V
Kestner, in his work, had always opposed the intrusion of the personal equation. When he had erred, as all men must, it had mostly been through the emotions. Yet here he had made the mistake, as Wilsnach had anticipated, of confounding a case by giving rein to a personal impulse.
There are times, however, when the ultimate truths of instinct and feeling are saner than facts. And Kestner, as he looked at the violet-blue eyes facing him, saw nothing to deplore and little to regret. He only wished he was well out of that dowdy black silk monstrosity which encompassed him with the gloom of a shroud.
"So I am being watched?" he said, striving to make his tone a casual one. "And who or what happens to be watching me?"
"To demonstrate that would only mean to bring danger still closer to you," she replied, puzzled by his sustained air of fortitude.
"It may not be so important as you imagine," he suggested. "The important fact is that you and I are here together, face to face, and able to talk this thing out."
"What thing?" she parried.
"Please don't compel me to preach," said Kestner, wondering at the spirit of humility with which the attainment of his own ends was crowning him.
"To preach about what?" she still inquired. He realised that she still shrank back from those frontiers of intimacy which he seemed bound to cross.
"About this life you're leading," he said. "About what it will lead to, and what it will do to you."
"Is painting on ivory so fatal?" she asked. But her smile was almost pitiful.
"It's crime that's fatal," cried Kestner. "You can't succeed, neither you nor your father nor Morello. You're getting protection of a kind at the present moment. But it's a poor kind, and it can't last! You're facing the wrong way. You'll only go down, and still farther down, and at every step you'll have meaner and dirtier work to do. You'll go down until you're nothing but a slum-worker leading the life of a street-cat. You'll shut yourself off from every decent influence that can come into a woman's life. And even though you should slip through the hands of the law—and you can't do that—month by month and year by year you'll fall lower and lower, lying and cheating and flimflamming and bunco-steering and scurrying from one warren to another."
"Wait," she said, white to the lips. But Kestner did not choose to wait.
"You won't come in contact with one man you can respect or trust. But crooked as they are, the time will come when you'll have to turn to them for protection. And if they give you that, they'll expect their price for it. And they'll get their price, in the end. Oh, believe me, I've seen the woman adventurer. I've followed their careers, by the hundred—not through novels, but through life. They all lead one way, and that way is down!"
The woman sitting opposite him did not speak for several moments. Her face was very white. Kestner could see the blue veining in the temple under the heavily massed chestnut hair. When she spoke she spoke very quietly.
"All this is very eloquent," she said, "and, I'm afraid, very obvious. But it is quite beside the mark. There are things you don't understand. But the fact remains that I am already with these people. And I intend to stay there until the end!"
"But what end?" demanded Kestner.
"It will not be the end you expect," was her tranquil-toned reply.
"I know your position, and I know what it leads to."
"Yet hopeless as that position appears, I may enjoy advantages unknown to my enemies."
"I am not your enemy. I have no desire to be."
"In that," she answered, "I cannot believe you."
"But I have nothing to gain in all this."
"That is the one thing I doubt," she replied, after a slight pause.
"How can I prove it?"
She pondered a moment.
"By going quietly through that door, returning to your hotel, and taking the night boat for Naples, and from Naples returning to Paris."
Kestner did not even smile.
"It will be for your own good," she warned him, "for your own safety."
"That is a feature of the situation on which I am not permitted to figure," he said.
She glanced at the leather-bound travelling clock on the table in front of her.
"It is more dangerous, every moment you stay," she said, and he felt sure her uneasiness was not a pretence. He crossed to the table and stood in front of her.
"Do you know," he said, quite close to her, "I don't believe you're as brave as you'd have me believe, or as hard as they've tried to make you! You're not that sort! I can't believe it!"
She was about to answer him, with her eyes still fixed on his, when the faintest shadow of a change crept over her face. The lips framing themselves to speak remained silent. Her gaze did not actually wander from his face, yet he knew that into her line of vision some outer and newer element had entered.
He had no time to determine what this was. But at the same moment that it flashed home to his wondering mind that a door behind had opened and some one had stealthily entered the room, he heard her voice, a little thin and shrill with fear.
