They were all without baggage, of course. After he saw them, Dibley got into action quickly. He yelled for guards to close in; he had out his gun. But they were down the stairs and I didn’t need to grab that gun; so I didn’t. Shots sounded below, however. I couldn’t tell who fired them. I went down the stairs with Dibley and the rest of the drift from the platform; but my three friends had doubled, dodged and were away.
I waited as long as I dared; then I climbed and caught the train. Dibley didn’t; but his orders overtook us. At Ashtabula, an hour or so east, they stopped us and officers came aboard to take off all baggage from compartment E, car No. 424, and also to capture George’s large, piggy portmanteau. A special engine was about to start with all that for Cleveland.
During the stop, I rather expected a word or two might be said to me; but it became plain that Dibley’s opinion of me continued true to form. Nobody bothered me; the train went on; my berth was made and I took that new suit case of Doris Janvier’s behind the curtains.
XVI I WALK INTO A PARLOR.
Naturally I debated about opening the bag. She’d given me the key; she had told me to use it, “please!” to find her new toothbrush. But I didn’t open it for that. She had meant, I thought, that I should see what I was carrying. So at last I unlocked it and in the light of the little berth lamp I came upon her own intimate attire—a kimono, slippers and silk pajamas, ridiculous little lovely things; stockings, some more gossamer silk which probably was what Field’s advertise as an “envelope”, a mirror, a brush, a manicure set. There was the new toothbrush and “This Freedom”, and below the book, tied together, a pair of steel plates. After looking so far, I felt no harm in gazing further, especially at these.
One was engraved to print ten-dollar National Bank Notes; the other was good—or bad—for the denomination of a hundred. I’m no judge of engraving on steel but they looked like excellent plates to me.
I rewrapped them and brigaded them with “This Freedom” and shoved them back in the suit case, which I locked. I went to use the toothbrush and also to think about those plates. “Well, wasn’t that what you expected when you gave her your word?” I said to myself. The answer was that then I hadn’t the plates in my hand and I was talking to Doris.
Going to bed, I lay awake, mulling over all manner of doubts having to do with Doris and Jerry and Keeban, Christina, and with me. I did some practical speculating, too; I wondered whether old “Iron Age”, when he rendezvoused Doris’s luggage returned from Ashtabula, was going to note the omission of kimono, slippers, silk pajamas, envelope, mirror, brush and “This Freedom” from the normal equipment of a young lady of the day; I wondered if, missing them, he might feel strange suspicions of me, which even the memory of my cheese quotations would not allay. But evidently he did not.
I got to sleep; when I awoke, Doris’s suit case and those plates remained as they were. Nobody had disturbed them or me.
Breakfasting beside the Hudson, I propped before me the New York Times. It was innocent of knowledge of minor doings in the west, such as a sudden getaway with shooting near the Lake Shore station at Cleveland, but it played a special from Chicago on the front page.
Janvier, the counterfeiter, had been taken with two of his new plates. The Times correspondent was feeling decidedly high up because of it. Trust New York to respond to word that the financial structure is just a bit more safe. Old Wally Bailey was gloriously bucked over the business too; he had himself interviewed in two places; first he certified that the plates, which had been captured, were the source of the highly deceptive and dangerous twenty and fifty-dollar false Federal Reserve notes recently put in circulation in great quantities; second he sounded the alarm that Janvier had completed, also, a couple of other plates, one for printing ten-dollar bills and one for striking off notes of one-hundred dollar denomination. The police had evidence that these plates existed but they had failed to find them.
For the best of reasons! I had them tied up with “This Freedom” underneath Doris’s lingerie.
I carried her suit case myself across to the Belmont where I took it to my room and then, after locking myself in, I gathered Janvier’s plates from it and carried them, in my pocket, up to our bank where I had a safe deposit box and I put them away there. Much happier in my head, I wired Fanneal and Company, Chicago, not to expect me at the desk that morning and dropped into our New York branch and pretended that business had brought me on.
Beans and butter never struck me so dull as upon this morning; and the only thrill I could squeeze from Philadelphia double daisies and Fond du Lac twins was the second-hand memory of yesterday. I kept ’phoning the Belmont inquiring for telegrams; but nothing came in for me.
What was happening in Cleveland? I wondered. Was Doris going back to Chicago, now that her father was taken; or would she stick to her plan to come on?
Vine—Keeban—was here, she said; Christina was here. So, if Jerry was anywhere, probably he also was here; and, if any of his old habits clung to him, he’d know I’d arrived, too. There is a column printed every day, you know, giving the news of arrivals of out-of-town buyers in every line of trade. My name, with New York address, was in the papers that afternoon. Jerry used to glance over the arrivals in our line.
I felt lonely as Crusoe that day, particularly when dinner time approached. I imagined I’d make myself better by drifting over to dine with some friends I’d met on Fifth. There was a daughter, there, about Doris’s age and size; a popular girl,—a deb of a couple of years’ standing. Sitting and smoking, I mean, rather.
I bored the poor dear. I always had, so why not now? She never flicked a stir in me. Not that she tried; she didn’t. That was it. “Well, old Steve, we’ll struggle through with the meal somehow!” Such was the sensation underlying the ennui; so, naturally, she made it mutual with me.
Thank God, she didn’t try to mix salad dressing at the table; so I kept my memory clear.
That night, when I returned to the hotel, I had a wire filed at Buffalo; three words, no signature: “Seediness yonder thus.”
You may suppose I had my Webster handy, and, counting my words up and down, made out “See you Thursday.”
That was to-morrow; so I had to figure out, during the night, what I was to say. You see, I had to bring her those plates and give them to her; but she had to give me a chance to argue her out of using them.
Lying in bed, many a good way of putting my point of view came to me. I got up several times and jotted them down; some I just talked over with myself. I made rather a night of it; never was more earnest over anything in my life. I looked to my talk with that girl as a sort of turning point in her life, and for me, if I could simply make her see matters straight. I was crazy over her; you’ve gathered that; and trusted her, too, or would trust her with anything but a counterfeit steel plate which her father had engraved. I figured I could make it so I could trust her with that, too.
