“If you are able to be there.” Could there be a double meaning in that? For if Rook had sent that midnight visitor, then there were no lengths indeed to which he might go—for the hand, like a beast’s paw, upon the window-sill, had been, as Annister had known upon the instant, the hand of the Thug, the Dacoit, the Strangler.
Warnings, thrice repeated; a hand in the dark; a waitress who was not all she seemed; an invitation, suave, and, as Annister conceived it, ironic—it was a situation not without its possibilities for action.
And Black Steve Annister loved action. Perhaps, after all, he was to have it now, whether he would or no.
Rook he had known aforetime, but he was convinced that the latter would not recognize him save as Black Steve Annister, wastrel of the wide world, gentleman adventurer-in-waiting to the High Gods of Adventure and Derring-do, knight-errant of the highways and byways of Criminopolis, scarce a black sheep, indeed, but a wolf of the long trail and of the night.
Rook had known him as such in the days when, as jackal for certain vested interests, the black-bearded lawyer had run foul of young Annister, just then beginning a hectic career of spending which, but three years in the past, had abruptly terminated with Annister’s complete disappearance from joyous jazz-palace and discreetly gilded temple of high hazard.
For he had dropped out of sight, lost, as a stone is lost, in the sea-green waters of oblivion, save for an occasional ripple thereafter which proclaimed him blacksander, beachcomber, chevalier d’industrie, until one memorable evening a twelve-month gone ... but Rook would be knowing nothing of that.
Annister had come home from the South Seas to find his father gone, and a note: “Do not look for me, for you are not my son.” And an exhaustive inquiry had failed even to suggest the slightest clue.
The elder Annister could have written his check for seven figures, and it appeared, following his disappearance, that he had done so; they had come in from North and South and East and West, steadily, and, as it seemed, with purpose. But as a clue to his whereabouts they had been unavailing.
But, from the moment of his discovery of that note, Black Steve Annister, visiting a certain office in a certain side-street not far distant from the Capitol, had surprised its guardian with a terse:
“That offer of yours, Childers—I’ve come to take it up.”