Never-Fail Blake

  VII

  By the time he was on the noon boat that left for Macao, Blake hadquite forgotten about the revolver. As he steamed southward oversmooth seas, threading a way through boulder-strewn islands andskirting mountainous cliffs, his movements seemed to take on a sense offinality. He stood at the rail, watching the hazy blue islands, theforests of fishing-boats and high-pooped junks floating lazily atanchor, the indolent figures which he could catch glimpses of on deck,the green waters of the China Sea. He watched them with intent, yetabstracted, eyes. Some echo of the witchery of those Eastern waters attimes penetrated his own preoccupied soul. A vague sense of hisremoteness from his old life at last crept in to him.

  He thought of the watching green lights that were flaring up, dusk bydusk, in the shrill New York night, the lamps of the precinct stations,the lamps of Headquarters, where the great building was full of movingfeet and shifting faces, where telephones were ringing and detectiveswere coming and going, and policemen in uniform were passing up anddown the great stone steps, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, strong-limbedpolicemen, talking and laughing as they started out on their nightdetails. He could follow them as they went, those confident-striding"flatties" with their ash night-sticks at their side, soldiers withoutbugles or banner, going out to do the goodly tasks of the Law, soldiersof whom he was once the leader, the pride, the man to whom they pointedas the Vidoc of America.

  And he would go back to them as great as ever. He would again compeltheir admiration. The newspaper boys would again come filing into hisoffice and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how muchhe could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to themhow he shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in,and brought him back to Justice.

  It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Blake's steamer drew nearMacao. Against a background of dim blue hills he could make out thegreen and blue and white of the houses in the Portuguese quarters,guarded on one side by a lighthouse and on the other by a stolid squarefort. Swinging around a sharp point, the boat entered the innerharbor, crowded with Chinese craft and coasters and dingy tramps of thesea.

  Blake seemed in no hurry to disembark. The sampan into which hestepped, in fact, did not creep up to the shore until evening. There,ignoring the rickshaw coolies who awaited him as he passed anobnoxiously officious trio of customs officers, he disappeared up oneof the narrow and slippery side streets of the Chinese quarter.

  He followed this street for some distance, assailed by the smell of itsmud and rotting sewerage, twisting and turning deeper into thedarkness, past dogs and chattering coolies and oil lamps andgaming-house doors. Into one of these gaming houses he turned, passingthrough the blackwood sliding door and climbing the narrow stairway tothe floor above. There, from a small quadrangular gallery, he couldlook down on the "well" of the fan-tan lay out below.

  He made his way to a seat at the rail, took out a cigar, lighted it,and let his veiled gaze wander about the place, point by point, untilhe had inspected and weighed and appraised every man in the building.He continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on hishands and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black bouldershadowed his eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes ofhis waistcoat. He lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone andclatter of voices below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending todrop off into a doze of ennui. But all the while he was most acutelyawake.

  For somewhere in that gathering, he knew, there was a messengerawaiting him. Whether he was English or Portuguese, white or yellow,Blake could not say. But from some one there some word or signal wasto come.

  He peered down at the few white men in the pit below. He watched theman at the head of the carved blackwood table, beside his heap of brass"cash," watched him again and again as he took up his handful of coins,covered them with a brass hat while the betting began, removed the hat,and seemed to be dividing the pile, with the wand in his hand, intofours. The last number of the last four, apparently, was the object ofthe wagers.

  Blake could not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as theyellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entirecountry puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf ofcenturies that divided the two races. These yellow men about himseemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner oflife and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at throughthe bars of the Bronx Zoo cages.

  A white man would have to be pretty far gone, Blake decided, to fallinto their ways, to be satisfied with the life of those yellow men. Hewould have to be a terrible failure, or he would have to be hounded bya terrible fear, to live out his life so far away from his own kind.And he felt now that Binhart could never do it, that a life sentencethere would be worse than a life sentence to "stir." So he tookanother cigar, lighted it, and sat back watching the faces about him.

  For no apparent reason, and at no decipherable sign, one of the yellowfaces across the smoke-filled room detached itself from its fellows.This face showed no curiosity, no haste. Blake watched it as it calmlyapproached him. He watched until he felt a finger against his arm.

  "You clum b'long me," was the enigmatic message uttered in thedetective's ear.

  "Why should I go along with you?" Blake calmly inquired.

  "You clum b'long me," reiterated the Chinaman. The finger againtouched the detective's arm. "Clismas!"

  Blake rose, at once. He recognized the code word of "Christmas." Thiswas the messenger he had been awaiting.

  He followed the figure down the narrow stairway, through the slidingdoor, out into the many-odored street, foul with refuse, bisected byits open sewer of filth, took a turning into a still narrower street,climbed a precipitous hill cobbled with stone, turned still again,always overshadowed and hemmed in by tall houses close together, withblack-beamed lattice doors through which he could catch glimpses ofgloomy interiors. He turned again down a wooden-walled hallway thatreminded him of a Mott Street burrow. When the Chinaman touched him onthe sleeve he came to a stop.

  His guide was pointing to a closed door in front of them.

  "You sabby?" he demanded.

  Blake hesitated. He had no idea of what was behind that door, but hegathered from the Chinaman's motion that he was to enter. Before hecould turn to make further inquiry the Chinaman had slipped away like ashadow.