CHAPTER NINE
SADIE WIMPEL nursed no great love for head waiters. She had, in the past, too often dashed with these mysterious embodiments of interlocking authority and subserviency. Yet after her interview with the head waiter of the Alsatia, the same being both brief and persuasive, she sat in the pink-lighted room of serried tables and near-onyx and plate mirrors, sedately sipping her second cup of black coffee.
She would have much preferred a gin rickey. But seeing matters of moment before her, she decided to keep a clear head and a cool hand. For, over the rim of her cup as she drank, she could distinctly see at a table not more than the toss of an oyster cracker from her, a rotund and somewhat familiar figure in full evening dress.
About this rubicund figure, seated in solitary state at his small rose-shaded table, there was still something both inalienably blithe and disarmingly inconsequential. Had the serviette tucked up under his many-terraced chin been red instead of white he would have suggested a weather-beaten but still light-hearted old robin. There was something perkily ingenuous and bird-like in the very movements of this portly diner as he lifted a chafing-dish cover and peered interrogatively into what appeared to be a generous portion of chicken a la King.
Sadie, as she sat gazing at this rotund voluptuary so engrossingly immured in his ventral delights, decided that Wallaby Sam made an ideal figure for the work of a foreign agent. His blitheness of aspect was in itself a discourager of suspicion. His beaming blandness of eye and his rosiness of cheek gave him an outward semblance of care-free innocence in no way suggestive of the international intrigant. And Sadie further realized that if Wallaby Sam had seen her, he was now bent on ignoring her.
So at the moment that he was engaged in prodding critically into the depths of his steaming chafing-dish Sadie took the bull by the horns. She rose from her chair, gathered up her possessions and moved forward until she came to the table of the fat man so engrossed in his collation.
The fat man in question did not even look up as the young lady with the debonair droop and the tip-tilted nose sank into a seat opposite him. As before, all his attention seemed centered on the viands before him.
"Ain't it crool, the way most men'll furget a soul-mate?" murmured Sadie.
Wallaby Sam reached for his glass of Chablis, took a sip from it and put it down on the table again. Then he looked up at Sadie, blinking at her with impassive and only mildly querulous eyes. Then he gave all his attention to the plate beside him.
"And me tryin' to ketch your eye for the last half-hour!" lamented the slighted Sadie.
"So I noticed," the blithe old robin calmly announced.
This, for a moment, seemed to dampen the effusive young lady's ardor. But it was only for a moment.
"What's the reason for the frost?" she determinedly inquired.
"I don't get bit twice by the same snake!" quietly averred the rosy-cheeked old gentleman, as he stabbed his heart of lettuce to the core. Then he cut it, crisscross, with much vigor.
"I guess I'm the party that's gotta kick comin' for that old rumble," maintained the girl. But Wallaby Sam, alias Adolph Breitman, chose to ignore her complaint. It was several minutes, in fact, before he spoke again.
"What, I mean who, are you doing these days?" he grimly inquired.
"I ain't feedin' no goldfish!" quite as grimly retorted Sadie, and that reference to the old days tended to make the man opposite her wince a trifle. "But for a couple o' months, Baron, I was eatin' wheat-cakes wit' the down-and-outers. And yuh was the party that put me there!"
Wallaby Sam glanced appreciatively over her resplendent attire.
"You seem to have emerged from the experience without material loss," he reminded her.
Sadie was able to muster up the semblance of a contented little laugh.
"Oh, I'm workin' a new line nowadays!"
"What line?" casually inquired the diner.
"Cuttin' keys!" was the laconic reply.
Wallaby Sam finished up his creamed chicken before speaking again.
"And what do you make out of cutting keys?" he finally inquired.
"I make a haul o' loose joolry now and then!" Sadie recklessly acknowledged. "And now and then I get sumpin worth more'n joolry!"
"Such as?" inquired her companion.
"Yuh see," explained Sadie, "I hit one o' the best hotels, rent a room for a day and get a key. But b'fore I give up me room I beat it over to me own little joint, cut a dooplicate o' that hotel key and hand in the original. Then I blow up from the Palm Room or the Fox Trottery when the next party is out, and fine 'em a bunch o' rhinestones for not keepin' their jools under cover!"
