Part 19

He turned a corner, walked on the length of a block, and on the next corner, drawing back into a doorway out of the radius of the street lamp, paused a moment to get his bearings. He smiled a little grimly. If the affair ever came to her knowledge, would she give the Rat credit this time for a spontaneous change of heart in saving the Wop’s life, and saving Ivan Barloff’s cash? He scowled suddenly. The latter proposition did not altogether please him. Barloff was not far removed in guilt from those who proposed to victimize Barloff! There would be a certain ironical justice in robbing from Barloff the cash that Barloff had all too patiently, a great portion of it at least, robbed from others! But Red Vallon and his pack were not to get it, were they? It was the lesser evil to warn Barloff, that was all. In the main, therefore, the night’s work was over, since the Wop was safe, for five minutes’ conversation with Barloff would end the whole affair now, so far as he, Billy Kane, was concerned.

He glanced down the street. Just a little ahead, on the opposite side, huddled in between two six-story tenements, was Barloff’s squat, dingy, little house. There was a faint glow of light, as though it came from somewhere far in the interior, showing through the single front window on the ground floor. Billy Kane considered this thoughtfully for a few seconds. Barloff was at home evidently, but the probability was that one, at least, of Red Vallon’s men was on watch in front of the house. In fact, it wasn’t probability; it was a certainty. Barloff, according to Red Vallon, was to receive a fake telephone message that would lure him out of the house, and someone undoubtedly would be waiting to report the old Russian’s exit. It therefore, to say the least of it, would be—Billy Kane’s smile was mirthless—unwise for the Rat to walk up to Barloff’s front door under the existing conditions!

He might have telephoned. He shook his head, as he crossed the road, and, keeping in the shadows, stepped into the cross street. He preferred to interview Barloff via Barloff’s back yard. He was still obsessed with the desire to take personal toll from all concerned in the miserable night’s work, but he realized that impulse and sane action did not always go hand in glove. He could not afford to play fast and loose with this rôle of the Rat, or take any unnecessary risks, but he could satisfy himself to the extent, at least, of a personal interview with Barloff, who was perhaps after all the most despicable of the lot, and put into the puny, shrivelled soul of the man a fear that would make for some degree of future righteousness!

A lane, as he had expected, ran in the rear of the tenements and Barloff’s house. Billy Kane slipped into this, located Barloff’s house, low-lying against the sky line between the taller buildings, swung himself over the fence, dropped noiselessly to the ground, and for a moment stood there motionless.

The yard was very small, and, but a few feet in front of him, a light from the open and uncurtained window of Barloff’s rear room streamed out across the intervening space. Voices reached him, but he could not distinguish the words; neither, from where he stood, could he see anyone in the room, though the window was quite low, little more than breast high from the ground.

And then a form inside the room passed across the window space, a woman’s form; and again a voice reached him, a woman’s voice, and Billy Kane drew in his breath sharply. He still could not distinguish the words, but he had recognized the voice.

Once again he had jumped too hastily to conclusions in so far as she was concerned—it was the Woman in Black. There was no question as to why she was there; it was obvious that she had simply forestalled him in warning the old Russian; but—a perplexed frown furrowed Billy Kane’s forehead—her hand would have showed a little late in the game to have saved the Wop!

He stole forward, keeping in the shadows of the side fence, reached the rear wall of the house, edged across to the side of the window where he could both see and hear, and crouched there. His eyes swept the interior in a swift, comprehensive survey. It was a sordid, ill-furnished, bare-floored room, and very dirty. A seedy old morris chair in the center of the room supplied the only suggestion of comfort or luxury, and that an incongruous one, that the place possessed. Apart from that, there was a huge and aged safe, a relic of the days when such things were locked with keys, which was backed up against one wall; and near an open door, which apparently led into the front room, there was a battered desk with an equally battered swivel chair—and that was all, unless the telephone that stood upon the desk might be included in the furnishings. There was, however, another door, also open, which faced the safe, and which apparently gave on a passageway that in turn opened on the back yard. Billy Kane glanced around him. Yes, there was a rear door here, just a little to his right.

