Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

And then suddenly there came a twisted smile of comprehension to Billy Kane’s lips. Old Barloff laid the hatchet down on the desk, and, rubbing his hands together in a sort of fiendish exaltation, a malicious grin on his cunning and crafty face, ran over to the safe and knelt before it. His mumble became quite audible now:

“The Wop! The Wop! Dead—eh? And all these little rentals, these nice little rentals, just in! And. if they are stolen—eh? I am a poor man—eh? I could not replace them. And so they would be mine—mine. She’s sure he is dead. She said so—that they murdered him. But she did not see it with her own eyes. If she comes back and tells the police that, I will say that the Wop must have escaped the trap they set for him, for with my own eyes I saw him, and since he is dead he will not be able to deny that. Yes, yes, Barloff, your old brain is still your best friend! And the others—ha, ha! They have planted it on the Wop—ha, ha! It would be a pity to disappoint them—and lose the rentals. Yes, yes, Barloff, that is so, is it not? Certainly, the Wop has robbed you, and tried to get revenge on you, too, because you were honest enough to go to the police five years ago!”

The man had the safe open now, and was snatching books and papers from the interior, and throwing them in a litter upon the floor. And now he had an old tin cash box in his hands. He laid this on the floor and opened it, and in a sort of hideous rapacity seemed to gloat over it. He dipped in his hands and lifted out banknotes, and let them filter through his fingers, and rubbed his hands together, and buried them again in the money; while behind the steel-bowed spectacles his little black eyes glittered with feverish exaltation again, and his whole body seemed to quiver in unholy, greedy worship.

Billy Kane’s jaw locked hard. The man’s whole life was a damnable hypocrisy—a rogue’s alias. Thousands the man had somewhere, and, by comparison, the paltry hundreds in the cash box, if hundreds even there were, seemed to hold up as to a mirror the man’s soul, stripped bare, until it stood out in all its naked, shrivelled miserliness, its godless grovelling to the only god it knew!

“The rentals—all the rentals!” mumbled Barloff again. “I am a poor man—how can I pay them over to-morrow when they have been stolen from me to-night, and I have nothing left? Yes, yes, Barloff, you are getting old, but you are not yet a fool!”

The man was suddenly all haste. He snatched up the cash box, and ran to the piece of furniture which had struck Billy Kane as so incongruous an adjunct to the furnishings of the room—the old morris chair. He turned this over on its back, there was a faint click of a hidden spring, and the bottom underneath the seat gaped outward on what were evidently ingeniously concealed hinges. Billy Kane’s eyes, behind his mask, narrowed in grim humor, as he caught a glimpse of piles of neatly stacked banknotes in the hollow bottom of the chair, that was a sort of spacious, boxlike compartment—and then the old miser had thrust in the cash box, closed the seat again, and righted the chair. Old Barloff, after all, did not place all his faith in a presumptive burglar’s chivalry for the obvious helplessness of the rickety old safe!

Barloff was rubbing his hands together unctuously once more, as he hurried back now to the desk. The desk was close to the already splintered door that led to the front of the house, and Barloff, catching up the hatchet in one hand, pulled the portable telephone instrument toward him with the other, and snatched the receiver from its hook.

“The police—quick—quick!” he called into the transmitter, his voice pitched in a well-simulated scream of terror, and brought the hatchet down with a crash on the splintered panels.

Billy Kane made no movement save that his lips twitched a little. The low, cunning trickery of the man produced a sort of nauseating disgust, and, too, a sort of merciless anger; but, given enough rope now, Barloff was in a fair way to hang himself, and it would afford him, Billy Kane, a very genuine pleasure to adjust, as he now proposed to do, the noose that would accomplish that hanging!

Barloff was still raining his hatchet blows on the door; and then suddenly, evidently having got his connection, he was screaming again, between blows, into the mouthpiece of the telephone: