# The Door of Dread/Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN
SADIE WIMPEL kept her eye on Dorgan as he backed against the wall. She watched him quite as closely as he watched the door. Yet as she did so she was not altogether idle. She quietly picked up the two sheets of India paper folded together on the table. Then with her eyes still on Dorgan she unbuttoned her shirt-waist and as quietly secreted the papers, reassuring herself of their safety before she let her gaze wander from her enemy's face.
The next moment she was lounging indolently back in her chair, viewing with veiled eyes the door through which Keudell would enter. Yet for all her pose of impassivity a close observer might have noticed the quickened throb of her throat-pulse and the quickened rise and fall of her breast, for she was only too keenly aware that the advent of Keudell meant the advent of a newer and a greater peril. ​And that peril was all the more disturbing because it remained still undefined.
She sat without perceptible movement, however as the door swung open and Keudell himself strode in past the snake-embrodered screen. Nor did she move as he advanced toward the center of the room, seeming to fill it with his huge presence, menacing it with his smile of apparent unconcern. On his scarred blond face, still damp from the driving rain through which he had passed, was an expression too unconcerned to be called a sneer and too sinister to be described as a smile. It was only a pale and slightly protuberant eye, moving restlessly from side to side, which typified the alertness of the mind behind the pretended apathy of the gross and heavy body.
But what most interested Sadie Wimpel was the fact that Keudell's right hand rested in the loose side pocket of his coat. It remained there with a rigidity which tended to thrust the corner of that carefully tailored garment slightly forward and did not at first thought add to the impressiveness of the figure. But Sadie had seen enough of underworld life to venture a guess as to just what Keudell held in that hidden right hand.
​"So this is your hang-out?" the newcomer finally remarked, taking a step or two nearer the table behind which the indifferent-eyed seeress sat. Dorgan, as Keudell advanced deeper into the room, swung slowly about so as to keep facing him.
The pale-faced seeress seemed to emerge from her catalepsy.
"Ain't the wall-paper to your likin'?" she calmly inquired.
Keudell stood for a moment returning her stare.
"And it seems so short a time since you and I were engaged In a conversation which, unfortunately, did not come to a finish!" suavely intoned her huge blond visitor.
"It was finish enough for me!" promptly asserted the young woman confronting him. The half-sneering smile went from Keudell's face. For one brief moment his glacial eye rested on Dorgan.
"So you two thought you could get away with it," he said, with an oddly meditative movement of the jaw muscles which did not tend to add to his attractiveness. Sadie waited for Dorgan to speak, but that worthy merely stood watching the newcomer, watching him with a steely and non-committal stare of deliberation.
​"Ain't yuh kind o' takin' chances," the young woman mildly inquired, "blowin' into a privut house where yuh ain't been askt?"
"I'm going to take more than chances!" retorted Keudell.
"Ain't he the ol' cut-up!" cooed the derisive Sadie. But her mockery had small effect on Keudell.
"You know what I came for," he deliberately announced.
"For to git your hand read?" asked the innocent-eyed Sadie.
Her evasiveness seemed too much for Keudell's patience. He turned away from her and confronted the watchful-eyed Dorgan.
"I want those papers," he quietly announced.
"I haven't got 'em," retorted the man with his back to the wall, "and you wouldn't get them if I had 'em!"
It was Sadie who cut in before Keudell could speak again.
"Don't yuh let this pink-eye buffalo yuh into sayin' or doin' what yuh don't wantta!" she shrilled out, with a sudden show of anger. "For he's goin' to git outta here, and git out quick, or he'll be took out!"
​"Who'll take me out?"
"What's the matter wit' a bunch o' cops doin' it?"
"Who will get them?"
"I gotta feelin' that me maid's already out after 'em!"
"Neither you nor your maid can leave this house," calmly announced Keudell. "And nobody's going to leave it until I get what I came after."
"Even though yuh're pinched on the way out?"
Keudell laughed at her.
