VI
Kestner knew it was not yet morning. He also knew that he had not as yet captured Lambert.
There were still other things which he knew, and one of them was the need for silence. He was only too keenly alive to the danger, in that strange place, of the slightest sound. There might be peril in the minutest audible movement.
Yet sound seemed the one thing for which his over-tensioned nerves were clamoring. And the one relief which his aching muscles demanded was movement, free and abandoned movement. Yet he dare not so much as lift his rib-cage and enjoy the luxury of a good sigh.
That misery of mind and body would have been less acute had there been some glimmer of light, however microscopic. The unbroken darkness had become inquisitional. It kept imparting to him the impression of being disembodied, of floating ghost-like between heaven and earth, of crouching poised at the lonely centre of some lonely etheric waste. He felt lonesome. And he wished he could smoke.
The darkness that encompassed Kestner was like a covering of muffling black velvet. It was a blanketing opaqueness that seemed to shut off the very air from his lungs. It seemed something more than a mere negation of light, something tractile and enflolding, a deepening inky tide which threatened to solidify and embalm him, struggling for breath, in its Nubian depths. It had merged into something tangible and threatening, something active and assailing, seeming to cannonade the harried sentries of his nervous system with its thunderous volleys of immaterialities.
The silence too was more than oppressive. It had become enervating, exhausting. It lay about him no longer a silence of rhythms, of periodic climaxes and relapses. It was now a dull monotone, a Dead Sea of uninterrupted hush, a cessation of movement and life so complete that it seemed universal, something incredibly diffused and prolonged, a culmination of stillness that assaulted the nerves even as the continued top-most note of a steam calliope might.
Yet somewhere under the arched iron roof of that huge wharf-shed, cathedral-like in its trick of echoing and re-echoing with the slightest movement, waited the enemy he had followed so far and hunted so long. Somewhere within the walls of that water-front warehouse, perhaps not ten spaces from him, waited the leader and the last active member of the Lambert gang.
Just where that enemy waited Kestner could not tell. And in that absence of knowledge lay the core of the Secret Agent's mental unrest, his strain of suspense. They were there, together, in that midnight building. That was all he could be sure of. They were pitted in that abysmal blackness, as men pit game-cocks to fight out their fight to a finish.
Fate had indeed pitted them there, but Fate had not ordained that they should fight. For something had made Lambert suspicious. He had grown as silent as a hunted animal assured of the adequacy of its shelter. He had converted that interminable night into a duel of silences. He had suddenly lapsed into utter stillness,—and for a stillness so heroically maintained, Kestner knew, there must indeed be an ample reason. It was an unending Waterloo of waiting, and it had not been engineered without cause.
Once, as Kestner thought this over, the chill of the night air brought a tickle to his nostrils, and he had to put a finger over his upper lip, pressing it tight against his teeth, to stop the sneeze which threatened to shake his body and fling an explosion of sound across the darkness.
This brought a fresh terror to Kestner's already harassed mind. A mere cough could be his undoing; one uncontrolled spasm of the body could crown his night's work with ignominious defeat. One telltale sound would verify Lambert's suspicions. And Lambert must have nursed these suspicions. For it was plain that something had happened. Something had occurred to disturb his enemy's peace of mind, to shake his confidence, to put a stop to his raid on the olive-oil tins in which the counterfeit paper from the Palermo plant was so cunningly sealed.
Lambert, his pursuer acknowledged, might be even closer to him than he imagined. The counterfeiter might be within a dozen feet of him. He might be even closer. Kestner might reach out a hand and suddenly find his waiting enemy within touch. Nothing could be certain, in that engulfing darkness. All Kestner knew was that the other man was there, between the same imprisoning walls as himself, waiting, watching, motionless, confronting him with a stoic campaign of inactivity, an ordeal of suspended action.
That suspension of action was even harder on Kestner than on his enemy, for Lambert was inured to the periodic quiescence of the fugitive. He had always faced danger, as an outlaw, and under the strain and stress of undefined pursuers had acquired fortitude. As a criminal he had always been surrounded by some vague and unknown menace, never knowing from what quarter the arm of the law might suddenly reach. And he had adjusted himself to these indeterminate apprehensions. He had grown reconciled to the tedium of prolonged concealment.
But with Kestner it was different. As an officer of constituted authority he had been taught to move promptly and to act decisively. He had always been the aggressor, the pursuer. His nerves were the nerves of the beagle. He had always run with the hounds. He had never been schooled in this rabbit- like trick of skulking motionless in protective shadows. He hated the dark. And it was beginning to tell on him.
