II
It was exactly one hour later that Kestner stopped his taxi-cab on a side-street sloping down to the East River water-front. He was apparelled in a suit of rusty brown, purchased from a Seventh Avenue second-hand man, a pair of square-toed tan shoes that had both seen better days and been made for larger feet, and a weather-stained felt hat with an oily sweatband and a sagging brim.
He slackened his pace a little as he turned the corner, leisurely rolling a Durham cigarette and as leisurely returning the cotton pouch to his coat-pocket. He stared indolently and irresolutely about him, as he stood opposite the shooting-gallery window. Then he shuffled by, hesitated, and finally swung back in his tracks. But during every moment of that apparent aimlessness he was carefully inspecting his ground.
As he shuffled into the gallery itself he found it comparatively deserted, steeped in the lull of its mid-afternoon quietness. Yet he stood puffing his cigarette, lethargically watching two youths in sailor blouses as they shot at a glass ball dancing at the summit of a fountain spray. They were shooting desultorily, and with comments of ribald disgust. So Kestner sank into one of the four red-armed chairs ranged in front of the street-window. From that point of vantage he stared casually and dreamily about him.
He found himself confronted by a long and rather low-ceilinged room filled with the drifting fumes of gun-oil and tobacco and smokeless cartridges. Across the front of this room ran a counter, with a hinge-top at one end, and at the other an orderly row of waiting fire-arms.
Behind this counter stood an anæmic and sallow-faced youth of about twenty, languidly passing the blade of a broken-handled razor along the face of an oil-covered hone. About that youth Kestner could find little that was worthy of attention. But he let no movement of the sallow-faced boy escape him.
Beyond the counter-top were the targets, white-painted discs of metal, a row of clay pipes illuminated by unseen electric-bulbs, and a further row of diminutive white ducks which travelled on an endless chain across a dusky and well-devised background, a ceaseless, hurrying procession ceaselessly inviting the skill of the most casual visitor. A more remote target stood at the end of a galvanised iron tube, and along one side of this narrow tube ran a hemp rope connecting with a whitening brush on a pivot.
It was not until the two sea-faring youths put down their rifles, relighted their stogies, and wandered on to other diversions, that Kestner languidly rose from his chair and advanced to the gun-counter. As he did so the sallow-faced youth pulled the hemp rope and rewhitened the tunnel target, switched on the lights which illuminated his crowded parliament of targets, and went on with his honing.
Kestner threw down a quarter and picked up a rifle. As he took deliberate aim at one of the moving white ducks he noticed that a door in the side-wall to the left had opened and another man had stepped into the room. And Kestner's interest in that gallery immediately increased.
He fired and saw a duck go down. Then he turned and glanced sleepily at the newcomer. It would have taken a keen eye to discern any interest or any alteration in that look. The change was there, however, for at a glance the man in the rusty brown clothes had realised that the intruder was not Carlesi.
Yet this intruder was not without his points of interest. He appeared to be a rotund and square-shouldered and small-eyed man of about forty-five, with a skin so oddly weather-reddened that its colour seemed to have been deepened with brick-dust. His wide-brimmed Stetson hat was stained with sweat, and from one corner of the full-blooded thick lips drooped a green Havana cheroot.
Kestner, as he tried for another duck and sent it over, conceded there was both audacity and authority in that figure with the brick-dust skin and the alert little eyes. And Kestner, as he aimed for a bull's-eye and missed by a bare inch, wondered just what that picturesque newcomer's business could be, and just what connection he could have with Carlesi and a bundle of bond-paper.
But curiosity did not deter Kestner from his target practice. He remembered, as he tried again for the nearest bull's-eye and rang the bell, his long months of rifle and revolver work, his early pistol-drill as a police "rookie," his idle weeks and weeks of shooting at the Monte Carlo pigeons. He had always been proud of his gun-work. But his aim would have been more assured, he knew, if the number of his cigars had been more limited.
He was able to go down the row of clay pipes, however, snapping pipe after pipe off at the stem, each in its turn. Then, having leaned over the counter in utter idleness for a minute or two, he tried out the tube target. His third shot rang the bell. So did his fifth, his eighth, his ninth and his tenth. Then he put down his gun, felt through his pockets, and stared about with a heavy-eyed dismay.
"Hell!" he mumbled, "there ain't even a dime for another go!"
He was conscious of the fact that the stranger in the sweat-stained Stetson had crossed over to the counter and was standing close beside him. He could hear the click of a coin as it was snapped down on the board.
