CHAPTER VII
Durkin sat at the restaurant table, smoking, his watch in his hand. It was already seven minutes to four. As the seventh minute slipped into the sixth, and the sixth into the fifth, some first vague sense of impending disaster stole over him.
“Is this seat taken, sir?”
It was a waiter speaking, with a short, florid man at his heels.
“Yes,” said Durkin, quietly, “I’m expecting a lady—in five minutes.”
The florid man bowed. The waiter said “Yes, sir,” tipped the chair against the table edge, and went on in search of a seat.
Durkin smoked hard once more, relishing the touch of irony in it all. He did not, naturally enough, explain that the lady he was expecting had made the engagement three thousand miles away from the table at which he sat and at which he was to meet her precisely on the stroke of four. Such things were theatrical, and unnecessary; besides, one had to allow for accidents. And once more, with a puzzled brow, he took up his paper and looked through theMajestic’spassenger list, still involuntarily cast down by a wayward sense of possible calamity.
He imagined some dark coalition of forces against him, obscurely depressed, for the moment, by the shadow of some immense, seemingly impassive, and yet implacable animosity of eternal rule toward the accidental revolter. The same vague feeling had possessed him that infelicitously happy day when, after abandoning his operator’s key, he had become an “overhead guerrilla.” Still later it had come to him, from time to time, as, dazzled by the splendor of that vast hazard which had ended in such disastrous triumph, he had revolted against MacNutt, and preyed on the preyer himself. He had begun to feel, and he had felt, from that time forward, that he was existing under a series of conditions other than those of the men about him. He was no longer one of them. He was out of the fold. He carried the taint of the pariah. He was, henceforth, however he might try, as Frances Candler had warned him, to muffle or forget it, a social anomaly.
To the consciousness of this he applied his customary balm, which lay in the thought that now the older creeds and ethics of life had crumbled away. The spirit which dominated America today, he felt, was that of the business man’s code of morals; it was the test, not of right, but of might, as it flowered in intelligence and craftiness. And that first dubious victory, of his own, he argued with himself, had been one of intelligence—should not victory, then, always be with the alerter head and the warier hand? And this vague and mysterious enemy whose emissaries, even though relentless, were always so temptingly dull—would they not always meet and clash, and the battle be to the strong?
A woman, dressed in black, with a dark veil caught up around the rim of her hat, pushed her way through the crowded restaurant toward the table in the corner. She might have passed for a mere girl, but for the heavy shadows about the weary-looking, violet eyes and the betraying fullness of her soberly gowned figure. She glanced at the clock, and smiled a little, with her calm, almost pensive lips, as she placed a pearl-gloved hand on the back of the tilted chair.
“I am on time, you see,” she said, quietly in her soft contralto, as she sank into the chair with a contented sigh, and began drawing off her gloves. “It is precisely four o’clock.”
Outwardly she appeared at ease, well-poised and unruffled. Only the quick rise and fall of her bosom and the tremulousness of her hands gave any sign of her inner agitation.
“Why—Frank!” cried Durkin, with eloquent enough inadequacy, his face paling a little, for all his own assumption of easy fortitude. He continued to look at her, a sudden lump in his throat choking back the hundred stampeding words that seemed clamoring to escape. He noticed, as he had so often noticed before, how rapid and easy were her movements, and how, through all her softness, she impressed one with a sense of her great muscular agility.
For one wavering moment she let her eyes lose their studied calmness, and, inwardly surrendering, gazed at him recklessly, abandonedly, with her very soul in her face.
“Is it safe here?” she murmured, as she drew her chair up.
He nodded. “As safe as anywhere,” he was on the point of replying, but did not speak the words.
“Dearest!” she whispered to him, with her eyes still on his face, and her back to the crowded room.
He tried to seize her ungloved hand in his, but she drew him up with a sudden monitory “Hsssssh!” Then he, too, remembered, and they took up their rôle of outward indifference once more.
“I had to come back, you see!” she confessed, with what seemed a shamed and mournful shake of the head.
“Something told me you would, all along, even after your first letter. I saw it, as surely as I see you now!”
“Oh, Jim, what I wrote you was true!—it showed me that we can’t bury our past, in a day, or a week or a month! It’s made me afraid of myself and taught me how weak I am!”
And again she looked at him, across the quiet but abysmal gulf of her reawakening despair.
“But there is just where we make ourselves so unhappy—we’re so afraid about being afraid! Life without some fear—what is it?”
“Oh, I am without defence!” she lamented, indeterminately and inconsequently. She sighed again, and still again gazed into his face with her shadowy and unhappy and seemingly hungry eyes. Then, with a sudden abandoning uptoss of her reckless hands, that seemed to fling both solemnity and memory from her, she laughingly declared that it was already too late to cry over spilt milk. Yet the sound of her careless laughter fell, in some way, more lugubriously on Durkin’s ear than had all her earlier lamentation.
“Butwhydid you ever write that first letter?” he persisted.
She knew she could not explain, satisfactorily. “It was the result of being lonesome, let’s say, and perhaps being morbid, after my illness!”
