© Шитова Л. Ф., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2021

© ООО «ИД «Антология», 2021

The Blue Cross

The boat touched Harwich^[1] and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous. There was nothing notable about him, except contrast between his clothes and his face. His clothes included a pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark, and ended in a short black beard. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels^[2] to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent^[3] to Brussels, from Brussels to Holland; and they believed that he would take some advantage^[4] of the Eucharistic Congress^[5], then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some clerk or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly stopped keeping the world in agitation; and when he did so, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was of gigantic stature, and the tales were told of how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli^[6] with a policeman under each arm. It should be stated that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in bloodless scenes; his real crimes were mostly those of ingenious robbery. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people's doors to the doors of his own customers. An amazing simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street overnight merely to direct one traveller into a trap. Lastly, he was known to be a perfect acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper and climb up to the tree-tops like a monkey. So the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? Valentin's ideas on this were still in a process of development.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his ability to disguise, could not hide, and that was his height. If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot^[7]. He had already studied all the people on the boat; and the people who took a train at Harwich to go to London were limited to six. Among them was a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. The little priest had a face as round and dull as a dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting. Valentin had no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver “with blue stones” in one of his brown-paper parcels. His simplicity amused the Frenchman, and Valentin even had the good nature to warn him against telling everybody about the silver. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out for anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above it.

He alighted at Liverpool Street^[8], however, quite sure that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland Yard to register his position and arrange for help in case of need; he then lit a cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets and squares near Victoria^[9], he paused suddenly and stood. It was a quiet square, very typical of London. The tall, flat houses round looked at once prosperous and uninhabited. One of the four sides was much higher than the rest; and the line of this side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents – a restaurant that looked as if it had been part of Soho^[10]. It was an attractive object, with small plants in pots and long, striped blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood high above the street, and a flight of steps from the street ran up to the front door. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. Nelson does die in the instant of victory. In short, there is in life an element of coincidence which people may miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe^[11], wisdom should expect the unforeseen.

Aristide Valentin was very French; and the French intelligence is very special. He was not “a thinking machine”; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man. All his wonderful successes had been made by logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong first principles. Here he had no strong first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a state of ignorance, Valentin had a view and a method of his own.

In such cases he expected the unforeseen. In such cases, when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of going to the right places – banks, police stations, rendezvous – he systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty house, took paths that led him out of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He said that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had no clue at all it was the best, because there was just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietness of the restaurant, took all the detective's romantic fancy and made him strike at random^[12]. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a cup of black coffee.

It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted; the litter of other breakfasts stood on the table to remind him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to his order, he began to shake some white sugar into his coffee, thinking all the time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau had escaped, once by a pair of nail scissors, and once by a house on fire. He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realized the disadvantage. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic,” he said with a smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.

He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come; it was certainly a sugar-basin. He wondered why they should keep salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more such vessels. Yes; there were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there was some speciality in the condiment in the saltcellars. He tasted it; it was sugar. Then he looked round at the restaurant with interest, to see if there were any other traces of that singular artistic taste which puts the sugar in the saltcellars and the salt in the sugar-basin. Except for an odd stain on one of the white-papered walls, the whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the bell for the waiter.

When that official hurried up, curly-haired and rather sleepy at that early hour, the detective (who could appreciate the simpler forms of humour) asked him to taste the sugar and see if it was up to the high reputation of the hotel. The result was that the waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.

“Do you play this joke on your customers every morning?” inquired Valentin. “I mean, changing the salt and sugar?”

The waiter, when he got this irony, stammeringly assured him that the restaurant had certainly no such intention; it must be a most curious mistake. He picked up the sugar-basin and looked at it; he picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that, his face growing more and more confused. At last he abruptly excused himself, and hurrying away, returned in a few seconds with the proprietor. The proprietor also examined the sugar-basin and then the salt-cellar; he also looked confused.

Suddenly the waiter started speaking.

“I zink,” he stuttered, “I zink it is those two.”

“What two clergymen?”

“The two clergymen,” said the waiter, “that threw soup at the wall.”

“Threw soup at the wall?” repeated Valentin, feeling sure this must be some special Italian metaphor.

“Yes, yes,” said the attendant excitedly, and pointed at the dark stain on the white paper; “threw it over there on the wall.”

Valentin looked at the proprietor, who came to his rescue^[13].

