Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“I know. Oberleutnant von Keller. Standard brand. Devotion to duty, ninety-five per cent. Devotion to the Fatherland, one hundred. To the party, one hundred and five. Imagination, zero.”

Keller stiffened, and visibly repressed his retort.

“Did I understand this Frenchman correctly?” Linnaus went on. “Did he tell you that you have been putting your trust in a traiter?”

“So he says, Herr Oberst.”

“He says? God in heaven, Lieutenant, have you no flair for your own profession? You have been trusting, I gather, a police chief named Lenormand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An old man? Even older than I? Thin and stooped? Sparse gray goatee? Formerly chief of the Sûreté in Paris?”

Keller nodded yes to each of the questions. Colonel Linnaus threw his head back and laughed a harsh high laugh. “Within five minutes,” he announced, “that guard will return to tell us that M. Lenormand is not at the prefecture. He will not be found at his house either. You will search in vain for him for months, while he laughs at you.”

Keller bridled. “I may not, as the Colonel says, have imagination; but I am efficient. Any man who lives I can arrest. What is this Lenormand? A ghost?”

The Colonel smiled. “A ghost? No... not quite...”

“Then why can I not arrest him?”

“Because,” Colonel Linnaus said slowly, “no one has ever successfully arrested Arsène Lupin.”

Max Blanchard blinked his fever-reddened eyes. He saw the startled face of M. Duval, the puzzlement of the Oberleutnant. “Arsène Lupin?” Keller asked.

“You may check the records in Paris,” Linnaus said. “M. Lenormand[2] was indeed Chief of the Sûreté, in 1906 if my memory is correct. He was also one of the many avatars of that multifaceted genius whom we know as Lupin.”

“But Arsène Lupin...” Keller protested. “He’s not real. He’s in a book.”

“Our Fuehrer,” the Colonel said gravely, “has been in many books, and shall figure in more till the end of the making of books.”

“That’s history. But Lupin is in novels.”

“There is a worthy novel of Ewers’ entitled Horst Wessel. Does that make you doubt the true life of our hero?”

“But even if he’s real, he must be dead by now. You said 1906?”

Colonel Linnaus sighed lightly. “Let me explain, while we wait for the guard’s report to confirm me. These French... they are a strange people. I do not understand them well. When I was working in Norway with Jonas Lie, I knew where I was. I am a collateral descendant of Linnaeus, and my Norse mother named me Peer to honor Ibsen’s hero. Yes, I understand the Scandinavians, even those who most bitterly resist us, as I understand our own race, but these French...—”

“There is something in them that we cannot touch. Something that can be said only in their own language. Esprit... élan... panache... gloire... How can one translate a single one of those words into German? And all those words mean: Arsine Lupin. He is madness and wit and grace and moon-touched audacity. He is—”

The Colonel paused, coughed, and resumed more soberly: “He is the effrontery of the individual who dares oppose himself to the State. He is the outrage of anarchy, the fallacy of individualism. And he refuses to die.

“There was a French legend that in times of great peril the horn of Roland would sound and Charlemagne himself would return to save France. Well, the times of great peril came for the contemptible Third Republic. But the horn that sounded was the claxon of a Paris cab, and there returned... Arsène Lupin.”

For a moment there was silence in the room. Blanchard saw the Colonel’s painted face lit with a half-admiration for the man he must pursue and destroy. Then a guard came in, heiled, and said, “Herr Oberst, M. Lenormand is nowhere to be found.”

Keller looked convinced. Still he protested. “But he worked for us—”

“There is no limit,” Linnaus snapped, “to the man’s highfantastic enterprise. Did he not make himself head of the very Sûreté that had sworn his capture? Did he not once force our Kaiser himself to become his accomplice in an escape? Working ‘for’ us would suit his humor. And what did he do for you?”

“He betrayed de Gaullists, Underground workers—”

“— whom you had hitherto considered loyal collaborators? Of course. Ass! Cannot you see what he was doing? He simply turned genuine collaborators over to you and tricked you into executing them. Ah, the devil is sly. And he has never met his match. What was Ganimard?[3] A plodding bourgeois. Herlock Sholmes?[4] An Englishman. Never has he been faced with a detective of his own caliber... until now.”

Colonel Linnaus’ thin lips curved into a smile, twisting his saber scars into the grimace of a sadistic clown. “First these,” he said. “The American and your helpful betrayer of the Underground. And then... Arsène Lupin!”

Fever and all, Max Blanchard shuddered. There was a chill resolution about this ancient dandy that made his spine crawl.

“Shall I summon Grussmann?” Keller asked. “He has a skill all his own in extracting information.”