"And I assume you are working this hotel at this particular moment?"
Sadie smiled.
"Oh, I slipped into four twenty-seven jus' for the sake of old times," she audaciously announced. Wallaby Sam, with knife and fork poised upright, sat studying her serene-eyed young face. For she had taken the trouble, before approaching him, to ascertain from the office the exact number of Breitman's quarters in the Alsatia.
"So you were in four twenty-seven?" he meditatively repeated.
"That gimme the nerve to swing down here," she pregnantly acknowledged.
Wallaby Sam put aside his knife and fork. Then, still meditatively, he moved his head slowly up and down.
"You're a clever girl!" he quietly declared. "You deserve a better line of work!"
"I'm wit' yuh there!"
"And I'm going to give it to you."
"When?" asked Sadie.
"As soon as I finish this meal," replied Wallaby Sam with decision. But still he sat regarding her without the slightest spirit of animus.
"And where'll it be?" asked the careless-eyed Sadie.
"Right over in my office," was the answer.
"Then s'posin' yuh loosen up and order me a Peach Melba and a cup o' cawfee," suggested the pert-faced girl, with a shrug of indifference. "For if I work wit' a party, I also eat wit' him!"
Wallaby Sam studied her as she sat licking whipped cream from her long-handled spoon. She did it with a quietness oddly feline. He studied her as she smiled back at him over her demi-tasse, chirpily inquiring if it didn't kind of remind him of other days. And he continued to study her as she sat at his side in a taxicab, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as they made their way to his rooms.
Sadie, on the other hand, was by no means favorably impressed with either the unsavory neighborhood or the blank-fronted side-street house wherein Wallaby Sam acknowledged those rooms to be. But she showed no hesitation as she stepped from the taxicab and waited for her ruddy-cheeked companion to unlock the house-door. She was not afraid of Wallaby Sam as she would have been of Keudell. And she had sufficiently run the gauntlet of forbidding-fronted houses to be no longer intimidated by them.
"We'll go to my office on the first floor up," explained Wallaby Sam, as he ushered her in. He switched on the hall lights and led Sadie toward the stairway which faced them. He touched another light-button at the head of the stairs, unlocked a massive-looking door and opened it.
"Be so good as to switch on the light," he politely requested as he ushered Sadie through this second door and pointed to the push-button faintly discernible on the farther wall.
She still felt reasonably sure of herself. And at that juncture, she told herself, nothing was to be gained by hesitation. So she stepped briskly forward to turn on the switch.
She was half-way across the room when she heard the slam of the door behind her. Then came the sound of a key hurriedly turned in the massive lock, and then she uttered a foolish and quite child-like little squeal of indignation.
She ran back to the door and tugged at the knob. Then she fell to kicking at the panels. But this resulted in nothing. And she knew, by this time, that Wallaby Sam had deliberately, and a little more promptly than she had expected, made her a prisoner.
She stood there for a minute or two in the darkness, schooling herself to calmness. Then she felt her way carefully about the room, padding along the solid wall until she came to the light-button. To her relief, as she pushed this, a solitary electric bulb flowered into light in the ceiling above her. Then she stood with her back to the wall, studying the room about her.
It was not a promising room, she saw, in which to be a prisoner. It was quite without windows, and with the exception of an old leather couch, was equally without furniture. She surmised that it must have once been used as a storeroom, for the heavy door, she saw, had been fireproofed with sheet-iron, painted and grained to look like wood. A rectangle of bare bricks above it showed where a transom-opening had been later walled up, for screwed to the door-frame still stood the slender rod of a transom shift. In the ceiling, at the far side of the room, was the grill work of a small ventilating flue. But beyond this the room was sealed as tight as a strong box.
"I guess I'm the Crusoe o' this island, all right, all right!" she announced to the walls about her.
But she next gave her attention to the walls, for on more than one occasion in the past she had succeeded in eating her way out through mere plaster and laths. But the walls in question, she discovered as she tapped interrogatively about, seemed to be of solid masonry plastered and then covered with painted burlap.
She went to the heavy leather couch and carefully and noiselessly turned it over. Amid the quadrangle of dust where it had stood she found a small pile of old newspapers, a pair of faded tapestry window curtains, an empty cardboard box and a faded cotton umbrella with a broken ferule. She stared down at them with disgust. Then she returned the couch to its former position, and sat down on it, deep in thought.
