The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 8
VIII
BLAKE stood regarding the door. Then he lifted his revolver from his breast pocket and dropped it into his side pocket, with his hand on the butt. Then with his left hand he quietly opened the door, pushed it back, and as quietly stepped into the room.
On the floor, in the center of a square of orange-colored matting, he saw a white woman sitting. She was drinking tea out of an egg-shell of a cup, and after putting down the cup she would carefully massage her lips with the point of her little finger. This movement puzzled the newcomer until he suddenly realized that it was merely to redistribute the rouge on them.
She was dressed in a silk petticoat of almost lemon yellow and an azure-colored silk bodice that left her arms and shoulders bare to the light that played on them from three small oil lamps above her. Her feet and ankles were also bare, except for the matting sandals into which her toes were thrust. On one thin arm glimmered an extraordinarily heavy bracelet of gold. Her skin, which was very white, was further albificated by a coat of rice powder. She was startlingly slight. Blake, as he watched her, could see the oval shadows under her collar bones and the almost girlish meagerness of breast half-covered by the azure silk bodice.
She looked up slowly as Blake stepped into the room. Her eyes widened, and she continued to look, with parted lips, as she contemplated the intruder's heavy figure. There was no touch of fear on her face. It was more curiosity, the wilful, wide-eyed curiosity of the child. She even laughed a little as she stared at the intruder. Her rouged lips were tinted a carmine so bright that they looked like a wound across her white face. That gash of color became almost clown-like as it crescented upward with its wayward mirth. Her eyebrows were heavily penciled and the lids of the eyes elongated by a widening point of blue paint. Her bare heel, which she caressed from time to time with fingers whereon the nails were stained pink with henna, was small and clean cut, as clean cut, Blake noticed, as the heel of a razor, while the white calf above it was as thin and flat as a boy's.
"Hello, New York," she said with her foolish and inconsequential little laugh. Her voice took on an oddly exotic intonation, as she spoke. Her teeth were small and white; they reminded Blake of rice, while she repeated the "New York," bubblingly, as though she were a child with a newly learned word.
"Hello!" responded the detective, wondering how or where to begin. She made him think of a painted marionette, so maintained were her poses, so unreal was her make up.
"You 're the party who 's on the man hunt," she announced.
"Am I?" equivocated Blake. She had risen to her feet by this time, with monkey-like agility, and showed herself to be much taller than he had imagined. He noticed a knife scar on her forearm.
"You 're after this man called Binhart," she declared.
"Oh, no, I 'm not," was Blake's sagacious response. "I don't want Binhart!"
"Then what do you want?"
"I want the money he 's got."
The little painted face grew serious; then it became veiled.
"How much money has he?"
"That 's what I want to find out!"
She squatted ruminatively down on the edge of her divan. It was low and wide and covered with orange-colored silk.
"Then you'll have to find Binhart!" was her next announcement.
"Maybe!" acknowledged Blake.
"I can show you where he is!"
"All right," was the unperturbed response. The blue-painted eyes were studying him.
"It will be worth four thousand pounds, in English gold," she announced.
Blake took a step or two nearer her.
"Is that the message Ottenheim told you to give me?" he demanded. His face was red with anger.
"Then three thousand pounds," she calmly suggested, wriggling her toes into a fallen sandal.
Blake did not deign to speak. His inarticulate grunt was one of disgust.
"Then a thousand, in gold," she coyly intimated. She twisted about to pull the strap of her bodice up over her white shoulder-blades. "Or I will kill him for you for two thousand pounds in gold!"
Her eyes were as tranquil as a child's. Blake remembered that he was in a world not his own.
"Why should I want him killed?" he inquired. He looked about for some place to sit. There was not a chair in the room.
"Because he intends to kill you," answered the woman, squatting on the orange-covered divan.
"I wish he 'd come and try," Blake devoutly retorted.
"He will not come," she told him. "It will be done from the dark. I could have done it. But Ottenheim said no."
"And Ottenheim said you were to work with me in this," declared Blake, putting two and two together.
The woman shrugged a white shoulder.
"Have you any money?" she asked. She put the question with the artlessness of a child.
