Never-Fail Blake Part 12

He concluded, after much thought on the matter, that Binhart would continue to work his way westward. That the fugitive would strike inland and try to reach Europe by means of the Trans-Siberian Railway seemed out of the question. On that route he would be too easily traced. The carefully guarded frontiers of Russia, too, would offer obstacles which he dare not meet. He would stick to the ragged and restless sea-fringes, concluded the detective. But before acting on that conclusion he caught a _Toyo Kisen Kaisha_ steamer for Shanghai, and went over that city from the Bund and the Maloo to the narrowest street in the native quarter. In all this second search, however, he found nothing to reward his efforts. So he started doggedly southward again, stopping at Saigon and Bangkok and Singapore.

At each of these ports he went through the same rounds, canva.s.sed the same set of officials, and made the same inquiries. Then he would go to the native quarters, to the gambling houses, to the water-front and the rickshaw coolies and half-naked Malay wharf-rats, holding the departmental photograph of Binhart in his hand and inquiring of stranger after stranger: "You know? You savvy him?" And time after time the curious yellow faces would bend over the picture, the inscrutable slant eyes would study the face, sometimes silently, sometimes with a disheartening jabber of heathen tongues. But not one trace of Binhart could he pick up.

Then he went on to Penang. There he went doggedly through the same manoeuvers, canva.s.sing the same rounds and putting the same questions.

And it was at Penang that a sharp-eyed young water-front coolie squinted at the well-thumbed photograph, squinted back at Blake, and shook his head in affirmation. A tip of a few English shillings loosened his tongue, but as Blake understood neither Malay nor Chinese he was in the dark until he led his coolie to a Cook's agent, who in turn called in the local officers, who in turn consulted with the booking-agents of the P. & O. Line. It was then Blake discovered that Binhart had booked pa.s.sage under the name of Blaisdell, twelve days before, for Brindisi.

Blake studied the map, cashed a draft, and waited for the next steamer.

While marking time he purchased copies of "French Self-Taught" and "Italian Self-Taught," hoping to school himself in a speaking knowledge of these two tongues. But the effort was futile. Pore as he might over those small volumes, he could glean nothing from their laboriously pondered pages. His mind was no longer receptive. It seemed indurated, hard-sh.e.l.led. He had to acknowledge to his own soul that it was beyond him. He was too old a dog to learn new tricks.

The trip to Brindisi seemed an endless one. He seemed to have lost his earlier tendency to be a "mixer." He became more morose, more self-immured. He found himself without the desire to make new friends, and his Celtic ancestry equipped him with a mute and sullen antipathy for his aggressively English fellow travelers. He spent much of his time in the smoking-room, playing solitaire. When they stopped at Madras and Bombay he merely emerged from his sh.e.l.l to make sure if no trace of Binhart were about. He was no more interested in these heathen cities of a heathen East than in an ash-pile through which he might have to rake for a hidden coin.

By the time he reached Brindisi he had recovered his lost weight, and added to it, by many pounds. He had also returned to his earlier habit of chewing "fine-cut." He gave less thought to his personal appearance, becoming more and more indifferent as to the impression he made on those about him. His face, for all his increase in flesh, lost its ruddiness. It was plain that during the last few months he had aged, that his hound-like eye had grown more haggard, that his always ponderous step had lost the last of its resilience.

Yet one hour after he had landed at Brindisi his listlessness seemed a thing of the past. For there he was able to pick up the trail again, with clear proof that a man answering to Binhart's description had sailed for Corfu. From Corfu the scent was followed northward to Ragusa, and from Ragusa, on to Trieste, where it was lost again.

Two days of hard work, however, convinced Blake that Binhart had sailed from Fiume to Naples. He started southward by train, at once, vaguely surprised at the length of Italy, vaguely disconcerted by the unknown tongue and the unknown country which he had to face.

It was not until he arrived at Naples that he seemed to touch solid ground again. That city, he felt, stood much nearer home. In it were many persons not averse to curry favor with a New York official, and many persons indirectly in touch with the home Department. These persons he a.s.siduously sought out, one by one, and in twelve hours'

time his net had been woven completely about the city. And, so far as he could learn, Binhart was still somewhere in that city.

Two days later, when least expecting it, he stepped into the wine-room of an obscure little pension hotel on the Via Margellina and saw Binhart before him. Binhart left the room as the other man stepped into it. He left by way of the window, carrying the cas.e.m.e.nt with him.

