The Hand of Peril/Part 4/Chapter 11
XI
Kestner, as he stood there leaning against the faded panel of that locked door which separated him from those passionately contending voices, retained little memory of where he was. He had forgotten the Alambo and its unsavoury warrens, he had forgotten the dingy gaiety of the crimson-papered bedroom behind him, he had forgotten the fusillade of ragtime piano-music, melancholy in its constant reiterations, which assailed his ears. He no longer remembered just why he was there. He was unconscious even of the ignominy of his position, of his eavesdropper's attitude behind a closed door, where he crouched with twitching nerves along his body and beads of sweat on his forehead.
All he heard and comprehended were those words of Morello's—the words which seemed to solve at one stroke the enigma of Maura Lambert's life. They flashed light into the deepest corner of a mystery which from the first he had been unable to explain or explore. They brought to him a sudden yet undecipherable sense of elation. They not only carried with them a readjustment of the entire case, but also the consciousness that his interest in the career of this girl, who had been driven into crime under compulsion, was more than a professional interest. And he did not lament the discovery. It left him with something to live for, something to work for.
But Kestner could give no further thought to the matter, for the girl on the other side of the door was already speaking again. The timbre of her voice had altered. It seemed touched with fear, and at the same time with exaltation. It carried, even above the trivial noises of that sordid rookery of sordid lives, the note of a soul which found itself confronted by issues wider than it could understand.
"That can't be true!" she half-sobbed. "It can't!"
"You do not believe? No! That is natural," Morello cried back at her. "They have made all your life a lie. But when I show you Carlesi, face to face, will you believe?"
"I can't believe it!" Yet for all that protest her voice carried a note of tremulous rhapsody which even Kestner could detect. And Morello, glorying in the discovery that he was upsetting her world about her, that he was leaving her nothing stable, nothing on which to rely, let the tide of his grim purpose carry him along.
"You will come with me, and then you will know. I do not ask you to believe. You will see, with your own eyes. And then you will know. You will know what I know, that Paul Lambert is not your father, that he robbed your father in Civitavecchia when he went there dying of Roman fever. Lambert had been sent there from Paris, to steal maps of the fort. But instead of stealing the maps, he stole you. He saw you were a clever child and that he could make use of you. He took you to a convent in Switzerland. You will remember that. And when he took you out of that convent he began training you for his work. Already he was a forger, yes, a good forger. He forged the papers in which you always believed, the papers about yourself. Then you know what he did. You know how he—"
Kestner, straining to catch every word, heard Morello's voice trail off into sudden silence. In that silence, for a second or two, he could hear nothing but the stridently muffled notes of the distant piano and the far-away rattle and clank of an elevator door-grill as it slid shut on its runway. Then he caught the unmistakable sound of a woman's gasp of terror and surprise.
Immediately following that strange gasp came another sound, the sound of a newer and deeper voice sounding in the room just beyond the locked door.
"You welcher!" boomed out that sterner and harsher voice. And the cry was repeated, slowly and deliberately, but in a tone even more passionate. "You dirty welcher!"
Kestner could see nothing of what had taken place or was then taking place. But as he heard that voice he knew it was Lambert himself speaking, Lambert who must have stepped quietly into the room while the Neapolitan was pouring out his volcanic utterances to the bewildered woman in front of him. And the sudden realisation of what Lambert's intrusion meant at such a moment brought a tingle of nerves needling up and down the backbone of the intently listening Kestner.
He waited there, motionless and breathless, as that silence of only a few seconds prolonged itself into something which to his straining nerves seemed almost interminable.
Then, above the din of the Alambo's many activities, came still another sound. It was not loud. It was a sound not unlike that of one board being dropped flat on another, or of two books being slapped together to rid them of dust.
It was a sound that might have been accepted as the distant explosion of gases in the exhaust of a back-firing automobile, or, to the uninitiated ear, as the quick slam of a door. But to Kestner it meant something quite different. It was a sound which he had heard on more than one occasion, and always with a feeling of nettling nerve-ends.
Almost before the meaning of that sound had fully registered itself on his startled consciousness there was a second and less determinate sound. The floor under Kestner's feet quivered a little with the concussion of some sudden weight imposed upon it.
But the Secret Agent no longer stood there inactive. That tell-tale thud brought his hand up to the brass draw-bolt. Even when this was released, however, he found the door still locked. He could not distinctly remember whether he cried out or not. But he at least knew that he was struggling and straining ineffectually against a locked door, and losing valuable time.
