CHAPTER XXXI

The Ring Invisible

In those few seconds in which Alexis Orski digested the full import of the words etched on that brass medal, the sweat had broken out on his forehead in great beads. Now he felt himself choking for air. A dozen things came together suddenly in his consciousness, as the jagged pieces of a great colored picture-puzzle might suddenly fly together to reveal their picture. Indeed, to Orski, the picture was complete. So devoid were his lungs, seemingly, of air, precious air, that he tugged frantically at his high tight collar. But he could not loosen it. He managed at last to get a deep revivifying breath, and with a terrific effort he pulled himself together. With one hand steadying himself along the wall, he tiptoed drunkenly toward the closed door of the office, with its single upper ground glass pane, Without showing himself, however, against that ground glass pane, he reached forth a hand that trembled now as though it had the ague, and with a quick motion shot the oiled silent bolt which barred out visitors and employes both. Only now was his tension even partly abated. A long drawn out sigh of relief escaped him like the exhaust from a steam engine. At once he dropped to his hands and knees and peered, as best he could, through a slight crack existing between the light ebon-stained wooden door and the black metal casing of the doorway, a crack no doubt created because in the erection of the hastily constructed Cubist Building a door contractor had here and there used wood with the grain running wrongly.

He could make out Imogene—Miss Cranley—sitting at her little table, and on that black shiny synthetic onyx bench just outside the massive black railing a man’s tweed-clad knees were visible. The man himself Orski could not see. Only the latter’s knees. The knees did not move. They merely waited, patiently, persistently, resolutely. On his hands and his own knees Orski crawled away from the door. Stooping low so that no shadow would fall on that glazed glass pane, walking like some man-sized ape in the African forests, he managed to get clear across the room—to a window outside of line with that door pane. He looked out—not across the street this time—but far down below, in the tangle of traffic. Cars galore were banked on each side of the Rialto now—for the hour had arrived when parking in Old Loop was permitted. He screwed up his slightly myopic eyeballs by a mighty squinting effort of his extrinsic eye-muscles, his forehead creasing into fine parallel corrugations by the effort. Whose long rakish olive-tinted car might that one be, standing almost squarely across the street from the Randolph Street entrance of the Cubist Building? Whose would that sinister-looking black one be, pre-empting the very curb in front of that entrance? Two men in the olive-tinted one across the street. Nonchalant. Smoking cigarettes. One’s eyes, though, resting on that Randolph Street entrance. Three men in the black car on the curb adjacent to the entrance. All waiting. Waiting for whom? For what? Orski shook his head desperately. What kind of car or cars were parked this very second at the Clark Street entrance? Again he shook his head with even greater desperation. The Organization—the great Mala underworld organization—worked perfectly when it did work. He thought a single foolhardy moment of his own expensive purple Cressop-8 parked at this very second upstairs in the Cubist Building garage, but he abandoned that rash idea almost the second he conceived of it, for the broad sloping car exit of the Cubist Building spewed forth its cars at a point but twenty feet or so to the north of that Clark Street entrance. If the Clark Street entrance were covered, the Clark Street auto exit—the one and only other exit—was likewise. Suicide, that was what it would be. Randolph Street entrance. Clark Street entrance. Automobile exit. Suicide! The cold medal still clutched in his left fist screamed to him, even in his daze of mind, what he must not do. Must not do. Must not. Must not do.