Durkin called the waiter and gave him an order, puffing his cigar with assumed unconcern, while the woman murmured across the table to him: “You look quite foreign, with that magnificent Vandyke! And, by the way, how do you like my English bang?”
“Why, it’s dyed!” said Durkin, for the first time missing the sunny glint in the familiar crown of chestnut.
“Jim,” said the woman, in lower tones, sobering again, “there’s trouble ahead, already!”
She drew her chair a little closer, and leaned forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Durkin lighted another cigar, and lounged toward her with the same careless pose, his face alert with new and different interest.
“MacNutt?”
“No, not him, thank heaven!”
“You don’t mean Doogan’s men?”
“Not so loud, dear! No, not Doogan’s men, either. It’s nothing like that. But tell me, quickly, has anything gone wrong over here?”
“Not a thing—except that you were away!”
“But hasn’tanythinghappened since I saw you?”
“Nothing worth while—no. It’s been so dull, so deadly dull, I all but jumped back into the old game and held up a Charleston pool-room or two! Five whole weeks of—of just waiting for you!”
She caught up her veil, where a part of it dropped down from her hat-rim, and smiled her wistfully girlish smile at him. Then she glanced carefully about her; no one seemed within earshot.
“Yes, I know. It seemed just as long to me, dearest. Only, because of several things,Ihad to jump into something. That’s what I must tell you about—but we can’t talk here.”
“Then we’ll have William call a taxi?”
She nodded her assent.
“We can talk there without having some one hanging over our shoulders.”
“Do you know,” she went on, as she watched the waiter push out through the crowded, many-odored room, “I often think I must have lived through the ordinary feelings of life. I mean that we have already taken such chances together, you and I, that now only a big thing can stir me into interest. I suppose we’ve exhausted all the every-day sensations.”
“Yes, I know the feeling,” said Durkin, through his cigar-smoke. “I suppose it’s really a sort of drunkenness with us now. I couldn’t go back to the other things, any more than I could go back to—to stogies. All this last four weeks of hanging about I have felt like—oh, like a sailor who has pounded round every strange sea in the world, and has come home to be told not to go out of his own back yard.”
“That’s how I felt, towards the last, in London, with nothing to do, nothing to think about, or plan, or live for. I got so I nearly screamed every time I faced the four dull walls of that hotel room. But, you see we have both fallen back on the wrong sort of stimulant. After all, what I wrote you in that letterwastrue! Neither of us two should ever have been evil-doers. I am too—too much like other women, I suppose. And you’re too thin-skinned and introspective—too much of a twentieth century Hamlet. You should never have tapped a wire; and I should never have been a welcher and robbed MacNutt. You ought to have gone on being a nice, respectable young train-despatcher, with a row of geraniums in front of your station window; and I ought to be a prim little branch-office telegrapher in one of those big Broadway hotel corridors, in a little wire cage, between the news-stand and the cigar-counter. Then we should both have a lot still to look for and to live for.”
She broke off inconsequently, and gazed out through the lightly-curtained window, to where a street piano was throbbing out the waltz-tune ofStumbling.
“Do you remember our first days together?—the music and theatres and drives! Oh, what a happy four weeks they were!” And she gazed at him dreamily, as she hummed the tune ofStumblingin her throaty, low-noted contralto, ending with a nonchalant little laugh, as she looked up and said, “But here’s our taxi, at last!”
In the half-light of the taxi-cab, as they turned into Fifth Avenue, and swung up toward Central Park, she let her tired body rest against his shoulder, with her arm clinging to him forlornly. There was a minute or two of silence, and then putting her face up to him, she said, with a sudden passionate calmness:
“Kiss me!”
He felt the moist warmth of her capitulating lips, the clinging weight of her inert body, and, deep down within his own consciousness he knew that, if need be, he could die for her as the purest knight might have died for some old-world lady of spotless soul and name.
Yet after all, he wondered, as he held her there, were they so irretrievably bad? Was it not only their game, this life they had drifted into?—their anodyne, their safeguard against exhausted desires and the corroding idleness of life?
She must intuitively have felt what was running through his mind, as she slipped away from him, and drew back into her own corner of the taxi-cab, with a new look of brooding melancholy in her shadowy eyes.
“If I were ignorant and coarse, and debased, then I could understand it. But I’m not! I have always wanted to be honest. From the first I have longed to be decent.”
“Youarehonest, through and through,” he protested. “You are as strong and true as steel.”
She shook her head, but he caught her in his arms, and she lay there half-happy again.
“Oh, Frank, for the twentieth time,” he pleaded, “won’t you marry me?”
“No, no, no; not till we’re honest!” she cried, in alarm. “I wouldn’t dare to, I couldn’t, until then.”
“But we’re only what we have been. We can’t change it all in a day, can we—especially when there is so much behind?”
“I want to be decent,” she cried, in a sort of muffled wail. “No, no; I can’t marry you, Jim, not yet. We may not be honest with other people, but wemustbe honest with ourselves!”