"You fail to remember that I'm an attaché of the Austrian Embassy, and members of an embassy can not be arrested."
It was Sadie's turn to laugh. She even suspected him of lying.
"I don't care if yuh're the King of Siam! Yuh can't pull that wild-west stuff this close to Broadway! It ain't bein' done this season!"
"How about that man of mine you shot through the leg?"
"He got what was comin' to him!"
"And I'm going to get what is coming to me. I have a right to those papers, and I'm going to get them."
Sadie was thinking both hard and fast. But to ​disguise the fact that her empty little head was for once working overtime, she languidly took up a cigarette and lighted it. Then she looked at Keudell, with pity in her eye.
"Honest, King, yuh wring me heart wit' thoughts o' the ol' days when the rubes were buyin' gold bricks down to Union Square! For yuh're sure workin' the wrong game! Ain't yuh ever goin' to git gerry to the fact yuh can't throw a scare into us two? And ain't yuh ever goin' to wake up to the fact that if yuh want them submarine models yuh gotta git down and talk business?"
The one thing for which Sadie was now maneuvering was time. Dorgan she no longer feared. He and his destinies were nothing to her. All she remembered was that she carried certain papers which must reach either Wilsnach or Kestner, and nobody else. She carried them, yet she carried them at a time when their possession was a peril. The heavy-witted Dorgan, she felt, might still betray her to save his own scalp. And she felt equally assured of the fact that Keudell himself would kill her as readily as he would strike a match, rather than let those gun plans slip through his fingers.
"There's been too much talking business," was ​Keudell's retort, "and nothing came of it. And now I'm not going to waste words and I'm not going to waste time. I want those papers!"
Time, however, was the one thing which Sadie was insisting that he should waste. And closely as she watched her enemy, and that enemy watched her, one of her fingers was repeatedly and frantically playing on the button of her hidden push bell and she was silently praying for intervention, intervention in the form of Zuleika, or Wilsnach, or Kestner himself.
"Where'd yuh git a license to come rough-housin' through this ward and squealin' about papers yuh ain't even paid for yet?" she burst out, with all the insolence at her command.
Keudell, with his pale eyes fixed on Dorgan's face, quietly lifted his right hand from the side pocket where it had been resting.
"My license is right here!" he announced.
"Hully gee!" gasped Sadie. For Keudell's threat of force was no longer a veiled one. In his half-raised right hand he held a heavy-bodied automatic revolver. And he repeated his command of "I want those papers!" as he stepped closer to the strangely divergent pair opposing him.
​There was something in Keudell's face, as he stood facing her, which sent a distinct wave of apprehension through that watchful-eyed young woman. It was not merely the face of a braggart and bully. It was the face of an aggressively determined man, who, for reasons that could not be fathomed, found himself confronted by his last resource. There was no longer mere belligerency about the grim lines of the mouth. There was something strangely like desperation itself. It suggested a final abandonment to a course which could no longer be evaded, a final comprehension of consequences which, however grave they might prove, now had to be unflinchingly faced. Something deep within Sadie Wimpel's unanalytical little soul convinced her of the fact that Keudell was at the end of his rope, and being at the end of his rope, was no longer going to be satisfied with half measures.
Then her eyes followed Keudell's figure as he stepped closer to the sullen-faced Dorgan. Dorgan, she knew, was not subtle. Yet, on the other hand, he was not easily intimidated.
"You can't hold me up this way!" he rebelliously announced, with his one unbandaged eye blinking ​down at the somber gunmetal of the leveled revolver.
"Can't I?" was Keudell's cry.
"No, you can't! And what's more you can't even scare me!"
"Then I'll do a little more than merely scare you!" said Keudell with an audible gasp, as he took one step closer to the man against the wall.
