The box from japan, p.38
The Box from Japan, page 38
“All right, Levenson,” assented Orski, but somewhat dejectedly. “Now pay attention. Levenson—” His voice dropped a bit. “I’m—I’m in trouble. I’m—I’m leaving town. I—
“What the—” broke in Levenson apprehensively. “Not—not that 19-year-old redhead, is it? You—you can fix that.”
“Oh no, no, no,” said Orski wearily. “Nothing at all involving women! God no, Levenson. I’m—I’m in a deeper sort of trouble. Levenson, I’m leaving town in a few minutes—a half-hour—an hour at most. I’ll probably hop west—say northwest—from Central Air Field by a private plane. So I want you to pay off my man Briggs for me. Any time tomorrow will do. Give him two weeks’ advance wages. And close my apartment indefinitely. And Levenson—get this now—all my preliminary planning concerning that new auxiliary plant at Argo, Illinois, is shelved for the moment. We may—we may have our main offices in the future in Montreal—or—or in Toronto. Why of course I know they’re in Canada. Do you think I’m only in the first grade of school? But we’ll keep our main plant and salesrooms here, though, because of tariff considerations. I may myself carry on the Canadian offices for the rest of—well, Levenson—for the rest of this cursed Prohibition era. Good country, Canada. Good old King Edward the VIIIth—he doesn’t stand for the high-handed stuff this damn hick town stands for. And then they’ve—they’ve got governmental liquor regulation, too. They—”
“But good Lord, Chief, if you’re to roost up there till the end of Prohibition, that—that would be two years at least, till the Vigesimal mail vote turns the Dry-as-Dust party out on its behind. If it does, that is. If it does!”
“Yes, I know all about that, Levenson. Canada is a beautiful country, though, Levenson. A beautiful country. I—I think I should like to live there. To live there—always. It’s—it’s a beautifully policed country, too; it puts the fear of God in every one of its crook’s hearts.”
“Chief, I don’t get it. For the life of me I don’t get it. But I s’pose I can wait till you’re ready to tell me more about—all this. But you’re—you’re leaving tonight, you say?”
“Yes. Quicker than that, Levenson. In a very, very short while, in fact. The minute a certain fellow gets back here.”
“Where—where are you now, Chief?”
“Doesn’t matter. In—in a drugstore, Levenson. In Old Loop.”
“Well where—where—will you be—what’s your next address?”
“I don’t know. For a while I’m going to do some jumping. All over. Just going to—well—travel for pleasure. I’ll have no fixed address. I shall be on the move, maybe day and night, for at least a number of weeks. Chiefly Canada, though. Western Canada, possibly. You’ll hear from me, though, from here and there—day and night. By wire sometimes. Sometimes by letter. Unsigned in every case. Each communication you get from me must be destroyed as soon as received. Get that? You’re to keep locked in your own brain, Levenson, where it was received from. Got that? All right. See that you don’t slip now. I’m depending on you absolutely. Now, however, about my affairs here. First, carry through this Hemingway deal exactly as already planned out by us: when the police nab him, and you in turn get to him, get that 2-percent of stock which he doesn’t even know yet he owns, at any price, from $10 up to—well—whatever you have to pay. He’ll be too beaten up to have any wits about him. Get his receipt for your money. Have a conveyance of the stock ready, and made out to Alexis Orski. Now for other matters involving your carrying on affairs for me. In the bottom right-hand of my desk is a locked drawer. Burst that lock. Under a thin panel on the bottom are two articles—one is of no importance—just a photograph—put it away—picture of myself as a lad—but the other is a power-of-attorney, drawn up privately at my request a week ago, by Moses Cohenstein in case of any emergency. It gives you the right to vote all my stock for me at any stockholders’ meeting of the American Projectiscope Company, or any directors’ meeting of our own Ajax Corporation. You’re to vote ‘No,’ so far as American Projectiscope Company goes, on any transfer of their Zell Process to the Consolidated Projection Corporation. That is, up to and past noontime, of the coming Sol 25th, next Wednesday. At that hour, our Hextite crystal is as free from their option as the oldest nigger slave was free from Simon Legree on the morning of January 1st, 1863. Wasn’t that the date of your Declaration of Emancipation? I thought so. In other words, Levenson, you just sit tight—and sign nothing. See? And don’t give the Halsey people—not any one of ’em—a red penny for a single share of their worthless stock. Just seven days, Levenson, seven days, and that’s what their stock will be. Worthless. Not even good for paper for kids to make toy airplanes out of. On Sol 26th, however, Levenson, you’re to start framing up the new deal that Consolidated Projection Corporation is champing at the bit for. Don’t try to monkey with the million dollar figure—the sum being already in escrow, and the figure being a fair set-off to the way in which they too control the situation partly—that might, you see, unnecessarily clog the flow of matters. And you know the rest. You’re to use my majority stock in Roger Halsey’s American Projectiscope Company—it’ll be a majority then, by God!