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Mystery of the Iron Box

<h2 id='chap09' class='c011'>CHAPTER IX</h2> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c013'> <div>ONE MORE LINK</div> </div></div> “We’re not licked yet. Come on.” Sandy took hold of Ken’s arm with sudden vigor. “Come where?” Ken asked. “Just follow me. It’s my turn to have a hunch. But hurry!” Sandy dragged him quickly to the top of the stairway, hesitated there a moment trying to orient himself in the confused underground labyrinth beneath Grand Central Station, and then demanded, “Which way is Lexington Avenue?” “Over that way.” “That’s the way we go then.” Sandy darted toward the exit, and Ken followed. Like a broken-field runner Sandy ducked, pivoted, and plunged through the crowd, with Ken always close behind him, until they emerged into the street. Just in front of them a taxicab was discharging a baggage-laden passenger. Sandy crossed the sidewalk in a single leap. “Come on!” he shouted to Ken. To the driver he said, “Chatham Square—as fast as you can get there!” Ken barely managed to pull the door shut behind himself as the taxi started off. He collapsed breathless against the cushions. “Where’s he taking us?” he asked, as soon as he could speak. Sandy opened his mouth to answer, but the words were pushed back down his throat as the driver swung left, with wildly squealing brakes, an instant before the green light blinked off. “Wherever it is,” Ken gasped, “do we have to go in this much of a hurry?” “It’s Chatham Square,” Sandy answered. “And we do.” Ken blinked. “What makes you think—?” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence. The cab driver was sounding his horn so loudly, in impatience at a slow-moving truck up ahead, that speech was useless. When the taxi finally rounded the truck and darted forward into the clear, Sandy answered the uncompleted question. “I told you it was a hunch,” he said. “But the Tobacco Mart’s on Chatham Square, isn’t it?” Ken nodded. “So?” “Well, Barrack said he worked there, but it looks now as if he doesn’t.” Ken interrupted. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you before, but the label on that package Barrack left on top of the box said Spectrum Printing Company.” “Then Barrack must have been lying about his job with the Tobacco Mart. Why would he have been mailing packages for a printing firm if he didn’t work there?” “As a favor, maybe,” Ken suggested. Sandy ignored him. “I’m assuming, therefore, that he does not work for the Tobacco Mart. But the fact that he used its name must mean he knows the outfit—and may be tied in with it somehow. And therefore our friend Watch Crystal might also be tied in with it. Anyway, my hunch is that that’s where he’s going. If I’m wrong we haven’t lost anything, except the price of the taxi fare.” “You think then,” Ken said slowly, bracing his feet on the floor as the cab tore around another corner to head downtown, “that they definitely recognized each other in the restaurant—that the exchange of the package was a planned thing?” Sandy stared at him. “What else could it have been? Sure, Barrack might honestly have left a package behind in a restaurant. And some stranger sitting near by might have noticed it, and been dishonest enough to pick it up and make off with it. Sure, it could all have happened that way. But not to those two. Not after Barrack admitted to us that he’d been with Watch Crystal the other day. Besides, there was something mighty smooth and furtive about the way that exchange was made. If that whole deal wasn’t carefully planned I’ll—I’ll—” “You can’t eat your hat in this weather,” Ken said. “It’s too cold. You’ll need it.” The taxi driver, skillfully edging his way through the traffic, spoke over his shoulder. “Any special number on Chatham Square?” “No,” Sandy told him. “Just drop us off when you get there.” A few minutes later the driver was saying, “O.K. Drop off. You’re here—and fast, like you ordered.” “Swell. Thanks.” Sandy added a tip to the fare registered on the meter. When the taxi started back uptown the boys stood uncertainly for a moment on the sidewalk. Chatham Square was a junction point of several streets and alleys, all radiating out from its open area like the spokes of a crazily designed wheel. Evidence of New York’s large Chinese population was everywhere. The window of the drugstore just behind them was so covered with Chinese characters that no street number was visible. A sign on the adjoining building announced—in English—that tattooing was done on the premises, next door was a Chinese grocery whose windows were heaped high with strange items of food including a variety of dried fish and meat. A few steps beyond the grocery a blank wall was covered with large sheets of paper bearing freshly inked Chinese characters. Beneath them, in a cluster on the sidewalk, stood several Chinese huddled in warm coats. “They’re reading the news bulletins,” Ken murmured, as Sandy stared. He let his eye wander farther around the square until finally he saw a street number on the front of a souvenir shop. “The Tobacco Mart must be down that way,” Ken decided, gesturing toward