One of the policemen directing the street-traffic at Forty-Second Street glanced in at them, through the misty window, and smiled broadly. It seemed to remind her of other worlds, for she at once sat up more decorously.
“Time! Time! we are losing time—and I have so much to tell you.”
“Then give me your hand to hold, while you talk.”
She hesitated for a half-laughing moment, and then surrendered it.
“Now, tell me everything, from the first!”
CHAPTER VIII
“It’s the Blue Pear,” she said, hesitatingly, wondering how to begin—“which, of course, means nothing to you.”
“And just whatisit, please?”
“The Blue Pear, Jim, is a diamond. It’s a diamond that you and I, in some way or another, have got to get back!”
“To get back? Then when did we lose it?”
“Ilost it. That’s what I’ve got to tell you.”
“Well, first tell me what it is,” he said, wondering at her seeming gaiety, not comprehending her nervous rebound from depression to exhilaration.
“It’s a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, only tinted with a pale blue coloring the same as the Hope Diamond is tinged with yellow. That’s how it came to get its name. But the odd thing about it is that, when it was cut in Amsterdam, rather than grind away a fifteen-carat irregularity, it was left in a sort of pear-shape. Even before it was mounted by Lalique, it sold in Paris for well over six thousand pounds. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, it brought something like seven thousand pounds. There it was given to a French actress by a Spanish-American coffee-king. It was an African stone, in the first place.”
“But what’s all this geography for?” asked Durkin.
“Wait, dear heart, and you’ll understand. The coffee-king quarrelled with the Paris woman. This woman, though, smuggled the stone back to France with her. It was sold there, a few months later, for about one-fourth its market value. Still later it was bought for a little under six thousand pounds, by the late Earl of Warton, who gave it to his younger daughter, Lady Margaret Singford, when she married young Cicely—Sir Charles Cicely, who was wounded the first year of the war, you remember. Well, Sir Charles didn’t like the setting—it had been made into a marquise ring of some sort—so he took it to Rene Lalique’s work-shop in Paris, and had it mounted after his own ideas.”
“But who is Lalique?”
“A Frenchl’art nouveaugoldsmith—the Louis Tiffany of the Continent. But I’ve a lot to tell you, Jim, and only a little time to do it in, so we shall have to cut out these details. Lalique made a pendant out of the Blue Pear, hung on a thin gold stem, between little leaves of beaten gold, with diamond dew-drops on them. Well, four weeks ago the Blue Pear was stolen from Lady Margaret’s jewel case. No, Jim, thank you, not by me; but if you’ll wait, I’ll try to explain.
“I hardly know what made me do it—it wasennui, and being lonesome, I suppose. Perhaps it was the money,—a little. But, you see, when Albert, my innocently wayward young cousin, got mixed up with young Singford, I found out a thing or two aboutthatless innocent gentleman. It started me thinking; and thinking, of course, started me acting.”
He nodded, as a sign that he was following her.
“I had detective-agency cards printed, and went straight to the Cicelys. Lady Margaret wouldn’t see me; she sent down word that the reward of three hundred pounds was still open, and that there was no new information. But I saw her at last—I shan’t explain just how. Before very long I found out something further, and rather remarkable—that Lady Margaret wanted to drop the case altogether, and was trying to blind Scotland Yard and the police. And that made me more determined.
“Before the end of the week, I found out that young Singford, Lady Margaret’s brother, had been mixed up in a row at Monaco, had made a mess of things, later, at Oxford, and had decided to try ranching in the Canadian North-West. I had already booked my passage on theCeltic, but the whole thing then meant too much for me, and, when I found young Singford was sailing that week on theMajestic, I succeeded in getting a berth on that steamer. Jim, as soon as I saw that wretched boy on deck, I knew that I had guessed right, or almost right. Oh, I know them, I know them! I suppose it’s because, in the last year or two, I have come in contact with so many of them. But there he was, as plain as day, a criminal with stage-fright, a beginner without enough nerve to face things out. I rather think he may have been a nice boy at one time. And I know just how easy it is, once you make the first little wrong turn, to keep on and on and on, until you daren’t turn back, even if you had the chance to.”
“And you took pity on him?” inquired Durkin, “or did you merely vivisect him at a distance?”
“Not altogether—but first I must tell you of the second dilemma. Before we sailed, and the first day out, I thought it best to keep to my cabin. You can understand why, of course. After all, this is such a little world, when you know the Central Office might be after you!”
“Or some old business friend?”
“That was precisely what I thought, only a good deal harder, when I was sat down to dinner, the second day out, and glanced across the table. You remember my telling you about my first experiences in America, when I was a shrinking and pink-cheeked young English governess, and never knew a bold thought or a dishonest act? Do you remember my describing the woman—it’s always a woman who is hard on another woman!—who accused me of—of having designs on her husband? Her husband, a miserable, oily little Hebrew diamond-merchant who twice insulted me on the stairs of his own house, when I had to swallow it without a word! Well, it was that woman who sat across the table from me. They had put me at the Captain’s table—my London gown, you see, looks uncommonly well. But there was that woman, a little more faded and wizened and wrinkled, looking at me with those beady old hawk eyes of hers; and I knew there was trouble ahead.
