The Surakarta/Chapter 12
XII
THE HOUSE OF THE MAN WHO SHOT AT NOTHING
Max Schimmel descended quickly to the street and took a surface car back toward the center of the city. Half way back to the business district he left the car and turned up a side street.
The houses on both sides of this street were all alike—blank-windowed and cheerless, with soiled lace curtains. They all had narrow fronts, high front steps over high basements, which made the real height of the house amount to four stories, and all had the sign "Rooms to Rent" in the windows.
Max, having already visited this locality in the afternoon, had no need to inspect these houses one by one or to compare their numbers with the address given him by McAdams. He turned into one of them with an air of proprietorship.
This house was even more dismal than the rest, the sign in its window older, more faded, less hospitable in its invitation. On one side, only the difference in the color of its brick divided it from its neighbor; on the other a cement walk less than three feet wide led, tunnel-like, between the two brick walls back to the rear. Max had engaged and paid for a room there in the afternoon, arranging to return that evening with his luggage. He stopped now in the cheerless and stuffy-smelling parlor to announce to the landlady that his luggage was still delayed; and as he climbed the three flights of stairs, she followed.
The room where lived the man who, the evening before the emerald was stolen, had shot at nothing at all was upon the top floor. This room, as Max had ascertained in the afternoon, the stranger still occupied; but farther back was an empty room that Max, after some parleying as to the price, had engaged.
"Eferything iss very goot," Max replied to the landlady's question as to whether he needed anything more, "if only I am not disturbed by my neighbor in the second room."
"That can be only for a few days," the landlady hastened to assure him. "He has paid for a week and at the end of that week he shall go; for already others on this floor are complaining. It is my own fault for taking in a brown man; but I thought: He is only a lodger, not a boarder—so nobody will object."
"It iss because he iss brown that they object?" Max inquired; for he had been not at all surprised, on his visit in the afternoon, to learn of McAdams' confusion of "Japanese" with "Javanese" which he felt might well have occurred before the report had reached McAdams.
"They—yes. For me I object because first he puts on the door an extra lock, so that my key will not open it; and then he gets meals for himself in his room, I suspect—though that is against the rules—bringing in food secretly, I think, in his valise. All day he stays in the room, and because of that the room cannot be cleaned."
"But going out, you said this afternoon, at night?"
"Each night he goes out, as I said, locking his door; and he returns at different times—sometimes earlier, sometimes later."
"Pretty soon, if I haf rightly understood the time, he ought to be going." Max looked at his watch.
At this instant they heard the lodger's door closed quietly down the hall. Max at once ran out into the hall, but all he was in time to see was the back of a small and agile man who was swiftly descending the stairs. He therefore rid of the landlady as soon as possible. When she had gone he took off his shoes, went quietly down the hall to the second door from his own and carefully examined it. He was convinced by a very brief examination of it that the new lock which had been put upon it was one that could not be opened without the key. He returned then to the room he himself occupied and, carefully locking himself in, opened the window.
This window, though it was on the top floor of the house, was still some ten feet below the top of the flat brick wall that formed the parapet of the roof, and Max saw that the roof could not be reached from it. He therefore looked across to the wall of the next house, which, being exactly like its neighbor, had here at the rear a wall of rough brick, straight and parallel with that of the house he was in. The second wall was barely three feet from him—not too far for even a small man, who had been accustomed to making his way up chimney crevasses in mountain-climbing, to reach with his feet and, bracing his back against the wall on the nearer side, carry himself along between the two walls with feet and hands.
Max now took off his coat. With his feet against one wall and his back braced against the other, he began to work himself along between the two with feet and hands and elbows. He discovered with satisfaction, by peeping through the window, that the occupant of the room next his own was out; and crossing this window, he soon came to the second one. An instant later his knife was between the sashes and had slipped back the simple lock, and Max slid softly into the room.
He saw at once, though dimly, that it was an ordinary boarding-house room, very like his own, with no sign of unusual occupancy. A small gas griddle connected with the fixture by a tube seemed to bear out the landlady's statement that the lodger prepared his own food. The only other unusual article in the room was a large trunk or box of Oriental appearance standing against the farther wall. Presently Max, still standing by the window, cleared his nostrils with a deep breath. Slowly, very slowly indeed, he now made out surely an odor—the softly pungent, entirely distinctive smell of sandalwood. It was concealed—that is, the sandalwood was covered—but it was there. Max crossed the room and slipped his hand about the bulky box-trunk from which this odor came.
He felt for the fastenings—straps, the buckles of which yielded easily. Below these was a lock; but it was not a lock like that on the door, which defied picking, and Max had come prepared for contingencies like this. Presently he softly lifted the lid of the trunk. On top it contained only clothing. Slipping his hand under this clothing, he felt an object—large and of cubical shape. Something softly clicked under his hand—and now again, as he moved his hand, something clicked. He hastily lifted the clothing without disarranging it and peered into the trunk. Then he gently reclosed the lid and fastened it.
Finally he stood up and looked carefully once more all around the room, and slowly shook his head with an air of bewilderment. Very plainly what Max had found in this room was not what he had expected. For he began now a systematic search, looking into all the corners, under and on top of everything, and in the closet—then again he went carefully over it all. At last he fixed the window-latch so that he could refasten it from the outside with his knife; and edging himself out, he reclosed and fastened the window and regained his own room.
The closing of the street door three floors below startled him. He listened inside his door. No other noises reached him from below, but he detected faint sounds upon the same floor with him. Coming out quickly from his room, he collided with the nervous little Javanese, speeding through the hall, and so jostled him that he nearly dropped the suitcase he was carrying and did let slip from under his coat the bottle of milk he was taking to his room. But in this corroboration of the identity and habits of his neighbor Max found no consolation. It was not remarkable that the Javanese had stayed. To leave—even with the excuse that he was afraid of another robber—would have been calling too much attention to himself perhaps. Yet what was the sandalwood doing in his room?
Max had approached the perplexing matter of the disappearance of the Surakarta exactly as he would have approached some phenomenon of nature which science had not yet classified and placed. He had begun by imagining a method by which the theft of the emerald might have been accomplished—exactly as, confronted by some biological problem, he would have constructed a theory to aid him in discovering and appreciating the facts. But he understood that this method can only be used when one stands ready to abandon his theory as soon as even a single fact is shown to be at variance with it.
"It was the dublicate box!" he exclaimed in his perplexity, when he had got back into his room and carefully reclosed the door. "It iss there! But by all reasoning it iss not there; for it to be there—that iss imbossible. But for it not to be there—that also is imbossible, since with my own hands I haf touched it."
He threw himself down upon the edge of the bed and clutched his head in both hands as though it was in danger of bursting. But after thinking it over, he finally went downstairs to the telephone booth upon the first floor of the boarding house and called Hereford's apartment.
Hereford, he found, was out; so Max merely left a message.
"Chust tell Mr. Hereford when he comes in that Max called him up to say he had located"—he whispered this very low—"the dublicate box. That iss all. Chust say Max Schimmel hass located the dublicate box."
Whereupon he went back to his room. But about midnight he suddenly jumped up and started for the Hotel Tonty on the chance of finding McAdams.