by Jerry
He motions her behind him, shielding her; reaches out and does something to the lock, levels his gun. “It’s open,” he calls out. “Come in at your own risk.”
Nothing for a minute. Then very slowly it starts to fall back toward them.
“Quicker than that or I’ll shoot!” He kicks it the rest of the way with the edge of his foot.
The tremblingly upraised arms are the first things they see. And the empty background behind the solitary figure. O’Shaughnessy takes a step backward, propelling her with him, not in retreat but to give himself elbow-room.
The face is Oriental, Chinese. Spectacles and close-cropped hair. Hat fallen off just now at the unexpected welcome.
O’Shaughnessy: “This is the place you wanted?”
“Yes, if you will permit me to mop my forehead—”
“You warm?”
“No, but my reception was.”
“All right, close the door behind you. We’ve been a little draughty here all night.”
The visitor bows nervously. “Allow me to introduce myself—”
“You’re on the air.”
“I am Lawrence Lee, American name. I have come to offer you interesting proposition—”
“I just had one, thanks, a couple days ago.”
“I had great trouble finding you—”
“You’re going to have even greater losing me, if this is a come-on.”
“I represent the illustrious Benevolent-Wisdom Yang. His recruiting-agent in United States. He has ordered a shipment of lovely planes, and needs someone who will know how to make them work. Your reputation has reached our ears. Can I offer you post on generalissimo’s staff?” O’Shaughnessy, gun still bared, sticks his left hand in his pocket, pulls it out again, lets the lining trail after it. “You make it sound interesting—up to a point.”
“Five hundred dollars American, a week.”
“I’m no greenhorn, I’ve been in China before. I’m O’Shaughnessy of Winnipeg, he can’t get another like me. The coolies used to bow down and worship in their rice-paddies whenever I passed overhead.” That he can stand and bargain like this, when both their lives are hanging by a thread, is—well, just part of his being O’Shaughnessy.
“Two thousand, p’aps?”
“More like it.” He turns to her, still huddled behind him. “Shall we do it, just for the fun of it?” Then, with a grin to the emissary, “Yang would not, I take it, be interested in a dead pilot?”
The agent, with Oriental lack of humor: “Dead pilot could not handle planes satisfactory.”
“Well, I may have a little trouble getting through alive from here to the Northwest Station. I can’t promise you I will.” She shudders at this point, clings closer. “However, that’s my look-out. You leave two through tickets for Frisco on tap for us at the ticket-office, and if I don’t show up to claim them, you can always get a refund from the railroad—and another pilot.”
“Today-train agreeable? Shall do. Boat-tickets will be waiting in Frisco at N. Y. K. Line office. And for binder, one thousand advance suitable?” O’Shaughnessy says in Chinese, “I could not wound your generosity by refusing.” Then in English, “Carry your hat in your hand leaving here, so your face can be seen clearly.”
The envoy bows himself out. “Happy comings-down.”
When they’re alone once more, he says to her: “Shanghai-ho. The Coast Limited leaves at eleven, so we’ve got just one hour to make it.”
“But how are we going to get out of here?”
“I don’t know yet, but we are.” He goes back to the window, peers narrowly down through the gap of the drawn shade. “There goes Confucius without anyone stopping him; I guess they didn’t tie him up with me.” Then, “Who’s that fat woman walking up and down out there with a poodle?”
“Oh, that’s the lady in the rear flat I climbed into yesterday. She always airs her dogs like that regularly every morning.”
“Dogs? She’s only got one there.”
“She’s got two in the flat. She has to take them down in relays because they fight.”
“I’ve got it now!” he says. “Wait’ll she comes upstairs again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You’re going to take the next one down. I’m going to see that you get to the station and safely aboard that train first of all. I’ll stall them off here; you call me back as soon as you get there. Then I’ll make a break for it myself—”
“Leave you—?” she wails.
“I’m giving the orders in this ground-crew. Here she comes now.” He goes to the door, stops her, brings her in with him. She’s globular and baby-faced, with carefully gilded hair under a large cartwheel hat that flops around her face.
