Читать книгу Anthony Trent, Master Criminal - Martyn Wyndham - Страница 5

Table of Contents

ANTHONY TRENTwas working his typewriter at top speed when there came a sudden, peremptory knocking at his door.

“Lord!” he grumbled, rising, “it must be old Lund to say I’m keeping him awake.”

He threw open his door to find a small, choleric and elderly man clad in a faded dressing gown. It was a man with a just grievance and a desire to express it.

“This is no time to hammer on your typewriter,” said Mr. Lund fiercely. “This is a boarding house and not a private residence. Do you realize that you generally begin work at midnight?”

“Come in,” said Anthony Trent genially. With friendly force he dragged the smaller man along and placed him in a morris chair. “Come in and give me your opinion of the kind of cigar smoked by the president of the publishing house for whose magazines I work noisily at midnight.”

Mr. Lund found himself a few seconds later sitting by an open window, an excellent cigar between his teeth, and the lights of New York spread before him. And he found his petulance vanishing. He wondered why it was that although he had before this come raging to Anthony Trent’s door, he always suffered himself to be talked out of his ill humors. It was something magnetic and engaging that surrounded this young writer of short stories.

“I can’t smoke a cigar when I’m working,” said Trent, lighting a pipe.

“Surely,” said Mr. Lund, not willing so soon to be robbed of his grievance, “you choose the wrong hours to work. Mrs. Clarke says you hardly ever touch your typewriter till late.”

“That’s because you don’t appreciate the kind of story I write,” Anthony Trent told him. “If I wrote the conventional story of love or matrimony I could work so many hours a day and begin at nine like any business man. But I don’t. I begin to write just when the world I write of begins to live. My men and women are waking into life now, just when the other folks are climbing into their suburban beds.”

“I understood you wrote detective stories,” Mr. Lund remarked. His grievances were vanishing. His opinion of the president of Trent’s magazine was a high one.

“Crook stories,” Anthony Trent confided. “Not the professional doings of thoughtless thugs. They don’t interest me a tinker’s curse. I like subtlety in crime. I could take you now into the great restaurants on Broadway or Fifth Avenue and point out to you some of the kings of crime—men who are clever enough to protect themselves from the police. Men who play the game as a good chess player does against a poorer one, with the certainty of being a move ahead.”

Mr. Lund conjured up a vision of such a restaurant peopled by such a festive crowd. He felt in that moment that an early manhood spent in Somerville had perhaps robbed him of a chance to live.

“They all get caught sooner or later,” asserted the little man in the morris chair.

“Because they get careless or because they trust another. If you want to be a successful crook, Mr. Lund, you’ll have to map out your plan of life as carefully as an athlete trains for a specific event. Now if you went in for crime you’d have to examine your weaknesses.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Lund a little huffily, “I am not going in for a life of crime. I am perfectly content with my own line.” This, with unconscious sarcasm for Mr. Lund, pursued what he always told the borders was “the advertising.”

“There are degrees in crime I admit,” said Anthony Trent, “but I am perfectly serious in what I say. The ordinary crook has a low mental capacity. He generally gets caught in the end as all such clumsy asses should. The really big man in crime often gets caught because he is not aware of his weaknesses. Drink often brings out an incautious boasting side of a man. If you are going in for crime, Mr. Lund, cut out drink I beg of you.”

“I do not need your advice,” Mr. Lund returned with some dignity. “I have tasted rum once only in my life.”

Trent looked at him interested.

“It would probably make you want to fight,” he said.

“I don’t care to think of it,” said Mr. Lund.

“And the curious part of it is,” mused Trent, “that in the sort of crowd these high class crooks mix with it is most unusual not to drink, and the man who doesn’t is almost always under suspicion. The great thing is to be able to take your share and stop before the danger mark is reached. Did you ever hear of Captain Despard?”

“I think not,” Lund answered.

“A boyhood idol of mine,” Anthony Trent admitted. “One of the few gentleman crooks. Most of the so-called gentlemen criminals have been anything but gentlemen born. Despard was. I was in Devonshire on my last trip to the other side and I made a pilgrimage to the place where he was born. Funny to think that a man brought up in one of the ‘stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand,’ should come to what he was.”

