The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 11
XI
THREE hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake was breakfasting at the Café Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table with him sat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Passos.
Two hours after this breakfast Passos might have been seen on the Avenida Central, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds. Still later in the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at the Paineiras, half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he was interrogating a certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolis boat.
By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information that Binhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in the outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat bound for Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone- white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like propulsion. And an existence so centered on one great issue found scant time to worry over the trivialities of the moment.
After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner for Colon. And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind. Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson and riding-breeches and unstained leather leggings. Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees.
Sometimes he talked with graders and carmen and track-layers in Chinese saloons along Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with a bridge-builder or a lottery capper in the barroom of the Hotel Central, where he would sit without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to his game of "draw" or stolidly "rolling the bones" as he talked—but always with his ears open for one particular thing, and that thing had to do with the movements or the whereabouts of Connie Binhart.
One night, as he sat placidly playing his game of "cut-throat" in his shirt-sleeves, he looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as stolid as his own. This figure, he perceived, was discreetly studying him as he sat under the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In a quarter of an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought a fresh supply of "green" Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to where the russet-faced stranger stood watching the street crowds.
"Pip, what 're you doing down in these parts?" he casually inquired. He had recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come in contact five long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading an East River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridges designed for Castro's opponents in Venezuela.
"Oh, I 'm freightin' bridge equipment down the West Coast," he solemnly announced. "And transshippin' a few cases o' phonograph-records as a side-line!"
"Have a smoke?" asked Blake.
"Sure," responded the russet-faced bucaneer. And as they stood smoking together Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the usual feelers, plying the familiar questions and meeting with the too-familiar lack of response. Like all the rest of them, he soon saw, Pip Tankred knew nothing of Binhart or his whereabouts. And with that discovery his interest in Pip Tankred ceased.
So the next day Blake moved inland, working his interrogative way along the Big Ditch to Panama. He even slipped back over the line to San Cristobel and Ancon, found nothing of moment awaiting him there, and drifted back into Panamanian territory. It was not until the end of the week that the first glimmer of hope came to him.
It came in the form of an incredibly thin gringo in an incredibly soiled suit of duck. Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda of the Hotel Angelini, sipping his "swizzle" and studiously watching the Saturday evening crowds that passed back and forth through Panama's bustling railway station. He had watched the long line of rickety cabs backed up against the curb, the two honking auto-busses, the shifting army of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round which the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraising the groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling mass of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and the mezcal of Guatemala and the anisado of Ecuador had combined with the pulque of Mexico to set their unmistakable seal.
But three minutes later the two men were seated together above their "swizzles" and Blake was exploring Dusty's faded memories as busily as a leather-dip might explore an inebriate's pockets.
"Who 're you looking for, Jim?" suddenly and peevishly demanded the man in the soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other's indirections.
Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.
"I 'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.
"Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once been afraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changed things, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time had changed Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy of movement and strangely slow of thought.
"Well, I 'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.
"Then why did n't you say it an hour ago?" contested McGlade, with his alcoholic peevish obstinacy.
"Well, let 's have it now," placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited, with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty's curt laugh of contempt.
"I can tell you all right, all right—but it won't do you much good!"
"Why not?" And still Blake was bland and patient.
"Because," retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that was both unclean and unsteady, "you can't get at him!"
"You tell me where he is," said Blake, striking a match. "I 'll attend to the rest of it!"
McGlade slowly and deliberately drank the last of his swizzle. Then he put down his empty glass and stared pensively and pregnantly into it.
"What's there in it for me?" he asked.
Blake, studying him across the small table, weighed both the man and the situation.
"Two hundred dollars in American greenbacks," he announced as he drew out his wallet. He could see McGlade moisten his flaccid lips. He could see the faded eyes fasten on the bills as they were counted out. He knew where the money would go, how little good it would do. But that, he knew, was not his funeral. All he wanted was Binhart.
"Binhart 's in Guayaquil," McGlade suddenly announced.
"How d' you know that?" promptly demanded Blake.
"I know the man who sneaked him out from Balboa. He got sixty dollars for it. I can take you to him. Binhart 'd picked up a medicine-chest and a bag of instruments from a broken-down doctor at Colon. He went aboard a Pacific liner as a doctor himself.
"What liner?"
"He went aboard the Trunella. He thought he 'd get down to Callao. But they tied the Trunella up at Guayaquil."
"And you say he 's there now?"
"Yes!"
"And aboard the Trunella?"
"Sure! He 's got to be aboard the Trunella!"
"Then why d" you say I can't get at him?"
"Because Guayaquil and the Trunella and the whole coast down there is tied up in quarantine. That whole harbor 's rotten with yellow-jack. It 's tied up as tight as a drum. You could n't get a boat on all the Pacific to touch that port these days!"
"But there 's got to be something going there!" contended Blake.
"They daren't do it! They couldn't get clearance—they couldn't even get pratique! Once they got in there they 'd be held and given the blood-test and picketed with a gunboat for a month! And what 's more, they 've got that Alfaro revolution on down there! They 've got boat-patrols up and down the coast, keeping a lookout for gunrunners!"
Blake, at this last word, raised his ponderous head.