He turned sharply from the window. Across the room he went again, on tiptoes, again stooping low, gorilla like as before. No betraying silhouette, he saw to it, fell upon that half-translucent, half-opaque pane in his office door. As he swung past the line of that crack, making his way this time toward a doorway connecting his sanctum with Levenson’s now empty office, he glimpsed once more those waiting tweed-covered knees. Again an idea seized him—but only for a second. Useless utterly, to summon the police, to get this one worker. Chances were 100-percent probable that his very phone circuit was tapped—illicitly tapped, moreover, and not legitimately, as had all of Roger Halsey’s phone services been tapped by his own lieutenants. A call to the police—that would bring the whole tottering house of blocks tumbling down on his head instanter. The Organization would beat the police by many, many minutes. They were undoubtedly prepared for that very move. And as for that one worker outside—Orski shook his head. A mere atom of spider-web filament comprising, in all its tightly cohering strands, a huge spider web, covering Chicago, even all of Cook County. Perhaps the fellow was armed. Perhaps not even armed at all. Perhaps he was merely the official conveyer of the warning. Waiting to flash the news to gangdom that the recipient had gotten the message which would turn him into a quivering hare running in front of a thousand now unleashed hounds. There would be another man in the outside hall. An automatic on his hip. $200 to pay his fine if picked up. A still further pair would be downstairs in the foyer. The Organization. Men, men, men, who drew their very life’s blood from the stupendous golden Mala treasury.

Orski reached the polished hat stand. From it he silently swung off his velour hat. There was one way out of this place, and one way only now for him. But if he made it—and he was certain he was going to make it—he must not be hatless; he must not attract any more attention on the streets outside, swarming with gangdom, than that damnably striking bearded physiognomy of his did attract. He slid across the room now, careening a bit dizzily from the shock whose effects had not by any means evaporated, and steadied himself a bare moment on the handle of the unglassed door which led into Levenson’s now empty office. Only a second, though. Now he felt steady again. Silently he opened the door, passed through it, closed it again behind him without a sound. Across Levenson’s richly plum-carpeted floor he shot. The door of Levenson’s office, leading to the outer room of workers, was closed, thank God! He stooped low, though, as he crossed the line of its ground glass pane. Through a narrow panelless door in its corner, and over which were the simple words “Emergency Fire Exit,” he wedged himself. Now he was in the clear. For a time, that is. He was in a long gloomy corridor, unfinished as to plastering, at least on one side, and walled from ceiling to floor on the other with great porous fire bricks. That corridor, he knew, ran entirely in back of his whole room of vassals. Along it he half walked, half ran. He must make speed. Once the quarry was reported to have received his message, the whistle would sound forth clear and shrill for the hounds. At the end of the unfinished corridor, a long row of glistening wash basins, lighted by a single dusty bulb, stood out against the fire brick. This was where the office draughtsmen washed. He felt in the half-light along the right wall. A doorknob. He turned it. Into a large room he swept, a room lighted by the red rays of the setting sun, a room full of draughtsmen in shirtsleeves, working at huge tilted boards, bandying jests and quips back and forth over their India ink bottles. His abrupt appearance on the scene caused a wave of rigidity to sweep over the whole force. Words ceased in mid-air. But without stopping Orski made his way past them all with a rush, and through a door into another room, quite occupantless, which held nothing but filed documents and blueprints. Now for it! He braced himself. Straight through an absolutely unlettered door, opposite to the one by which he had entered, he stepped into a deserted corridor which seemed to lead, at its right end, into the main building corridor with its brightly tinted rugose walls, and at its left end to the vertically closing corrugated steel doors of two giant freight elevator shafts. He could not see, as he closed that unlettered door and turned sharply left, one of the draughtsmen, in the second room behind him, nudge another at his side, and gasp: “Didja see the Old Man? Wow! White as a ghost! Looked like he was facing death itself.”

But now, confronting the freight elevator shafts, far away and entirely removed from that ultra-finished main building corridor which passed a certain opening carrying the words “Offices of the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company” and the space in front of whose office railing housed at this very moment a pair of grim, waiting tweed-clad knees, each knee leading to an automatic gun in either of its owner’s hip pockets, or both in readiness to carry their owner—and his report—to somebody further up the hall, Orski pressed the button madly. He kept his finger, moreover, right on that button. And the one of the lumbering freight elevators which was in operation, coming downward, and stopping in front of him, seemed to awake in him some semblance of electrified activity.

“Here—here!” he called to the operator, a bristle-bearded man in checkered shirt, who commenced to shut his vertical doors in Orski’s face, and wave this vagrant, aberrant passenger towards the passenger corridor far, far to the latter’s right. “Let me in! Let me in, I tell you. I want to go down with you. Local elevators all stopped. Trouble on the automatic control board. And I’ve got to catch a passenger plane. Yes, a plane. I’m Orski, president of the Ajax Company.”