"Jigger, hand the gen'leman a gun. It's worth a nickel or two to see real shootin'!"
Kestner laughed with lazy unconcern, took the rifle, and tried for his eleventh target.
"Missed!" ejaculated the stranger as the bullet left its tell-tale stain a half-inch above the bull's-eye.
"'S what booze does," complained Kestner as he sighted again. Out of the next six shots, however, four of them were bull's-eyes. It was by that time, too, that Kestner had decided on his rôle.
"You're a slick shot," solemnly admitted the stranger.
"Get me some day without a hang-over," was the other's heavily boastful reply.
"Say, son, where'd you learn to shoot that way?"
"Down in the Panhandle Country," was the promptly mendacious reply.
"Learnt ridin', too, I s'pose?"
"Anything on hoofs," acknowledged the other, as he made a fumble at rolling a cigarette.
"You out o' work?" casually inquired the stranger.
"Yep!"
"What's your trade?"
Kestner felt that his new friend was not long in getting down to cases.
"Tried brakin' on the C. and G. T., but the work was too heavy. Before that I was a plumber. But I got in bad, out yonder."
"Where?"
Out West."
"How?"
"Scabbin'."
"I guess you've done strike-breakin' then?"
"Sure. A man's got to live."
"And you ain't gun-shy of a little excitement?" Kestner laughed.
"I can eat it." Then he yawned, openly and audibly. "But what I could eat now's about ten hours' sleep."
The stranger at his side grew suddenly thoughtful.
"I'm roundin' up a bunch o' strike-breakers myself," he explained. The lowering of his voice became confidential, fraternal. "I'm lookin' for a couple o' hundred good men; and you're the style I'm after."
Kestner viewed him with a carelessly cynical eye.
"What're you payin'?"
"Three dollars a day, and everything found. That includes transportation from New York."
"In gold?"
The query elicited a guarded look of appraisal from the stranger in the Stetson hat. The figure in rusty brown, apparently, was not as unsophisticated as he looked.
"Gold, sure," was the final response.
"And where's the transportation to?"
The stranger waved an ambiguously comprehensive arm.
"Down South."
"But how far down?" Kestner backed disdainfully away. "Get this, my friend, first crack: No Mexican stuff for mine!"
"Oh, we'll call this the other side of the Canal."
"But what's the game?"
"Protectin' nitrate mines."
"Go on!"
"Ain't that enough?"
"Not for me." Kestner leaned sleepily against the shooting-gallery counter. The other man stood studying him.
"Look here, son, I'm roundin' up a bunch o' longhorns who can take a chance, and do what they're told, and keep their mugs shut. That's worth three dollars a day. And if they can shoot it's worth two dollars extra."
"That sounds like Banana belt revolution work."
"No, son, it's just Banana belt politics. And once we carry the election in that republic there's a three hundred dollar bonus waitin' for ev'ry man who's made good. And I'm a poor guesser if you'd be a quitter in a game like that."
"Oh, I'm glad enough to get out o' this burg. But I'm bust. What're you givin' me down?"
"Twenty bones."
"And no questions asked?"
"All you've got to do is step down to the office and sign up."
Kestner viewed the other man with a sudden show of suspicion. But that mention of an office interested him.
"There's no street-parade about this thing, is there?"
"Son, what're you scared of?" was the stranger's gentle inquiry.
"I'm scared o' nothin'. But a couple o' flatties've got my number and they're goin' to pound me off the island. All I want is a corner to crawl into till I can sleep this head o' mine off."
"Then just step this way," said the man with the Stetson hat, as he glanced casually about and crossed to the sidewall door and opened it. He waited until the sleepy-eyed man at his heels had passed through that door. Then he swung it shut.
"And here's your twenty to cinch the thing," he added as he produced a capacious roll of bills and peeled off two yellowbacks.
Kestner took the two bills, folded them up, and started to tuck them carefully into his vest pocket. Then, as he listlessly followed the other man down the narrow steps into the next room, he drew out those yellowbacks for a second inspection.
"I thought you paid in gold," he suddenly demurred.
"That's as good as gold, ain't it?"
Kestner, at the moment, did not answer, for he was staring down at the two ten-dollar notes, re-inspecting them with the trained eye of the expert.
"Ain't that as good as gold?" demanded the other man.
"Sure," was Kestner's easy answer, for the first glance had warned him that those two yellowbacks were counterfeits. And the second glance had convinced him of the fact that they had been printed from Lambert plates, with Lambert inks, and on Lambert paper.