—to convey the Zell Process to Consolidated, putting all the Zell mechanical paraphernalia in at $1—and our Hextite optical crystal at $999,999. If Halsey and the minority stockholders try desperately to enjoin you, their action to enjoin can be dissolved by Cohenstein in ten minutes before any court, thanks to that Feebron vs. Cudmore U. S. Supreme Court decision covering combined inventions as conveyed jointly by two majority conveyors. And that, I guess, ends the matter. All, perhaps, but the disposition of the sales money. As to that, call a hasty official Ajax directors’ and stockholders’ meeting in Cohenstein’s office, pass an affirmative vote with my majority stock, and have the legitimate regular profits on the deal, as they would eventuate if, say, it went through as it stands right today—as Roger Halsey would like it to go through now—deposited in escrow in—say—the Good Kaiser Wilhelm Trust Company—a new banking company, yes, but very sound. Then call another official meeting, and pass a quick vote to take up, with that money, all outstanding Ajax Company notes and the two plant mortgages. Yes, vote a complete liquidation. We’d better get affairs into the clear. Things are so damned prosperous all over the world these days that it looks suspiciously to me like time for another big panic! Yes, I know—I noted by all the noon papers that stocks rose another half billion dollars this morning on the New York Stock Exchange. But that’s due merely to some official statement today on the part of Sir George Leets over in England that makes certain the imminence of John Bull and Uncle Sam’s joint recognition of the Mexican president day after tomorrow, and the inevitable opening up of that big sales field again. The stock market rise, Levenson, doesn’t mean anything in itself. Things are so prosperous in general that another slump is doubtlessly on the way. And so—are you getting all this, Levenson? Yes? All right. Now as to the additional profits on the deal, as obtained through our juggling the constituent Zell Process values by our two majorities. Pass a vote—yes, an Ajax vote—declaring them a dividend. Yes, a dividend. I want money! So do you, I take it. Have the $160,000 or thereabouts, that comes to me on my own two-thirds majority stock, deposited to the credit of my personal account in the Father Dearborn Trust Company Bank. I’d suggest that you don’t bother to deposit your own additional slice, which you’ll get, thanks to your minority holdings in Ajax, because you’ll only have to draw it all out to blow on some brunette. Alas, too true, Levenson. Too true! Now one final thing. If any of the Halsey crew—say Roger Halsey—or that newspaper nephew of his who was so asinine as to allow the old man to tie up his conveyance rights and whipsaw us—comes snivelling around, begging to have a lap of the cream off the edge of our saucer, kick ’em bodily out of the office and throw their hats after ’em. Let ’em know for once and all they’re done, finee, through! In other words they’re—they’re stinko, see?”
“I’ll carry it all through, Chief, exactly as you outline it, subject to any possible further modifications you might write me about. And—by the way, Chief, you’re—you’re not sick, are you?”
Orski, in his ears ringing the sharp grating sound of a car’s metallic wheels on the curb outside—a sound never made by a careful taxi driver—was feeling his forehead grow moist and clammy. He knew vaguely that he was in a sudden panic, and that he was going to act again exactly as a panic-stricken man. “That’s—that’s all,” he bit off desperately. “I’ll communicate with you by wire to—tomorrow. Under no conditions my address to anyone. Remember that. Good-by.”
He sped to the front window. The long low black car he had pictured in his frightened brain as standing there, was a flamboyant thing, splotched up crudely in vivid pigments, saucy sayings lettered across its windshield, containing three super-jazz age youths letting out a super-jazz age flapper who was blowing kisses at all of them. “God!” ejaculated Orski. “My—my nerves are sure shot. Now for the flying field.”