The checker-shirted operator, apparently recognizing him at last as one of the big men of the building’s business firms, or at least recognizing the name Ajax as one stencilled upon many pieces of freight and furniture he may have carried to that floor, swung wide his short electrical lever so that the big doors started to open to their fullest extent, but Orski had stepped hastily over the lower one before it had even traveled to the limits of its motion, “Let’s go!” he half snarled. And even as the doors clanged to, he had fumbled in his pocket and brought forth a handful of bills, of which he stuck a “one” in the amazed operator’s palm. The big car, bill clasped in operator’s gnarled red fist, lumbered to the first floor, then even considerably lower than that, and the gates which the operator’s lever now slid open exposed to view only a dull gray drab alley, hemmed in with high buildings gilded at their tops alone with sunset light, paved with cobblestones and filled with both stationary and moving motor trucks, with boxes, with crates, barrels of ashes, paper, trash. A huge battered garbage pail across the way from the freight exit threw fulsome fumes into the air. But to fumes and all, Orski was oblivious. For there was no silent man standing there, face grim, hands in coat pockets. No waiting car, drawn up. Only motor trucks with cursing drivers, their sirens screaming belligerently at each other. In a jiffy Orski was away from the gate, threading his way eastward in the alley in and out of roaring trucks and past parked ones. In the fraction of a minute he was out on Dearborn Street, an even block from that black enameled building which housed those two tweed-clad knees—a building which, he knew, literally prickled, at this moment, outside all of its exits—all but one, that is!—with thin hard-faced, hard-eyed men who had been given their orders and knew what they were to do. An empty yellow taxicab was rolling slowly by the alley exit. Orski choked with eagerness as he tried to summon it, and succeeded only in making feeble gestures with his two hands.

The driver, a much sunburned fellow whose cherry-hued face suggested one who had been spending too much time at the bathing beaches and not enough time in his cab, seeing an apparent fare standing at the mouth of an alley waving frantically at him, drew up sharp. Even before he had come to a stop, Orski had leaped on the running board and was inside the dark interior of the car. “Number 5533 Greenwood Avenue,” he said, mopping off his white forehead with his coat sleeve. “And—and burn up the crossings—best you can. Got to—got to pack—to catch a night plane.”

The machine was off with a jerk. Reaching Michigan Boulevard, filled at this hour of the day with hurrying chattering stenographers and homegoing clerks, the sun not yet so low but that the great white-marble Field Museum, standing miniature-like fair over east in Grant Park, gleamed like an exquisite ivory carving, the driver was enabled to make greater speed with his big car on that broad thoroughfare of glistening macadam. Orski looked fearfully back, once, twice, a number of times, to see whether a long slinking car, filled with hard-eyed men, might be stealing along in his rear. There was none. He had outwitted them. He would outwit them further. They were—they were holding an empty bag. An empty Cubistic bag! But once Orski’s machine passed just such a car coming towards him—and he pressed sickly back in his seat, a greenish pallor suffusing his entire face, even to the skin below his beard. But the occupants of that car, four of them, looked stolidly, unseeingly ahead of themselves. Their low-slung and obviously high-powered vehicle, a rat-faced pasty-visaged fellow at the wheel, continued straight on its way. Its passengers were not at all interested, it appeared, in a mere Yellow Cab carrying a homebound passenger. And in a jiffy the two machines were two blocks apart—lost forever in the maze of traffic. And Orski breathed again. His face changed back from green at least to white.

It was less than twenty minutes, and his cab was in Hyde Park, on Ellis Avenue, within four blocks of his luxurious satyrically furnished bachelor apartment in the Greenwood Manors, when Orski’s heart suddenly skipped a beat in his breast, and he felt the blood drain from his face. “God—am—am I crazy?” he muttered to himself. “They’ll have that place covered—above all.” He bit his thin lower lip in his very recrimination. Exactly like every hare, scuttling for its supposedly safe hole in the ground, he had forgotten that the wisest hounds would be not in his rear, but would be at that precise hole, waiting for the breathless quarry to arrive there. He leaned forward, rapped fiercely on the glass back of the driver; brought him to a stop.