About mid-morning, I got another wire; from Jersey City this: “Seven three chess omnivorus noose.”
No signature again; but the system, which Doris taught me in that vestibule, gave me the place and the time. Up five from seven made twelve; down three from three, zero. Up five from chess, first syllable “cher” down three from omnivorous, “on”; up one from noose, “noon.”
The telegram: “120 Cheron (Street) Noon.”
Cheron proved to be one of those streets, turned at several angles, down by Brooklyn Bridge.
I rehearsed all my talk, went to the vault and withdrew that pair of plates. I decided to make this meeting on foot, not in taxi, so I took the subway from Grand Central to the Bridge and emerged in that intriguing maze which radiates under the ramp of that old roadway suspended above East River.
Cheron Street showed itself on a corner full fifteen minutes before noon. It was a sunny bit of city that clear, winter day; it was one of those houses-and-stores streets with red-brick fronts, tall narrow windows and iron stairs and railings. Children romped about; hucksters were making sales to sets of the wisest buyers I ever saw. Price quotations floated to me and I wondered how they could work so close to cost.
I was trying to make the time pass more swiftly by turning attention to such trifles while I waited. For I would not call at No. 120 till noon.
Of course I’d located the number and looked it over several times. It was on one of the regular red brick fronts which owned windows cleaner than most of its neighbors. Nice, old-fashioned curtains, stiffly starched, showed their white patterns. It seemed a precise and prim abode, not over-populated.
During the minutes I watched, men, women and children went in and out of the doors on each side,—practical looking men, who might be mechanics engaged in car repairs at a garage around the corner; in ways which I’ve mentioned, the women proved they were frugal housewives; the play of the children added to the decent domesticity of the street.
There was absolutely nothing sinister in sight and nothing and nobody menacing like the dyke-keeper in Klangenberg’s delicatessen.
No one went in or out of Number 120; and I imagined it the abode of some aging, female relative of Doris; an aunt possibly, who might have been her guardian in some country town during Doris’s childhood and who now had moved to the city and who probably took support from the proceeds of Janvier’s plates but had nothing more to do with them.
When noon came, and Doris had not appeared, I realized that she must be waiting me within; and I went up and rang the bell.
An old woman admitted me, a nice-appearing, wrinkled and gray-haired thing.
“Come in,” she said to me immediately, before I could ask for anyone. Plainly I had been expected; and she motioned me into the prim, red-plush parlor with an ancient piano and crayon enlargements on the wall; and also faded, plush hangings in the door.
These were particularly important furnishings; for it was when I was stepping between them that I was hit on the head; and not by that old woman nor by any infirm or failing person. The hit was wholly vigorous and expert; and right at the base of the back of my head.
Of course, I realized all this afterwards; at the time, I knew nothing. I was walking into that prim, red-plush parlor quite strong and happy; I passed the portières and instantaneously I was “out.” I was also down but didn’t know it; I went “out” while still on my feet; but naturally, when I found myself again, I was on the floor.
XVII CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO A GAS CALLED KX.
A good many persons of both sexes have put into writing the mental confusion usually concomitant to the process of “coming to.” The descriptions which I’ve happened to read were done by good writers, certainly; but the writers don’t impress me now as people who’d been personally hit on the head. At least, they lacked treatment under the hand of a pluperfect, postgraduate performer upon the medulla oblongata.
The trouble with those descriptions is that they are too advanced and intricate. The subject generally is seized with some figurative image, which is quite all right from my experience; but whereas others seem to have come to consciousness through flights of fancy similar to stanzas in “Spoon River Anthology” or Carl Sandberg’s best, I woke up repeating to myself the simplest of verse. In fact:
The psycho-analyst says that the subconscious, which is always with us, working, never is actually foolish; it is interpretive, if you have the insight to understand it. Well, this was my subconscious expression. It was interpretive, true enough.
Now the spider, in my complex, was not that old woman; Doris was doing the spider in my dream.
Upon becoming aware that, though I lay on the edge of a red-plush parlor, I was not physically a fly, I felt over myself to find what was missing.
There should be something hard and heavy and extremely important under my coat in my right inside pocket. That region was soft and pliable now. Plates were lacking; that was it,—nice, new, counterfeit plates which I’d procured from under Doris Janvier’s lingerie in that Pullman on the Century and which I’d put in my pocket to return to her here at Number 120 Cheron Street with an idea of evangelizing her out of using them.
Phrases and periods from that talk I’d prepared for her came into my mind and mixed into the parade of other ideas which followed the spider-and-fly act. They gave me a laugh, anyway.
I lay, looked and listened. After a few minutes, I sat up. Apparently I had the house to myself. Also I had my watch and other personal possessions, everything except those plates.
I took a chance on rising; and still nobody disturbed me. Possibly I might have poked all over that house but I felt no overmastering impulse. The door and that street, on the other side of the pane with these nice, prim, old-fashioned curtains, looked very good to me. I got out and shut the door behind me. Over by the bridge I found a patrolman and asked him to take me to the nearest police station.
That was the place where I sketched to interested ears the essentials of what I’d done since leaving Chicago. I gave them all,—how I’d suspected her before she took the train, how I helped her get away at Cleveland; how I’d carried on the plates and went to return them, trusting to the patent leather platitudes I’d prepared to turn her to the paths of rectitude.
I gave them, with that last particularly, the laugh of their lives. They wanted to know if I actually expected she would meet me alone in a parlor to talk ethics with me.
They might have at least arrested me; but they didn’t even do that. They did detail an officer to accompany me; but he felt himself distinctly as one charged to keep me from further harm. They rushed a squad over to Number 120 Cheron Street, of course, and surrounded the house properly before closing in. But nobody, not even the old woman, was there. The house was empty and so eminently proper to all appearances that, for a while, a theory prevailed that I had invented my whole story.
