fresh outbreak of
activity on the part of those left free. The second method is to bribe
an anarchist to betray his comrades. I have never found any difficulty
in getting these gentry to accept money. They are eternally in need,
but I usually find the information they give in return to be either
unimportant or inaccurate. There remains, then, the third method,
which is to place a spy among them. The spy battalion is the forlorn
hope of the detective service. In one year I lost three men on
anarchist duty, among the victims being my most valuable helper, Henri
Brisson. Poor Brisson's fate was an example of how a man may follow a
perilous occupation for months with safety, and then by a slight
mistake bring disaster on himself. At the last gathering Brisson
attended he received news of such immediate and fateful import that on
emerging from the cellar where the gathering was held, he made
directly for my residence instead of going to his own squalid room in
the Rue Falgarie. My concierge said that he arrived shortly after one
o'clock in the morning, and it would seem that at this hour he could
easily have made himself acquainted with the fact that he was
followed. Still, as there was on his track that human panther, Felini,
it is not strange poor Brisson failed to elude him.

Arriving at the tall building in which my flat was then situated,
Brisson rang the bell, and the concierge, as usual, in that strange
state of semi-somnolence which envelops concierges during the night,
pulled the looped wire at the head of his bed, and unbolted the door.
Brisson assuredly closed the huge door behind him, and yet the moment
before he did so, Felini must have slipped in unnoticed to the
stone-paved courtyard. If Brisson had not spoken and announced
himself, the concierge would have been wide awake in an instant. If he
had given a name unknown to the concierge, the same result would have
ensued. As it was he cried aloud 'Brisson,' whereupon the concierge of
the famous chief of the French detective staff, Valmont, muttered
'_Bon_! and was instantly asleep again.

Now Felini had known Brisson well, but it was under the name of
Revensky, and as an exiled Russian. Brisson had spent all his early
years in Russia, and spoke the language like a native. The moment
Brisson had uttered his true name he had pronounced his own death
warrant. Felini followed him up to the first landing--my rooms were on
the second floor--and there placed his sign