“Have been removed. Your new quarters are prepared for you. Be good enough to follow me.”
Slowly, Professor Morgenstahl stood up, watched by unflinching green eyes. He moved around the corner of the table, where the nearly completed model stood. He was estimating the weight of that tall, gaunt figure; and to ounces, his estimate was correct. But in the moment when, clear of the heavy table, he was preparing to strangle with his bare hands this yellow-faced horror who had rescued him from the grave, only to plunge him into a living hell, the watching eyes seemed to grow larger; inch by inch they increased—they merged—they became a green lake; he forgot his murderous intent. He lost identity. . . .
Chapter 32
BELOW WU KING’S
“Lay off there,” shouted Inspector Finney.
The roar of the oxy-acetylene blowpipe ceased. They were working on the third door below Wu King’s premises, from a tunnelled staircase of the existence of which Wu King blandly denied all knowledge. Turning upwards:
“What’s new?” Finney shouted.
“We’ve got the street door open!”
Leaving the men with the blowpipe, Finney ran up. The air was stifling, laden with acrid fumes. An immensely heavy door, an iron framework to the outer side of which the appearance of a wall had been given by cementing half-bricks into the hollow of the frame, stood open. A group of men sweating from their toils examined it. Outside, on the street, two patrolmen were moving on the curious sightseers.
“So that was the game,” Finney murmured.
“No wonder we couldn’t find it,” said one of the men, throwing back a clammy lock of hair from his damp forehead. It looks like a brick wall and it sounds like a brick wall!”
“It would,” Finney commented drily: “it is a brick wall, except it opens. Easy to guess now how they got it fixed. They did their building from the other end, wherever the other end is. Now just where do we stand?”
He stepped out on to the street, looking right and left. The masked door occupied the back of a recess between one end of Wu King’s premises and the beginning of a Chinese cigar merchant’s. Its ostensible reason was to accommodate a manhole in the sidewalk. The manhole was authentic: it communicated with an electric main— Inspector Finney knew the spot well enough. Tilting back his hard black hat, he stared with a strange expression at the gaping opening where he had been accustomed for many years to see a brick wall.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he muttered.
“This lets Wu out, I guess,” said one of the men. “If we didn’t know the darned thing was here, he can claim he didn’t.”
“He’ll do it,” Finney replied. “And he’ll probably get by with it. . . . There must be a bell some place: we traced the cable.”
“We found it. Forced it out blowing through the iron. The brickwork’s made to look kind of old, and there were posters stuck to it. I guess the push was under the posters; that’s how it looks.”
Inspector Finney went inside again, first glancing sharply right and left at the expressionless faces of a number of Chinamen who, from a respectful distance, were watching operations. There was an elaborate lock to this ingenious door, electrically controlled—but where from, remained to be discovered. . . .
Ten minutes later the third door was forced, and Inspector Finney found himself in a rectangular saloon curiously appointed but showing evidence of long neglect. The place, now, smelled like an iron foundry.
“This looks like an old dope joint to me,” said one of the party, “but it’s plain it hasn’t been used for a long while.”
“Strip all the walls,” Finney ordered; “we’re not through yet.”
A scene of whole-hearted wrecking followed upon which the Fire Department could not have improved. Nevertheless, nearly an hour had elapsed before a cunningly hidden fourth door was discovered.
“Go to work, boys,” said Finney.
The sweating workers got busy, bringing down the blowpipe and rigging it for further operations. Finney stared spec-ulatively at a patch of scarred wall. He did not know, indeed never learned, that beyond that very piece of wall upon which his gaze was fixed a spiral staircase led from a point below to the top floor of Wu King’s building. Since only by measurements and never by sounding could the shaft in which it ran be discovered, it was not unnatural that Inspector Finney should concentrate the whole of his attention upon the fourth iron door recently discovered.
These iron doors made him savage. At the present moment he was recalling a recent conversation with the government agent Hepburn; he remembered boasting that no such door could be fitted in the Chinatown area without his becoming aware of the fact. It was a bitter pill, for here were four!
He reflected with satisfaction, however, that no man knows everything. At least he could congratulate himself upon the finding of this secret staircase. Between the eastern end of Wu King’s premises and the western end of that adjoining, measurements had shown a space unaccounted for. Operating from inside Wu King’s, floor boards had been torn up and a thick party wall brought to light. Through this Finney had caused a way to be broken; and they had found themselves on the first stair below street level.
That was good work! He resettled his hard hat upon his hard head and lighted a cigarette. . . .
Nevertheless, from the time that operations had commenced in early morning, up to the moment when the fourth door succumbed, many weary hours of toil had been spent by the party under Inspector Finney. He was up on the street wondering what all this secret subterranean building really meant when:
“We’re through!” came a cry, hollow, from the acrid depths.
A minute later he stood on the lowest step, directing the ray of his torch upon oily, dirty-looking water.
“I guess that’s tidal level,” a voice said, “but sometimes these steps went deeper.”