“Never mind—never mind that first number—the Greenwood Avenue number,” he said hurriedly. “I remember now, the man I’m—I’m to see there isn’t home. Take me to my own home instead. No, never mind. I’ve—I’ve left my keys at my office. Take me—let’s see—take me to the Hyde Park Arms Hotel—Ingleside Avenue—just south of 57th—turn off west right here, please, and go—go as far as Cottage Grove, and—and circle back east again on 57th Street to get there. I don’t want to see a—a certain woman in this neighborhood who—who thinks I’m out of town.”

The driver, not averse to extricating people from apparent complications de amour, nor to twining in any direction any number of circular degrees so long as the taximeter clicked merrily, achieved the curious roundabout circuit smoothly, and in three minutes Orski, still faint in his breast at the misplay he had so nearly made, was stepping hurriedly out under a trig green-and-red striped sidewalk canopy which led into a painfully new building of orange bricks with arched entrance and hand-carved stone window trimmings. He raised a prohibitory forefinger as the driver started to pull his flag. “No—don’t pull your flag. I want you to do a few things for me. I’ve a big business conference in Salt Lake City for tomorrow morning, and I’m—I’m locked fast out of my own quarters. I want two or three traveling things.” He pulled out a yellow twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, then hesitatingly added a ten to it. “Run your cab over to 63rd Street, turn east—or west—doesn’t matter—and stop at the first haberdashery store you see. It’s—no, haberdashery means gentlemen’s furnishings. Yes. Get me a cheap traveling bag—an overnight affair—say, $5 or thereabouts. Buy me a suit of pajamas, size B. Fairly heavy in texture though. Two white shirts, size 16. A black tie. Any kind. And about four collars, to fit the shirts. Yes, high like this one. Now hop—wait—get me a cheap hairbrush, a comb—and stop off at any drugstore and get me a toothbrush and a package of Amos-and-Andy toothpaste. Yes, same stuff that used to be called Pepsodent. Yes, get the shirts reasonable. Use your own judgment.” He squinted meaningfully at the numbered badge on the driver’s hat. “Now don’t run off, Number 7809. I’ll pay you well.”

“Righto, gov’nor,” said the taxi driver cheerfully. Orski could not know that all Yellow taxi drivers, by orders of the Grand Mogul who controlled the taxi octopus and who thereby ran the myriad of drivers even as had those sweating slaves been run, who built the Pyramids five thousand years ago, were autocratically ordered, each and every man, to remain on the streets of Chicago until their meters registered $10 ‘takings,’ whether the luckless drivers stayed out two hours, or whether two days and two nights; nor did Orski know that this young man had a “date” tonight—and that the latter’s meter was nicely mounting, especially with a trip to the Central Air Field in the offing, so that Car 7809 could be now turned in quite early. “And—say—gov’nor, who’ll I ask fer?”

“Mr.—Mr. Blairstone,” retorted Orski, hesitating a bare second, then neatly combining the names of a couple of business acquaintances. “Hop now, fellow. And hurry back. My plane leaves shortly—and I want to wash up.”

As the cab shot off southward on that quiet, and more or less deserted street, deserted at least at this bright end of a sunny day because two-thirds of its occupants were beginning to sit down to dinner, Orski turned up reflectively through the flapping canopy, and strode silently through the rich blue carpet-clad foyer of the Hyde Park Arms where several months before, in a like situation of having actually forgotten his keys, except that that other time had been an evening when he had given his combination butler, valet and serving man a night off, he had disgustedly remained from midnight till morning. He passed unseeingly the artistic oil paintings, encased in aesthetically correct heavy gilt frames on its walls, as well as its dainty marble statue of Aphrodite, garment slightly upraised from chaste shoulder, noting only appreciatively, from the corner of his eye, that the foyer was quite deserted. At a tiny desk in a gilt-framed nook in the further hallway, he registered as “C. Blairstone, Omaha,” and asked suavely for a room fronting the street. Paying the $3 asked for by an animated fashion-plate of a clerk, with tiny mustache on upper lip, Orski was within a moment being shown by a trim negro maid into a commodious chamber on the second floor, furnished with nearly brand new maroon plush furniture as well as a seductive-looking canopied bed, a generous room, indeed, that looked out upon the street on which, within another hour, night—or at least dusk—would fall.

