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 we do find 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, what am I 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 must think, and not pound our 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.