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Updated: June 24, 2025
There is nothing to do." "Speak for yourself, doctor." And, stooping, he picked up the knife. "Is it not a butcher's knife?" asked Saniel, who could only use this word. "It looks like it." He had raised Caffie's head and examined the wound. "You see," he said, "that the victim has been butchered. The stroke was from left to right, by a firm hand which must be accustomed to handle this knife.
She received me kindly, and after having made me sit down in front of her, she told me that hearing from her concierge that I was exerting myself in my brother's behalf, she had something to tell me which would demonstrate that Caffie's assassin was not the man whom the law had arrested and detained.
That which he arranged so laboriously had succeeded according to his wish, and the only imprudence that he had committed, in a moment of aberration, seemed not to have been observed; no one had noticed his presence in the cafe opposite Caffie's house, and no one was astonished at his pertinacity in remaining there at an hour so unusual.
His fault had been in not foreseeing, the day after Caffie's death, that circumstances might arise sooner or later which would force it upon him. At that moment it did not present the same dangers as now; but parting from the idea that he had not been seen by any one, that he could not have been seen, he had rejoiced in the security that this conviction gave him, and quietly become benumbed.
Then the idea, the vision that had come to him two hours before, came back to him, clear and complete at nightfall, that is, at the moment when the concierge was in the second wing of the building, he mounted to Caffie's apartment without being seen, and with this knife he cut his throat.
If they should ever meet, she would recognize him, and recognizing him, she would speak. Would she be believed? This was the decisive question, and from what he had heard of her, it seemed that she would be. Denials would not suffice. He did not go to Caffie's at a quarter past five. Where was he at this moment? What witness could he call upon?
What he should have foreseen would come to pass, nothing more; the lesson that experience taught him was hard, and this was not the first one; the evening of Caffie's death he saw very clearly that a new situation opened before him, which to the end of his life would make him the prisoner of his crime.
The evening of the assassination she was in this same room, lying on this same bed, before this same window, and after having read all day, she reflected and dreamed about her book, while listlessly watching the coming of twilight in the court, that already obscured everything in its shadow. Mechanically she had fixed her eyes on the window of Caffie's office opposite.
"He did not even notice it at first. But later, in the street, seeing one leg of his trousers longer than the other, he thought of the ladder, and found that he had lost a button. He would not return to Caffie's to look for it, of course." "Of course." "How could he foresee that Caffie would be assassinated? That the crime would be so skilfully planned and executed that the criminal would escape?
To have made himself unrecognizable was, without doubt, a safe precaution; but having started on this course, he would not be easy until he had destroyed all traces of himself in such a way that Madame Dammauville would never be able to find the man that she had seen so clearly under Caffie's lamp.
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