the right. “Let’s cross the square and try to sight it from there.” They dodged through the square’s congested traffic, walked past a motion-picture theater whose lobby was decorated with stills from Oriental pictures, and then backtracked quickly into the protection of the theater’s posters. They had found what they were looking for—a weathered sign atop a dilapidated three-story building on the other side of the street. The sign read TOBACCO MART—Smokers’ Supplies and Novelties—WHOLESALE ONLY. The two upper floors of the building were pierced by dusty blank-staring windows, the top ones dingily curtained. The street floor was fronted by glass display windows, but they had been painted black to a line above eye level, so that the passer-by could see nothing of what was beyond them. Sandy shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “Well, there it is,” he said unnecessarily. “Now all we have to do is see if my hunch—” He broke off because Ken had grabbed his arm. “There’s Watch Crystal!” Ken said. “Coming around the corner there! You were right!” Instinctively they backed farther into the theater lobby as the man they watched hurried toward the entrance of the Tobacco Mart. He paused a moment in front of it and looked quickly around. His eyes, beneath a lowered hatbrim, surveyed the front of the theater opposite, and the upper stories of the buildings on either side of it. Ken could feel his heart thudding heavily. He had no idea whether they had been noticed or not. And then, as if satisfied, the man hurried through the black-painted door of the wholesale tobacco shop. Ken took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “you sure outsmarted him! And I was ready to give up when he disappeared back there at Grand Central Station. Do you think he spotted us—that that’s why he was going through all those evasion tactics?” “I don’t know. Maybe he has reasons of his own for thinking that he’s always in danger of being tailed. We can’t even guess about what’s going on here. We don’t know enough. The question is,” Sandy added, “how to go about learning any more. I suppose we could go into the Tobacco Mart and inquire the price of cigars by the thousand lot.” Ken shook his head. “No use tipping our hand—on the chance that Watch Crystal hasn’t seen us yet.” He glanced toward the cashier’s window and saw that the ticket seller was already eying them with marked disapproval. “But we can’t hang around here any longer. Let’s see if we can’t find a better vantage point, where we can keep an eye on the Tobacco Mart for a while. Then if Watch Crystal comes out and goes somewhere else—” “Right,” Sandy agreed. “If we follow him long enough we’re bound to get some clue as to what he’s up to.” They found what they were seeking almost immediately—an observation post that seemed custom-made for the job of watching the grimy store across the square. It was a small branch library—one of the many subdivisions of New York’s huge public library system. It occupied a narrow building not more than twenty-five feet wide, but it appeared to use all three floors of the structure. In any case, as the boys could see through a large window running almost the full width of the building, the second floor was clearly a reading and reference room. Several elderly men were seated there at broad tables, reading by the gray light of the winter afternoon. “That’s for us,” Sandy agreed, when Ken suggested that they go in. “I’ll keep an eye on the Tobacco Mart until you get set up there, and then I’ll join you.” Ken pushed through the heavy doors on the street level and found himself in the library’s lending room. There were long rows of stacks at the rear, and a charge desk near the entrance presided over by a single librarian. She looked up only briefly as Ken walked past her to the flight of stairs mounting against one wall. The reading room on the second floor was larger than it had seemed from the street, and entirely occupied by heavy oak tables set parallel to each other down its entire length. But the half-dozen readers—all men—were clustered around the two tables nearest the front, where the light was best. Ken took a newspaper from the periodical rack as he went by, and sat down in one of two adjoining vacant chairs at the front table. He had only to look through the window, over the top of his paper, to see the Tobacco Mart across the square. A few minutes later Sandy slid quietly into place beside him, shaking his head to indicate that he had seen nothing of interest while he kept guard below. The three shabbily dressed men who shared their table glanced at them curiously, as if unaccustomed to seeing strange faces in that room, and then returned to their half-dozing perusal of magazines or newspapers. The minute hand on a large wall clock crept slowly on its way. The big room was warm and quiet, shut off from the traffic noises below. The creaking of Sandy’s chair, as he shifted his weight on the hard seat, sounded loud in the silence. At the end of half an hour the door of the Tobacco Mart still remained closed. No one had left or entered the shop. Sandy shrugged, got up to exchange the photographic