CHAPTER XLIV

“Liao Keng Ru”

Halsey dropped down weakly on the chair by the side of the bed. For the first time inside the walls of the hospital, the gradually increasingly sickening odor of ether and drugs that permeated every cubic inch of the atmosphere began to fill him with a sense of nausea. He found himself unable to repress a slight shiver as he gazed down at the place on the bedding which showed where the patient’s knees, swathed doubtlessly in rolls upon rolls of bandages, lay; beyond that point—nothing! At length he found his tongue.

“This is the man,” he said in a low voice to the others. “His name is Alexis Orski; he is president of the Ajax Electrical Company of this city, with offices in the Cubist Building.”

“A moment until I bring a pencil and notebook,” the nurse said. “I’ll get them as I fix the hypo the doctor ordered.” She withdrew. The orderly, pausing only a moment, left also. Halsey found himself alone with the delirious man. The latter turned red-rimmed bright eyes on him, but seemed to be utterly unconscious of his presence. He was muttering something, as his hands clawed at the coverlid.

“Alexis Orski—Alexis Orski—” he was saying in a low voice that rose and fell in volume. “Not Kronkieneff—for God’s sake no—you’re—you’re wrong. I’m not Kronkieneff at all. You’re wrong, I tell you. I’ll call the police. I’ll—I’ll—No wait—what will you take to go? Suppose I did? Suppose I did? Damn you, don’t you suppose I paid dearly for the matter of the Liao Keng Ru? Wait. Don’t—don’t shoot. I’ve been expecting you for years. I’ll pay it all back—every cent—every yen. Every yen, I tell you. Don’t move yet. Wait—wait till I speak. How many of there are you? I’ll pay it back—I’ve got ten times that money now—a hundred times—I’ve doubled it—I’ve trebled it—I’ve—I’ve—I’m the richest man in the world. Wait—don’t—don’t—for God’s sake—” His hands clutched wildly at the coverlid, his voice rose frantically, and his black eyes stared off into space as though some avenging demon were poised above him. “Don’t shoot, Mala. I know you, back—back of that long green beard. I want to talk business. I knew all the time—all the time—all the time —you must be Russian. When you first came—to see me—about that whisky aging gadget—I knew. I knew. Russian, yes. Not Polish. Russian. That is, your father, Mala. I don’t know yet—which one of the men he was. Gregor eh? That—that means nothing—to me, Mala. He might have been the tall mujik—with the yellow hair—who caught a week in the guardhouse. His name was Gregor. But there were lots of Gregors. Or is Gregor a pseudonym, Mala? Yes, pseudonym, you ignorant fool. Pseudonym! Is he the little fellow—named Andrev—who swum out and cut that pontoon cable? Don’t you see, Mala—I—I wasn’t on that detachment—long enough. To know the men. But I knew—I knew, damn it—that you’d found me. I knew, Mala, that you had all of your gorillas out for me—this afternoon. I called the depot—the air field—I knew, Mala. Now listen, Mala, I can’t pay him back—for all those years in—in the wheelchair. I didn’t intend that—Christ no!—no—no—no—no—no—no. But I’ll pay back. I’ve big money coming, Mala. Cash. Velvet. A stock deal. Zell—Zell Process it’s called. I’m going to get to a fellow named Hemingway. I win—if I get him. And I win—if nobody gets him! See? My right-hand man—is handling the whole thing. For me. Right now. This minute. This second. Yes. I’ve got right-hand men too, Mala. They can conduct my business—as well as I. Just like you. You’ve got a thousand right-hand men, haven’t you, Mala? Exactly one thousand. I saw ’em all. Today. But let’s get back to the subject. Money. Money. If nobody gets Hemingway, I win. If my right-hand man gets to him—I win. Yes, I know; it’s all Greek to you, isn’t it? You want just—to kill—poor Kronkieneff, eh? You—ha ha ha ha—” The man on the bed laughed a laugh that sent the chills running through Halsey. “Poor fool, you poor Polack fool—you call yourself a Polack, don’t you? I’m not talking to you on a Chicago phone. Call in your gorillas. Send ’em back to delivering beer. I’m out, see? I beat you! I’m on a Junkers flying boat—passing over Ontario right this minute—talking to you—short waves, you fool—short waves—I boarded it at Toledo—I’ve licked you, you Polack louse—I’m in Canada—King—Empire—show your dirty Polack nose in this country, damn you, and you’ll—Yes, show it. Show it! What—oh God, Mala! I was just dreaming. I—I meant to take the boat. Yes. The Junkers. It—it left from Lake Englewood—near 63rd Street. I’ve been kidding. Just my little joke. My little joke. Sit down. Your beard is so red. Like the hair of a hot little mama I know. Do you soak it—yes, your beard—in alky? Do you? Do you? Come. Maneuver your wheel chair closer. We’ll talk business now. Money—I’ve got it. Got it. Got it. Barrels—oceans of it. Oceans—I’ve—” He suddenly quieted as though an effort either of his will or of his subconscious mind were working even in delirium. “No, my good friend. I am sorry to say I have never heard of the Liao Keng Ru. Nor of Kronkieneff. Nor of Orski. Who are they? I’m just plain—plain—well—Levenson is my name. Mr. Orski’s out for lunch. Come, come, put your beard on. I’m—I’m fooling again. I’m not Levenson either. I’m—God, man, I don’t know who I am. I don’t know. I don’t know, I tell you.” He suddenly subsided, or at least his mutterings became unintelligible.

