The Door of Dread/Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
IT was ten o'clock the next morning that Sadie Wimpel presented herself at Kestner's door, in response to her superior officer's summons.
"Sit down," said that superior officer, without his customary smile. Sadie, eying him, sank into a chair.
"I suppose you know that we missed Wallaby Sam by half an hour last night?"
"He always was a headliner on the get-away circuits!" acknowledged the girl.
"But the thing I can't understand, Sadie, is why you neglected to call us up the moment you knew where Breitman's plant was. I'm not saying that this code stuff wasn't a magnificent haul. But it would have been twice as valuable if we'd been able to round up Wallaby Sam himself. And it was quite bad enough losing Andelman."
The girl betrayed a tendency to fidget.
"Well, there's one remark I wantta make, Mista Kestner. When this work turns into a three-ring circus I can't watch but one ring at a time. I got so excited when I put me hands on those gover'ment codes that I thought I'd better be goin' when the goin' was good. I didn't think much about Wallaby Sam, except that he might come to, and gimme the chase!"
Kestner studied her with a form of perplexity.
"But Breitman has been acting as Keudell's right-hand man! And I felt sure that had been made plain to you."
"Oh, I was gerry to that, all right," admitted the somewhat embarrassed young woman in the chair. "But there were certain reasons why I wasn't so crazy about havin' Wallaby Sam rounded up last night!"
"What reasons?"
"Well, I knew Wilsnach would be on the job. And I didn't want Wilsnach third-degreein' that old robin!"
"Why not?"
"B'cause that old robin knows too much about me past."
"What past?"
"The past Blynn said yuh'd all keep the door shut on, s'long as I kept it shut myself!"
"But can you, Sadie?"
"Not if there's a roast comin' ev'ry time I make a try at it!" was the girl's somewhat embittered retort.
Kestner, conscious of her anger, glanced down at his watch.
"But why isn't Wilsnach here?" he asked.
Sadie, getting up from her chair, crossed aimlessly to the window and stared out over the serrated line of the housetops.
"I ain't his nurse!" was her retort, flung back over an insolent shoulder.
"But I sent for you both," explained Kestner, at a loss to account for both her sudden acerbity and her splendor of raiment. For Sadie was arrayed in a tailored suit of steel blue that fitted her like a glove, with a modish little rainbow hat a-rake on her elaborately coiffured head and a huge bunch of hothouse violets pinned to her waist.
"Service work ain't exactly made us into Siamese twins," she announced, as she continued to stare out over the housetops. Her soul was not at peace with itself, and she preferred to evade the over-investigatory eye of her chief. The belated Wilsnach, she even suspected, was at that moment patiently stand in line to buy two seats for the Casino opening. And one of those seats, she also suspected, was for her.
Kestner sat studying the trim young figure in steel blue. Then he smiled a little, as though some untoward incident had confirmed his earlier suspicions as to her disingenuousness.
"Sadie, where did those violets come from?" he calmly inquired.
"Is wearin' 'em against the law?'* she as calmly equivocated.
Kestner smiled for the second time.
"Has Wilsnach been sending you flowers for the second time?"
Sadie, at this, swung squarely about and faced her interrogator.
"So he told yuh he sent me them roses?" There was an unlooked-for note of sharpness in that indignantly put question.
"Yes," admitted Kestner, "he told me."
Sadie's laugh was quite without mirth.
"And I s'pose he told yuh why?"
"He said you deserved them, as I remember it, for he considered you'd done as neat a piece of work as he'd ever seen in all the Service."
Sadie turned back to the window. She laughed again, but her eyes were smarting.
"About the same as slippin' a fish-tail to the trained seal at the end of its stunt, I s'pose!" she commented.
Kestner suddenly became serious.
"Sadie, how many times have you been married?"
When the girl in the steel blue suit swung about for the second time, it was almost with fierceness.
"S'posin' I have hitched up a time or two! Ain't a girl gotta have some hobby?"
"How many times have you been married?" repeated the man confronting her.
Open antagonism now showed itself in Sadie's stare.
"Yuh'll be wantin' me finger-prints next!" was her pertly derisive cry.
"But how many times, please?"
Their eyes met. Then Sadie turned back to the window.
"I was married twice—not countin' Cambridge Charlie! And it took so much dough to git a decree against that first lemon that I let the other guy attend to his own unhitchin'!"
"How about Wallaby Sam?"
Sadie snorted aloud.
"That old geezer was nothin' but a gang-boss to me! And yuh canned me chances before I could git a hook into him!" Her voice took on a note of mockery. "But wasn't I the foolish kid to run away wit' the idear that gittin' married was just me own privut affair? Wasn't I the wall-eyed wop not to see that about ev'ry gover'ment agent paradin' a tin badge had a right to poke his nose into me birt' certificate and me other equally privut matters? Wasn't I, now?"
