style="font-size:15px;"> And yet, death and the fear of death are a living presence in that drab shop.
The shadows that lie in black pools on the unpainted floor might well be the brooding shadows of world-events stirring heavily in the womb of time; the dirt-streaked curtains at the rear that part occasionally to show a narrow camp-cot, a wooden chair, and a two-burner gas-plate on an upended box, might be the veil that hides a nation’s fate. For Ford Duane is not quite what he seems, though his very existence depends on the maintenance of his identity as a dreamy, cobweb-brained sexton of a Tomb of Defunct Books.
Surely the bent old man, in a frock coat of rusty black, and high, clean stock over which his grayish chin folds and quivers, who hugs a dog-eared volume in his gaunt fingers, cannot have picked this particular doorway in which to stand timorously for any other cause but chance. He had tottered slowly down the long block, pausing momentarily at each cluttered entrance, palpably working up courage to pass through one of them. His bleared old eyes blink and peer nearsightedly at Duane as he silently appears from the shadows almost as though one of them had come to life.
The ancient gulps. “I—I—You buy old books, do you not?” he quavers.
A secret smile flickers around the other’s suprisingly firm, determined mouth. “Occasionally,” he responds, “Though I prefer to sell them. What have you there?”
“A Petronius, printed by Arden and bound by Trant.” He says it proudly, and hearer’s dark eyebrows arch as if in appreciation, but, curiously enough, there was never any such printer as Arden nor any binder as Trant. Is Ford Duane a neophyte then, to be impressed by unctuously mouthed but counterfeit names? Is the would-be seller a fraud? Perhaps. And then again…
“Let me see it.” Duane takes the book from the reluctant hand of the old man, riffles its yellow pages. The leather of its binding smears his fingers with a fine brown dust. “Yes,” he says at last. “It is a fine specimen, but I can only offer you two dollars for it.”
“Two dollars! It cost me twenty-five!” And so starts a leisurely chaffering on the doorstep, where any passerby can hear. And why not? They have nothing to hide, those two…
Nothing?
The bargaining is over at last, the book is Duane’s. As he counts the money into a palsied palm, he watches the old man falter down the street, vanishing around the nearest corner. Then he turns back into his shop.
Those extraordinarily keen eyes of his flick over the two or three idlers as he moves slowly toward the rear. His thin, aquiline face is impassive, but an exceedingly close observer might notice that a tiny muscle is twitching in his smooth cheek. He goes through the curtain that ineffectually conceals his living quarters from the store proper and it drops behind him. Momentarily, at least, he is concealed from those outside. He rests a hand on a breast-high book-filled shelf; there is a flicker of movement—and he has vanished!
* * * *
Behind those shelves that have swung out and back on oiled hinges so quickly, Ford Duane is no longer impassive. By the light of a small bulb high up in the ceiling his face is alive and his eyes glow with excitement.
The book he has just purchased is still in his hand, he lays it on a shelf that is attached to the inner wall, opens it to the first blank flyleaf. Seating himself on a high stool, he pulls out a drawer beneath the shelf, fumbles out of it a tiny hooded lamp that he sets next to the leather covered Petronius. He plugs the short cord attached into a socket before him, reaches to a handy switch.
Click! The ceiling bulb goes out and velvety, impenetrable darkness invades the cubicle. Click! That was the sound of another switch, but the blackness remains, so thick as to be almost tangible. There must be something wrong with the wiring of the little lamp.
No! There, just where the book must be, tiny wriggles of light appear, iridescent tracery of living fire. Indistinct at first their outlines become clearer. They are letters, words. Exhaled breath hisses sharply as Ford Duane reads the message that has come to him thus deviously from an inner, closely-barred and guarded room in a certain building in faraway Washington.
A solution of aspirin, a ball-pointed pen, were all that were required to write that invisible communication. A special bulb, equipped to emit only ultra-violet light was all that was needed to make it give up its secret.
But a man will die tonight, before Duane can act on the instructions thus given him. A man will die and horrible death will hover over hundreds, thousands more. Tomorrow a coded cable will flash under two oceans and bring consternation into another barred and guarded room in a chancellery three thousand miles from the one in Washington…
* * * *
A black shade was tightly drawn over the window of a small room on the twentieth floor of the St. Vincent Hotel. The towering façade outside this aperture dropped sheer and ledgeless from its sill. Only a fly could have found hand- or foot-hold, on that blank wall, and so far did the huge hostelry overtop the surrounding low roofs that the interior of the chamber could be observed only from the spidery structure of Brooklyn Bridge, a quarter-mile away, and then only by a powerful spy-glass.
But the room’s occupants seemed to have great need of secrecy, for its door was locked, not only by its usual bolt but also by a contrivance that slid between door-edge and jamb and could be removed without trace. The crevices around the door and its keyhole were tightly stuffed with cotton batting, and the single light within was cast by a lamp whose shade was covered with a black cloth. Its illumination was thrown only downward to the table-top on which it stood.
The rest of the room, therefore, was in semi-darkness enhanced somehow by the pale gleam of the bed’s coverlet and the darker shadows of two men seated opposite one another at the table.
Only their hands were clearly visible.
One pair clutched the edge of the small round table. They were big hands, their joints swollen, the tips and inner surfaces of their fingers calloused as only long, hard labor can harden a man’s skin. They were weather-tanned, but under the bronze there was a gray pallor oddly at variance with their evident strength. The palms were wet with cold sweat.
The owner of these hands, one knew, was under a tremendous strain, was fighting hard to keep an appearance of steadiness and calm while he waited for some critical decision to be made by the other.
The hands of that other, slim and effeminate, conveyed an impression of wily power, of sure dominance. Their skin was oddly tinged, the nails filed to queer long points, and at the base of those nails, crescents of deep blue, strangely exotic.
These hands gripped the margins of the topmost blueprint of a pile spread over the top of the table. One felt, rather than saw, that the owner of those hands was intently absorbing every quirk and angle of the sharply defined white lines that patterned the cerulean sheet.
Within the circle of illumination there were two other objects, both close to the hands holding the outspread plan. One was a bulky package of grimy-edged, rumpled envelopes held by a thick, black elastic. The other was a bull-nosed automatic, compact and vicious.
For a while there was no sound in that mysteriously isolated chamber except the faint rustle of paper and the heavy, tortured breathing of the man who waited. Then his vis-à-vis spoke. “Yes,” he muttered, “These are what I wanted, Mister Lassiter. You have fulfilled your bargain.”
“How about your end, then?” Lassiter asked hoarsely. “The letters—?”
“Are