Then they began hearing from Dibley and confirmed the first part; about two days later, there was plenty of proof of the rest. The prints from those missing Janvier plates began making their début at the banks all over New York; Philadelphia reported a few; soon Boston was heard from.
They were so good that some of the experts at the banks wired Washington for a check on serial numbers before throwing Janvier’s work out. Naturally, all this made me popular.
I didn’t care about returning home; I didn’t drop into our New York office. I stayed in my room, mostly, where old “Iron Age” Dibley, among others, visited me.
He informed me that Doris and George and Felice all completed their get-away at Cleveland; and he didn’t feel himself in the least to blame for that. No; he’d shifted any chagrin, which he might have felt, right on to me. Doris undoubtedly had come on afterwards, counting upon my chronic fatuity to respond to feeding by her telegrams; undoubtedly—to Dibley’s mind—she personally arranged the medulla oblongata performance for me.
Of course, I’d felt that; but when old “Iron Age” got gloating over it, he cheered me into a question or two. Had she? Was I sure?
Well, I’d certainly indicated to the police that I was; and no one developed any further ideas upon the subject. Number 120 Cheron Street was deserted of Doris and her crowd as the Flamingo Feather after the ball. The issue of those new Janvier tens and hundreds seemed to shift to the south; Atlanta reported rather more than its share; Nashville and Memphis broke into the column of complaints and New Orleans was not overlooked.
I was about convinced that my friends of the Flamingo and Cheron Street had shifted base again when I received, through the mails at the hotel, a note in Jerry’s handwriting.
“Steve: Here’s your chance,” I read. “Get to T. M. Teverson at once and talk to him; or Sencort. Prevent any meeting in Sencort Directors’ room. Make this absolutely sure. Examine pipe, particularly. J.”
Jerry’s writing and his manner with me, beyond doubt. He was still alive then and, if that postmark meant anything, he was in New York City at ten o’clock last night.
Of course, I’d never seen Keeban’s writing. It might be identical with Jerry’s; Keeban might try this with me for some scheme of his own. But I didn’t think it. In the first place, this started with such an understanding of me.
“Steve: Here’s your chance!”
Now Jerry, alive and looking on at me from somewhere in New York, naturally would start with that thought for me. He’d be feeling, from the first moment I’d stuck with him after he was accused and when I continued to stick through that affair of the Scofields’, how I’d had a steady run of results against me. He’d have heard how, out of that Flamingo Feather ball, I’d gone deeper into disrepute; and he’d been thinking just that for me: “Here’s your chance, Steve.” He meant, of course, my chance to rehabilitate my reputation somewhat.
“Get to T. M. Teverson at once!” That meant to get to the big man of the moment in New York. Officially, he was first vice-president of the Sencort Trust; but unofficially he was a sort of financial vice-regent of Europe for the time being. You see, that was the instant of the particular crisis in international affairs when the Sencort Trust took the load, and “carried” two of the major powers, along with seven or eight of the minors, for the sake of the peace of the world and to postpone, for a while anyway, the rush of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse over the rest of Europe.
Teverson personally was packing tremendous responsibilities; and naturally every one, whose impulse in difficulty is to slip out from under and loot and destroy, was keen to take a pot shot at him.
Jerry’s note must mean that he’d run on the trail of an especially capable plot which involved the employment of pipes running into the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust. Suggestive, that mention of pipes; and he had emphasized the need to see Teverson at once.
I had the note just after breakfast; and the Times this morning told that Lord Strathon, for England, and F. L. Géroud, for France, were arriving on the Majestic for immediate conference with the Sencort committee about loans and reparations. That meeting, this morning, undoubtedly was booked for the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust,—a big bag, sure enough, for whoever was going gunning through the pipes this morning.
I’d no time to lose, so I rushed to Wall Street and up in the old Trust Building to Teverson’s office. He was down meeting the Majestic, which was just docking; so I sent in my card to Sencort.
Now I knew the old man slightly; he had, among a thousand other flyers, his venture in beans, netting himself something too. Also, Fanneal and Company had supplied on some foreign-food contracts he’d financed; so I was sure he’d know my name.
He did; he sent out word he couldn’t see me and told the girl to explain that he was expecting Lord Strathon and M. Géroud momentarily.
“Tell him that’s why I have to see him now,” I urged the girl.
She brought out word that the Sencort Trust would not let the contracts on the supplies to be bought with proceeds of the new loans; and, if they did, I’d have to see him later.
I said to that girl, “You read the papers?”
Of course she did; and, when I asked, she granted that she’d seen considerable mention of me, recently.
“That’s good,” I said. “Will you ask Mr. Sencort if he has, too? And, if he has, assure him I’ve called on nothing connected with my usual business, but something else of direct importance to him.”
“Rising out of your—” she hesitated and then said—“your counterfeiter’s connection, Mr. Fanneal?”
“Rising from it,” I told her, “but not stopping there. Now I leave it to you to get me in to see Mr. Sencort.”
I saw, by this time, she was curious, if not a little impressed. It’s queer how a short and conspicuously unsuccessful connection with crime produces an effect which a lifetime in a creditable business can not do,—at least not the bean business. That girl disappeared and when she was back again, it was to ask me into Mr. Sencort’s office.
The old man was at his desk and alone, and I saw at once that the girl had gone the distance for me with him; I had much to make good, so I went to it immediately.
“I’ve come to ask you not to have any meetings in your directors’ room to-day.”
Of course he asked why; and I told him, “I’ve word, which I feel sure is reliable, that there is a plot against your meeting.”
“Hmm!” said Sencort, evidently disappointed. “Much obliged for your trouble.”
Plainly, he wasn’t interested.
I said, “You’ll not meet in that room this morning?”
He was looking at papers on his desk. “Why not? I’ve had it examined. I’ve been warned before, Fanneal; so we’ve already taken precautions. These threats never amount to anything. Much obliged to you, however.”
