Irresolutely the ex-convict retreated a few yards more, stepping out into the roadway. Was he indeed in the wrong street? Was that why he felt so uncomfortable? Yes, that must be it—he was in the wrong street! Fifth [43] Avenue was not for him any more, even though once he had lived on Fifth Avenue.
As he shambled across to the opposite sidewalk he shoved his hand up under his hat, which was too large for him, and scratched his head in a new perplexity. And then to him, in a flash, came a solution of the situation, and with it came inspiration and purpose. It was precisely in that brief moment that Felix Looms, the well-known writer, died, he having been killed instantaneously by the very thing after which he had lusted.
The man who had been Felix Looms—Felix Looms, who was now dead—headed eastward through a cross street. He hurried along, moving now with decision and with more speed than he had shown in his loitering course from the station. In turn he crossed Madison Avenue and Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, so that soon the district of big restaurants and clubs and churches and hotels and apartment houses lay behind him and he had arrived in a less pretentious and more crowded quarter. He reached Third Avenue, with its small shops and its tenements, and the L structure running down the middle of it; he crossed it and kept on.
Midway of the next block he came to a place where a building was in course of construction. The ground floor was open to the street, for the façade, which was to be a shop front, had not gone up yet. The slouching pedestrian stopped [44] and looked in searchingly. He saw scattered about over a temporary flooring, which was laid roughly on the basement rafters, a clutter of materials and supplies. He saw a line of gas pipes and water pipes, which protruded their ends from beneath a pile of sheathing, looking rather like the muzzles of a battery of gun barrels of varied bores.
At sight of this piping the eyes of the passer-by narrowed earnestly. Over his shoulders, this way and that, he glanced. There was no watchman in sight. The workmen—all good union men, doubtless—had knocked off for the day; but it was not yet dark and probably the night watchman had not come on duty.
He looked again, and then he stepped inside the building.
In a minute or so he was out. He had one arm pressed closely against his side as though to maintain the position of something he carried hidden beneath his coat. Head down, he walked eastward. Between Third Avenue and Second he found the place for which he sought—a small paved passageway separating two tenements, its street end being stopped with a wooden door-gate which swung unlocked. He entered the alley, slipping into the space just behind the protecting shield of the gate.
When he emerged from here the brick paving of the passage where he had tarried was covered with tough paper, torn to ragged fragments. There was a great mess of these paper scraps [45] on the bricks. A small leather envelope, worn slick by much handling, gaped emptily where it had been dropped in an angle of the wall behind the door. The man responsible for this litter continued on his way. His left arm was still held tight against his side, holding upright a fourteen-inch length of gas pipe the man had pilfered from the unfinished building a block away.
About the gas pipe was wrapped a roll of sheets of thin paper, pasted together end to end and closely covered with minute characters done in indelible, purplish-blue shorthand ciphers. The sheets, forming as they did a continuous strip, spiralled about the gas pipe snugly, protecting and hiding the entire length of the heavy metal tube.
This was about six o’clock. About nine o’clock Marcus Fishman, a Roumanian tailor, going to his home in Avenue A from a sweatshop in Second Avenue, was stalked by a footpad at a dark spot in East Fifty-first Street, not far from the river, and was knocked senseless by a blow on the head and robbed of eleven dollars and sixty cents.