By the time he was on the noon boat that left for Macao, Blake had
quite forgotten about the revolver. As he steamed southward over
smooth seas, threading a way through boulder-strewn islands and
skirting mountainous cliffs, his movements seemed to take on a sense of
finality. He stood at the rail, watching the hazy blue islands, the
forests of fishing-boats and high-pooped junks floating lazily at
anchor, the indolent figures which he could catch glimpses of on deck,
the green waters of the China Sea. He watched them with intent, yet
abstracted, eyes. Some echo of the witchery of those Eastern waters at
times penetrated his own preoccupied soul. A vague sense of his
remoteness from his old life at last crept in to him.
He thought of the watching green lights that were flaring up, dusk by
dusk, in the shrill New York night, the lamps of the precinct stations,
the lamps of Headquarters, where the great building was full of moving
feet and shifting faces, where telephones were ringing and detectives
were coming and going, and policemen in uniform were passing up and
down the great stone steps, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, strong-limbed
policemen, talking and laughing as they started out on their night
details. He could follow them as they went, those confident-striding
"flatties" with their ash night-sticks at their side, soldiers without
bugles or banner, going out to do the goodly tasks of the Law, soldiers
of whom he was once the leader, the pride, the man to whom they pointed
as the Vidoc of America.
And he would go back to them as great as ever. He would again compel
their admiration. The newspaper boys would again come filing into his
office and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how much
he could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to them
how he shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in,
and brought him back to Justice.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Blake's steamer drew near
Macao. Against a background of dim blue hills he could make out the
green and blue and white of the houses in the Portuguese quarters,
guarded on one side by a lighthouse and on the other by a stolid square
fort. Swinging around a sharp point, the boat entered the inner
harbor, crowded with Chinese craft and coasters and dingy tramps of the
sea.
Blake seemed in no hurry to disembark. The sampan into which he
stepped, in fact, did not creep up to the shore until evening. There,
ignoring the rickshaw coolies who awaited him as he passed an
obnoxiously officious trio of customs officers, he disappeared up one
of the narrow and slippery side streets of the Chinese quarter.
He followed this street for some distance, assailed by the smell of its
mud and rotting sewerage, twisting and turning deeper into the
darkness, past dogs and chattering coolies and oil lamps and
gaming-house doors. Into one of these gaming houses he turned, passing
through the blackwood sliding door and climbing the narrow stairway to
the floor above. There, from a small quadrangular gallery, he could
look down on the "well" of the fan-tan lay out below.
He made his way to a seat at the rail, took out a cigar, lighted it,
and let his veiled gaze wander about the place, point by point, until
he had inspected and weighed and appraised every man in the building.
He continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on his
hands and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black boulder
shadowed his eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes of
his waistcoat. He lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone and
clatter of voices below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending to
drop off into a doze of ennui. But all the while he was most acutely
awake.
For somewhere in that gathering, he knew, there was a messenger
awaiting him. Whether he was English or Portuguese, white or yellow,
Blake could not say. But from some one there some word or signal was
to come.
He peered down at the few white men in the pit below. He watched the
man at the head of the carved blackwood table, beside his heap of brass
"cash," watched him again and again as he took up his handful of coins,
covered them with a brass hat while the betting began, removed the hat,
and seemed to be dividing the pile, with the wand in his hand, into
fours. The last number of the last four, apparently, was the object of
the wagers.
Blake could not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the
yellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire
country puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of
centuries that divided the two races. These yellow men about him
seemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner of
life and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at through
the bars of the Bronx Zoo cages.
A white man would have to be pretty far gone, Blake decided, to fall
into their ways, to be satisfied with the life of those yellow men. He
would have to be a terrible failure, or he would have to be hounded by
a terrible fear, to live out his life so far away from his own kind.
And he felt now that Binhart could never do it, that a life sentence
there would be worse than a life sentence to "stir." So he took
another cigar, lighted it, and sat back watching the faces about him.
For no apparent reason, and at no decipherable sign, one of the yellow
faces across the smoke-filled room detached itself from its fellows.
This face showed no curiosity, no haste. Blake watched it as it calmly
approached him. He watched until he felt a finger against his arm.
"You clum b'long me," was the enigmatic message uttered in the
detective's ear.
"Why should I go along with you?" Blake calmly inquired.
"You clum b'long me," reiterated the Chinaman. The finger again
touched the detective's arm. "Clismas!"
Blake rose, at once. He recognized the code word of "Christmas." This
was the messenger he had been awaiting.
He followed the figure down the narrow stairway, through the sliding
door, out into the many-odored street, foul with refuse, bisected by
its open sewer of filth, took a turning into a still narrower street,
climbed a precipitous hill cobbled with stone, turned still again,
always overshadowed and hemmed in by tall houses close together, with
black-beamed lattice doors through which he could catch glimpses of
gloomy interiors. He turned again down a wooden-walled hallway that
reminded him of a Mott Street burrow. When the Chinaman touched him on
the sleeve he came to a stop.
His guide was pointing to a closed door in front of them.
"You sabby?" he demanded.
Blake hesitated. He had no idea of what was behind that door, but he
gathered from the Chinaman's motion that he was to enter. Before he
could turn to make further inquiry the Chinaman had slipped away like a
shadow.