The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 37

She saw me, at the same time that I saw her. In fact, she turned and stared at me. I couldn't have escaped her, as I stood there under the street-lamp. But no slightest sign of recognition came from that coldly inquiring face. She neither smiled nor bowed nor looked back.

And the wine-colored landaulet swept on, leaving me standing there with my sodden hat in my hand and a great ache of desolation in my heart.

She must have seen me, I repeated as I turned disconsolately back and stood watching men and women still ducking under doorways and dodging into side-streets and elbowing into theater-lobbies. It seemed during the next few moments as though that territory once known as the Rialto were a gopher-village and some lupine hunger had invaded it. Before the searching nuzzles of those rain-guests all pleasure-seekers promptly vanished. Gaily cloaked and slippered women stampeded away as though they were made of sugar and they and their gracious curves might melt into nothing at the first touch of water. Above the sidewalk, twenty paces from the empty doorway where I loitered, an awning appeared, springing up like a mushroom from a wet meadow. In toward one end of this awning circled a chain of limousines and taxicabs, controlled by an impa.s.sive Hercules in dripping oil-skins. And as a carrier-belt empties grain into a mill-bin, so this unbroken chain ejected hurrying men and women across the wet curb into the light-spangled hopper of the theater-foyer. And the thought of that theater, with its companionable crush of humanity, began to appeal to my rain-swept spirit.

Yet I stood there, undecided, watching the last of the scattering crowd, watching the street that still seemed an elongated bull-ring where a matador or two still dodged the taurine charges of vehicles. I watched the electric display-signs that ran like liquid ivy about the shop fronts, and then climbed and fluttered above the roofs, misty and softened by rain. I watched the ironic heavens pour their unabating floods down on that congested and overripe core of a city that no water could wash clean.

Then the desolation of the empty streets seemed to grow unbearable.

The spray that blew in across my dampened knees made me think of shelter. I saw the lights of the theater no more than twenty paces away. It was already a warren of crowded life. The thought of even what diluted companions.h.i.+p it might offer me continued to carry an appeal that became more and more clamorous.

A moment later I stood before its box-office window, no wider than a medieval leper-squint, from which cramped and hungry souls buy access to their modern temples of wonder.

"Standing room only," announced the autocrat of the wicket. And I meekly purchased my admission-ticket, remembering that the head usher of that particular theater had in the past done me more than one slight service.

Yet the face of this haughtily obsequious head usher, as his hand met mine in that free-masonry which is perpetuated by certain silk-threaded sc.r.a.ps of oblong paper, was troubled.

"I haven't a thing left," he whispered.

I peered disconsolately about that sea of heads seeking life through the clumsy lattice of polite melodrama.

"Unless," added the usher at my elbow, "you'll take a seat in that second lower box?"

Even through the baize doors behind me I could hear the beat and patter of the rain. It was a case of any port in a storm.

"That will do nicely," I told him and a moment later he was leading me down a side aisle into the curtained recess of the box entrance.

Yet it was not ordained that I should occupy that box in lonely and unrivaled splendor. One of its chairs, set close to the bra.s.s rail and plush-covered parapet that barred it off from the more protuberant stage box, was already occupied by a man in full evening dress. He, like myself, perhaps, had never before shared a box with other than his own acquaintances. At any rate, before favoring me with the somewhat limited breadth of his back, he turned on me one sidelong and unmistakably resentful stare.

Yet I looked at this neighbor of mine, as I seated myself, with more interest than I looked at the play-actors across the foot-lights, for I rather preferred life in the raw to life in the sirups of stage emotionalism.

It startled me a little to find that the man, at the moment, was equally oblivious of anything taking place on the stage. His eyes, in fact, seemed fixed on the snowy shoulders of the woman who sat at the back of the stage box, directly in front of him. As I followed the direction of his gaze I was further surprised to discover the object on which it was focused. He was staring, not at the woman herself, but at a pigeon-blood ruby set in the clasp of some pendant or necklace encircling her throat.

There was, indeed, some excuse for his staring at it. In the first place it was an extraordinarily large and vivid stone. But against the background where it lay, against the snow-white column of the neck (whitened, perhaps, by a prudent application of rice powder) it stood out in limpid ruddiness, the most vivid of fire against the purest of snow. It was a challenge to attention. It caught and held the eye.

It stood there, just below where the hair billowed into its crown of Venetian gold, as semaphoric as a yard-lamp to a night traveler. And I wondered, as I sat looking at it, what element beyond curiosity could coerce the man at my side into studying it so indolently and yet so intently.