Sadie's heart leaped up into her throat. She knew what was coming. She knew that Keudell had suffered indignities enough to leave him desperate. That much was evident from the very fact that he had sought her out in her own home; that he had forced his way into the enemy's lair; that he had been willing to place his head in the lion's mouth. And unimaginative as she was, this thought fixed in her mind the value of the papers she carried in her own breast, the papers for which Wilsnach would have traveled half-way around the world. They were certainly worth the fight. But once Keudell broke loose, her last chance was gone. And Keudell was surely going to break loose.
"Wait!" was her shrill cry as she suddenly stood up behind her table. "If yuh want your papers that bad, you sure kin have 'em!"
​For one fraction of a second Keudell looked about at her. But he still kept the revolver pointed at Dorgan's ribs.
"I intend to have them!"
"Then put that gun down and yuh'll git 'em!"
"Where are they?"
"In that man's pocket!"
"Then come and take them out of his pocket! And come quick!"
For one brief second Sadie Wimpel hesitated. But it was a second and no more, for she had decided on her plan and intended to carry it through. She rounded the table and stepped close to the rebellious-eyed Dorgan. She even essayed a reproving jerk of his coat lapel.
"Can't yuh see the jig's up?" she demanded. For time was the one thing for which she was still fighting.
"Hand over those papers!" repeated Keudell. And Sadie knew it was not a moment for trifling.
She slipped a hand down inside Dorgan's coat, unbuttoned the pocket-flap, and drew out the yellow manila envelope which he had stored away there. There was something more than reproof in Dorgan's eye as she did so; there was blind revolt and ​the white heat of a rage that had no chance of exhausting itself in action. But by this time Dorgan was a mere incident in the widening circle of Sadie's enterprises. What she wanted now was escape from that house, and escape at any cost.
She saw Dorgan raise a hand, as though to strike at her, and she caught at this movement as a pretext for dodging back behind her table. For a moment she nursed the hope of continuing her flight through the black curtains that draped the front of her materializing cabinet, and through the cabinet to the rear door that opened on the hall, and from the hall to the upper regions of the house.
But this hope lasted only for a moment, for Keudell was at her side before she had even rounded the table-end. He stood so close to her, as she drew up, that the revolver barrel in his upraised hand pressed against her body and gave her a runway of chills up and down the backbone.
"Hand me that package!" he commanded. He spoke with a quiet huskiness of voice that seemed more threatening and more intimidating than the loudest shout could be.
During one moment's space Sadie's questioning eyes rested on those of her captor, for the fingers ​of the left hand were now clamped about her arm. She saw the foolishness of all further evasion, the danger of all quibbling. Still watching him, she slowly raised her hand and held out the sealed manila envelope.
Keudell took possession of it with a clutch of the fingers and a quick backward movement like that of a child jerking a chestnut from an overheated hearth. As he did so Sadie was vaguely concious of Dorgan's stealthy movement along the room-wall. She had no time to give this much thought, for she saw that Keudell was engaged in an equally absorbing movement. She realized that he was promptly and deliberately tearing open the end of the manila envelope which she had handed to him. And the opening of that envelope, she knew, would bring still another change to the shifting drama.
Sadie leaned forward a little over the table-edge, watching the big blond figure, oddly calm in the presence of a crisis which she knew could no longer be averted. She saw Keudell draw forth the contents of the opened envelope. She saw, even before he unfolded it, that the sheet which he had withdrawn was nothing more than the carefully ​folded page of a newspaper. She saw the foreign agent stare down at this newspaper page, stare down at it a little stupidly, with his jaw muscles slightly relaxed. Then he no longer occupied her attention, for she became suddenly conscious of the fact that Dorgan no longer stood with his back against the wall, but had advanced toward the center of the room, and even as his unbandaged eye was bent on Keudell his right hand was groping quickly and foolishly about the bowl of goldfish on its little tripod of Ruskin bronze.