Blake followed, but the lighter and younger man out-ran him and was swallowed up by one of the unknown streets of an unknown quarter. An hour later Blake had his hired agents raking that quarter from cellar to garret. It was not until the evening of the following day that these agents learned Binhart had made his way to the Marina, bribed a water-front boatman to row him across the bay, and had been put aboard a freighter weighing anchor for Ma.r.s.eilles.

For the second time Blake traversed Italy by train, hurrying self-immured and preoccupied through Rome and Florence and Genoa, and then on along the Riviera to Ma.r.s.eilles.

In that brawling and turbulent French port, after the usual rounds and the usual inquiries down in the midst of the harbor-front forestry of masts, he found a boatman who claimed to have knowledge of Binhart's whereabouts. This piratical-looking boatman promptly took Blake several miles down the coast, parleyed in the _lingua Franca_ of the Mediterranean, argued in broken English, and insisted on going further.

Blake, scenting imposture, demanded to be put ash.o.r.e. This the boatman refused to do. It was then and only then that the detective suspected he was the victim of a "plant," of a carefully planned shanghaing movement, the object of which, apparently, was to gain time for the fugitive.

It was only at the point of a revolver that Blake brought the boat ash.o.r.e, and there he was promptly arrested and accused of attempted murder. He found it expedient to call in the aid of the American Consul, who, in turn, suggested the retaining of a local advocate.

Everything, it is true, was at last made clear and in the end Blake was honorably released.

But Binhart, in the meantime, had caught a Lloyd Brazileiro steamer for Rio de Janeiro, and was once more on the high seas.

Blake, when he learned of this, sat staring about him, like a man facing news which he could not a.s.similate. He shut himself up in his hotel room, for an hour, communing with his own dark soul. He emerged from that self-communion freshly shaved and smoking a cigar. He found that he could catch a steamer for Barcelona, and from that port take a Campania Transatlantic boat for Kingston, Jamaica.

From the American consulate he carried away with him a bundle of New York newspapers. When out on the Atlantic he arranged these according to date and went over them diligently, page by page. They seemed like echoes out of another life. He read listlessly on, going over the belated news from his old-time home with the melancholy indifference of the alien, with the poignant impersonality of the exile. He read of fires and crimes and calamities, of investigations and elections. He read of a rumored Police Department shake up, and he could afford to smile at the vitality of that h.e.l.lbender-like report. Then, as he turned the worn pages, the smile died from his heavy lips, for his own name leaped up like a snake from the text and seemed to strike him in the face. He spelled through the paragraphs carefully, word by word, as though it were in a language with which he was only half familiar.

He even went back and read the entire column for a second time. For there it told of his removal from the Police Department. The Commissioner and Copeland had saved their necks, but Blake was no longer Second Deputy. They spoke of him as being somewhere in the Philippines, on the trail of the bank-robber Binhart. They went on to describe him as a sleuth of the older school, as an advocate of the now obsolete "third-degree" methods, and as a product of the "machine"

which had so long and so flagrantly placed politics before efficiency.

Blake put down the papers, lighted a cigar, sat back, and let the truth of what he had read percolate into his actual consciousness. He was startled, at first, that no great outburst of rage swept through him.

All he felt, in fact, was a slow and dull resentment, a resentment which he could not articulate. Yet dull as it was, hour by hour and day by idle day it grew more virulent. About him stood nothing against which this resentment could be marshaled. His pride lay as helpless as a whale washed ash.o.r.e, too ma.s.sive to turn and face the tides of treachery that had wrecked it. All he asked for was time. Let them wait, he kept telling himself; let them wait until he got back with Binhart! Then they would all eat crow, every last man of them!

For Blake did not intend to give up the trail. To do so would have been beyond him. His mental fangs were already fixed in Binhart. To withdraw them was not in his power. He could no more surrender his quarry than the python's head, having once closed on the rabbit, could release its meal. With Blake, every instinct sloped inward, just as every python-fang sloped backward. The actual reason for the chase was no longer clear to his own vision. It was something no longer to be reckoned with. The only thing that counted was the fact that he had decided to "get" Binhart, that he was the pursuer and Binhart was the fugitive. It had long since resolved itself into a personal issue between him and his enemy.

XI

Three hours after he had disembarked from his steamer at Rio, Blake was breakfasting at the Cafe Britto in the Ovidor. At the same table with him sat a lean-jawed and rat-eyed little gambler by the name of Pa.s.sos.

Two hours after this breakfast Pa.s.sos might have been seen on the Avenida Central, in deep talk with a peddler of artificial diamonds.

Still later in the day he held converse with a fellow gambler at the Paineiras, half-way up Mount Corcovado; and the same afternoon he was interrogating a certain discredited concession-hunter on the Petropolis boat.

