Some weeks before this a man had been murdered at the head of the stairs there. The dwellers of 41, having scruples about the murder, had placed upon the wall a coloured print of the Virgin, to whom they lit a taper each night. This taper now showed Hi the three doors of the landing; he knocked gently on the middle door.
After knocking a second time, he was aware of a tenseness in the room within, though no one answered. At a third knock, he felt, rather than heard, other doors in the tenement softly opened, while unseen eyes took stock of him. Someone inside the room was moving something: “putting something under the bed,” he thought. A board dropped with a clatter, then a chair (so it seemed) was jammed against the door from within, then a woman’s cautious voice asked, “Who is it?”
“Señor Rust,” Hi said, in a low voice, “Señor Rust.”
She did not let him in. He heard her moving about inside, with queer little clicking noises as though she were snapping on some pairs of stays (which indeed she was).
“Señor Rust,” he repeated, “Señor Rust.”
The lamp in the room, which had been turned down, now turned up; the door opened a little; a short, sharp, elderly dwarf of a woman stared at him, and motioned him to come in. He went into a hot little lamp-lit room, where ’Zeke stood stock still, fumbling with his hat, beside the bed. The woman bolted the door carefully behind him. She had a skin like parchment, coloured like old ivory. She looked at him out of sharp, black, beady eyes which missed nothing. Her head trembled a little; her long green ear-rings waggled and clicked. She looked like a gimlet about to pierce. Hi knew, without any telling, that he had come at a ticklish time, when the two were appraising loot from the burning. His knock had been mistaken for the knock of the police. Something had been stuffed under the floor and a mat drawn over the place: ’Zeke was now standing on the mat.
The woman asked him in Spanish about his health, adding that for her own part she asked nothing better from God, since she was ever better after the rains, which, as it was well known, drew away from the air we breathe many most pestilential vapours. Hi replied in English that he was afraid that he came at a very inconvenient time.
“Rust,” he said, “could you take a message for me, and be away, perhaps, for some days?”
“Yes, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I daresay.”
“Starting at once?”