better get out of this before I do you an injury!”
The door slammed behind him on a room ringing with Wertheimer’s unaffected laughter.
XX
War
But why?—he asked himself as he swung his cab aimlessly away—why that blind rage with which he had welcomed Wertheimer’s overtures?
Unquestionably the business of blackmailing was despicable enough; and as a master cracksman, of the highest caste of the criminal world, the Lone Wolf had warrantably treated with scorn and contempt the advances of a pariah like Wertheimer. But in no such spirit had he comprehended the Englishman’s meaning, when finally that one came to the point; no cool disdain had coloured his attitude, but in the beginning hot indignation, in the end insensate rage. …
He puzzled himself. That fit of passion had all the aspect of a psychical inconsistency impossible to reconcile with reason.
He recalled in perplexity how, toward the last, the face of the Englishman had swum in haze before his eyes; with what disfavour, approaching hatred, he had regarded its fixed, false smirk; with what loathing he had suffered the intimacy of Wertheimer’s tone; how he had been tempted to fly at the man’s throat and shake him senseless in reward of his effrontery: emotions that had suited better a man of unblemished honour and integrity subjected to the insolent addresses of a contemptible blackguard, emotions that might well have been expected of the man Lanyard had once dreamed to become.
But now, since he had resigned that infatuate ambition and turned apostate to all his vows, his part in character had been to laugh in Wertheimer’s face and bid him go to the devil ere a worse thing befall him. Instead of which, he had flown into fury. And as he sat brooding over the wheel, he knew that, were the circumstances to be duplicated, his demeanour would be the same.
Was it possible he had changed so absolutely in the course of that short-lived spasm of reform?
He cried no to that: knowing well what he contemplated, that all his plans were laid and serious mischance alone could prevent him from putting them into effect, feeling himself once more quick with the wanton, ruthless spirit of the Lone Wolf, invincibly self-sufficient, strong and cunning.
When at length he roused from his reverie, it was to discover that his haphazard course had taken him back toward the heart of Paris; and presently, weary with futile cruising and being in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, he sought the cab-rank there, silenced his motor, and relapsed into morose reflections so profound that nothing objective had any place in his consciousness.
Thus it was that without his knowledge a brace of furtive thugs were able to slouch down the rank, scrutinizing it covertly but in detail, pause opposite Lanyard’s car under pretext of lighting cigarettes, identify him to their satisfaction, and hastily take themselves off.
Not until they were quite disappeared did the driver of the cab ahead dare warn him.
Lounging back, this last looked the adventurer over inquisitively.
“Is it, then,” he enquired civilly, when Lanyard at length looked round, “that you are in the bad books of the good General Popinot, my friend?”
“Eh—what’s that you say?” Lanyard asked, with a stare of blank misapprehension.
The man nodded wisely. “He who is at odds with Popinot,” he observed, sententious, “does well not to sleep in public. You did not see those two who passed just now and took your number—rats of Montmartre, if I know my Paris! You were dreaming, my friend, and it is my impression that only the presence of those two flies over the way prevented your immediate assassination. If I were you, I should go away very quickly, and never stop till I had put stout walls between myself and Popinot.”
A chill of apprehension sent a shiver stealing down Lanyard’s spine.
“You’re sure?”
“But of a certainty, my old one!”
“A thousand thanks!”
Jumping down, the adventurer cranked the motor, sprang back to his seat, and was off like a hunted hare. …
And when, more than an hour later, he brought his panting car to a pause in a quiet and empty back-street of the Auteuil quarter, after a course that had involved the better part of Paris, it was with the conviction that he had beyond question shaken off pursuit—had there in fact been any attempt to follow him.
He took advantage of that secluded spot to substitute false numbers for those he was licensed to display; then at a more sedate pace followed the line of the fortifications northward as far as La Muette, where, branching off, he sought and made a circuit of two sides of the private park enclosing the hôtel of Madame Omber.
But the mansion showed no lights, and there was nothing in the aspect of the property to lead him to believe that the chatelaine had as yet returned to Paris.
Now the night was still young, but Lanyard had his cab to dispose of and not a few other essential details to arrange before he could take definite steps toward the reincarnation of the Lone Wolf.
Picking a most circumspect route across the river—via the Pont Mirabeau—to the all-night telegraph bureau in the rue de Grenelle he despatched a cryptic message to the Minister of War, then with the same pains to avoid notice made back toward the rue des Acacias. But it