Kestner found himself in a basement-room which, bore evidence of at one time being used as a plumber's shop. In the front corner stood an overturned enamel bath-tub and a couple of hand-bowls of the same material. Behind these lay a pile of gas-piping, and in the heavily grated window below the street-level Kestner could make out a dusty array of pipe-wrenches and faucets, a gasoline pump torch, and a broken heat-coil. Next to this window was a grated door which opened on a steep flight of steps leading to the sidewalk level. In the middle of the room stood a huge flat-topped desk on which was a telephone transmitter, a city directory, and a green-shaded electric-light.
But it was none of these things that held Kestner's attention. His quick glance had already taken in the fact that two doors opened through a wooden partition across the back of the room. And from behind one of these doors came the sound of machinery, the rhythmic clatter and thump of what could be only a bed press in operation.
"Got a printin' plant back there?" he somnolently inquired as he sniffed the betraying smell of benzine.
"Sure," said the other man, pulling open one of the desk drawers and flinging a form-pad on the battered table-top. His next movement was one of impatience. "You sign here," he said as a stubby forefinger touched the bottom of the pad.
"I do a little printin' myself," amiably persisted the new recruit. He sat stiffly down at the desk and took up a pen. Then he leaned close over the form, possessed of a sudden desire to conceal his face. For on the floor, at one end of the desk where he sat, stood a gallon can—a can from which the top had been cut away. Yet the insignia and the lettering on this can testified to the fact that it must recently have held olive oil. And oil, Kestner knew, could have been poured readily enough from the unsealed spout in a corner of the severed top. What startled him, however, was the discovery that the can bore the same stamp as those which had been stored full of sand and counterfeit paper in the Lambert printing-plant at Palermo.
Kestner, as he leaned in sleepy dejection over the printed form and scrawlingly attached a signature to its bottom, was not as absentminded as his appearance implied. He could see that the shooting-gallery abovestairs was merely a trap to gather in adventurous roustabouts and beach-combers and strike-breakers. These worthies were apparently being drafted for some dubious expedition into Latin-American politics. What that expedition was did not greatly interest the man who had so recently sworn allegiance to the cause. What held his attention was the fact that this movement was being financed by spurious Lambert money, that he himself carried two of those counterfeit yellowbacks in his pocket, and that the murderer of Morello had in some way associated himself with the brick-skinned man in front of him.
Kestner still leaned sleepily over the desk-top. He was demanding of himself what deal Lambert in his desperation could have made with this adventurer from the Tropics.
"Gi' me a dollar a day extra," he languidly suggested, "and I'll do your printin' for you."
"You're a day too late," announced the other. "And you said you wanted to sleep off that head."
"I sure do. I never got a wink las—"
He stopped speaking, for the telephone bell beside him shrilled out its sudden summons. The man in the Stetson hat very promptly lifted the transmitter away from the desk-top and took down the receiver.
"Yes," he answered over the wire. "Sure.… This is Burke.… Sure.… An Italian named Carlesi … ever since morning.… Yes.… Carlesi.… Search me.… All right.… Any old time.… Sure.… Sure!"
Kestner, still sitting at the desk, rubbed a heavy forehead.
"I thought you were goin' to let me get where it was quiet for a couple of hours," he complained.
The man in the Stetson hat had taken the topmost sheet from the pad, folded it up, and placed it in his wallet. He stood for a moment or two without speaking, his alert little eyes studying the other man's stooping shoulders. The silhouette of that somnolent figure seemed to reassure him.
"All right," he said as he crossed the room and unlocked the door that led into what seemed to be a narrow passageway to the left of the printing-room. "You can have my whole private office."
"Me for the hay!" announced Kestner. He got up slowly, yawned, and stepped towards the open door.
"It ain't exactly hay, son," amended his new-found host, "but I've put in a night or two myself on that bit of counter along the wall."
"It looks good to me," responded Kestner as he sleepily unlaced his square-toed shoes and slipped them off. Then he made a show of clambering heavily up on the counter-top. He yawned again as he covered his legs with a worn and paint-stained square of tarpaulin.
"Sleep tight," he heard the stranger call back to him as he closed the door—and the man on the counter suddenly lifted his head, for he felt sure of a touch of mockery in that apparently blithe-noted farewell.
Then a sensation not altogether conducive to quiet repose sped through Kestner's body. He had distinctly heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock and then withdrawn. That meant he had been made a prisoner. And the Secret Agent was further conscious of the somewhat disconcerting fact that in taking his departure the man in the Stetson hat had also carried away with him a pair of square-toed shoes which obviously were of no immediate use to a sleeper.