passed Weston and Reed on guard outside to see that nobody carted in
time bombs since they’d last reported the room clear, and we stepped
into the regular, long-tabled, black-walnut panelled mausoleum sort of
room which directors picked for their deliberations a generation or so
ago.
There it was, with two windows to the street and both closed; it was
winter, you see, and Sencort wasn’t the only near octogenarian to
rally round that walnut. It had electric lights and nothing else but a
steam radiator, carpet and chairs and five old etchings on the walls.
Everything was clear; nothing was wrong in the drawers or under the
tables or chairs or even under the carpet. Reed had carefully tested
the radiators and steam pipes. They were absolutely in order.
But I kept poking about the room and, behind an etching, I found the
capped head of an old gas pipe which evidently brought illuminating gas
to the room in the days before electric lighting.
It was capped, I say, and looked quite all right, but I happened to put
my fingers behind the cap. Then I called Teverson; and he felt, and
called Reed.
“What do you think of _that_?” he asked.
_That_ was a slot--rather a series of slots--cut through the pipe
behind the cap on the right wall. You couldn’t see them from the front;
you hardly could see them when you pressed cheek to the wall but you
could feel them top, bottom and sides of the pipe cut through, leaving
just enough metal to hold the cap in place; and freshly cut; for the
edges were sharp to your fingers and shining to your eyes. But of
course every scrap and shaving of the metal had been cleaned away. The
pipe behind the cap back of an etching on the opposite wall was exactly
like this.
“It was to come that way, I guess,” I said carefully to Teverson.
“Was?” he repeated as carefully. “What makes you think it isn’t yet to
come? Not in the middle of our meeting now, but to whoever is here,
which means you and me.” But he did not move away; instead, he walked
to the window and stood there looking down. I glanced down too and into
Wall Street and got a glimpse of that part which seemed particularly to
bear a message for us this morning--that strip between Morgan’s offices
and the sub-treasury where people were peacefully passing and feeling
absolutely secure that summer noon, not so long ago, when without
warning at all that infernal no-one-yet-knows-what went off and did
what nobody about Wall Street will ever forget.
Of course, what had strewed the street had been gathered up and the
pavement repaired and flushed and swept and the buildings restored
long ago; yet this neighborhood wasn’t precisely the best spot to
disregard a threat of terrorism,--especially when you’ve found
ancestral gas pipes freshly chiselled for no use you wish to put them
to.
“We’ve expected trouble from radicals about this stage in our foreign
financing, Fanneal,” Teverson said to me. “We’ve guarded Géroud and
Strathon from the minute they passed quarantine; we’ve double-guarded
these premises with special men who are watching every stranger who
comes in to-day; we’ve taken every precaution--or thought we had.
That’s why Sencort was so sure nothing could happen.”
He stepped nearer to the window and I realized that he was not standing
there merely to think, but he was intentionally showing himself to
convince any watcher that the room was occupied. He turned about and
went on, “No one knows where the other ends of these pipes are now; of
course they haven’t been used for decades. They might stop anywhere or
they might have been led on indefinitely. If what killed Costrelman
came through the air--and it seems certain it did--and if those pipes
are conveyors for more of it, they could have pumped it in and nobody
suspected till somebody fell over; it might be coming now on us. Do
you feel any movement of air from that pipe?”
“I can’t be sure,” I said.
“Come out now,” said Teverson, pulling at me absolutely unnecessarily;
he didn’t have to put up any argument. “I may be a damn fool, as
Sencort suggests, but then I’ve rather a longer life expectancy--away
from slotted gas pipes--than he. Besides, I’m beginning to feel some of
this is personal against me. I was invited to Costrelman’s dinner and
was expected, though I didn’t get there.... Weston, get help at once
and try to cover the places where these pipes may run to; they may be
entirely outside the building, of course. Jump! Reed, post men here to
see no one uses this room or room next to it to-day. Leave the electric
lights burning as if the room was being used and send some one, on
the run, to that animal store the other side of Broadway in a cellar,
Thames Street, I think, and buy four or five guinea pigs; if he gets
back with them in fifteen minutes, cover your head, hold your breath,
and put them inside this door; close it. If he doesn’t get back that
soon, don’t even go near the door. Wait here, Fanneal.” He left me in
an office near by and himself rushed away.