“You’ve examined the pipes in that room?” I asked.
“Pipes?” he repeated. There’s always something about definiteness which claims the attention. He pressed a button on his desk.
The girl, who had got me in, reappeared. “Ask Reed and Weston whether they’ve particularly examined the pipes in the directors’ room,” he said; and when the girl was gone, he nodded to me. “Sit down, Fanneal.”
Some one rang him on the ’phone, just then; and when he was through talking, the girl gave word: “Not particularly, Mr. Sencort. They’re going over them now.”
Again she left us alone.
“Rather rotten situation in Europe,” I commented conversationally.
“Hmm,” Sencort grunted, chewing his cigar, with as little interest in my reactions on the European trouble as in my warning to him. He gave me the impression that, having read about my performance with those counterfeit plates, he was willing to refresh his memory upon the sort of citizen who did that sort of thing.
His girl reentered and reported, “Mr. Teverson is here with Lord Strathon and M. Géroud, sir.”
Sencort nodded. “Heard from Reed?”
“He’s outside, sir.”
“Send him in.”
Reed proved to be a tall, keen-looking chap, evidently alert and undoubtedly dependable. He was one of the bank detectives, not in uniform.
“We’ve gone over the whole room again, sir; and also the rooms adjoining. Everything is in order,” he reported.
“Particularly the pipes?” Sencort asked.
“There’s nothing wrong with the pipes, sir.”
“Very well,” Sencort dismissed him; and then he looked at me. “Much obliged, Fanneal,” he thanked me again.
Of course, he was dismissing me, but I held my ground. “The warning which reached me, Mr. Sencort, did not advise mere examination of the room,” I insisted. “It said to prevent its use. I must urge you, whatever you think, not to meet in that room.”
“Fanneal, if I governed my movements according to cautions of well-meaning friends, I’d have put myself and family and friends in a steel safe thirty years ago. Reed says that room is clear; it is on the fifth floor, so attack from the street is impossible. Here’s Teverson now.”
Another hint for me, but I stuck, and just then Teverson came in to see what was so absorbing in here, and old Sencort, in explaining why he was preferring a chat with me to a conference with M. Géroud and Lord Strathon at that hour, of course dragged in the mad idea I’d brought along. But Teverson wasn’t amused by it at all.
“Reed and Weston have both examined the room,” Sencort repeated, “and found all in order.”
“All was in order over at Ed Costrelman’s the other night, not only before but after the—the occurrence,” Teverson mentioned in a thoughtful sort of brooding manner which sparked up old Sencort.
“What occurrence?” he came back loudly; of course Teverson had the door shut after him.
“Good Lord,” said Teverson, “didn’t you know that Ed Costrelman’s dead?”
“Certainly,” said Sencort. “I also know that his butler is dead and most of his party was sick but have recovered; from something wrong in the wine or vermuth. What has that to do with us? We’re not serving liqueur at directors’ meeting.”
“It wasn’t in the wine or vermuth,” Teverson came back calmly. “It wasn’t in the food either; everything they’d drunk or tasted has been analyzed. Everything, I tell you, was in order.”
“What was it, then?” Sencort went at him, still with more impatience than interest. “Simultaneous, group indigestion?”
“A poison, a definite, lethal agent, reached Costrelman and the butler—Swan—in fatal amount and the rest in less quantity. The post-mortem on Ed and Swan was completed this morning; there was definite, characteristic destruction of motor nerve centers.”
“Characteristic of what?” This was old Sencort—yielding, pliable nature, he had, you see—at Teverson again.
“A cheerful little chemical composition which the infernal-machine and poison squad of the secret service call KX.”
“What?”
“In your school days, how did you designate algebraically an unknown quantity?” Teverson asked old Sencort, evidently knowing that the way to handle the old boy was by going to the good old Socratic.
“By the later letters of the alphabet,” Sencort grunted.
“That is the X in the name of this; it means they haven’t an iota of information on one ingredient, except by its effect; by K, they mean they can halfway guess at the other; it seems to be the masterpiece of an Austrian chemist known as Stenewisc who hides himself most successfully somewhere on the East Side here. If he’d been born in the Borgias’ time, he’d have been Lucretia’s favorite; for his stuff killed Costrelman and Swan and almost killed half a dozen more without giving the slightest warning till the physical seizure came, and without leaving an external trace.”
“Poison to kill has to get into one,” Sencort came back, not giving up yet. “If it wasn’t in the food or in the drink, where was it?”
“What,” returned Teverson, sticking to the Socratic, “goes into one’s body beside food and drink?”
“Air’s all I can think of.”
“All I can,” Teverson admitted. “And, with that in mind, I believe I’ll have a look around our directors’ room myself, if you’ll hold, up our meeting for a few minutes.”
“Damn foolishness,” acceded Sencort graciously.
“Pipes were what I was particularly warned against,” I said to Teverson.
“Come along,” he invited me; so I went with him to the fifth floor, passed Weston and Reed on guard outside to see that nobody carted in time bombs since they’d last reported the room clear, and we stepped into the regular, long-tabled, black-walnut panelled mausoleum sort of room which directors picked for their deliberations a generation or so ago.
There it was, with two windows to the street and both closed; it was winter, you see, and Sencort wasn’t the only near octogenarian to rally round that walnut. It had electric lights and nothing else but a steam radiator, carpet and chairs and five old etchings on the walls. Everything was clear; nothing was wrong in the drawers or under the tables or chairs or even under the carpet. Reed had carefully tested the radiators and steam pipes. They were absolutely in order.
But I kept poking about the room and, behind an etching, I found the capped head of an old gas pipe which evidently brought illuminating gas to the room in the days before electric lighting.
It was capped, I say, and looked quite all right, but I happened to put my fingers behind the cap. Then I called Teverson; and he felt, and called Reed.
“What do you think of that?” he asked.