But even as he spoke, his sunburned taxi driver rolled up, came to a perfect stop a bare half-inch from the collegiately decorated chariot, and clambered out, under his arm a collection of manilla-wrapped packages. So Orski left the window, and busied himself riffling rapidly over the thin pages of the gargantuan directory which hung on one wall of the room, till his man had come up inside the little hotel, had made his inevitable inquiry for “Mr. Blairstone’s room” and was tapping on the door of the room itself. With his precious telephone number clutched somehow in the tentacles of his brain, Orski opened the door. The taxi driver, beaming, came in.
“I sure made that counter-jumper hop, gov’nor,” he said. “’Cause o’ you havin’ to make that plane. Now here’s all the stuff, pyjammers, shirts—ever’thing.” He withdrew from his pocket a cellophane-covered toothbrush and a wrapped tube of paste. “Toot’bresh, too. I grabbed it off the drugstore counter and left the money.” He dug into the capacious pocket of his khaki blouse and withdrew a handful of silver and bills. “Ever’thin’ itemized, gov’nor, ’cept the toot’bresh, on the side of that there big package—yep—the travelin’ bag. Seven-fifty fer it. Cheapest they had.”
“O.K., lad. Go downstairs now and wait for me. We’ll be jumping out in a few minutes for Central Air Field. Sure, just let your meter tick on. This is all on me!”
With the withdrawal of the driver, Orski did not even bother to count his change, nor check up the itemization. Instead, he stripped off manilla paper wrappings and white cotton string from garments and bag itself, and jammed the various articles down into the alligator leather receptacle. They filled it rather loosely, that was certain, but the bag looked neat and trig, and, what was of considerable importance, had a plenteous capacity for further pick-ups of material, where and when such pick-ups might take place. Now he stood erect from his hasty packing. He stepped to the dial phone which stood on the little gilt-legged center table. And he realized indeed, now, that his nerves were demoralized, for the number he had so carefully locked in his brain was gone entirely—both numeral and exchange. He dialed the emergency operator. “Give me Central—Central Flying Field,” he told her. “No—no directory here.”
In a moment he had it. He asked for an individual whose name he gave as “Mr. Daniel Stark, Director General of the Field.” In his mind’s eye he could see across the city to those low administration buildings covered with gray stucco, clustered around the entrance to the huge field with its high wire fence, and to Stark’s private upstairs office with its charts, maps, phones, hanging weather reports, looking out with one capacious window over the field itself, and with its other window over the entrance gate and onto the narrow city street outside, like an additional observational eye of itself.
“Who’s talking?” the switchboard operator asked him.
“Er—his friend in the Cubist Building, tell him.”
In a moment a brisk authoritative voice came on the wire.
“Who is this, please?”
“Dan, this is Alexis.”
“Oh—hallo, ’Lex. What can I do for you?”
“Say, Dan, could you fix me up personally on a fast two-seater plane and a good pilot—to go northwest tonight?”
“Sure thing, ’Lex. I’ve several all tuned up. And pilots a-plenty cooling their heels. This is our hour for those kinds of calls, you know. When will you want it?”
“Oh—in a half-hour, or even less, Dan.”
“O.K. I’ll have our traffic manager, Mr. Matlacker, fix it up at once. Ask for me—that is, if you have time. I’m on duty till an hour after full dark sets in. So that’ll put me here a little more than two hours yet.”
“Fine. Thanks a lot, Dan. I’ll see you later—oh, say, Dan, by the way, is there anything off center today out around your diggings? I mean—well—any suspicious-looking cars, for instance, hanging around—er—your entrance?”
“Well—’Lex—curious that you should speak of that. Yes, there’s a long low car been parked across the street now for several hours. It’s got four clergymen in it; at least they’re wearing inverted ecclesiastical collars and black frock coats. But by the Gods, ’Lex, they’re the toughest-looking bunch of ministers I ever saw. If they should usher me in at the gates of heaven some day, I—I wouldn’t want to come in!”
“How—how do you know they’re ministers?” asked Orski. His voice was tense.
“Well—I don’t. The old policeman who covers this block out here in the weeds asked ’em if he could help ’em in any way—and they displayed a printed card or document or something to him showing they were a Methodist delegation of clergymen waiting for a Bishop Somebody-or-Other who is expected in from the East on a private passenger plane. I looked ’em over a bit from my window here with my binoculars, and if you ask me, ’Lex, I’d say they look more like hoodlums to me. Old Rooney says the two he talked with had a Bowery accent.”