With the departure of the maid, grinning from ear to ear at a quarter tip, he did not even bother to fling off his velour hat from his still moist brow, nor to open the windows, but hastily dialed the phone in his room and asked for Levenson’s number. After but two short rings, Levenson himself answered.

“A. O. speaking, Levenson,” Orski said guardedly.

“Hello, Chief! Want the low-down? Here it is. I just got back to the Palmer House. Caught Duffy free for sixty seconds about the very minute I got to the bureau. Took up Oleander’s note with 800 bucks, passed Duffy the two reward checks and the photo, and fixed everything up with the Cap, in fact; and we’re sewed up nicey-nice. Hemingway is our meat, ours entirely and exclusively, and the Baxter newspaper daddy-longlegs is out.”

“All right, Levenson,” assented Orski, but somewhat dejectedly. “Now pay attention. Levenson—” His voice dropped a bit. “I’m—I’m in trouble. I’m—I’m leaving town. I—

“What the—” broke in Levenson apprehensively. “Not—not that 19-year-old redhead, is it? You—you can fix that.”

“Oh no, no, no,” said Orski wearily. “Nothing at all involving women! God no, Levenson. I’m—I’m in a deeper sort of trouble. Levenson, I’m leaving town in a few minutes—a half-hour—an hour at most. I’ll probably hop west—say northwest—from Central Air Field by a private plane. So I want you to pay off my man Briggs for me. Any time tomorrow will do. Give him two weeks’ advance wages. And close my apartment indefinitely. And Levenson—get this now—all my preliminary planning concerning that new auxiliary plant at Argo, Illinois, is shelved for the moment. We may—we may have our main offices in the future in Montreal—or—or in Toronto. Why of course I know they’re in Canada. Do you think I’m only in the first grade of school? But we’ll keep our main plant and salesrooms here, though, because of tariff considerations. I may myself carry on the Canadian offices for the rest of—well, Levenson—for the rest of this cursed Prohibition era. Good country, Canada. Good old King Edward the VIIIth—he doesn’t stand for the high-handed stuff this damn hick town stands for. And then they’ve—they’ve got governmental liquor regulation, too. They—”

“But good Lord, Chief, if you’re to roost up there till the end of Prohibition, that—that would be two years at least, till the Vigesimal mail vote turns the Dry-as-Dust party out on its behind. If it does, that is. If it does!”

“Yes, I know all about that, Levenson. Canada is a beautiful country, though, Levenson. A beautiful country. I—I think I should like to live there. To live there—always. It’s—it’s a beautifully policed country, too; it puts the fear of God in every one of its crook’s hearts.”

“Chief, I don’t get it. For the life of me I don’t get it. But I s’pose I can wait till you’re ready to tell me more about—all this. But you’re—you’re leaving tonight, you say?”

“Yes. Quicker than that, Levenson. In a very, very short while, in fact. The minute a certain fellow gets back here.”

“Where—where are you now, Chief?”

“Doesn’t matter. In—in a drugstore, Levenson. In Old Loop.”

“Well where—where—will you be—what’s your next address?”