“Woman, I suppose,” said Lund, as one man of the world to another.

“Not in the beginning,” Anthony Trent answered. “He was a cavalry officer in India—Kipling type you know—and had a craze for precious stones. Began to collect them honestly enough and found his pay and private fortune insufficient. He got kicked out of his regiment anyway and went to Cape Town. One night a very large diamond was stolen from a bedroom of the Mount Nelson hotel and he was suspected. They couldn’t prove anything, but he came over here to New York and sold it, under another name, and with a different history, to one of the Pierpoints. The trouble with Captain Despard was that he used to drink heavily when he had pulled a big thing off. While he was planning a coup he was temperate and he never touched a drop while he was working.”

“Started to boast, I suppose?” Lund suggested.

“No,” said Anthony Trent. “Not that sort at all. He lived at a pretty fair sort of club here in the forties and was well enough liked until the drink was in him. It was then that he began to think of his former mode of life and the kind he was now living. He used to think the other members were trying to slight him or avoid him. He laboriously picked quarrels with some of them. He beat up one of them in a fist fight in the club billiard room. This fellow brooded over his licking for a long time and then with another man, also inflamed with cocktails, went up to Despard’s room to beat him up. Despard was out, so they broke his furniture. They found that the legs of chairs and tables had been hollowed so as to conceal what Despard stole. It was in one of the chairs that they found the Crediton pearls which had been missing for a year. They waited for him and he was sent to Sing Sing but escaped. He shot a man later in Denver and was executed. He might have been living comfortably but for getting suspicious when he had been drinking.”

“You must have studied this thing deeply,” Lund commented.

“I have,” Anthony Trent admitted; “I know the histories of most of the great criminals and their crimes. The police do too, but I know more than they. I make a study of the man as well as his crime. I find vanity at the root of many failures.”

“Cherchez la femme,” Mr. Lund insisted.

“Not that sort of vanity,” Anthony Trent corrected. “I mean the sheer love to boast about one’s abilities when other men are boasting of theirs. There was a man called Paul Vierick, by profession a second story man. He was short, stout and a great consumer of beer and in his idle hours fond of bowling. He was staying in Stony Creek, Connecticut, one summer, when a tennis ball was hit up high and lodged in a gutter pipe on the roof. Vierick told the young man who had hit it there how to get it. It was so dangerous looking a climb that the lad refused. Some of the guests suggested in fun that Vierick should try. They made him mad. He thought they were laughing at his two hundred pound look. They were not to know that a more expert porch climber didn’t exist than this man who had been a professional trapeze man in a circus. They say he ran up the side of that house like a monkey. Directly he had done it and people began talking he knew he’d been unwise. He had been posing as a retired dentist and here he was running up walls like the count in Dracula. He moved away and presently denied the story so vehemently that an intelligent young lawyer investigated him and he is now up the river.”

“That’s an interesting study,” Mr. Lund commented. He was thoroughly taken up with the subject. “Do you know any more instances like that?”

“I know hundreds,” Anthony Trent returned smiling. “I could keep on all night. Your town of Somerville produced Blodgett the Strangler. You must have heard of him?”

“I was at school with him,” Lund said almost excitedly. It was a secret he had buried in his breast for years. Now it seemed to admit him to something of a kinship with Anthony Trent. “He was always chasing after women.”

“That wasn’t the thing which got him. It was the desire to set right a Harvard professor of anatomy on the subject of strangulation. Blodgett had his own theories. You may remember he strangled his stepfather when he was only fifteen.”

“He nearly strangled me once,” Mr. Lund exclaimed. “He would have done if I hadn’t had sufficient presence of mind to bite him in the thumb.”

“Good for you,” said the other heartily. “You’ll find the history of crime is full of the little mistakes that take the cleverest of them to the chair. And yet,” he mused, “it’s a great life. One man pitting his courage and knowledge against all the forces organized by society to stamp him out. You’ve got to be above the average in almost every quality to succeed if you work alone.”