"Tony—don't shoot!"
He saw her hand dart out to the corner of the table. The movement was so quick that it left him no time to determine its significance. But the next instant the room was in utter darkness.
"Don't shoot," he heard her pleading, almost in a frenzy. "Not yet—not yet!"
Kestner swung his body about the corner of the table, stooping low as he did so. He brushed the woman's skirts, and crouched there. He could hear her breathing, quick and tense, as she waited. Yet even at that moment he was conscious of the fact that he did not want her to know he was hiding there, that he was using her as a shield.
It was then that he heard Morello's voice out of the darkness, quite close to him.
"No!" proclaimed the Neapolitan, with a catch of the breath that was almost a grunt of contempt. "I will not shoot! But I will cut his heart out!"
Kestner edged forward to the table again, padding quickly and lightly about its surface. He had started to grope through the foolish and faded black draperies for his own automatic, when he remembered the other revolver which the woman had taken from the drawer. He felt a little easier in mind when he held it in his band.
As he backed away again he could hear Morello cross the room. He listened intently, for he had no love for naked steel. The next moment he heard a key turned in a lock, and then the sound of the key withdrawn.
"What are you doing?" asked the woman's voice through the blackness. Kestner knew she was still standing close behind the table.
"Turn on the lights," panted Morello.
Kestner dropped on his hands and knees and wormed his way over to where he remembered the wires ran from the table to the floor. He caught and twisted them together, using the revolver-barrel for a lever. He twisted them until they snapped under the strain. He knew then that the light-circuit was broken.
"Turn on the lights!" cried Morello, this time in a command.
"When you promise to do what I say," contended the woman at the table.
An oath escaped the Neapolitan.
"Do you want that man to escape?"
Kestner, as he crouched low, awaiting his chance, wondered if she did or not. He knew he still carried a key for that carefully locked door. He also knew that it would have to be used silently. So he crouched there, still waiting.
"Oh, I'll get you!" he heard that Americanised Neapolitan voice announce, with still another oath. The Secret Agent felt, from the sound of that voice, that his opponent had retreated to the farther wall, so as to command a full view of the place.
The next moment a white bulb of light exploded on the darkness, wavered about the wall, and pencilled for one interrogative moment towards the locked door.
Kestner knew that Morello had turned on a pocket flash-light. As quick as the thought came home to him, and before the light could steady itself, he aimed directly into the heart of the bulb and fired.
There was a gasp from the woman, a cry from the man. But the light went out. And at the same moment that he pulled the trigger Kestner leapt to one side. He ran with cat-like quickness, for he knew what was coming.
He was almost at the locked door before the first shots of that quick volley rang through the room. And he knew the shots were being fired at the quarter in which the flash of his own gun had shown itself.
He was at the door, and his key was in the lock, before the reverberations from that volley had died down. He had the door open and had sidled out before he heard Morello's repeated command for light, and the woman's distracted cry that she could not turn them on.
Kestner, listening to their contending voices, closed the door and locked it. He decided, on second thoughts, to leave the key where it stood. Then he groped his way through the velvety blackness to the street door. As he expected, he found it locked. But for this, too, he still carried his pass-key.
He opened the door quickly but cautiously, dreading what the sound of those shots might at any moment bring about him. It had never been an inviting neighbourhood; and it was no longer an inviting household.
He held his automatic in his right hand as he slipped through the partly opened door and faced the narrow street. He saw that street lying peacefully before him, bathed in its white Sicilian moonlight. He could see the serrated shadow-edge of the house-fronts dividing the roadway, one half in moonlight, one half in unbroken darkness.
It was as he squinted down this tranquil moonlit vista, feeling sure that Wilsnach would be coming on the run at any moment, that the gloom opposite him was stabbed by a jet of flame.
Kestner, at the same moment, stumbled back with a sense of shock. He awakened, the next second, first to a stinging sensation along the top of the head, and next to the fact that he had dropped back into a half-crouching and half-sitting posture on the stone doorstep. He threw up one hand, involuntarily, to find that his iron-grey wig had been whisked from its place on the top of his head. He did not wait to decipher this seeming miracle, for another stab of flame flashed from the gloom, and then another and another, from different points along the shadowy line of houses.
By this time Kestner had awakened to what it all meant, for still again he felt a quick sting of pain across the ridge of his shoulder. And his blood was up.
It was then that he brought his automatic into play. He watched for his light-flash, and shot abstemiously, remembering that his ammunition was limited and his period of defence problematical.
He was firing with the second revolver when Wilsnach came dodging and scurrying and fighting his way to the door. He kept calling out, as he came nearer, for the other man to get back out of the light.
Kestner did not get back out of the light, however, until he had seized the panting Wilsnach and swung him in through the half-opened door. Then the door was slammed shut and a key turned in the lock. The darkness was Cimmerian. But Wilsnach could feel Kestner catching and tugging at his coat-sleeve.
"Quick!" cried the Secret Agent. "They're on both sides of us here!"
"But are you hurt?" demanded Wilsnach.
"I've got a scratch or two," was the other's hurried answer. "But we'll be getting a heap worse if we're not out of here in three minutes!" He was dragging Wilsnach back deeper into the velvety darkness. "D'you hear them? They'll have that door down in a jiffy!"
"But we can't hide in this hole!" panted Wilsnach.
Kestner was now stumbling and groping his way through the blackness.
"Come on!" he commanded.
"But where?" demurred Wilsnach.
"We've still got the wine-cellar. There's a chance there, if we're quick enough."
The next minute they were running down a flight of stone steps, fumbling with a door-lock, and groping and passing their way along a mouldy passage between unbroken walls.
"Hurry," urged Kestner. "And keep one hand against me, through this crowded press-room." For he was groping with both hands now, deviously, through a larger chamber that smelled of benzine and inks and acids, then fumbling and struggling with another door-knob, and climbing still another flight of stone steps.
"Stoop low!" panted Kestner, as he bent a little unsteadily to unlatch a small grated window no bigger than a kennel-front. He swayed from side to side as he did so, like a man uncertain of his footing. He was attempting to scramble up through the opening, but seemed without strength to make it. Wilsnach got a shoulder under him and pushed him up.
When Wilsnach followed he found Kestner still on the flagstone outside, lying flat and gulping down quick lungsful of fresh air, as though the last of his strength had gone. Wilsnach had to help the other man to his feet.
"It's all right," he whispered, "There's the strada just beyond this wall!"
Wilsnach, with an arm about his colleague, scurried unsteadily along the deep shadows of the house-fronts, rounding a corner and striking further eastward.
"And there's a carrozza!" panted Kestner, with his hand pressed to his side.
Wilsnach, the next moment, was hailing the driver. Night-hawks, the world over, can never afford to be too inquisitive. So the swarthy little Sicilian made no comment as the all but helpless Kestner was lifted bodily into the open carriage.
"Where to?" asked Wilsnach, jumping in beside him, with one glance back to make sure they were not being followed.
"Tell him to get us down to the Via Francesco Crispi, quick!" was the determined but weak-toned answer.
Wilsnach repeated the order. Then, as he sat back on the worn seat-cushions, he stared down at his hand, rubbing his fingers slowly together and stooping over them in the white moonlight.
He slipped one hand back over Kestner's left shoulder.
"There's blood on your coat," he suddenly announced. The other man languidly lifted a hand and felt his wet shoulder.
"I got a crack on the collar-bone," he explained, with a wan attempt at a laugh.
"Is that all?"
Again Kestner raised a languid hand and felt gingerly along the top of his bare head, where the hair was matted and wet and still warm to the touch.
"And what feels like a bullet-scrape along my bump of veneration," gently added the Secret Agent.
"Then we must get to a hospital!" cried out the suddenly perturbed Wilsnach.
"Not on your life," was Kestner's answer as they went rattling down through the narrow streets.
"Then where in the name of God are we going?" Wilsnach suddenly demanded.
"We're going to the water-front, where we can find a boatman!"
"A boatman?" echoed Wilsnach.
"A boatman to get us out to the Pannonia," was Kestner's thin-timbered but resolute response. "For we're going to America, old man, and we're going on the same boat with the Lamberts!"