“I don’t know. For a while I’m going to do some jumping. All over. Just going to—well—travel for pleasure. I’ll have no fixed address. I shall be on the move, maybe day and night, for at least a number of weeks. Chiefly Canada, though. Western Canada, possibly. You’ll hear from me, though, from here and there—day and night. By wire sometimes. Sometimes by letter. Unsigned in every case. Each communication you get from me must be destroyed as soon as received. Get that? You’re to keep locked in your own brain, Levenson, where it was received from. Got that? All right. See that you don’t slip now. I’m depending on you absolutely. Now, however, about my affairs here. First, carry through this Hemingway deal exactly as already planned out by us: when the police nab him, and you in turn get to him, get that 2-percent of stock which he doesn’t even know yet he owns, at any price, from $10 up to—well—whatever you have to pay. He’ll be too beaten up to have any wits about him. Get his receipt for your money. Have a conveyance of the stock ready, and made out to Alexis Orski. Now for other matters involving your carrying on affairs for me. In the bottom right-hand of my desk is a locked drawer. Burst that lock. Under a thin panel on the bottom are two articles—one is of no importance—just a photograph—put it away—picture of myself as a lad—but the other is a power-of-attorney, drawn up privately at my request a week ago, by Moses Cohenstein in case of any emergency. It gives you the right to vote all my stock for me at any stockholders’ meeting of the American Projectiscope Company, or any directors’ meeting of our own Ajax Corporation. You’re to vote ‘No,’ so far as American Projectiscope Company goes, on any transfer of their Zell Process to the Consolidated Projection Corporation. That is, up to and past noontime, of the coming Sol 25th, next Wednesday. At that hour, our Hextite crystal is as free from their option as the oldest nigger slave was free from Simon Legree on the morning of January 1st, 1863. Wasn’t that the date of your Declaration of Emancipation? I thought so. In other words, Levenson, you just sit tight—and sign nothing. See? And don’t give the Halsey people—not any one of ’em—a red penny for a single share of their worthless stock. Just seven days, Levenson, seven days, and that’s what their stock will be. Worthless. Not even good for paper for kids to make toy airplanes out of. On Sol 26th, however, Levenson, you’re to start framing up the new deal that Consolidated Projection Corporation is champing at the bit for. Don’t try to monkey with the million dollar figure—the sum being already in escrow, and the figure being a fair set-off to the way in which they too control the situation partly—that might, you see, unnecessarily clog the flow of matters. And you know the rest. You’re to use my majority stock in Roger Halsey’s American Projectiscope Company—it’ll be a majority then, by God!—to convey the Zell Process to Consolidated, putting all the Zell mechanical paraphernalia in at $1—and our Hextite optical crystal at $999,999. If Halsey and the minority stockholders try desperately to enjoin you, their action to enjoin can be dissolved by Cohenstein in ten minutes before any court, thanks to that Feebron vs. Cudmore U. S. Supreme Court decision covering combined inventions as conveyed jointly by two majority conveyors. And that, I guess, ends the matter. All, perhaps, but the disposition of the sales money. As to that, call a hasty official Ajax directors’ and stockholders’ meeting in Cohenstein’s office, pass an affirmative vote with my majority stock, and have the legitimate regular profits on the deal, as they would eventuate if, say, it went through as it stands right today—as Roger Halsey would like it to go through now—deposited in escrow in—say—the Good Kaiser Wilhelm Trust Company—a new banking company, yes, but very sound. Then call another official meeting, and pass a quick vote to take up, with that money, all outstanding Ajax Company notes and the two plant mortgages. Yes, vote a complete liquidation. We’d better get affairs into the clear. Things are so damned prosperous all over the world these days that it looks suspiciously to me like time for another big panic! Yes, I know—I noted by all the noon papers that stocks rose another half billion dollars this morning on the New York Stock Exchange. But that’s due merely to some official statement today on the part of Sir George Leets over in England that makes certain the imminence of John Bull and Uncle Sam’s joint recognition of the Mexican president day after tomorrow, and the inevitable opening up of that big sales field again. The stock market rise, Levenson, doesn’t mean anything in itself. Things are so prosperous in general that another slump is doubtlessly on the way. And so—are you getting all this, Levenson? Yes? All right. Now as to the additional profits on the deal, as obtained through our juggling the constituent Zell Process values by our two majorities. Pass a vote—yes, an Ajax vote—declaring them a dividend. Yes, a dividend. I want money! So do you, I take it. Have the $160,000 or thereabouts, that comes to me on my own two-thirds majority stock, deposited to the credit of my personal account in the Father Dearborn Trust Company Bank. I’d suggest that you don’t bother to deposit your own additional slice, which you’ll get, thanks to your minority holdings in Ajax, because you’ll only have to draw it all out to blow on some brunette. Alas, too true, Levenson. Too true! Now one final thing. If any of the Halsey crew—say Roger Halsey—or that newspaper nephew of his who was so asinine as to allow the old man to tie up his conveyance rights and whipsaw us—comes snivelling around, begging to have a lap of the cream off the edge of our saucer, kick ’em bodily out of the office and throw their hats after ’em. Let ’em know for once and all they’re done, finee, through! In other words they’re—they’re stinko, see?”