“Do you want to do something for us? I’ve got to get my wife out of the building and I can’t do it openly—we’re being watched. Will you lend her your hat and coat and dog? Your other dog.”
“I’ll gladly lend my hat and coat, but Fifi—my little Fifi—who’ll bring her back?”
“She’ll turn her over to the station-master for you, you can call for her later. I tell you her life’s in danger. Do this, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she says, looking at Nova, “I think I understand. I was sure I’d seen your face somewhere before—in the paper, you know, ‘fell me, what was he like? Was he as bad as they said? I heard he used to make people stand with their feet in buckets of cement—”
“Skip it,” says O’Shaughnessy, “you’ve got your wires crossed.”
It only takes a couple minutes for the change. The wide-brimmed concealing hat hides everything but Nova’s chin. He ties a couple of pillows around her with cord, one in front and one in back, under the coat, apologizing, “No offense,” to the woman as he does so.
“That’s all right,” she sighs. “I know I’ve filled out.”
The fat lady stays up in their flat; she thinks it will be a good idea to give them a glimpse of her passing back and forth behind the windows. Make them think Nova’s there. For this purpose they raise the shades once more. He goes down to the lower hall with Nova and the dog. Their parting is a mixture of comedy and tension. “I’ll be standing here behind the door covering you with my gun. Don’t be frightened. Imitate her waddle. Walk slow and keep your eye on the dog, like she does. Give yourself a good two blocks before you jump for it. And don’t drop those pillows to the sidewalk, whatever you do!”
“Oh, O’Shaughnessy, if you don’t show up, I’m going to die.”
“I’ll be there with bells on.”
The bulky, padded figure eases out through the door, minces after the dog, straining at its leash. He edges up slantwise against the door, screened by an abutment of the hall-wall, peering out after her, gun ready, until she passes from his radius of vision. Then quickly chases upstairs where the window will give him a wider perspective.
The dog stops. The figure under the concealing hat-brim stands patiently by. They go on again a few yards. They stop again. “Darn dog!” he chafes, sweating with impatience in the hollows of his hands. Finally, almost imperceptibly, by fits and starts, she’s progressed around the corner and out of sight.
He glues his eyes on the motionless taxi now. That street she just went up is a continuation of the one it’s on. If it makes a move, starts out after her suddenly, he’ll know—
Slow tense minutes. She must be a block away now. The cab’s still standing. She ought to be off the streets by this time, safely installed in a cab, whirling toward the station. They’ve put it over!
He takes a deep breath of released tension, steps back into the room away from the window. The worst’s over, she’s made it. All that’s left now is to sit tight until she calls him to let him know she’s reached the station. Fifteen minutes ought to do the trick, making every allowance for traffic-hitches and lights.
He sits there smoking calmly, waiting. The fat lady is still there in the flat. This, to her, is romance with a capital R. She’s enjoying it more than a
box of marshmallows. She’s eating it up.
And then in a flash, before he quite knows how it’s happened, seventeen minutes have passed, and the call is two minutes overdue, and the calmness is going out with every noseful of smoke he’s expelling.
Twenty minutes. He throws down his cigarette, and takes three or four quick turns around the room. “She should have called by now,” he says.
“Yes, she should have,” agrees the fat lady. “It doesn’t take that long to get from here to the Northwest Station.”
Twenty-five minutes, half an hour. “Maybe the phone’s out of order—” But he’s afraid to get on and test it, afraid to block her call. He shakes his fist at it helplessly.
He’s prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. There’s a shiny streak down one side of his face. “I shouldn’t have let her go ahead—I ought to be hung! Something’s gone wrong. I can’t stand this any more!” he says with a choked sound. “I’m starting now—”
“But how are you—”
“Spring for it and fire as I go if they try to stop me.” And then as he barges out, the fat lady waddling solicitously after him, “Stay there; take it if she calls—tell her I’m on the way—”
He plunges straight at the street-door from all the way back in the hall, like a fullback headed for a touchdown. That’s the best way. Gun bedded in his pocket, but hand gripping it ready to let fly through lining and all. He slaps the door out of his way without slowing and skitters out along the building, head and shoulders defensively lowered.
