ABOVE AND BELOW
“Thank the guid God I see ye alive, Dan,” said Mary Kerry.
Having her husband’s dressing-gown over her night attire, and her
usually neat hair in great disorder, she stood just within the doorway
of the little dining-room at Spenser Road, her face haggard and the fey
light in her eyes. Kerry, seated in the armchair dressed as he had come
in from the street, a parody of his neat self with mud on his shoes and
streaks of green slime on his overall, raised his face from his hands
and stared at her wearily.
“I awakened wi’ a cry at some hour afore the dawn,” she whispered
stretching out her hands and looking like a wild-eyed prophetess of
old. “My hairt beat sair fast and then grew caud. I droppit on my knees
and prayed as I ha’ ne’er prayed afore. Dan, Dan, I thought ye were
gene from me.”
“I nearly was,” said Kerry, a faint spark of his old truculency
lighting up the weary eyes. “The man from Whitehall only missed me by a
miracle.”
“’Twas the miracle o’ prayer, Dan,” declared his wife in a low,
awe-stricken voice. “For as I prayed, a great comfort came to me an’ a
great peace. The second sight was wi’ me, Dan, and I saw, no’
yersel’—whereby I seemed to ken that ye were safe—but a puir dying soul
stretched on a bed o’ sorrow. At the fuit o’ the bed was standing a
fearsome figure o’ a man—yellow and wicked, wi’ his hands tuckit in his
sleeves. I thought ’twas a veesion that was opening up tee me and that
a’ was about to be made clear, when as though a curtain had been
droppit before my een, it went awe’ an’ I kenned it nae more; but
plain—plain, I heerd the howling o’ a dog.”
Kerry started and clutched the arms of the chair.
“A dog!” he said. “A dog!”
“The howling o’ a sma’ dog,” declared his wife; “and I thought ’twas a
portent, an’ the great fear came o’er me again. But as I prayed ’twas
unfolder to me that the portent was no’ for yersel’ but for her—the
puir weak hairt ye ha’ tee save.”
She ceased speaking and the strange fey light left her eyes. She
dropped upon her knees beside Kerry, bending her head and throwing her
arms about him. He glanced down at her tenderly and laid his hands upon
her shoulders; but he was preoccupied, and the next moment, his jaws
moving mechanically, he was staring straight before him.
“A dog,” he muttered, “a dog!”
Mary Kerry did not move; until, a light of understanding coming into
Kerry’s fierce eyes, he slowly raised her and stood upright himself.
“I have it!” he said. “Mary, the case is won! Twenty men have spent the
night and early morning beating the river bank so that the very rats
have been driven from their holes. Twenty men have failed where a dog
would have succeeded. Mary, I must be off.”
“Ye’re no goin’ out again, Dan. Ye’re weary tee death.”
“I must, my dear, and it’s _you_ who send me.”
“But, Dan, where are ye goin’?”
Kerry grabbed his hat and cane from the sideboard upon which they lay,
and:
“I’m going for the dog!” he rapped.
Weary as he was and travel-stained, for once neglectful of that
neatness upon which he prided himself, he set out, hope reborn in his
heart. His assertion that the very rats had been driven from their
holes was scarce an exaggeration. A search-party of twenty men, hastily
mustered and conducted by Kerry and Seton Pasha, had explored every
house, every shop, every wharf, and, as Kerry believed, every cellar
adjoining the bank, between Limehouse Basin and the dock gates. Where
access had been denied them or where no one had resided they had never
hesitated to force an entrance. But no trace had they found of those
whom they sought.
For the first time within Kerry’s memory, or, indeed, within the memory
of any member of the Criminal Investigation Department,
Detective-Sergeant Coombes had ceased to smile when the appalling truth
was revealed to him that Sin Sin Wa had vanished—that Sin Sin Wa had
mysteriously joined that invisible company which included Kazmah, Mrs.
Sin and Mrs. Monte Irvin. Not a word of reprimand did the Chief
Inspector utter, but his eyes seemed to emit sparks. Hands plunged
deeply in his pockets he had turned away, and not even Seton Pasha had
dared to speak to him for fully five minutes.
Kerry began to regard the one-eyed Chinaman with a superstitious fear
which he strove in vain to stifle. That any man could have succeeded in
converting a _chandu-khân_ such as that described by Mollie Gretna into
a filthy deserted dwelling such as that visited by Kerry, within the
space of some thirty-six hours, was well nigh incredible. But the Chief
Inspector had deduced (correctly) that the exotic appointments depicted
by Mollie were all of a detachable nature—merely masking the filthiness
beneath; so that at the shortest notice the House of a Hundred Raptures
could be dismantled. The communicating door was a larger proposition,
but that it was one within the compass of Sin Sin Wa its effectual
disappearance sufficiently demonstrated.
Doubtless (Kerry mused savagely) the appointments of the opium-house
had been smuggled into that magically hidden cache which now concealed
the conjurer Sin Sin Wa as well as the other members of the Kazmah
company. How any man of flesh and blood could have escaped from a
six-roomed house surrounded by detectives surpassed Kerry’s powers of
imagination. How any apartment large enough to contain a mouse, much
less half a dozen human beings, could exist anywhere within the area
covered by the search-party he failed to understand, nor was he
prepared to admit it humanly possible.
Kerry chartered a taxicab by Brixton Town Hall and directed the man to
drive to Prince’s Gate. To the curious glances of certain of his
neighbors who had never before seen the Chief Inspector otherwise than
a model of cleanliness and spruceness he was indifferent. But the
manner in which the taxi-driver looked him up and down penetrated
through the veil of abstraction which hitherto had rendered Kerry
impervious to all external impressions, and:
“Give me another look like that, my lad,” he snapped furiously, “and
I’ll bash your head through your blasted wind-screen.”
A ready retort trembled upon the cabman’s tongue, but a glance into the
savage blue eyes reduced him to fearful silence. Kerry entered the cab
and banged the door; and the man drove off positively trembling with
indignation.
Deep in reflection the Chief Inspector was driven westward through the
early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets presented
that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can present in
all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places
inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to
be witnessed upon the highways; but to all of them Kerry was blind as
he was deaf to the din of workaday Babylon. In spirit he was roaming
the bank of old Father Thames where the river sweeps eastward below
Limehouse Causeway—wonder-stricken before the magic of the one-eyed
wizard who could at will efface himself as an artist rubs out a
drawing, who could _camouflage_ a drug warehouse so successfully that
human skill, however closely addressed to the task, failed utterly to
detect its whereabouts. Above the discord of the busy streets he heard
again and again that cry in the night which had come from a hapless
prisoner whom they were powerless to succor. He beat his cane upon the
floor of the cab and swore savagely and loudly. The intimidated cabman,
believing these demonstrations designed to urge him to a greater speed,
performed feats of driving calculated to jeopardize his license. But
still the savage passenger stamped and cursed, so that the cabby began
to believe that a madman was seated behind him.
At the corner of Kennington Oval Kerry was effectually aroused to the
realities. A little runabout car passed his cab, coming from a
southerly direction. Proceeding at a rapid speed it was lost in the
traffic ahead. Unconsciously Kerry had glanced at the occupants and had
recognized Margaret Halley and Seton Pasha. The old spirit of rivalry
between himself and the man from Whitehall leapt up hotly within
Kerry’s breast.
“Now where the hell has _he_ been!” he muttered.
As a matter of fact, Seton Pasha, acting upon a suggestion of
Margaret’s had been to Brixton Prison to interview Juan Mareno who lay
there under arrest. Contents bills announcing this arrest as the latest
public development in the Bond Street murder case were to be seen upon
every newstand; yet the problem of that which had brought Seton to the
south of London was one with which Kerry grappled in vain. He had
parted from the Home office agent in the early hours of the morning,
and their parting had been one of mutual despair which neither had
sought to disguise.
It was a coincidence which a student of human nature might have
regarded as significant, that whereas Kerry had taken his troubles home
to his wife, Seton Pasha had sought inspiration from Margaret Halley;
and whereas the guidance of Mary Kerry had led the Chief Inspector to
hurry in quest of Rita Irvin’s spaniel, the result of Seton’s interview
with Margaret had been an equally hurried journey to the big jail.
Unhappily Seton had failed to elicit the slightest information from the
saturnine Mareno. Unmoved alike by promises or threats, he had coolly
adhered to his original evidence.
So, while the authorities worked feverishly and all England reading of
the arrest of Mareno inquired indignantly, “But who is Kazmah, and
where is Mrs. Monte Irvin?” Sin Sin Wa placidly pursued his
arrangements for immediate departure to the paddyfields of Ho-Nan, and
sometimes in the weird crooning voice with which he addressed the raven
he would sing a monotonous chant dealing with the valley of the Yellow
River where the opium-poppy grows. Hidden in the cunning vault, the
search had passed above him; and watchful on a quay on the Surrey shore
whereto his dinghy was fastened, George Martin awaited the signal which
should tell him that Kazmah and Company were ready to leave. Any time
after dark he expected to see the waving lantern and to collect his
last payment from the traffic.
At the very hour that Kerry was hastening to Prince’s Gate, Sin Sin Wa
sat before the stove in the drug cache, the green-eyed joss upon his
knee. With a fragment of chamois leather he lovingly polished the
leering idol, crooning softly to himself and smiling his mirthless
smile. Perched upon his shoulder the raven studied this operation with
apparent interest, his solitary eye glittering bead-like. Upon the
opposite side of the stove sat the ancient Sam Tûk and at intervals of
five minutes or more he would slowly nod his hairless head.
The sliding door which concealed the inner room was partly open, and
from the opening there shone forth a dim red light, cast by the
paper-shaded lamp which illuminated the place. The coarse voice of the
Cuban-Jewess rose and fell in a ceaseless half-muttered soliloquy,
indescribably unpleasant but to which Sin Sin Wa was evidently
indifferent.
Propped up amid cushions on the divan which once had formed part of the
furniture of the House of a Hundred Raptures, Mrs. Sin was smoking
opium. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers, and
her dark eyes were partly glazed. Buddha-like immobility was claiming
her, but it had not yet effaced that expression of murderous malice
with which the smoker contemplated the unconscious woman who lay upon
the bed at the other end of the room.
As the moments passed the eyes of Mrs. Sin grew more and more glazed.
Her harsh voice became softened, and presently: “Ah!” she whispered;
“so you wait to smoke with me?”
Immobile she sat propped up amid the cushions, and only her full lips
moved.
“Two pipes are nothing to Cy,” she murmured. “He smokes five. But you
are not going to smoke?”
Again she paused, then:
“Ah, my Lucy. You smoke with _me?_” she whispered coaxingly.
_Chandu_ had opened the poppy gates. Mrs. Sin was conversing with her
dead lover.
“Something has changed you,” she sighed. “You are different—lately. You
have lots of money now. Your investments have been good. You want to
become—respectable, eh?”
Slightly—ever so slightly—the red lips curled upwards. No sound of life
came from the woman lying white and still in the bed. But through the
partly open door crept snatches of Sin Sin Wa’s crooning melody.
“Yet once,” she murmured, “yet once I seemed beautiful to you, Lucy.
For La Belle Lola you forgot that English pride.” She laughed softly.
“You forgot Sin Sin Wa. If there had been no Lola you would never have
escaped from Buenos Ayres with your life, my Lucy. You forgot that
English pride, and did not ask me where I got them from—the ten
thousand dollars to buy your ‘honor’ back.”
She became silent, as if listening to the dead man’s reply. Finally:
“No—I do not reproach you, my dear,” she whispered. “You have paid me
back a thousand fold, and Sin Sin Wa, the old fox, grows rich and fat.
Today we hold the traffic in our hands, Lucy. The old fox cares only
for his money. Before it is too late let us go—you and I. Do you
remember Havana, and the two months of heaven we spent there? Oh, let
us go back to Havana, Lucy. Kazmah has made us rich. Let Kazmah die....
You smoke with me?”
Again she became silent, then:
“Very likely,” she murmured; “very likely I know why you don’t smoke.
You have promised your pretty little friend that you will stay awake
and see that nobody tries to cut her sweet white throat.”
She paused momentarily, then muttered something rapidly in Spanish,
followed by a short, guttural phrase in Chinese.
“Why do you bring her to the house?” she whispered hoarsely. “And you
brought her to Kazmah’s. Ah! I see. Now everybody says you are changed.
Yes. She is a charming friend.”
The Buddha-like face became suddenly contorted, and as suddenly grew
placid again.
“I know! I know!” Mrs. Sin muttered harshly. “Do you think I am blind!
If she had been like any of the others, do you suppose it would have
mattered to _me?_ But you _respect_ her—you _respect_....” Her voice
died away to an almost inaudible whisper: “I don’t believe you. You are
telling me lies. But you have always told me lies; one more does not
matter, I suppose.... How strong you are. You have hurt my wrists. You
will smoke with me now?”
She ceased speaking abruptly, and abruptly resumed again:
“And I do as you wish—I do as you wish. How can I keep her from it
except by making the price so high that she cannot afford to buy it? I
tell you I do it. I bargain for the pink and white boy, Quentin,
because I want her to be indebted to him—because I want her to be so
sorry for him that she lets him take her away from _you!_ Why should
you _respect_ her—”
Silence fell upon the drugged speaker. Sin Sin Wa could be heard
crooning softly about the Yellow River and the mountain gods who sent
it sweeping down through the valleys where the opium-poppy grows.
“Go, Juan,” hissed Mrs. Sin. “I say—_go!_”
Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin lying,
a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed, stirred
slightly—her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared straightly
upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their shadowy
depths.