“I’ll carry it all through, Chief, exactly as you outline it, subject to any possible further modifications you might write me about. And—by the way, Chief, you’re—you’re not sick, are you?”

Orski, in his ears ringing the sharp grating sound of a car’s metallic wheels on the curb outside—a sound never made by a careful taxi driver—was feeling his forehead grow moist and clammy. He knew vaguely that he was in a sudden panic, and that he was going to act again exactly as a panic-stricken man. “That’s—that’s all,” he bit off desperately. “I’ll communicate with you by wire to—tomorrow. Under no conditions my address to anyone. Remember that. Good-by.”

He sped to the front window. The long low black car he had pictured in his frightened brain as standing there, was a flamboyant thing, splotched up crudely in vivid pigments, saucy sayings lettered across its windshield, containing three super-jazz age youths letting out a super-jazz age flapper who was blowing kisses at all of them. “God!” ejaculated Orski. “My—my nerves are sure shot. Now for the flying field.”

But even as he spoke, his sunburned taxi driver rolled up, came to a perfect stop a bare half-inch from the collegiately decorated chariot, and clambered out, under his arm a collection of manilla-wrapped packages. So Orski left the window, and busied himself riffling rapidly over the thin pages of the gargantuan directory which hung on one wall of the room, till his man had come up inside the little hotel, had made his inevitable inquiry for “Mr. Blairstone’s room” and was tapping on the door of the room itself. With his precious telephone number clutched somehow in the tentacles of his brain, Orski opened the door. The taxi driver, beaming, came in.

“I sure made that counter-jumper hop, gov’nor,” he said. “’Cause o’ you havin’ to make that plane. Now here’s all the stuff, pyjammers, shirts—ever’thing.” He withdrew from his pocket a cellophane-covered toothbrush and a wrapped tube of paste. “Toot’bresh, too. I grabbed it off the drugstore counter and left the money.” He dug into the capacious pocket of his khaki blouse and withdrew a handful of silver and bills. “Ever’thin’ itemized, gov’nor, ’cept the toot’bresh, on the side of that there big package—yep—the travelin’ bag. Seven-fifty fer it. Cheapest they had.”

“O.K., lad. Go downstairs now and wait for me. We’ll be jumping out in a few minutes for Central Air Field. Sure, just let your meter tick on. This is all on me!”

With the withdrawal of the driver, Orski did not even bother to count his change, nor check up the itemization. Instead, he stripped off manilla paper wrappings and white cotton string from garments and bag itself, and jammed the various articles down into the alligator leather receptacle. They filled it rather loosely, that was certain, but the bag looked neat and trig, and, what was of considerable importance, had a plenteous capacity for further pick-ups of material, where and when such pick-ups might take place. Now he stood erect from his hasty packing. He stepped to the dial phone which stood on the little gilt-legged center table. And he realized indeed, now, that his nerves were demoralized, for the number he had so carefully locked in his brain was gone entirely—both numeral and exchange. He dialed the emergency operator. “Give me Central—Central Flying Field,” he told her. “No—no directory here.”

In a moment he had it. He asked for an individual whose name he gave as “Mr. Daniel Stark, Director General of the Field.” In his mind’s eye he could see across the city to those low administration buildings covered with gray stucco, clustered around the entrance to the huge field with its high wire fence, and to Stark’s private upstairs office with its charts, maps, phones, hanging weather reports, looking out with one capacious window over the field itself, and with its other window over the entrance gate and onto the narrow city street outside, like an additional observational eye of itself.

“Who’s talking?” the switchboard operator asked him.

“Er—his friend in the Cubist Building, tell him.”

In a moment a brisk authoritative voice came on the wire.

“Who is this, please?”

“Dan, this is Alexis.”

“Oh—hallo, ’Lex. What can I do for you?”

“Say, Dan, could you fix me up personally on a fast two-seater plane and a good pilot—to go northwest tonight?”

“Sure thing, ’Lex. I’ve several all tuned up. And pilots a-plenty cooling their heels. This is our hour for those kinds of calls, you know. When will you want it?”

“Oh—in a half-hour, or even less, Dan.”

“O.K. I’ll have our traffic manager, Mr. Matlacker, fix it up at once. Ask for me—that is, if you have time. I’m on duty till an hour after full dark sets in. So that’ll put me here a little more than two hours yet.”

“Fine. Thanks a lot, Dan. I’ll see you later—oh, say, Dan, by the way, is there anything off center today out around your diggings? I mean—well—any suspicious-looking cars, for instance, hanging around—er—your entrance?”

“Well—’Lex—curious that you should speak of that. Yes, there’s a long low car been parked across the street now for several hours. It’s got four clergymen in it; at least they’re wearing inverted ecclesiastical collars and black frock coats. But by the Gods, ’Lex, they’re the toughest-looking bunch of ministers I ever saw. If they should usher me in at the gates of heaven some day, I—I wouldn’t want to come in!”

“How—how do you know they’re ministers?” asked Orski. His voice was tense.

“Well—I don’t. The old policeman who covers this block out here in the weeds asked ’em if he could help ’em in any way—and they displayed a printed card or document or something to him showing they were a Methodist delegation of clergymen waiting for a Bishop Somebody-or-Other who is expected in from the East on a private passenger plane. I looked ’em over a bit from my window here with my binoculars, and if you ask me, ’Lex, I’d say they look more like hoodlums to me. Old Rooney says the two he talked with had a Bowery accent.”

“Ha! Not having any trouble, are you, Dan—at the air field? No gangster’s planes—anything—”

“No. Tatrelli, one of Chicago’s big hoodlums, the fellow that’s supposed to handle the North Side beer territory for Big Shot, keeps his big cross-continent 3-engined Fokker out here. However, it’s in its hangar. Outside of that—well—”

“Yes—well! Listen here, Dan. Think carefully now. Any other waiting cars there? Or—or planes waiting to hop off?”

“What—what do you mean, ’Lex? No—wait—by God, ’Lex, there is a plane waiting outside of Hangar Number 11, near the inside of the gate, with a pilot and three hunters in it. They’re going to the Canadian North Woods to hunt. They’ve got all their guns and equipment piled in it—it’s a Hi-Speed Vega plane—and they’re waiting, they told my ground manager, for a fourth hunter who’s supposed to come about dark. They’ve got hunting licenses; so my baggage inspector naturally had to pass their equipment. They seem to be all in readiness to hop at a minute’s notice. They—come to think of it, ’Lex, they don’t look so darn good themselves. I gave ’em only a single glance when I was touring the hangars a while ago, but they look to me now, as I think of ’em, like a bunch of rum runners taking a much-needed vacation from bootlegging. But what could all this have to do with you, ’Lex?”

Orski’s shoulders had slumped visibly as this information came to him from across Chicago. “Perhaps—nothing, Dan,” he said dully. “I’m—I’m dodging a subpoena on a big—civil case. That’s—that’s all. These confounded process servers—you can’t tell how they’ll fix themselves up. Come to think of it, Dan, I—I don’t think I’ll be flying just yet. Not for a while, anyway. Probably not tonight, in fact. I’ll phone tomorrow.” And without even explaining matters further than he had, he hung up.