CHAPTER XXV
Durkin, with an officer at either elbow, tried to think far ahead and to think fast. Yet try as he might, his desperate mind could find no crevice in the blind wall of his predicament. Nothing, at any rate, was to be lost by talking.
“What’s this for, boys, anyhow?” he asked them, with sadly forced amiability.
“Different things,” said Doogan’s man O’Reilly, noncommittally.
“But who made the charge—who laid the complaint, I mean?”
“’Tis an old friend of yours!” chuckled O’Reilly, thinking of other things.
Durkin looked at the man studiously. “Not Robinson?”
“And who’s Robinson?—better try another guess!”
“Nor the Postal-Union people?”
“And what have you been doin’ to them?” retorted the officer, as he gnawed at the corner of his tobacco plug and tucked it away in his vest pocket again.
“They tried to soak me once, without cause,” lamented Durkin, indignantly. But his hopes had risen. After all, he felt, it might be only some old, unhappy far-off thing.
“Who the devil was it, then?”
“Twas MacNutt!” said O’Reilly, watching him. “MacNutt’s turned nice and good. He’s a stool-pigeon now!”
“MacNutt!” echoed Durkin, and as before, a great rage burned through him at the sound of the name.
Hope withered out of him, but he gave no sign. He wondered what, or just how much, MacNutt dare reveal, even though he did stand in with the Central Office.
It was dark a minute or two for him, as his mind still leaped and groped at the old blind wall. Then suddenly into the depths of his despair swayed and stretched a single slender thread of hope.
It was Custom House Charley’s saloon so artfully disguised as a soda-bar. There the second waiter was Eddie Crawford—the same Eddie Crawford who had worked with him on the Aqueduct pool-room plot, and had been discharged with him from the Postal-Union.
It seemed eons and eons ago, that poor little ill-fated plot with Eddie Crawford!
Eddie had struggled forlornly on as an inspector of saloon stock-tickers, had presided over a lunch counter, and had even polished rails and wiped glasses. But now he mixed drinks and dispensed bootlegger’s gin for Custom House Charley.
If Eddie was there—
“Look here, you two,” cried Durkin decisively, coming to a full stop to gain time. “I’ve struck it heavy and honest this time, and, as you people put it, I’ve got the goods on me. I can make it worth five thousand in spot cash to each of you, just to let this thing drop while you’ve still got the chance!”
The Central Office man looked at O’Reilly. Durkin saw the look, and understood it. One of them, at any rate, if it came to a pinch, could be bought off. But O’Reilly was different. “Look here, you two,” said Durkin, showing the fringe of his neatly banded packet of notes.
The Central Office man whistled under his breath. But O’Reilly seemed obdurate.
“Double that, young man, and then double it again, and maybe I’ll talk to you,” Doogan’s detective said easily, as he started on again with his prisoner.
“And if I did?” demanded Durkin.
“Talk’s cheap, young fellow! You know what they’re doing to us boys, nowadays, for neglect of duty? Well, I’ve got to get up against more than talk before I run that risk!”
“By heaven—I can do it, and I will!” said Durkin.
O’Reilly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The prisoner could feel the two officers interrogating each other silently behind his back.
“Step in here, then, before you’re spotted with me,” said Durkin. “Come in, just as though we were three friends buying a soda, and shoot me, straight off, if I make a move to break away!”
“Oh, you’ll not break away!” said the man with the steel grip, confidently, still keeping his great handful of loose coat-sleeve. But he stepped inside, none the less.
Durkin’s heart beat almost normally once more. There stood Eddie Crawford, leisurely peeling a lemon, with his lips pursed up in a whistle. One hungry curb-broker was taking a hurried and belated free lunch from the cheese-and-cracker end of the counter.
Durkin stared at his old friend, with a blank and forbidding face. Then he drooped one eyelid momentarily. It was only the insignificant little twitch of a minor muscle, and yet the thought occurred to him how marvellous it was, that one little quiver of an eyelid could retranslate a situation, could waken strange fires in one’s blood, and countless thoughts in one’s head.
“What will you have, gentlemen?” he asked, easily, briskly.
“Scotch highball!” said the officer on his right.
“Give me a gin rickey,” said the officer on his left.
“A silver fizz,” said Durkin, between them.
That, he knew, would take a little longer to mix. Then there came a moment of silence.
Durkin’s long, thin fingers were drumming anxiously and restlessly on the polished wood.
The busy waiter, with a nervous little up-jerk of the head, gave these restlessly tapping fingers a passing glance. Something about them carried him back many months, to his operating-desk at the Postal-Union. He listened again. Then he bent down over his glass, for he was mixing the silver fizz first.
