Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Penguin Classics) by Maurice Leblanc

Author:Maurice Leblanc [Leblanc, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

“Well, what do you think of Baron Repstein?” cried Lupin, after giving me all the details of that tragic night. “What a dirty scoundrel! And how it teaches one to distrust appearances! I swear to you, the fellow looked a thoroughly honest man!”

“But what about the millions?” I asked. “The princess’s jewels?”

“They were in the safe. I remember seeing the parcel.”

“Well?”

“They are there still.”

“Impossible!”

“They are, upon my word! I might tell you that I was afraid of the detectives, or else plead a sudden attack of delicacy. But the truth is simpler…and more prosaic: the smell was too awful!…”

“What?”

“Yes, my dear fellow, the smell that came from that safe…from that coffin…. No, I couldn’t do it…my head swam…. Another second and I should have been ill…. Isn’t it silly?…Look, this is all I got from my expedition: the tie-pin…. The bed-rock value of the pearl is thirty thousand francs…. But all the same, I feel jolly well annoyed. What a sell!”

“One more question,” I said. “The word that opened the safe!”

“Well?”

“How did you guess it?”

“Oh, quite easily! In fact, I am surprised that I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“Well, tell me.”

“It was contained in the revelations telegraphed by that poor Lavernoux.”

“What?”

“Just think, my dear chap, the mistakes in spelling….”

“The mistakes in spelling?”

“Why, of course! They were deliberate. Surely, you don’t imagine that the agent, the private secretary of the baron—who was a company-promoter, mind you, and a racing-man—did not know English better than to spell ‘necessery’ with an ‘e,’ ‘atack’ with one ‘t,’ ‘ennemy’ with two ‘n’s’ and ‘prudance’ with an ‘a’! The thing struck me at once. I put the four letters together and got ‘Etna,’ the name of the famous horse.”

“And was that one word enough?”

“Of course! It was enough to start with, to put me on the scent of the Repstein case, of which all the papers were full, and, next, to make me guess that it was the key-word of the safe, because, on the one hand, Lavernoux knew the gruesome contents of the safe and, on the other, he was denouncing the baron. And it was in the same way that I was led to suppose that Lavernoux had a friend in the street, that they both frequented the same café, that they amused themselves by working out the problems and cryptograms in the illustrated papers and that they had contrived a way of exchanging telegrams from window to window.”

“That makes it all quite simple!” I exclaimed.

“Very simple. And the incident once more shows that, in the discovery of crimes, there is something much more valuable than the examination of facts, than observations, deductions, inferences and all that stuff and nonsense. What I mean is, as I said before, intuition…intuition and intelligence…. And Arsène Lupin, without boasting, is deficient in neither one nor the other!…”

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