Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

He might have telephoned. He shook his head, as he crossed the road, and, keeping in the shadows, stepped into the cross street. He preferred to interview Barloff via Barloff’s back yard. He was still obsessed with the desire to take personal toll from all concerned in the miserable night’s work, but he realized that impulse and sane action did not always go hand in glove. He could not afford to play fast and loose with this rôle of the Rat, or take any unnecessary risks, but he could satisfy himself to the extent, at least, of a personal interview with Barloff, who was perhaps after all the most despicable of the lot, and put into the puny, shrivelled soul of the man a fear that would make for some degree of future righteousness!

A lane, as he had expected, ran in the rear of the tenements and Barloff’s house. Billy Kane slipped into this, located Barloff’s house, low-lying against the sky line between the taller buildings, swung himself over the fence, dropped noiselessly to the ground, and for a moment stood there motionless.

The yard was very small, and, but a few feet in front of him, a light from the open and uncurtained window of Barloff’s rear room streamed out across the intervening space. Voices reached him, but he could not distinguish the words; neither, from where he stood, could he see anyone in the room, though the window was quite low, little more than breast high from the ground.

And then a form inside the room passed across the window space, a woman’s form; and again a voice reached him, a woman’s voice, and Billy Kane drew in his breath sharply. He still could not distinguish the words, but he had recognized the voice.

Once again he had jumped too hastily to conclusions in so far as she was concerned—it was the Woman in Black. There was no question as to why she was there; it was obvious that she had simply forestalled him in warning the old Russian; but—a perplexed frown furrowed Billy Kane’s forehead—her hand would have showed a little late in the game to have saved the Wop!

He stole forward, keeping in the shadows of the side fence, reached the rear wall of the house, edged across to the side of the window where he could both see and hear, and crouched there. His eyes swept the interior in a swift, comprehensive survey. It was a sordid, ill-furnished, bare-floored room, and very dirty. A seedy old morris chair in the center of the room supplied the only suggestion of comfort or luxury, and that an incongruous one, that the place possessed. Apart from that, there was a huge and aged safe, a relic of the days when such things were locked with keys, which was backed up against one wall; and near an open door, which apparently led into the front room, there was a battered desk with an equally battered swivel chair—and that was all, unless the telephone that stood upon the desk might be included in the furnishings. There was, however, another door, also open, which faced the safe, and which apparently gave on a passageway that in turn opened on the back yard. Billy Kane glanced around him. Yes, there was a rear door here, just a little to his right.

His eyes reverted to the interior of the room. She was still pacing up and down its length from the desk to the window and back again. Perhaps it was the effect of the green-shaded incandescent bulb that dangled over the desk, but, as she turned facing the window, he saw that her face, drawn in sharp, pinched lines, was very white, and that in the dark brown eyes, all softness gone from them now, there was a hard and bitter light. And at the desk, the old Russian, a gray-bearded and threadbare figure in dirty and grease-spotted clothes, huddled deep down in his chair, and wrung his hands together, and with little, black, shifty eyes, that peered over the rims of steel-bowed spectacles, followed her about in a fascinated sort of way, and the while he kept circling his lips with his tongue.

“The Wop! The Wop!” he shrilled out suddenly, and seemed to cower lower in his chair. “Yes, yes, I am afraid! My God, I am afraid! He is strong. He would have no pity on an old man. He has sworn it. I know! I have been afraid of this day. Why did they let him out? They know, too! And I was only honest—everybody knows that. He was a thief. What else could an honest man do except what I did? He—he will kill me, and——”

“The Wop is dead.” Her voice was low, bitter, hard, and yet, too, it seemed to hold impatience and irritation directed against the Russian. “I have told you that. It is not the Wop you have to fear now. The Wop is dead.”

“But you are not sure, not positive, not absolutely positive of it!” Barloff was wringing his hands the harder; and his tones, rather than being assertive, seemed to be pleading for a denial.