That was a slot—rather a series of slots—cut through the pipe behind the cap on the right wall. You couldn’t see them from the front; you hardly could see them when you pressed cheek to the wall but you could feel them top, bottom and sides of the pipe cut through, leaving just enough metal to hold the cap in place; and freshly cut; for the edges were sharp to your fingers and shining to your eyes. But of course every scrap and shaving of the metal had been cleaned away. The pipe behind the cap back of an etching on the opposite wall was exactly like this.
“It was to come that way, I guess,” I said carefully to Teverson.
“Was?” he repeated as carefully. “What makes you think it isn’t yet to come? Not in the middle of our meeting now, but to whoever is here, which means you and me.” But he did not move away; instead, he walked to the window and stood there looking down. I glanced down too and into Wall Street and got a glimpse of that part which seemed particularly to bear a message for us this morning—that strip between Morgan’s offices and the sub-treasury where people were peacefully passing and feeling absolutely secure that summer noon, not so long ago, when without warning at all that infernal no-one-yet-knows-what went off and did what nobody about Wall Street will ever forget.
Of course, what had strewed the street had been gathered up and the pavement repaired and flushed and swept and the buildings restored long ago; yet this neighborhood wasn’t precisely the best spot to disregard a threat of terrorism,—especially when you’ve found ancestral gas pipes freshly chiselled for no use you wish to put them to.
“We’ve expected trouble from radicals about this stage in our foreign financing, Fanneal,” Teverson said to me. “We’ve guarded Géroud and Strathon from the minute they passed quarantine; we’ve double-guarded these premises with special men who are watching every stranger who comes in to-day; we’ve taken every precaution—or thought we had. That’s why Sencort was so sure nothing could happen.”
He stepped nearer to the window and I realized that he was not standing there merely to think, but he was intentionally showing himself to convince any watcher that the room was occupied. He turned about and went on, “No one knows where the other ends of these pipes are now; of course they haven’t been used for decades. They might stop anywhere or they might have been led on indefinitely. If what killed Costrelman came through the air—and it seems certain it did—and if those pipes are conveyors for more of it, they could have pumped it in and nobody suspected till somebody fell over; it might be coming now on us. Do you feel any movement of air from that pipe?”
“I can’t be sure,” I said.
“Come out now,” said Teverson, pulling at me absolutely unnecessarily; he didn’t have to put up any argument. “I may be a damn fool, as Sencort suggests, but then I’ve rather a longer life expectancy—away from slotted gas pipes—than he. Besides, I’m beginning to feel some of this is personal against me. I was invited to Costrelman’s dinner and was expected, though I didn’t get there.... Weston, get help at once and try to cover the places where these pipes may run to; they may be entirely outside the building, of course. Jump! Reed, post men here to see no one uses this room or room next to it to-day. Leave the electric lights burning as if the room was being used and send some one, on the run, to that animal store the other side of Broadway in a cellar, Thames Street, I think, and buy four or five guinea pigs; if he gets back with them in fifteen minutes, cover your head, hold your breath, and put them inside this door; close it. If he doesn’t get back that soon, don’t even go near the door. Wait here, Fanneal.” He left me in an office near by and himself rushed away.
“Now you tell me,” he went at me three minutes later, “how much you know about this?”
XVIII DORIS APPEARS AND VANISHES.
I was a changed man, as you may imagine. Yesterday and up to this minute of this morning, I was the laugh of the locality. “F. P. A.” had put in a little paragraph about me; the librettists of the running revues also had tamped in a line or two of appropriate personal reference to the Chicago vendor of beans, with two nice, new money plates packed in his jeans.
It was music to me to hear any one address me as Teverson was doing.
“You know nearly all that I do,” I told him. “Maybe you’ve heard I’ve been in a little mix-up with counterfeiters and others recently. I got my tip out of that.”
“Who sent the tip?”
I shook my head; it was hopeless to go into the question of Jerry with him; and Teverson was not inclined to waste time impractically.
“Pipes!” he repeated. “They were going to use the pipes; that’s all you knew of their method?”
“That’s all.”
“What do you want to do now?” he asked me, almost deferentially. “Stay here?”
“I’d like to see this through, of course,” I said. “I’d like to know what happens to those guinea pigs.”
“Whatever you like,” he answered, and shook hands with me. I could see he was getting uneasy about Strathon and Géroud. He went out and I, having nothing to do but wait, wandered in the hall.
A door opened at the rear and showed an enclosed stairway lit by yellow electricity; a girl had come up the stairs and now was standing in the dimness of the hall.
During the second she showed herself in the lighted doorway, before the door closed again, I had a glimpse of her outline. She was little and trim; like Doris, I thought.
I stepped down by her and she went to the side of the hall and stood. Then I had the instinct to seize her; and there, in the quarter-light, I saw what I was feeling with my hands. She was Doris Janvier.
With the realization, my head seemed to hurt where I’d been hit; but my fingers held firm to her, giving her no chance to get away.
“What are you doing here?” I challenged.
She was quick! “I came up to see Mr. Teverson!” she said to me. “They wouldn’t let me see him downstairs. I heard he was up here!”
I half shook her. “You came up to see if they were meeting in the directors’ room. You’re the “wire” inside to-day! You came to see if everybody was placed! Well, nobody’ll be in that room but guinea pigs this morning. I don’t mind telling you, for you’ll not get back to tell them.”
“Oh!” she said. That was all, just then. “Oh!”
I kept hold of her, not knowing what else to do or say.
“Where are they?” I asked her, after a half-minute.
“Who?”
“Your crowd.”
She waited half a minute herself and then said, “I don’t know.”
“Never mind; we’ll find them. We’re following your pipes,” I assured her. I dragged her toward the front of the hall and had a better look at her.
“They’re not my pipes!” she denied.
“That’s true,” I admitted. “You found them in place; all you had to do was to make new openings.”
“Steve!” she said to me.
“Don’t try it,” I asked her.
