This curious creature was dressed like a workman, in heavy hobnailed boots, brown corduroy trousers with strings tied around the legs below the knees, a black handkerchief tied in sailor fashion around his neck and an old grey tweed coat that almost reached halfway down his thighs. His hands were stuck deep down in the pockets of his coat.
“Where’s yer hurry takin’ ye, Gypo?” he drawled in a low lazy voice, as if he were half-drunk or lying on his back in a sunny place on a hot summer’s day.
“Who’s in a hurry?” growled Gypo. “How d’ye make out I’m in a hurry?”
“Oh, nothin’ atall. Don’t get yer rag out, Gypo. Ye might talk to the people. We never see ye atall now since ye left the Organization. Are ye workin’?”
“No,” snapped Gypo angrily. The short ejaculation coming from his thick lips sounded like a solitary gunshot coming a long way over still air. “I ain’t workin’ an’ all o’ you fellahs, that were supposed to be comrades o’ mine, take damn good care to keep out o’ the way, for fear I might ask ye for the price of a feed or a flop. Yer a quare lot o’ Communists.”
Mulholland drew himself in at the middle, emitted his breath, shrugged his shoulders, thrust out his right foot and leaned his weight backwards heavily on his left foot. Then he turned his head up sideways to let the drizzling rain beat on the back of his neck instead of on his face. The grin left his mouth and for a moment he appeared to have become angry.
“Ye don’t seem to be in any need o’ money tonight, Gypo,” he breathed ever so gently.
Then just as suddenly he broke into an almost fawning and ingratiating smile. He continued in his ordinary lazy voice:
“Don’t be tryin’ to make out yer broke, after me seein’ the money that fell outa yer pocket in the kitchen beyond just now. Aren’t ye goin’ to stand us a wet?”
Gypo had begun to shiver. He shivered with minute movements, just as a massive tree shivers, when the forest earth is shaken beneath it by a heavy concussion. Then suddenly he recovered himself. Without pausing to think, he shot out both hands simultaneously like piston-rods. Mulholland gasped as the two huge hands closed about his throat. He struck out helplessly with his own hands at Gypo’s body. His blows were as ineffective as the flapping of a linnet’s wings against its cage. Gypo’s face was lit with a demoniac pleasure as he raised Mulholland’s body from the ground, clutching it by the throat with his two hands. He raised it up like a book which he wanted to read, until Mulholland’s eyes were level with his own. Then they both looked at one another.
Mulholland’s eyes were still cold and glassy, impenetrable and absolutely without emotion. Gypo’s eyes were ferocious and eager, full of a mad savage joy. His mouth had shut tight and the skin had run taut over the glossy humps on his face, so that his face looked like tanned pigskin. Mulholland’s tongue was hanging out.
Then Gypo groaned and prepared to crush out Mulholland’s life between his thick fingers, when he was disturbed by a shout from behind. He dropped Mulholland to the street like a bag and whirled about. Tommy Connor had rushed up from the doorway of No. 44 where he had been waiting. He was standing now with his mouth wide open in astonishment and terror.
“What’s wrong, boys?” he cried. “In the name o’ God what are ye up to?”
“He suspects me,” cried Gypo, “and …” Then he sank into silence, unable to say any more. His unsatisfied fury choked him.
“Suspects ye of what?” cried Connor. “What d’ye say he suspects ye of?”
“I didn’t suspect him of anythin’ atall,” cried Mulholland, rising to his feet slowly. His face was contorting with pain. “I only asked him to—”
“Yer a liar, ye did,” bellowed Gypo. “Ye suspect me, an’ well I know ye, Bartly Mulholland. D’ye think I don’t know ye an’ all about ye? Ye got a grudge agin me an’ Frankie McPhillip this long time. Don’t I know yer Intelligence Officer for No. 3 Area an’ that yer nosin’ around now—”
“Shut up or I’ll plug ye where ye stand,” hissed Connor, ramming the muzzle of his revolver into Gypo’s side. “Don’t ye know there are people listenin’? D’ye want to let the dogs o’ the street know the secrets o’ the Organization that ye swore on yer oath to kape?” He panted and continued in a lower voice still: “Are ye mad or are ye lookin’ to get plugged?”
Gypo’s mouth remained open in the act of beginning a word, but he did not utter the word. He half-turned his body in order to look into Connor’s face. He saw it, big, angry, menacing, with the nostrils distended, so that the insides, blackened with coal, were visible. The face was within four inches of Gypo’s face. Connor’s revolver muzzle was pressing into Gypo’s right armpit. Gypo feared neither the face nor the revolver. He stared with wrinkled forehead at Connor, knowing that he could crush him and Mulholland, both together, crush them to death, to a shapeless pulp, by clasping them in his arms.
But they were not merely two men, two human beings. They were something more than that. They represented the Revolutionary Organization. They were merely cogs in the wheel of that Organization. That was what he feared, what rendered him powerless. He feared that mysterious, intangible thing, that was all brain and no body. An intelligence without a body. A thing that was full of plans, implacable, reaching out everywhere invisibly, with invisible tentacles like a supernatural monster. A thing that was like a religion, mysterious, occult, devilish.
Frankie McPhillip had once told him that they tracked a man to the Argentine Republic, somewhere the other side of the world. Shot him dead in a