Then she slipped off her wrap, pinned up the skirt of her Collet gown, and having vigorously but determinedly worked a steel from her corsets, crossed to the door-frame against which the transom-rod was screwed. Then patiently and laboriously, using her corset-steel as a screw-driver, she removed the fastenings which held the lower end of this rod to the wood. The upper fastenings were beyond her reach. But she was satisfied with being able to lever away a good two-thirds of the rod, twisting and bending the solid iron until it broke under the strain.
When she shook it free of its fasteners she held in her hand an instrument of either offense or defense that was two feet in length and almost a quarter of an inch in thickness. She weighed it in her hand, studiously, as a golf player weighs a driver, and then stared even more studiously about the room in which she found herself a prisoner.
Her first point of attack was the door, on which, she concluded, she might be able to use her rod as a jimmy. But this, she soon saw, was hopeless, as the sheet-iron covering gave her no opening and the necessity for silence limited her to only prying and levering movements. So she directed her attention next to the walls. These she found, once she had scratched away the burlap and plaster, to be of brickwork. And she promptly realized that it would take her all night to burrow through a barrier so formidable.
Her last resource, accordingly, was the floor. This was covered by a well-worn Wilton carpet securely tacked in place. So it took several minutes' work with her rod to free even one corner of this carpet. She worked slowly and cautiously, for she found the dust disagreeable, and she worked silently because she wanted no betrayal of her movements.
When she had two sides of the carpet free of tacks she rolled it carefully back, revealing a dust-covered hardwood floor not at all to her liking. But near the center of this floor, she saw, was a break in the solid boarding, apparently marking the spot where a pipe-flue or a ventilator had once stood. It had been neatly and firmly patched, however, with short boards matching the rest of the tongue-and-groove flooring. So she spread out one of the old newspapers, kneeled down upon it, and began a silent and cautious investigation of the board-cracks.
In five minutes she had the first short piece of flooring removed. In a scarcely greater length of time she had succeeded in lifting away the remaining six boards. This gave her a clear view of the floor-joists and the plaster and laths forming the ceiling of the room below. What stood in that room below she had no means of knowing and no power of judging. She merely remembered that her work must be absolutely silent. For with the first sound, she felt, her last chance would be gone.
She knelt beside her burrow, for several minutes, deep in thought. Then she rose to her feet, spread several of the newspapers about the opening, found the corset-steel she had tossed aside, and from under the couch drew out the old cotton umbrella with the broken ferule. Placing these beside her, she lay face down on the floor with her head directly over the opening. Then, with the utmost care and delicacy of finger movement, she began to pick away all detachable pieces of plaster showing between the laths. She persevered at this until she had picked and nibbled a square foot of the lathing as clean of plaster as a hound gnaws a ham bone clean of meat. But the finishing coat of the ceiling below still remained intact. And this, she knew, was the perilous part of the operation.
So it was with the care of a surgeon, using her corset-steel as a bistoury, that she made her first tentative incision through the harder plaster-of-Paris below one of the wider lath-vents. A small section of this cracked loose, and with the aid of her steel point she was able to keep it from falling. Holding her breath, she finally succeeded in lifting it away. By the soft flow of warmer air against her cheek she knew that she had cut an opening through the ceiling-shell into the room below.
So she lay there, without moving, listening intently and staring down through the narrow crevice. Yet no sound was to be heard and no faintest glimmer of light showed itself. So she began to work again at the plaster, this time attacking a lath-end nearly severed by a heaven-sent knot-hole. From this knot-hole she picked away every shred of plaster, taking infinite precautions that no loose ends should fall away and strike the floor below. For what that floor held was still a mystery to her.
By this time she was able to insert a couple of fingers through the opening and could work to greater advantage. Once the lath-end was clean of plaster she held it firmly and pressed it from the joist until it was free of the nail-head, after which it was easy enough to twist it entirely away. This gave her an opening a good two inches wide and four inches long, an opening entirely through the ceiling. Through this she guardedly and slowly pushed the umbrella, first releasing the handle-spring so that when it was completely through the aperture the steel cover-rods mushroomed outward and opened wider and wider as she drew the umbrella handle cautiously upward again.
