Part 27 (1/2)
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 role 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.sed across the window s.p.a.ce, 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 furnis.h.i.+ngs. There was, however, another door, also open, which faced the safe, and which apparently gave on a pa.s.sageway 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, s.h.i.+fty 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sertive, 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 role 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 pa.s.sed, 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?”