Chapter 3: The Midnight Visitor

Ausable was different from other secret agents in several ways. He had a small room in the musty corridor of a gloomy French hotel that was on the sixth and top floor, and it was scarcely a setting for a romantic adventure. He was a sloppy fat man with a weird accent. In spite of living in Paris for over twenty years after moving from Boston, he spoke French and German with great difficulty and had not lost touch with his American accent. Generally, a spy gets messages passed secretly to him by beautiful girls; Ausable was not of that kind. He got only a routine telephone call making an appointment. These were some of the ways he was different from the conventional notion of a secret agent. Besides, in the story, we noticed how he dealt with Max by cooking up some stories about a non-existent balcony and convincing him to jump off the building, so that he could get rid of Max forever.

Fowler was a young and romantic writer who had come to meet Ausable. He experienced his first thrill of the day when he saw an unknown man in Ausable’s room pointing a small automatic pistol towards him and Ausable.