She heaved a sigh of relief as she fixed this handle in place, for she knew now that she could work without danger of being overheard. From now on all falling fragments of plaster merely dropped soundlessly into the inverted bell of the umbrella cover and hung there until she had an opening large enough to let her hand through and lift them away. She worked more quickly now, both grateful for the current of fresh air that seeped up against her face and encouraged by the thought that her movements had been quite silent. And by this time she had cleared away over a foot and a half of the laths and plaster between the two joists.
She emptied the umbrella of its debris, closed it and carefully drew it up through the aperture. Then she silently and cautiously moved the heavy leather couch over against the opening. She next took up the pair of old tapestry window curtains and tied and twisted and knotted them together. One end of this roughly improvised scaling-ladder she tied to the nearest couch-leg, the other end she lowered into the darkness of the room beneath her.
She kneeled over this little well of darkness again, listening intently. Then she rose to her feet, took up her wrap and gloves, gave one final look about her disordered prison and carefully switched off the light. Then, holding her wrap in her teeth, she sat down on the floor and gathered her skirts close about her knees, letting her slippered feet protrude through the ceiling-hole. The next moment she was lowering herself slowly and cautiously down through this hole.
It was not an easy thing to do. But Sadie was youthful and she was also muscular. She had need, none the less, of all the strength of her lithe young body as she lowered herself, hand by hand and inch by inch, along that pair of knotted window curtains swinging free in space.
Two small fears possessed her as she did so. One was that the dust from the curtains would compel her to sneeze. The other was that she might reach the curtain-end before her dangling feet came in contact with the floor of the room beneath her and that the sound of her fall might yet betray her. For she knew, once her shoulders were below the upper floor level, that there could be no going back.
Her fears, however, were quite groundless, and she had no inclination to go back. Her swaying toe touched a carpeted floor and with her next movement both feet were firmly planted. Then she took a great breath of relief and peered about through the unbroken darkness, with her ears straining for the slightest sound.
She stood there listening for several minutes. Then she stooped and pulled the slippers from her feet. These, together with her long white gloves, she bundled up in her wrap. Then she groped her way slowly and noiselessly across the floor until her outstretched fingers came in contact with a wall-surface. She continued to work her guarded way along this wall until she came to a door. Once there she put down her wrap, leaving it close beside the baseboard. Then she stood with her ear pressed flat against the door-panel.
As she listened there she could make out the faint but unmistakable sound of movements in some other part of the house. Just where those movements came from she could not tell. But they served as a warning that her way to the street might not be so clear as she had hoped.
She reached for the door-knob, and nursing it between firm Angers, turned it so guardedly that she succeeded in opening the door without ponderable sound. She swung it back with equal caution. Then, from some room farther along the darkened hall, she made out a vague ray of light. And the next moment she knew that it was from this room that she had caught the sound of some one moving cautiously about.
She tiptoed forward through the darkness, advancing on her shoeless feet without appreciable noise. She crept on until she came to the partly opened door itself. Without moving this door, she craned about and peered into the lighted room.
Then she held her breath again and stood without the shift or change of a muscle-flexor. For on the far side of that room, with his back to her, she could distinctly see the rotund figure of Wallaby Sam.
He was stooping before the opened door of a small wall safe. She could see the high lights on the polished dome of his head and along the arc of his smoothly starched collar-back. Above this collar she could see the pendulous and pink-fleshed neck. She could even hear his heavy breathing as he stooped lower and drew a packet of papers from one of the inner chambers of the open safe. And even in that position of stooping abstraction he retained an aspect that was both rubicund and bird-like in its suggestion of perky inconsequentiality.
Sadie's stare, as she studied him, was even more abstracted. It wandered from the high light on the forward stooping head-top to the center table half-way across the room, where her mildly inquiring glance rested on the tall column of a Russian brass candlestick at least a foot and a half in height. Then, taking a deep breath, she advanced noiselessly into the room, edging step by guarded step toward the center table.
Once there, and with her eyes still fastened on Wallaby Sam's stooping back, she reached gropingly out for the brass candlestick. Then she advanced again toward the open safe- front, with her intent gaze fixed on the small shining area of the pink-fleshed skull.