His eyes reverted to the interior of the room. _She_ was still pacing up and down its length from the desk to the window and back again. Perhaps it was the effect of the green-shaded incandescent bulb that dangled over the desk, but, as she turned facing the window, he saw that her face, drawn in sharp, pinched lines, was very white, and that in the dark brown eyes, all softness gone from them now, there was a hard and bitter light. And at the desk, the old Russian, a gray-bearded and threadbare figure in dirty and grease-spotted clothes, huddled deep down in his chair, and wrung his hands together, and with little, black, shifty eyes, that peered over the rims of steel-bowed spectacles, followed her about in a fascinated sort of way, and the while he kept circling his lips with his tongue.

“The Wop! The Wop!” he shrilled out suddenly, and seemed to cower lower in his chair. “Yes, yes, I am afraid! My God, I am afraid! He is strong. He would have no pity on an old man. He has sworn it. I know! I have been afraid of this day. Why did they let him out? They know, too! And I was only honest—everybody knows that. He was a thief. What else could an honest man do except what I did? He—he will kill me, and——”

“The Wop is dead.” Her voice was low, bitter, hard, and yet, too, it seemed to hold impatience and irritation directed against the Russian. “I have told you that. It is not the Wop you have to fear now. The Wop is dead.”

“But you are not sure, not positive, not absolutely positive of it!” Barloff was wringing his hands the harder; and his tones, rather than being assertive, seemed to be pleading for a denial.

“I am positive enough of it,” she answered evenly, “to see that the one who is responsible pays for it to-night! It is my fault”—her voice caught a little, but hardened instantly—“I trusted where I was a fool to trust, and I have paid for it with another’s life. But that has nothing to do with you. You know now that the telephone message you received a little while ago was simply to lure you out of the house at half past nine in order that they might have a clear field in which, without contradiction, to make it appear that the robbery they are planning was the Wop’s work. It is scarcely nine o’clock yet. You have plenty of time in which to act. You can appeal to the police, or——”

Billy Kane was no longer paying any attention to her words. Tense, strained, he stood there. He seemed to be trying to lash his brain into virility, into activity. He seemed to be groping out in an ineffectual mental way for some means to avert a disaster that he realized was closing down upon him. She believed the Wop was dead. She naturally held the Rat responsible—and he was the Rat, so far as she was concerned. She had warned him, without mincing words, that if any crime in which the Rat was involved was carried through to its fulfilment she would hold him responsible and hand him over to the police. She had reason to believe that he had already tried to double cross her once; she now believed that to-night he had tried to do it again. She would leave here, and go straight to the police. The police, then, would not only be looking for Billy Kane, they would be looking for the Rat—and they would get Billy Kane! And that would be the end of it all!

The end of it—when he already knew who the murderer of David Ellsworth was; when, apart from the collection of rubies, he had already recovered the proceeds of the Ellsworth vault robbery; when, if he could only cling for a few days more to this rôle he played, he might hope to clear his own name, to stand foursquare with the world again, and to bring to justice those who had taken old David Ellsworth’s life. Somehow, in some way, he must prevent her from carrying out what was now her obvious intention of unmasking the Rat. But he dared not show himself in front of the house to intercept her when she went out—he dared not show himself as the Rat out there. To bring the underworld down upon him was only to invite a swifter destruction from another source.

He gnawed in perplexity at his lips, staring into the room. She kept pacing up and down. Barloff had risen from his seat, and in a curious, cringing way, standing now by the rickety old safe, was fondling it and patting it with his hands.

“Yes, yes!” Barloff was crooning. “I thank you—I thank you! I do not know who you are, but I thank you! I have not much, very little, very, very little, but I am an old man, and what would become of me if I lost my little? The police, yes, the police——”

The old Russian, his back now to the window, was still talking, more to himself than to her. She came close to the window this time and Billy Kane suddenly showed himself. She was very clever, very self-centered, very sure of herself. If she was startled, she gave no sign of it. She came still closer until she leaned for a moment against the sill.