For Dorgan himself had undoubtedly been awaiting that moment of divided attention on the part of his enemy. Even as his hand closed on the lip of the glass bowl, about which the small swarm of iridescent bodies were dreamily revolving, Sadie stood puzzled as to the meaning of the movement. She was puzzled, too, by the quick writhe of his body, like the twist of a ball-thrower's torso, as he wheeled and swept the bowl from its bronze tripod.
Then she understood. For with one and the same movement the bowl with its flame-colored bodies and its gravel-bed and its gallon of green-tinted water went hurtling straight at the head of the startled Keudell.
​It struck true. But Keudell still wore his hat, and the stiff fiber brim of this served to break somewhat the force of the blow. Yet it could not stop the blinding deluge of water and gravel and madly flopping bodies which cascaded about him. And almost coincident with the crash of the breaking glass came the sound of Keudell's revolver falling to the floor.
Yet, oddly enough, what most held Sadie's attention at the moment was one goldfish which writhed and flopped on Keudell's wide shoulder as he staggered back against the table-edge. She watched it as it danced like a flame down his vest-front and then minuetted with its fellows at his feet, like quavering shreds of sunlight dancing on the water-stained carpet.
She stared in horror as Keudell's heels stamped impartially on these fragile bits of pulsing life and on the crunching fragments of bowl-glass. She saw him grope and flounder about, blinded for a moment by both the blow and the shower about his head.
The next moment, however, he had recovered himself and was stooping to catch up the fallen revolver. At the same instant that his fingers came ​in contact with it, Dorgan took two quick steps forward, swinging back his right foot as he came to a stop. He kicked viciously, and with all his force, his heavy shoe striking the firearm and the grasping fingers at the same time.
The blow sent the revolver scuttling across the carpeted floor, under the black-draped table and out of sight again beyond the curtains of the materializing cabinet.
The force of the blow; also sent Keudell's body swinging half-way about, and brought Dorgan himself staggering against the table behind which Sadie Wimpel now stood. There his hand fell on the plaster-of-Paris skull which stood on its black velvet mat. He caught it up, irreverently, by the jawbone. The next moment he sent it with all his force against the half-turned body of Keudell, where it ricochetted from the heavy shoulder and crashed against the door-frame, shattering into a hundred pieces.
But by this time Keudell was no longer passive. He swung about and seized a chair. At the same moment that Dorgan caught up the clairvoyant's large crystal-gazer's globe of solid glass from its bronze tripod and sent it cannonading against his ​enemy, Keudell himself flung the chair with all his force.
Dorgan's howl, half of anger and half of pain, as the chair-back struck against his hip, was brute-like and throaty and singularly suggestive of the bleat of a stock-yards calf.
But Sadie did not wait for more. She swung about and dove through the curtains of her cabinet-front. Her first impulse was to find and possess herself of the fallen revolver. But as she stood staring about at the back of her cabinet she saw the door so invitingly confronting her. At the same time she realized that her flight remained unobserved by the two combatants. And a natural and instinctive propulsion toward escape asserted itself.
She opened the door and slipped through it into the shadowy back hallway, where she could still hear the muffled crash of furniture and the thud of stamping feet. But Sadie no longer hesitated. Her passion to reach the open was now an all-consuming one. She was even vaguely conscious, as she darted for the front of the house, of a gaunt and towering figure bound close to the spindles of the stair-banister. She was dimly aware that this dusky figure was that of her own attendant, Zuleika, and ​that she hung there tied and trussed with the voluminous cotton drapery of her own Oriental turban. A fold of this same turban had also been used as a gag, knotted and tied tight across the bruised cheek-flaps and holding the rigid head close in against the stair-spindles. Above the gash of white this gag made across the dusky face, the eyes of the unhappy negress rolled dolorously, both in speechless revolt against such treatment and in mute appeal for release.
But Zuleika no longer figured in Sadie's movements or her sympathies. Her one obsession was to reach the open. And her passion to escape was based on something more than mere fear. It was based on the knowledge that she was acting for the Service, and that now, as never before, the Service stood in need of her help.