About the man himself there seemed little that was exceptional. Beyond a certain quick and shrewd alertness in his eye-movements as he looked about at me from time to time with m.u.f.fled resentment which I found not at all to my liking, he seemed medium in everything, in coloring, in stature, in apparel. His face was of the neutral sallowness of the sedentary New Yorker. His intelligence seemed that of the preoccupied office-worker who could worm his way into an ill-fitting dress suit and placidly approve of second-rate melodrama. He seemed so without interest, in fact, that I was not averse to directing my glance once more toward the pigeon-blood ruby which glowed like a live coal against the marble whiteness of the neck in front of me.

It may have been mere accident, or it may have been that out of our united gaze arose some vague psychic force which disturbed this young woman. For as I sat there staring at the s.h.i.+mmering jewel, its wearer suddenly turned her head and glanced back at me. The next moment I was conscious of her nod and smile, unmistakably in my direction.

Then I saw who it was. I had been uncouthly staring at the shoulder-blades of Alice Churchill--they were the Park Avenue Churchills--and farther back in the box I caught a glimpse of her brother Benny, who had come north, I knew, from the Nicaraguan coast to recuperate from an attack of fever.

Yet I gave little thought to either of them, I must confess. At the same time that I had seen that momentarily flas.h.i.+ng smile I had also discovered that the jeweled clasp on the girl's neck was holding in place a single string of graduated pearls, of very lovely pearls, the kind about which the frayed-cuff garret-author and the Sunday "yellows"

forever love to romance. I was also not unconscious of the quick and covert glance of the man who sat so close to me.

Then I let my glance wander back to the ruby, apparently content to study its perfect cutting and its unmatchable coloring. And I knew that the man beside me was also sharing in that spectacle. I was, in fact, still staring at it, so unconscious of the movement of the play on the stage that the "dark scene," when every light in the house went out for a second or two, came to me with a distinct sense of shock.

A murmur of approval went through the house as the returning light revealed to them a completely metamorphosed stage-setting. What this setting was I did not know, nor did I look up to see. For as my idly inquisitive glance once more focused itself on the columnar white neck that towered above the chair-back a second and greater shock came to me. Had that neck stood there without a head I could have been scarcely more startled.

The pigeon-blood ruby was gone. There was no longer any necklace there. The column of snow was without its touch of ruddy light. It was left as disturbingly bare as a target without its bull's-eye. It reminded me of a marble grate without its central point of fire.

My first definite thought was that I was the witness of a crime as audacious as it was bewildering. Yet, on second thought, it was simple enough. The problem of proximity had already been solved. With the utter darkness had come the opportunity, the opportunity that obviously had been watched for. With one movement of the hand the necklace had been quietly and cunningly removed.

My next quick thought was that the thief sat there in my immediate neighborhood. There could be no other. There was no room for doubt.

By some mysterious and dextrous movement the man beside me had reached forward and with that delicacy of touch doubtless born of much experience had unclasped the jewels, all the time shrouded by the utter darkness. The audacity of the thing was astounding, yet the completeness with which it had succeeded was even more astounding.

I sat there compelling myself to a calmness which was not easy to achieve. I struggled to make my scrutiny of this strange companion of mine as quiet and leisured as possible.

Yet he seemed to feel that he was still under my eye. He seemed to chafe at that continued survey; for even as I studied him I could see a fine sweat of embarra.s.sment come out on his face. He did not turn and look at me directly, but it was plain that he was only too conscious of my presence. And even before I quite realized what he was about, he reached quietly over, and taking up his hat and coat, rose to his feet and slipped out of the box.

That movement on his part swept away my last shred of hesitation. The sheer precipitancy of his flight was proof enough of his offense. His obvious effort to escape made me more than ever determined to keep on his trail.

And keep on his trail I did, from the moment he sidled guiltily out of that lighted theater foyer into the still drizzling rain of Broadway.

Stronger and ever stronger waves of indignation kept sweeping through me as I watched him skulk northward, with a furtive glance over his shoulder as he fled.

He was a good two hundred feet ahead of me when I saw him suddenly turn and at the risk of a visit to the hospital or the morgue, cross the street in the middle of the block, dodge desperately between the surface cars and automobiles, and beat it straight for the Times Building. I promptly threw decorum away and ran, ran like a rabbit, until I came to the Forty-second Street entrance to the drug store through whose revolving doors I had seen my man disappear. I felt reasonably certain he wouldn't stop to drink an ice-cream soda and he didn't, for as I hurried past the fountain I caught sight of him turning into the stairway that leads to the subway station. I dashed ahead but he was through the gate before I could catch up with him. I had no time for a ticket as the guards were already slamming shut the doors of a south-bound "local."

