I didn’t know the girl. I never saw her face. It was dark and she left the shed before me. I dropped my robe there; and when I walked out, the circle of capture had closed and was still contracting, not expanding. The police took, altogether, thirty-six persons,—twenty girls, sixteen men.
The “bulls” booked them all but proved able to hold nobody. They showed prison records against seven but nothing then “out” against any one. The pick-up, as shown on the picture pages, included a Tudor queen, two of the lighting plants, a pirate, a Turk, a Cæsar but not Cleopatra; not even Magellan. Not the Elizabethan Christina, not Raleigh, either Jerry or Keeban.
The raid was made to get Jerry and Christina; for some one had tipped it that they’d be at the Flamingo Feather. The tip told even the time.
I kept wondering about that tip and who gave it. Not Jerry, I thought; but where, during the end of that evening, was Jerry? And I considered that it was only after he had gone that Keeban had come in,—or the man in mask whom I’d called Keeban, and who did that dagger dance with Christina.
She’d told me, at that time when she lay on her bed like Madame Récamier, that Jerry had killed old Win; she showed no knowledge at all of Keeban.
You’ll understand I kept my thoughts to myself; and I kept to myself that I’d danced at the Flamingo Feather that night of “the thieves’ ball,” which was raided. The newspapers, always keen for the colorful, played up the pictures they took of those twenty girls and sixteen “crooks” in costume; but the papers did not even know of that dagger dance. Much less could they give news of the final consequence of it.
In my mind, when I thought of it, Keeban had caught Christina. In my mind, he had her somewhere wholly in his power; at his own time, in his own manner, he would punish her. Imagining this, I would get up and walk about; I felt I had to do something. But where were they? Where was Jerry? If he were not the Raleigh who had returned; if he were not the man who had danced, where had he gone? What had happened to him?
I learned, during those days, the completer truth of what Jerry had told me of the underworld. It wasn’t a place; not at all. For the places, they all remained. There was the Flamingo Feather, dull and drab by daylight with its door beyond the bakery, the pawnshop, the soft-drink parlor; its light was out; its iron basket rusted and filled with wet, melting snow. At night “The Apollo Club”—giggling clerks—consorted there; and then “The Brothers of Byzas,” who, if he was like his kin, was a teamster, apparently.
Gone, gone from the Flamingo Feather were my friends of the masque, vanished as wholly as yesterday’s snow from the basket over the door.
Nor could Klangenberg’s help me. There was the door within which stood shelves heaped with delicatessen; but a strange child pondered over the keys of the cash register which invited “come again.” He knew nothing of Klangenberg who had “gone away.” Not even the “dyke-keeper” remained.