"Mighty little," retorted Blake, still studying the woman from where he stood. He was wondering if Ottenheim had the same hold on her that the authorities had on Ottenheim, the ex-forger who enjoyed his parole only on condition that he remain a stool-pigeon of the high seas. He pondered what force he could bring to bear on her, what power could squeeze from those carmine and childish lips the information he must have.
He knew that he could break that slim body of hers across his knee. But he also knew that he had no way of crushing out of it the truth he sought, the truth he must in some way obtain. The woman still squatted on the divan, peering down at the knife scar on her arm from time to time, studying it, as though it were an inscription.
Blake was still watching the woman when the door behind him was slowly opened; a head was thrust in, and as quietly withdrawn again. Blake dropped his right hand to his coat pocket and moved further along the wall, facing the woman. There was nothing of which he stood afraid: he merely wished to be on the safe side.
"Well, what word 'll I take back to Ottenheim?" he demanded.
The woman grew serious. Then she showed her rice-like row of teeth as she laughed.
"That means there 's nothing in it for me," she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted child.
"No more than there is for me," Blake acknowledged. She turned and caught up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited cream and gold. She was thrusting one arm into it when a figure drifted into the room from the matting-hung doorway on Blake's left. As she saw this figure she suddenly flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray in the middle of the floor.
Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman. This newcomer, he also saw, ignored him as though he were a door post, confronting the woman and assailing her with a quick volley of words, of incomprehensible words in the native tongue. She answered with the same clutter and clack of unknown syllables, growing more and more excited as the dialogue continued. Her thin face darkened and changed, her white arms gyrated, the fires of anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She seemed expostulating, arguing, denouncing, and each wordy sally was met by an equally wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged and rebuked with her passionately pointed finger; she threatened with angry eyes; she stormed after the newcomer as he passed like a shadow out of the room; she met him with a renewed storm when he returned a moment later.
The Chinaman now stood watching her, impassive and immobile, as though he had taken his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake studied him with calm and patient eyes. That huge-limbed detective in his day had "pounded" too many Christy Street Chinks to be in any way intimidated by a queue and a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He was merely puzzled.
Then the woman turned to the mandarin coat, and caught it up, shook it out, and for one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding it. Then she suddenly turned about on the Chinaman.
Blake, as he stood watching that renewed angry onslaught, paid little attention to the actual words that she was calling out. But as he stood there he began to realize that she was not speaking in Chinese, but in English.
"Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear me?" she cried out, over and over again. Yet the words seemed foolish, for all the time as she uttered them, she was facing the placid-eyed Chinaman and gesticulating in his face.
"Don't you see," Blake at last heard her crying, "he doesn't know what I'm saying! He doesn't understand a word of English!" And then, and then only, it dawned on Blake that every word the woman was uttering was intended for his own ears. She was warning him, and all the while pretending that her words were the impetuous words of anger.
"Watch this man!" he heard her cry. "Don't let him know you 're listening. But remember what I say, remember it. And God help you if you haven't got a gun."
Blake could see her, as in a dream, assailing the Chinaman with her gestures, advancing on him, threatening him, expostulating with him, but all in pantomime. There was something absurd about it, as absurd as a moving-picture film which carries the wrong text.
"He 'll pretend to take you to the man you want," the woman was panting. "That 's what he will say. But it 's a lie. He 'll take you out to a sampan, to put you aboard Binhart's boat. But the three of them will cut your throat, cut your throat, and then drop you overboard. He 's to get so much in gold. Get out of here with him. Let him think you 're going. But drop away, somewhere, before you get to the beach. And watch them all the way."
Blake stared at the immobile Chinaman, as though to make sure that the other man had not understood. He was still staring at that impassive yellow face, he was still absorbing the shock of his news, when the outer door opened and a second Chinaman stepped into the room. The newcomer cluttered a quick sentence or two to his countryman, and was still talking when a third figure sidled in.
Those spoken words, whatever they were, seemed to have little effect on any one in the room except the woman. She suddenly sprang about and exploded into an angry shower of denials.
"It 's a lie!" she cried in English, storming about the impassive trio. "You never heard me peach! You never heard me say a word! It's a lie!"
