It was black with a blackness that seemed to possess tangible substance,
as though it wrapped itself around and enveloped the body with a pall
whose very texture could be felt. It was unknown ground, and the foot
reached out uncertainly, wary of where next it might find lodgment, and
the hands stretched out, as a blind man’s hands stretch out, feeling for
hidden things through space. It was dank and musty, and in the nostrils
was an earthy, cavernous smell; and there was a silence that seemed
guarded by the very bowels of the earth itself. And in the silence and
the darkness peril lurked—a peril that merged courage into foolhardiness
for one who would invite it, and set the nerves on edge, and kept the
muscles taut like tight-strung bow strings, and stimulated the senses
into abnormal activity until the eyes peopled the darkness with phantoms
that were not there, and the ears created sounds that did not exist.
Billy Kane’s face, under the mask, was drawn in hard, strained lines; he
raised his right hand, that gripped his automatic, and drew the back of
his hand across his forehead. Foolhardiness! Yes, that was it! He was a
fool to come here, to take the risk! He knew Wong Yen’s by reputation as
one of the most infamous Chinese underground dives in the Bad Lands; he
remembered it concretely from that incident of a few nights ago when
Laverto had had young Clancy drugged here. Was that only a few nights
ago? He shook his head. Since those few nights ago he no longer measured
the passing of time by normal standards; he had lived all his life since
those few nights ago!
He moved forward through the blackness, cautiously, silently. Where was
the next wall? Or was there any wall at all? His hands, reaching out as
far as they could stretch, touched nothing. This was below the ordinary
cellar level; it was a sub-cellar, a chain of sub-cellars. How many men
had entered here, yes, and women too—and disappeared? A murder hole! And
up above him somewhere was New York—millions of people, taxicabs,
crowded sidewalks, theatres, and, yes, churches, places where people
worshipped. Incredible!
He had heard of places like this, and so had the public; and the public
smiled in self-sufficient tolerant amusement. Well, why not, where even
the police were ignorant! Everybody admitted that the Chinese quarter
was full of ridiculously imitated catacombs perhaps; but what did it
matter if in a block of houses the inmates burrowed from cellar to
cellar like rats, and built mysterious doors and passageways, and threw
about everything the disguise of wicked and shuddering things—when it
was only disguise! It was good for business. The gape-wagons and the
slumming conductors profited and so did the Celestials; and the
slummers, satiated with thrills, the women drawing their skirts closely
around their silk-clad ankles, the men surreptitiously feeling in their
pockets to assure themselves that their watches and valuables were still
in their possession, got their money’s worth. Everybody was satisfied,
and the public smiled.
Billy Kane’s fingers tightened on the butt of his automatic. Back
somewhere behind him in the darkness a Chinaman still guarded a door
that neither slummer nor police had ever entered; but the guard was a
gagged and huddled thing on the floor now, still senseless probably from
the blow on the head from this same pistol butt. There had been no other
way. The man was not far behind—just at the entrance so skilfully
disguised by an ordinary coal bin. Was there still another guard in
front of him? More than one? If he only dared to use his flashlight for
a second! A fool to come here where, if caught, he would not have a
chance of escape, was he? Well, perhaps—only there was a man’s life at
stake.
Perhaps he was already too late! Red Vallon had said, though, that there
wasn’t any hurry about “bumping off” the Wop, that they had him safe in
here “with his bean tapped to keep him quiet until they finished the
rest of the game.” It was less than an hour ago that Red Vallon had said
that, and it was only eight o’clock now, and the “rest of the game,” to
give it every chance of success, would not be played out for still
another hour yet, not before old Barloff had closed up for the night. He
wasn’t too late, he couldn’t be too late—there was a man’s life at
stake: only an ex-convict’s, a man out from Sing Sing but a few hours
ago. Just a prison bird! But the Wop was innocent this time and——
Was that a sound there from somewhere in front of him? Billy Kane stood
still. Nothing! No; a dozen sounds that were not really sounds at all.
His ears were full of uncanny noises.
