Читать книгу The Opal Pin - Rufus Gillmore - Страница 3

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The tall, reserved-looking Englishman in evening dress, Inverness on arm, stick in hand, consulted his watch, then sauntered quietly out of the foyer of the Waldorf. Interested apparently only in the shop-windows and passing women, he walked slowly along Thirty-fourth Street. On Broadway he stopped to mail a letter. A few steps further he drew another letter from his pocket, tore it and dropped the pieces carelessly into the gutter. Without change of gait or look behind, he then entered the bar of the Martinique. Once inside, he glanced back guardedly through the door. The short, athletic but slightly corpulent man whom he had seen approach one of the Waldorf house detectives, was picking up the pieces.

Smiling, the tall, reserved-looking Englishman moved to the bar, bought a high-ball, drank it. After that he wandered out into the foyer and reserved two seats for the following night at the Little Theater. He gave the name of Howe. Then he descended to the grill room, ordered food and drink, and sat there placidly enduring the music of the negro-minstrels until one o’clock came and the room closed.

Now, he took the elevator to the office floor and started with a direct, swinging gait toward the Thirty-third Street exit of the hotel. Half way through the long vestibule he stopped suddenly, as if recalling something, retraced his steps and left the hotel by its Thirty-second Street exit. Along this street to Fifth Avenue, down the avenue to Thirty-first, along Thirty-first Street he sauntered. Not until he neared the corner of Madison Avenue did he venture his first look behind. Then he dropped his stick and turned in picking it up. The short, athletic but slightly corpulent man was far behind, on the other side of Thirty-first Street.

The Englishman turned up Madison Avenue. Around the corner he drew a master-key from his pocket and quickened his gait. The outer of the two doors of the house he was approaching someone had left ajar. After a hurried look back he entered the vestibule and noiselessly closed the outer door. With the master-key he opened the inner door.

It was a boarding house. Carpets, furniture, the absence of anything personal lying about, said so. Screened by the heavy hangings at the windows of the front parlor, he watched stealthily. He saw the man who had followed him stop at the corner of Thirty-second Street, look indecisively west, north, east, and then hurry away toward Fourth Avenue.

The tall, reserved-looking Englishman waited in the dark shadows of the parlor for nearly an hour. No one entered the boarding house, no one left it. At the end of this time he drew over his shoes a pair of thick black woolen hose. His tread thus muffled, he went up the stairs.

He walked as one who knew definitely where he was going. On the fourth floor he proceeded to the front room on the left. He tried the door. It was locked. He bent down and with a pair of nippers deftly turned the key in the lock. Then he extinguished the dimly burning hall light and entered the room.

The refracted light from the street made everything clear. He went straight to the bureau at the front of the room and surveyed the things scattered over its top. The photograph of an actor matinee-idol seemed to cause him doubt, and the sight of a piquant tri-cornered hat to increase it. He turned, looked sharply at the ink-black hair of the young woman asleep on the couch and shook his head.

His gaze returned with annoyance to the bureau and fell upon a few rings, pins and trinkets in a glass dish. Sneeringly he emptied them into his pocket. Immediately something happened.

“The opal pin! Had that anything to do with it? Carl! Carl! Tell me!”

The young woman was talking in her sleep. He bent down into the shadow beneath the sill of the window and waited to make sure that he had not roused her. Then he crossed the room and went out.

In the hall he listened an instant, then crept carefully down one flight. Again he used his nippers on the key in the door, put out the dim hall light and entered the room immediately under the one he had just left.

The lights in the street made this even brighter than the room above. His eyes gleamed as they fell on the bonnet of an older woman on the bureau; they glistened as they stopped on the pistol beside it. In the chambers and barrel of that pistol were the unset diamonds and pearls he sought.

They were just across the room, his in one moment. He stood quietly observing, weighing, relishing, before taking them. It was so easy now! All the rest, after what he had been through!

Suddenly he started and cocked his ears. The young woman in the room above had risen, was walking across her room, and her footsteps made what in the quiet night seemed like a vast noise. All the inaction went out of his manner; he stepped briskly toward his prize.

“Here! Here! What are you doing in my room?”

He stopped half way to the bureau. The woman had raised herself on her arms in the bed and was peering at him. Quickly he lifted an arm shielding his face from view.

“I—I beg your pardon, madam,” he stammered. “I—I must have got into the wrong room.”

“Well, make yourself scarce!” The woman seemed not a whit alarmed.

“I’m very sorry, madam—” he paused, gazing eagerly at the pistol containing the treasure and evidently reckoning his chances—”I’m very sorry to have made such a mistake and disturbed you.” After a quick glance at her under his arm, he turned and pretended to stagger out of the room.

He had been none too quick at arriving at his decision. As he ran down the stairs he heard her calling out the front window:

“Help! Murder! Thieves! Help!”

Her cries were arousing the people in the house and the whole street in front. He stopped to open the front door and to shut it with a slam that would mislead. Then he crept craftily downstairs, opened a window, stepped through into the back yard, and coolly closed the window behind him.