Kestner did not smile. His patience, in fact, carried with it a touch of pity.
"That is not the point, Sadie. You just spoke about a certain door. And the point is that a very wise man has said the future is only the past, entered by another door. No one is more anxious for your eventual happiness than I am. But our past has the habit of reaching out a hand and taking our happiness away from us. I only want to warn you that—"
"Well, there's no wop can put the rollers under me!" cut in the indignant-eyed young woman. "There was nothin' underhand about any o' that hitchin' up, and there was nothin' underhand about the unhitchin'—which is more than some o' these Fift' Avenoo ribs can say! I was druv to it! Three lemons in a row, who never come through wit' enough to pay a honest board-bill!"
"Then I'm as glad as you are that you're legally free. But there is one other question I must ask you. Has—er—has Wilsnach ever led you to believe that a termination of that freedom might be not altogether undesirable?"
"Come again!" said the puzzled Sadie.
"Has Wilsnach," repeated Kestner with a sigh, "been trying to make love to you?"
Still again Sadie's laugh was about as mirthless as the chatter of a kingfisher.
"That gink?" she inquired, with a gesture of contempt. "Why, that gink ain't got no more idear o' makin' love than a hearse-plume has!"
"But you don't altogether dislike him, do you?"
Sadie's face softened a little.
"He's the only guy who's been decent to me in a dog's age! I mean exceptin' yuh—and yuh're goin' to beat it for the double-harness shop as soon as yuh get through pilotin' this case!"
Kestner's face retained all its solemnity. "But this case is far from ended," he reminded her.
"No, it ain't ended. And until it's ended I s'pose there's no use rememberin' we're human bein's! It's all for the sake o' the Law! But take it from me, I'm gettin' good and tired o' the Law! What I've saw o' the Law this last few weeks is enough to drive a girl to blackmailin' her way up and down Broadway until her sucker-list is as empty as a last year's bird's nest!"
"You could never, never go back to that sort of thing, Sadie."
"Yuh don't know what I could go back to," declared the desperate-eyed young woman at the window. "And gum-shoein' ain't so soul-satisfyin' that I'm goin' to hang crape over me natural feelin's until Keudell's last come-on goes up to the Big House!"
"But until this case is finished, Sadie, none of us can afford to have feelings. That may seem a little hard, but I've suffered from it quite as much as you have. The three of us, Wilsnach and you and myself, are now secret agents. And a secret agent, after all, is only a spy. And a spy has to remember that he must always work alone, without official help, and that when working he can have no friends, and that if he's cornered he can't even ask for protection. This is a big case we're on, and in a case like this we sometimes have to use queer agents."
Sadie swung about on him.
"Am I so queer?" she promptly demanded.
"I'm trying to save you from getting that way. You're far too fine a girl, Sadie, to let a chance like this ever slip away from you."
"I don't see that it's gettin' me anywhere in partic'lar."
"But it isn't ended yet."
"And don't look like it ever will end."
Kestner could afford to smile at her petulance.
"You must remember," he explained with the utmost patience, "that it took Wilkie just fourteen months to run down that famous one-hundred-dollar Monroe-head silver certificate. And we're running down something infinitely more important than a piece of counterfeit paper."
"Oh, I ain't kickin' against helpin' to round up Keudell. No decent Amurican wants a foreign agent like that nosin' out our Navy secrets. And I guess I hate him as much as yuh do. What's more, he's the kind o' crook yuh gotta get, or he'll get yuh. But I ain't consoomed wit' affection for gropin' round in the dark. I wantta be gerry to what's goin' on, and I wantta know when I'm gummin' the game."
"Precisely," the patient-eyed Kestner assured her. "And that's exactly why you and Wilsnach were sent for. There's a new kink in this case, and I've got to explain it. But I can't understand why Wilsnach's so late in reporting. By the way, did you see him after leaving the Alsatia?"
"No!"
"Did you see him before that Andelman dinner?"
Sadie, under her rice-powder, turned a shade or two pinker.
"Yes," she finally acknowledged.
"Where?"
"Up t' the Metropolitan."
"What Metropolitan?"
"The Museum wit' all those old Masters in it. Mista Wilsnach said it'd do me mind good. He's been tryin' to argue me into believin' that picture gallery guff's got something in it."
Kestner knew better than to smile openly. He wheeled about in his chair and toyed with the paper-weight on his table, apparently finding it difficult to phrase any fit reply to his companion's last remark. He surprised that companion by suddenly opening a drawer and flinging a photograph on the table-top.
"Well, since you insist on being gerry to what's going on, here's a different kind of picture for you to study. And it will pay you quite as well as any canvas up at the Metropolitan."
Sadie did not deign to examine the photograph. She was busy repinning the violets to her waist. Kestner himself took up the picture and held it out for her.
