Phantom Wires Part 24

It was through the hair-dressing parlor that Mac.n.u.tt led the dazed and unprotesting Frank, pinning her to his side by the great arm that was, seemingly, so carelessly linked through hers. He gave a curt nod to the capped and ap.r.o.ned attendant, who touched a b.u.t.ton on her desk, without so much as a word of challenge or inquiry. The machine-like precision with which each advance was watched and guarded, disheartened the imprisoned woman.

"I'm boss here for a while, and I'm goin' to clean out the building, so that you can have this little picnic all to your lonely!" remarked Mac.n.u.tt, as he pushed her on.

A door to the rear of the second parlor swung open, and as she was led through it she noticed that it was sheathed with heavy steel plating.

Still another door, which opened as promptly to Mac.n.u.tt's signal, was armored with steel, and it was not until this door had closed behind them that her guardian released the cruel grip on her arm. Then he chuckled a little, gutturally, deep in his pendent and flaccid throat.

"We're up to date, you see, doin' business in a regular armor-clad office!"

Frank looked about her, with widening eyes. Mac.n.u.tt laughed again, at the sense of surprise which he read on her face.

It was obviously a poolroom, but it was unlike anything she had ever before seen. It was heavily carpeted, and, for a place of its character, richly furnished. The walls were windowless, the light being shed down from twelve heavily ornamented electroliers, each containing a cl.u.s.ter of thirty lamps. These walls, which were upholstered with green burlap, bordered at the bottom with a rich frieze of lacquered and embossed _papier-mache_, were divided into panels, and dotted here and there with little canvases and etchings.

On the east end of the room hung one especially large canvas, crowned with a green-shaded row of electric lamps.

Mac.n.u.tt, with a chuckle of pride, touched a b.u.t.ton near the door, and the huge canvas and Bouguereau-looking group of bathing women painted upon it disappeared from view, disclosing to Frank's startled eyes a bulletin blackboard, such as is used in almost every poolroom, for the chalking up of entries and the announcement of jockeys and weights and odds.

Mac.n.u.tt pressed a second b.u.t.ton, and the twelve electric fans of burnished bra.s.s hummed and sang and droned, and filled the room with a stir of air.

"A little diff'rent, my dear, from the way they did business when you and me were pikers, up in the West Forties, eh?"

Frank remained silent, as the bathing women, with a methodic click of the mechanism, once more dropped down through the slit in the picture frame, and hid the red-lined bulletin board from view.

"Gamblers, like us, always were weak on art," gibed Mac.n.u.tt. "There's d.i.c.k Penfield, spendin' a hundred thousand a year on pictures an' vases an' rugs, and Sam Brucklin makin' his Saratoga joint more like a second Salon than a first-cla.s.s bucket-shop, and Larry Wintefield, who knows more about a genuine Daghestan than you or me knows about a Morse sounder, and Al MacAdam, who can't buy chinaware fast enough! As for me, I must say I have a weakness for a first-cla.s.s nood!" The woman beside him shuddered. "That's all right--but I guess a heap o' these painters would be quittin' the profession if it wasn't for folks of our callin'!"

Frank's roving but unresponding eyes were taking in the huge mahogany table, in the centre of the room, the empty, high-backed chairs cl.u.s.tered around it, the countless small round tables, covered with green cloth, which flanked the walls, and the familiar Penfield symbol, of three interlaced crescents, which she saw stamped or embossed on everything.

He went to one of the five cherry-wood desks which were strewn about the room, and still again touched a b.u.t.ton.

"Blondie," he said to the capped and ap.r.o.ned attendant who answered the call from the hair-dressing parlors, "I want you to meet this lady friend of mine! Miss Frances Candler, this is Miss Blondie Bonnell, late of Wintefield's Saratoga Sanitarium for sick purses, and still later of MacAdam's Mott Street branch! Now, Blondie, like a good girl, run along and get the lady something to drink!"

This proffered refreshment the outraged lady in question silently refused, staring tight-lipped at the walls about her. But Mac.n.u.tt, on this score, made ample amends, for having gulped down one ominously generous gla.s.s of the fiery liquid, he poured another, and still another, into the cavern of his pendulous throat, with repeated grateful smacks of the thick and purplish lips.

"Now, I'm goin' to show you round a bit, just to make it plain to you, before business begins for the day. I want you to see that you're not shut up in any quarter-inch cedar bandbox!"

He took her familiarly by the arm and led her to a door which, like the others, was covered with a plating of steel, and heavily locked and barred.

"Necessity, you see, is still the mother of invention," he said, as his finger played on the electric signal and released the obstructing door.

"If we're goin' to do poolroom work, nowadays, we've got to do it big and comprehensive, same as Morgan or Rockefeller would do their line o'

business. You've got to lay out the stage, nowadays, to carry on the show, or something'll swallow you up. Why, when we worked our last wire-tapping scheme with a hobo from St. Louis, who was rotten with money, we escorted him, on two hours' notice, into as neat a lookin'

Postal-Union branch office as you'd care to see, with half a dozen fake keys a-goin' and twenty actors and supers helpin' to carry off the act.

_That's_ the up-to-date way o' doin' it! That's how a man like Penfield makes this kind o' graftin' respectable and aboveboard and just about as honest as bein' down in the Cotton Exchange!"

