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Mystery of the Iron Box

<h2 id='chap12' class='c011'>CHAPTER XII</h2> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c013'> <div>CORNERED</div> </div></div> At seven fifty-seven, four minutes before the Brentwood train was due to depart, the boys left the restaurant and sauntered down to the head of the stairway leading to Track Ten. At exactly eight o’clock they walked down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to make sure they were still being followed. “All aboard!” the conductor was calling. “All aboard!” The boys entered the car nearest them and began to walk toward the front of the train. Through the windows they caught a glimpse of Cal, keeping pace with them along the platform. As they entered the next car there was a slight lurch, and then another. The train was starting to move. The boys sank down into an empty seat. An instant later Ken leaped up. “O.K. We’ve left him. Come on.” He ran toward the forward end of the car with Sandy close at his heels. The trainman was just closing the door when they reached him. “Wrong train!” Ken gasped, pushing past him. He leaped to the platform and ducked immediately behind a baggage truck piled high with mailbags. Sandy joined him there. They let the last car of the train rumble past before they risked a look. The man in the pea jacket had already turned his back on them and was walking toward the stairway. “We’ll take the other stairs back there,” Ken said. “Keep behind the pillars.” They reached the upper level before Cal did, in time to watch him cross the waiting room and take the escalator to the Seventh Avenue exit. “He doesn’t know much about Penn Station,” Ken murmured. “Come on. We’ll get a cab before he does.” He ducked down a short flight of steps to an intermediate level and ran for the taxicab stand. Less than a minute later they were once more leaning back against leather cushions and Sandy was saying, for the second time that day, “Chatham Square—as fast as you can get there.” Twenty minutes afterward they were crouched down in a narrow passageway between two buildings, a few doors down the street from the Tobacco Mart. They waited nearly five minutes before a cab drew up before the shop’s darkened windows, and Cal darted out of it across the sidewalk. His heavy knock on the door sounded above the roar of the departing taxi’s motor. They could even hear his voice saying, “It’s me—Cal.” The door of the Tobacco Mart opened, Cal disappeared inside, and the door closed again. “Now?” Sandy asked. “I’ll just take a look around first.” Ken sidled out of the alleyway and stood in the shadows. There were few people on the street. The Chinese Theater across the square was still lighted up, and the library was still open. But the immediate vicinity of the Tobacco Mart was quiet. “Let’s go,” Ken murmured. They approached the Tobacco Mart and slipped quickly past it. The front part of the shop was entirely dark, but a dim light seemed to show somewhere in the rear, as if from behind a partition. Ken stopped at a narrow door just beyond the shop and gave it a tentative push. It moved inward with a slight creak. He pushed it half open and peered inside. “Come on.” Ken couldn’t keep the triumph out of his voice. He had noticed the door that afternoon, from his post in the library, and had guessed—after his conversation with the delivery boy—that it led to the floors above the Tobacco Mart. Apparently it was left unlocked for the convenience of the third-floor tenant. On the far side of the door, which they closed carefully after they had slipped through it, they found themselves in a musty hallway. By the street glow which faintly penetrated the grimy pane they could see two mailboxes set into the wall. The door of one hung open on a broken hinge. Ken risked a quick flash from his pencil flashlight. It revealed a flight of stairs that mounted upward against the left wall. Ken put a cautious foot on the first tread and let it take his weight. There was only a single creak—a faint one. Walking close to the wall, to minimize the possibility of other creaks, Ken led the way to the top. A door, presumably leading to the empty second-floor apartment above the shop, was to their right. It had no lock. Ken’s flash showed a gaping round hole where the hardware had once been. He turned the flash off. He waited a moment, listening. The silence was complete. Then he pushed the door open, looked into the empty room beyond, and led the way in. They seemed to be in the center room of a three-room flat. An archway separated it from the room overlooking the street—a room faintly lighted by a glow through unwashed windows. A narrower open doorway separated it from the rear room. Ken remembered the dim light that they had seen at the rear of the Tobacco Mart. He turned toward the rear room of the second-floor apartment. “Easy,” he whispered. Sandy, behind him, needed no warning. He edged his feet forward as cautiously as if he were stalking a deer in the silent woods. At the doorway that opened into the rear room they