Free French Leave by Maggie MacKeever Page B

shawl around her shoulders and stepped out into the hall. The Duc’s family was concerned? It was understandable. Descending the stairs, Barbary wondered if there was some manner in which they might be put off the track.
    Mab stood staring out the window. Behind her Tibble busied himself at the stove. Mab heard a clatter, then a moan. “Enough!” she said. “Wait for Barbary to return. I have told you already, Tibble, that you should not try to cook. You will bum yourself again.”
    But Tibble was not cooking. “Miss Mab! Miss Mab!”
    Mab swung around, alerted by the urgency in Tibble’s voice. He was not at the stove, but by the divan, bent over the Duc.
    Dead, then? Mab felt chilled. She hurried across the room.
    The Duc’s eyes were open, staring at the draperies that hung over the divan. He made even a handsome corpse, Mab thought sadly. Then with painful slowness he turned his head.
     

Chapter  Nine
     
    Inspecteur Ollivant had not given up his quest for a certain missing Duc.  At that very moment, he was searching the Palais Royale. No easy feat, this, and it had already taken several hours:  Paris’s center of dissipation and depravity was an immense mass of architecture which enclosed six squares, some planted with trees. Thus far the Inspecteur had counted fifteen restaurants  and twenty-nine cafès; seventeen billiard-saloons and twenty-four jewelers shops; six booksellers, eight watchmakers, a dentist-pedicure and a manufacturer of pictures in hair. In the wooden arcades known as the Camp des Tartares were a similar profusion of establishments, where officers bought jewelry and other presents for ladies of the pavé who strolled about in revealing evening clothes, though evening had not yet come. Beneath the shops were subterranean apartments where less affluent revelers danced and drank and diced, and indulged in whatever other vices struck their fancy. 
    The first floor was reserved for gambling, and it was those gambling rooms that most interested Inspecteur Ollivant—not for his own sake; the inspector disliked gambling, but in his search for the Duc de Gascoigne. Already Yves had visited the best-known houses: number 113, where the stakes played for round the roulette table were ruinously high, and unlucky players recovered in the ‘room of the wounded’ next door; number 150, which was affiliated with a money-lending establishment that supplied unlucky gamesters with the means to continue playing at an interest of six percent each month; number 64, which boasted tables for trente-et-quatre and passé-dix, and an adjoining gun shop.
    A large number of the rooms opened in succession, and all were crowded with people playing hazard and other games of skill, losing at one table what they had won at the last. An occasional shout of triumph or groan of defeat rose above the murmur of voices, the metallic chink of coins, the crack of the croupier’s stick.
    Inspecteur Ollivant was relieved to escape into the fresh air. If the Duc de Gascoigne had indeed engaged himself to gamble in the Palais Royale, it was for the first time; he was not known there. The inspector mulled over this development. M’sieur le Duc had parted from Ma’mselle Foliot, and then disappeared.
    Ducs did not simply disappear, not in these days, troubled as they might be. De Gascoigne had to be somewhere. Unfortunately, as to where, Inspecteur Ollivant hadn’t the slightest clue. It was a situation of the most frustrating. Yves was not a man without ambition, and for those ambitions the matter of the missing Duc might well spell doom.
    Mais non! He must not think such things. He would solve the mystery of the missing Duc with such speed and cleverness and subtlety that it would seem only fitting that he be made a plainclothes detective for the newly formed Sûreté. Then he would be rid of this ugly uniform, which was as uncomfortable as it was hot, and which also made very evident his profession as a Gardien de la Pax.
    It