X
It was by no means a feeling of fear that surged through the man imprisoned in that squalid inner room of the Alambo, as he heard the voice of his old-time enemy. It was more an incongruous feeling of deliverance, of relief at the thought that Maura Lambert had not as yet betrayed him. Then he stood again listening, for the sound of voices was once more coming from the outer room.
"How dare you come here?" he could hear the woman demand.
He could hear Morello's repeated laugh of mockery, and then the sound of the Neapolitan's voice. It was a voice to which little of its native colouring still clung, for as Kestner had so often remarked, many years in America had robbed his speech of its idiom, and his vocation as a criminal had further imposed on him the necessity of denationalisation.
"I can come anywhere now," was Morello's careless answer. There was an audacity in that declaration which seemed new to the man: it was not without its effect on the woman confronting him.
"But what right have you to come here?" she repeated in a voice which quavered a little, in spite of herself.
From some apartment nearby the strident notes of a piano struck up, as a vaudeville team settled down to determined rehearsals of an undetermined ragtime hit. Over and over the syncopated music was repeated, providing a raucous and ceaseless accompaniment for the dialogue taking place in Number Seventeen. That tumult of sound compelled Kestner to place his ear flat against the panel of the intervening door, that none of the talk might escape him in the general din.
"What right have you to keep me out?" he could hear Morello demand. And again there was the sound of the full-throated laugh, but this time it was quite without mirth.
"You have been drinking!" proclaimed the accusatory voice of the woman.
"Have I?" was the heavy retort of her tormentor. It was plain that he had stepped closer to her. "And what if I have? When I want a thing, I get it."
"Tony!" cried the reed-like voice of the other, in sharp command.
"Bah!" cried back the scoffing voice. "Do not talk to me as though I were a child. The time for that is over!"
"And the time for this sort of nonsense is over," countered the woman. She had backed away from him, apparently, and was standing quite close to the bedroom door. Kestner, in the brief lapse of silence that followed, could catch the sound of her breathing. Then the neighbouring piano struck up a louder tumult and he could hear only Morello's voice again.
"Do you think you can get away from me?" the Neapolitan was saying. "No, signorita, it is too late in the game for that! You are one of us, and you will stay one of us always!"
"You have nothing to do with what I am, or what I intend to be," was Maura Lambert's defiant retort.
"No, that is already settled. You cannot get away from that, any more than you can get away from me. You came here, thinking I would not find you. And the next morning I am here. And on still the next morning I will be here!"
Kestner found himself unable to combat the sense of uneasiness which rose like a chilling tide through his indignant body. Here was a force that was elemental in its primitiveness, that could not be combated by the ordinary movements of life. And because of that very primitiveness it would always prove doubly perilous. It seemed to reduce everything to the plane of the brute. It was as disconcerting as the discovery of a tigress patrolling a city street. It was a padded Hunger which could be checkmated only by a force as feral as its own.
"My father would kill you for this!" he could hear the frightened girl cry out. And the next moment he could hear Morello's laugh of careless disdain.
"He would kill me, would he? And two days ago he sent me to you, and said just what I have said to-day!"
"That is a lie!" Maura Lambert called out. "You know what happened to Ferrone, two winters ago in Capri! He talked that way, and he went to Corfu with a bullet in his arm! And when Shoenbein insisted on insulting me, as you are doing, my father followed him to Abbazzia and he was in the hospital at Fiume for over three weeks!"
"Yes," mocked Morello, "he watched over you then, because you were of use to him. He watched over you the same as a circus manager watches over an animal in a cage! Oh, yes, he took good care of you—the same care that a track-racer takes of his horse! He took care of you because he had use for you. He kept others away so that you could serve him and his ends. He put you in a cage, and fed you and kept you warm. He taught you the tricks he needed. He decked you out in fine feathers and let you idle about in soft places—but he did that because it paid him to do it! And it paid him to see that you were always alone, and he kept you always alone!"
"That's not true! You know it's not true! He kept my life clean, he kept it decent, no matter what it cost, because he was my father and he cared for me!"
