Phantom Wires Part 23

"Ah! I see! And what do you want us to do?"

"I want your help to get her out of there, today, before any harm comes to her."

"What sort of harm?"

Durkin found it hard to put his fears and feelings into satisfactory words. He was on dangerous seas, but he made his way doggedly on, between the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of plain-spoken suggestion.

"I see--in other words, you want the police to raid Penfield's downtown gambling establishment before two o'clock this afternoon, and release from that establishment a young lady who drove there, and probably not for the first time, in an open cab in the open daylight, because certain ties which you do not care to explain bind you to the young lady in question?"

The brief and brusque finality of tone in the other man warned Durkin that he had made no headway, and he caught up the other's half-mocking and tacit challenge.

"For which, I think, this office will be adequately repaid, by being brought into touch with information which will help out its previous action against Penfield!"

"Who will give us this?"

Durkin looked at his cross-examiner, nettled and impatient.

"I could!"

"But will you?"

"Yes, on the condition I have implied!"

"In other words, you stand ready to bribe us into a doubtful and hazardous movement against the strongest gambler in all New York, on the expectation of an adequate bribe! This office, sir, accepts no bribes!"

"I would not call it bribery!"

"Then how would you describe it?"

"Oh, I might be tempted to call it--well, cooperation!"

Some tinge of scorn in his words nettled the officer of the law.

"It all amounts to the same thing, I presume. Now, let me tell you something. Even though you came to me today with a drayful of crooked faro layouts and doctored-up roulette wheels from Penfield's house, it would be practically impossible, at this peculiar juncture of munic.i.p.al administration, to take in my men and carry out a raid over Captain Kuttrell's head!"

"Ah, I see! You regard Penfield as immune!"

"Penfield is _not_ immune!" said the public prosecutor. The oldish-young face was very flushed and angry by this time. "Don't misunderstand me. As a recognized and respected citizen, you always have the right to call on the officers of the law, to secure protection and punishment of crime. But this must be sought through the natural and legitimate channels."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean go to the police."

"But to lay a charge with the police would be impracticable, in this case."

"Why would it?"

"Simply because it wouldn't get at Penfield, and it would only lead to--to embarra.s.sing publicity!"

"Exactly so! And you may be sure, young man, that Penfield is quite aware of that fact. To be candid, it is just such things as this that allow him to be operating today. If you start the wheels, you must stand the racket!"

"Then you allow a notorious gambler to break every law of the land and say you can give me no help whatever in balking what amounts to a criminal abduction?"

The swivel-chair creaked peremptorily, as the public prosecutor turned sharply back to his desk.

"You'd better try the police!" he bit out impatiently.

Durkin strode to the door. He was halfway through it, when he was called sharply back.

"Don't carry away the impression, young man, that we're not fighting this man Penfield as hard as we can!"

"It looks like it!" mocked the man in the doorway.

"One moment--we have been after this man Penfield, and his kind, and we're still after them. But we don't pretend to accomplish miracles.

This city is made up of mere human beings, and human beings still have the failing of breaking out, morally, now in one place, now in another.

We can compress and segregate those infectious blots, but until you can show us the open sore we can't put on the salve. If you are convinced you are the object of some criminal activity, and are willing to hold nothing back, I can detail two plain-clothes men from my own office to go with you and help you out."

Durkin laughed, a little recklessly, a little scoffingly. Two plain-clothes men to capture a steel-bound fortress!

"Don't trouble them. They might make Penfield mad--they might get themselves talked about--and there's no use, you know, making a mess of one's mayoralty chances!"

And he was through the door indignantly, and as indignantly out, before the district-attorney could so much as flick the ash off his cigarette-end.

But after doing so, he touched an electric b.u.t.ton, and it was at once answered by an athletic-looking clerk with all the earmarks of the collegian about him.

"Tell Barney to follow that man who just went out. Tell him to keep him under his eye, closely, and report to me tonight! Hurry these papers back to the Fire Commissioner. Then get that window up, and let the Mott Street Merchants' Protective a.s.sociation in!"

Durkin, in the meantime, hurried uptown in his hansom, consumed with a feeling of resentment, torn by a fury of blind revolt against all organized society, against all law and authority and order. Still once more it seemed that some dark coalition of forces silently confronted and combated him at every turn. The consciousness that he must now fight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust coalition brought with it a desperate and almost intoxicating sense of audacity. If the law itself was against him, he would take fate into his own hands, and go to his own ends, in his own way. If the machinery of justice ground so loosely and so blindly, there remained no reason why he himself, however recklessly he went his way, should not in the end disregard its engines and evade its ever-impending cogs.

He would show them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialism could only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive and lightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down and delegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order, he would show them what he, alone, could do in his own behalf.

And as he drove hurriedly through the crowded city streets, still lashing himself into a fury of resentment against organized society; he formulated his plan of action, and mentally took up, point by point, each new move and what it might mean. As he pictured, in his mind, each antic.i.p.ated phase of the struggle he felt come over him, for the second time, a sort of blind and irrational fury, the fury of a rat in a corner, fighting for its life and the life of its mate.

CHAPTER XX

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

"And here's where we two hang out!" It was Mac.n.u.tt who spoke.

Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor struggling when he drew up in front of what she knew to be Penfield's lower gambling club. It stood in that half-squalidly residential and half-heartedly commercial district, lying south of Washington Square, a little to the west of Broadway's great artery of traffic. A decorous and unbetraying door, bearing only the modest sign, "The Neptune Club," and a narrow stairway leading to an equally decorous and uncompromising hall, gave no hint, to the uninitiated, of what the great gloomy walls of the building might hold.

But on one side of the narrow door she could make out an incongruously ornate and showy cigarstore; on the other, an equally unlooked-for woman's hair-dressing and manicuring parlor.

In the one, indeed, you might sedately purchase a perfecto, and take your peaceful departure, never dreaming of how closely you had skirted the walls of the busiest poolroom south of all Twenty-third street. In the other you might have your hair quietly shampooed and Marcelled and dressed, and return to your waiting automobile, utterly oblivious of the fact that within thirty feet of you fortunes were being still staked and lost and won and again swept away at one turn of a wheel, or one stroke of a chalk on a red-lined blackboard.