Chapter 16

"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."

"If you live," she breathed.

"Never fear for me...."

"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed yourself for me?"

"You must not think that. I am far too selfish--"

"That is not so. And I refuse positively to do as you wish unless you tell me how I may communicate with you."

Resigned to humour her, he recited his address and the number of the house telephone, and when she had memorized both by iteration, resumed:

"Once outside, if anybody tries to hinder you, don't let them intimidate you into keeping quiet, but scream, scream at the top of your lungs. These beasts abominate a screaming woman, or any other undue noise. Not only will that frighten them off, but it will fetch the nearest policeman."

The music ceased. She stood flushed, smiling, adorably pretty, eyes star-like for him alone.

"We are not far from the lift now," she said just audibly.

"But the door is shut. Hush. Here comes the encore. Once more around...."

They drifted again into that witching maze of melody and movement made one.

"You are silent," she said, after a little. "Why?"

Lanyard answered with a warning pressure on her hand.

The elevator was stationary at the floor, its door wide, the maitre d'hotel engaged in a far quarter of the room, while those four formidable guardians of the exit were gossiping with animation over their glasses.

"Steady. Now is our time."

Abruptly they stopped. A couple that had been following them avoided collision by a close margin. Over his partner's head the man scowled portentously--and dissipated his display of temper on Lanyard's indifferent back.

Upon those guests who sat between the dancing floor and elevator, Lanyard wasted no consideration. Pushing roughly between two adjoining tables, he lifted one chair with its astonished occupant bodily out of the way, then turned, swung an arm round the girl's waist, all but threw her through the lane he had created, followed without an instant's pause.

It was all so quickly accomplished that the girl was in the car before another person in the room appreciated what was happening. And Lanyard, in the act of slamming the door shut without heed for the protesting operator, saw only a room full of amazed faces with gaping mouths and rounded eyes--and one man of the four at the near-by table in the act of rising uncertainly, with a stupefied look.

Elbowing the boy aside, he seized the operating lever and thrust it to the notch labelled "Descend." An instant of pause followed: like its attendant the elevator seemed stalled in inertia of stupefaction.

Beyond the door somebody loosed an infuriated screech. Angry hands drummed on the glass panel. With a premonitory shudder the car started spasmodically, moved downward at first gently, then with greater speed, coming to an abrupt stop at the street level with a shock that all but threw its passengers from their feet.

Up the shaft that senseless punishment of the panel continued. Some other intelligence conceived the notion for ringing for the car to return: its annunciator buzzed stridently, continuously.

Unlatching the lower door, Lanyard threw it back, stepped out, finding the lobby deserted but for a simpering group of coat-room girls, to one of whom he flipped a silver dollar.

"Find this lady's wraps--be quick!"

Deftly catching the coin, the girl snatched the check from Cecelia Brooke, and darted into the women's dressing room.

Throughout a wait of agonising suspense, the elevator boy remained cowering in a corner of the car, staring at Lanyard as at some shape of terror, while the ignored buzzer droned without cessation to persistent pressure from above.

Out of the dark entrance to the lower dining room the bearded diplomatist popped with the distracted look of a jack-in-the-box about to be ravished of its young.

"Monsieur is not leaving?" he expostulated shrilly, darting forward.

Lanyard stopped him with a look whose menace was like a kick.

"I am seeing this lady to her cab," he said in a cold and level voice.

The coat-room girl emerged from her lair with an armful of wraps and furs.

Again the bearded one made as if to block the doorway.

"But, monsieur--mademoiselle--!"

Lanyard caught the fellow's arm and sent him spinning like a top.

"Out of the way, you rat!" he snapped; then to the girl: "Be quick!"

As she shouldered into a compartment of the revolving door incoherent yells began to echo down the staircase well. At length it had occurred to those above to utilize that means of descent.

Wedged in the wheeling door, a final glimpse of the lobby showed Lanyard the startled, putty-like mask of the maitre d'hotel at the head of the stairway with, beyond him, the head of one who, though in shadow, uncommonly resembled Ekstrom--but Ekstrom as he was in the old days, without his beard.

That picture passed like a flash on a cinema screen.

They were on the sidewalk, and the girl was running toward a taxicab, the only vehicle of its sort in sight, at the curb just above the entrance.

Coatless and bareheaded, Lanyard swung to face the door porter, a towering, brawny animal in livery, self-confident and something more than keen to interfere; but his mouth, opening to utter some sort of protest, shut suddenly without articulation when Lanyard displayed for his benefit a .22 Colt's automatic. And he fell back smartly.

Jerking open the cab door, the girl stumbled into the far corner of the seat. The motor was churning in promising fashion, the chauffeur settling into place at the wheel. Into his hand Lanyard thrust a ten-dollar bill.

"The Knickerbocker," he ordered. "Stop for nobody. If followed steer for the nearest policeman. There'll be no change."

He closed the door sharply, leaned over it, dropped the little pistol into the girl's lap.

"Chances are you won't want that--but you may."

She bent forward quickly, eyes darkly lustrous with alarm, and placed a hand upon his arm.

"But you?"

"It is I whom they want, not you. I won't subject you to the hazard of my company."

Gently Lanyard lifted the hand from his sleeve, brushed it gallantly with his lips, released it.

