Part 11

I had the note just after breakfast; and the _Times_ this morning told that Lord Strathon, for England, and F. L. Géroud, for France, were arriving on the _Majestic_ for immediate conference with the Sencort committee about loans and reparations. That meeting, this morning, undoubtedly was booked for the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust,--a big bag, sure enough, for whoever was going gunning through the pipes this morning.

I’d no time to lose, so I rushed to Wall Street and up in the old Trust Building to Teverson’s office. He was down meeting the _Majestic_, which was just docking; so I sent in my card to Sencort.

Now I knew the old man slightly; he had, among a thousand other flyers, his venture in beans, netting himself something too. Also, Fanneal and Company had supplied on some foreign-food contracts he’d financed; so I was sure he’d know my name.

He did; he sent out word he couldn’t see me and told the girl to explain that he was expecting Lord Strathon and M. Géroud momentarily.

“Tell him that’s why I have to see him now,” I urged the girl.

She brought out word that the Sencort Trust would not let the contracts on the supplies to be bought with proceeds of the new loans; and, if they did, I’d have to see him later.

I said to that girl, “You read the papers?”

Of course she did; and, when I asked, she granted that she’d seen considerable mention of me, recently.

“That’s good,” I said. “Will you ask Mr. Sencort if he has, too? And, if he has, assure him I’ve called on nothing connected with my usual business, but something else of direct importance to him.”

“Rising out of your--” she hesitated and then said--“your counterfeiter’s connection, Mr. Fanneal?”

“Rising from it,” I told her, “but not stopping there. Now I leave it to you to get me in to see Mr. Sencort.”

I saw, by this time, she was curious, if not a little impressed. It’s queer how a short and conspicuously unsuccessful connection with crime produces an effect which a lifetime in a creditable business can not do,--at least not the bean business. That girl disappeared and when she was back again, it was to ask me into Mr. Sencort’s office.

The old man was at his desk and alone, and I saw at once that the girl had gone the distance for me with him; I had much to make good, so I went to it immediately.

“I’ve come to ask you not to have any meetings in your directors’ room to-day.”

Of course he asked why; and I told him, “I’ve word, which I feel sure is reliable, that there is a plot against your meeting.”

“Hmm!” said Sencort, evidently disappointed. “Much obliged for your trouble.”

Plainly, he wasn’t interested.

I said, “You’ll not meet in that room this morning?”

He was looking at papers on his desk. “Why not? I’ve had it examined. I’ve been warned before, Fanneal; so we’ve already taken precautions. These threats never amount to anything. Much obliged to you, however.”

“You’ve examined the pipes in that room?” I asked.

“Pipes?” he repeated. There’s always something about definiteness which claims the attention. He pressed a button on his desk.

The girl, who had got me in, reappeared. “Ask Reed and Weston whether they’ve particularly examined the pipes in the directors’ room,” he said; and when the girl was gone, he nodded to me. “Sit down, Fanneal.”

Some one rang him on the ’phone, just then; and when he was through talking, the girl gave word: “Not particularly, Mr. Sencort. They’re going over them now.”

Again she left us alone.

“Rather rotten situation in Europe,” I commented conversationally.

“Hmm,” Sencort grunted, chewing his cigar, with as little interest in my reactions on the European trouble as in my warning to him. He gave me the impression that, having read about my performance with those counterfeit plates, he was willing to refresh his memory upon the sort of citizen who did that sort of thing.

His girl reentered and reported, “Mr. Teverson is here with Lord Strathon and M. Géroud, sir.”

Sencort nodded. “Heard from Reed?”

“He’s outside, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Reed proved to be a tall, keen-looking chap, evidently alert and undoubtedly dependable. He was one of the bank detectives, not in uniform.

“We’ve gone over the whole room again, sir; and also the rooms adjoining. Everything is in order,” he reported.

“Particularly the pipes?” Sencort asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with the pipes, sir.”

“Very well,” Sencort dismissed him; and then he looked at me. “Much obliged, Fanneal,” he thanked me again.