Mr. Lund felt a trifle uncomfortable. The bright laughing face that had been Anthony Trent to him had given place to a sterner cast of countenance. The new Trent reminded him of a hawk. There was suddenly brought to the rather timid and elderly man the impression of ruthless strength and tireless energy. He had been a score of times in Anthony Trent’s room and had always found him amusing and light hearted. Never until to-night had they touched upon crime. The New York over which Mr. Lund gazed from the seat by the window no longer seemed a friendly city. Crime and violence lurked in its every corner, he reflected.

Mr. Lund was annoyed with himself for feeling nervous. To brace up his courage he reverted to his former grievance. The sustaining cigar had long ceased to give comfort.

“I must protest at being waked up night after night by your typewriting machine. Everybody seems to be in bed and asleep but you. I must have my eight hours, Mr. Trent.”

Anthony Trent came to his side.

“Everybody asleep?” he gibed. “Why, man, the shadows are alive if you’ll only look into them. And as to the night, it is never quiet. A myriad strange sounds are blended into this stillness you call night.” His voice sank to a whisper and he took the discomfited Lund’s arm. “Can you see a woman standing there in the shadow of that tree?”

“It might be a woman,” Lund admitted guardedly.

“It is,” he was told; “she followed not ten yards behind you as you came from the El. She’s been waiting for a man and he ought to be by in a few minutes now. She’s known in every rogues’ gallery in the world. Scotland Yard knows her as Gipsey Lee, and if ever a woman deserved the chair she does.”

“Not murder?” Lund hazarded timidly. He shivered. “It’s a little cold by the window.”

“Don’t move,” Anthony commanded. “You may see a tragedy unroll itself before your eyes in a little while. She’s waiting for a banker named Pereira who looted Costa Rica. He’s a big, heavy man.”

“He’s coming now,” Lund whispered. “I don’t like this at all, Mr. Trent.”

“He won’t either,” muttered the other.

Unable to move Mr. Lund watched a tall man come toward the shadows which hid Gipsey Lee.

“We ought to warn him,” Mr. Lund protested.

“Not on your life,” he was told. “This time it is punishment, not murder. She saved his life and he deserted her. Pereira’s pretending to be drunk. I wonder why. He dare not touch a drop because he has Bright’s disease in the last stages.”

A minute later Mr. Lund, indignant and commanding as his inches permitted, was shaking an angry finger at his host.

“You’ve no right to frighten me,” he exclaimed, “with your Gipsey Lee and Pereira when it was only poor Mrs. Clarke waiting for that drunken scamp of a husband who spends all he earns at the corner saloon.”

Heavy steps passed along the passage. It was Clarke making his bedward way to his wife’s verbal accompaniment.

“You ought to be pleased to get a thrill like that for nothing,” said Anthony Trent laughing. “I’d pay good money for it.”

“I don’t like it,” Mr. Lund insisted. “I thought you meant it.”

“I did,” the other asserted, “for the moment. New York is full of such stories and if they don’t happen in this street they happen in another. They always happen after midnight and I’ve got to put them down on the old machine. Somewhere a Gipsey Lee is waiting for a defaulting South American banker or a Captain Despard is planning to get a priceless stone, or a humbler Vierick plotting to climb into an inviting window, or some one like your boyhood chum Blodgett planning to get his hands around some one’s throat.”

Anthony Trent leaned from the window and breathed in the soft night air.

“It’s a great old city,” he said, half affectionately, “and I make my living by letting my hook down into the night and drawing up a mystery. You mustn’t mind if I sometimes rattle the old Royal when better folks are asleep.”

“If you’ll take the advice of an older man,” said Mr. Lund with an air of firmness, “you’ll let crook stories alone and choose something a little healthier. Your mind is full of them.”

Still a little outraged Mr. Lund bowed himself from the room. Anthony Trent fed his ancient briar and took the seat by the window.

“I wonder if he’s right,” mused Anthony Trent.