"Good-night!" he laughed, then stepped back, waved a hand to the chauffeur--"Go!"

The taxicab shot away like a racing hound unleashed. With a sigh of relief Lanyard gave himself wholly to the question of his own salvation.

The rank of waiting motor-cars offered no hope: all but one were private town cars and limousines, operated by liveried drivers. A solitary roadster at the head of the line tempted and was rejected; even though it had no guardian chauffeur, something of which he could not be sure, he would be overhauled before he could start the motor and get the knack of its gear-shift mechanism. Even now Au Printemps was in frantic eruption, its doors ejecting violently a man at each wild revolution.

Down Broadway an omnibus of the Fifth Avenue line lumbered, at no less speed than twenty miles an hour, without passengers and sporting an illuminated "Special" sign above the driver's seat.

Dashing out into the roadway, Lanyard launched himself at the narrow platform of the unwieldy vehicle and, in spite of a yell of warning from the guard, landed safely on the step and turned to repel boarders.

But his manoeuvre had been executed too swiftly and unexpectedly. The group before Au Printemps huddled together in ludicrous inaction, as if stunned. Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom.

So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!

The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.

"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."

From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers encountered.

"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like the devil. It's life or death with me!"

The protruding eyeballs of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the bribe.

"You're on!" he breathed hoarsely, and ran forward through the body of the conveyance to advise the driver.

Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear seat, looking back.

The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost was Ekstrom.

Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle, and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two passengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.

Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.

The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more cautiously to resume the pursuit.

Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus Circle.

The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended suspicion and respect.

"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"

"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."

"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."

"You won't unless I lose my life."

"Anything you'd like me to do?"

"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him in the act."

"Sure I will!"

The guard disappeared.

Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly, however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a wreck.

But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.

At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath the span of the Elevated.

Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.

Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a shattered window fell crashing.

There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained the platform.

In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.

Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which was at this hour dark and untenanted.

In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol shots woke scandalised echoes.

Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.

Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.

In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.

XIX

FORCE MAJEURE

This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.

If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it; that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery that Lanyard had come safely through the _Assyrian_ debacle to take up anew his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.

Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.

Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the address known to Ekstrom's associates, and so open to him, but its peculiar characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.

Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any assurance that Ekstrom would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every assurance that Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the passive part.

A banal axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights upon the offensive.

Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.

He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police intervention.

Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him the private door.

Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action, and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender, he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and strolled no more.

Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he had passed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly, avoiding all lighted ways.

Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to call up Cecelia Brooke.

No time now for that; the errand that engaged him was of a nature to brook no more procrastination. The girl must wait. He was sorry if, as she had protested, solicitude for his welfare must interfere with her night's rest. But what must be, must: until he saw the end of this adventure he could be influenced by no minor consideration whatsoever.

Not that he seriously believed Cecelia's sleep would be uneasy because of him. That was too much.

His temper was grim and skeptical. The resentment roused by the trap that had so nearly laid him by the heels, together with the subsequent effort to assassinate him out of hand, had settled into a phase of smouldering fury whose heat consumed like misty vapours every lesser emotion, every humane consideration.

Some by-thought recalling the Weringrode's innuendo that he was in love without his knowledge, moved him to laugh outright if strangely, an unpleasant laugh that held as much of pain as of derision.

What room in that dark heart of his for love?... the heart of a thief and a potential assassin, the heart of the Lone Wolf!...

How was he to know he had hardly left his lodgings before their hush was interrupted by the grumble of the house telephone?

Intermittently for upward of three minutes that sound persisted. When at length it discontinued the quiet of the untenanted rooms reigned undisturbed for a brief time only.

An odd metallic stridor became audible, a succession of scrapings of stealthy accent at the private entrance. Its latch clicked. The door swung back against the wall with a muffled bump. Two pairs of furtive feet padded in the little private hallway. The flash of an electric hand-lamp flickered hither and yon like a searching poignard, picked out the door to the one bedchamber and vanished. There was guarded whispering, then a thud as one of the intruders gained the middle of the bedchamber in a bound. An instant later a switch snapped, and the room was flooded with light.

Beneath the chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven jowls; and his eyes were blazing.

"Stole away!" he muttered briefly in disgust, then called: "Ed!"

As quietly as a shadow a second man joined him, greeting him with a "Hush!"

This gentleman was in far more presentable repair and a more equable frame of mind. There was even a glint of amusement in his hard blue eyes. His countenance had an Irish cast.

"Hush?" the other iterated with contempt. "What for? The hound's not here."

"No, Karl," Ed admitted; "but there are others in the house. If it's known to them that Lanyard's out, they may turn in a police alarm; and I for one have had enough of bulls for one night."

Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."

"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."

"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about." Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"

His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.

"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.

In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.

"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting, anyway."

"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."

The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.

"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.

"Shut up! Listen...."

Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a negro.

"No'm, he ain't in."

The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.

"Are you sure?"

"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's all."

"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"

"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"

"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home that he is all right."

"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"

"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."

"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho' has got the p'suadin'est way...."

The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.

"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with on the boat. She may know something...."

"But--"

"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss Cecelia Brooke."

Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made directly toward the central chandelier.

"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"

But the girl had impetuously followed him in.

The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.

Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.

XX

RIPOSTE

The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor delay.

There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street; this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these, Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike economy of motion.

Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.

Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.