Blake strode to the middle of the room, towering above the other figures, dwarfing them by his great bulk, as assured of his mastery as he would have been in a Chatham Square gang fight.
"What 's the row here?" he thundered, knowing from the past that power promptly won its own respect. "What 're you talking about, you two?" He turned from one intruder to another. "And you? And you? What do you want, anyway?"
The three contending figures, however, ignored him as though he were a tobacconist's dummy. They went on with their exotic cackle, as though he was no longer in their midst. They did not so much as turn an eye in his direction. And still Blake felt reasonably sure of his position.
It was not until the woman squeaked, like a frightened mouse, and ran whimpering into the corner of the room, that he realized what was happening. He was not familiar with the wrist movement by which the smallest bodied of the three men was producing a knife from his sleeve. The woman, however, had understood from the first.
"White man, look out!" she half sobbed from her corner. "Oh, white man!" she repeated in a shriller note as the Chinaman, bending low, scuttled across the room to the corner where she cowered.
Blake saw the knife by this time. It was thin and long, for all the world like an icicle, a shaft of cutting steel ground incredibly thin, so thin, in fact, that at first sight it looked more like a point for stabbing than a blade for cutting.
The mere glitter of that knife electrified the staring white man into sudden action. He swung about and tried to catch at the arm that held the steel icicle. He was too late for that, but his fingers closed on the braided queue. By means of this queue he brought the Chinaman up short, swinging him sharply about so that he collided flat faced with the room wall.
Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a comprehension of what surrounded him. He wheeled about, stooped and caught up the papier-mâché tea-tray from the floor and once more stood with his back to the wall. He stood there, on guard, for a second figure with a second steel icicle was sidling up to him. He swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray down on the hand that held this knife, crippling the fingers and sending the steel spinning across the room. Then with his free hand he tugged the revolver from his coat pocket, holding it by the barrel and bringing the metal butt down on the queue-wound head of the third man, who had no knife, but was struggling with the woman for the metal icicle she had caught up from the floor.
Then the five seemed to close in together, and the fight became general. It became a mêlée. With his swinging right arm Blake battered and pounded with his revolver butt. With his left hand he made cutting strokes with the heavy papier-mâché tea-tray, keeping their steel, by those fierce sweeps, away from his body. One Chinaman he sent sprawling, leaving him huddled and motionless against the orange-covered divan. The second, stunned by a blow of the tea-tray across the eyes, could offer no resistance when Blake's smashing right dealt its blow, the metal gun butt falling like a trip hammer on the shaved and polished skull.
As the white man swung about he saw the third Chinaman with his hand on the woman's throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing her there as a butcher might place a fowl on his block ready for the blow of his carver. Blake stared at the movement, panting for breath, overcome by that momentary indifference wherein a winded athlete permits without protest an adversary to gain his momentary advantage. Then will triumphed over the weakness of the body. But before Blake could get to the woman's side he saw the Chinaman's loose-sleeved right hand slowly and deliberately ascend. As it reached the meridian of its circular upsweep he could see the woman rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick effort, yet some effort which Blake could not understand.
At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the woman's body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood that burst over the woman's body. She had made use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man's abdominal cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone. He had been ripped up like a herring.
Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.
His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen Chinaman's sleeves.
"We 've got to get out of here!" she whimpered, as she caught up the mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the mandarin coat.
"But where 's Binhart?" he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.
"Never mind Binhart," she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper toe, "or we 'll get what he got!"
"I want that man Binhart!" persisted the detective.
"Not here! Not here!' she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak closer about her body.
She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, "Quick! Come quick!" Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.
"Oh, white man!" she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping their way along a narrow passage. They slipped through a second door, closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the darkness.
How many turns they took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they stood and listened.
Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some sign from her to go on again. He thought she was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his side. He felt it move upward, exploringly. At the same time that he heard her little groan of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.
He could not tell what the darkness held, but his movement was almost instinctive. He swung out with his great arm, countered on the crouching form in front of him, caught at a writhing shoulder, and tightening his grip, sent the body catapulting down the stairway at his side. He could hear a revolver go off as the body went tumbling and rolling down—Blake knew that it was a gun not his own.