Of course, he was dismissing me, but I held my ground. “The warning which reached me, Mr. Sencort, did not advise mere examination of the room,” I insisted. “It said to prevent its use. I must urge you, whatever you think, not to meet in that room.”

“Fanneal, if I governed my movements according to cautions of well-meaning friends, I’d have put myself and family and friends in a steel safe thirty years ago. Reed says that room is clear; it is on the fifth floor, so attack from the street is impossible. Here’s Teverson now.”

Another hint for me, but I stuck, and just then Teverson came in to see what was so absorbing in here, and old Sencort, in explaining why he was preferring a chat with me to a conference with M. Géroud and Lord Strathon at that hour, of course dragged in the mad idea I’d brought along. But Teverson wasn’t amused by it at all.

“Reed and Weston have both examined the room,” Sencort repeated, “and found all in order.”

“All was in order over at Ed Costrelman’s the other night, not only before but after the--the occurrence,” Teverson mentioned in a thoughtful sort of brooding manner which sparked up old Sencort.

“What occurrence?” he came back loudly; of course Teverson had the door shut after him.

“Good Lord,” said Teverson, “didn’t you know that Ed Costrelman’s dead?”

“Certainly,” said Sencort. “I also know that his butler is dead and most of his party was sick but have recovered; from something wrong in the wine or vermuth. What has that to do with us? We’re not serving liqueur at directors’ meeting.”

“It wasn’t in the wine or vermuth,” Teverson came back calmly. “It wasn’t in the food either; everything they’d drunk or tasted has been analyzed. Everything, I tell you, was in order.”

“What was it, then?” Sencort went at him, still with more impatience than interest. “Simultaneous, group indigestion?”

“A poison, a definite, lethal agent, reached Costrelman and the butler--Swan--in fatal amount and the rest in less quantity. The post-mortem on Ed and Swan was completed this morning; there was definite, characteristic destruction of motor nerve centers.”

“Characteristic of what?” This was old Sencort--yielding, pliable nature, he had, you see--at Teverson again.

“A cheerful little chemical composition which the infernal-machine and poison squad of the secret service call KX.”

“What?”

“In your school days, how did you designate algebraically an unknown quantity?” Teverson asked old Sencort, evidently knowing that the way to handle the old boy was by going to the good old Socratic.

“By the later letters of the alphabet,” Sencort grunted.

“That is the X in the name of this; it means they haven’t an iota of information on one ingredient, except by its effect; by K, they mean they can halfway guess at the other; it seems to be the masterpiece of an Austrian chemist known as Stenewisc who hides himself most successfully somewhere on the East Side here. If he’d been born in the Borgias’ time, he’d have been Lucretia’s favorite; for his stuff killed Costrelman and Swan and almost killed half a dozen more without giving the slightest warning till the physical seizure came, and without leaving an external trace.”

“Poison to kill has to get into one,” Sencort came back, not giving up yet. “If it wasn’t in the food or in the drink, where was it?”

“What,” returned Teverson, sticking to the Socratic, “goes into one’s body beside food and drink?”

“Air’s all I can think of.”

“All I can,” Teverson admitted. “And, with that in mind, I believe I’ll have a look around our directors’ room myself, if you’ll hold, up our meeting for a few minutes.”

“Damn foolishness,” acceded Sencort graciously.

“Pipes were what I was particularly warned against,” I said to Teverson.

“Come along,” he invited me; so I went with him to the fifth floor, passed Weston and Reed on guard outside to see that nobody carted in time bombs since they’d last reported the room clear, and we stepped into the regular, long-tabled, black-walnut panelled mausoleum sort of room which directors picked for their deliberations a generation or so ago.

There it was, with two windows to the street and both closed; it was winter, you see, and Sencort wasn’t the only near octogenarian to rally round that walnut. It had electric lights and nothing else but a steam radiator, carpet and chairs and five old etchings on the walls. Everything was clear; nothing was wrong in the drawers or under the tables or chairs or even under the carpet. Reed had carefully tested the radiators and steam pipes. They were absolutely in order.

But I kept poking about the room and, behind an etching, I found the capped head of an old gas pipe which evidently brought illuminating gas to the room in the days before electric lighting.