paused, a pair of silent shadows. Suddenly Ken grabbed Sandy’s hand and pointed it at the thing he saw—a six-inch ragged round hole in the floor against one wall. Light came up through it, like a column of dim dust-filled smoke. And also, faintly through the opening, drifted the mumble of voices. They were on the threshold of what must once have been a kitchen, Ken thought. And the hole in the floor had once given passage to a drain pipe. Hardly daring to believe in their luck, he began to move carefully toward the upward-shining ray of light. Sandy edged along beside him. They progressed scarcely an inch at a time, aware that they might be heard at any moment by the occupants of the room just under their feet. It took long minutes to cross the floor. But the voices below grew more distinct with every step they took. Before they reached their goal they had both identified the three voices taking part in the conversation below. The boys had heard them all before. They were the voices of Barrack, Grace, and Cal. The first full sentence they heard distinctly was spoken by Cal. “But they went back home—to that town called Brentwood,” Cal said. “I tell you I saw them get on the train, and I saw the train pull out. So what is there to worry about?” “I know what you told us.” Grace’s voice, which had been so diffident and polite that day in Sam Morris’s jewelry store, now had a startling note of authority and command. “But nobody can tell us what they’re going to do when they get there. Are they going to take their little story to the cops?” “What story could they take?” Barrack demanded. “They’d be fools to report that they had a gun pointed at them on the barge tonight. Cal here could vouch that they’d been trespassing. Cops would laugh at them.” “Cops might not laugh if the kids said it was you who had the gun,” Grace pointed out sharply. “Cal would have to say they were mistaken, that’s all,” Barrack said. “I don’t know what you’re worrying about.” There was a moment’s silence. Ken, in the process of lowering himself to his knees in order to look through the hole, held his body completely still. “I’m worrying,” Grace said finally, “because they turned up there at all. They saw you last night. They’d seen me in that little jerkwater jewelry store. But how’d they happen on the barge? If you can’t give me a good answer to that, I think we ought to clear everything out of this location immediately. How do we know they haven’t already connected one of us with this place too?” “Be reasonable,” Barrack said. “They’re just kids. They’re not geniuses from the F.B.I.” “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about my end of it,” Cal said cheerfully. “I’m taking care of that tonight. If you just keep this stuff undercover for a while, nobody can prove anything on any of us.” “Maybe so,” Grace said. “But what’s the good of producing this stuff if we can’t distribute it?” Ken was finally on his knees, his hands on either side of the hole. He brought his eye into line with the opening just as Grace asked his question. The three men were seated around a table in the room below. Their faces were in shadow but a light bulb dangling from a cord illuminated the table’s surface. Ken stifled a gasp. All over the table, like a scattered pack of large cards, lay crisp fresh ten-dollar bills. Counterfeiters! The word sounded so loud in his mind that for an instant Ken was afraid he had shouted it. Swiftly he tugged Sandy down to join him. “This is good stuff,” Grace was saying. “And I’m not going to let anything jeopardize our chances to make a real killing with it. Believe me, it would take an expert to tell them from the real thing.” He brought one of the bills close to his eye to study it. Sandy, upright on his knees again, pulled his tiny new camera out of his pocket. He held it in the column of light for Ken to see, and Ken nodded vehemently. A photograph of the men around that money-laden table ought to be enough to send every Treasury agent in the country to Chatham Square. Then Ken saw that Sandy was rising carefully to his feet. For a moment he was puzzled. Dimly he saw Sandy gesture toward the outer room, and finally Ken understood him. Sandy had to adjust his camera before it would be ready for use, and realized they didn’t dare use Ken’s flashlight so close to the hole. Some slight reflection might be caught downstairs. They made their way back as far as the doorway with the same caution they had used crossing the room earlier. Ken’s hands were shaking a little by the time he was holding his light for Sandy, and the redhead seemed to be having some slight difficulty making the delicate adjustments on his small camera. They could no longer hear what the men below were saying. It was impossible to know what evidence they were missing. But if Sandy could get his picture that would furnish all the evidence they needed. And they might be seriously in need of evidence—especially if the men did decide, as Grace had suggested, to clear everything out of their present location. If they managed to accomplish that immediately, the story