She was out through the door and half-way down the house-steps before she noticed that a taxicab was standing at the curb. Its engine was humming, and from under the dripping hood of its driving-seat a water-proofed figure was studiously watching her approach.
As she reached the sidewalk and turned to the ​east this driver speeded up his engine and started westward. She felt relieved at this movement, until she discovered through the falling rain another taxicab facing her farther down the block. The driver of this cab, the moment he caught sight of her, jumped from his seat. She at once divined his intention, and much as she dreaded a retreat from the direction of Broadway, she swung sharply about and started westward. By this time she was running.
Before she had taken a hundred steps she could hear the hum of the second taxicab and the chink of its loose tire-chains against the fender-wings.
That cab, she knew, was pursuing her. And she also knew, by this time, that the side-street which held them was practically deserted. Her one object now was to reach Eighth Avenue, where, if no patrolman happened in sight, there would at least be decent citizens enough to call on for protection.
But the taxicab which had preceded her westward, she suddenly discovered, had already swung sharply about and drawn up close to the curb at the Avenue corner. And this first driver, like his confederate, had descended from his seat and was ​plainly awaiting her approach. And still there seemed nobody in sight to whom she could appeal for help.
It was not that she was greatly afraid for her own sake. More than once, in her earlier days of adventure, she had proved to the predatory male a captive only too readily liberated and too willingly abandoned. But she remembered the gun plans hidden away behind the flimsy barrier of her shirt-waist front, and she knew what to expect from any agent of Keudell. A five-minute search in the darkened body of either of those cabs, she knew, would cause her and poor Wilsnach's papers to part company forever. And she wanted this to be a home run. Since she had gone through so much on that day of days, she did not intend to give up until the last ditch was reached. That much at least she owed to Willsie.
Suddenly, as she ran, she veered diagonally across the rain-pooled street, her instinct telling her that the farther she kept away from that waiting taxi-cab with its sinister shadowed hood the better would be her chances. The driver, who was not ignorant of her maneuver, stepped promptly about the front of his car and crossed the side-street ahead of her. ​He did not run, since a dripping pedestrian or two imposed on him the necessity of not exciting undue suspicions. Yet Sadie saw that he might still head her off before she turned south into Eighth Avenue. And she knew the second cab was close behind her, making impossible any lateral escape into the doorways past which she was speeding.
Then, of a sudden, a wave of renewing hope swept through her tired body. For under the clearer light of the street corner lamp beyond the waiting taxicab she made out the crimson oblong of a mail box. It stood out, a quadrangle of warm red, as reassuring and consoling as a harbor light to a distressed skipper. Trivial as it seemed, it suddenly typified the organized strength of a nation's governmental machinery. It stood there, a sanctuary demanding respect, something official and inviolate, something which it was peril to outrage.
It was not until she heard the pursuing cab draw up behind her that she ventured once more to change her course and dart across the street. She was running now with little groaning gasps of desperation, whimpering like a harried pup, but grimly resolved to reach that mail box before the driver who had come between her and her goal could do so.
​All she asked was to reach that corner without interruption. Once she was there, she knew, and once her precious packet was dropped within its protecting sheet-iron sanctuary, she did not much care what happened. So she ran now as she never ran before.
Her foot turned as she took the muddy curb on the run, and she went down and slithered across the wet pavement like a base-runner charging for third. But that movement brought her body into contact with the box-pillar. At the same instant that she struggled to her knees she drew the packet from its hiding-place. The next moment she had staggered to her feet and shoved the precious packet into the narrow maw of the box itself, which seemed to swallow it up like a sea-lion swallowing a fish-tail. And that, she knew, was the end of her battle.
She felt the sudden weight of a hand on her shoulder. It was more a blow than a clutch, and she did not have strength enough to resist its force. So she once more subsided to the wet pavement, going down as quietly and invertebrate as a straw-stuffed dummy, but still clinging stubbornly to the painted box-pillar with her wet arms. As she clung there, however, she threw back her head and ​screamed, again and again, with all the power of her lungs.