Then he wheeled about and ran back into the centre of the room. There he caught up a slattern-cushioned arm-chair, letting the cushions fall about him as he raised it high above his head. Then, swinging back to the locked door, he brought the chair-legs with a shattering crash against the faded panels. That quick blow splintered the edge of the door, breaking away the mortised lock and leaving it free to swing outward into the next room.
Kestner, dropping the chair, stepped into that next room.
On the floor, half-way between the bedroom and the opened door leading to the hall, lay Morello. He lay on his back, with either arm thrown out at right angles to his body, in the form of a cross.
Kestner stooped over him. There was a small blue hole in the man's forehead, just above the nose-bridge where the black-haired eye-brows met, and from the back of the head the skull had been blown entirely away. And in the meantime the rhapsodic rag-time Saturnalia of sound went on in its. nearby room uninterrupted.
Kestner stepped to the hall door and shut and locked it. Then he picked up the revolver which Lambert must have thrown back into the room as he fled. The Secret Agent's fingers were a little unsteady as from force of habit he examined this revolver and found the cartridge of one chamber empty. But he dropped the fire-arm, without emotion, close beside Morello's outstretched right hand. Then he peered quickly and inquiringly about the room.
The package of plates was no longer there. On the floor was the piece of green baize in which they had been wrapped, but the delicately chased oblongs of metal were gone. Gone too was the travelling-bag and the hat and gloves which had stood beside it.
And with them, Kestner suddenly realised, Maura Lambert had once more slipped away from him.
He was not so troubled by the thought that Lambert also had made his escape. A getaway such as that was only the fortune of war, a reverse to be atoned for by other movements on other days.
But the memory of what had so recently taken place in that dingy-walled room, and the thought that now of all times he could be of help to the girl so sorely in need of that help, carried him across the room and down the many-odoured hall to the elevator.
The car rose to his floor, in response to his frantic pushes on the bell-button. A second later he was shooting down towards the office.
"Did a tall man and a girl with a leather bag go down here a moment ago?" Kestner asked the close-cropped negro-boy operating the car. That youth's heavily impersonal face lightened into sudden interest as he felt a coin pressed into his hand.
"Yas, sah, dat young woman wen' down about two minutes ago! But th' tall gen'elmun, I see him go down by th' sta'ahs, sah, on de up trip w'en de woman rung f'r me, sah!"
"Was he hurrying?"
"Yas, sah—he was trabbelin', all right!"
Kestner stepped from the elevator-car to the office-desk. A pale-eyed clerk, with a head as bare as a billiard-ball, was leisurely re-addressing a heterogeneous pile of mail-matter.
Beside this mail-matter Kestner placed a card on which he had scribbled his name and address.
"I think you had better call a policeman," he said to the pale-eyed clerk, still bent over his letters. "A man has just been murdered in Number Seventeen!"
The shining bald dome moved upward with incredible rapidity.
"A man's been what?" he vacuously demanded.
"If you want me later ring me up," cried back Kestner as he made for the door of the Alambo.
Outside that door his quick eye fell on Wilsnach himself. His colleague of the Service was holding by the arm a small and vigorously protesting messenger-boy.
"There's th' guy I want!" was that youth's triumphant cry as Kestner made a spring for them.
"What's wrong here?" barked out the Secret Agent.
"This gink's tryin' to butt into my business. He comes up on th' run an' grabs me after I hand over that message o' yours!"
"Where did you hand it?"
"W'y, to th' dame herself as she hops into a taxi an' beats it for Broadway without even waitin' to sign for it!"
Kestner wheeled about and stared eastward. There was no taxi in sight.
"Was she alone?" was his next quick query.
"Yep!"
"Not with a tall man of about fifty?"
"Oh, that ol' guy grabbed th' first taxi an' got away as though he was answerin' a three-alarm call. That was b'fore th' dame wit' th' bag come out o' the hotel!"
"We're too late!" gasped Kestner.
He suddenly turned about and caught Wilsnach by the coat sleeve.
"You got that man Carlesi?" he demanded. And his heart went down as he read the answer on Wilsnach's somewhat bewildered face, even before his lips spoke the words.
"I thought I had him cornered, but he gave me the slip!"
Kestner's hand dropped.
"O God, what a mess for one morning!" he breathed aloud.
Wilsnach stepped back a little and stared at his superior. It was not often that Kestner lapsed into emotionalism over trivialities.
"But this man Carlesi is only small potatoes," argued Wilsnach. "He's nothing but—"
"Never mind what he is," cut in Kestner, "we've got to get that man if it takes us round the world!"