“Out here—the lane—when you leave!” he whispered quickly.

She nodded her head, but her lips had tightened in a forbidding little smile as she turned away again,

Billy Kane drew back from the window. There was a sense of relief upon him; but also a vague, disquieting, and very much stronger sense of something else that he could not quite define; only that between them there always seemed to stand that barrier of a forbidding smile, and that cool, contemptuous light in the brown eyes that very often changed from contempt to loathing and abhorrence. He shrugged his shoulders suddenly. He was a fool—that was all!

Her voice drifted out to him, dying away as he neared the fence:

“I am going now, Mr. Barloff, and I should advise you not to waste any time in taking whatever precautions you intend to take. You had better communicate at once with the police, and——”

Billy Kane swung himself over the fence, and stood there waiting in the lane. A minute, two, three passed, and then he caught the sound of a light step, and she stood before him in the darkness.

“Well?” she said curtly. “I am here, Bundy. What do you want?”

He was the Rat, alias Bundy Morgan, in her eyes, and it was the Rat who spoke.

“I heard you in there,” he said gruffly. “You’re going to beat it for the police, and wise them up about me. Well, you want to can that stunt, because I’ve got a little explanation to make. See?”

“You do not need to make any explanation,” she answered evenly. “My stupidity is at an end! That enigmatic little memo of yours was a better safeguard in itself than the hiding place in which you had secreted it, for I did not understand it until I saw a few lines in the paper this evening giving a short résumé of the Wop’s somewhat unedifying career, and stating that he had been released from prison. I was too late to save the Wop himself, but was not too late to prevent you from climbing in through that window, and carrying out the rest of your abominable scheme.”

“I went there to warn Barloff myself,” said Billy Kane.

She laughed icily.

“Do you expect me to believe that, after you have murdered a man so that you could put the onus of another crime upon him! This is the end to-night! I was mad to trust you at all. I was madder still to give you another chance, when I caught you playing a double game both with your own criminal associates and with me when you stole that letter from Dayler two nights ago!” She came a little closer to him. Both hands were tightly clenched. Her lips quivered a little; her voice choked. “I did not know what it was like to feel guilty of murder, to feel that one had taken another’s life. I know now. My folly in giving you a moment’s freedom has made me as guilty as you. But the end has come. Do you understand? You might put me out of the road, too, here in this lane, but that would not change the result any. You know that. You know in that case that the police would be after you anyway—that I have taken care of that. On the other hand, you may run for it now, and you may make it a question of hours, or a question of days, but as soon as the police lay hands on you your career is finished.”

There was a strange stirring within Billy Kane’s soul. She was very close to him, so close that he could see the pinched, haggard look in her face, and see the lips quiver again, and see the clenched hands rise to her eyes as though to shut out the abhorrent sight of him from her, and to shut out perhaps, too, the pictured sight of a man murdered, and for whose life she not illogically held herself accountable.

His hands gripped hard—hard as the mental grip in which he held himself. A sudden yearning, an almost uncontrollable impulse was upon him to reach out and sweep this lithe, fearless little figure that had become so mysteriously a part of his life, a greater part than he had ever realized before, into his arms. She would struggle like a wild cat, and fight with every ounce of strength, yes, and hatred, that was in her, but he could hold her because he was the stronger, and tell her that he was not the Rat, and—— He swallowed hard. And then what? Tell her that he was Billy Kane? A wan smile came to his lips. She would perhaps prefer the Rat! The Rat, publicly at least, was known as the less infamous of the two! He laughed a little harshly.

“Forget it!” he said roughly. “I’ve played straight with you, and before you go spilling any beans to the police you’d better get onto yourself. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I know that the Wop was murdered to-night in Wong Yen’s by you, or your orders,” she said passionately. “I know that the Wop is dead—that is enough!”