“A war-correspondent, who had been nice to me, had brought up about everybody at our table worth while, and introduced them to me, that night before going down. So, when I saw that yellow face and those hawk eyes, I knew I had to think hard and fast.”
“‘Are you not the young woman,’ she said, in a sort offrappéof nasal indignation, ‘are you not the young woman whom I once employed as a governess and discharged for misconducting herself with—er—with the other servants?’
“I was so busy trying to be cool that I didn’t bother thinking out an answer. I did want to say, though, that it was not a servant, but her own devoted and anointed husband. I kept on talking to the Captain, deciding to ignore her icily. But that yellow hag deliberately repeated her question, and I heard the war-correspondent gasp out an indignant ‘My God, madam!’ and saw the Captain’s face growing redder and redder. So I went on and asked the Captain if intoxication was becoming commoner on the high seas. Then she began to splutter and tremble. I kept looking at her as languidly as ever, and a steward had to help her away.
“But she knew that she was right. And she knew that I knew she knew. Though I had all the men on my side, and the Captain cheerfully saw to it that she was moved down to the tail end of the Doctor’s table, among the commercial travellers and the school-ma’ms, I knew well enough that she was only waiting for her chance.
“It didn’t change the face of things, but it upset me, and made me more cautious in the way I handled young Singford. In some way, I felt a bit sorry for the poor chap, I thought a little sympathy might perhaps soften him, and make him tell me something worth while. But he had too much good old English backbone for that. And, although he told me I was the best woman he ever knew, and a little more solemn nonsense like that, I at last had to go for him very openly. It was a moonlight night—the sea-air was as soft as summer. We were standing by the rail, looking out over the water. Then I made the plunge, and very quietly told him I knew two things, that he had stolen his sister’s diamond pendant, and that for three days he had been thinking about committing suicide.
“I watched his hand go up to his breast-pocket—the moon was on his terrified young face—and I came a little nearer to him, for I was afraid of something—I tried to tell him there was no use jumping overboard, and none whatever in throwing the Blue Pear into the Atlantic. That would only make things past mending, forever. Besides, he was young, and his life was still before him. I talked to him—well, I believe I cried over him a little, and finally, without a word, he reached in under his coat, and there, in the moonlight, handed me the Blue Pear. I gave him my word of honor it would be taken back to his sister, and even lent him twenty pounds—and you can imagine how little I had left!”
Durkin looked up, as though to ask a question, but she silenced him with her uplifted hand.
“That was the night we came up the Bay. I slipped down to my cabin, and turned on the electric light. Then I opened the little case, and looked at my pendant. You know I never liked diamonds, they always seemed so cold and hard and cruel—well, as though the tears of a million women had frozen into one drop. But this Blue Pear—oh, Jim, it was beautiful!”
“Itwas?—Good heavens, you don’t mean—?”
“Shhhh! Not so loud! Yes, that is just it. There I stood trying it in the light, feasting on it, when a voice said behind me, a voice that made my hair creep at the roots, ‘A very unsafe stone to smuggle, young lady!’ And there, just inside my door, stood the yellow hag. She had stolen down, I suppose, to nose among my luggage a bit. I could have shaken her—I almost did try it.
“We stood staring at each other; it was the second battle of the kind between us on board that ship. I realized she had rather the upper hand in this one. I never saw such envy and greed and cruelty in a human face, as she ogled that stone.
“It seemed to intoxicate her—she was drunk to get her hands on it—and she had enough of her own, too. So, once more, I had to think as fast as I could, for I knew that this time she would be relentless.
“‘No, I shan’t smuggle it,’ I said, in answer to her look.
“‘Youpay duty—a thousand, two thousand dollars!’ she gasped at me, still keeping her eyes on the stone, flashing there in the light. ‘Given to you,’ she almost hissed, ‘by some loving father whose child you guided into the paths of wisdom? Oh, I know you, you lying huzzy! It’s mine!’ she cried, like a baby crying for the moon, ‘it’s mine! You—you stole it from me!’”
She paused, at the memory of the scene, and Durkin stirred uneasily on the seat.
“What made the fool say that?” he demanded.
“Why, she meant that she could claim it, and intended to claim it, insinuating that she would see that it was declared at the wharf, if I kept it, and arguing that I might as well lose it quietly toher, as to the Treasury officers. I knew in a flash, then, that she didn’t know what the Blue Pear was. I closed the little gun-metal case with a snap. Then I put it, Blue Pear and all, in her hand. She turned white, and asked me what I meant.
“‘I am going to give it to you—for a while, at least,’ I said, as coolly as I could, making a virtue, of course, of what I knew was going to be a necessity.
“She looked at me open-mouthed. Then she tore open the case, looked at the stone, weighed it in her fingers, gasped a little, held it to the light again, and turned and looked at me still once more.
“‘This pendantwasstolen!’ she cried, with sudden conviction. She looked at the stone again—she couldn’t resist it.