“Yes, sir,” he said, “it's quite true, though I don't suppose it has anything to do with the sugar and salt. Two clergymen came in and drank soup here very early. They were both very quiet, respectable people; one of them paid the bill and went out; the other, who seemed a slower coach^[14] altogether, was some minutes longer getting his things together. But he went at last. Only, the instant before he stepped into the street he picked up his cup, which he had only half emptied, and threw the soup on the wall. I was in the back room myself, and so was the waiter; so I could only rush out in time to find the wall stained and the shop empty. It don't do any particular damage, but it was confounded cheek^[15]; and I tried to catch the men in the street. They were too far off though; I only noticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street.”

The detective was on his feet, hat pulled and stick in hand. He had already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind he could only follow the first odd finger that pointed. Paying his bill, he was soon running into the other street.

It was fortunate that even in such moments his eye was quick. Something in a shop-front went by him like a flash; yet he went back to look at it. The shop was a popular greengrocer and fruiterer's, an array of goods set out in the open air and ticketed with their names and prices. In two compartments there were two heaps, of oranges and of nuts respectively. On the heap of nuts lay a piece of cardboard, on which was written in blue chalk, “Best tangerine oranges, two a penny.” On the oranges was the equally clear description, “Finest Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb^[16].” M. Valentin looked at these two cards and thought he had met this form of humour before, and that somewhat recently. He drew the attention of the red-faced fruiterer to this inaccuracy in his advertisements. The fruiterer said nothing, but sharply put each card into its proper place. The detective, leaning elegantly on his walking-cane, continued to look around the shop. At last he said, “Excuse me, my good sir, but I should like to ask you a question in experimental psychology and the association of ideas.”

The red-faced shopman regarded him with an eye of menace; but he continued gaily, swinging his cane, “In case I do not make myself clear, what is the mystical association which connects the idea of nuts marked as oranges with the idea of two clergymen, one tall and the other short?”

The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's; he really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself upon the stranger. At last he stammered angrily: “I don't know what you 'ave^[17] to do with it, but if you're one of their friends, you can tell 'em from me that I'll knock their silly 'eads off, parsons or no parsons, if they upset my apples again.”

“Indeed?” asked the detective, with great sympathy. “Did they upset your apples?”

“One of 'em did,” said the shopman; “rolled 'em all over the street. I'd 'ave caught the fool but for havin' to pick 'em up.”

“Which way did these parsons go?” asked Valentin.

“Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the square,” said the other promptly.

“ Thanks,” replied Valentin. On the other side of the second square he found a policeman, and said: “This is urgent, constable; have you seen two clergymen in shovel hats^[18]?”

The policeman began to chuckle heavily. “I 'ave, sir; and if you arst me, one of 'em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the road that confused that —”

“Which way did they go?” snapped Valentin.

“ They took one of them yellow buses over there,” answered the man; “them that go to Hampstead^[19].”

Valentin showed his official card and said very rapidly: “Call up two of your men to come with me in pursuit,” and crossed the road. In a minute and a half the French detective was joined by an inspector and a man in plain clothes.

“Well, sir,” began the former, “and what may —?”

Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. “I'll tell you on the top of that omnibus,” he said, and ran across the traffic. When all three sank panting on the top seats of the yellow bus, the inspector said: “We could go four times as quick in a taxi.”

“Quite true,” replied their leader, “if we only had an idea of where we were going.”

“Well, where are you going?” asked the other, staring.

Valentin smoked for a few seconds; then, removing his cigarette, he said: “If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him. Stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he does. Then you may see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do is to keep our eyes skinned^[20] for a queer thing.”

“What sort of queer thing do you mean?” asked the inspector.

“Any sort of queer thing,” answered Valentin, and fell into silence.

The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed like hours; the great detective would not explain further, and perhaps his assistants felt a growing doubt of his task. Perhaps, also, they felt a growing desire for lunch, for the hours went long past the normal luncheon hour. But though the winter twilight was already darkening the road ahead of them, the Parisian detective still sat silent and watchful, eyeing the facade of the streets that went by on either side. By the time they had left Camden Town behind, the policemen were nearly asleep; at least, they gave something like a jump as Valentin struck a hand on each man's shoulder, and shouted to the driver to stop.

They tumbled down the steps into the road without realizing why they had been disturbed; when they looked round for explanation they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left side of the road. It was a large window, forming part of the long facade of a gilt and magnificent public-house; it was the part reserved for respectable dining, and labelled “Restaurant.” This window, like all the rest along the frontage of the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass^[21]; but in the middle of it was a big, black smash.

“Our cue at last,” cried Valentin, waving his stick; “the place with the broken window.”

“What window? What cue?” asked his principal assistant. “Why, what proof is there that this has anything to do with them?”

Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage.