CHAPTER ELEVEN
SADIE WIMPEL'S progress up Broadway that morning was much brusker than the movements of most blacksnakes. She hurried north as far as Forty-second Street, made sure that she was not being followed and then dipped into the Subway. There she caught an express for East Fourteenth Street.
Ascending to the street, she hurried still farther eastward and then turned south. When she came to the "family entrance" of a corner saloon she stepped in through the faded swing door, looked about, and seated herself at one of the little round tables in the empty room. A bartender in his shirtsleeves presented himself.
"Gimme a long beer," commanded the girl.
When the bartender returned with this, however, she viewed its foaming collar with indifference.
"Where's Tim?" she demanded.
"Still sunnin' hisself out in front," solemnly announced her servitor.
"I wantta see him."
"Sure!" assented the bartender, as he swept Sadie's spurned change into his huge palm and went whistling from the heavy-aired room with its residuary taint of many beverages.
Two minutes later a portly figure wearing a diamond shirt-stud and pink-striped collar and cuffs stepped back into the empty "parlor." From one corner of his mouth drooped a dark-colored cigar.
"Howdy, Sadie!" he said, without removing the cigar. He stared down at her with open and half-derisive approbation. "Hully gee, but they've got yous queened up like a Coney Island float!"
"Tim, where's Shindler?" demanded the woman at the table, altogether ignoring the other's gallantry.
The man called Tim smoked meditatively for a moment or two: it was plain that he nursed a latent respect for Sadie Wimpel.
"That's one on me, little one," he confessed. "If yuh want to find Shindler yuh'd better dig up Coke Kilvert. I seen him and Coke drinkin' Chianti over to Peruchetti's some time early last week."
"And not since then?"
"Nope!"
Sadie rose to her feet. "All right," she announced. "I'll root out Coke."
She made her way farther eastward and again turned south. She walked hurriedly and with determination. She passed through unsavory streets and veered nonchalantly about even more unsavory characters who looked after her with quietly appraising eyes. But there was that in her carriage which discouraged pursuit.
She kept on her way until she entered a Second Avenue pawnshop which she knew to be a "fence" for a gang of up-town "dips." Leaning against a counter she beheld a slim-bodied young man with a misleading air of delicacy and with eyes as soft as a woman's. That disarming air of fragility, she remembered, was a valued asset in professions such as his.
"Hello, kid," he said, without moving.
"Hello, Coke."
"What's doin'?" was the youth's languid inquiry.
"Where's Shindler?"
Coke gazed impassively at his nail-ends.
"Search me! I ain't seen him this week."
"Where'd yuh see him last week?"
Coke pondered that question for several moments. There was an air or determined authority about Sadie Wimpel which rather disquieted him.
"Down to Nitro Charlie's," he finally admitted.
"What was he cookin' up?"
Coke's eyes fluttered.
"How t'ell should I know?"
"Yuh gotta know," was Sadie's quiet response.
Coke passed a second measuring glance over her trimly clad body.
"Why?"
"Because I'm stoolin' for a Fed guy, this week. And I don't wantta have to dig up nothin' against yuh. Coke! What was Shindler cookin' up?"
Their studiously contending glances came together like aerial scouts above masked batteries. Behind his enemy's entrenchments, Coke conceded, might be reserves which it would be foolish to oppose.
"Him and Charlie hit on a plan o' squeezin' a bunch out of a German gunpowder man called Piorkowski. It was some plant, for Charlie'd pinched a river-launch full o' new smokeless from the naval magazine up to Iona Island. It was a Navy officer's patent and was bein' stored there to ripen for a mont' or two."
"Go on!" commanded Sadie.
"Then Shindler faded away."
"But where?"
"Search me, Sadie! All I know is that Charlie's sore as a pup, and squealin' about Shindler givin' him the go-by!"
"And who's Piorkowski?"
"He's the big spade over here for that Krupp gang o' ammunition makers. And that's about all I know."
"That'll help," said Sadie.
Ten minutes later she was in the Subway again, bound for the upper parts of the city. She sat deep in thought as her train sped northward, remembering from other days the fact that Shindler had once been a "runner" for the Deutsche Waff en Munitions Gesellschaft. This brought her other equally disturbing thoughts, and she did not look up until her train stopped at the Grand Central Station.
Then she suddenly shrank lower in her seat, between the crowding shoulders on either side of her, like a snail into its shell. For walking slowly along the platform with his habitual air of aimless vacuity she caught sight of Shindler himself.
There, not thirty feet away from her, she had the dubious triumph of beholding the one man in all the world she had the least desire to see. For Shindler and Strasser, she very well knew, were one and the same man.
If for a moment Sadie shrank unconsciously back between her fellow-travelers, at the sight of that disturbingly familiar figure, her scrutiny of the gentleman in question was none the less pointed.
Three years, she noticed, had worked considerable change with him, more than her study of Kestner's Washington snapshot had led her to anticipate. He had plainly lost a ponderable part of his old-time jauntiness. His air of innocuous perkiness seemed no longer a part of him. It appeared more like a mask, put on to conceal the fact that he was a hounded and harried man uncertain of the future. He now wore eye-glasses, she saw, a pair of tortoise-shell "blinkers" which further dissimilated his true appearance by giving him an air of owlish preoccupation. That beguiling and half-scholarly stoop of his was more accentuated than of old, and as he moved along the crowded platform carrying a yellow hand-bag stained with grease he seemed merely an innocuous and neutral-tinted citizen ready to merge inconspicuously into his background of neutral-tinted companions. Yet Shindler himself, Sadie knew, was not unlike the drab-liveried water-moccasin, in being quite as virulent as he was self-effacing. That was a part of his effectiveness.
By this time Sadie had collected her wits and started for the door. Yet before she stepped from the car platform she made a second and even more disconcerting discovery. Moving aimlessly along through the ever-shifting crowd, with the air of a man who had no object in view and no mission in life, Wilsnach himself passed within ten feet of her. And she knew, at a glance, that Wilsnach was shadowing Shindler.
She realized, as she merged into the crowd and moved discreetly after them, that her career seemed suddenly to focus and centralize on those two strangely divergent yet alarmingly contiguous figures.
The thought of their coming together did not add to her peace of mind. Shindler, she knew, was a good dodger. She had, in the past, encountered only too many proofs of that. And if in the tumult of her seething little brain any one definite idea sought articulation, it was the frantic hope that Shindler would once again prove himself the master of flight that he had seemed in his earlier days.
But Sadie did not intend to leave things to chance. There was too much at stake and already that strangely incongruous couple were slipping beyond her sphere of observation. So she started resolutely in pursuit.
Shindler she could no longer see. But there was no mistaking Wilsnach as he slowly and with elaborate carelessness mounted the steps that led above-ground. She hurried after him, once he had turned the corner, but in Forty-second Street she held back again, guardedly watching her confederate as he ambled across the car-tracks and passed eastward in front of the Belmont. Still farther eastward she could now make out the figure of the man with the "blinkers" and the yellow hand-bag.
So she followed discreetly after them, keeping to the north side of the street. She clung to the trail with the casual nonchalance of an expert "tailer," taking advantage of any bit of cover that offered and falling promptly back when she found the thinning stream of pedestrians no longer a veil between her and her quarry.
Then she suddenly stopped and wheeled about, for on the opposite side of the street she had seen Wilsnach do the same. She noticed, as she bent over a corner news-stand and inspected the second edition of an evening paper whose ink was quite dry before mid-day, that the man with the leather handbag had swung about and was retracing his steps westward. So she leisurely and aimlessly purchased a newspaper.
Wilsnach, as the enemy essayed his doubling movement, turned and stared interestedly through a plate-glass window at a seductive array of ninety-cent outing-shirts. Then he leisurely entered the store itself.
Shindler must have seen that movement, Sadie promptly surmised, for he lost no time in taking advantage of a clear field. He ducked for a cross-town car, walked through it and quickly jumped aboard another car moving westward. Wilsnach, emerging into the open, hailed a taxicab and plainly started in pursuit.
That cross-town stream of traffic was too turgid to permit of Sadie's eye following any one particular unit. She saw the twin rows of cars stop and start and stop again, and she wondered if in the complexities of that thousand-wheeled movement Shindler could still make his escape. But the taxi-cab that held Wilsnach, she could see, had already passed on to the west of Fifth Avenue.
Sadie hovered about the news-stand for an irresolute moment or two and then started westward. She stood back in the shadow of a Subway kiosk to wait for a Madison Avenue surface-car to swing about into Vanderbilt, when on the opposite corner, emerging demurely and quietly from the grill of the Manhattan, she caught sight of a figure wearing tortoise-shell "blinkers" and carrying a yellow handbag.
It was Shindler. She at once turned about and descended the Subway steps, wondering whether or not this figure was destined to come down the same underground passage that for the moment concealed her.
As soon as she felt reasonably assured that this was not to be the case, she hurriedly retraced her steps. By the time she reached the street Shindler was well past the kiosk and was now walking definitely eastward. He was doing so with a quite unlooked for briskness of step.
Sadie, still carrying her newspaper, followed him. She continued to follow him as he turned southward again. She did not hesitate until she saw him stop before the entrance of one of those shabbier side-street hotels which are little more than bed-houses with bar-room attachments. She was well within a sheltering doorway as he stood looking sharply back along the almost empty thoroughfare. Then he made a dive for his warren.
Sadie stood there for several moments. Then, once her plan of action was formulated, she swung west and north again to Forty-second Street. Near the corner of Madison Avenue she dipped into a trunk-shop, bought a cheap rattan suit-case and swung back eastward again. At the Grand Central news-stand she bought seven magazines, the bulkiest she could find, and half a dozen newspapers. These she stowed away in the suit-case, concluding this to be the quickest way to give it sufficient weight for a lady traveling light. Then she promptly proceeded to the squalid caravansary, whose only splendor was its brightly gilded brewery sign, where Shindler had already installed himself.
She was given a room, together with many heavily inquiring glances, on the third floor. She was oblivious of both its meager furniture and its unkempt condition, for once she was alone she placed herself on sentry duty at her slightly opened door. Then, growing bolder, she ventured into the many-odored hallway and explored it from end to end. A study of the room-numbers as she did so convinced her of the fact that the figures which she had seen opposite the name of Strasser on the dog-eared register implied he had been given a room on the floor below.
So she returned to her quarters, got her suit-case and her door-key and went boldly down to the office. There she demanded a larger room. She was proffered one with a bath, but it would cost her a dollar more. Sadie, when she learned this was on the second floor, took it without hesitation. She even went so far as to allay official suspicion by paying for it in advance.
Yet she knew, as she made her way up to this room, that the hardest part of her work was still ahead of her. She knew, as she took off her gloves and her absurd bunch of hothouse violets, that she could not expect luck to come her way twice in the same morning.
Her success, she decided, would have to depend on her own initiative. So she waited beside her slightly opened door, as patient as a farm-collie above a wood-chuck's hole. To wait and watch, in fact, seemed the only thing left for her to do.
It was a long quarter of an hour before she was rewarded with any sound from that immediate neighborhood. But the sound, in this case, was Shindler's own voice. Narrowing her door-crack, she could see him standing in his own doorway, three rooms to the right on the opposite side of the hall, frugally ordering a pitcher of beer and a cheese sandwich. As of old, he spoke suavely and softly, with an intonation that seemed almost plaintive.
Sadie waited until the slatternly bell-boy had disappeared. Then she stepped out into the hallway, closed her door behind her, and walked quietly to the room which she knew to be harboring Shindler.
On the door of this room, after waiting for a moment or two, she quietly knocked. A preoccupied voice from within said "Come!" Taking a deeper breath, she opened the door and stepped into the room.
Bending over a chair, on which stood the opened yellow hand-bag, was Shindler. His coat was off and he was gazing with studious abstraction at some unknown object in the interior of the bag. He sighed pensively as he turned slowly about. He raised one hand, as though to run it through his disordered and grotesquely thinning cow-lick. But the movement was arrested in mid-air.
"For the love o' Gawd!" he slowly ejaculated.
Sadie viewed him with apparent unconcern.
"Don't let me butt in on your unpackin'!" she smilingly announced.
He stood still staring at her. Astonishment such as his could not be swallowed whole.
"I thought—thought you were in Budapest!" was his plainly inadequate exclamation.
Sadie's lip curled with scorn.
"Yuh mean yuh left me there!" she amended.
His mildly abstracted eyes took on a look of trouble.
"I had the chance of beatin' it or bein' gathered in. So naturally I beat it."
"That's what most yella dawgs 'd do!"
She could see the habitually mild eyes harden a little.
"That's a hell of a way to talk to your husband!"
Sadie stood for a second or two with her eyes closed, as though her body had sustained a blow which bewildered even her mind.
"Well, yuh suttinly were that partic'lar kind of a husband," she finally retorted. She stepped over closer to him. "Yuh were a crook when yuh roped me into marryin' yuh, and yuh made me a crook! Yuh killed any chanct I ever had o' bein' decent. Yuh were ready to use me for your dirty work. Yuh made me into a gun-moll. Yuh didn't even stop—"
But he cut her short.
"Didn't I keep you from starvin'? And didn't I spend on you when I had it to spend?"
"Yes; yuh lit me up like an all-night drug-store! But yuh did it wit' stolen money. And when I got your number yuh tried to lie your way out of it. And when trouble came yuh did more than show your heels like a hound—yuh were so white-livered yuh planted them Bavarian fort-maps in me trunk and left me to face the music!"
"They'd have shot me—and it don't look like they did much to you!"
"And when yuh thought I was off the map," went on the relentless-eyed Sadie, "yuh married that wire-tapper's widow! And then yuh—"
"What's the use of rakin' all that up?" suddenly demanded the wrinkled-browed man confronting her. It was not adding to his happiness,
"There's a lot of use in it. They tell me this ain't a good country for bigamists. Mebbe it ain't. But I know that wit' things as they are it's an awful unhealthy climate for spy-work!"
Shindler stood eying her for several moments of utter silence.
"What do you want, any way?" he finally demanded.
"I wantta know just what yuh're goin' to do about it!"
The man in the "blinkers" sat down in the chair beside the many-stained table on which stood a crockery ash-receiver, a highly lithographed tray advertising a German beer, and a melancholy plaster-of-Paris statuette of Columbus without a head.
"What are you goin' to do about it?" Shindler inquired. Behind his beguiling air of pensiveness, by this time, was the craftiness of the professional criminal declining to be cornered.
Sadie Wimpel also sat down. Shindler, she knew, was not so guileless an enemy as he appeared. And she was equally aware of the fact that her steps would have to be picked with caution.
"What's your graft these days?" she calmly inquired.
"What's yours?" he asked, as his roving eye made an inventory of her outward apparel. His sardonic approval of that apparel only seemed to anger her. She gave no expression to that anger, however, for a knock sounded on the door and brought a sudden chill about her heart where the tightness of the steel blue tailor-made had already established certain vague discomforts.
She saw, to her relief, that it was merely the slatternly bell-boy with a pitcher of beer and a cheese sandwich. Shindler, after inspecting the tray, sent for a second glass.
"You seem to be on Easy Street," he continued, as the boy took his departure.
"Are yuh?" Sadie demanded.
"I'm goin' to be, or I'm goin' to know the reason why," was Shindler's retort. For the first time he spoke with a perceptible trace of passion.
"It'll never be in this burg," announced Sadie.
"Why won't it?" he demanded.
"Yuh know, Abe, I'm a kind of a astrologer and clairvoyant these days. That's me purfession, this season. And I've been readin' your stars, and they sure say yuh're goin' to travel!"
There was a touch of scorn in his smile.
"You're dead certain of that?" he quietly inquired.
"I'm dead certain of it," was her equally impassive reply: "Yuh're goin' to slip over to the Grand Central this afternoon and get the first train out o' this town for Montreal. And from there yuh're goin' to beat it back to Europe!"
"And what's goin' to make me do that?"
"Ain't yuh hep to the fact that yuh've been tailed for the last three weeks?"
Shindler laughed.
"I've been tailed for the last three years—and I'm still wearin' my hair long, ain't I?" He suddenly turned about on her. "But why're you so keen about gettin' me off to the other side again?"
She realized, in view of the gulfs that yawned between them, the newer things that Wilsnach had brought into her life.
"Abe, I'm goin' to be honest wit' yuh. I've a gen'l'man friend here who's the right sort. I think a good deal o' that man. And some day he's goin' to think a good deal o' me—if I can ever get a chance o' showin' him I wantta travel in his class!"
"And it ain't my class?" was Shindler's sneering demand.
"Your class? If he ever found out I'd hitched up wit' a pole-cat like yuh, it'd sure make him seasick!"
Shindler's scrutiny of her impassive face was interrupted by the boy with the glass.
"So you're ashamed o' me?" he pensively complained.
"I'm ashamed o' myself," solemnly acknowledged Sadie Wimpel. "I'm so ashamed o' myself that I'm goin' to grubstake yuh to a cabin passage over to Cherbourg!"
Shindler stood in the middle of the room, with the glass in his hand. "Ain't you kind of knockin' your own home-circle?" he inquired. But behind that velvety mask, Sadie knew, there was the fire of a rage that burned all the fiercer for being self-consuming.
"I ain't knockin' yuh—nuttin could knock yuh! I'm blamin' myself for ever bein' so blind and foolish as to hitch up wit' a cur like yuh. I didn't know much then, but I should've known better'n that. I didn't even know it was Schmielz and yuh that killed Padolsky over in Odessa the same as Keudell killed Eichendorff! I didn't—"
"Cut that out!" Shindler suddenly barked. His voice was as sharp as a pup's yelp.
"That's what I intend to do—cut the whole business out."
Shindler's sneer was not a pretty one.
"That don't make your record over. I guess there's more than me between you and your kid-glove friend!"
It was Sadie's turn to show passion.
"No, there ain't! There's no man livin' got a claim on me—exceptin' yuh, and I don't reckon yuh as a man!"
"Well, there's one thing you can reckon on!"
"What's that?"
"That I don't go to Cherbourg."
"Then yuh go up the River to the Big House!"
He looked at her quietly, with the beer-pitcher in his hand. So impassive were their attitudes that an outsider, contemplating them through the window, might have accepted their talk as an exchange of mere conjugal commonplaces. And such, Sadie suddenly remembered, they were—for Shindler's career had been made up of revolt and crime and evasion.
"What'll send me up to the Big House?" he was casually inquiring.
"I may be a purfessional clairvoyant, Abe, but I don't need to go into no trance to dig out what yuh and Nitro Charlie've been tryin' to cook up this last two weeks! And Charlie'd sure take it hard, after lootin' that launch-full of Iona Island powder, to know yuh were hangin' the Indian sign on him for the chance o' doin' a little gay-cattin' for Keudell and his gang!"
Shindler slowly replaced his beer-jug.
"What're you ragin' about, anyway?" he demanded. But his blink was one of bewilderment, bewilderment at her comprehension of his well-hidden secrets.
"There's a Service man or two who'd sure be interested to know just what yuh found out about them coast-defense guns at Indian Head, and them mortars at Fort Monroe!"
Shindler quite as slowly sat down beside the table. He did not look at Sadie Wimpel. His vacantly ruminative eyes were fixed on the two empty beer glasses in front of him. He toyed idly, as he sat there, with a seal ring on his finger, twisting it nervously round and round. And Sadie, as she sat studying him, remembered that he was always most virulent when he was most passive.
Through the gray mists of memory, too, as she sat regarding him, there came to her the impression that she had witnessed this scene before, or some scene mysteriously akin to it. Then through these mists, like sunlight through fog, came the key to the coincidence. It came with the thin remembrance of something she had not thought or heard of, for several long years. It was some ghostly memory of a ghostly rumor that Shindler's ring was a "trick" ring. Once, when happy with heroin, he had explained its theft from the mistress of a murdered coke-snuffer in Bourdeaux. And he had boasted that inside its tiny sliding panel was ample space for enough chloral hydrate for a knock-out.
Shindler laughed a little as he turned toward the table. But Sadie was so keenly alert that her nerve-ends began to tingle.
"So that's how the land lies!" he said, as he slowly proceeded to fill the two empty glasses. Sadie watched him from under her demurely drooping eyelids. Adeptly as the move was made, she had the satisfaction of seeing the little cloud of whitish powder sift down into the second glass. The thought of his suave depravity sickened her. But she was determined to act out her part.
He shrugged as he handed her the glass, though his face was still wrinkled with its mildly contemptuous laughter.
"Say, kid, we can't afford to fight, us two!" he protested.
"We ain't goin' to fight!" announced Sadie.
"Then don't you lose any sleep about me tryin' to butt in on your love-affairs. I guess I've got troubles of my own!"
Sadie noticed that he eyed her closely as she lifted the beer to her lips and made a pretense of drinking it. Then she put down the glass with a sudden show of anger.
"But yuh can't help buttin' into my affairs so long as yuh're on this side of the Atlantic. And if yuh stay another two days in this burg yuh're goin' to butt into Sing-Sing!"
"Who'll put me there?" once more demanded Shindler. He was collected enough to light a cigarette.
"The guy who was tailin' yuh up to half an hour ago!"
She could see Shindler's face smiling through the smoke-cloud.
"Well, I guess I'm ready for that guy," he announced. Sadie watched him as he crossed the room to the open hand-bag. As he stooped over this hand-bag and carefully lifted something from it her hand shot out and the glass of beer it held was poured into the headless statute of Columbus that stood at the center of the table.
Then she lounged back in her chair and held the emptied glass to her lips. As Shindler slowly walked toward her she was apparently engaged in draining the last of her drink. So intent was she on this maneuver that she did not at first notice what Shindler had taken from his bag.
But as he placed it carefully on the table she saw that it was a tin box about five inches high and some eight inches long. To one end of it was wired a bit of mechanism that looked like a small clock without its metal casing.
She blinked up at Shindler as the latter leaned over it and stared down into her face.
"That's what your gum-shoe man is goin' to tail into!" he announced.
The girl put her empty glass down on the table-edge. She did it a little unsteadily.
"What is it?" she asked, as she rubbed her forehead. For the second time Shindler intently studied her face.
"It's a pound tobacco-box packed with something to put him asleep. It's packed with a damned sight stronger brand o' guncotton than ever came off Iona Island. And this neat little alarm-clock works, you see, has a piece of picture-wire tied to a wheel-shaft here, so that as it winds up it pulls the cork out of a bottle of sulphuric acid inside the box. That does the trick. And if you get inquisitive, and try to open the box, that also does the trick!"
Sadie was leaning somnolently back in her chair. "What trick?" she demanded with vacuous eyes.
Shindler emitted a small sigh of satisfaction. Then he lifted the tin box carefully back into his hand-bag. Then he turned and faced the woman again.
"Aren't you feelin' all right?" he innocently inquired.
"I'm—I'm queer!" she murmured, as she made an effort to grope ineffectually for the table-edge. "I guess yuh'd—yuh'd better get me outta here!"
Shindler, however, made no immediate move to get her out of there. He did not even deign to answer her. He stared for a moment down at her inert figure. Then he crossed to the shabby oak dresser at the far side of the room and took up the few worn toilet articles which he had so recently unpacked. These he deliberately and slowly packed away in the hand-bag. He next looked studiously about the room, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. Then he put on his coat, took up his hat and the hand-bag and walked toward the door.
Sadie could hear him as he took the key from the lock. She could also hear the door behind her open and close. She did not raise her head, but she was thinking both hard and fast. She knew that within the next minute or two she must reach a decision, and she knew only too well that this decision would be a momentous one in her life. Shindler, the king of dodgers, was making another of his get-aways. Wasn't that, she argued with her unhappy soul, the best thing that could happen to him? And to her? Wouldn't that really make things easier for her? Wouldn't that give her a fighting chance with Wilsnach, the fighting chance that every decent girl ought to have?
She rolled her head to one side. She made sure, as she did so, that the room was empty. Then, as she sat up and stared at the two empty beer glasses, another question came to her. What could she tell Kestner? And what would Wilsnach say? And how much did either of them already know?
She felt sure, the next moment, that she could never lie to them. And she knew that she could never start to go straight by crooked thinking. She was in the Service, and that meant being on the side of the Law, and the Law meant truth. She was on a case for Kestner. What that case meant in all its complexities, she could not quite understand. But she had her part to play. She had to stick to Shindler, by hook or crook, to the bitter end. She had to stick to him, no matter what it cost. And Wilsnach, when he found out what he found out, could say and think what he liked.
The next moment she was on her feet, straightening her hat and essaying a furtive dab or two at her nose. She shook down her rumpled skirt as she crossed the room to the door. Then a gasp of dismay broke from her, for Shindler, she found, had quietly locked this door behind him.
She circled back about the room in search of a telephone. But there was none. She found a push-bell, with a printed card of directions, and she was trying to decipher these when she heard the sound of hurrying steps in the hallway without. And the next moment came the rattle of a key in the lock.
That could mean only one thing. It was Shindler coming back.
Quick as a cat, she sank once more into her chair beside the table, with her arms outspread and her face flat on the beer-stained wooden surface stippled with cigarette-burns. She scarcely breathed as she heard the door behind her open and a quick step or two cross the room.
Then out of the silence and quite close to her she heard a voice. And she knew it was the voice of Wilsnach.
"Good God, it's Sadie!" she heard him gasp.
He dropped on one knee beside her and she could feel his hand against her body, with an interrogatory touch on the wrist and the quick pressure of a finger against her neck artery, as though to make sure her heart was still beating. Then he lifted her face and stared into it.
"Sadie, what is it? What's the matter?" he cried in mingled alarm and pity.
But Sadie kept her eyes closed, luxuriating in the consciousness that his arm was about her and half holding her up, that his hand was brushing her temple and his breath fanning her cheek. And it was equally consoling to know that the thought of calamity to her could bring anything like a feeling of consternation to him. He was fumbling at the neck of her dress, by this time, trying to loosen it. And even the absurd movements of his fingers engaged in that absurd mission were not altogether disagreeable to her.
"Sadie, speak to me!" he implored.
But Sadie entertained no intention of speaking to him. To do that would end a situation which might never come again. So Sadie kept her eyes shut and made the most of it.
Wilsnach, as he stared down into her face, felt the injustice of it all. It was not the kind of work into which any woman should have been dragged. Sadie, he knew, was not like other women. But still it was not quite fair to her. He felt more than sorry for her: he felt under a tremendous debt of gratitude to her. She had stood by him in more than one crisis. She had, in fact, never failed him. Her companionship had come to mean a great deal to him. She was a quick-witted and a big-hearted girl who'd never been given a chance. And there was something about her that he liked, and liked a lot.
Wilsnach, as he held her there, leaned down and did a very human but a very indiscreet thing. He pressed his lips against the full red lips that were so close to his own. And it startled him a little to find them quite warm and the pressure of them against his own a sensation that was unexpectedly and altogether pleasant.
Equally startling was the effect of that caress on Sadie herself. Resolute as she was in the performance of her professional duty, fixed as had been her determination to play out her part, that one unlooked for touch was too much for her. Her will crumbled under it. All memory slipped away from her. She no longer thought of Shindler or Kestner or the case that had brought her within those unsavory walls. All she knew was that Wilsnach had kissed her.
Her reaction to that advance was both unwilled and immediate. Her eyes opened dreamily and for one moment she stared up into his face. Then her head sank contentedly down into the hollow of his protecting shoulder. Her arms tightened about his neck. And in a response as unreasoned as had been those movements themselves she found herself murmuring: "Do yuh care? Do yuh?"
Wilsnach, an hour before, might have been in some doubt as to his answer to that question. In his austerely busy life there had been neither time nor place for women. But now he found the gaze of a pair of dumbly appealing eyes something distinctly more than pleasant. He realized that the pressure of a pair of clinging arms could make a man dizzily and absurdly happy. He discovered something strangely desirable in the lips murmuring so close to his own. They seemed to cannonade the cemented stronghold of his bachelorhood with explosion of emotions against which he stood quite unfortified. And forsaking reason himself, he bent lower and for the second time pressed his lips against the warmth of her responding lips.
"I love you, Sadie!" a voice that did not seem like his own voice was saying. And if the truth of that declaration had not before been plain to him, he now found it both pleasant enough and plausible enough to reiterate. And even more bewildering was the quiet light of rapture which his words had produced in the intent face staring up into his.
"I'd go through Hell for yuh!" she solemnly announced. She could not make love as other women did. Life had been too hard with her. But with her capitulation there could and there would be no reservations.
"You'll never need to do that," protested Wilsnach. "We'll try and make it more like the other place!"
"And yuh care that much?" she hungrily repeated.
"I care far more than that!" stoutly declared Wilsnach.
"And yuh wasn't just kiddin' when yuh sent me them violets?" she forlornly demanded.
"Of course I wasn't."
That brought Sadie's thoughts back to the world that still lay about them.
"And yuh—yuh could care for a girl who'd got balled up wit' a couple o' lemons, b'fore she got gerry to what a real man was like?"
"We're not going to think of the past," he told her. "Neither of yours nor of mine!" But her strangling little sigh did not escape his notice. She was remembering what Kestner had only that morning told her.
"But yuh can't get away from the past," she declared, as she shook herself free and stared about the room that brought the thought of Shindler sweeping back into her memory.
Wilsnach followed her glance. And he too came back to realities.
"But what happened here?" he demanded.
"I tailed that boob to this dump, and got into his room when he thought it was a bell-hop at the door. Then he tried to put me under wit' a couple o' knock-out drops."
"That cur!" said Wilsnach. "I'll make him pay for that!"
"How'll yuh make him pay for it?" demanded Sadie, "He's given us both the slip."
"Given us both the slip!" exclaimed Wilsnach. "Not on your life! He walked right into my arms on those stairs!"
"He what?"
"And I had the irons on him before he so much as got his breath!"
Sadie stared at her feet again.
"Then where'd yuh leave him?"
Wilsnach could not even guess as to the source of her alarm.
"Why, I locked him in the clothes-closet of that empty room down the hall, the room where you left your violets and gloves. That's what sent me in here, double-quick."
"But how'd yuh know I was here, in this room?"
"I found Strasser carrying a key with this room-number on its shank-plate. So I dove for this room to see what it meant."
"And what'd yuh do wit' his valise?"
"Why?" inquired the puzzled Wilsnach.
"What'd yuh do wit' his valise?" shrilly repeated the girl.
Wilsnach stood staring at her in perplexity.
"Why, I gave it to the officer to take down to the taxi."
"What taxi? What officer?"
Wilsnach could afford to be patient.
"The officer I brought along for the purpose of formally gathering in Strasser, of course. And the taxi, I might add, was to get him quickly down to Headquarters, without any fuss and feathers, before the arrest became known."
"Then Strasser's still in that closet?"
"By this time," exclaimed Wilsnach, "our officer has doubtless taken him down to the taxi, as I instructed him to do when I handed him the closet key."
"But the valise?"
"The valise, Sadie, is naturally going along with the rest of us!"
"Not wit' yuh!" was her unexpectedly passionate declaration.
"Why not?" asked the still more amazed Wilsnach.
That question remained for all time unanswered.
For at that precise moment a sudden detonation shook the building in which they stood. The windows rattled. A tremor ran along the floor under their feet and minute flakes of loosened plaster snowed down about them. Sadie stood gaping at Wilsnach, an unuttered question in her staring eyes.
Wilsnach himself ran to the window and thrust out his head. But this window opened on the back of the house and showed nothing of the street. Then he went to the door and opened it. The place seemed oddly quiet after that one sudden thunder of sound which had shaken its floors.
"What do you suppose that was?" he asked through the open door. Then he stared along the hall toward the stair-head where he could make out a hurriedly approaching figure. This figure was both hatless and breathless. It was quite close to Wilsnach before the latter realized it was his own officer, the officer to whom he had handed the key.
This officer came and leaned against the door-post where Wilsnach stood. His eyes were red-rimmed and blinking and his nose was bleeding a little. He wiped his stained lip with the back of his hand. Then he blinked heavily down at his singed uniform.
"Well, your guy got away!" he said in a muffled voice, like a man with a mouthful of food.
"Got away?" echoed Wilsnach.
The hatless man snickered. Both his movements and the sounds that he made seemed oddly uncoordinated.
"Blew himself up with a bomb, before I could even get a foot on the running-board!"
"He what?"
"He blew himself up! Why, there ain't a piece o' him the size of an oyster cracker!"
It was not Wilsnach's voice that spoke next, but Sadie Wimpel's. It sounded thin and quavering from the stillness of the shadowy room.
"Somebody get—get me a drink o' water, quick!" she said, as she sank into the shabby chair beside the table that still held the two empty glasses. "I'm—I'm kind o' sick!"
Wilsnach caught up one of these glasses and ran to the wash-bowl tap on the other side of the room. Water dripped down the sides of the unsteady glass as he hurried back to her.
"Don't you worry about that man," he said, as he tried to hold the glass to her lips.
"But he's dead!" cried out the girl, sitting up straight in her chair.
"Do you call that much loss?" he demanded, as she pushed the glass away from her mouth. About its brim she could still detect a thin odor of beer. It reminded her too much of the past.
She was herself by this time, staring frowningly up into Wilsnach's worried face.
"Do you know what that man was?" he asked, as in answer to her signal he helped her to her feet.
"Yes, I know what he was," Sadie replied, clinging forlornly to Wilsnach's arm. For a moment she was tempted to tell him everything, to cleanse her soul of the secret, to swing wide the door which she had once so dreaded to open.
Yet, looking up at him, she hesitated. It could be done later on, at some other time, when she was surer of his faith in her. For she could not afford to lose that faith of his in her. It was the one thing she had left. It was the one thing that could save her.
She surprised both Wilsnach and the officer waiting somewhat restlesstly at the open door by suddenly flinging her arms about the man beside her.
"D'yuh rully care for me?" she passionately demanded.
"Of course I do," was the reply of a somewhat constrained Wilsnach, glancing apprehensively toward the hallway.
"Then I don't give a rip what happens!" she cried out with her abandoned little vibrata of emotion.