“‘You might call it the Robin’s Egg, when you have it re-cut,’ I told her.
“She gave a jump—that was what she was thinking of, the shrewd old wretch. She shoved the case down in her lean old breast.
“‘Then you will smuggle it in for me?’ I asked her.
“‘Yes, I’ll get it through, if I have to swallow it!’
“‘And you will keep it?’ I asked; and I laughed, I don’t know why.
“‘You remember my house?’ she cried, with a start.
“‘Like a book!’ I told her.
“‘But still I’ll keep it!’ she declared.
“It was a challenge, a silly challenge, but I felt at that moment that this was indeed a plunge back into the old ways of life. But, to go on. She didn’t seem to realize that keeping the Blue Pear was like trying to conceal a white elephant, or attempting to hide away a Sierra Nevada mountain. Then that cruel old avaricious, over-dressed, natural-born criminal had her turn at laughing, a little hysterically, I think. And, for a minute or two, I felt that all the world had gone mad, that we were only two gray gibbering ghosts talking in the enigmas of insanity, penned up in throbbing cages of white enamelled iron.
“I followed her out of the cabin, and walked up and down alone in the moonlight, wondering if I had done right. At the wharf, I fully intended to risk everything and inform on her, then cable to the Cicelys. But she must have suspected something like that—my stewardess had already told me there were two Treasury Department detectives on board—and got her innings first. For I found myself quietly taken in charge, and my luggage gone over with a microscope—to say nothing of the gentle old lady who massaged me so apologetically from head to foot, and seemed a bit put out to find that I had nothing more dutiable than an extra pair of French gloves.”
“Had you expected this beforehand?” interposed Durkin.
“Yes, the stewardess had told me there was trouble impending—that’s what made me afraid about the Blue Pear. Just as I got safely through Customs, though, I caught sight of the yellow hag despatching her maid and luggage home in a taxi-cab, while she herself sailed away in another,—I felt so sure she was going straight to her husband’s store, Isaac Ottenheimer & Company, the jeweller and diamond man on Fifth Avenue, you know, that I scrambled into a taxi and told the driver to follow my friend to Ottenheimer’s. When we pulled up there, I drew the back curtains down and watched through a quarter-inch crack. The woman came out again, looking very relieved and triumphant. And that’s the whole story—only,—”
She did not finish the sentence, but looked at Durkin, who was slowly and dubiously rubbing his hands together, with the old, weary, half-careless look all gone from his studious face.
He glanced back at the woman beside him admiringly, lost himself in thought for a moment, and then laughed outright.
“You’re a dare-devil, Frank, if there ever was one!” he cried; then he suddenly grew serious once more.
“No, it’s notdaring,” she answered him. “The true name of it iscowardice!”
CHAPTER IX
Four hours later, in that shabby little oyster-house often spoken of as “The Café of Failures,” lying less than a stone’s throw from the shabbiest corner of Washington Square, Frances Candler met by appointment a stooped and somewhat sickly-looking workman carrying a small bag of tools. This strange couple sought out a little table in one of the odorous alcoves of the oyster-house, and, over an unexpectedly generous dinner, talked at great length and in low tones, screened from the rest of the room.
“You say it’s a Brandon & Stark eight-ton vault; but can’t you give me something more definite than that to work on?” the man was asking of the girl.
“Only what I’ve told you about its position; I had to watch out for Ottenheimer every moment I was in that store.”
“I see. But while I think of it, providing wedofind the stone there, do we turn it over again or—?”
“I gave my word of honor, Jim!”
The shadow of a smile on his face died away before her unyielding solemnity.
“Oh, of course! There’s three hundred pounds on it, anyway, isn’t there?”
She nodded her head in assent.
“But I think we’ve got our trouble before us, and plenty of it, before we see that three hundred pounds,” he said, with a shrug.
“The time’s so short—that is the danger. As I was on the point of telling you, Ottenheimer has an expert diamond-cutter in his shops.”
“And that means he’ll have the apex off our Pear at the first chance, and, accordingly, it means hurry for us. But tell me the rest.”
“Ottenheimer himself owns, I discovered, the double building his store is in. He has his basement, of course, his ground floor show-room and store; and work-rooms, and shipping department, and all that, on the second story. Above them is a lace importer. On the top floor there is a chemical fire-apparatus agency. In the south half of the building, with the hall and stairway between, is an antique furniture store, and above them a surgical supply company. The third and top floors are taken up by two women photographers—their reception room on the third floor, their operating-room, and that sort of thing, on the top floor, with no less than two sky-lights and a transom opening directly on the roof. I arranged for a sitting with them. That is the floor we ought to have, but the building is full. Three doors below, though, there was a top, back studio to let, and I’ve taken it for a month. There we have a transom opening on the roof. I looked through, merely to see if I could hang my washing out sometimes. But barring our roof off from Ottenheimer’s is an ugly iron fencing.”
“Did you get a chance to notice their wiring?”
“The first thing. We can cut in and loop their telephone from our back room, with thirty feet of number twelve wire.”