The back cellar entrance beneath a Chinese tea-shop, and after that the
rear of the coal bin! Billy Kane was laughing to himself, but the laugh
was void of mirth. There was a grim, horrible sort of irony about it
all. Believing him, Billy Kane, to be the Rat, Red Vallon had _reported_
the accomplishment of the first stage in the execution of the plan with
gusto. After that, deft questioning had elicited from the gangster the
secret of this entrance to Wong Yen’s, and then luck, and then the guard
taken unawares. The guard could hardly be blamed. The guard naturally
enough, had little reason to suspect the approach to that coal bin of
any one who had not the “open sesame” to what was beyond, and he had
been lurking there where the boards of the bin ingeniously slid apart,
and had shown not the slightest uneasiness at his, Billy Kane’s,
presence until it was too late. Then there had been a steep, narrow
passage downward, and then—_this_. Beyond, near or far, he did not know
which, these sub-cellars hid the real thing that the so-called
underground Chinatown above counterfeited, hid debauchery and vice, and
cradled crime, and here the poppy reigned, and the dregs of humanity
skulked fearful of the sunlight.
“They had flung the Wop into a corner and left him until they got around
to finishing the job,” Red Vallon had explained callously. The Wop,
therefore, must be somewhere near at hand. But he, Billy Kane, could see
nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.
His physical faculties strained and alert, subconsciously Billy Kane’s
mind was milling over that conversation with the gangster of an hour
ago, and upon him, in spite of his own present peril, there came a cold
and merciless fury. It was more to-night than the ordinary moral
obligation, more than the mere responsibility to render abortive the
crimes that came to his knowledge through his tenure of this rôle of the
Rat, that was actuating him now; it was the callous, damnable brutality
of the scheme that, linked with its hellish ingenuity, seemed to outrage
every instinct of manhood he possessed, and fired him with an
overmastering desire, not only to frustrate the crime itself, but to
take toll in a personal, physical way, if he could, from those who were
enacting it.
It was one of those plans, conceived by the Rat, that waited patiently
for its hour of maturity to arrive, and then was executed and carried
through to its fulfilment by the minions of that Directorate of crime of
which the Rat appeared to be the most versatile and vicious member, but
without the Rat, necessarily, taking any further active part in it. And
he, Billy Kane, who fate had seen fit to mold with features that were
evidently a counterpart of that master rogue’s, who was for the moment
accepted and obeyed as the Rat, and was supposed to be the originator of
the plan itself, could not very well ask Red Vallon, for instance, for
details! Therefore he did not know all the details, but he knew enough!
He had wormed quite a little out of Red Vallon without the gangster
suspecting anything more than that he, Billy Kane as the Rat, was taking
particular pains to see that the stage was properly set, and that the
possibility of failure was reduced to its absolute minimum. It was very
simple. It required simply a man’s life—the murder of the Wop.
He knew something of the Wop, for the Wop’s story was common property.
The Wop, in the old days, five years ago, before he had gone “up the
river” for a “job” in the line which was his particular specialty, was
known both as a tough customer and as one of the cleverest “box-workers”
in the safe-cracking profession. The testimony of one Ivan Barloff had
been mainly responsible for the Wop’s capture and conviction, and the
Wop had travelled to Sing Sing with a thirst for vengeance gnawing at
his soul, and with the threat quivering on his twisted lips that he
would get even with the other when he got out again. Nor had the five
years of prison hell seemed to assuage any of the Wop’s desire to square
accounts! He had repeated his threat many times in prison, and he had
been indifferent as to who heard him. The feud was no secret to the
police. That was the gist of it.
As for Ivan Barloff, Billy Kane was somewhat more precisely informed,
both because the time he, Billy Kane, had spent on the East Side in
carrying out David Ellsworth’s philanthropies could hardly have been
passed without at least a hearsay acquaintanceship with so well-known a
character in that quarter as Ivan Barloff, and because, too, Red Vallon,
in that last interview, had seemed to take a malicious delight in
exploiting his own vastly more intimate knowledge of the little old
Russian of many parts. On his own account he knew, naturally, only what
the public knew and believed about the man: Barloff was a sort of father
to the flock, a very numerous flock, of Poles and Russians of the
uneducated and illiterate class. He was all things to them. He was
counselor and confidant, he was money lender, he was entrusted with what
money they had as savings for investment, he wrote their letters, he
collected their rents, being a kind of owners’ sub-agent, and he lived
amongst them, alone, in a little old frame house that was sandwiched in
among the ramshackle tenements that housed so many of his compatriots in
that section. In appearance he was a very dirty and unkempt old man, and
ostensibly he was as honest as he was dirty—and he was accepted as such
by public, police and compatriots alike.