"Who's the gink?" she casually inquired.
"That's the man we've got to round up in the next twenty- four hours."
"Why?" was Sadie's indifferent demand, as she took the photograph from Kestner's fingers.
Her companion did not answer her, for the bell of the desk-phone close beside him shrilled out a sudden call. He lifted the receiver and spoke a word or two over the wire.
"Here's Wilsnach now," he announced, as he hung up the receiver.
But Sadie paid no attention to his words, for her face was bent low over the photograph which he had handed to her. She studied it long and earnestly. She studied it so long that Kestner sat in turn studying her. Yet what her thoughts were he was unable to decipher. He merely saw that a new and quite unlooked-for air of solemnity had descended about her.
"So that's the guy I gotta help round up!" she said, as Wilsnach stepped into the room. But she said it more to herself, apparently, than to either of the two men confronting her. And she continued to stare abstractedly out over the serrated line of the housetops as the newcomer seated himself at her side.
Kestner, in the meantime, handed the photograph to Wilsnach.
"This mild-looking gentleman," began the man at the table, "is the cause of this little conference of ours. We're here to discuss him. And having discussed him, we're commanded to gather him in some time before to-morrow night!"
Wilsnach looked up from his second scrutiny of the picture.
"Anything to do with the Keudell case?" he inquired.
"That is a point which we still have to determine. His name seems to be Strasser, David Strasser. And he's either a genius or one of the cleverest gay-cats, as they call them over here, that ever scouted ahead of a foreign spy."
"Whadda yuh mean by genius?" contemptuously inquired Sadie, coming out of her trance. Kestner noticed that she ignored the snapshot which Wilsnach was endeavoring to pass on to her.
"A man has surely some claim to being called a genius when he can walk up to Lieutenant-Commander Hellweg, who is in charge of the government's proving-grounds at Indian Head, and quietly but unequivocally inform him that both his ordnance and his explosives are out of date!"
"Or a nut!" interjected Sadie.
"Well, that's what this mild-eyed little man did, and, what's more to the point, he seems to have come dangerously near to proving it!"
Kestner took up the photograph which Wilsnach had placed on the table and stared down at it as he continued to speak.
"I'm not an expert on such things, so I'm not going to give you an expert's report on the case. But as Brubacher explains it to me, this man has invented a new explosive. No, it's not exactly a new explosive, but it's an adaptation of the form of the older high explosives. These nitric and picric acid mixtures are all about the same thing, really, whether they happen to be called Melinite or Maximite or Cordite or Ballastite or Turpinite or Lyddite or any other old thing ending in 'ite.' Chemically, they've reached their topmost limit of power, and the problem has been to build guns strong enough to stand their fire (where a pressure of twelve thousand pounds to the square inch is now considered low) and at the same time resist their heat, when less than two hundred discharges burns out a sixteen-inch gun."
"Sixty-four discharges did for the Sider coast gun," amended Wilsnach.
"This man Strasser has apparently hit on a new idea. He realized that our naval guns couldn't be made much heavier, for such a rifle has to have three feet of length for every inch of caliber. This means that our new sixteen-inch gun, for instance, has to be at least forty-eight feet long. Each gun, Brubacher tells me, weighs almost ninety-four tons. To mount heavier guns than that in the turret of a dreadnaught means the displacement of the ship has to be enormously increased, since the projectile of each rifle weighs two thousand pounds and a broadside from a battery of them would keel over any vessel that wasn't of proportionately enormous tonnage. And there is a reasonable limit, of course, to the size of all warships, even though our newer inventions have emancipated gun range beyond the mere line of human vision. It was once possible, I mean, to shoot only as far as the eye can see. But the hydroplane and the machinery of modern range-finding have pretty well overcome that. And now the naval gun that can reach the farthest is the gun that wins the fight. Do you follow me?"
"We're right behind yuh!" retorted Sadie.
"But, as I said before, charges can't be increased because guns can't be made heavier. And too much explosive in a gun makes it about as dangerous for the man behind it as for the man in front of it. Strasser apparently realized all this. So he set to work studying the character of the explosive. He decided that what was wanted was not a pound on the projectile, but a push. He wanted an explosive that would 'follow through,' like the driver of a golf player as it lifts the ball, and not like the single sharp crack of a baseball bat. That single sharp crack burns out the bore, after a certain number of discharges, and keeps the breech-pressure always up to the danger mark."
"Do yuh get him?" the despairing-eyed Sadie demanded of the scrupulously attentive Wilsnach. The latter nodded, though with a touch of impatience.