I could see her face now,—her lips straight and thin, her eyes fixed on me, her forehead damp with those tiny drops of perspiration which you know are cold. She was wearing, not the same suit she’d had on the train; but one as smart, with fur collar and cuffs. She was the same neat little thing who had so completely fooled me; but she wouldn’t again.
“Steve!” she repeated my name. “I came here to find Mr. Teverson to warn him. Since he’s been warned, I don’t care.”
“I do!” I retorted and held her. She’d spoken as if I’d let her walk away.
Reed was back at the door of the directors’ room with little furry things in his hands. Somebody opened the door, he entered and came out quickly without the guinea pigs. He saw me and stepped up.
“Who’s this, Mr. Fanneal?” he asked me, respectfully enough, gazing at Doris.
I didn’t reply and he answered himself. “Oh, it’s her who was asking for Mr. Teverson downstairs.”
“I’ll see to her,” I said to Reed, and I led her into a room which I found empty.
“Now you’d better tell me all you know,” I advised her.
“What’ll you do, if I don’t?”
“You’ll not get out of this!” I promised her. “Not out of this!”
Nothing yet had really happened in “this”; we’d discovered nothing actual but those slotted pipes. Not even the guinea pigs had been killed yet; but the certainty of the plot, which had convinced Teverson too, turned me sick when I thought of it. And this girl, whom I held, was in the scheme.
True, she had stopped, on a lower floor, to inquire for Teverson; but that proved nothing in her favor. I thought how I’d trusted her before and how I’d been hit on the back of the head when I went to that meeting place where I was to have my chance to argue with her, alone.
I held to her; and she gazed at me and I felt her breathing slowly and deeply. The little clock on the desk near us turned to eleven; and we both heard steps and talk in the hall.
“What are they doing?” she asked me.
I opened our door; and we both saw two men, whose figures looked like Weston and Reed. They had hooded affairs, of gas-mask pattern over their heads, and they were at the door of the directors’ room.
“Don’t go in!” Doris cried to them. “No mask’s any good! Don’t let them in!” she cried to me.
Apparently they did not hear and Doris jerked toward them. I held her and shoved her back of me. “Don’t go in, Reed!” I called and at that moment, though I did not know it, I must have let Doris go.
I was watching the men and calling to them again; they had the door open a little; now they dropped back, but they could look in.
“They’re dead,” said Reed’s voice.
“Sure,” said the other. Then I missed Doris; and when I saw her, she was at the top of the stairs where she had first appeared. She had the door open and she was standing in it, looking back; then she slammed it. I was after her, but she had too good a lead. On the third floor, she entered the Sencort offices and left me on the back stairs with a bolted door between us.
I beat upon it and shouted and then realized, too late, that my best chance was to go to the ground and head her off. Of course I never headed her; she was gone.
When I returned upstairs, Reed had ventilated the directors’ room by opening the windows from the outside ledge. He had taken out the four guinea pigs he had left penned on the top of the directors’ table. They were all dead without visible hurt or reason.
Teverson came out of his conference, which was being held on the third floor; and he turned the limp guinea pigs over thoughtfully.
“There’s only one reason those aren’t Strathon and Géroud and Sencort and me, Fanneal,” he said, looking at me. “You want to do one more big thing for us and against—them?” He moved his head toward the wall; I knew whom he meant.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Keep this all quiet. It’s asking something, I know.”
I guess I got red at that. He meant I’d played rather prominently as a goat and it was something to ask me to conceal the one thing I’d put through.
“It’s the only thing to do,” I agreed.
He gave me his hand again. “We’ll all know,” he said.
“How about the men you have tracing the pipes?” I asked.
“Nothing from them yet.”
And there was nothing until a good deal later, when they found that those old gas pipes had been extended into an unused basement room in the building to the left. When they entered this room, they found proof that recently it had been occupied; men had been doing things there with reference to the end of that extended gas pipe, but everybody had got away.
I kept quiet, of course; the Sencort people hushed their clerks. Lord Strathon, for England, and M. Géroud, for France, met with Sencort and Teverson and made their agreements as everybody read. Nobody read of that near success at gassing them dead as those guinea pigs which had been penned on their table.
Nobody knew, but the Sencort people and I and those who had slotted the pipes and killed the four guinea pigs from that next-door basement room.
“Get out of New York, Steve! Stay away!” said another note to me in Jerry’s handwriting.
It arrived the second day after the gassing of the guinea pigs and I was thinking it over, when walking on Park Avenue and, being far from my hotel, I gave in to a taxi driver who offered his cab at the curb.
“Belmont!” I told him; and he started in the right direction; then he swung to the east and was over Third Avenue. He was up an alley while I was rapping at his window.
I realized then and opened the door and jumped out while the cab was still moving; but I was near his destination. A gat was at my midriff before I’d stopped slipping in the muck underfoot; and as I looked into the faces of the gents surrounding me, I understood that, upon the rack of their club, my number to-day had arrived at the top.
XIX I HEAR OF THE GLASS ROOM.
They were not masked; it was daylight. The hour was late in the afternoon, to be sure; but I saw them plainly as they made no attempt at concealment. And I could guess at the significance of this. They showed themselves, without care, for they felt absolutely sure I would never have a chance to give evidence against them.
I used to wonder why a man doesn’t put up a fight, in spite of having a gun shoved against him, when he knows he’s in for the worst possible after he surrenders to such a circle as met me. The fact is, at the moment, the gun at your belt is wholly convincing; you aren’t competent to imagine incidents subsequent to the occasion of its going off. So you don’t force the occasion.
“Step in there,” somebody said to me; and I stepped. “There” was a door in the rear of a building; it led into an empty room and to another door indicated as my destination.
Here was a closet without further portal and without window; its light came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself alone.
I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of pitch dark. I indulged myself—or attempted to—in some of that logic said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of poison gas would not be found lacking.
The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust; therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the certainty of this, I should have been satisfied; but I had to go about the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.