Red Vallon, however, had thrown quite a different light on the other’s
character. The man possessed the craft and cunning of a devil, and a
devil’s inhumanity. He had fed like a leech on the guileless trust of
his ignorant clientele. He had made money—a great deal of money.
Thousands were stored away in his rickety old safe, that was so rickety
it disarmed suspicion; and, preserving his secret, he patronized no
bank, but covered his constantly increasing fortune with the guise of
squalor and poverty, which he kept on a level scarcely, if any, above
that of those he filched.
The man was a miser of the most sordid and cold-blooded sort. A nickel
was not too mean a thing to scheme for, if by any means he could lay his
hands upon it. Also, the man had other remunerative relationships, very
carefully selected relationships, with others than those with whom he
openly associated. To a select few of the underworld he acted at times
as “fence,” receiving such stolen goods as he could readily dispose of
among his compatriots, who, innocent of any guilty knowledge, bought the
articles eagerly at a greatly reduced figure, imagining, if they stopped
to imagine at all, that the articles represented unredeemed pledges on
money loaned here and there by Barloff.
Billy Kane’s lips twisted in a thin smile there in the darkness. It was
a deal such as that, so he had gleaned from Red Vallon, that had
originated the feud between Ivan Barloff and the Wop. The Wop had
brought some of the proceeds of one of his predatory safe-breaking raids
to Barloff, and a bargain was concluded between them; but in some way
that night Barloff became aware that the police had followed the Wop to
his, Barloff’s, house. Barloff was taking no chances. He promptly
cleared his own skirts at the expense of five years in Sing Sing for the
Wop. He scurried to the nearest police station with the stolen articles,
and with unctuous righteousness explained that he was suspicious as to
how the Wop had come by them, but had bought them to pull the wool over
the Wop’s eyes so as to enable him, Barloff, to communicate with the
police, and give the police a chance to make an investigation. Barloff
got away with it, and the Wop got his ride “up the river.” It was
perhaps not unnatural that the Wop had sworn revenge, and had made no
secret of it!
Billy Kane’s twisted smile deepened. It was all very simple. It involved
simply the taking of a man’s life—the Wop’s—which was a very small
matter in the eyes of that Crime Trust which was running rampant now
through the underworld. Also, the Rat was a man of large vision. He
builded ahead and waited patiently. Barloff was known by the Rat to have
a great deal of money in ready cash. It would not have been a very
difficult matter perhaps to have robbed the old Russian at any time, but
there was always the certainty of an investigation as an aftermath, and
investigations sometimes had a tendency to lead in awkward directions.
Much better, therefore, and much safer, that the trend of the
investigation, and its limits, should be fixed in advance—by the Rat.
And so they had waited for the Wop to regain his freedom.
They had not waited five years, however, for the scheme probably had not
occurred to the Rat until perhaps a few months ago. But now the Wop
being free at last, the Wop’s first act of freedom was to be made to
appear that of putting his oft-repeated threat into execution. Barloff
was to be lured out of his house on some specious pretext, the house
would then be entered, and a forged note in the Wop’s scrawl, carefully
prepared beforehand, jeering in its tone and to the effect that the Wop
would have got Barloff as well as Barloff’s cash if the latter had not
been fortunate enough to have been out of the house at the time, would
be left pinned, say, to the wall. There would not be much room for
investigation! The Wop, being dead, would not make any defense. The Wop
would never be found; and as the natural thing for the Wop to do was to
disappear after leaving his defiant message behind him, who was to
imagine that such disappearance was not of the Wop’s own free will and
design? The Wop was the cat’s-paw!
The blackness was absolute. Billy Kane was feeling out again with both
hands. He seemed to have lost in a measure even his sense of direction.
He was either in a very much wider passage than that through which he
had entered, or else the excavation around him was actually itself one
of the sub-cellars. If he could but get the touch of a wall again to
guide him! Yes, here it was! It swerved sharply, almost at right angles,
to the left. He followed it, moving slowly, scarcely more than a few
inches at a time.
It was strange how his brain worked on ceaselessly, seemingly oblivious
to his immediate surroundings, seemingly concerned with things
extraneous to his present danger! And yet that was not altogether true.