“Then we’ve got to get in on that line, first thing!”
He ruminated in silence for a minute or two.
“Of course you didn’t get a glimpse of the basement, under Ottenheimer’s?”
“Hardly, Jim. We shall have to leave that to the gas-man!”
And they both laughed a little over the memory of a certain gas-man who short circuited a private line in the basement of the Stock Exchange building and through doing so upset one of the heaviest cotton brokerage businesses in Wall Street.
“Did you notice any of the other wires—power circuits, and that kind of thing?”
“Yes, I did; but there were too many of them! I know, though, that Ottenheimer’s wires go south along our roof.”
“Then the sooner we give a quiet ear to that gentleman’s conversations, the better for us. Have you had any furniture moved in?”
“It goes this evening. By the way, though, whatamI just at present?”
Durkin thought for a moment, and then suddenly remembered her incongruous love for needlework.
“You had better be a hard-working maker of cotillion-favors, don’t you think? You might have a little show-case put up outside.”
She pondered the matter, drumming on the table with her impatient fingers. “But how is all this going to put us inside that eight-ton safe?”
“That’s the trouble we’ve got to face!” he laughed back at her.
“But haven’t you thought of anything, candidly?”
“Yes, I have. I’ve been cudgeling my brains until I feel light-headed. Now, nitro-glycerine I object to, it’s so abominably crude, and so disgustingly noisy.”
“And so odiously criminal!” she interpolated.
“Precisely. We’re not exactly yeggmen yet. And it’s brain we’ve got to cudgel, and not safe-doors! I mean, now that we really are mixed up in this sort of thing, it’s better to do it with as clean fingers as possible. Now, once more, speaking as an expert, by lighting a small piece of sulphur, and using it as a sort of match to start and maintain combustion, I could turn on a stream of liquid oxygen and burn through that safe-steel about the same as a carpenter bores through a pine board. But the trouble is in getting the oxygen. Then, again, if it was a mere campaign of armour against the intruder, I could win out in quite a different way. I could take powdered aluminum, mixed with some metallic superoxide, such as iron-rust, and get what you’d call thermit. Then I could take this thermit, and ignite it by means of a magnesium wire, so that it would burn down through three inches of steel like a handful of live coals through three inches of ice. That is, if we wanted to be scientific and up-to-date. Or, even a couple of gallons of liquid air, say, poured on the top of the safe, ought to chill the steel so that one good blow from a sledge would crack it.”
“But that, again, is only what cracksmen do, in a slightly different way!”
“But, of course, by tapping an exceptionally strong power-circuit somewhere in the neighborhood, I could fuse portions of the steel with electricity, and then cut it away like putty. Yet all that, you see, is not only mechanical and coarse, and full of drawbacks, but it’s doing what we don’t want to do. It’s absolutely ruining a valuable deposit-vault, and might very well be interpreted as and called a criminal destruction of property. We have no moral and legal right to smash this gentleman’s safe. But in that safe lies a stone to which he has neither moral nor legal right, and it’s the stone, and only the stone, that we want.”
“Then what are we to do?”
“Use these thick heads of ours, as we ought. We mustthink, and notpoundour way into that vault. I mean, Frank, that we have got to get at that stone as Ottenheimer himself would!”
They looked at each other for a minute of unbroken silence, the one trying to follow the other’s wider line of thought.
“Well, there is where our test comes in, I suppose,” said Frances, valiantly, feeling for the first time a little qualm of doubt.
Durkin, who had been plunged in thought, turned to her with a sudden change of manner.
“You’re a bad lot, Frank!” he said, warmly, catching her frail-looking hands in his own.
“I know it,” she answered, wistfully, leaning passively on her elbows. “But some day I am going to change—we’re both going to change!” And she stroked his studiously bent head with her hand, in a miserably solicitous, maternal sort of way, and sighed heavily once or twice, trying in vain to console herself with the question as to why a good game should be spoilt by a doubtful philosophy.
CHAPTER X
Entrenched in her little top-floor studio, behind a show-case of cotillion-favors, Miss Cecelia Starr sat in her wicker rocker, very quietly and very contentedly sewing. She felt that it had been an exceptionably profitable day for her.
Three hairpins and a linen handkerchief held a watch-case receiver close over her ear, after the style of the metallic ear-bands of a central-office operator. Leading from this improvised ear-band and trailing across the floor out into her private room at the back, ran a green cloth-covered wire. This wire connected again with an innocent-looking and ordinary desk-battery transmitter, rigged up with a lever switch, and standing on a little table next to the wall, up which might be detected the two bimetallic wires which, since ten o’clock that morning, tapped and bridged the general wire connecting the offices of Ottenheimer & Company with the outside world.
From time to time the members of that firm went to their telephone, little dreaming that a young lady, decorously sewing velvet scissors-cases on a studio top-floor of another building, was quietly listening to every message that passed in and out of their bustling place of business. It was a strange medley of talk, some of it incoherent, some of it dull, some of it amusing. Sometimes the busy needle was held poised, and a more interested and startled expression flitted over the shadowy violet eyes of Miss Cecelia Starr. At such times she vaguely felt that she was a disembodied spirit, listening to the hum of a far-away world, or, at other times, that she was an old astrologer, gazing into some mystic and forbidden crystal. Still again, as she listened, she felt like a veritable eagle, invisible, poised high in ethereal emptiness, watching hungrily a dim and far-off sign of earthly life and movement.
Suddenly, from the street door sounded the familiar two-three ring of Durkin. This door remained open during the day, and she waited for him to come up. She went to her own door, however, and laughed girlishly as he stepped into the room, mopping his moist forehead. There was a very alert, nervous, triumphant expression in his eyes, and once again the feeling swept over her that it was now crime, and crime alone, that could stimulate into interest and still satisfy their fagged vitalities. It was their one and only intoxication, the one thing that could awaken them from their mental sloth and stir them from life’s shadowy valley of disillusionment.
Her quick eye had taken note of the fact that he wore a soiled blue uniform, and the leather-peaked blue cap of a Consolidated Gas Company employee, and that he carried with him a brass hand-pump. He laughed a little to himself, put down his pump in one corner of the room, and allowed his fingers to stray through his mutilated Vandyke, now a short and straggly growth of sandy whiskers. Then he turned to her with an unuttered query on his face.
“I was right,” she said quietly, but hurriedly.
“I never really doubted it!”
“Ottenheimer has a private drawer in the vault. It’s in that. His wife telephoned down very cautiously about it this morning. A little later, too, Ottenheimer was called up from a Brooklyn drugstore, by a Mrs. Van Gottschalk, or some such name, who said her husband was still in bed with the grip, and couldn’t possibly get over until Monday. This man, you see, is Ottenheimer’s diamond-cutter.”
“Thank heaven, that gives us a little more time!”
“Three days, at least! But what have you done, Jim?”
“Been trying to persuade the janitor of the Ottenheimer Building that I was sent to pump the water out of his gas-pipes,—but he was just as sure that I wasn’t. I got down in his cellar, though, and had a good look about, before I saw it wouldn’t do to push the thing too far. So I insisted on going up and seeing the owner about that order. There was an inside stairway, and a queer-looking steel door I wanted to get my knuckles against. I started up there, but he hauled me back. I found out, though, that this door is made of one-inch steel armor-plate. There’s another door leading from the foot of the outer hallway into the cellar itself. But that’s only covered with soft sheet-iron—more against fire than anything else. Fifteen minutes will get through that one, easily. It’s the inner door that is the problem. I tried it with a knife-point, just one hard little jab. It took the end off my Roger’s blade.”
“But is this door the only way in?”
“Absolutely; the rear is impossible, bricked-up; and the Avenue itself is a little too conspicuous. The bolts of this door, as far as I can make out, slide into heavy steel cups sunk in solid cement, and are controlled, of course, from inside. Judging from the thickness of these, and the sound of the door, it would take either a pound of soap and nitro-glycerine on the one hand, or five hours of hard drilling with diamond-point drills, on the other, to get through. We’ll say seven hours, altogether, to get into the building. Then comes the safe, or, rather, the vault itself. I had a casual glance at that safe this morning, before I got these duds on—dropped in to purchase an engagement ring, but was altogether too hard to suit. It’s a ten-tonner, I believe, and about as burglar-proof as it can be made. Nothing but a gallon of gun-cotton would make so much as a dent in it. But here again, explosions are not in my line. We’ve got to use these wits of ours. We’ve got to get in that safe, and we’ve got to get through that door! I can’t risk six hours of machine-shop work down there; and I’m still too respectable to drop into safe-cracking.”
“Well, the combinations of that sort of vault, you know, aren’t often advertised on the ash-barrels.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we have got to get it by our own wits, as you say.”
“The janitor, old Campbell, leaves the building about ten-fifteen every night. He’s also a sort of day-watchman, I find. He’s a pretty intelligent and trusty old fellow, absolutely unapproachable from our standpoint. Another thing, too, the place is webbed with Holmes’ burglar-alarm apparatus. It would take another hour or so to get the right wires cut off and bridged. I hate to feel squeamish at this stage of the game—but that Ottenheimer safe does look uninviting!”
Frances walked up and down, with the little watch-case receiver and its handkerchief still crowning her heavy mass of dark hair, like a coronet, and the green wires trailing behind her, like the outline of a bridal-veil. She was thinking quickly and desperately. Suddenly she stopped in the midst of her pacing, and looked hard at Durkin.
“I’ve found it,” she said, in a feverish half-whisper. “We’ve got to do it!”
Durkin looked at her gloomily, still struggling with his own line of fruitless thought.
“Here, Jim, quick, take this and listen!” She placed the receiver close to his ear as she spoke. “Now, that’s Ottenheimer himself at the ’phone. Can you catch his voice distinctly? Well, do you notice what kind of voice it is—its timbre, I mean? A plaintive-toned, guttural, suave, mean, cringing sort of voice! Listen hard. He may not be at the ’phone again today. Is he still talking?”
