The Hand of Peril/Part 5/Chapter 3
III
Kestner lay stretched out along his counter-top, carefully considering his predicament. Steadily, from the next room, came the consoling clank and pound of the bed press. Occasionally from the shooting-gallery in the adjoining building crept the thin and muffled bark of the target-rifles. Now and then, too, he could hear the faint drone of a steamer whistle somewhere out on the East River. But beyond this narrow cantata of noises no enlightening sounds came to him.
He waited a few minutes, to make sure he was not being watched. Then he slipped quietly from the counter-top, walked noiselessly to the door, and cautiously turned the knob. That door, as he already knew, was locked.
He wheeled slowly about, studying the narrow chamber in which he found himself a prisoner. High up in the brick wall at the rear was a two-foot window, guarded with bar-iron sunk In the masonry. A few feet beyond this opening he could see a white-washed plane of unbroken brick, but nothing else.
Between him and the printing-room stood a wooden partition of unpainted matched pine. Here and there along cracks in the boards he could make out the glimmer of light, presumably from an electric bulb swung above the busy hand press. But no crevice was broad enough to permit him a glimpse of that room which he so wished to inspect.
The front of his narrow prison was shut off from the outer office by a partition of pine no heavier than that which ran along the side. And Kestner, when he realised that it would require no great effort to force a way through a barrier so flimsy, felt less disturbed in spirit. The worthy in the Stetson hat, he concluded, had merely taken an ordinary precaution to keep a new and untried recruit under surveillance. He had not imprisoned an acknowledged enemy. He had merely impounded an unstable adventurer who could later be made to serve certain desired ends.
Kestner returned to his study of the little chamber. Except for the counter and the tarpaulin he found it as bare as a cell. The one thing that worried him now was the loss of his shoes. But a source of even greater perplexity was the fact that he could see nothing of the printing-room next to him. And to investigate that printing-room was his first business in life.
He explored the partition wall, foot by foot. Then he took out his pocket-knife, squatted down at the inner end of the counter, and found two boards where the tongue and groove of the matched pine did not come close together.
He cut away the wood along this narrow fissure, timing each knife stroke to synchronise with the clank of the press. Each sliver and shaving of pine was brushed carefully up and hidden beneath the counter-end. And a ten-inch shift of the counter, he saw when he had finished, could easily hide all signs of work.
But that work resulted in a quarter-inch crevice which commanded a reasonably clear view of the next room. And Kestner, leaning forward, could see the shock-headed dome of a middle-aged man at work above the hand press, picked out by the light from an unshaded electric bulb. On shelves beyond the press stood a litter of grey camp-blankets and waterproofs and wooden boxes that looked suspiciously like cases of ammunition. One corner of the room was piled high with larger boxes. A couple of these had been broken open, apparently for inspection. From the unsealed end of one protruded the stock of an army carbine.
Exceptional and significant as this merchandise appeared, it did not interest Kestner so much as did the man at work beside the press. He watched that man as he carefully re-inked his rollers and continued to feed in his sheets of cinnamon-brown bond paper, some eight or nine inches square. He watched the stooping-shouldered and swarthy-skinned worker as he held one of these squares up to the light, examined it with his squinting and red-rimmed eyes, and then proceeded to adjust a platen-shaft which seemed to be giving him trouble.
As the printer returned to his task of running his cinnamon-brown squares through the press Kestner awoke to a realisation of just what was taking place behind the closed door of that cellar work-room. Those sheets of tinted bond, the Secret Agent decided, could be used for just one purpose. He had surmised it even before he caught sight of the oddly prepared shade of ink and the figures and letters so freshly impressed on the sheets themselves.
In that humble little cellar-room was being created the currency of an impending Republic. From eight photo-engraved plates, in one block, the man at the press was busily printing forty-peso "shin-plasters." And those forty-peso notes, Kestner suddenly remembered, were an integral part of the cause to which he himself had so recently sworn allegiance.
He was reminded of the imminence of this cause by the sudden thump of a closed door, the sound of steps, and then the murmur of hurried voices from the room to the front. The Secret Agent crept back to the transverse partition that shut off his narrow cell and pressed an ear flat against the pine boards. In that position he was able to make out the clear-cut tones of the man who had first spoken to him in the shooting-gallery above.
