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 valorem duty 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 his r’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.