John Lescroart - Son of Holmes

“Let’s begin with last Wednesday. By the way, consenting to be a regular guest was an admirable choice of covers. Whether it had begun by design or by coincidence, you wasted no time in recognizing the value of this particular group to your ends. They were a singularly respectable, though eccentric, group of citizens. Your presence among them established your bona fides in an especially effective manner. To the rest of the community, your status as newcomer—and hence a natural object of rumor and suspicion—was substantially mitigated. Then, too, among a group with so many foreign connections, you stand out as passably French. It was a fine decision on your part.”

“Thank you,” said Georges sarcastically.

“Don’t mention it. But to continue, when you saw me enter Monsieur Giraud’s sitting room last Wednesday, you immediately recognized me, as I’ve said. Perhaps my small deductions that evening were a misplaced show of bravado, but in any event you wasted no time, since an agent like yourself is always prepared. I am, too. While the others were preparing for their toast, you slipped from your pocket a mercury fulmonade cap which you’d earlier procured, no doubt, by prying it from the back of a bullet. Much smaller than a petite pois , it was an admirable weapon. You placed it on the table and brought your beer bottle down on it, causing it to explode and cutting yourself. The explosion, by the way, left a small but recognizable mark on the table.

“You then excused yourself to dress the wound and, passing my seat by the door, took advantage of everyone’s being grouped around the spilled beer, as you knew we would be, to drop the poison—stolen from Monsieur Pulis, I assume—into my glass. You didn’t even have to break your stride.

“When you returned and found that Routier had inadvertently returned to my seat and drunk the poison intended for me, your panic increased. Please correct me where I may be wrong.”

Georges sat quite still. “Every word is wrong.”

Lupa smiled. “Of course. I didn’t suppose I’d catch you with that. Still, there were other endeavors to which you were committed, and you had a timetable to follow, so the next day you had to go to St. Etienne and deliver an excessive amount of gauze to the arsenal. That you entered and met Monsieur Ponty was incidental. What was not incidental was his comment on learning of your trade. He said, ‘I hope we can keep your deliveries small.’ Monsieur Giraud, here, has an admirable memory and repeated back to me your conversation with Ponty. That comment aroused my suspicion, and I fell on it like a hungry dog.

“From that moment on, you were my prime suspect. But you had worked well and left few clues. When Chatelet was killed last Friday night, I was tempted to cross you off, but then my associate in St. Etienne had reported that he’d been followed back to Valence, and by his description, I assumed it had been you. The man who followed my agent, by the way, did not have a limp, but we’ll get to that. So, in fact, you hadn’t gone south on business, but had remained here, hoping to get a chance to kill me.

“Chatelet, with a bit of terrible luck for both of you, ran into you on the street as he interrogated Pulis Friday night. Worse yet, Pulis then introduced you to the inspector. Of course, between Henri’s being your friend and Pulis’s deep suspicion of me, it never crossed his mind that your presence was questionable.”

Henri, his face red now and dripping with sweat, looked wide-eyed from Georges to Lupa. Again and again he seemed to be trying to swallow, but the dryness of his mouth wouldn’t allow it. Remembering his beer, he sucked at it like a man dying of thirst.

Lupa pressed on. “Still, Chatelet presented you with an immediate danger. He wouldn’t even have to suspect you of anything. Merely his knowledge that you were in Valence would have condemned you.”

Georges still smirked. “Why, exactly, would that be?”

“Because in questioning the other suspects, possibly including myself, that fact would have come out. In other words, you were not in St. Etienne where you were believed to be. In fact, you had followed my man to Valence.”

“Fascinating,” Georges said.

“Not really,” Lupa answered. “So Chatelet presented too great a risk, and you did away with him.

“On Sunday, you followed me to the woods where I was to have had lunch. When you saw your opportunity, you fired three times but, luckily for me, you missed. That must have been particularly galling for you. When Monsieur Giraud and I gave chase, you ran, and you escaped.”

Lupa leaned back and pulled the bell for Fritz. “That,” he explained, “was my signal for Fritz to get Magiot and his men.”

“That’ll be the end of you, then,” said Georges levelly.

Lupa drank his beer. “We’ll see. Well, to get on with it, yesterday you succeeded in your primary mission, which was to blow up the arsenal. To do that, you used one of your agents—I’d be curious to know how you recruited the janitor, since all the employees there had ‘Top Secret’ clearance, but that’s another question. Reasoning told me what he had done. My man in St. Etienne, who’d been watching the place all day, noted that the smokestacks had stopped functioning about an hour before the explosion. Shortly afterward, the janitor had left the building.

“What he had done was to enter the boiler room in the fifteen or twenty minutes when, according to Ponty, everyone in the building, including the men stoking the boilers, was acting as a ‘pack mule.’ He opened the doors to the boilers and stuffed them with as much of your excess gauze as he could fit. The boilers are located, or were located, directly adjacent to the ammunition room, and an explosion of the boilers would of course set off the highly unstable dynamite in the next room. The gauze effectively stopped up the pipes, creating intolerable pressure within the boilers. It also stopped their smoking for at least a half hour before the pressure became critical.

“There was your flaw. There is no other explanation for the smoke stopping just prior to the explosion. You thought it would go unnoticed, and for the most part it did. Only my agent there noticed it. Otherwise, it was a brilliant plan. You were having lunch with Messieurs Anser and Giraud while the pressure was building in those boilers. But you should have stayed with directing your agents. When you act on your own, you make mistakes. My agent, you see, swears that he can identify the man who was following him. He didn’t know it was you, but now we’ll give him a chance to say if it was. Watkins!”

Watkins seemed to magically appear out of the wall as he pushed aside the tapestry and stepped out of the tunnel. Everyone gaped.

“How many secret entrances does this place have?” Tania asked.

“None anymore. You’ve seen them all.” He turned to Watkins. “Is he here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kindly point him out.”

He pointed at Lavoie. I reached inside my jacket to be near my pistol just in case it would be needed.

“That’s all very clever,” said Georges. “It’s a neat little theory, with the minor drawback of being completely false. You can’t prove a word of what you’ve said.”

Henri cleared his throat. “You were here . . . I mean we did meet you, the inspector and I . . .”

Georges smiled at his friend. “I never denied it, Henri. The point never came up, did it?”

Henri, confused, leaned back in his chair.

“Monsieur Lavoie is right,” Lupa said to the group. “I could have paid this man to come in here and identify him. There is no proof. And so, now, I’m going to ask him to do something which will undoubtedly demonstrate his innocence.”