“Now you tell me,” he went at me three minutes later, “how much you
know about this?”
XVIII
DORIS APPEARS AND VANISHES.
I was a changed man, as you may imagine. Yesterday and up to this
minute of this morning, I was the laugh of the locality. “F. P. A.”
had put in a little paragraph about me; the librettists of the running
revues also had tamped in a line or two of appropriate personal
reference to the Chicago vendor of beans, with two nice, new money
plates packed in his jeans.
It was music to me to hear any one address me as Teverson was doing.
“You know nearly all that I do,” I told him. “Maybe you’ve heard I’ve
been in a little mix-up with counterfeiters and others recently. I got
my tip out of that.”
“Who sent the tip?”
I shook my head; it was hopeless to go into the question of Jerry with
him; and Teverson was not inclined to waste time impractically.
“Pipes!” he repeated. “They were going to use the pipes; that’s all you
knew of their method?”
“That’s all.”
“What do you want to do now?” he asked me, almost deferentially. “Stay
here?”
“I’d like to see this through, of course,” I said. “I’d like to know
what happens to those guinea pigs.”
“Whatever you like,” he answered, and shook hands with me. I could see
he was getting uneasy about Strathon and Géroud. He went out and I,
having nothing to do but wait, wandered in the hall.
A door opened at the rear and showed an enclosed stairway lit by yellow
electricity; a girl had come up the stairs and now was standing in the
dimness of the hall.
During the second she showed herself in the lighted doorway, before the
door closed again, I had a glimpse of her outline. She was little and
trim; like Doris, I thought.
I stepped down by her and she went to the side of the hall and stood.
Then I had the instinct to seize her; and there, in the quarter-light,
I saw what I was feeling with my hands. She was Doris Janvier.
With the realization, my head seemed to hurt where I’d been hit; but my
fingers held firm to her, giving her no chance to get away.
“What are you doing here?” I challenged.
She was quick! “I came up to see Mr. Teverson!” she said to me. “They
wouldn’t let me see him downstairs. I heard he was up here!”
I half shook her. “You came up to see if they were meeting in the
directors’ room. You’re the “wire” inside to-day! You came to see if
everybody was placed! Well, nobody’ll be in that room but guinea pigs
this morning. I don’t mind telling you, for you’ll not get back to tell
them.”
“Oh!” she said. That was all, just then. “Oh!”
I kept hold of her, not knowing what else to do or say.
“Where are they?” I asked her, after a half-minute.
“Who?”
“Your crowd.”
She waited half a minute herself and then said, “I don’t know.”
“Never mind; we’ll find them. We’re following your pipes,” I assured
her. I dragged her toward the front of the hall and had a better look
at her.
“They’re not my pipes!” she denied.
“That’s true,” I admitted. “You found them in place; all you had to do
was to make new openings.”
“Steve!” she said to me.
“Don’t try it,” I asked her.
I could see her face now,--her lips straight and thin, her eyes fixed
on me, her forehead damp with those tiny drops of perspiration which
you know are cold. She was wearing, not the same suit she’d had on the
train; but one as smart, with fur collar and cuffs. She was the same
neat little thing who had so completely fooled me; but she wouldn’t
again.
“Steve!” she repeated my name. “I came here to find Mr. Teverson to
warn him. Since he’s been warned, I don’t care.”
“I do!” I retorted and held her. She’d spoken as if I’d let her walk
away.
Reed was back at the door of the directors’ room with little furry
things in his hands. Somebody opened the door, he entered and came out
quickly without the guinea pigs. He saw me and stepped up.
“Who’s this, Mr. Fanneal?” he asked me, respectfully enough, gazing at
Doris.
I didn’t reply and he answered himself. “Oh, it’s her who was asking
for Mr. Teverson downstairs.”
“I’ll see to her,” I said to Reed, and I led her into a room which I
found empty.
“Now you’d better tell me all you know,” I advised her.
“What’ll you do, if I don’t?”
“You’ll not get out of this!” I promised her. “Not out of this!”
Nothing yet had really happened in “this”; we’d discovered nothing
actual but those slotted pipes. Not even the guinea pigs had been
killed yet; but the certainty of the plot, which had convinced Teverson
too, turned me sick when I thought of it. And this girl, whom I held,
was in the scheme.
