The Hand of Peril/Part 3/Chapter 3
III
It was the theatre hour, the hour when the city flutters with solemn excitement like a bird fluttering in its bath. In that valley of light known as Broadway motor-cars and taxi-cabs hummed and throbbed and circled up to brightly-lighted foyers and were off again, like hungry trout in search of dusk's most glittering flies. Electric sky-signs flashed and shimmered in every colour of the rainbow, street crowds moved and gathered and moved again, lines of traffic pulsed intermittently along the side-streets, and over all hung that vague and misty aura of light which could crown even canyons of concrete with a wayward sense of beauty.
Kestner leaned forward in his taxi seat, drinking it in with hungrily unhappy eyes. They had already explored Fifth Avenue to the lonelier reaches of the upper city, and had swung sadly down through the wooded silences of Central Park, and had wandered by way of Seventy-second Street over to Riverside Drive, and had stopped to stare pensively up at Grant's Tomb, and had swung down Broadway again, bewildered by the changes which had crept over a city altering with every altering season. And now, made doubly melancholy by the hilarity which beleaguered them from every side, they were making their way back to Fifth Avenue and their belated dinner at Delmonico's.
Kestner stared out at the hurrying stream of faces, eager and yet unelated. He continued to peer out as the taxi-cab came to a standstill before the imperious arm of a traffic-squad officer. He watched the cross-section of suspended traffic which the same imperious arm sent shuttling across their right-of-way, like waters loosened from an opened sluice-gate.
Then, in a passing car, he caught one fleeting glimpse of a woman's face. Her beauty may have seemed no more pictorial than that of a hundred faces he had already passed. Yet there was a sudden trip and skip of the pulse as he stared out at that transitory picture made by the soft pallor of an oval face framed against the gloom of a cab-hood.
"What's up? " demanded Wilsnach as their taxi started forward with a jerk.
Kestner, who had risen, did not answer him. He was already struggling with the cab-door and calling aloud to his driver. Then he saw it was useless. An intervening tumult of traffic was sweeping them on, like a chip on a stream. The oval face and the unknown carriage were already lost in the crowd.
"What's the matter?" repeated Wilsnach, as Kestner dropped back in his seat.
For several seconds the Secret Agent's face was blank with preoccupation as they swung from Longacre Square into Forty-fourth Street, and went purring on towards the quieter areas of Fifth Avenue.
"Among other things," said Kestner, with the ghost of a sigh, "I just remembered that I'm as hungry as a hound-pup, and here's Delmonico's!"
This acknowledgment of hunger was confirmed by the meal that ensued. Kestner's sense of depression seemed to have forsaken him. He became more communicative, more interested in the people about him. Yet twice he deserted the table on the excuse of a telephone-call, and twice Wilsnach was left to listen idly to the music and stare at the multi-coloured raiment of the white-shouldered women and ponder over Kestner's prolonged absence.
Wilsnach knew by the other's air of abstraction as he resumed his seat that something out of the ordinary was in the air. And knowing his man, he was content to wait. But time slipped by, and still Kestner sat in a brown study.
"I suppose we ought to be getting aboard that steamer," suggested Wilsnach after a listless glance at his watch.
Kestner stared across the rose-shaded table at him. The music of the distant orchestra was pleasing to the ear; the coffee had been irreproachable; and Kestner's fresh cigar was precisely his idea of what a cigar should be.
"Why?" he asked with half-humorous indolence. The lazy tone of that question made Wilsnach look up. For the latter had long since learned that when his friend was most somnolent of eye he was most alert of mind.
"Because by daylight we've got to be out on the rolling deep."
"Wilsnach, that's where you're wrong," quietly announced the other man.
"In what way?" inquired Wilsnach, feeling, for all the other's quietness, the approach of something epochal.
"It is quite true that within an hour we shall go aboard the Mauretania. But morning will not see us on the rolling deep!"
"Why not?"
"Because, once aboard that liner, we shall quietly disembark from her other side—by way, I mean, of one of the lighters in the slip."
"Go on," prompted Wilsnach. Life had always been too full of surprises to let a small bouleversement like this bewilder him.
"We shall then with equal quietness proceed to a hotel. And in the morning, instead of watching the waves and betting on the day's run, I fancy we shall both be rather busy."
"At what?"
"At the task which has been engaging us for some time, Wilsnach, that of rounding up this Lambert gang."
The agent from the Paris Office sat absorbing this ultimatum.
"And what changed the Chief's mind?" he finally inquired.
"The Chief has not changed his mind. It merely happens that I have changed mine."
"What made you?"
"Remembering certain things, two of which stand out conspicuously from the others. The first is that this gang I speak of can lay claim to the most expert forger that ever handled a pen."
"That's the woman!"
"Precisely. And the second is that when Lambert took possession of my personal effects in that Paris studio, he got, among other things, my Department pocket cipher-code."
"Which would do him precious little good!"
"On the contrary, it was of sufficient value to enable him to hurry on to Washington with the girl, pick up what he could of the Department procedure, and then have the girl forge two signatures to despatches addressed to the incoming steamer Pannonia. That's the situation. Those messages were made to bear every evidence of being official. The one feature missing was the fact that they were sent from a district office and not from the Department's own operator."
"You mean they faked those two wires?" This time Wilsnach could not dissemble his astonishment.
"I do. And it strikes me as being about as bold a bit of work to head off pursuit as I ever encountered. I take off my hat to Lambert!"
"But are you sure, dead sure?"
Kestner smiled.
"I've been talking to both Cuddeback and the Chief himself, on long distance. No such messages ever came out of the Department."
"Then what are we to do?"
"We're to keep after Lambert and his gang until we get them and get them right. We're to keep on that trail until we run the last man down."
Wilsnach's perplexity did not disappear.
"But it's not even a trail," he protested. "We know they're in America. But America happens to be quite a sized continent."
Kestner smoked on for a meditative minute or two.
"It's a small world, Wilsnach, when you're trying to hide in it. Do you recall that Paris case of Elise Van Damme—how the girl's head was found in a doorway, wrapped in paper, without a single clue, except an old brass key? Our friend Hamard visited eight thousand houses, eight thousand, mind you, and tested over fifty thousand door-locks, before he got on the trail. But in the end he found his man and unravelled that mystery."
"But we haven't even the brass key," demurred Wilsnach.
"We have something better," amended his companion. "We have the knowledge that Maura Lambert is in this city at this present moment."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because we passed her in an automobile, in Longacre Square, not three hours ago!"
"How do you know that?"
"I know it because I saw her."
Wilsnach sat staring at the other man. He even ventured a slightly satiric smile.
"You should have every reason to remember her," he had the temerity to remark.
"What's more important, Wilsnach, we should have every reason for finding her again. And to-morrow we take up the trail."
"But why wait until to-morrow?"
Kestner leaned forward across the table.
"Don't you realise that we're being watched, from some quarter or other, ever since we landed from that steamer? We've been shadowed. And don't you suppose we'll be shadowed until we go aboard the Mauretania to-night? That's why we're going to turn Lambert's trick on his own gang and go over the side into a lighter when they imagine we're safe in our cabin. This is a stage of the game, Wilsnach, when we've got to make good, as they say on this side of the water."
"I'm ready," said Wilsnach, not without relish, as he sat thinking the situation over.
"Then here's where we start," announced the listless-eyed Secret Agent as he rose from the table and glanced casually about. But Wilsnach, as he followed him into the open, knew that listless glance was only a mask behind which a quick brain was already at work.