"Slam her one, Hunk!" calmly suggested the second driver, as he joined his confederate, "or that she-hyena'll have the whole ward buttin' in on this!"
Sadie ducked as Hunk promptly proceeded to slam her one, and Hunk's fist came into violent collision with the box-pillar. Whereupon Sadie screamed louder than ever. So arresting were those screams, in fact, that neither Hunk nor his water-proofed friend had the chance for a second effort. A spindle-legged messenger boy suddenly scurried across the Avenue. A second later a round-eyed German butcher emerged from his shop, with his carving knife and one corner of a ruddy-stained apron still in his hand.
"Whadda yuh doin' t' that rib, anyway?" impersonally inquired the spindle-legged youth, for the two water-proofed figures were now tugging in unison at the woman who still clung to the box-pillar.
"This souse's gotta pay her fare, or come to the station-house!" wrathfully and tactfully responded the man called Hunk. Two other pedestrians had joined the messenger boy and the gory-aproned butcher, and already stood staring at the struggle, ​viewing it with that impassive detachment peculiar to the metropolitan spectator on such occasions. Yet Sadie continued to cling to her pillar and scream.
"Aw, hell!" said Hunk, as he glanced apprehensively about the rain-swept Avenue. Then he suddenly backed away toward his cab.
"Beat it, Chick!" he called back. "There comes a cop!" And Chick promptly did as Hunk suggested.
Sadie Wimpel, although no longer exercising her lungs, still kept her arms wrapped about the box-pillar as the patrolman sauntered up. She even continued to cling to that pillar, blindly, perversely, as the officer stooped and made an effort to lift her to her feet.
"I'll show them wise babies!" she was sobbingly announcing, over and over again. The patrolman had her on her feet by this time. He suddenly stopped and turned her face to the light. Then she quietly and wearily relaxed on the broad bosom spangled with metal buttons. For it was the same officer, she saw, who had earlier in the week saved her from the over-zealous plain-clothes man still in ignorance of Washington's side-street "plant."
​"What're they tryin' to do to you this time?" he demanded as he held her up.
"Try in' to pinch me roll!" she pantingly responded.
"Who did?"
"Them taxi-bandits!"
The officer warded the accumulating crowd back with the flailing end of his night-stick. "Did they get it?" he demanded as he stared up and down the rain-swept side-street already empty of any sign of a taxicab. Then he stooped and pounded on the curbstone with his night-stick. "Did they get it?" he repeated.
"Not on your life!" returned Sadie. "I poked it into this mail box!"
"Then what d' you want me for?" asked the officer, remembering that he was conferring with a federal agent.
"Yuh gotta call up Hendry and tell 'im to have Morgan hurry a couple o' men up here to this box! And that box's gotta be watched!"
The officer hesitated.
"What's the matter with lettin' the collector be takin' it up on his next round?"
​"Collector?" shrilled Sadie. "Yuh gotta keep any collector from unlockin' that box till Morgan gets his men up here, or your job won't be wort' a tradin' stamp!"
"Why?"
Sadie's eye met the slightly skeptical eye of the officer.
"B'cause there's a bunch o' stuff in under that lid wort' a hundred thousand dollars, or yuh kin put me in the nut-ward up at Bellevue!"
The officer replaced his night-stick. The federal authorities, he remembered, had a way of moving darkly and by means of mysterious agents.
"And then what d'you want me to do?"
"I want yuh t' pass me through this ring o' pop-eyed rubbernecks," Sadie said, as she stared wearily about at the ever deepening circle of onlookers, "and then git something in brass buttons up to that house o' mine. But before yuh do that yuh'll kindly lead me into a drum where I kin wrassle wit' a couple o' broiled Delmonicoes! For I'm goin' to feed, and feed deep," she grimly announced. "And what's more, I'm goin' to wash it down wit' a full quart o' fizz!"