True, she had stopped, on a lower floor, to inquire for Teverson;
but that proved nothing in her favor. I thought how I’d trusted her
before and how I’d been hit on the back of the head when I went to that
meeting place where I was to have my chance to argue with her, alone.
I held to her; and she gazed at me and I felt her breathing slowly and
deeply. The little clock on the desk near us turned to eleven; and we
both heard steps and talk in the hall.
“What are they doing?” she asked me.
I opened our door; and we both saw two men, whose figures looked like
Weston and Reed. They had hooded affairs, of gas-mask pattern over
their heads, and they were at the door of the directors’ room.
“Don’t go in!” Doris cried to them. “No mask’s any good! Don’t let them
in!” she cried to me.
Apparently they did not hear and Doris jerked toward them. I held her
and shoved her back of me. “Don’t go in, Reed!” I called and at that
moment, though I did not know it, I must have let Doris go.
I was watching the men and calling to them again; they had the door
open a little; now they dropped back, but they could look in.
“They’re dead,” said Reed’s voice.
“Sure,” said the other. Then I missed Doris; and when I saw her, she
was at the top of the stairs where she had first appeared. She had the
door open and she was standing in it, looking back; then she slammed
it. I was after her, but she had too good a lead. On the third floor,
she entered the Sencort offices and left me on the back stairs with a
bolted door between us.
I beat upon it and shouted and then realized, too late, that my best
chance was to go to the ground and head her off. Of course I never
headed her; she was gone.
When I returned upstairs, Reed had ventilated the directors’ room by
opening the windows from the outside ledge. He had taken out the four
guinea pigs he had left penned on the top of the directors’ table. They
were all dead without visible hurt or reason.
Teverson came out of his conference, which was being held on the third
floor; and he turned the limp guinea pigs over thoughtfully.
“There’s only one reason those aren’t Strathon and Géroud and Sencort
and me, Fanneal,” he said, looking at me. “You want to do one more big
thing for us and against--them?” He moved his head toward the wall; I
knew whom he meant.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Keep this all quiet. It’s asking something, I know.”
I guess I got red at that. He meant I’d played rather prominently as a
goat and it was something to ask me to conceal the one thing I’d put
through.
“It’s the only thing to do,” I agreed.
He gave me his hand again. “We’ll all know,” he said.
“How about the men you have tracing the pipes?” I asked.
“Nothing from them yet.”
And there was nothing until a good deal later, when they found that
those old gas pipes had been extended into an unused basement room in
the building to the left. When they entered this room, they found proof
that recently it had been occupied; men had been doing things there
with reference to the end of that extended gas pipe, but everybody had
got away.
I kept quiet, of course; the Sencort people hushed their clerks. Lord
Strathon, for England, and M. Géroud, for France, met with Sencort and
Teverson and made their agreements as everybody read. Nobody read of
that near success at gassing them dead as those guinea pigs which had
been penned on their table.
Nobody knew, but the Sencort people and I and those who had slotted the
pipes and killed the four guinea pigs from that next-door basement room.
“Get out of New York, Steve! Stay away!” said another note to me in
Jerry’s handwriting.
It arrived the second day after the gassing of the guinea pigs and I
was thinking it over, when walking on Park Avenue and, being far from
my hotel, I gave in to a taxi driver who offered his cab at the curb.
“Belmont!” I told him; and he started in the right direction; then he
swung to the east and was over Third Avenue. He was up an alley while I
was rapping at his window.
I realized then and opened the door and jumped out while the cab was
still moving; but I was near his destination. A gat was at my midriff
before I’d stopped slipping in the muck underfoot; and as I looked into
the faces of the gents surrounding me, I understood that, upon the rack
of their club, my number to-day had arrived at the top.
XIX
I HEAR OF THE GLASS ROOM.
They were not masked; it was daylight. The hour was late in the
afternoon, to be sure; but I saw them plainly as they made no attempt
at concealment. And I could guess at the significance of this. They
showed themselves, without care, for they felt absolutely sure I would
never have a chance to give evidence against them.