It was capped, I say, and looked quite all right, but I happened to put my fingers behind the cap. Then I called Teverson; and he felt, and called Reed.

“What do you think of _that_?” he asked.

_That_ was a slot--rather a series of slots--cut through the pipe behind the cap on the right wall. You couldn’t see them from the front; you hardly could see them when you pressed cheek to the wall but you could feel them top, bottom and sides of the pipe cut through, leaving just enough metal to hold the cap in place; and freshly cut; for the edges were sharp to your fingers and shining to your eyes. But of course every scrap and shaving of the metal had been cleaned away. The pipe behind the cap back of an etching on the opposite wall was exactly like this.

“It was to come that way, I guess,” I said carefully to Teverson.

“Was?” he repeated as carefully. “What makes you think it isn’t yet to come? Not in the middle of our meeting now, but to whoever is here, which means you and me.” But he did not move away; instead, he walked to the window and stood there looking down. I glanced down too and into Wall Street and got a glimpse of that part which seemed particularly to bear a message for us this morning--that strip between Morgan’s offices and the sub-treasury where people were peacefully passing and feeling absolutely secure that summer noon, not so long ago, when without warning at all that infernal no-one-yet-knows-what went off and did what nobody about Wall Street will ever forget.

Of course, what had strewed the street had been gathered up and the pavement repaired and flushed and swept and the buildings restored long ago; yet this neighborhood wasn’t precisely the best spot to disregard a threat of terrorism,--especially when you’ve found ancestral gas pipes freshly chiselled for no use you wish to put them to.

“We’ve expected trouble from radicals about this stage in our foreign financing, Fanneal,” Teverson said to me. “We’ve guarded Géroud and Strathon from the minute they passed quarantine; we’ve double-guarded these premises with special men who are watching every stranger who comes in to-day; we’ve taken every precaution--or thought we had. That’s why Sencort was so sure nothing could happen.”

He stepped nearer to the window and I realized that he was not standing there merely to think, but he was intentionally showing himself to convince any watcher that the room was occupied. He turned about and went on, “No one knows where the other ends of these pipes are now; of course they haven’t been used for decades. They might stop anywhere or they might have been led on indefinitely. If what killed Costrelman came through the air--and it seems certain it did--and if those pipes are conveyors for more of it, they could have pumped it in and nobody suspected till somebody fell over; it might be coming now on us. Do you feel any movement of air from that pipe?”

“I can’t be sure,” I said.

“Come out now,” said Teverson, pulling at me absolutely unnecessarily; he didn’t have to put up any argument. “I may be a damn fool, as Sencort suggests, but then I’ve rather a longer life expectancy--away from slotted gas pipes--than he. Besides, I’m beginning to feel some of this is personal against me. I was invited to Costrelman’s dinner and was expected, though I didn’t get there.... Weston, get help at once and try to cover the places where these pipes may run to; they may be entirely outside the building, of course. Jump! Reed, post men here to see no one uses this room or room next to it to-day. Leave the electric lights burning as if the room was being used and send some one, on the run, to that animal store the other side of Broadway in a cellar, Thames Street, I think, and buy four or five guinea pigs; if he gets back with them in fifteen minutes, cover your head, hold your breath, and put them inside this door; close it. If he doesn’t get back that soon, don’t even go near the door. Wait here, Fanneal.” He left me in an office near by and himself rushed away.

“Now you tell me,” he went at me three minutes later, “how much you know about this?”

XVIII

DORIS APPEARS AND VANISHES.

I was a changed man, as you may imagine. Yesterday and up to this minute of this morning, I was the laugh of the locality. “F. P. A.” had put in a little paragraph about me; the librettists of the running revues also had tamped in a line or two of appropriate personal reference to the Chicago vendor of beans, with two nice, new money plates packed in his jeans.

It was music to me to hear any one address me as Teverson was doing.

“You know nearly all that I do,” I told him. “Maybe you’ve heard I’ve been in a little mix-up with counterfeiters and others recently. I got my tip out of that.”

“Who sent the tip?”

I shook my head; it was hopeless to go into the question of Jerry with him; and Teverson was not inclined to waste time impractically.