"The boat-patrols would n't phase me," he announced. His thoughts, in fact, were already far ahead, marshaling themselves about other things.
"You 've a weakness for yellow fever?" inquired the ironic McGlade.
"I guess it 'd take more than a few fever germs to throw me off that trail," was the detective's abstracted retort. He was recalling certain things that the russet-faced Pip Tankred had told him. And before everything else he felt that it would be well to get in touch with that distributor of bridge equipment and phonograph records.
"You don't mean you're going to try to get into Guayaquil?" demanded McGlade.
"If Connie Binhart 's down there I 've got to go and get him," was Never-Fail Blake's answer.
•••••
The following morning Blake, having made sure of his ground, began one of his old-time "investigations" of that unsuspecting worthy known as Pip Tankred.
This investigation involved a hurried journey back to Colon, the expenditure of much money in cable tolls, the examination of records that were both official and unofficial, the asking of many questions and the turning up of dimly remembered things on which the dust of time had long since settled.
It was followed by a return to Panama, a secret trip several miles up the coast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, a dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty red hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pitted and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the studious-eyed detective.
The following evening he encountered Tankred himself, as though by accident, on the veranda of the Hotel Angelini. The latter, at Blake's invitation, sat down for a cocktail and a quiet smoke.
They sat in silence for some time, watching the rain that deluged the city, the warm vitalizing rain that unedged even the fieriest of Signor Angelinas stimulants.
"Pip," Blake very quietly announced, "you 're going to sail for Guayaquil to-morrow!"
"Am I?" queried the unmoved Pip.
"You 're going to start for Guayaquil to-morrow," repeated Blake, "and you 're going to take me along with you!"
"My friend," retorted Pip, emitting a curling geyser of smoke as long and thin as a pool-que, "you 're sure laborin' under the misapprehension this steamer o' mine is a Pacific mailer! But she ain't, Blake!"
"I admit that," quietly acknowledged the other man. "I saw her yesterday!"
"And she don't carry no passengers—she ain't allowed to," announced her master.
"But she 's going to carry me," asserted Blake, lighting a fresh cigar.
"What as?" demanded Tankred. And he fixed Blake with a belligerent eye as he put the question.
"As an old friend of yours!"
"And then what?" still challenged the other.
"As a man who knows your record, in the next place. And on the next count, as the man who 's wise to those phony bills of lading of yours, and those doped-up clearance papers, and those cases of carbines you 've got down your hold labeled bridge equipment, and that nitro and giant-caps, and that hundred thousand rounds of smokeless you 're running down there as phonograph records!"
Tankred continued to smoke.
"You ever stop to wonder," he finally inquired, "if it ain't kind o' flirtin' with danger knowin' so much about me and my freightin' business?"
"No, you 're doing the coquetting in this case, I guess!"
"Then I ain't standin' for no rivals—not on this coast!"
The two men, so dissimilar in aspect and yet so alike in their accidental attitudes of an uncouth belligerency, sat staring at each other.
"You 're going to take me to Guayaquil," repeated Blake.
"That 's where you 're dead wrong," was the calmly insolent rejoinder. "I ain't even goin' to Guayaquil."
"I say you are."
Tankred's smile translated his earlier deliberateness into open contempt.
"You seem to forget that this here town you 're beefin' about lies a good thirty-five miles up the Guayas River. And if I 'm gunrunnin' for Alfaro, as you say, I naturally ain't navigatin' streams where they 'd be able to pick me off the bridge-deck with a fishin'-pole!"
"But you 're going to get as close to Guayaquil as you can, and you know it."
"Do I?" said the man with the up-tilted cigar.
"Look here, Pip," said Blake, leaning closer over the table towards him. "I don't give a tinker's dam about Alfaro and his two-cent revolution. I 'm not sitting up worrying over him or his junta or how he gets his ammunition. But I want to get into Guayaquil, and this is the only way I can do it!"
For the first time Tankred turned and studied him.
"What d' you want to get into Guayaquil for?" he finally demanded. Blake knew that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.
"There 's a man I want down there, and I 'm going down to get him!"
"Who is he?"
"That 's my business," retorted Blake.
"And gettin' into Guayaquil 's your business!" Tankred snorted back.
"All I 'm going to say is he 's a man from up North—and he 's not in your line of business, and never was and never will be!"
"How do I know that?"
"You 'll have my word for it!"
Tankred swung round on him.
"D' you realize you 'll have to sneak ashore in a lancha and pass a double line o' patrol? And then crawl into a town that 's reekin' with yellow-jack, a town you 're not likely to crawl out of again inside o' three months?"
"I know all that!" acknowledged Blake.
For the second time Tankred turned and studied the other man.
"And you 're still goin' after your gen'leman friend from up North?" he inquired.
"Pip, I 've got to get that man!"
"You've got 'o?"
"I 've got to, and I 'm going to!"
Tankred threw his cigar-end away and laughed leisurely and quietly.
"Then what 're we sittin' here arguin' about, anyway? If it 's settled, it 's settled, ain't it?"
"Yes, I think it 's settled!"
Again Tankred laughed.
"But take it from me, my friend, you 'll sure see some rough goin' this next few days!"