It was the taxi, you bet. No sound from it, at least not at this distance, just a thin bluish haze slowly spreading out around it that might be gas-fumes if its engine were turning; and at his end a long row of dun-colored spurts—of dust and stone-splinters—following him along the wall of the flat he’s tearing away from. Each succeeding one a half yard too far behind him, smacking into where he was a second ago. And they never catch up.
He rounds the corner unscathed, spins like a dervish on one leg, brakes with the other, snaps a shot back at the cab, mist-haloed now, which is just getting into gear; and slipping out away from the curb. Glass tinkles faintly back there—he got the windshield maybe—and he sees the cab lurch crazily for a minute, as though more than glass got the bullet.
Then he sprints up the street without waiting to see any more. His own shots make plenty of noise, and the vicinity is coming to shocked life around him. Nothing in sight though that’s any good to him—a slow-moving truck, a laundry-wagon. But music somewhere ahead—a cab radio—and he steers toward the sound, locates it just around the next corner, is in and on the way almost between two notes of a single bar. At the wheel herself.
The driver rears up in consternation in the back, holding a handful of pinochle-cards, shrieks, “Hey! what’s the—”
“All right, climb around here and take it—I’m in a hurry, got no time to lower the gangplank!”
“What about these other guys?” The back of the cab is alive with shanghaied card-playing cab-drivers.
“They’ll have to come along for the ride.” Two blocks behind the other cab has showed up, is putting on a burst of speed. O’Shaughnessy warns, as the driver crawls over his lap: “I want you to keep that cab back there where it belongs—zigzag, I don’t care what you do—but lose it. It means your back-tires if you don’t!”
The rear-view mirror suddenly spatters into crystal confetti.
“See, what’d I tell you? Left, left, get offa here, don’t stay in a straight line with ’em!”
The driver says, “What you done? I don’t like this!” He takes a turn that nearly lands them axle-shafts in air.
A series of two-wheel turns, and a combination of lights in their favor—the rabbit’s foot must be working again—closing down after them like portcullises each time. They shake them off.
It’s twelve-and-a-half minutes before train-time when he jumps down at the Northwest Station, slaps one of Lawrence Lee’s sawbucks in through the cab window and dives inside.
At the barrier: “Tickets, please!”
“Wasn’t one left here for me with you?”
“Nope.”
“My wife must have taken them through to the train with her, then. Didn’t you see her—pretty blonde, big floppy hat—?”
“All blondes are pretty to me, haven’t seen a bad-looking one so far today—”
“Buddy, I’m not interested in your love-life, I wanna get through here to see if I can find her—”
“Hey, come back here!”
The agony of that wild, headlong plunge into car after car, calling: “Nova! Nova!” from the vestibule of each one. No sign of her. Upstairs again at a mile a minute, nearly knocking over the gateman a second time—eight minutes to train-time now.
At the ticket-window, “Two for the Coast—O’Shaughnessy—were they picked up?”
“Nope, here they are waiting for you.”
Uncalled for! She never got here, then! Seven minutes to find her, in a city of four million people! Outside again, and looking around him dazed. Dazed—and dangerous—and yet helpless. Ready to give this town something to be tough about, but not knowing where to start in—Instinctively touching the rabbit’s foot, that habit of his. And then—like a genie at the summons of Aladdin’s lamp—a redcap, haphazardly accosting him in line of duty. One out of the dozens swarming all over the place, but the right one, the right one out of all of them!
“Cab, boss?”
“No. Wait, George—blonde lady, big droopy hat, did you see anyone like that drive up here at all the past half-hour or so?”
“Li’l dog with a haircut ’cepting on its ankles?”
“Yes! Yes!” He grabs the guy by both shoulders. “Hurry up and tell me, for Pete’s sake!”
The redcap show’s his teeth.