Hastily but noiselessly he scaled the fence into the yard beyond, scaled the fence of that into the next. Here, he paused to remove the mufflers from his shoes and to bury them deeply under the rubbish in a garbage barrel; then he passed through the gate of that yard into the adjacent alley and reconnoitered. The outcries had as yet attracted attention only to the front of the house. He walked slowly, very slowly, along Thirty-first Street to Fifth Avenue, made sure that no one saw him turn south, and a few minutes later crossed Madison Avenue to the east at Twenty-eighth Street. He must have calculated that the alarm further up the avenue would draw away the fixed policeman at this post.

Ten minutes later he was giving the railroad signal—two long and then two short rings—on one of the bells at a tenement house on the East Side. As soon as the door clicked he entered and ascended noiselessly to the back apartment on the second floor. On the door of this he knocked, repeating his former signal. Without waiting for answer he knocked out the signal again; then again, this time stopping after the first two slow knocks.

“Is that you, Brit?” some one called softly through the closed door.

“No,” he answered.

Apparently this was the countersign. The door opened.

The little dark man who admitted him wore a badge of one of the city inspection departments. He had shoebutton eyes, one a glittering black, the other the color of a deep purple. He followed his visitor silently into the inner room. Here double curtains were drawn tightly over the windows, the lamp was so shaded as to cast little light save upon the table, and the openings for heating pipes were snugly sealed with felt.

“Get ‘em, Brit?” The little dark man slumped confidently into the only comfortable chair.

British remained standing, meditating, one hand resting on the table. The question had to be repeated before it gained his attention.

“You told me third floor front. I made a mistake, went up three flights, and got into the wrong room.”

“Getting careless. Well?”

British made a gesture of impatience at the interruption to his thoughts. “This is all I got. I don’t know why I bothered to take them.” He threw upon the table the contents of his pocket.

“Chicken feed!” The little dark man eyed the loot contemptuously. But, his further questions remaining unanswered, he was soon at the table greedily overhauling the booty. Suddenly his attention became centered on a single piece. It was a scarf-pin, its large blue stone carved into the form of a devil’s head. The leering, sinister face seemed to fascinate him. His small eyes glittered until they both seemed black. He picked up the pin and examined closely the grinning head; even after he put it down he continued to poke it about upon the table, in order to bring out the wonderfully translucent, lifelike glints in the blue.

“Say, haven’t you pulled an opal here?” he exclaimed suddenly.

British gave it but a glance. “Mink, you’re a greedy little bounder! Blind to everything except the spoil, aren’t you?”

“Well, droppin’ to earth, what else is there to it?” Mink’s shoebutton eyes deserted the opal pin and rested for a moment on his frowning companion. One corner of his mouth curled sarcastically with the small certainty that he had asked an unanswerable question.

“There’s the game, though I can’t seem to make you see it.”

“The game! Guff!” Mink sneered. “If I was going round mixing in with the silk-stocking and lobster-palace ginks and ginkesses like you, but me—all I’m trusted with is the bell-hop, messenger-boy work. All I care about is the stuff. Don’t try to put over any more of that gentleman-preacher dope on me. The game! O mummer!” His voice ascended mockingly to the pitch of a woman’s. “ ‘Mrs. Sy-mansky—Mrs. Sy-man-sky!’” he called, “ ‘can your Arthur come over and play with my little Willie?’ ”

Brit smiled. “No respect left for me at all, have you?” he commented carelessly.

“Not when you hand over that line of talk.”

“It’s strange,” Brit considered him smilingly, “vulgar, sordid little beggar that you are, I can’t help wanting to convince you. Doesn’t it mean anything to you to have a hand in a game no one else has ever thought of playing? A lone game, and so splendidly protected! You’ve been wondering lately why nothing gets into the newspapers about our little operations. Do you know why? Because I mapped out a game in advance that would remove both the police and the newspapers from our track.”

“Gee! Some swelled-up, as well as swell guy, ain’t you?”

Brit went on, untouched. “We’ve taken nothing except the jewelry and unset stones smuggled in here from the Continent. Do you remember that, after the first few hauls, I stopped, laid low, waited, and you couldn’t understand why? That was head-work, Mink, and a part of my plan. Those first few losers made a great noise about their losses to the police and newspapers. Then your conscientious Collector of Customs did just what I had planned he should. He made those careless smugglers pay the tariff. After they had lost their jewels they had to pay the duty on them; delayed advices from the Continent told their value. They were robbed twice, once by us and afterward by your absurd Customs tariff. Do you understand now why later losers shut their mouths tight, never went near the police or reporters, and put only private detectives on our track?”

Mink evaded the issue. “Private detectives! Say, Brit, ain’t they a cinch?”

“Yes.” Brit waited hopefully. “Is that all you have to say?”

“Sure.” Mink grinned. “I might be more enthusiastic if I got a fairer share of the stuff.”

“Not even satisfied with the spoils! On my word, you’re a low-down, ungrateful gnome!” Brit turned intolerantly away. “But it doesn’t matter now, thanks be!”