“Yes, the old scoundrel. There, he’s finished!”
“What was it about?”
“Just kicking to some one down in Maiden Lane, because Judge Hazel, of the District Court, has overruled the board of appraisers and imposed a ten per cent.ad valoremduty on natural pearls coming in.”
“But his voice—Jim, you have got to learn to imitate that voice.”
“And then what?”
“Then cut in, presumably from Ottenheimer’s own house, and casually ask, say, Phipps, the second salesman, and head of the shipping department, just what your safe-combination happens to be. It has slipped your memory, you see?”
“And Phipps, naturally, in such a case, will ring up Central and verify the call.”
“Not necessarily. At the first call from him we shall cut his wire!”
“Which cuts us off, and gives us away, as soon as a special messenger can deliver a message and a lineman trace up the trouble.”
“Then why cut him off at all? If that’s too risky, should the worst come to the worst, we can tell Central it’s a case of crossed wires, bewilder her a bit, and then shut ourselves off.”
“I believe you’ve almost got it.”
“But can you get anywhere near that voice?”
“Listen, Frank; how’s this?”
He drew in his chin, half-laughingly, and throwing his voice into a whining yet businesslike guttural, spoke through an imaginary transmitter to an imaginary Phipps.
“That would never, never do!” cried the other, despairingly. “He’s a German Jew, if you have noticed—he sounds his w’s like w’s, and not like v’s, but he makes hisr’s like w’s.”
“Oh, I have it,” broke in Durkin, from a silent contemplation of his desk-’phone. “We’ll just release the binding-posts on our transmitter a little, and, let’s say, keep the electrode-bearing a trifle slack—fix things up, I mean, so that any voice will sound as tinny as a phonograph—decompose it, so to speak. Then, if necessary, we can lay it to the fact that the wires are out of order somewhere!”
“Good, but when—when can we do it?”
Durkin paced the room with his old-time, restless, animal-like stride, while Frances readjusted her receiver and restlessly took her seat in the wicker rocker once more.
“This is Friday. That leaves Saturday night the only possible night for the—er—invasion. Then, you see, we get a whole day for a margin. First, we’ve got to find out exactly what time Ottenheimer himself leaves the place, and whether it’s Phipps, or some one else, who closes up, and just what time he does it.”
“They close at half-past five on Saturdays. Ottenheimer has already made an engagement for tomorrow, about five at the Astor, with an importer, to doctor up some invoice or other.”
“We could make that do; though, of course, any one in his office would be more likely to suspect a call from the Astor, being a public place. You must find out, definitely, this afternoon, just who it is closes up tomorrow. Then we must get hold of some little business detail or two, to fling in at him in case he has any suspicions.”
“That shouldn’t be so very difficult. Though I do wish you could get something nearer Ottenheimer’s voice!”
“I’ll have a rehearsal or two alone—though, I guess, we can muffle up that ’phone to suit our purpose. My last trouble now, is to find out how I’m going to get through those two doors without powder.”
Again he fell to pacing the little room with his abstracted stride, silently testing contingency after contingency, examining and rejecting the full gamut of possibilities. Sometimes he stood before the woman with the receiver, staring at her with vacant and unseeing eyes; at other times he paced between her and the window. Then he paused before the little green coils of wire that stretched across the room. He studied them with involuntary and childish movements of the head and hands. Then he suddenly stood erect, ran to the back window, and flung it open.
“My God, I’ve got it!” he cried, running back to where the woman still sat, listening, “I’ve got it!”
“How?” she asked, catching her breath.
“I’ve got to eat my way through what may be, for all I know, a full inch of Harveyized steel. I’ve got to burrow and work through it in some way, haven’t I? It has to be done quickly, too. I’ve got to have power, strong power.”
He stopped, suddenly, and seemed to be working out the unmastered details in his own mind, his eyes bent on a little shelf in one corner of the room.
“Have you ever seen an electric fan? You see this shelf, up here in the corner! Well, at one time, an electric fan stood there—see, here are the remnants of the wires. It stood there whirling away at five or six thousand revolutions to the minute, and with no more power than it takes to keep an ordinary office-lamp alight. Right at the back of this house is a wire, a power-circuit, alive with more than two hundred times that voltage, with power in plenty—a little condensed Niagara of power—asking to be taken off and made use of!”
“But what use?”
“I can capture and tame and control that power, Frank. I can make it my slave, and carry it along with me, almost in my pocket, on a mere thread of copper. I can make it a living, iron-eating otter, with a dozen fangs—in the shape of quarter-inch drills, gnawing and biting and eating through that armor-plate door about the same as a rat would gnaw through a wooden lath. Oh, we’ve got them, Frank! We’ve got them this time!”
“Not until we know that combination, though,” qualified the colder-thoughted woman in the wicker rocker, still not quite understanding how or in what the other had found so potent and so unexpected an ally. And while he leaned out of the window, studying the wire-distribution, she discreetly slipped her watch-case receiver over her head, in case anything of importance should be going through over the telephone.