One thing had a bearing on another; and one thing led to another. It was
like the cogs of wheels fitting into each other as they turned around
and around. This tenure of the Rat’s rôle, that was no less dangerous,
was apposite. Where was the Rat? While he, Billy Kane, fought to free
himself from the stigma of David Ellsworth’s murder, while he fought for
his own good name and his own life on that score, this rôle of the Rat,
while it afforded temporary sanctuary from the police, forced him into
perils that——
His lips compressed tightly. He had stumbled over something soft and
yielding. His outstretched hand, though it saved him, slipped along the
wall and came up against another wall, again at right angles, but this
time where, obviously, the walls made a corner. He stooped down, and
felt over the obstruction that his foot had encountered. It was a man’s
body. It moved now, and writhed a little at his touch. It was the Wop
almost certainly, the Wop “flung into a corner” out of the way like a
sack of meal. But the man was still alive. Thank God for that! He had
been afraid that the initiatory stage of the work might have been only
too well accomplished.
His hands felt upward along the bound body, and touched the other’s
face, and felt the cloth gag twisted and knotted around the man’s mouth.
His hands felt still a little higher up—to the close-cropped prison
hair. It was the Wop beyond question. He took a knife from his pocket.
“Don’t make a sound!” he breathed, as he removed the gag, and cut away
the cords from around the other’s feet and hands. “You’re the Wop,
aren’t you?”
The man’s affirmation was almost inarticulate. Billy Kane slipped his
arm around the other’s shoulders and lifted the man into a sitting
posture. He had a flask of brandy in his pocket, brought purposely for
the Wop’s benefit, and he held the flask now to the other’s lips. The
stimulant seemed to inject new life and strength into the man.
“Who—who are you?” the Wop asked weakly.
“Don’t talk!” Billy Kane cautioned. “The one thing to do is to get out
of here now. Do you think you can walk at all?”
“Yes,” the man answered. “I—I’m not as bad as all that.”
“Try, then,” said Billy Kane.
The progress was slow, pitifully slow. The Wop, despite his own
assertion, was both weak and cramped, and at first he was almost a dead
weight, as he clung with an arm flung around Billy Kane’s shoulders; but
gradually he appeared to get back his strength. They stopped every two
or three yards both to rest and listen. Again Billy Kane held the flask
to the other’s lips. Again they went on.
“My Gawd, it’s—it’s black in here!” the Wop mumbled, and shivered a
little.
Billy Kane made no answer. He was taking care now not to lose touch with
the walls. The ground under foot was beginning to rise steeply. He
caught his foot and almost fell over a huddled thing on the earth—the
Chinese guard. A certain murk seemed to be penetrating the blackness. He
stopped again, felt out in front of him, and listened intently for a
moment, and then he placed his lips to the Wop’s ear.
“There’s an opening here into a coal bin,” he whispered. “Get down on
your hands and knees and crawl through. Straight across from the coal
bin there’s a short flight of steps up to a door that opens on the
alley. We’ll make a break for it now. Keep close to me. And don’t make a
noise. There’s a cellar stairway to the room above, and the room above
isn’t likely to be empty! Understand?”
“Yes,” said the Wop.
“Come on, then,” said Billy Kane.
He crawled through the opening with the Wop at his heels, and rose to
his feet, then gripping at the Wop’s arm, he stole across the cellar,
gained the steps and, an instant later, stepped out into a dark and
narrow alleyway. He did not pause here; he hurried the Wop down the
alleyway, and halted only when within a few yards of the first
intersecting street: just far enough back in the alleyway to keep well
beyond the radius of light from the adjoining thoroughfare.
Neither man spoke for a moment. After the silence of that death trap
behind them, the roar of an elevated train from Chatham Square near by
seemed to Billy Kane a din infernal, and greater only by a little than
the rattle of wheels, the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and the
multitudinous noises of ordinary traffic. He could just make out the
Wop’s features. One side of the man’s face was streaked with clotted
blood stains; but apart from that the Wop now showed little outward
evidence of the attack that had been made upon him. He stood there now,
quite steady on his feet, his eyes studying Billy Kane’s mask in a
puzzled way.
“Say,” said the Wop, a sudden huskiness in his voice. “I owe you
something. What’s your name?”
Billy Kane shook his head.
“Never mind about that,” he said quietly. “There’s something else that’s
of vastly greater importance so far as you are concerned. Do you know
why they got after you to-night, or who it was that got you in that
trap?”
“No,” said the Wop.
“I’ll tell you, then,” said Billy Kane. “It was because you threatened
to get even with Ivan Barloff.”
“Barloff!” The Wop’s fists clenched, and he stepped closer to Billy
Kane. “So it was Barloff, was it? He must have had the fear of God in
him, then, to make him spend any money—even to hire thugs! Barloff, eh?