"Now this man Strasser," continued Kestner, "saw that the explosive itself was about as powerful as chemistry could make it. So he began to experiment with guncotton, in the matter of mechanical distribution. He found that a multi-perforated charge resulted in a relatively low initial pressure in the gun, while the explosive, because it was cushioned with these countless perforations, burned with sufficiently accelerating rapidity to maintain a constant pressure behind the projectile during its entire transit through the gun-barrel. In other words, he devised an explosive that would 'follow through' and make the longest drive. The longer the gun, of course, the greater the push. So he calmly walked up to the Washington authorities and requested them to make him a sixty-foot gun. This gun was to weigh some sixty-nine tons, the same weight as our present fourteen-inch naval gun, and would cost the government, Brubacher said, about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to build."
"And they built it?" asked Sadie.
"They called the man a crank, and got rid of him. Then he went to Indian Head and saw Hellweg. He was carrying a satchel full of the explosive and Hellweg let him have his talk out. They kept the man there for several days, or one pretext or another, and got hold of all his new explosive they could. Then they secretly tried it out at the Coast Artillery School at Fort Monroe—and it made good! It wasn't properly aged, for cannon powder needs half a year to dry out, but even with a twelve-inch gun they got a range of almost sixteen miles. And that was an eye-opener!"
"But what," demanded Wilsnach, "had this man Strasser hit on?"
"He'd hit on the idea of packing his explosive in a series of attenuated fibers instead of in a solid mass, so that combustion, diffused for even the infinite part of a moment, uniformly prolonged pressure throughout the entire length of the gun. That gave the push instead of the crack."
"Hully gee!" interrupted the wearied girl.
"Instead of being made into tightly packed flakes or strips," Kestner went on, "Strasser seems to have secured a compound annularization of the explosive by twisting infinitely small hollow tubes of it into spirals and then spiraling this into coils and then still again spiraling the result, the same as big cables are made by twisting small wires together and then again twisting the twist, ad infinitum. The wires, in this case, were like extremely small bed-springs prodigiously prolonged and finally combined so as to produce the greatest fiber attenuation possible. So combustion, instead of being like the sound-crack you get when you smite twelve keys of a piano, was more like the trickle of sound when you run your finger along their face."
"I believe I get it now," admitted Wilsnach.
"But there's another kink to this, which I can't make very plain. It depends on the fact that an explosive, in vacuo, loses its effectiveness. And Strasser seems to have adapted this to his granularization process, for chemical analysis showed our people that periodically along his row of detonating units he had produced a semi-vacuum. They think this in some way tends to retard the full force of the explosion and helps to give the pushing power I spoke of. And that's about all we know."
"Which seems to be consld'r'ble!" commented Sadie, as she took a small mirror from her vanity bag and wearily proceeded to powder her nose.
"And what are we to do?" asked the ever-practical Wilsnach.
"They've sent us orders to corral Strasser. That mild-mannered crank, it seems, finally got indignant at the suspicion and contempt with which he was being treated by the federal authorities. He kicked over the traces and announced that if Uncle Sam didn't want to buy his secret he'd go to a government that would be glad enough to get it. He suddenly packed up and made for New York."
It was Sadie who spoke next.
"How d'yuh know he wasn't tryin' to get next to those new coast guns of ours?" she casually inquired. "Why couldn't a guy like that be a come-on for Keudell all the time?"
"As for that, of course, we are still in the dark! And we can't get the answer to it until we get the man himself."
"And what's the procedure this time?" inquired Wilsnach.
Kestner sat for a moment deep in thought. Then he handed over the photograph to his colleague.
"Here's the man we want. It's a good snapshot of him. Brubacher had him photographed without letting him know he was being taken. To-morrow a print of this picture will be sent out to about every city in America. But I'd rather like to get Strasser before the city authorities could step in."
"And we've nothing but the picture to go on?"
"Nothing beyond the fact that Strasser bought a ticket for New York and was seen heading this way."
"Then what are your suggestions?"
Kestner shrugged a shoulder. "I have none," he admitted.
"Then we must follow the usual procedure."
"Precisely. We've first got to seine the city. And the only suggestion I can make is that we divide our territory so that any two of us will not be covering the same ground."
Wilsnach, after deeply scrutinizing the picture for the second time, again passed it on to Sadie Wimpel. As before, she gave a cursory glance at it and tossed it back on the table.
"I'll cover the trains and ferries along the River," finally announced Kestner. "And you, Wilsnach, might fine-comb the likeliest hotels and restaurants and that sort of thing." Kestner, as he turned to the woman seated by the window, seemed to hesitate. "As for you, Sadie, what would you prefer doing?"
Sadie was busy buttoning her gloves.
"Seein' it's such a nice day," she languidly announced, "I guess I'll just blacksnake along Broadway and see what I can slide into!"
"Am I to infer from this," asked Kestner, "that the case rather fails to interest you?"
"Oh, I'll be on the job when the gong rings!" was Sadie's listless reply. "Yuh needn't cut off the mitts, Chief, until yuh're dead sure I've gone to the mat!"