Halsey heard him through with a mixture of feelings which would have been difficult to define. The words Kronkieneff, as well as Liao Keng Ru, meant nothing to him beyond the fact that they suggested some terrible haunting secret of the other’s life that was coming out now that Orski’s subconscious mind was liberated in delirium. He did, though, catch a faint adumbration of something. Mala—Stefan Mala, Chicago’s notorious “Big Shot”—had called personally on this man. On business. A gadget of some kind. There had been a misinterpretation of some sort. A father—Mala’s?—a wheel chair—Gregor—and this man Orski had ludicrously flown the city, thinking that the gunmen swarming over Chicago after Tatrelli had been after him. But what in God’s name had been on that medal? That was the question. The biggest of all questions right now. It was all incoherent—just a foggy, misty picture, composed of even more nebulous segments. But one thing which he caught in the man’s half intelligible and half unintelligible ravings made an indelible impression on his mind: the word “yen.” The yen, he knew full well, was a Japanese coin worth nearly fifty cents of American money, not a Russian unit of value at all, and he marveled helplessly at the sound of it on the tongue of a man of Orski’s name and Orski’s face and nationality.

The arrival of the nurse with her pencil and notebook, and her gleaming hypodermic syringe, put a momentary stop to Halsey’s bewildered reflections. With the insertion of the fine needle-point under the skin of Orski’s forearm, he was sleeping as peacefully as a babe within a moment. She took up her book. Halsey gave her again the information he had just given to her verbally, and she wrote it all out painstakingly in her book. He asked her a single question.

“I happen to know this gentleman,” he said, “and he had a small object of mine—a brass medal with a pin affixed to it, the medal itself being about an inch and a quarter in diameter, with some Russian words etched on it. I don’t particularly want it now, but have you got it—perhaps in safekeeping?”

She shook her head quite definitely. “I myself went over every inch of his clothing,” she said, “when he was brought in, for I was assigned to his case. I did not leave a corner of his clothes, nor a pocket, unturned when we learned that he was unidentifiable. There was quite nothing of the sort you describe.”

“Were his quarters at the Hyde Park Arms gone over by the railroad detective?”

“I understand yes. Thoroughly. Nothing was found.”

“Hm! Well, my property seems to be vanished. Thrown away perhaps.” He looked down at the now sleeping man. “Well, poor devil, I daresay he’s lost more than I have—for I have a pair of legs yet. Yes, I guess he’s lost more.”

She turned to him now, the professional once more,

“We thank you for the identification,” she said, “but I must ask that you go now. The patient has used up a good bit of strength, and I must draw the shade now and give him absolute quiet.”

So Halsey arose silently and with a last look at the pitiable figure on the bed, left the room. He made his way down the sequence of narrow escalators by himself, throwing the same levers in the same way, at the tops, and at the bottoms. Outside he hopped, by another taxicab, straight east to the same old Illinois Central electric suburban lines, by which he had come this far south, and boarded another express for the long, but swift ride back to downtown Chicago that would have eaten up his taxi tickets as a huge cat swallows raw red meat. As he settled into a seat, he had forgotten all about Artemus Baxter, about the Mazoru-Ikeuna, about Carleton McCollum, about everything, in fact, except this strange jumble of facts which he had stumbled upon. Who was Kronkieneff—and what was the Liao Keng Ru? What mad vengeance had the ill-fated Orski been dodging when he met with the accident that had now crippled him for life? He must have been in a frightful mental state, to have risked boarding that fast-moving train. It had been, obviously, a matter of some very close connection with a Junkers flying boat that would have taken him entirely out of America. The fact that Mala had been supposedly Russian—or, more exactly, Mala’s father, Gregor—wasn’t that the name?—yes—and that Mala’s whole organization was out in apparent full force, must have meant, to Orski at least, certain death—the typical death of a Chicago gangster. And yet Orski was no gangster. His was decidedly not the beer and alcohol game, much less the dark fields of vice or racketeering. Nor the vocation of powerful gambler, either. His was high finance, at most, with nothing to do in the matter of purveying casks of “cut” whiskey and barrels of “needled” beer. Halsey shook his head. There had been a tragic crossing of the threads of destiny—a supposed tragic crossing, that is, for one Orski. And it was all too much for one, Carr Halsey. But he had a clue now.

When he dismounted on platform “D” of the huge new Union Railway Station, covering two square city blocks, at the foot of Randolph Street, and came out on that thoroughfare, instead of going straight to a surface car, an L-train or a bus, he made his way through the tunnel underneath crowded Michigan Boulevard and into the low graystone Public Library, its broad first floor sills swarming with its customary pigeons.

Once within, he went to the big general reading room on the top floor. And, inside that silent room of long polished tables and reading automatons, he proceeded straight to the encyclopedia rack itself. It contained the identical 1942 blue-backed encyclopedia, constituting a fusion or combination of all the material to be found in the older competing encyclopedias, which graced his own downtown studio, considerably to the west of the library. In the volume “LE-MU,” the same one, indeed, in which yesterday morning he had been futilely searching for the cryptic word Mazoru, he thumbed rapidly over the super-thin India paper pages comprising the L’s, and stumbled suddenly upon the very trio of words he was looking for: LIAO KENG RU. And though the article contained but 34 words, it opened up a still further field of exploration, a field which, in fact, was to reveal exactly why Alexis Orski of Chicago had frantically fled that city, on receipt of a simple little brass medal—dropped in a chemical laboratory in Bush Bourse.

Indeed, the threads of destiny had crossed in a strange pattern, to say the least.