Well, I’m going to see Barloff pretty soon!”
“No, you’re not!” said Billy Kane crisply. “That’s exactly why I am
telling you this. It isn’t Barloff. It’s a crowd that knew of your
threat, and _they’re_ getting after Barloff, and framing you up for the
job. They’re planting a little evidence against you in Barloff’s place
in exchange for Barloff’s cash, and with you finished off via the murder
route, they expect the police to throw up their hands after a while and
admit you’ve made a clean get-away—with the swag.”
The Wop’s face was close to Billy Kane’s, and the Wop’s face was
suddenly pinched and white. He touched his lips with his tongue. And
then, as suddenly, the blood flushed back, and he thrust out his under
jaw truculently.
“They would, eh—the dirty swabs!” he snarled. “Who are they? I’ll make
’em crawl for this!”
Billy Kane smiled grimly.
“No, I guess not!” he said softly. “You’re very much better out of it.
But I promise you they’ll not get away with it if you’ll do what you are
told now.”
The Wop knuckled his forehead in a perplexed way.
“What do you want me to do?” There was a lingering sullen note in the
Wop’s voice.
“Just this,” said Billy Kane quietly. “I want you to get out from under.
You’re not looking for another five years in Sing Sing, are you?”
The Wop flinched. He drew his knuckles again across his eyes.
“No,” he said hoarsely.
Billy Kane nodded.
“Quite so!” he said calmly. “Well, then, it is simply a question of
establishing an alibi for you that will be absolutely hole-proof from
now until, say, midnight. Where can you go?”
“I know Gus Moray, that runs the Silver King saloon,” said the Wop.
“He’d swear to it, all right.”
“Yes; whether you were there or not!” said Billy Kane dryly. “That’s not
good enough! If anything breaks wrong to-night you’ve got to have
something better than an alibi in a dive like that to stack up against
what will look like open-and-shut evidence against you. You’ve got to
get on a higher plane than that.”
The Wop shook his head.
“I ain’t been a very regular church attendant,” he said, with a sickly
grin, “and——” He stopped short, and suddenly leaned toward Billy Kane.
“Say, would a minister do?”
“It would be an improvement,” admitted Billy Kane, with a smile.
“Well, I got it, then!” announced the Wop. His hesitancy had vanished.
He seemed eager, almost anxious now. The iron of five years of prison
was evidently far too poignant a memory to risk it being turned into
reality again. “I got it! There’s a guy named Mister Claflin that ran
one of them mission joints down around where I uster hang out before I
went up. He’s all right! He’s the only soul on God’s earth came near me
when I was doing my spaces. Twice he came up to Sing Sing to see me. He
didn’t hold no prayer meeting with me neither, but he’s got a grip in
his hand that makes a fellow feel he ain’t all dirt. He’s white, he is!”
“Do you know where he lives?” inquired Billy Kane crisply.
“No,” said the Wop, and was suddenly downcast. “And he ain’t at the
mission any more, ’cause he told me he’d got a regular layout uptown
somewhere.”
“No matter!” said Billy Kane cheerfully. “Any drug store has a
directory. You can find the address there. Got any money?”
The Wop felt through his pockets, and the red flared into his face
again.
“Frisked!” he flung out savagely.
Billy Kane handed the other a banknote.
“Spend this on the first taxi you can grab,” he said. “You’ve got to get
there as soon as you can, and you’ve got to keep under cover getting
there. If Mr. Claflin is not at home, wait in his house for him. Don’t
let them sidetrack you. And make it a point of establishing the hour you
get there, either with the minister himself, or whoever happens to be at
home. And stay there until midnight anyhow. Understand?”
“Yes,” said the Wop.
“Well, then,” said Billy Kane, “beat it!”
The Wop hesitated.
“Say, ain’t I going to know who you are?” he blurted out. “Say, I ain’t
anything but a crook, just a damned crook with a prison record, but—but
I’d like to pay what I owe. Ain’t you going to give me the chance?”
“You’ve got it now.” Billy Kane’s hand went to the other’s shoulder.
“It’s a rotten road to Sing Sing. You’re out of it now—stay out of it.”
He gave the Wop a friendly push toward the street. “We’ve no more time
to lose. Beat it!” he said, and without giving the Wop time to reply, he
turned abruptly, and ran back along the alleyway.