“Nix!” said Billy Kane, alias Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat. “The Wop isn’t dead, and he isn’t in Wong Yen’s either. I pulled him out of there.”

She stared at him, coming still closer in the darkness until he could feel her breath upon his face. It was a long minute before she spoke.

“I do not believe you!” she said in a dead voice.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I did not expect you to!” The Rat’s tones were insolent now. “But you can prove it, can’t you? The Wop’s safe. He’s at a minister’s house. The minister’s name is Claflin. I don’t know the address, but you can easily find it. It wouldn’t do me any good to lie to you, would it? You can’t drag me to the police by force, and whether you squealed to them in the next ten minutes, or half an hour later after finding out I was lying, I’d be just as bad off, wouldn’t I?”

She drew back—but her eyes were still fixed steadily upon him.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well?” demanded Billy Kane.

“I can find this minister’s house in that half hour, I think,” she said in a low voice. “And the Wop—if he is there.” Her voice hardened. “You are quite right, Bundy, it will have done you no good to have lied. I promise you that! If I do not find the Wop, the police will find—_you_!”

She was gone.

XXII—THE FIGHT

Billy Kane stood in the lane for a moment, staring after her through the darkness and his lips puckered in a sort of impotent little smile. She would find the Wop, of course, and thereafter the old relationship between them would be reëstablished, and——.

He whirled suddenly, and in an instant was astride the top of the fence, his face set and hard, as there came, low but unmistakably from the interior of Barloff’s house, the sound of blows and the rending of wood, as though a door were being violently forced. A glance showed him that the window had been closed and the shade drawn down. Barloff had evidently got that far in safeguarding himself, only Red Vallon’s Apachés had struck, perhaps suspicious of _her_ visit, without waiting for the old Russian to go out! What else could those blows mean but an attack on Barloff? Certainly, Barloff must still be in there, for Barloff, warned, wasn’t going out; he was going to appeal, by telephone presumably, to the police.

Billy Kane’s mind was racing, as he whipped his mask from his pocket, adjusted it over his face, dropped to the ground, and ran across the yard. The night’s work obviously now, was far from over yet! He had still to play, after all, that other rôle of his in the underworld—the man in the mask! Red Vallon had said that the Pigeon, French Marr and the Cadger were to carry out the robbery inside the house. That made three to one! His one chance then was to take them by surprise.

He was working now with Whitie Jack’s skeleton keys at the rear door. The Cadger was an expert safeworker, just as the Wop was, and that was part of the game to make it appear to be the Wop’s work. The Wop was safe now, of course, but—he bit at his lips, cursing his clumsiness with the keys—old Barloff certainly wasn’t! They had intended to get Barloff out of the house, but if, without waiting for that, they struck with Barloff there, they would not stand on any more ceremony with the old man than they had with the Wop, since the Wop was to stand for it anyway. It was strange, ominously strange, that there was no outcry from Barloff, that even the sound of blows and splintering wood had ceased!

The door gave under his hand. He pushed it open cautiously, a bare half inch at a time. In front of him was a small room, obviously the kitchen, that connected with the rest of the house only by the side door of Barloff’s rear room from which the light now filtered in across the kitchen floor. He stole silently forward in the direction of the lighted doorway and halted, as, a little back from the edge of the door jamb, he stared in amazement into the room beyond.

The door near Barloff’s desk that led into the front room hung shattered on its hinges, its panels broken and splintered, but the only occupant of the room was Barloff himself. The man was standing there, a hatchet in his hand, surveying the wreckage, and mumbling inaudibly to himself.