"But I've got business of my own to wind up here," he was complaining. "I've got to gather up another couple o' dozen men. Then I've got to get sixty cases o' wind-mill equipment aboard, and a lighter loaded with those phony gasoline engines o' mine."
"But I tell you, Burke, I've got to get away from here!"
At the first sound of that voice, so guardedly lowered in tone, Kestner knew it was Lambert speaking.
"And I've got to get away from here too." It was Burke's voice speaking this time. "And I've got a few palms to grease before I can get clearance."
"But when we made our deal you agreed to get me away, and get me away without any waiting," retorted the impatient voice of Lambert. Kestner, behind his thin screen of matched pine, remembered that he was within twenty feet of the man who had murdered Morello.
"Then the thing for you to do," said the heavier voice of the man called Burke, "is to get down to Tompkinsville and slip aboard the Laminian. You'll be all right there for a couple o' days. Then I'll push things through and get off by Friday noon."
"But I've got that paper to gather up. And it amounts to over three millions. We'll need that, no matter which side of the Equator we're on!"
There was a change, Kestner realised, in the voice of Lambert. It seemed the voice of a nervous and harried man uncertain of the future. It had lost its oldtime placid sense of power, its full-throated resonance. It seemed now to hold something not unlike a touch of pleading, an undertone of plaintiveness.
"Well, why not do your gatherin' to-day?" demanded Burke.
"But I can't do it. That stuff is consigned to a man named Morello."
"Then what's the matter with an order from Morello?"
"I can't get one."
"Why?"
There was a moment of silence.
"Morello's where he can't be reached."
"Then why not work the wharf people?"
"I took the risk and went to the Brooklyn pier. They telephoned somewhere to verify my statement. Then they told me the shipment would have to be held. And I can't keep dodging around this town in daylight."
"I imagined that," was the other's laconic retort.
"If we get that stuff, I've got to get it myself."
"Well, that wouldn't be so much of a stunt. There's no time-lock on it."
"It's held and guarded in a bonded warehouse."
"S'posin' it is. I've got a couple o' river junkies who can get into anything along the waterfront."
"But I must handle those cans myself. We must have the right ones. We don't want seven hundred gallons of olive oil mixed up with that shipment of paper."
"Which means you'll have to get into that warehouse."
"Then tell me how. For God's sake, tell me how!"
"How? Why, I'll get you two or three men who can slip in under with a muffled kicker and cut out one of those six-inch floor-planks."
"But there'll be a watchman there at the street end of the pier—perhaps two of them."
Kestner could hear the easy laugh of the man called Burke.
"Whitey McKensic'll fix that for you. He's got a trick o' cuttin' out a pier-plank and asphalt over-lay with a brace and bit, goin' through eight inches of oak without makin' more noise than eatin' through a cheese—just gets up between a couple o' stringers and runs a row o' holes across a plank. Then he runs another row close together, about three feet from the first row. Then he chisels that block free, lets it drop out, and crawls up through the hole. He drops what he wants into his boat, slips down with the tide, and unloads at a Bath Beach fence."
"But all that takes time," complained the restless-souled Lambert.
"I've seen Whitey take a half-inch ship auger, bore up through a pier floor, tap an eighty-gallon brandy-cask, and drain it off and get away in half an hour's time."
"Then the sooner I get through the floor the better. How about to-night at eleven?"
There was a moment or two of silence.
"Tide's against us."
"Then twelve?"
"Too early. About four in the mornin' would be the best."
Then came still another silence.
"Hold on a minute! Why couldn't you wait until about half-past nine to-night, go to their watchman with an order from the office, and get inside and stay there until Whitey gives a signal?"
"Where would I get the order?" Lambert, it was plain, was not his usual inventive and expeditious self. The other man even laughed a little.
"Ain't you a scratcher? Couldn't you work a little Jim the Penman stunt on that wharf bunch?"
"If you can get me a letter-head."
"Sure I can."
"That would give me time to sort out the paper and get it baled together ready for handling."
"There's just one thing," objected the man called Burke.
"What's that?" demanded Lambert.
His question remained unanswered, for at that moment a door opened and a youthful and nasal-noted voice, apparently that of Jigger, was heard to call out from the head of the stair-way: "Yes, ma'am, he's here all right."