magazine he had been looking at for another one, and sat down again. Another old man came in, glared at Ken as if he were occupying his own favorite chair, and settled himself noisily at the second table. His arrival was the only event that broke the peaceful monotony of the second half hour. Finally Sandy pulled an envelope out of his pocket, and the stub of a pencil, and appeared to be making notes from an article in his magazine. But he held the envelope so that Ken could see what he had written. “What do you think really goes on over there?” Sandy’s scrawl read. “Is the Tobacco Mart an innocent place of business—or is it not? And if it is why did Watch Crystal behave so mysteriously?” Ken shrugged his shoulders as a signal that he had no answers to Sandy’s questions. They were the same questions he had been asking himself. He tilted his head in a gesture toward the street that asked, “Do you want to leave? Shall we give this up?” Sandy grinned and shook his head slightly. “Why?” he scribbled on the envelope. “Always like to catch up on my reading during vacation. And I’m not hungry yet.” By the end of the next hour several of the room’s other occupants had departed. The square outside was beginning to fill with the first early shadows of winter darkness. Suddenly Ken sat erect in his chair. An instant later he was getting to his feet, motioning Sandy to follow. But Sandy had already shut his magazine and stuffed his envelope and pencil back into his pocket. They had both seen the boy who emerged from the Tobacco Mart and started briskly down the street, pushing a two-wheeled cart laden with packages. “Delivery boy,” Ken said, as the library door shut behind them and they hurried along the sidewalk in the same direction. “Maybe we can learn something from him.” The boy’s destination was not far away. It proved to be—as Ken and Sandy had suspected—the nearest post office. The place was crowded at that hour of the day. The boy from the Tobacco Mart took his place at the end of a lengthy line waiting in front of the parcel-post window. The pile of packages he had brought with him was heaped at his feet, so that he could shove them along as the line moved up. Ken got into place just behind him. “Quite a load you’ve got there,” he said conversationally. “That?” The boy touched the pile of packages with the toe of his shoe. His voice sounded contemptuous. “That’s nothing. You should have seen what I had to lug around in the old days.” “Old days?” Ken repeated casually, as if he had no other interest than idle talk to pass the time. “Business better then?” “The boss was better,” the boy corrected him. “Fellow who used to own the business knew his stuff. But the new owner—!” He shook his head in disgust. “Our line is smokers’ supplies—tobacco and stuff, see? But sometimes I think he doesn’t know the difference between a good Havana cigar and a—a cigar-store Indian.” Ken laughed what he hoped sounded like a sympathetic laugh. His mind was racing, busy with the interesting news that the Tobacco Mart had a new owner—a man who seemed to know nothing about tobacco. Sandy, behind him, gave him a poke in the ribs to indicate that he too had heard. “Too bad,” Ken said. “But I suppose it takes time to learn a new business, if it’s been dumped in your lap unexpectedly—if you inherit it or something.” “He didn’t inherit this.” The boy moved his packages ahead with a small angry kick. “He bought it. And that’s what I can’t understand. Why? He doesn’t lay in hardly any new stock. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to fill the orders that come in! So naturally not so many are coming any more. And I’m telling you we used to have orders from all over the country!” Before Ken could ask him a new question he went on again. He seemed only too glad to talk to somebody who was willing to listen to his complaints. “I’ve been working there for three years,” he muttered, “after school and on Saturdays and all. But believe me, I’m thinking about quitting. At first I tried to help the guy out—give him a right steer once in a while when I saw he didn’t know anything. But would he listen? Oh, no! According to him, he knows everything.” “Stubborn,” Ken suggested, his tone still sympathetic. “Stubborn and dumb,” the boy added. “Finally I said to him the other day, ‘Look, Mr. Grace, why don’t you rent out the second floor now that you don’t need it for supplies any more?’ It’s empty, see? And it could just as well be rented, like the top floor is. But you know what he says? ‘No, Pete,’ he says to me, ‘I like it this way—quiet. Tenants right over my head might be noisy.’ Can you beat that? I know he’s losing money on the business. He can’t even be making expenses, the way he runs things. And here he won’t even try to make a little extra money!” “Sounds as if you could do a lot better for yourself somewhere else,” Ken said. “And, brother, I’m going to! Why that—!” The boy broke off as he suddenly became aware that he had reached the head of the line. Ken and Sandy stayed where they were, hoping for further information about the mysterious new owner of the Tobacco Mart. But the boy was busy, conscientiously checking up on each package that he pushed through the window. As the clerk handed him his change he said, “You’re slipping, Pete. Used to ship out twice this amount—and once a day instead of once a week.” “You’re telling me!” the boy answered, with his sour grin. “You should tell my genius boss—John D. Grace. The D is for dopey.” He moved aside from the window. “Be seeing you!” He included Ken in his farewell gesture. “Good luck!” Ken called after him. “Lift your parcels up here, please,” the clerk said impatiently. Ken stared at him blankly. “Oh—eh—I just wanted some stamps, please. Two threes and—” “Buddy,” the clerk said, “can’t you read? That sign in front of you says parcel post. If you want stamps—” “Oh, sorry. Thanks.” Ken departed hastily, with Sandy close behind him. Out on the sidewalk again they headed instinctively back toward the Tobacco Mart. Pete, the delivery boy, was only half a block ahead of them, whistling dismally as he pushed his truck along the uneven sidewalk. “Very interesting,” Sandy murmured. “Very interesting indeed,” Ken agreed. “Do you suppose Grace is our friend Watch Crystal? Do you think—?” He let the question die away. They had turned the corner into the block where the Tobacco Mart stood. The man they called Watch Crystal was visible at its door, peering impatiently out and down the street. When he saw Pete approaching he called to him. “Hurry up! This is a rush order!” He was waving a small package, about the size of two cartons of cigarettes. “O.K. I’m coming, Mr. Grace.” There was more surprise than anything else in the boy’s voice. “Somebody must want a smoke awful bad,” he added as he drew near his employer. Grace ignored his attempt at humor. “Take a taxi,” he ordered. “And take one back here. You’ll be bringing another package with you.” “Somebody returning their old cigar stubs?” Pete asked. Grace snapped at him. “I don’t pay you to ask idiotic questions. Get going! The address is on the package.” “Yes, sir, Mr. Grace.” Pete turned away, his eyes already ranging the busy square for a vacant taxi. “There’s one for us!” Sandy had sighted a cab that was just swinging around the corner behind him. He made a dive for it and Ken rushed after him. “Just pull over to the curb and wait a minute,” Sandy directed. Ken strained his eyes in the growing dusk to keep Pete in sight. The boy was walking slowly on down the sidewalk, waving his arm occasionally when he thought he saw a taxi approaching. The driver of the boys’ car turned around in his seat, his eyes curious. “Playing games?” “Playing games,” Sandy agreed. The driver shrugged. “It’s all right with me. It’s your dough that’s ticking away on the clock.” “All right,” Ken said a moment later. Pete had found a cab and climbed in. “Follow that taxi there.” He pointed it out. Ten minutes later the boys found themselves far downtown, less than a block from the East River. From inside their parked cab they could see Pete, half a block ahead, getting out of his cab and entering a small cigar store. The boy’s taxi remained at the curb. In almost no time Pete reappeared, clutching a package about half the size of the one he had delivered. “Back to the Tobacco Mart?” Sandy asked. Ken thought quickly. Pete’s taxi was already rolling off. “Let’s not. We seem to be following a chain—first Barrack, then Grace, then Pete—and now this. Let’s see what ‘this’ is.” “Good idea. How much?” Sandy asked their driver. He was grinning as he joined Ken on the sidewalk a moment later. “Sounded to me as if the driver said, ‘So long, Junior G-men.’” “Well,” Ken said, “maybe the laugh will turn out to be on us after all. But so long as we can pick up new links in the chain we might as well keep going.” “That reminds me.” Sandy spoke through chattering teeth. “Link sausage makes a fine meal.” But he moved steadily along beside Ken toward the little shop up ahead. They approached it warily, but when they got close they saw that its windows were so steamed up that they were no longer transparent. Ken’s teeth were chattering, too. “Maybe we could go right in,” he said. “At least it would be warm. And nobody in there would be likely to recognize us.” The wind from the river cut like ice. “It’s an idea,” Sandy said. “Maybe they sell chocolate. Though right now I think I could even eat chewing tobacco.” Suddenly a shadow appeared against the steamy glass of the shop’s door. The boys swung around and walked quickly into the entrance to a shop two doors away. Feeling safe in the darkness, Ken poked his head out far enough to see. The broad-shouldered man who came out of the small cigar store was wearing a pea jacket. A knitted stocking cap perched high on the round head above his short bull neck. He walked toward the boys and passed within a few yards of them. “He’s got it,” Sandy said quietly. “One more link,” Ken murmured. “Come on.” The package held tightly under the man’s arm appeared to be the same one Pete had delivered a few minutes before. The boys moved out after him as he walked on into the night. <div class='pbb'></div> <hr class='pb c000' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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