"How much has he cared?" demanded Morello. "The same as a crook cares for his capper! The same as a rabbit-hunter cares for his ferret! And when he thinks you cannot be of use to him, he will drop you, the same as he would drop an old shoe!"
Kestner had to strain his ear to catch the girl's answer above the din of the piano-pounding in the nearby apartment.
"That is my father you are speaking of," he could hear the quavering voice reply, and it rose in pitch as the phrase was repeated, "my father—do you hear!"
Still again the sound of Morello's heavy laughter filled the outer room.
"So he's your father," he scoffed. "Then I call him a fine kind of a father! Ha, a fine father, wasn't he, to take all those years to train you as a forger! A fine father to take a young girl and show her the secrets of counterfeiting, and keep her at it, until she was the best steel-engraver in the business! He was a kind man, was he not, to take you out of a convent, when he found you were clever with a pen and brush, and put you to copying postage-stamps and Austrian bank-notes and let you think it was for museum exhibitions! That was a fine trick, was it not? Ha, and he was a fine father when he tried to match you off with that check-forger named Carlesi, that smooth-tongued cut-throat who had swindled his way from Messina to Berlin and back before you had stopped playing with your dolls! Ah, I see you remember Carlesi!"
"I don't want to hear any more of this!" cried the girl. "I can't listen to—"
"But you must hear more of this," contended the other, losing himself more and more in that fiery torrent of words as he went on. "And you are going to hear it now. I, myself, Antonio Morello, have something to say about that. Carlesi you remember, yes, and you will never forget him. This man you call your father said you should marry him—you, a girl of eighteen and Carlesi already hunted out of Berne and Vienna and Budapest by the police! Do you know why he planned that marriage? I will tell you why. He saw he was losing his hold over you, and he was afraid. He needed you in his work. He had spent years in making you what you were. But he saw you were beginning to be restless, that your heart was not at rest, that you might break away from him! And he wanted to tie you down, for his own use. He wanted to chain you to where he had placed you, the same as a dog is tied to its kennel. And Carlesi was to be the chain to hold you there!"
"That is not true!" half moaned the girl.
"Ha, so it is not true? And it is not true, that night in Perugia, in the villa where by chance you found the first printing-press? That night when Carlesi tried to come through the window, after you had quarrelled with him in the garden. That was your father's villa, on that night, and Carlesi could never have come to that window without your father's consent. No, this fine father of yours knew what Carlesi was going to do. That was part of the plan. But you shot Carlesi as he pushed his way in through the window. Ah, you remember that too! You shot him, through the curtains, and he fell back into the garden. That was something which this man Lambert had not looked for. It changed his plans. But it did not end them. He was too clever for that!"
"I will not listen," cried the desperate girl. "I will not listen to this!"
"You must listen. For it is time you heard these things. You killed Carlesi. And he fell into the garden, and your father took care of the body. He covered up the crime and promised that no one should know. It took much money. That was explained to you, and that was why, the next day, you forged the signatures to the Paris Electric certificates which had been stolen a month before. Lambert knew, then, that he had you under his thumb. You had killed a man, and no one must know. It was the secret between you and your father. It was the chain that held you down. And Carlesi dead was worth even more to him than Carlesi alive!"
"Oh, don't—don't!" half sobbed the girl. "Don't go on with this!"
But Morello was not to be stopped.
"You killed Carlesi. You leaned out of the window and saw your father carry the body away. You saw it, with your own eyes. But you did not see everything. You did not see where he was taken. You did not see that he was still alive, and that in three weeks' time he was given four thousand lira on condition that he go to America and never be seen back in Italy!"
"What do you mean by that?" gasped the breathless girl.
"I mean what I have said. You did not kill Carlesi. It was this fine father of yours who lied to you, who made you think you had murdered a man!"
"This can't be true—it can't!"
"I can prove it is true. I can bring this man Carlesi to you, and then you will know. He will point out the bullet-wound, with his own finger. Then you will understand who the liar is!"
The girl's voice was so quiet that the listening Kestner could scarcely catch her next words as she spoke.
"My father would never lie to me like that! He would never do that!"
It was then that Morello exploded his final devastating truth at her.
"Your father!" he cried. "He is no more your father than I am!"