“Excuse me, monsieur, if I seem a little nervous. You will understand, as soon as I fill you in... We’re all alone here, aren’t we?... I have just arrived from La Rochelle. All that happened there was just...”
She has not sat down. She paces back and forth. She folds and unfolds her handkerchief, obviously racked by the most extreme agitation, while Torrence methodically goes on filling his pipe.
At that point, a door opens. A tall redheaded young man, who seems to have grown too fast so that his suit has become too small on him, enters the room, notices who is there, apologizes, and says, “Oh, excuse me, boss.”
“Well, what is it, Emile?”
“Nothing, monsieur. I just — I forgot something...”
He grabs something, a file folder of some sort, which he has taken from one of the shelves, and disappears so awkwardly that he bumps into the doorjamb.
“Please go on, mademoiselle,” Torrence says.
“I don’t remember where I was... Let’s see. It was all so tragic, so terribly unexpected... My poor father—”
“Maybe you better start by telling me who you are.”
“Denise. Denise Etrillard, from La Rochelle. My father is the lawyer Etrillard. He’ll be in to see you this afternoon. He left shortly after me. But I was so afraid I thought I’d better—”
Right behind Torrence’s very ordinary office, there is another, smaller, darker office, filled with the most astonishing variety of things. The young redhead whom the boss addressed as Emile has sat down there at a common unpainted deal table. He bends down. He turns on a sort of switch and immediately he can hear clearly everything being said in the next room.
Facing him, a peephole. From the other side, no one would suspect the existence of this peephole, for it looks like a plain little mirror set in among the bookshelves.
Impassive, his eyes unmoving behind their big tortoiseshell glasses, an unlighted cigarette dangling from his lips, Emile is listening and watching, somewhat like the railway switchmen one sometimes sees perched up in their glass cages.
The young lady says, “Denise Etrillard. My father is the lawyer Etrillard...”
Displaying no reaction, Emile has pulled a heavy directory to him. He looks through the list of lawyers, to the letter E — Etienne... Etriveau... But no Etrillard?
He goes on watching and listening. This time, he is looking through a telephone directory, at the section covering the city of La Rochelle. There he finds an Etrillard, or rather, a Widow Etrillard, fishmonger...
The other side of the looking glass, the voice goes on:
“I really don’t feel up to giving you any complicated explanations right now. My father, who will be here by four o’clock at the latest, will be able to explain it to you much better than I can. It’s so terribly unexpected. The only thing I would ask of you, in the meantime, is for you to put away in a safe place the documents I was able to rescue...”
Emile grabs the phone in front of him on the desk. It rings in Torrence’s office. Torrence picks it up and listens.
“Ask her what time she got into town,” Emile is saying.
During this time, the young lady has taken from her handbag an impressive yellow envelope that looks even more important because of the five red wax seals that close it.
“Did you just arrive in Paris?” Torrence asks her.
“Yes, I hopped into the first available taxi and came right here. It was my father who told me—”
“Told you to come and see us?”
“We were just quietly sitting there, last night, when we suddenly heard noises in his office. My father reached for his gun... In the darkness, there was a man, but he was able to get away through the French door My father immediately understood that someone was trying to get their hands on these documents... But he couldn’t leave La Rochelle just like that, without notice. So, as he was afraid they might come back again, he entrusted this envelope to me When he explains the whole thing to you, you’ll understand why I am so nervous about it, so terrified. The people who are after us are absolutely ruthless...”
During this time, redheaded Emile has kept right on going about his business like an obedient office clerk. After looking through the Directory of Lawyers of France and the telephone directory for the Department of Charente-Inférieure, he is now looking through the combined schedule of French railroads, without, however, taking his eyes off the girl more than a few seconds at a time.
Really quite good-looking, the young lady. She is dressed exactly the way a provincial young lady of good family should dress. Her gray tailored suit is cut to a perfect fit. Her hat is fashionable without being trendy. She is wearing pearl-gray suede gloves.
But there is one detail that Torrence is unable to see, because he is too close to her and it is difficult to examine as carefully as one would like a person who is talking to you.
Whereas Emile, at his microscope, as he likes to call his peephole...
If, as she has just said, she left La Rochelle in a hurry, if she sat up in the train a good part of the night, if she has only just arrived in Paris and taken a taxi from the railroad station directly here to the Cité Bergère, how does it happen that her suit, so simple and so absolutely proper, still has such neat creases in it, especially the creases in the sleeves that come from packing a jacket in a valise or trunk?
La Rochelle. Let’s see, La Rochelle to Paris-Gare d’Orsay... Well, the only train she might have come in on got to Paris at 6:43 in the morning.
“All I’m asking,” she tells Torrence again, “is for you to put this document safely away in your safe until my father gets here. I beg you to do this for me, monsieur. He will explain it all to you. And I am sure that after that you won’t refuse to help us.”
She lies well. She is even very convincing. She paces back and forth. Is the nervousness she is displaying part of the act, too?
“Well, if you can assure me that your father will be here this afternoon,” Torrence grudgingly assents. “But I would still like to have an address for you in Paris. Are you stopping at a hotel?”
“Not yet. I’ll go and register at one now. I wanted to get here before anything else.”
“What hotel will you go to?”
“Why — the Hôtel d’Orsay. Yes, right there at the railroad station. You’ll keep this document safely for me, won’t you? I imagine it will be safe, as long as you keep it locked up, won’t it? No one would dare go after your safe, would they?”
She tries a pale little smile.
“No, no one would dare indeed, mademoiselle. And just to reassure you, I’m going to put this envelope in the safe right now, before your eyes.”
That good old giant of a Torrence gets up, takes a small key out of his pocket, and opens the safe. Automatically, the girl follows him toward it.
“If you only knew how relieved I am to finally see these papers in a safe place!” she says. “The honor, the whole life of an entire family is at stake...”
While Torrence conscientiously closes the safe again, Emile picks up the intercom once more, but this time he rings the desk of the clerk who is sitting reading his paper in the waiting room. Their conversation is short, if in fact it can be called a conversation. It consists of just one interjection of Emile’s: “Get your hat!”
At the same time, the young readhead wrinkles his brow. The safe once closed, Denise has leaned falteringly against Torrence’s desk, murmuring:
“Oh, I beg your pardon! I’ve been able to hold it all in until now... But it was such a nervous strain... Now that my job is almost done, I— I—”
“Are you ill?” Torrence is worried.
“I don’t know. I—”