Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

Billy Kane’s fingers tightened on the butt of his automatic. Back somewhere behind him in the darkness a Chinaman still guarded a door that neither slummer nor police had ever entered; but the guard was a gagged and huddled thing on the floor now, still senseless probably from the blow on the head from this same pistol butt. There had been no other way. The man was not far behind—just at the entrance so skilfully disguised by an ordinary coal bin. Was there still another guard in front of him? More than one? If he only dared to use his flashlight for a second! A fool to come here where, if caught, he would not have a chance of escape, was he? Well, perhaps—only there was a man’s life at stake.

Perhaps he was already too late! Red Vallon had said, though, that there wasn’t any hurry about “bumping off” the Wop, that they had him safe in here “with his bean tapped to keep him quiet until they finished the rest of the game.” It was less than an hour ago that Red Vallon had said that, and it was only eight o’clock now, and the “rest of the game,” to give it every chance of success, would not be played out for still another hour yet, not before old Barloff had closed up for the night. He wasn’t too late, he couldn’t be too late—there was a man’s life at stake: only an ex-convict’s, a man out from Sing Sing but a few hours ago. Just a prison bird! But the Wop was innocent this time and——

Was that a sound there from somewhere in front of him? Billy Kane stood still. Nothing! No; a dozen sounds that were not really sounds at all. His ears were full of uncanny noises.

The back cellar entrance beneath a Chinese tea-shop, and after that the rear of the coal bin! Billy Kane was laughing to himself, but the laugh was void of mirth. There was a grim, horrible sort of irony about it all. Believing him, Billy Kane, to be the Rat, Red Vallon had reported the accomplishment of the first stage in the execution of the plan with gusto. After that, deft questioning had elicited from the gangster the secret of this entrance to Wong Yen’s, and then luck, and then the guard taken unawares. The guard could hardly be blamed. The guard naturally enough, had little reason to suspect the approach to that coal bin of any one who had not the “open sesame” to what was beyond, and he had been lurking there where the boards of the bin ingeniously slid apart, and had shown not the slightest uneasiness at his, Billy Kane’s, presence until it was too late. Then there had been a steep, narrow passage downward, and then—this. Beyond, near or far, he did not know which, these sub-cellars hid the real thing that the so-called underground Chinatown above counterfeited, hid debauchery and vice, and cradled crime, and here the poppy reigned, and the dregs of humanity skulked fearful of the sunlight.

“They had flung the Wop into a corner and left him until they got around to finishing the job,” Red Vallon had explained callously. The Wop, therefore, must be somewhere near at hand. But he, Billy Kane, could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

His physical faculties strained and alert, subconsciously Billy Kane’s mind was milling over that conversation with the gangster of an hour ago, and upon him, in spite of his own present peril, there came a cold and merciless fury. It was more to-night than the ordinary moral obligation, more than the mere responsibility to render abortive the crimes that came to his knowledge through his tenure of this rôle of the Rat, that was actuating him now; it was the callous, damnable brutality of the scheme that, linked with its hellish ingenuity, seemed to outrage every instinct of manhood he possessed, and fired him with an overmastering desire, not only to frustrate the crime itself, but to take toll in a personal, physical way, if he could, from those who were enacting it.

It was one of those plans, conceived by the Rat, that waited patiently for its hour of maturity to arrive, and then was executed and carried through to its fulfilment by the minions of that Directorate of crime of which the Rat appeared to be the most versatile and vicious member, but without the Rat, necessarily, taking any further active part in it. And he, Billy Kane, who fate had seen fit to mold with features that were evidently a counterpart of that master rogue’s, who was for the moment accepted and obeyed as the Rat, and was supposed to be the originator of the plan itself, could not very well ask Red Vallon, for instance, for details! Therefore he did not know all the details, but he knew enough!

He had wormed quite a little out of Red Vallon without the gangster suspecting anything more than that he, Billy Kane as the Rat, was taking particular pains to see that the stage was properly set, and that the possibility of failure was reduced to its absolute minimum. It was very simple. It required simply a man’s life—the murder of the Wop.

He knew something of the Wop, for the Wop’s story was common property. The Wop, in the old days, five years ago, before he had gone “up the river” for a “job” in the line which was his particular specialty, was known both as a tough customer and as one of the cleverest “box-workers” in the safe-cracking profession. The testimony of one Ivan Barloff had been mainly responsible for the Wop’s capture and conviction, and the Wop had travelled to Sing Sing with a thirst for vengeance gnawing at his soul, and with the threat quivering on his twisted lips that he would get even with the other when he got out again. Nor had the five years of prison hell seemed to assuage any of the Wop’s desire to square accounts! He had repeated his threat many times in prison, and he had been indifferent as to who heard him. The feud was no secret to the police. That was the gist of it.

As for Ivan Barloff, Billy Kane was somewhat more precisely informed, both because the time he, Billy Kane, had spent on the East Side in carrying out David Ellsworth’s philanthropies could hardly have been passed without at least a hearsay acquaintanceship with so well-known a character in that quarter as Ivan Barloff, and because, too, Red Vallon, in that last interview, had seemed to take a malicious delight in exploiting his own vastly more intimate knowledge of the little old Russian of many parts. On his own account he knew, naturally, only what the public knew and believed about the man: Barloff was a sort of father to the flock, a very numerous flock, of Poles and Russians of the uneducated and illiterate class. He was all things to them. He was counselor and confidant, he was money lender, he was entrusted with what money they had as savings for investment, he wrote their letters, he collected their rents, being a kind of owners’ sub-agent, and he lived amongst them, alone, in a little old frame house that was sandwiched in among the ramshackle tenements that housed so many of his compatriots in that section. In appearance he was a very dirty and unkempt old man, and ostensibly he was as honest as he was dirty—and he was accepted as such by public, police and compatriots alike.