“Pipes!” he repeated. “They were going to use the pipes; that’s all you knew of their method?”

“That’s all.”

“What do you want to do now?” he asked me, almost deferentially. “Stay here?”

“I’d like to see this through, of course,” I said. “I’d like to know what happens to those guinea pigs.”

“Whatever you like,” he answered, and shook hands with me. I could see he was getting uneasy about Strathon and Géroud. He went out and I, having nothing to do but wait, wandered in the hall.

A door opened at the rear and showed an enclosed stairway lit by yellow electricity; a girl had come up the stairs and now was standing in the dimness of the hall.

During the second she showed herself in the lighted doorway, before the door closed again, I had a glimpse of her outline. She was little and trim; like Doris, I thought.

I stepped down by her and she went to the side of the hall and stood. Then I had the instinct to seize her; and there, in the quarter-light, I saw what I was feeling with my hands. She was Doris Janvier.

With the realization, my head seemed to hurt where I’d been hit; but my fingers held firm to her, giving her no chance to get away.

“What are you doing here?” I challenged.

She was quick! “I came up to see Mr. Teverson!” she said to me. “They wouldn’t let me see him downstairs. I heard he was up here!”

I half shook her. “You came up to see if they were meeting in the directors’ room. You’re the “wire” inside to-day! You came to see if everybody was placed! Well, nobody’ll be in that room but guinea pigs this morning. I don’t mind telling you, for you’ll not get back to tell them.”

“Oh!” she said. That was all, just then. “Oh!”

I kept hold of her, not knowing what else to do or say.

“Where are they?” I asked her, after a half-minute.

“Who?”

“Your crowd.”

She waited half a minute herself and then said, “I don’t know.”

“Never mind; we’ll find them. We’re following your pipes,” I assured her. I dragged her toward the front of the hall and had a better look at her.

“They’re not my pipes!” she denied.

“That’s true,” I admitted. “You found them in place; all you had to do was to make new openings.”

“Steve!” she said to me.

“Don’t try it,” I asked her.

I could see her face now,--her lips straight and thin, her eyes fixed on me, her forehead damp with those tiny drops of perspiration which you know are cold. She was wearing, not the same suit she’d had on the train; but one as smart, with fur collar and cuffs. She was the same neat little thing who had so completely fooled me; but she wouldn’t again.

“Steve!” she repeated my name. “I came here to find Mr. Teverson to warn him. Since he’s been warned, I don’t care.”

“I do!” I retorted and held her. She’d spoken as if I’d let her walk away.

Reed was back at the door of the directors’ room with little furry things in his hands. Somebody opened the door, he entered and came out quickly without the guinea pigs. He saw me and stepped up.

“Who’s this, Mr. Fanneal?” he asked me, respectfully enough, gazing at Doris.

I didn’t reply and he answered himself. “Oh, it’s her who was asking for Mr. Teverson downstairs.”

“I’ll see to her,” I said to Reed, and I led her into a room which I found empty.

“Now you’d better tell me all you know,” I advised her.

“What’ll you do, if I don’t?”

“You’ll not get out of this!” I promised her. “Not out of this!”

Nothing yet had really happened in “this”; we’d discovered nothing actual but those slotted pipes. Not even the guinea pigs had been killed yet; but the certainty of the plot, which had convinced Teverson too, turned me sick when I thought of it. And this girl, whom I held, was in the scheme.

True, she had stopped, on a lower floor, to inquire for Teverson; but that proved nothing in her favor. I thought how I’d trusted her before and how I’d been hit on the back of the head when I went to that meeting place where I was to have my chance to argue with her, alone.

I held to her; and she gazed at me and I felt her breathing slowly and deeply. The little clock on the desk near us turned to eleven; and we both heard steps and talk in the hall.

“What are they doing?” she asked me.

I opened our door; and we both saw two men, whose figures looked like Weston and Reed. They had hooded affairs, of gas-mask pattern over their heads, and they were at the door of the directors’ room.

“Don’t go in!” Doris cried to them. “No mask’s any good! Don’t let them in!” she cried to me.