“Why not?”

“Well, I was shadowed for the first time tonight.”

“Hell, that’s nothing.” But Mink watched him anxiously.

“No; nothing. Quite right, Mink—because I know precisely what it means. Shall I explain? I don’t know why your low order of intelligence makes the attempt so fascinating.” He smiled when Mink this time trusted his head rather than his tongue to reply. “Well,” he went on, “I was shadowed to-night, not by a mere private detective, but by one of your Secret Service men. This means that your Government has waked up to the news we are getting from its social spies abroad about jewels to be smuggled. Your Government has gone over its secret files, found that I, up to last Summer one of its paid agents in Paris, have not only withdrawn from the work, but have fled—vanished without leaving address or ripple. Hence, it follows that your Secret Service men are on the track of me and everyone who even remotely resembles me in appearance.”

“Moonshine, Brit; nothing but moonshine! Probably he was nothing but a private bull.”

“July to March! Nearly nine months! Quite a little longer than I expected!” Brit passed a careless hand over his brow.

Mink’s jaw dropped. “Brit, you ain’t going to run?” he demanded nervously.

“I come of excellent family. I’m the only bad egg of the lot. This is the first time the bobbies have ever had a chance at me. It would be really witty of me, wouldn’t it, to wait for them to catch up with me?”

“Brit, you’re joking!”

“Can it be that you’re beginning to appreciate me?”

“It’s such a perfect game. A wonder! No man ever thought up a better one.”

“What? The game, too! My soul leaps up!” British laughed with a sort of good-natured disdain.

“But a trifle too late on your part. While you were fondling that opal pin I was thinking higher thoughts—planning how to cover and begin all over again.”

Mink swallowed. “How?” he asked with sudden meekness.

“Well, I have no objection to telling you. I remain here to-night. To-morrow or the next day I slip into my rooms for a few trifles whose absence will not be noticed. The police inherit all clothes, furnishings, et cetera, with my compliments. That night the clothes I now wear will be found over by the river, traced back to my rooms where a note will be discovered stating that I have drowned myself rather than bring disgrace on my family, and that is the last that will ever be seen or heard of this man named Howe. Afterward I remain in hiding here until I can get a new outfit, or as long as we can stand each other, and then you, like all the rest, lose me for good and ever.”

“Then this ain’t no con game? You’re really going to cut me out?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme the clothes and furnishings in your Fifth Avenue rooms and I won’t say a word.”

“No.”

“You’d better.”

“You don’t know now and you never shall know where my rooms on the Avenue are located.”

Mink was temporarily silenced. “How do I know but you’re just dropping me for somebody else?” he complained at last.

“You don’t know.”

Mink’s face grew white and his eyes vindictive. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

“Another thing you’re not to know.”

“Yes,” he sneered, “and, after your getaway, I suppose you’ll arrange to have all those foreign letters about the stones sent to you, instead of me.”

“No.” British smiled. “Burn them. Write that I’m dead and the game is up. Mention my suicide. Enclose a newspaper cutting to make sure.”

He of the shoebutton eyes, one black and the other purple, attempted to stare down his confederate, but failed. “Fine; but you come off your high-and-mighty or I’ll squeal on you to the cops,” he threatened.

“Very well.”

“You don’t think I dare to?”

“No; and you’re too greedy. You know very well that I would see that you were plucked of everything you have set aside from our short but unhappy partnership in crime.”

Mink was extinguished. He sank back in his chair and relapsed into abject silence, his eyes on the floor. “Ain’t you going to tell me nothing?” he whined, after a long silence.

British looked at him, appeared to relent at his complete triumph. “Come, Mink, buck up, and I’ll tell you something about my new scheme,” he said with sudden kindness. “It’s better even than the old one. Ah, I thought that would gain your attention. Now listen carefully. Don’t miss a word. Before it’s too late I intend to begin all over and learn what I can accomplish as a gentleman. I’m thinking of prescribing a little marriage for myself. Has it ever occurred to you? Why should I run all these risks for money in small sums when I can probably carry an American heiress off her feet and marry a lump sum? I’ve determined to try it. I’m going to a new city, reform my late wicked ways, and try to marry back into the station in life I was born in, bred in, and belong in. Many a worse man has done that. Why shouldn’t I?”

“And you’re going to let them silk-stocking smugglers off with stuff that belongs to us as much as anyone?”

“Yes; I’m going to try something honest before I get so deep in I won’t care to get out; before crime gets me the way it does every one, and while I’ve got looks enough, yes, and character enough, left to be worth something. You don’t think I’m starting too late, do you?” British smiled ingratiatingly.

Mink did not answer, merely regarded him sullenly.

“You don’t think I’ve lost too much of my manners and polish to win one of your American heiresses and keep straight and make her happy, do you?”

“How do I know?” Mink turned away from him with a vicious impatience. “No; I don’t think you can do it, not in a thousand years,” he added with a snarl.

“Now you make me feel quite sure that I can.”‘ British laughed and passed into the adjoining room..