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.