It was the telegrapher’s double “i” that he had heard repeated and repeated by those carelessly tapping fingers, and then a further phrase that he knew meant “attention!”
Yet he worked away, impassive, unmoved, while with his slender little sugar-spoon he signalled back his answer, on the rim of his mixing-glass.
“Get a move on, boss,” said O’Reilly, impatiently.
“Sure,” said the waiter, abstractedly, quite unruffled, for his ear was a little out of practice, and he wanted to make sure just what those finger-nails tapping on the mahogany meant.
And this is what he read:
“Five—hundred—dollars—spot—cash—for—a—knock—out—to—each—of— these—two!”
“Too—expensive!” answered the sugar-spoon on the tumbler, as it stirred the mixture. “I—would—have—to—migrate.”
“Then—make—it—a—thousand,” answered the mahogany. “I’m pinched.”
“Done,” said the spoon, as the silver fizz was put down on the bar. Then came the gin rickey and the highball.
“They’ll—get—it—strong!” drummed the idle bartender on a faucet of his soda-fountain.
A moment later the three glasses that stood before Durkin and his guardians were taken up in three waiting hands.
“Well, here’s to you,” cried the prisoner, as he gulped down his drink—for that melodramatic little silence had weighed on his nerves a bit. Then he wiped his mouth, slowly and thoughtfully, and waited.
“But here’s a table in the corner,” he said at last, meaningly. “Suppose I count out that race money that’s coming to you two?”
O’Reilly nodded, the other said “Sure!” and the three men moved over to the table, and sat down.
Durkin had never seen chloral hydrate take effect, and Eddie Crawford realized that his friend was foolishly preparing to kill time.
“Here, boss, don’t you go to sleep in here,” called out Eddie, for already the Central Office man was showing signs of bodily distress.
Even the gaunt and threadbare-looking curb-broker was gazing with wondering eyes at the two lolling figures. Then, having satisfied both his hunger and his curiosity, the frugal luncher hurried away.
The hand of steel dropped from Durkin’s coat-sleeve.
“I’m—I’m queer!” murmured O’Reilly, brokenly, as he sagged back in his chair.
Durkin was watching the whitening faces, the quivering eyelids, the slowly stiffening limbs.
“My God, Eddie, you haven’t killed them?” he cried, as he turned to hand over his fee.
Eddie laughed unconcernedly.
“They’ll be dead enough, till we get out of this, anyway!” he said, already taking off his apron and drawing down a window-curtain in front of the table in the corner.
“What’s that for?” demanded Durkin, nervously, as the bartender dodged round to the telephone booth.
“Why, I’ve got to ’phone over t’ the boss t’ get back here and ’tend t’ his business. You don’t suppose I can afford t’ stay in this town now, with a sucker like O’Reilly after me!”
“But what can they do?” demanded Durkin, as he looked down at the collapsed figures. “Even when they come back?”
“Oh, they daren’t do much bleating, and go and peach right out, seeing they were in after graft and we could show ’em up for neglect o’ duty, all right, all right! But they’d just hound me, on the side, and keep after me, and make life kind o’ miserable. Besides that, I always wanted to see St. Louis, anyway!”
The swing doors opened as he spoke, and Custom House Charley himself hurried in.
“I’ve got to climb out for a few minutes, Chink, with a friend o’ mine here,” said his assistant, as he pulled on his coat.
He turned back at the swing door.
“You’d better put those two jags out before they get messin’ things up,” he suggested easily, as he held the door for Durkin.
A moment later the two men were out in the street, swallowed up in the afternoon crowds swarming to ferries and Elevated stations, as free as the stenographers and clerks at their elbows.
Durkin wondered, as he hurried on with a glance at the passing faces, if they, too, had their underground trials and triumphs. He wondered if they, too, had explored some portion of that secret network of excitement and daring which ran like turgid sewers under the asphalted tranquillity of the open city.
There was neither sign nor token, in the faces of the citied throng that brushed past him, to show that any of life’s more tumultuous emotions and movements had touched their lives. It was only as he passed a newsboy with his armful of flaring headlines, and a uniformed officer, suggestive of the motley harvest of a morning police court, that once more he fully realized how life still held its tumult and romance, though it was the order of modern existence that such things should be hidden and subterranean. It was only now and then, Durkin told himself, through some sudden little explosion in the press, or through the steaming manhole of the city magistrate’s court, that these turgid and often undreamed of sewers showed themselves. . . . After all, he maintained to himself, life had not so greatly altered.