“Ha! Not having any trouble, are you, Dan—at the air field? No gangster’s planes—anything—”
“No. Tatrelli, one of Chicago’s big hoodlums, the fellow that’s supposed to handle the North Side beer territory for Big Shot, keeps his big cross-continent 3-engined Fokker out here. However, it’s in its hangar. Outside of that—well—”
“Yes—well! Listen here, Dan. Think carefully now. Any other waiting cars there? Or—or planes waiting to hop off?”
“What—what do you mean, ’Lex? No—wait—by God, ’Lex, there is a plane waiting outside of Hangar Number 11, near the inside of the gate, with a pilot and three hunters in it. They’re going to the Canadian North Woods to hunt. They’ve got all their guns and equipment piled in it—it’s a Hi-Speed Vega plane—and they’re waiting, they told my ground manager, for a fourth hunter who’s supposed to come about dark. They’ve got hunting licenses; so my baggage inspector naturally had to pass their equipment. They seem to be all in readiness to hop at a minute’s notice. They—come to think of it, ’Lex, they don’t look so darn good themselves. I gave ’em only a single glance when I was touring the hangars a while ago, but they look to me now, as I think of ’em, like a bunch of rum runners taking a much-needed vacation from bootlegging. But what could all this have to do with you, ’Lex?”
Orski’s shoulders had slumped visibly as this information came to him from across Chicago. “Perhaps—nothing, Dan,” he said dully. “I’m—I’m dodging a subpoena on a big—civil case. That’s—that’s all. These confounded process servers—you can’t tell how they’ll fix themselves up. Come to think of it, Dan, I—I don’t think I’ll be flying just yet. Not for a while, anyway. Probably not tonight, in fact. I’ll phone tomorrow.” And without even explaining matters further than he had, he hung up.
CHAPTER XXXII
High Speed!
Orski’s face was grave. The flying field was cut off from him. That was plain. A car of tough-looking ministers outside the main and only gate, two with Bowery accents. Imported gunmen, of course. Imported so that no roving police squad car in Chicago would know their faces. An hour of full daylight yet—an hour of partial light after that, and a huge double battery of high-powered super-tungsten lights, moreover, flooding that whole entrance gate—both inside and outside—long before actual dark should come, and thereafter for the rest of the night. That crew in the waiting car were well placed, that was certain. And inside on the field itself! Three “huntsmen” and a pilot, guns of all caliber, steel-nosed ammunition a-plenty, every kind of short and long weapon, most probably, neatly passed through on ordinary Cook County hunting licenses. A pair of binoculars watching the inside of that gate—another pair watching every plane departing the field—plenty of spies lounging in the short open Flying Field foyer itself, to pass the word in person or by signal that the quarry had arrived and was making for a plane. Hell! Trapped in a compact, two-man plane, with nothing but thin aluminum and glass to protect him from the hail of bullets which that avenging wasp, now grimly waiting, was ready to pour in on him in the very skies, he was trapped indeed. He—he was as good as dead the minute his own plane should soar from the ground. Thorough, they were, to cover him inside the field in case that car of “ministers,” with their ministerial machine-gun, should fail to get him on the outside! Cunning, too. Not the underlings, who would know nothing about the things that lay beneath this bitter vendetta. But Mala—Stephen Mala—son of Gregor Mala. Mala, junior, the cunningest of all, for the young Slavonic underworld king knew beyond all doubt in the world that Alexis Orski would never, never go to the police with a call for protection, and that brass medal which was the only thing that would ever bring such protection. No, this affair was Orski vs. Mala—Mala vs. Orski—and Alexis Orski a dead man if he played his cards wrongly now. Curious thing, in a way, that Tatrelli’s crosscountry Fokker would be— But Orski shook his head decidedly. A coincidence, pure and simple. Not even a coincidence, in fact. For where would the notorious gangster keep a big white elephant like that, elsewhere than Central Flying Field? Orski shook his head again. Central Flying Field was off. All flying was off, by God! For flying meant the trap of all traps—the skies—the clouds. And a hurtling mass of metal and flaming gasoline. Worse than dying, riddled with bullets, in a ditch on the edge of Cook County. Lucky, Orski told himself, that he stood for the moment snug and safe—where he could work his unique problem out like a master spider himself.
