They were still working the same system. Boardman was slightly to one side. Captain Ransome was at the foot of the stairs. They were grabbing the men who came out, taking their fingerprints and passing them on to a fingerprint expert who sat within a sedan, curtains pulled. Chuck Gee’s men were scattered through the shadows. A cordon of police were in the background, ready to receive any customers that trickled down the main stairway.
Everything was ready. My scheme would either work or it would not, but I was desperate, had no time to put on finishing details.
Carefully, so as not to dislodge the bronze idol, I stuck my head through the crack in the door, blinked down the stairway.
To all appearances, in that half light, I was a feeble old man, clean shaven, a Chinaman who had nearly rounded out his span of life, blinking with Oriental stupidity, failing to take in the situation, frightened, yet harmless.
For two minutes I waited, cursing the police captain below for his carelessness in not watching the stairway. Had I been carrying a revolver I could have shot him. But they knew I didn’t carry a gun, and they knew I was trapped. Their carelessness was the carelessness of supreme self-confidence.
Then he looked up, blinked, and stared.
“Come down,” he ordered, and his gun came out and up.
I made no move.
“No savvy,” I said, with the calm, emotionless stupidity of an old Chinaman who has supreme contempt for the ways of the Fa K’ei.
“Come down, hurry you!”
I blinked slowly.
“No savvy.”
Captain Ransome started up, gun held before him.
“Well, here’s something you will savvy. Make a move and I’ll blow your damned head off. Come down, I say! No!” he added suddenly — “Damn your slant-eyed impudence, stay there. Move that head back or show a hand, though, and you’ll be laying on a marble slab inside of an hour. Here, John Chinaman, don’t you move.”
I thought of the conversation I had heard, remembered Ransome’s boast that he would be the one to kill Ed Jenkins. He wanted to empty his gun into me. They wanted me not merely wounded, but dead. Possibly he suspected my real identity and wanted to get back from the street so the others would not see him shoot me down in cold blood.
He was cautious as he came up the stairs. Evidently he feared a trap. I had started the play, must see it through. If I had so much as even jerked my head back he would have fired through the door. He was taking no chances.
I waited until his gun was almost at the tip of my nose, and then I drew slowly, an inch or so at a time.
“No savvy,” I said, querulously.
He kept the gun trained on my head; as I drew back, the gun followed. Finally, I was clear of the door, his arm was through it. He could see me in the hall, twisted, stooped, hands upstretched, behind me the vacant corridor.
“Damn you! Take this!” he said and lurched forward, tightening the finger which rested on the trigger.
As he thrust out his arm, his shoulder jostled the door.
My bronze god slipped noiselessly and smoothly downward, straight as a plumb.
As I heard it crack on his skull I grabbed him by the collar, dragged him inside. The gun exploded once, then fell from his limp hand. My fingers sought his pulse. My next move depended on circumstances. If he was clean out I would put on his uniform, take a chance of getting down one of the other stairways.
Damn him, he had a hard head. Even as I knelt beside him, he was stirring, and Boardman’s voice was calling uneasily up the stairs. I could hear a shuffling sound which I knew was made by the feet of the cops as they closed in to the entrance. They had heard the shot.
There remained only the most desperate course. It was sink or swim.
I rubbed yellow stain on Ransome’s features, took my grease-paint pencil and doped up his eyes. It was a crude job. The gun I put back in his hand. Then, as he struggled to his knees, dazedly, gropingly, I stuck the white whiskers back on my face, and boldly opened the door.
“Help!” I screamed in the shrill falsetto of a Chinaman. “Police, come quick!”
They blocked the foot of the stairs, eager, tense, yet suspicious, a dozen guns trained on me.
I gave them the story on the road down, gave it to them in a quavering voice, shrill with excitement, babbling pidgin-English, yet seeing that the words were sufficiently distinct to give them the idea.
“Policee man he come. White man with face painted like China boy hit him over head. He take off policeeman’s clothes, dross himself up allee samee cop. You catchum.”
The idea was logical. They could see something had happened when Ransome had started through that door, and the possibilities of the situation dawned upon them. Attired in the Captain’s uniform. Ed Jenkins could dash through one of the exits and gain the shelter of the rabbit warrens across the street before the guards could dope out the situation.
They started up with curses and cries.
Above me I heard the door open.
That would be Captain Ransome, and he would be wanting a pot shot at me as I went down the stairs.
I risked a look over my shoulder.
He was standing there in the doorway, still half dazed, an incongruous sight. His face was stained yellow, his eyes doped up with grease paint. He had on his uniform, and in his hand was a gun.
He saw me. and he saw the cops. He raised the gun. In that minute he knew that I was Ed Jenkins, and he wanted me to be taken — dead.
The cops on the stairs were looking for Ed Jenkins, his face doped up to look like a Chink’s, wearing the uniform of an officer.
Of course, Captain Ransome didn’t know that I had doped up his face. He felt the boys below would recognize him.
He raised the gun. and I dove headlong for the feet of the cops on the stairs.
Over my head guns crashed and bullets spatted.
There could be but one end to such a fusillade. When Ransome had raised his gun to shoot at me, it had, of course, been pointed toward the cops and he had started the merry fireworks. Two seconds later his dead body was slumping limply down the stairs, riddled with lead.
The cops crowded by and up. Someone stepped on my hand, another kicked me to one side. From the street came excited cries. I rolled over, jumped to one side and then I was scuttling through the night, my white beard streaming, while Boardman’s exulting cry earned the tidings to the waiting men, to Chuck Gee and his crowd of cut-throats.
“He’s dead. Jenkins is shot!”
It was the end. Excited Chinamen broke cover and scurried about through the shadows like dry leaves in an autumn wind. By the time the shouts above changed their tune to incredulous rage, I was safely across the street, up a flight of stairs, and exploring about through unknown passageways which were thronged with jabbering Chinese.
My whiskers had come off, some of the grease paint wrinkles had been wiped, and I was walking erect, a younger Chinaman, babbling hysterical inquiries, scuttling for cover, with the rest of the frightened covey. The Chinese are great for cover in excitement, and this time I was with the vanguard.
There was but one more duty I had. To look for Helen Chadwick. Had I staged my escape before she arrived? Would they seek to molest her now that I had broken through their cordon?
I slipped to a latticed window, glanced hastily at the street, and then stopped short.
Helen Chadwick’s red roadster was parked a short distance from the corner. She was somewhere within, then. Would she come out? Had Little Sun been successful in keeping her safe?
There were a hundred highbinders slipping through the shadows, scattering out through Chinatown on their mission of murder — Chuck Gee’s men, deploying for the purpose of assassinating Ed Jenkins.