I used to wonder why a man doesn’t put up a fight, in spite of having
a gun shoved against him, when he knows he’s in for the worst possible
after he surrenders to such a circle as met me. The fact is, at the
moment, the gun at your belt is wholly convincing; you aren’t competent
to imagine incidents subsequent to the occasion of its going off. So
you don’t force the occasion.
“Step in there,” somebody said to me; and I stepped. “There” was a door
in the rear of a building; it led into an empty room and to another
door indicated as my destination.
Here was a closet without further portal and without window; its light
came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when
I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself
alone.
I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images
of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of
pitch dark. I indulged myself--or attempted to--in some of that logic
said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of
gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of
poison gas would not be found lacking.
The last step on their ladder of reason was not difficult for my mind
to ascend. I had spoiled their great scheme at the Sencort Trust;
therefore now I was to be punished. Perhaps, in contemplation of the
certainty of this, I should have been satisfied; but I had to go about
the gathering up of earlier starts and sequences.
I felt myself caught in a continuity, frequently suggested but not
finally convincing, until suddenly that gat at my stomach summed up
everything for me. “Here you are!” it spoke. “You’ve gone this way and
that; but now you’ve come to it!”
I got to thinking what Jerry told me of “his friend”--Keeban,
his strange, sinister twin--“sitting in with destiny” by knowing,
in advance, what he was going to do to others. I’d thought of him
sitting in with destiny on Dorothy Crewe and old Win Scofield and on
Jerry himself; but I hadn’t thought of him sitting in with destiny
on me. Stupid, now that I came to see it; for of course I was in his
calculations all along; he’d used me, as long as I proved profitable
and now that I’d failed him, he’d finish me.
For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that
circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown
to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen.
They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority
in that circle.
I’d often noticed--haven’t you--how indistinguishable our felons are
from the philanthropists of the day. Mix up the captions--as the
best of newspapers sometimes do--accompanying the illustrated page
pictures of the gentry who last night did “Fanny’s First Play” for the
Presbyterian Home and the guests and ladies who last night failed to
start their Fiat promptly after they had it all filled from the ring
and wrist-watch trays in Caldon’s windows, and who could be sure which
words went with which faces?
Admit the truth; you’d hire most murderers on sight. Others do; why not
you? They look normal.
Nero was normal, H. G. Wells says; he had a little peculiarity, to
be sure, but that was merely incidental to his position, not to his
nature. He was so placed, you see, that the ideas, which remain mere
passing black thoughts and impulses with the rest of us, could without
any trouble or personal effort at all become actual deeds with him.
That was the secret of Nero. Before a man condemns Nero as being of a
separate species from himself, he should examine very carefully his own
secret thoughts. This is Wells’s own advice and monition.
It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the
other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs
of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too
prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action.
I wondered about Jerry and how much he might be knowing of my present
position; twice, recently, you remember, I’d had word from him. I did
the drowning-man acts,--both of them; I caught at the straw that
somehow he might save me, and I reviewed, if not my entire life, yet
several significant epochs of it; and I got to thinking about Doris.
She was in with the worst, I was now sure; she not only had had me hit
on the head, when I came to see her, but she’d worked in that scheme to
gas Sencort and his guests. I kept thinking about her and the dances
we’d had together at the Flamingo Feather and our dinner on the train
when I’d had the best time ever in my life.
Meanwhile I was listening and I began to realize that there was a
soft, regular sound separate from and nearer than those which reached
me through the door. It was the zephyr of breath. Some one was in the
closet with me.
“Hello,” I whispered. “Who’s here?”
A hand touched my side and I seized it,--a small, firm hand mighty like
Doris’s.
“Hello; who’re you?” I asked.
“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Doris! By Christopher, Doris!”
“Anybody else in here?” I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the
time; for after this, I was ready for anything.
“No,” she said.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked her; and she said, “What d’you
suppose?”
That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there
because I’d run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and
spoiled the best of Keeban’s schemes. Now why should she be here except
for the same reason?
“They saw you down on Wall Street,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I see,” I whispered.
“Do you?” she asked me.
I bent at the same time that my hands, which had been holding hers,
felt up her arms, over her shoulders and located her cheeks. I held her
between my hands and, bending, kissed her. On the lips, it was; I found
them fair. She helped, perhaps, a little.