Ken and Sandy could tell would seem to have little basis in fact. Finally the boys were again creeping back to the hole and Sandy was lowering himself carefully over it, until he lay flat on the floor with the camera to his eye. Ken was close enough so that he could hear the conversation below quite clearly again. Some decision seemed to have been reached. “All right,” Grace was saying, “then your end will be O.K., Cal. I don’t think anybody could ever trace your purchase of the paper, Barrack. And all we’ve got on hand went to the barge tonight. So when I get rid of this stuff we’ll be ready for any temporary trouble those kids can make.” “You’re sure the ink can’t be traced?” Cal asked. “Not a chance,” Barrack said firmly. “I ordered it when I sent in the regular order for the print shop.” Carefully the boys began to edge back, away from the hole. Ken was already trying to organize in his mind the story he would tell the moment he could get to a phone. The first important thing to impress on the authorities would be— A dull pounding from downstairs broke in on his train of thought. It was a moment before he realized that someone must be knocking on the Tobacco Mart’s front door. “Who could that be?” Barrack’s voice betrayed his tenseness. “You jumped like an old woman,” Grace said. “Just stay quiet in here. I’ll see.” Footsteps moved quickly over the floor, and a door opened. The moment the door shut again a hoarse cracked voice said, “I came to tell you—there’s somebody upstairs. I saw a light!” “What?” Grace almost shouted it. Then he seemed to pull himself together. “That’s impossible. We’ve been right here. We’d have heard if—What kind of a light?” “Just a little dim flickery kind of thing. The library was just closin’ up and they were tellin’ me I had to get out. But I swear I saw somethin’—quite a ways back from the windows.” There was a moment of paralyzed silence. Upstairs, in the musty darkness, Ken and Sandy were as staggered by the newcomer’s announcement as were the men below. Grace’s authoritative voice broke the stillness. “Barrack, you come with me upstairs! Get that gun out of the drawer there. You get back outside, Andy—and keep your eyes open. Cal, you take the back yard.” Ken’s mind had begun to work again too. There was no longer time to retreat by the stairs they had come up. They would run into Barrack and Grace before they reached the sidewalk. Ken flashed his light toward the rear windows of the room they were in, hoping that it would reveal a fire escape beyond one of them. The little beam flattened out against the glass, unable to penetrate its thick coating of grime. “There must be a fire escape!” Ken thought. He swung his flashlight in an arc to pull Sandy toward the windows with him. The first sash they tried slid up with a grating sound, but it was too late to worry about noise. Ken’s heart gave a leap when he saw the rusty shape of the fire escape beyond it. They still had a chance! In a split second they had both wriggled through the open window onto the grating. Ten feet below them, illuminated by the light from the rear windows of the Tobacco Mart, was a small paved back yard. Sandy swung one leg over the railing, his big hands firmly gripping the rickety metal framework. Behind them they could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. Just as Sandy prepared to swing his other leg over, the back door of the shop below them flew open and Cal stepped out into the courtyard. A pistol glinted in his hand. Sandy’s leg lifted over the railing and in the same motion he dropped. His feet struck Cal’s shoulders. The impact swung the man halfway around—and then he crumpled under the weight of Sandy’s body. Ken landed beside him, miraculously on his feet. “Through the store!” Sandy was up and had taken a step after him when Cal’s flailing hand caught his ankle. Cal’s other hand, still clutching the gun, came up from the pavement in a great arc. The redhead’s fist shot downward toward Cal’s stubbled chin. The hand on Sandy’s ankle loosened its grip. The gun clattered to the concrete just as Cal’s head thumped heavily against the same hard surface. Sandy spun around and ran after Ken. One after the other they hurdled a large carton that stood in their way, swerved around a pile of shipping containers, tore through the door into the outer shop, and lunged toward the front exit. Ken’s fingers reached for the knob. But before he could touch it the door opened inward, knocking him back on his heels. Sandy cannoned into him from behind. Grace’s square middle-aged figure was outlined in the doorway. The gun in his hand was steady. He brought it forward until it nudged against Ken’s chest. “Back up,” Grace said quietly. “It’s more private in the rear of the store.” Without turning his head he addressed Barrack, who had come up behind him. “Tell Andy to stay on guard outside. Then come back here. We have to decide what to do with these two snoopers.” <div class='pbb'></div> <hr class='pb c000' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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