The long arm of Fantômas

“Not at all, not at all!... Your leave, Monsieur Moche, to count them over again on my side? Ten thousand francs, quite a sum of money!”

“My word, yes, my man; so that clears your budget, eh?”

“Please don’t think I mistrust you because I check the notes; it’s the usual thing.”

“Go on, go on; don’t apologise.”

The bank collector deposited his peaked cap on a straw-bottomed chair beside him, mopped his streaming brow, and moistening his thumb with a rapid, eminently professional movement, passed one by one between his fingers the ten big blue bank notes his debtor had just paid over to him.

The heat was stifling; it was the 15th of May—settling day, and about four o’clock of the afternoon.

Bernard, an employé at the Comptoir National, was nearly at the end of his day’s round when he reached M. Moche’s abode, which lay at the far end of the quartier, No. 125 Rue Saint-Fargeau.

The man had climbed the stairs slowly. On the fourth floor right was a door with a brass plate on which was inscribed:

Moche, Advocate

The description was only roughly indicative of the professional status of the tenant of the fourth floor. M. Moche was indeed an advocate, but not an advocate borne on the rolls of the Cour d’Appel, a pleader affiliated to the Paris bar and consequently bound by the strict rules of the profession; he was an advocate in the bare, literal sense of the word, leading persons of some perspicacity to surmise that M. Moche was in actual fact merely an ordinary business agent.

Nor was the impression produced on a visitor entering M. Moche’s domicile such as to modify the supposition. A real barrister’s chambers are in the main very much like any middle-class private house, whereas M. Moche’s office, or to be more precise, M. Moche’s offices, bore the unmistakable stamp of a place of business.

The first room you entered was divided in two by a partition pierced by wicket-windows, the lower portion being solid, the upper consisting of a lattice-work of stout bars. Behind could be seen rows and rows of deed-boxes and bundles of papers ranged on big shelves. In this room M. Moche generally sat, and whenever the outer door opened he would follow suit by throwing open a little window and popping out his head to take stock of the visitor.

Anyone who had ever seen M. Moche, or even his head only framed in the window opening, could never forget the man, for the advocate of the Rue Saint-Fargeau possessed a physiognomy that was highly characteristic.

His features, prematurely wrinkled, betrayed his age to be a good fifty. Following the fashion of ministerial officers of former days, M. Moche wore on his cheeks a pair of short, bushy whiskers, of a reddish hue that made them strongly resemble a rabbit’s paws. His rather prominent nose, under which a black smudge of snuff was invariably to be found, carried a pair of enormous, round, gold-rimmed spectacles. Atop of his skull, which one guessed to be completely bald, was perched a badly made, badly kept wig, ragged at the temples and unduly flattened at the crown, whereon the wearer found it necessary from time to time to balance a little velvet skull-cap.

Had it not been for the shifty eyes that were never at rest for an instant, M. Moche might have been taken for a perfectly honest man; yet his old-maidish manner, his soft, silky address, his often exaggerated politeness, his trick of rubbing his hands and bending his back before visitors, somehow modified any such favourable impression.