"Buy me a ticket," I called to the astonished "chopper" as I tossed a dollar bill over the arm which he thrust out to stop me. I did not wait to argue it out, for the car door in front of me was already beginning to close. I had just time to catapult my body in between that sliding door and its steel frame. I knew, as I caught my breath again, that I was on the platform of the car behind the jewel thief.

And I stood there, carefully scrutinizing the line of car doors as we pulled into the Grand Central Station. I did the same as we pa.s.sed Thirty-third Street, and the same again at Twenty-eighth Street. The man had given no sign that he actually knew I was on his track. He might or might not have seen me. As to that I had no means of being certain. But I was certain of the fact that he was making off in a panic of indeterminate fear, that he was doing his utmost to evade pursuit.

This came doubly home to me as the train stopped at Twenty-third Street and I saw him step quickly out of the far end of the car, look about him, and dart across the station platform and up the stairway two steps at a time.

I was after him, even more hurriedly. By the time I reached the street he was swinging up on the step of a cross-town surface car. To catch that car was out of the question, but I waited a moment and swung aboard the one that followed it, thirty yards in the rear. Peering ahead, I could plainly see him as he dropped from his car on the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue. I could see him as he hurried up the steps of the Elevated, crossed the platform, and without so much as buying a ticket, hurried down the southeast flight of steps.

I had closed in on him by this time, so that we were within a biscuit toss of each other. Yet never once did he look about. He was now doubling on his tracks, walking rapidly eastward along Twenty-third Street. I was close behind him as he crossed Broadway, turning south, and then suddenly tacking about, entered the hallway of the building that was once the Hotel Bartholdi and promptly directed his steps toward the side entrance on Twenty-third Street.

Even as he emerged into the open again he must have seen the antediluvian night-hawk cab waiting there at the curb. What his directions to the driver were I had no means of knowing. But as that dripping and water-proofed individual brought his whip lash down on his steaming horse a door slammed shut in my face. Once more I so far forgot my dignity as to dodge and run like a rabbit, this time to the other side of the cab as it swung briskly northward. One twist and pull threw the cab door open and I tumbled in--tumbled in to see my white-faced and frightened jewel thief determinedly and frenziedly holding down the handle of the opposite door.

His face went ashen as I came sprawling and lurching against him. He would have leaped bodily from the carriage, which was now swinging up an all but deserted Fifth Avenue, had I not caught and held him there with a grimness born of repeated exasperation.

He showed no intention of meekly submitting to that detaining grasp.

Seeing that he was finally cornered, he turned on me and fought like a rat. His strength, for one of his weight, was surprising. Much more surprising, however, was his ferocity. And it was a strange struggle, there in the half light of that musty and many-odored night-hawk cab.

There seemed something subterranean about it, as though it were a battle at the bottom of a well. And but for one thing, I imagine, it would not, for me, have been a pleasant encounter. It's a marvelous thing, however, to know that you have Right on your side. The panoply of Justice is as fortifying as any chain armor ever made.

And I knew, as we fought like two wharf-rats under a pier-end, that I was right. I knew that my cause was the cause of law and order. That knowledge gave me both strength and a boldness which carried me through even when I saw my writhing and desperate thief groping and grasping for his hip pocket, even when I saw him draw from it a magazine-revolver that looked quite ugly enough to stampede a regiment.

And as that sodden-leathered night-hawk went placidly rolling up Fifth Avenue we twisted and panted and grunted on its floor as though it were a mail-coach in the Sierras of sixty years ago, fighting for the possession of that ugly firearm.

How I got it away from him I never quite knew. But when I came to my senses I had him on the cab floor and my knee on his chest, with his body bent up like a letter U. I held him there while I went through his pockets, quietly, deliberately, one by one, with all the care of a customs inspector going through a suspected smuggler.

I had no time to look over his wallet (which I remembered as being as big as a brief-bag) or his papers, nor had I time to make sure how much of the jewelry he wore might be his own. The one thing I wanted was the pearl necklace with the pigeon-blood ruby. And this necklace I found, carefully wrapped in a silk handkerchief tucked down in his right-hand waistcoat pocket--which, by the way, was provided with a b.u.t.toned flap to make it doubly secure.

I looked over the necklace to make sure there could be no mistake.

Then I again wrapped it up in the silk handkerchief and thrust it well down in my own waistcoat pocket.

"Get up!" I told the man on the cab floor.

I noticed, as I removed my knee from his chest, what a sorry condition his s.h.i.+rt-front was in and how his tie had been twisted around under his right ear. He lay back against the musty cus.h.i.+ons, breathing hard and staring at me out of eyes that were by no means kindly.

"You couldn't work it!" I said, as I pocketed the revolver and, having readjusted my own tie, b.u.t.toned my overcoat across a sadly crumpled s.h.i.+rt-front. Then for the first time the thief spoke.