HE cool and quiet of midnight hung over the city. The narrow cross-streets, lonely defiles of brownstone and brick flanked by still lonelier gas-lamps, dipped and fell away into the unbroken darkness of the East River.
I turned into one of these cross-streets. It lay before me as desolate as a glacial crevasse. Its midnight emptiness reminded me of a flume run dry, of a conduit waiting for its current, of a tideway eaten out by its daily life. It undulated off into darkness so quiet and sullen that I swung about, quickly, at the sound of an opened door.
I could make out the figure of a little old man, lean and stoop-shouldered. He was waving an arm at me. So I turned back, reluctantly, still thinking of supper in my all-night chop-house that smelt of broiling steaks and hot coffee.
"Get me a policeman!" called the thin and stooped little figure, as I came to the foot of his house steps. Instead of doing what he commanded, I went calmly up the wide brownstone slabs.
"I want a policeman!" he snapped, like a terrier, blocking my advance, with one hand on his tarnished brass door-knob.
"Well, I'm one!" was my indifferent answer.
I stood there, confronting him. He made a strange figure, in his German felt slippers and his ragged old crimson dressing-gown, held together at the waist by a piece of well-frayed window rope.
"No, no; an officer; a police officer!" he repeated, more impatiently. And still he blocked the door.
"Didn't I tell you I was an officer?" I retorted.
"Hey?" he squawked, to gain time, with his hand behind his ear.
"I'm a plain-clothes man, I say, from the City Detective Bureau!"
"Where's your badge, then?" he demanded, squinting out at me. I turned back my coat-lapel and showed the nickel shield I'd wheedled out of "Lefty" Boyle, the stool-pigeon, three weeks before.
"What's wrong in here?" I asked. The man's eyes were still on the badge.
"Take it off and let me see it," he insisted, stretching out a clawlike band. I unpinned the nickel trinket, and dropped it in the waiting palm. The man withdrew from sight, with a preoccupied and swinish grunt, promptly locking the door in my face as he did so.
Just as promptly I got my ear against a panel of that door, to make sure he wasn't 'phoning Headquarters. In two minutes they could have told him my nickel shield had been out of service since the days of McAdoo.
Hut the unmannerly little rat was merely satisfying himself that it was a police-shield. The door was unlocked in a moment, and the shifty old eyes were once more squinting out at me. I caught the sound of his second little grunt; this time it seemed almost one of satisfaction, as he returned the shield.
"You're an honest officer?" he still parried, turning from me and peering up and down the deserted street. His eyes, I could see, were still furtive and frightened.
"Look here, you!" I cried, now in actual exasperation. "I'm getting tired of this! Go back in there and 'phone Headquarters, and maybe they'll take a night off and let you know my whole family history and who's my second great-aunt on my mother's side"
That's just it!" cut in the wizened little ogre, querulously. "I can't telephone! I can't call up anybody—I can't get help! Something's been done to my wire!"
Things were getting interesting, after all.
"What you want is a lineman then, not a policeman!" I started down the steps.
He called me back, in alarm, as I felt he would do. He seemed afraid of me. But he seemed even more afraid of being left there alone. I returned his stare, with a show of rising indifference.
"Come in!" he said at last, with his odious and animal-like little grunt. "Come in!"
He held the door back a foot or two, and I squeezed inside. Then he promptly turned the key in the lock. That done, he slid the heavy bolt beneath it back into its socket, and hooked the wrought-iron chain that still further guarded his house entrance.
I had time for only one glance about me. On an old-fashioned marble-topped table stood a small kerosene lamp, meanly lighting the dim and cavernous hallway. In the half-light, to the rear, I could see the steps of a carpetless stairway, and the shadow of a door-frame or two. But that was all. The place was as bare and silent as a tomb.
"Well?" I asked, and my own voice echoed back out of the quietness with startling clearness.