Apparently they did not hear and Doris jerked toward them. I held her and shoved her back of me. “Don’t go in, Reed!” I called and at that moment, though I did not know it, I must have let Doris go.

I was watching the men and calling to them again; they had the door open a little; now they dropped back, but they could look in.

“They’re dead,” said Reed’s voice.

“Sure,” said the other. Then I missed Doris; and when I saw her, she was at the top of the stairs where she had first appeared. She had the door open and she was standing in it, looking back; then she slammed it. I was after her, but she had too good a lead. On the third floor, she entered the Sencort offices and left me on the back stairs with a bolted door between us.

I beat upon it and shouted and then realized, too late, that my best chance was to go to the ground and head her off. Of course I never headed her; she was gone.

When I returned upstairs, Reed had ventilated the directors’ room by opening the windows from the outside ledge. He had taken out the four guinea pigs he had left penned on the top of the directors’ table. They were all dead without visible hurt or reason.

Teverson came out of his conference, which was being held on the third floor; and he turned the limp guinea pigs over thoughtfully.

“There’s only one reason those aren’t Strathon and Géroud and Sencort and me, Fanneal,” he said, looking at me. “You want to do one more big thing for us and against--them?” He moved his head toward the wall; I knew whom he meant.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Keep this all quiet. It’s asking something, I know.”

I guess I got red at that. He meant I’d played rather prominently as a goat and it was something to ask me to conceal the one thing I’d put through.

“It’s the only thing to do,” I agreed.

He gave me his hand again. “We’ll all know,” he said.

“How about the men you have tracing the pipes?” I asked.

“Nothing from them yet.”

And there was nothing until a good deal later, when they found that those old gas pipes had been extended into an unused basement room in the building to the left. When they entered this room, they found proof that recently it had been occupied; men had been doing things there with reference to the end of that extended gas pipe, but everybody had got away.

I kept quiet, of course; the Sencort people hushed their clerks. Lord Strathon, for England, and M. Géroud, for France, met with Sencort and Teverson and made their agreements as everybody read. Nobody read of that near success at gassing them dead as those guinea pigs which had been penned on their table.

Nobody knew, but the Sencort people and I and those who had slotted the pipes and killed the four guinea pigs from that next-door basement room.

“Get out of New York, Steve! Stay away!” said another note to me in Jerry’s handwriting.

It arrived the second day after the gassing of the guinea pigs and I was thinking it over, when walking on Park Avenue and, being far from my hotel, I gave in to a taxi driver who offered his cab at the curb.

“Belmont!” I told him; and he started in the right direction; then he swung to the east and was over Third Avenue. He was up an alley while I was rapping at his window.

I realized then and opened the door and jumped out while the cab was still moving; but I was near his destination. A gat was at my midriff before I’d stopped slipping in the muck underfoot; and as I looked into the faces of the gents surrounding me, I understood that, upon the rack of their club, my number to-day had arrived at the top.

XIX

I HEAR OF THE GLASS ROOM.

They were not masked; it was daylight. The hour was late in the afternoon, to be sure; but I saw them plainly as they made no attempt at concealment. And I could guess at the significance of this. They showed themselves, without care, for they felt absolutely sure I would never have a chance to give evidence against them.

I used to wonder why a man doesn’t put up a fight, in spite of having a gun shoved against him, when he knows he’s in for the worst possible after he surrenders to such a circle as met me. The fact is, at the moment, the gun at your belt is wholly convincing; you aren’t competent to imagine incidents subsequent to the occasion of its going off. So you don’t force the occasion.

“Step in there,” somebody said to me; and I stepped. “There” was a door in the rear of a building; it led into an empty room and to another door indicated as my destination.

Here was a closet without further portal and without window; its light came through the door by which I entered; and it was so dark that, when I was thrust in and the door slammed and bolted, I supposed myself alone.

I stood still, with my hand on the door panel, while the after-images of light faded from my retinas and became replaced by the blackness of pitch dark. I indulged myself--or attempted to--in some of that logic said by Jerry, a little time ago, to be the present prerogative of gervers, guns and gorillas, and in which I felt certain that pumpers of poison gas would not be found lacking.