I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up everything for me. “Here you are!” it spoke. “You’ve gone this way and that; but now you’ve come to it!”
I got to thinking what Jerry told me of “his friend”—Keeban, his strange, sinister twin—“sitting in with destiny” by knowing, in advance, what he was going to do to others. I’d thought of him sitting in with destiny on Dorothy Crewe and old Win Scofield and on Jerry himself; but I hadn’t thought of him sitting in with destiny on me. Stupid, now that I came to see it; for of course I was in his calculations all along; he’d used me, as long as I proved profitable and now that I’d failed him, he’d finish me.
For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen. They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority in that circle.
I’d often noticed—haven’t you—how indistinguishable our felons are from the philanthropists of the day. Mix up the captions—as the best of newspapers sometimes do—accompanying the illustrated page pictures of the gentry who last night did “Fanny’s First Play” for the Presbyterian Home and the guests and ladies who last night failed to start their Fiat promptly after they had it all filled from the ring and wrist-watch trays in Caldon’s windows, and who could be sure which words went with which faces?
Admit the truth; you’d hire most murderers on sight. Others do; why not you? They look normal.
Nero was normal, H. G. Wells says; he had a little peculiarity, to be sure, but that was merely incidental to his position, not to his nature. He was so placed, you see, that the ideas, which remain mere passing black thoughts and impulses with the rest of us, could without any trouble or personal effort at all become actual deeds with him. That was the secret of Nero. Before a man condemns Nero as being of a separate species from himself, he should examine very carefully his own secret thoughts. This is Wells’s own advice and monition.
It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action.
I wondered about Jerry and how much he might be knowing of my present position; twice, recently, you remember, I’d had word from him. I did the drowning-man acts,—both of them; I caught at the straw that somehow he might save me, and I reviewed, if not my entire life, yet several significant epochs of it; and I got to thinking about Doris.
She was in with the worst, I was now sure; she not only had had me hit on the head, when I came to see her, but she’d worked in that scheme to gas Sencort and his guests. I kept thinking about her and the dances we’d had together at the Flamingo Feather and our dinner on the train when I’d had the best time ever in my life.
Meanwhile I was listening and I began to realize that there was a soft, regular sound separate from and nearer than those which reached me through the door. It was the zephyr of breath. Some one was in the closet with me.
“Hello,” I whispered. “Who’s here?”
A hand touched my side and I seized it,—a small, firm hand mighty like Doris’s.
“Hello; who’re you?” I asked.
“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Doris! By Christopher, Doris!”
“Anybody else in here?” I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the time; for after this, I was ready for anything.
“No,” she said.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked her; and she said, “What d’you suppose?”
That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there because I’d run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and spoiled the best of Keeban’s schemes. Now why should she be here except for the same reason?
“They saw you down on Wall Street,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I see,” I whispered.
“Do you?” she asked me.
I bent at the same time that my hands, which had been holding hers, felt up her arms, over her shoulders and located her cheeks. I held her between my hands and, bending, kissed her. On the lips, it was; I found them fair. She helped, perhaps, a little.
“How long you been here,” I asked her, my lips burning like flame; and how I liked it!
“What time is it?” she asked.
“’Bout five when they shoved me in.”
“I came at three.”
I kissed her again at that; I was still bending and had her cheeks between my hands.
“How’d they get you? You take a cab?”
“That’s how they got you?”
“Me,” I said. “But you—you weren’t so easy, were you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she temporized.
Queer—wasn’t that—how she wanted to show consideration for me? “I should have told you,” she blamed herself, “that they’d be watching the Sencort building, and when they bumped off just guinea pigs, they’d lay for who fooled ’em.”
“I had a tip to skip out,” I said. “But I didn’t start in time. Where did they get you?”
Now she told me, “They took me out of my room by the back way.”
I held to her but differently—oh, entirely differently—from my hold of her in that Sencort room. For I knew not only that she’d not been in that scheme, not only that she’d gone there to warn Teverson, as she said, but also I knew she’d nothing to do with that blow on my medulla oblongata at Cheron Street.
“Vine’s doing this, I suppose,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“He sent me both those telegrams?”
“No; only the second; I came on, as I wired you. He grabbed me when I arrived and threw you the second wire. I didn’t see the street till he was through with you.”
“What’d he do to you?”
“Me? Oh, he was all right about me, then.”
“He didn’t hurt you at all?”
She knew what I meant and replied, “He did not! Christina saw to that.”
“Oh, she’s back with him?”
“Umhm. That’s why she saw to it.”
“All right,” I said; and kept hold of her. My property, she was; mine.
“You’re forgiving me?” I said.
“For what?”
“Down on Wall Street; and what I did after I’d been hit.”
“Oh, that was you, Steve, just you.”
Pretty soon, then, I asked her, “What’s Vine’s idea for us now?”
You’d have thought I would have asked that the first thing. But question any doctor; inquire how patients act when they know there’s no hope for them. Do they say right away, “What is it, doctor?” They do not; they say, “Lovely weather; and what a view from this window!”
Doris was like a doctor in that, when I got around to asking her, she did her stalling, too; but finally she told me, “Well, I guess for us it’s the ‘glass room’.”
XX DORIS AND I ARE TAKEN TO IT.
When she said “for us,” I got another thrill there in the dark, and right away I got quite the opposite when she said “the glass room.”
I had not heard of it before. No; that was the première for the phrase with me; but it was one of those phrases which carry their own connotation; and this was decidedly an uncomfortable one.
“What’s the ‘glass room’?” I asked her.
“Never mind,” she said, and it was like a mother to a child. You’ve heard something of the sort when a visitor let slip, before the children, a remark about the feature atrocity in the morning paper. “Never mind,” Doris said again to me.
“Well, I’m grown,” I said. “And since I’m apparently a candidate for it, why not tell me—unless you prefer to have it come as a complete surprise to me?”
“Don’t!” she asked me; and we stood in silence in the dark.
