第91章

"I shall be there all the time, and if you don't like the way the thing develops you can arrest me. I suppose you've got some kind of law, with a stiff punishment attached, about conspiracy against an officer."

"Well--give me all the dope, and tell me where I'm to come," he yielded ungraciously.

"I've told you all I am going to tell. All the important 'dope' you'll get first-hand by being present when the thing happens. The place to come is the Hotel Grantham--room eleven-forty-two--at eight-thirty sharp."

To this Barlow grudgingly agreed. He might have exulted inwardly, but he would have shown no outer graciousness if a committee of citizens had handed him a reward of a million dollars and an engrossed testimonial to his unprecedented services. Barlow did not know how to thank any one.

Five minutes after she left Headquarters Maggie was in the back room of the Duchess's pawnshop, which her rapid planning had fixed upon as the next station at which she should stop. She did not waste a moment in coming to the point with the Duchess.

"Red Hannigan is really the most important of Larry's old friends who are out to get him, isn't he? " she asked.

"Yes--in a way. I mean among those who honestly think Larry has turned stool and squealer. He trusted Larry more than any one else--and now he hates Larry more than any one else. Rather natural, since he was two months in the Tombs before he could get bail--because he thinks Larry squealed on him."

"How's he stand with his crowd?"

"No one higher. They'd all take his word for anything."

"Can you find him at once?" Maggie pursued breathlessly.

That was a trifling question to ask the Duchess; since all the news of her shadowy world came to her ears in some swift obscure manner.

"Yes. If it is necessary."

"It's terribly necessary! If I can't get him, the whole thing may fail!"

"What thing?" demanded the Duchess.

"It might all sound impossibly foolish!" cried the excited, desperate Maggie. "You might tell me so--and discourage me--and I simply must go ahead! I feel rather like--like a juggler who's trying for the first time to keep a lot of new things going in the air all at once. But I think there's a chance that I may succeed! I'll tell you just one thing. It all has to do with Larry. I think I may help Larry."

"I'll get Red Hannigan," the Duchess said briefly. "What do you want with him?"

"Have him come to the Hotel Grantham--room eleven-forty-two--at eight-fifteen sharp!"

"He'll be there," said the Duchess.

There followed a swirling taxi-ride back to the Grantham, and a rapid change into her most fetching evening gown (she had not even a thought of dinner) to play her bold part in the drama which she was excitedly writing in her mind and for which she had just engaged her cast. She was on fire with terrible suspense: would the other actors play their parts as she intended they should?--would her complicated drama have the ending she was hoping for?

Had she been in a more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this play which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most impossible melodrama--a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for her to risk. But Maggie was just then living through one of the highest periods of her life; she cared little what happened to her.

And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas of a generation now gone.

She had been dressed for perhaps ten nervous minutes when the bell rang. She admitted a slight, erect, well-dressed, middle-aged man with a lean, thin-lipped face and a cold, hard, conservative eye: a man of the type that you see by the dozens in the better hotels of New York, and seeing them you think, if you think of them at all, that here is the canny president of some fair-sized bank who will not let a client borrow a dollar beyond his established credit, or that here is the shrewd but unobtrusive power behind some great industry of the Middle West.

"I'm Hannigan," he announced briefly. "I know you're Old Jimmie Carlisle's girl. The Duchess told me you wanted me on something big.

What's the idea?"

"You want to get Larry Brainard, don't you?--or whoever it was that squealed on you?"

There was a momentary gleam in the hard, gray eyes. "I do."

"That's why you're here. In a little over an hour, if you stay quiet in the background, you'll have what you want."

"You've got a swell-looking lay-out here. What's going to be pulled off?"

"It's not what I might tell you that's going to help you. It's what you hear and see."

"All right," said the thin-lipped man. "I'll pass the questions, since the Duchess told me to do as you said. She's square, even if she does have a grandson who's a stool. I suppose I'm to be out of sight during whatever happens?"

"Yes."

In the room there were two spacious closets, as is not infrequent in the better class of modern hotels; and it had been these two closets which had been the practical starting-point of Maggie's development of Dick Sherwood's proposition. To one of these she led Hannigan.

"You'll be out of sight here, and you'll get every word."

He stepped inside, and she closed the door. Also she took the precaution of locking it. She wished Hannigan to hear, but she wished no such contretemps as Hannigan bursting forth and spoiling her play when it had reached only the middle of its necessary action.

Barlow came promptly at half-past eight. He brought news which for a few moments almost completely upset Maggie's delicately balanced structure.

"I know who you are now," he said brusquely. "And part of your game's cold before you start."

"Why?--What part?"

"Just after you left Headquarters Officer Gavegan showed up. He had this Larry Brainard in tow--had pinched him out on Long Island."