He wondered how much longer it would have to last. The quietness seemed to manacle him, limb by limb. He had never dreamed that silence could become such a torture. He knew that sound would spell peril, and yet he prayed for sound in some form or another. He knew that somewhere in the neighbourhood, lonely as it was along that South Brooklyn waterfront, there must be companionable little noises, the whisper of the tide running between the piles under the wharf, far-off ferry-engines churning from the Battery to Staten Island, steel shovels clanging deep in the stoke-holes of rusty freighters lying at their slips. Across that distant cobweb of steel known as Brooklyn Bridge, he remembered electric trains were roaring and surface cars were clattering. Above that huddled island of unrest, beyond the bridge again, where even midnight could not fix the seal of silence, must swarm a multitudinous crown of noises, like bees above a hive. But none of these came to that locked and shuttered wharf-shed along a lonely and sleep-wrapped waterfront where Lambert and the man who sought him were prisoners.
Kestner fell to wondering how many hours they had been shut in there together, and how much longer the darkness would last. He had no means of judging the time. He dramatized the coming of morning, picturing to himself the first faint inkling of the first faint glimmer of grey. He could imagine the anxiety with which that vague glimmer would be watched, the tensity with which he and his enemy would peer at each other through the slowly lifting translucent veil, the breathlessness with which the first actual light would be welcomed, the suddenness with which the inevitable encounter would then begin.
That encounter, he knew, was bound to take place. LLambert, after that night, could never get away. Lambert, indeed, could have no immediate wish to get away. That counterfeiter, without scratcher or breaker or colleague left, would never think of fleeing from New York and leaving behind him those three millions in bank-notes, still sealed in their oil-tins so artfully weighted with sand and cork-dust. And those oil-tins could not be opened and moved without Kestner's knowledge.
No, Lambert was there, breathing the same heavy odour of baled Morocco leather and spices and tropical fruits shot through with the homelier ammoniacal smell from the planking where countless draught-horses had stood. He was there on the lonely fringe of the great city from which he had fled; and he was there, waiting, watching, knowing that the time for finalities could not long be delayed.
But the wait seemed an endless one.
Kestner found relief in studiously rehearsing in his own mind each step that had led up to the present situation. He recalled Lambert's flight from the room in the shooting-gallery building, the talk with Burke the gun-runner, the latter's promise to get him and his three million in counterfeit aboard the Laminian and in three days off for South America.
He remembered Burke's suggestion as to Whitey McKensic, the water-front junkie and river-pirate ready for anything from "milking" coffee-bags in transit on their lighters to stealing coal from the Canarsie barges. This same Whitey was to pick up two or three of his wharf-rat friends. He was given money to hire a boat and also to purchase an inch auger of the best tempered steel. Then when the tide was right Whitey was to slip in under the Saltus Pier, with his motor muffled and his lights quenched. Then he was to take bis auger and with that comparatively noiseless tool he was to cut out a square of the flooring big enough to admit a man's body. Through that hole they were to carry off Lambert and his illicit paper, leaving him aboard the Laminian before daylight crept over the lower Bay.
But Romano and his three federal confederates had been tipped off as to Whitey's intentions. They were to shadow that gang of wharf-rats and at the right moment intercept them and hold them, awaiting Kestner's. instructions. And Romano could be depended on.
Romano had to be depended on, for just before the ponderous doors of the Saltus wharf-shed had swung shut for the night a "gay-cat" acting for Lambert had appeared with the forged order from the Saltus offices in Bowling Green. There had been a dispute between this gay-cat and the thick-headed watchman, ending in an angry visit to the telephone in the little pier-office. The watchman had triumphed and the gay-cat had promptly taken his departure. Yet the manœuvre had proved successful, for in the meantime Lambert himself had slipped quietly into the wharf-shed and secreted himself in its shadowy recesses.
Three minutes later a trucking team had thundered in over the worn planking. From the truck itself a piano-crate—duly labelled and consigned for foreign parts—had been promptly dumped beside a pile of lemon-crates from Sicily. There had been some words between the watchman and the truck-driver, the former announcing his intention of not waiting all night before locking up. So the team had turned about and thundered out again, and the great doors had swung shut.
But during that tumult of sound a strange thing had taken place. In the darkness of the wharf-shed the cover of that piano-crate had apparently taken on life, had quietly and silently opened, as though it were a huge bivalve. And from that mouth-like orifice, inch by inch and with infinite precaution, a human figure had sidled out. Then, having cautiously replaced the cover, this figure had slipped back into the deeper shadows between the pungent tiers of crated lemons.
It had had its discomforts, that hurried journey in a cramped piano-crate, for all its eighteen inches of excelsior padding. But Kestner had not given that feature of the plan much thought. For he had been satisfied with the knowledge that he and Lambert were to be locked together in that silent warehouse, and could remain there without interruption.