He neither saw her nor heard her as she stood so closely behind him. He was crouched, with blithe wheezes of contentment, over a little bundle of folded white sheets and blue-prints. Around these, after a voluptuous stare at the closely inscribed white pages, he snapped a rubber band to hold them together.
It was at the precise moment that the rubber band snapped against the folded and sorted papers that his world suddenly went out, like a bubble bursting in mid-air.
For it was at that moment that the woman so close behind him, swinging with all her force, brought the heavy candlestick down on the wavering high light along the pink-fleshed skull.
It was only at the moment of the impact itself that she closed her eyes. In the next breath she was watching him go over sidewise, slowly and gently, and quite without sound or outcry. She saw him lie there on his side, with one hand thrown out, in a child-like attitude of inconsequential weariness.
"He neither saw nor heard her . . ."
She had no chance to read further, for a throaty little groan from the fallen man told her that he was coming to his senses. But she knew that she had recovered the wireless code.
So she scrambled to her feet, dodged back to the other room for her wrap and slippers and as quickly returned. She flung her wrap on the floor, and into it tossed the entire collection of papers. She had no time for sorting. That, she knew, could be done later. But she took everything that the wall safe could yield. Then she even more hurriedly put on her slippers, for by this time the grotesquely rotund figure on the floor had moved an arm and then its head, and was even staring up at her with dazed and uncomprehending eyes.
She caught up her wrap, tied the precious papers in it by the trick of knotting together her long sleeves, and held it close to her side, like a Calabrian immigrant clutching the shawl that carries her worldly goods. Then she crossed the room, stepped outside and closed the door after her. She groped her way hurriedly along the dark hall until she came to the street-door. It opened with a spring lock. The next moment she was outside the house.
But the side-street confronting her was both silent and deserted. And she had already recognized it as an unsavory part of the city. She was afraid of solitude, wordlessly terrified at the thought of isolation. Some mischance, she felt, was still destined to intervene and rob her of her precious haul. And now, of all times, she wanted to be sure of herself.
A little way down the street she made out a milliner's shop window, opposite a street lamp. And from beyond this street lamp she could hear the sound of steadily approaching footsteps.
A small chill seized her at the fateful sound of those feet. Needling tremors of apprehension continued to play along her spine until in the uncertain light she made out the brass buttons of a patrolman on his beat. Then she promptly dove down the house-steps and made for him, like a winded swimmer making for a life raft.
He drew up, as he saw her, and awaited her coming. He did so with not a little wonderment. He even suspended judgment as she caught his arm and clung to it.
"I want yuh t' pinch me!" she gasped.
Instead of doing so, however, he calmly swung her about and inspected her from her slippered toes to the undulatory upper hem of her dinner gown.
"What's the trouble, lady?" he quietly inquired.
"Pinch me!" commanded Sadie.
"Now, little one, you calm down!"
But Sadie refused to be calmed.
"Officer, are yuh goin' to gather me in?"
He turned her half-patiently and half-wearily about. Finding her breath unimpeachable, he had secretly decided that it was cocaine.
"You run along home and sleep it off," he mildly advised her. "Take a nice long sleep and the Willies'll all be gone in the morning!"
"Yuh won't run me in?" she challenged, as she turned and stared in terror first one way and then the other along the midnight street.
"I ain't no rest cure rubber," he announced, "and I guess the best—"
But he did not finish that sentence. For Sadie had backed slowly away until she stood beside a galvanized garbage pail awaiting its collector at the curb. From the top of this pail she lifted an empty beer bottle. Then she sent it flying straight and true through the plate-glass window of the milliner's shop beside them.
"Now yuh gotta gather me in!" she triumphantly announced.
And the officer, impressed with the fact that such madness might direct the next missile at his own person, promptly gathered her in.
Her smiling docility as he hurried her along to his signal box rather perplexed him. And she seemed clear-headed enough, now that his night-stick was out and his arm was securely linked through hers.
"Excuse me, lady," he finally inquired, "but why're you so bent on going to the station house?"
Sadie laughed quietly and triumphantly as she noted that a precinct captain was swinging across the street to join them.
"B'cause I've gotta gold mine under me left arm here," was her ridiculous answer, "and I sure wantta get behind bars before it's taken off me!"