“Watch out!”
She has slumped into his arms. Her eyes are half-closed. She is gasping for breath, fighting off the fainting spell that is coming over her.
Torrence wants to call for help. She stops him.
“No. Excuse me, please... It’s really nothing. Just a silly moment of weakness...”
She tries to smile at him, with a poor little smile that touches the heart of thick old Torrence.
“You’ll be here at four o’clock, won’t you?” she asks. “I’ll come in with my father. He’ll tell you the whole story. I am certain now that you won’t refuse to help us out.”
She is standing in the middle of the office. She bends down.
“My glove,” she says. “Good-bye, monsieur, I can assure you—”
Barbet the clerk, whom they call by that name because the unruly hairs on his face are reminiscent of the bird so named, gets up to show her out the front door. As soon as she is out in the stairway, he dons a greenish derby hat, familiar to everyone in the Cité Bergère, puts on his topcoat and, going out through a different doorway, gets down to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre before she does.
As for Torrence, he has turned toward the looking glass and merely winks. Emile leaves his own office and goes into the boss’s.
“Well, what do you think of that young thing?”
To which the clerk with the suit that no longer fits him fires back in a tone that admits of no contradiction: “I think you are a damned fool!”
Anyone who ever set foot inside Agency O, anyone who in difficult or threatening circumstances ever called on the famous detective Torrence for help would be more than a little surprised if they could see him, shamefaced, head down, mumbling in confusion at the young man whom he introduces on some occasions as his clerk, on others as his photographer, and sometimes as his chauffeur.
It is true that Emile has now changed. Of course, his suit hasn’t gotten any bigger or any less tight. His hair is still just as flamingly red, and he still has freckles around his nose and nearsighted eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses.
Nevertheless, he no longer looks quite so young. Twenty-five? Thirty-five? It would take a pretty smart fellow to say. His voice is dry, cutting.
“What did you have in the left-hand pocket of your jacket?” he asks.
Torrence checks his pockets.
“Oh, my Lord!”
“ ‘My Lord,’ indeed! If you think a young girl falls into your arms because she can’t resist you...”
“But, she was...”
Torrence is crestfallen, appalled, humiliated.
“I beg your pardon, Boss. She finally had me feeling sorry for her. I’m just a damned fool, you’re absolutely right. As for what she swiped from me... well, it’s a catastrophe. We have to run after her. We have to find her, no matter what—”
“Barbet is tailing her.”
In spite of being used to it, Torrence can’t help being amazed, once again.
“The handkerchief, wasn’t it?” Emile asks.
“Yes. You remember. I put it carefully away in an old envelope. I was figuring, this afternoon—”
“Open the safe, fast, you fool!”
“You want me... to open the—”
“Hurry, goddamn it!”
Torrence does as he is told. Despite his height and his girth, he is just a small boy when facing the thin young man with the glasses.
“Haven’t you caught on yet?” Emile asks him.
“Caught on to what?”
“Take that envelope out of the safe. Put it on your desk. No, better still, put it on the floor. That’s safer...”
Oh, come on! This time, the boss is really overdoing it. Torrence can’t see how an envelope that may at most have a dozen or so sheets of paper in it can... It’s true that there are small-sized bombs, but none as small as that, surely...
“I just hope she doesn’t give Barbet the slip,” Emile comments.
That beats all. Torrence is bug-eyed. Give Barbet the slip, indeed! As if anyone has ever succeeded in ditching Barbet!
“Do you remember, Torrence,” says Emile, “the definition of a good corporal? Big, strong, and stupid. Well, if things go on like this, I’m afraid you’ll be making corporal soon!”
“What can I say to that?”
“Nothing. Just tell me what we did this morning.”
“The insurance company phoned at eight o’clock, to put us on the trail of—”
“How many times has that happened in the last six months?”
“I’d have to check my calendar for that. Maybe twelve or thirteen times—”
“And what did we find each time we got to the site?”
“Nothing.”
“What you mean is, we found a jewelry shop that had been burglarized. Always the same modus operandi A man lets himself get locked into the building the night before. A man who laughs at locksmiths however smart they may be, and knows how to outfox every burglar alarm ever invented. Who does a neat, flawless job. Up to now, what kind of traces has he left?”
Torrence looks like a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework, his forehead turning every shade of red.
“No trace at all.”
“And what about this morning, at the jewelry shop in the Rue Tronchet?”
“We found a handkerchief.”
“Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Torrence slams his fist painfully down on the top of his desk.
“What a fool I am! A damned fool! A goddamned fool!”
“Don’t you smell anything?”
Torrence sniffs. His broad trencherman’s nostrils beat the air like the wings of a bird.
“I don’t smell a thing.”
Two or three times already, Emile has looked over at the phone, with a worried expression on his face.
“I just hope Barbet...”
For six months now, Agency O has come up empty-handed. Six months during which the largest of the insurance companies specializing in insuring jewelry has called in the Agency, the police having gotten nowhere. And during that period, thirteen burglaries. Without a trace. Without the tiniest clue.
And this morning... Torrence and redheaded Emile, lugging heavy photographic equipment with them, had gotten to the spot at the same time the police got there. There was a crowd outside the window of the jewelry shop.
“Boss, I’m sorry,” Emile had called out. “Could you lend me a hand reloading the camera?”
Torrence came over. Emile whispered to him:
“Under my foot... a handkerchief... Be careful.”
Torrence, doing as he was told, dropped something and, bending down to pick it up, grabbed the handkerchief. A little later, when no one was watching him, he slipped it into an envelope and put the envelope into his pocket.
Who could have seen what he was doing? Someone who was outside the shop perhaps, in the mob, among the two or three hundred gapers.
In the taxi, coming back to the Cité Bergère, they had taken a look at the handkerchief. In the corner, there was a laundry mark.
Emile said, “Now we’ve got them. This afternoon, Torrence, start making the rounds of Paris laundries...”
The phone rings.
“Hello... Yes... Where? At the Four Sergeants? Well, then you have lunch, too, old man. What else can I tell you? If, by any chance, you make the mistake of letting her get away...”
Then he explains to Torrence:
“Your young lady from La Rochelle is right now sitting in the Restaurant of the Four Sergeants, at the Place de la Bastille, and she just ordered lunch... Don’t you still smell anything?”
“I think I’m catching a cold, boss.”
“But that shouldn’t keep you from seeing...”
On the floor, a thin wisp of smoke is coming up from the yellow envelope. Torrence wants to rush and grab it.
“Just let it go, Old Man,” Emile says. “It’s just as I thought.”