And then suddenly there came a twisted smile of comprehension to Billy Kane’s lips. Old Barloff laid the hatchet down on the desk, and, rubbing his hands together in a sort of fiendish exaltation, a malicious grin on his cunning and crafty face, ran over to the safe and knelt before it. His mumble became quite audible now:

“The Wop! The Wop! Dead—eh? And all these little rentals, these nice little rentals, just in! And. if they are stolen—eh? I am a poor man—eh? I could not replace them. And so they would be mine—mine. She’s sure he is dead. She said so—that they murdered him. But she did not see it with her own eyes. If she comes back and tells the police that, I will say that the Wop must have escaped the trap they set for him, for with my own eyes I saw him, and since he is dead he will not be able to deny that. Yes, yes, Barloff, your old brain is still your best friend! And the others—ha, ha! They have planted it on the Wop—ha, ha! It would be a pity to disappoint them—and lose the rentals. Yes, yes, Barloff, that is so, is it not? Certainly, the Wop has robbed you, and tried to get revenge on you, too, because you were honest enough to go to the police five years ago!”

The man had the safe open now, and was snatching books and papers from the interior, and throwing them in a litter upon the floor. And now he had an old tin cash box in his hands. He laid this on the floor and opened it, and in a sort of hideous rapacity seemed to gloat over it. He dipped in his hands and lifted out banknotes, and let them filter through his fingers, and rubbed his hands together, and buried them again in the money; while behind the steel-bowed spectacles his little black eyes glittered with feverish exaltation again, and his whole body seemed to quiver in unholy, greedy worship.

Billy Kane’s jaw locked hard. The man’s whole life was a damnable hypocrisy—a rogue’s alias. Thousands the man had somewhere, and, by comparison, the paltry hundreds in the cash box, if hundreds even there were, seemed to hold up as to a mirror the man’s soul, stripped bare, until it stood out in all its naked, shrivelled miserliness, its godless grovelling to the only god it knew!

“The rentals—all the rentals!” mumbled Barloff again. “I am a poor man—how can I pay them over to-morrow when they have been stolen from me to-night, and I have nothing left? Yes, yes, Barloff, you are getting old, but you are not yet a fool!”

The man was suddenly all haste. He snatched up the cash box, and ran to the piece of furniture which had struck Billy Kane as so incongruous an adjunct to the furnishings of the room—the old morris chair. He turned this over on its back, there was a faint click of a hidden spring, and the bottom underneath the seat gaped outward on what were evidently ingeniously concealed hinges. Billy Kane’s eyes, behind his mask, narrowed in grim humor, as he caught a glimpse of piles of neatly stacked banknotes in the hollow bottom of the chair, that was a sort of spacious, boxlike compartment—and then the old miser had thrust in the cash box, closed the seat again, and righted the chair. Old Barloff, after all, did not place all his faith in a presumptive burglar’s chivalry for the obvious helplessness of the rickety old safe!

Barloff was rubbing his hands together unctuously once more, as he hurried back now to the desk. The desk was close to the already splintered door that led to the front of the house, and Barloff, catching up the hatchet in one hand, pulled the portable telephone instrument toward him with the other, and snatched the receiver from its hook.

“The police—quick—quick!” he called into the transmitter, his voice pitched in a well-simulated scream of terror, and brought the hatchet down with a crash on the splintered panels.

Billy Kane made no movement save that his lips twitched a little. The low, cunning trickery of the man produced a sort of nauseating disgust, and, too, a sort of merciless anger; but, given enough rope now, Barloff was in a fair way to hang himself, and it would afford him, Billy Kane, a very genuine pleasure to adjust, as he now proposed to do, the noose that would accomplish that hanging!

Barloff was still raining his hatchet blows on the door; and then suddenly, evidently having got his connection, he was screaming again, between blows, into the mouthpiece of the telephone:

“Is that the police?——Yes, yes!——Quick——This is Ivan Barloff——Barloff, Barloff, Barloff——yes, Barloff——Quick——Help!——For God’s sake, help!——It is the Wop!——Do you hear?——The Wop!”

Barloff slammed the receiver back on the hook, and flung the hatchet down on the floor. It was quiet in the room now except that the old man was talking again to himself, in a sort of triumphant glee:

“Ha, ha—got to escape from the Wop now—got to escape——yes, yes, Barloff, you have done well, very well—but you must hurry now—yes, hurry.”