"Come on, white man!" the girl in front of him was crying, as she tugged at his coat. And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn to the right, making a second descent, and then another to the left. They came to still another door, which they locked behind them. Then they scrambled up a ladder, and he could hear her quick hands padding about in the dark. A moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led to the open air, for the stars were above them.
He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.
"Don't stop!" she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of the uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to catch him and hold him for a moment.
"On the next roof you must take off your shoes," she warned him. "You can rest then. But hurry—hurry!"
He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting each shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time she was scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat, dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping tiles. Where she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She reminded him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases. He was glad when she came to a stop.
The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They could see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its searchlight played back and forth in the darkness.
She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted there, cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.
"I 'm dished!" she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through the darkness. "I 'm dished for this coast!"
He sat down beside her, staring at the searchlight. There seemed something reassuring, something authoritative and comforting, in the thought of it watching there in the darkness.
The girl touched him on the knee and then shifted her position on the coping tiles, without rising to her feet.
"Come here!" she commanded. And when he was close beside her she pointed with her thin white arm. "That 's Saint Poalo there—you can just make it out, up high, see. And those lights are the Boundary Gate. And this sweep of lights below here is the Praya. Now look where I 'm pointing. That 's the Luiz Camoes lodging-house. You see the second window with the light in it?"
"Yes, I see it."
"Well, Binhart 's inside that window."
"You know it?"
"I know it."
"So he's there?" said Blake, staring at the vague square of light.
"Yes, he 's there, all right. He 's posing as a buyer for a tea house, and calls himself Bradley. Lee Fu told me; and Lee Fu is always right."
She stood up and pulled the mandarin coat closer about her thin body. The coolness of the night air had already chilled her. Then she squinted carefully about in the darkness.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I 'm going to get Binhart," was Blake's answer.
He could hear her little childlike murmur of laughter.
"You 're brave, white man," she said, with a hand on his arm. She was silent for a moment, before she added: "And I think you 'll get him."
"Of course I 'll get him," retorted Blake, buttoning his coat. The fires had been relighted on the cold hearth of his resolution. It came to him only as an accidental afterthought that he had met an unknown woman and had passed through strange adventures with her and was now about to pass out of her life again, forever.
"What 'll you do?" he asked.
Again he heard the careless little laugh. "Oh, I 'll slip down through the Quarter and cop some clothes somewhere. Then I 'll have a sampan take me out to the German boat. It 'll start for Canton at daylight."
"And then?" asked Blake, watching the window of the Luiz Camoes lodging-house below him.
"Then I 'll work my way up to Port Arthur, I suppose. There 's a navy man there who 'll help me!"
"Have n't you any money?" Blake put the question a little uneasily.
Again he felt the careless coo of laughter.
"Feel!" she said. She caught his huge hand between hers and pressed it against her waist line. She rubbed his fingers along what he accepted as a tightly packed coin-belt. He was relieved to think that he would not have to offer her money. Then he peered over the coping tiles to make sure of his means of descent.
"You had better go first," she said, as she leaned out and looked down at his side. "Crawl down this next roof to the end there. At the corner, see, is the end of the ladder."
He stooped and slipped his feet into his shoes. Then he let himself cautiously down to the adjoining roof, steeper even than the one on which they had stood. She bent low over the tiles, so that her face was very close to his as he found his footing and stood there.
"Good-by, white man," she whispered.
"Good-by!" he whispered back, as he worked his way cautiously and ponderously along that perilous slope.
She leaned there, watching him as he gained the ladder-end. He did not look back as he lowered himself, rung by rung. All thought of her, in fact, had passed from his preoccupied mind. He was once more intent on his own grim ends. He was debating with himself just how he was to get in through that lodging-house window and what his final move would be for the round up of his enemy. He had made use of too many "molls" in his time to waste useless thought on what they might say or do or desire. When he had got Binhart, he remembered, he would have to look about for something to eat, for he was as hungry as a wolf.. And he did not even hear the girl's second soft whisper of "Good-by."