“You’ve explored the cavern, I suppose between three and five,” I said, starting up the small talk again.
“Yes.”
“It runs to solid walls, I take it?”
“Very solid.”
“Nothing like a trap door in the floor, by any chance?”
“Not by any.”
“Now a noise would probably be one of the worst advised projects possible, don’t you think?”
“It wouldn’t change the end at all,” Doris said, “and would only put us worse off now. They’d tie and gag us—or else let us yell for their amusement.”
“Of course some one’s just outside.”
“Of course.”
We were silent again and I listened. “Yet we don’t know. I hear nobody now.”
I threw my weight against the panels, bracing my feet as firmly as I could. The wood creaked but did not break. Hearing some one at the other side, I relaxed and the door opened.
“Who’s so crazy to come out?” one of the normals said to me. “Come along.” He punched me with his pistol. I came.
He slammed the door on Doris and threw over the bolt. Without another word to me, but guiding me by punches of his automatic against my side, he herded me into another closet, equipped with a heavy door. Here I was alone.
Standing alone in the dark, I wondered why they put me in with Doris, first; and I wondered now that it was too late to ask her again, exactly what “the glass room” was. Then my two perplexities partly answered each other.
She, having been caught doing a “double cross” on her crowd, knew what was going to happen to her; and they put me with her so she would tell me and so, while I waited, I would have the benefit of my own anticipations of the “glass room.”
Suggestive sort of name, wasn’t it?
I stood in that closet, or sat on the floor, for three hours. It turned out to be not yet nine when the normals removed me. Of course it seemed several times longer; many more than three hours’ thoughts went through my head.
“Ready for the ‘glass room’ now?” one of the normals said to me.
I said something in the manner of “Go ahead.”
“Come along then,” he said; and prodded me as before. But this time, as they were taking me out, they did a little more. They tied my hands and stuffed my mouth full of cotton and bound it in. After they had prodded me into their car, they threw a rope around my feet and pulled it tight.
I did not see Doris at all, then. I had no idea whether they already had attended to her, or whether she was next or whether they were leaving her behind.
In the car, the curtains were down; I couldn’t see out, yet I had some idea of where we were going. First we headed east, running with the long blocks, then we swung to the right and went with the short squares, crossing many streets and stopping many times at traffic signals.
That was one of the queerest features of the ride, to feel that the car, carrying me bound and gagged to the glass room, was halting, with the most punctilious, to obey the street regulations.
The three normals said little to me and not much more to each other. Altogether it was a quiet ride and, in itself, uneventful. We turned east again after our run south and I knew that we were in that bulge of the city below the numbered streets.
We went on to a bridge,—the Williamsburg bridge, I thought; and when we were off it, and had taken a couple of turns, I lost all reckoning. I wasn’t particularly up on Long Island City and Brooklyn.
When we reached our terminus, they threw the noose from my feet and prodded me to precede them from the car. Others were there waiting,—other normals, I mean. I saw nobody else in my fix. We were between two large, dark buildings which seemed to compose a factory of some sort. I saw corrugated, sheet-steel shutters covering the windows, not only next to the ground but upon the upper floors. The factory unit to the right communicated with the one to the left by a bridge-of-sighs effect about twenty feet from the ground. The whole place had a shut and deserted look which was intensified by the distance of the nearest night lamps.
There was a dark, overcast sky. I remember glancing up to get a glimpse of a star or so, if I could; but nothing like one was showing. So I took a long deep breath of the outside air, as the next best thing to do, before following some of the normals, and preceding others, into an aperture which developed a door somewhat farther along.
We were in a large, wide space of a character familiar to me; it was bare of furniture, except for many long, low tables, several chairs and stools and, here and there, a desk. Chutes slanted down upon the tables. These were for the delivery of goods in the days when the factory was working; here the shipments had been made up and dispatched.
I saw all this in the yellow glow from a couple of old electric bulbs in fixtures on the sides of the great supporting columns which stood in rows through the room. Although these lights proved that current was coming into the building, the state of this shipping floor was conclusive that the factory was shut down. It was an easy trick, I knew, for one of the normals to “cut in” the current which had been turned off by the company.
Several empty boxes, ready for goods which never slid down the chutes, were piled up on one side and I passed near enough to read the stencilling on their ends.
“Stamby-Temke Chemical Company,” they said.
I had a dim notion of the name. It seemed to me that this was one of the plants which had boomed during the war and afterwards had continued, with the idea that German dyes and chemicals would not again compete in the American market. They had quoted us coloring matter and synthetic fruit flavors; but we weren’t interested.
The normals walked me upon the broad platform of a freight elevator. I saw by the city license framed on its side that this was operated by electric power. A normal moved a lever and we slowly rose past one dark floor, two, three, four. Upon the fifth, we stepped out. Several lights were burning here and better ones than below,—bright Mazdas, these were. We were in another wide room but this had rows of desks and work benches; big bottles and carboys gleamed from shelves. The glass in the windows reflected the lights like mirrors, for they were black behind, with steel shutters tight screening them. None of this light escaped.
One of the normals jerked the binder from before my mouth and I coughed out the cotton without hindrance. From this floor, no shout could escape; nor could a shot be heard outside.
They watched me but let me alone. I sat on the edge of a desk and looked about at them. Just now, they were doing nothing.
It was plain, of course, that they had complete control of this empty plant. Probably Stamby-Temke had a watchman but the normals either overpowered him, terrorized him or bought him over. Perhaps he was one of them, who had applied for the job for the purpose of obtaining these buildings for their use. Evidently they were quite at home here.
They were so at ease, indeed, that they must be sure that no one would disturb them. I attempted a pose “at ease” but with my hands tied back of me, and more particularly with the feeling I had, I certainly made a poor pretense at it.
Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building.
You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought there by several others who used the building for—well, here I was to find out for what these normals used this building.
The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix I was; that was clear.
They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,” I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped down again on the edge of the desk.