“How long you been here,” I asked her, my lips burning like flame; and
how I liked it!
“What time is it?” she asked.
“’Bout five when they shoved me in.”
“I came at three.”
I kissed her again at that; I was still bending and had her cheeks
between my hands.
“How’d they get you? You take a cab?”
“That’s how they got you?”
“Me,” I said. “But you--you weren’t so easy, were you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she temporized.
Queer--wasn’t that--how she wanted to show consideration for me? “I
should have told you,” she blamed herself, “that they’d be watching the
Sencort building, and when they bumped off just guinea pigs, they’d lay
for who fooled ’em.”
“I had a tip to skip out,” I said. “But I didn’t start in time. Where
did they get you?”
Now she told me, “They took me out of my room by the back way.”
I held to her but differently--oh, entirely differently--from my hold
of her in that Sencort room. For I knew not only that she’d not been in
that scheme, not only that she’d gone there to warn Teverson, as she
said, but also I knew she’d nothing to do with that blow on my _medulla
oblongata_ at Cheron Street.
“Vine’s doing this, I suppose,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“He sent me both those telegrams?”
“No; only the second; I came on, as I wired you. He grabbed me when I
arrived and threw you the second wire. I didn’t see the street till he
was through with you.”
“What’d he do to you?”
“Me? Oh, he was all right about me, then.”
“He didn’t hurt you at all?”
She knew what I meant and replied, “He did not! Christina saw to that.”
“Oh, she’s back with him?”
“Umhm. That’s why she saw to it.”
“All right,” I said; and kept hold of her. My property, she was; mine.
“You’re forgiving me?” I said.
“For what?”
“Down on Wall Street; and what I did after I’d been hit.”
“Oh, that was you, Steve, just you.”
Pretty soon, then, I asked her, “What’s Vine’s idea for us now?”
You’d have thought I would have asked that the first thing. But
question any doctor; inquire how patients act when they know there’s no
hope for them. Do they say right away, “What is it, doctor?” They do
not; they say, “Lovely weather; and what a view from this window!”
Doris was like a doctor in that, when I got around to asking her, she
did her stalling, too; but finally she told me, “Well, I guess for us
it’s the ‘glass room’.”
XX
DORIS AND I ARE TAKEN TO IT.
When she said “for us,” I got another thrill there in the dark, and
right away I got quite the opposite when she said “the glass room.”
I had not heard of it before. No; that was the première for the
phrase with me; but it was one of those phrases which carry their own
connotation; and this was decidedly an uncomfortable one.
“What’s the ‘glass room’?” I asked her.
“Never mind,” she said, and it was like a mother to a child. You’ve
heard something of the sort when a visitor let slip, before the
children, a remark about the feature atrocity in the morning paper.
“Never mind,” Doris said again to me.
“Well, I’m grown,” I said. “And since I’m apparently a candidate for
it, why not tell me--unless you prefer to have it come as a complete
surprise to me?”
“Don’t!” she asked me; and we stood in silence in the dark.
“You’ve explored the cavern, I suppose between three and five,” I said,
starting up the small talk again.
“Yes.”
“It runs to solid walls, I take it?”
“Very solid.”
“Nothing like a trap door in the floor, by any chance?”
“Not by any.”
“Now a noise would probably be one of the worst advised projects
possible, don’t you think?”
“It wouldn’t change the end at all,” Doris said, “and would only put
us worse off now. They’d tie and gag us--or else let us yell for their
amusement.”
“Of course some one’s just outside.”
“Of course.”
We were silent again and I listened. “Yet we don’t know. I hear nobody
now.”
I threw my weight against the panels, bracing my feet as firmly as I
could. The wood creaked but did not break. Hearing some one at the
other side, I relaxed and the door opened.
“Who’s so crazy to come out?” one of the normals said to me. “Come
along.” He punched me with his pistol. I came.
He slammed the door on Doris and threw over the bolt. Without another
word to me, but guiding me by punches of his automatic against my side,
he herded me into another closet, equipped with a heavy door. Here I
was alone.
Standing alone in the dark, I wondered why they put me in with Doris,
first; and I wondered now that it was too late to ask her again,
exactly what “the glass room” was. Then my two perplexities partly
answered each other.