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"Yes, Monsieur le Préfet. Besides, the fellow is carefully tied up. Don't be alarmed. He won't escape." "Well, you've foreseen every contingency," said Valenglay, "and the business seems to me to be finished. But there's one problem that remains unexplained, the one perhaps that interested the public most.
Don Luis Perenna, I am sorry that I am not some absolute monarch. I should make you the head of my secret police." "A post which the German Emperor has already offered me." "Oh, nonsense!" "And I refused it." Valenglay laughed heartily; but the clock struck seven. Don Luis began to grow anxious.
There was not a sign of arrogance, nothing to raise a barrier between the Minister and the suspicious individual whom he was receiving: just a manifest, playful curiosity and sympathy, It was a sympathy which Valenglay had never concealed, and of which he even boasted when, after Arsène Lupin's sham death, he spoke of the adventurer and the strange relations between them.
Don Luis looked at Valenglay and said: "What is it that you really wish to say, Monsieur le Président?" "I will tell you. Although pressure was brought to bear upon us by Caceres's threats, Monsieur le Préfet de Police, anxious to see all possible light shed on the plot played by Florence Levasseur, did not interfere with your last night's expedition.
He was gloriously masterful, almost calm, so wholly did he appear to control his seething rage. He gave his orders in breathless little sentences, curt as words of command. "Mazeroux, run around to the Prefect's. Ask him to ring up Valenglay: yes, the Prime Minister. I want to see him. Have him informed. Ask the Prefect to say it's I: the man who made the German Emperor play his game. My name?
And yet, although it was the second time, nobody thought of making that little comparison. The egg of Columbus again! It had to be thought of!" Valenglay was a little surprised at the revelation. It seemed as if that devil of a man had sworn to puzzle him up to the last moment and to bewilder him by the most unexpected sensational news.
"To-day, Greater France in Africa exists. Thanks to me, it is a solid and compact expanse. Millions of square miles of territory and a coastline stretching for several thousand miles from Tunis to the Congo, save for a few insignificant interruptions." "It's a Utopia," Valenglay protested. "It's a reality." "Nonsense! It will take us twenty years' fighting to achieve."
Valenglay sat down and, coming straight to the point, said, in a serious voice: "Don Luis Perenna, on the first day of your reappearance that is to say, at the very moment of the murders on the Boulevard Suchet Monsieur le Préfet de Police and I made up our minds as to your identity. Perenna was Lupin.
"Have you collared the scoundrel?" "Yes." "By Jove!" said Valenglay. "You're a fine fellow!" And he went on to ask, "An ogre, of course? An evil, undaunted brute? "No, Monsieur le Président, a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and all the rest of it."
Arsène Lupin is dead." "If you like," Valenglay agreed. "But that does not show that Don Luis Perenna is alive." "Don Luis Perenna has a duly legalized existence, Monsieur le President." "Perhaps. But it is disputed." "By whom? There is only one man who would have the right; and to accuse me would be his own undoing. I cannot believe him to be stupid enough "
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