“That sho’ was a dirty trick that lady have played on her. She done come away without bringin’ no change fo’ her cab-fare, and the driver he wouldn’t listen to her no-how, he turn around and take her to the police station.”
“Which?”
“Neares’ one, I reckon.”
And there she is when he tears in a couple minutes later, sitting on a bench under the desk-sergeant’s eye, dog and all. Driver, too.
“We’ve been trying to reach you, young fellow.” The sergeant clears his throat meaningly, winks at O’Shaughnessy to show he won’t give him away. Wife starting on a vacation, somebody else answering the phone; he understands. “Couldn’t seem to get you.”
“How much is it? We’ve got a train to make.”
“Two dollas and twenny cents,” says the driver.
“Here it is. And here’s a little something extra—” Wham! and the driver nearly brings down the rear wall of the room as he lands into it.
Then he’s outside with her again, minus dog and pillows now, in another machine, tearing back to the station. Three minutes to spare. He doesn’t notice as he jumps down that die cab ahead of theirs, the one that’s just pulled into the driveway before them, has a shattered windshield.
They don’t have to be mind-readers, these others, to figure out where he and she will head for. If they’re on their way out of town, that means one of the stations. They’ve cased the La Salle Street Station first, now this one.
He starts her through the big vaulted place at a quick trot. Then suddenly a shout somewhere behind them, “There they are!” and five men are streaming in after them, one with a bloody bandage over his head.
O’Shaughnessy daren’t shoot; the station’s alive with people crisscrossing the line of fire. His pursuers can’t either; not that the risk of hitting somebody else would deter them, but they’re sprinting after him too fast to stop for aim. A redcap goes keeling over, and one of the rodmen topples over a piece of hand-luggage the porter dropped, goes sliding across the smooth floor on his stomach. And above it all the amplifier blaring out remorselessly, “Coast Limited—Kansas City—Denver—Salt Lake City—San Francisco! ’Bo
ard!”
He wedges her through the closing barrier, throws the tickets at the gate-man. A shot, and looking back he can see the uniformed figure at the gate toppling, even while the gateman still tries to wedge it closed. A young riot is taking place back there, shouts, scuffling, station-guards’ clubs swinging. But one figure squeezes through, detaches itself, comes darting after him, gun out. Tereshko.
O’Shaughnessy shoves her into a car vestibule. “Get on, kid. Be right with you.” The train is already giving its first few preliminary hitches—forward.
Tereshko’s gun flames out as he comes on; the shot hits the L of El Dorado, the Pullman’s gold-lettered name, slowly slipping past behind O’Shaughnessy’s back. Tereshko never has a chance for another shot. O’Shaughnessy closes in bare-handed; his fist swings out, meets Tereshko half way as he crashes into it, lands him spread-eagled on the platform. The gun goes flying up in a foreshortened arc, comes down again with a clank, and fires innocuously.
O’Shaughnessy flicks him a derisive salute from over one ear. “I gotta make a train, or I’d stay and do it right!” He turns and catches the handrail of the next-to-the-last vestibule as it glides by, swings himself aboard. Tereshko stands staring blurredly down his own nose at the dwindling observation-platform of the Coast Limited.
O’Shaughnessy sinks wearily down in the seat beside Nova, and as she shrinks into the protective angle of his outstretched arm, he tells her grimly: “You’re O’Shaughnessy’s girl for keeps. Let ’em try to take you away from me now!”
VIII
O’Shaughnessy, minutes after his Bellanca has kissed the hard-packed earth of the Shanghai municipal airport, is already on one of the airport phones asking for the Broadway Mansions. Seven weeks out of Shanghai, seven weeks back in the red mountains of Szechuan, China’s “wild west” piloting the great General Yang around, dropping a few well-placed bombs for him, and trans-shipping machine-gun parts inland from below Ichang, which is as far as the river boats can go. No commission in Yang’s fighting-forces, nothing like that—just his own crate, his own neck, payment in American gold dollars, and a leave of absence whenever he feels like it, which happens to be right now. Seven weeks is a plenty long time.