By evening he was able to return to Blake with the information that Binhart had duly landed at Rio, had hidden for three days in the outskirts of the city, and had gone aboard a German cargo-boat bound for Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot bra.s.s-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like propulsion. And an existence so centered on one great issue found scant time to worry over the trivialities of the moment.

After a three-day wait at Jamaica Blake caught an Atlas liner for Colon. And at Colon he found himself once more among his own kind.

Scattered up and down the Isthmus he found an occasional Northerner to whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him.

Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one pa.s.sing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson and riding-breeches and unstained leather leggings. Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees.

Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men and track-layers in Chinese saloons along Bottle Alley. Sometimes it was with a bridge-builder or a lottery capper in the barroom of the Hotel Central, where he would sit without coat or vest, calmly giving an eye to his game of "draw" or stolidly "rolling the bones" as he talked--but always with his ears open for one particular thing, and that thing had to do with the movements or the whereabouts of Connie Binhart.

One night, as he sat placidly playing his game of "cut-throat" in his shirt-sleeves, he looked up and saw a russet-faced figure as stolid as his own. This figure, he perceived, was discreetly studying him as he sat under the glare of the light. Blake went on with his game. In a quarter of an hour, however, he got up from the table and bought a fresh supply of "green" Havana cigars. Then he sauntered out to where the russet-faced stranger stood watching the street crowds.

"Pip, what 're you doing down in these parts?" he casually inquired.

He had recognized the man as Pip Tankred, with whom he had come in contact five long years before. Pip, on that occasion, was engaged in loading an East River banana-boat with an odd ton or two of cartridges designed for Castro's opponents in Venezuela.

"Oh, I 'm freightin' bridge equipment down the West Coast," he solemnly announced. "And transshippin' a few cases o' phonograph-records as a side-line!"

"Have a smoke?" asked Blake.

"Sure," responded the russet-faced bucaneer. And as they stood smoking together Blake tenderly and cautiously put out the usual feelers, plying the familiar questions and meeting with the too-familiar lack of response. Like all the rest of them, he soon saw, Pip Tankred knew nothing of Binhart or his whereabouts. And with that discovery his interest in Pip Tankred ceased.

So the next day Blake moved inland, working his interrogative way along the Big Ditch to Panama. He even slipped back over the line to San Cristobel and Ancon, found nothing of moment awaiting him there, and drifted back into Panamanian territory. It was not until the end of the week that the first glimmer of hope came to him.

It came in the form of an incredibly thin gringo in an incredibly soiled suit of duck. Blake had been sitting on the wide veranda of the Hotel Angelini, sipping his "swizzle" and studiously watching the Sat.u.r.day evening crowds that pa.s.sed back and forth through Panama's bustling railway station. He had watched the long line of rickety cabs backed up against the curb, the two honking auto-busses, the shifting army of pleasure-seekers along the sidewalks, the noisy saloons round which the crowds eddied like bees about a hive, and he was once more appraising the groups closer about him, when through that seething and bustling ma.s.s of humanity he saw Dusty McGlade pushing his way, a Dusty McGlade on whom the rum of Jamaica and the _mezcal_ of Guatemala and the _anisado_ of Ecuador had combined with the _pulque_ of Mexico to set their unmistakable seal.

But three minutes later the two men were seated together above their "swizzles" and Blake was exploring Dusty's faded memories as busily as a leather-dip might explore an inebriate's pockets.

"Who 're you looking for, Jim?" suddenly and peevishly demanded the man in the soiled white duck, as though impatient of the other's indirections.

Blake smoked for a moment or two before answering.

"I 'm looking for a man called Connie Binhart," he finally confessed, as he continued to study that ruinous figure in front of him. It startled him to see what idleness and alcohol and the heat of the tropics could do to a man once as astute as Dusty McGlade.

"Then why didn't you say so?" complained McGlade, as though impatient of obliquities that had been altogether too apparent. He had once been afraid of this man called Blake, he remembered. But time had changed things, as time has the habit of doing. And most of all, time had changed Blake himself, had left the old-time Headquarters man oddly heavy of movement and strangely slow of thought.

"Well, I'm saying it now!" Blake's guttural voice was reminding him.

"Then why did n't you say it an hour ago?" contested McGlade, with his alcoholic peevish obstinacy.

"Well, let's have it now," placated the patient-eyed Blake. He waited, with a show of indifference. He even overlooked Dusty's curt laugh of contempt.

"I can tell you all right, all right--but it won't do you much good!"

"Why not?" And still Blake was bland and patient.

"Because," retorted McGlade, fixing the other man with a lean finger that was both unclean and unsteady, "_you can't get at him_!"