He was leading her down a narrow hallway, four feet wide, with unbroken walls on either side of them. At the end of this still another armored door led into a medium-sized room, as bald and uninviting as a dentist's waiting-room. Here he led her to two horizontal slits in the wall and told her to look down.

She did so, and found herself peering below, out into the well-stocked cigar-store, with a clear view of the entrance.

"That's the conning-tower of this here little floating fortress,"

chuckled Mac.n.u.tt, at her shoulder. "This place you're in is steel-lined, and it would take three hours o' chisel and sledge work for anybody, from Eggers up to Braugham himself, to get inside, even though he did find us out, and even though he did escape the sulphuric bottles between the bricks. Each one o' these little slits is in line with a nice gilded cigar sign on the shop side of the wall. So no one down there, you see, knows who's eyin' them. _We_ don't need any lookout, hangin' round the street-front and tippin' us off. Our man down below sizes up everyone who comes into that shop. If he's all right, the b.u.t.ton's touched, and the white light flashes, and he gets through. If he's not, the cigar clerk rings another b.u.t.ton, just under his counter, and we know what to do. If it's a case o' raid, our lookout flashes the red light through each o' the four rooms, with one push of the b.u.t.ton, and then our second man throws back the switch and puts out every light in the buildin'. Then with another b.u.t.ton push, the locks of every door are thrown shut, and they're four inches thick, most of them, and of good oak and steel. If the electricity should give out, here, you see, are the hand bolts, which can be run out at any time. Then we've got a little mercerized steel office, which you won't see, where our cas.h.i.+er and our sheet-writers work!"

Frank said nothing, but her still roving eyes took in each detail, bit by bit, as she warned and schooled herself to note and remember each door and room and pa.s.sage.

"And now, in case you may be lookin' for it without my help, I'm goin'

to take you down and show you the way out. We go through this little pa.s.sage, and then we take up this steel trapdoor. It's heavy, you see!

Then we go down this nice little grill-work iron ladder--don't pull back, I've got you!--and then we open this next very fine steel door--so; and here we are in what you'd call the safety-deposit vaults.

It's a mighty handsome-lookin' safe, all laid in Portland cement, as you can see, but we're not goin' to tarry lookin' into that just now."

He was already feeling his way ahead of her, and she was still desperately struggling to impress each detail on her distracted mind.

"You see, if we want to get out, we go through this hall, and follow this little pa.s.sageway, one end openin' up right under the sidewalk, in the refractin' gla.s.s manhole. Leading to the back, here, is a second pa.s.sage, all barred, the same as the others. So, if our front is shut off, and they're hot on our trail, we shut everything after us as we go, and then open this neat little steel trapdoor, and find ourselves smellin' fresh air and five lines full of was.h.i.+n' from that Dago tenement just above us!"

"And why are you showing me all this?" demanded Frank.

He looked at her out of his pale-green furtive eyes, and locked the door with a vindictive snap of the bolts.

"I'll tell you why, my gay young welcher, for we may as well understand one another, from the start. Now that Penfield's shut up his Newport place and is coolin' his heels up in Montreal for a few months, I'm runnin' this nickel-plated ranch myself. And I've got a few old scores to wipe out--some old scores between that enterprisin' husband o' yours an' myself!"

"What has he ever done to you? Why, should you want to punish _him_?"

argued Frank, helplessly.

"I'm not goin' to punish him!" declared Mac.n.u.tt, with a little laugh.

"That's just where the d.a.m.ned fine poetic justice of the thing comes in. _He's goin' to punish himself_!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE PIT OF DESPAIR

Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously, belligerently.

"What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded.

She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatose expression had altogether pa.s.sed away. There was life, now, in every line of her body.

"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, all right, all right, but, by G.o.d, I've got _you_! And I mean that he's goin' to, that he's _got_ to, make a choice between them and you. So we'll just wait and find out which he loves best, his beau or his dough!" And he laughed harshly at the feeble witticism, as he added, in his guttural undertone: "And I guess we get the worth of our money, whichever way it goes!"

Frank's impression was that he was half drunk, that he was mumbling vaguely of revenges which grew up and died in their utterance. Her look of open scorn stung him into a sudden tremor of anger.

"Oh, don't think I'm spoutin' wind! If Durkin's the man you think he is, and I hope he is, _he'll be tryin' to nose his way into this place before midnight tonight_!"

"And he will," cried Frank, exultantly, "and with the whole precinct police force behind him!"

"He daren't!" retorted Mac.n.u.tt. "He daren't get within a hundred yards of the Central Office, and he daren't show his nose inside a precinct station-house! And that's not all, either. There's no captain on this side of New York who's goin' to buck against the whole Tammany machine an' poke into this Penfield business. If that young man with the b.u.t.terfly necktie over on Centre street thinks he can keep us movin', he's got to do a heap less talkin' and a heap more convictin' before he can put _our_ lights out! That air is good enough for politics--but it's never goin' to break this here Penfield combination! Oh, no, Jimmie Durkin knows how the land lays. He's one o' your bold and brainy kind, who likes to shut himself up in a garret for a week, and make maps of what he's goin' to do, an' how he's goin' to do it, and then trip off by his lonely and do his huntin' in the dark! And he's goin' to try to get in here, before midnight, tonight, and what's more, _he's goin' to find it uncommonly easy to do_!"

"You mean you'll entice him and trap him here?"

"No, I won't lay a finger on him. You'll do the enticin', and he'll do the trappin'! I won't even be round to see--till afterward!"

"What do you mean by that?"