"Chesterton, G.K. - The Innocence of Father Brown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chesterton G.K)

it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be
certain about Flambeau.

It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly
ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they
said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the
earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst)
Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the
Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he
had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by
committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and
bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of
athletic humour; how he turned the juge d'instruction upside down
and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran down
the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to
him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally
employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real
crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But
each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by
itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in
London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some
thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of
moving the little milk cans outside people's doors to the doors of
his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and
close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was
intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his
messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A
sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It
is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the
dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is
quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put
up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping
postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling
acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper
and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great
Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware
that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's
ideas were still in process of settlement.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of
disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If
Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall
grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have
arrested them on the spot. But all along his train there was
nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat
could be a disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had
already satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or
on the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There