Doors of the Night

by Frank L. Packard

The Cadger, a shrivelled, unkempt figure, his coat collar turned up over a collarless shirt, an aggressively checkered peak cap pulled far down over his eyes, thrust an envelope unceremoniously into Billy Kane’s hand.

“Dis is fer youse, Bundy,” he said hurriedly, already turning and making his way up the steps to the street again. “See youse later! I gotta go to Gannet’s joint fer his kit.”

Billy Kane closed the door, and locked it. He had not heard from Red Vallon since noon, nothing in reference to the Pippin’s quest for the Man with the Crutch. He tore the envelope open eagerly, the thought uppermost in his mind that this was a message from Red Vallon now; and then, staring at the sheet of paper which he had extracted from the envelope, he dropped, suddenly tight-lipped, into the chair by the table under the light.

It wasn’t from Red Vallon. It was a message like the one Red Vallon had showed him the night before, a message in the Crime Trust’s cipher. He turned instinctively in his chair, glancing toward the secret door at the rear of the room, as though he half expected to see it open, and see that slim little figure in black enter, as though he half expected to hear her cool, softly modulated voice that veiled, even as did the clear ripple in her laugh, menace and contempt. And then he laughed aloud in a short, hard way. A fool! Was he? Well, she had come in through that door before, hadn’t she, when something was in the wind?

His eyes reverted to the sheet of paper. He knew what it was! The headquarters of the Crime Trust had been broken up, and some of the leaders had even taken to cover since the night Karlin had been arrested by the police; but all the cogs in that Machiavellian machinery had not stopped, and plans formulated and set in motion in the past were still to be carried to their ultimate conclusions as they matured day by day. There was not the slightest doubt but that this was one of their devil’s schemes. Red Vallon—or was it the owner of those great, dark, steady eyes?—had said enough to make him understand that, when temporarily scattered, temporarily wary of the police, some unhallowed “managing director” carried on their work, and communicated with the different members of the gang by means of these cipher messages.

And now as he stared at the missive in his hand, angry flush rose slowly to his cheeks, and he half made as though to tear the paper into shreds. God knew, he had enough to do to keep his own life in his own body without this; there was scarcely a moment of the day or night when he was not battling with all the wits he possessed to save himself from discovery—from the police as Billy Kane, from the underworld as the spurious Rat—and his brain was already sick and tormented beyond endurance with the struggle. Why, then, should he decipher this? If he did, he could not sit idly by and, in the possession of the details of some purposed crime, permit that crime to be enacted! It was the moral obligation flung in his face again, just as it had been on the night he had trapped Karlin, just as it had been last night when he had snatched Vetter’s diamonds from Red Vallon’s maw, and not through any threat of hers held over his head, as she so thoroughly believed! She wasn’t here now—was she?

He laid the paper down upon the table, and smoothed it out. Tear it up! His short laugh was a jeer flung at himself. Certainly, he could tear it up, and he would know nothing about it, except that he had shirked and turned his back like a coward upon the responsibility that was already his! He could read the cipher, if he wanted to; he had seen her work one out the night before.

“I thought I’d settled this sort of thing with myself before!” he muttered grimly, and taking a pencil from his pocket he began to work out the cipher.

It took some time, perhaps twenty minutes; and then he was studying a second sheet of paper upon which he had written the decoded message:

The Cadger and Gannet will report to you at nine o’clock. The Ninth Street house will be empty. Dayler and servants out this evening. Secure sealed manila envelope in wall safe, left of mantel, in library. Combination: Two right, eighteen; one left, eight; one right, twenty-eight. Police on trail to-morrow.