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Mystery of the Iron Box

<h2 id='chap13' class='c011'>CHAPTER XIII</h2> <div class='nf-center-c0'> <div class='nf-center c013'> <div>A DESPERATE PLAN</div> </div></div> “Where’s Cal?” Grace said sharply. They were all in the back room, within the circle of light that illuminated the table on which fresh green bills were still scattered. Barrack and Grace, both with guns, kept the boys between them. “Cal!” Grace called. “Coming!” The man spoke in a mumble, and when he appeared at the rear door a moment later he was shaking his head dazedly. But his head jerked up and his big hand balled into a fist when he saw the boys. He came toward them in a rush. “Shut that door!” Grace’s voice stopped him. Cal sketched a jab with his fist. “Just let me—!” “I said shut that door.” “O.K.” Cal turned and slammed the back door shut with a crash. “Sit down—you two,” Grace ordered the boys. “And put your hands flat on the table.” “Look here!” Sandy managed to get a note of angry innocence into his voice. “I don’t know what you—” “Quiet.” Barrack added weight to the command with a prod of his gun. Cal laughed unexpectedly. “They’re sure not going to be taking any stories to the police now.” He grinned even as he massaged the reddening bruise on his chin. “What makes you think the police don’t already know what we know?” Ken asked. His voice had sounded uneven for the first few words, but he had managed to steady it before the end of the sentence. “And the Treasury men too?” he added for good measure. “We’re with Global News, you know, and the way we work—” “I told you to keep quiet.” Grace sounded more impatient than alarmed. “Look, Grace,” Cal said suddenly, “why don’t we—?” Grace turned on him angrily. “Whatever we’re going to do,” he said, “we’re not going to discuss it now.” He jerked his head toward the boys. “Keep them covered, Barrack.” He disappeared into the front part of the shop for a moment and returned with a roll of wrapping twine. “Here, Cal,” he said, tossing it to him. “Tie their hands.” Helpless between the two pointing guns, Ken and Sandy had to submit. Cal took a vicious pleasure in his task. He jerked their hands roughly behind them, and when he bound the rough twine around their wrists he pulled it so hard that it cut into the flesh. “Just tie them,” Grace said. “Don’t try to amputate their hands.” “They’re all right,” Cal assured him. “But they’ll stay tied, believe me.” “We’ll put them in the cellar for the time being,” Grace ordered. “They won’t be able to overhear us from down there. And they won’t,” he added with a faint smile, “be overheard themselves if they decided to do a little yelling. The buildings on both sides of us are empty until eight o’clock in the morning—and there’s a heavy stone wall on the street side.” He opened a door in the side wall as he spoke, and gestured to Barrack to lead the way down a flight of stairs visible below. Barrack lighted the way with a flashlight. Ken and Sandy were prodded after him down the rough uneven stairs into a damp, dank-smelling basement. Old boxes littered the floor and cobwebs hung from the beams like tattered gray curtains. For a moment, in one corner, a pair of small bright eyes caught the light from Barrack’s flash, and then there was a scampering sound as the rat burrowed into the safety of a pile of rubbish. At Grace’s order Barrack swung open a heavy door. “In there,” Grace told the boys. Cal’s heavy hands thrust at their shoulder blades and they half fell into an empty coalbin. The door swung shut behind them. They could hear it being jammed into place as one of the men drove a piece of timber against it from the outside. Then the footsteps of the departing men resounded on the stairs. Almost immediately a faint scurrying began somewhere near by in the heavy darkness. “More rats,” Sandy said between clenched teeth. Ken controlled his own instinctive shivering at the thought. He knew that rats and snakes were the two things Sandy hated most. “Just keep shuffling your feet,” he said, “and they won’t come near us.” He shuffled his own feet noisily on the gritty floor. “If I could just—!” Sandy broke off with a gasp and Ken realized that he was straining at his bonds. “You’ll never break that twine,” Ken told him. “Don’t wear yourself out trying.” Sandy let his breath out in a gust. “Guess you’re right.” He moved a few steps. “But I can try the door. Maybe—” He threw his weight against it, using his shoulder as a battering ram. The wood didn’t even budge. Sandy tried a second time, and a third, with no better results. Then he gave up. “Doesn’t make any sense, anyway,” he muttered. “Even if we got out of this hole—” He stamped his feet up and down several times, and somewhere a startled rat squealed sharply. “I wish I’d taken the time to hit dear old Cal a second time. If there’d been just two of them to handle—It would have been even smarter if I hadn’t tried to adjust my camera in the light of your flash.” “How could we have guessed,” Ken demanded, “that one of those old men in the library reading room was a lookout? Anyway,” he added, “we’d have been all right if I hadn’t stopped on the way out to grab a couple of those bills off the table. If I’d reached the door half a second earlier I’d have had it open before Grace got there and we could have been out on the street.” “I didn’t know you had some of the bills.” There was a desperate note in Sandy’s sudden laugh. “Well, they say money talks. Maybe it’ll tell us how to get out of here.” “Grace and his friends are going to get us out of here themselves before tomorrow morning,” Ken said firmly. “You could tell that from the way they talked. They’re not going to risk keeping us here when the buildings on either side are opened up.” “Maybe they’re not going to keep us anywhere—alive,” Sandy said. “Grace didn’t fall for your hint that the police know as much about them as we do. Probably he thinks he could just quietly put us out of the way, without anybody ever guessing what had happened to us.” “If he was going to do that, I think he’d have done it immediately,” Ken said. He hoped he sounded more convinced of that than he actually felt. “This is his base of operations. I don’t think he’ll risk doing anything here that might attract attention to it.” “Half an hour ago we were on the point of attracting attention to the place ourselves,” Sandy said bitterly. “But now that he’s got us under his thumb he doesn’t have to worry any more. He’s safe.” He lashed out suddenly with his foot. There was a piercing squeal and then the thud of a soft body against the wall. “That’s one rat that won’t walk across my foot again,” Sandy muttered. “I agree with you,” he went on an instant later, “that they’ll probably move us out of here. But the only place I want to go right now is to the police—and somehow I don’t think that’s where they’ll take us.” “Use your head, will you?” Ken forced himself to speak sharply. “If they’re going to take us some place else, that will be our chance. Start thinking about that, instead of—” “Chance to make a break, you mean?” There was a new, faintly hopeful note in Sandy’s voice. “To make a break—or maybe to send a message. Wait! I think I’ve got an idea!” Ken was no longer trying to steady Sandy. He was caught up in the excitement of the thought that had just struck him. “Those phony bills I picked up—there are about five of them, I think—are inside my windbreaker. Can you back up to me and open the zipper?” “I think so,” Sandy said. “Why?” But he was feeling his way toward Ken in the dark. “These are apparently good counterfeits,” Ken said, turning so that Sandy’s fumbling hands would find his zipper tab. “They’d probably fool most people—except bank clerks.” “So? I don’t get it. Hold still.” “I’ll hunch down to make it easier.” Ken scuffed his feet noisily for a moment and then bent his knees until the top of his windbreaker was even with Sandy’s hands. “There it is.” Sandy had found the tab. “But my fingers are so numb I can’t pull it down.” “Just hold it,” Ken directed. “I’ll stand up.” He straightened slowly, and the slide fastener slid down as he came erect. “Good. Now try to get hold of the bills inside.” “Wait until I see if I can get the circulation going again.” Sandy began to beat his hands against the wall. “Go on with what you were saying,” he muttered. “If we can tear these bills in half and scatter them along the way to—wherever they take us—we’ll be leaving a trail for the police to follow,” Ken said. Sandy grunted. “But suppose the police don’t find them? Suppose somebody else does? The proportion of police to ordinary citizens in this town—” “But it won’t matter who finds them,” Ken broke in. “Look: what good is half a ten-dollar bill?” “No good,” Sandy said shortly. “Especially to us.” “But suppose you found half a bill. What would you do?” Ken persisted. “Take it to a bank,” Sandy said. “That would be the only place that would—Bank!” he repeated suddenly. “What a dope I am! The bank would spot it as a phony. The person who brought it in would be questioned.” “Right,” Ken said excitedly. He had had to make Sandy figure it out for himself, to prove that his idea was sound—that others might reach the same conclusion he had himself. “And when they trace the location of the various halves that are picked up, they’ll have a rough chart of where we’ve gone. Provided,” he added, less hopefully, “that we’re not taken out into the country somewhere. We couldn’t count on the bills being picked up anywhere except along a city street.” But Sandy’s spirits were now high enough for them both. “They won’t waste the time to take us very far,” he insisted. “And when a gang of Treasury men are turned loose on the hunt, they won’t waste any time. Come on. Let’s get those bills torn in two while we’ve got the chance. Which side are they on?” Ken turned. “I’m right in back of you. They’re on my right—tucked into my belt.” “Got them!” Sandy fumbled a minute, remembering to shuffle his feet as he did so. “Those rats are getting braver every minute,” he muttered. Then he sighed. “I can’t tear them by myself.” “It needs both of us. Wait—let me help.” It was heartbreaking work. Standing back to back, their hands almost numb, they kept laboriously at it. Ken held a bill and Sandy tore the stiff paper a fraction of an inch at a time. Fear that they might drop a piece on the floor, and expose their possession of the bills, made them doubly careful. But finally the job was done. Ken had five halves stuffed into a back pocket, and so did Sandy. Even with their hands bound they could pull them out and drop them somewhere—if they ever got the chance. “If we were only untied,” Ken muttered, “I could write a couple of words on each one. Dad’s name, maybe, and the word Global. That ought to be a help if—” He stopped. There were footsteps coming down the stairs. Even through the heavy door they could hear Cal’s whining voice. “I can’t help it if it is too early for you,” he was saying. “I have to get the truck back by eleven. That’s when he starts working.” “If you’re worried that somebody will notice their tied hands,” Barrack said, “let’s untie them temporarily. I’ll keep a gun on them, in case they try to make a break. And it’ll just be across the sidewalk.” “All right,” Grace said grudgingly. “That’s the way we’ll have to do it.” Ken held his lips against Sandy’s ear, while the men outside were tugging the bracing timber away from the door. “Help cover for me if we get a chance, and I’ll try to scribble something on the bills,” he whispered. “Right.” A few moments later, in the beam of a flashlight and under three watchful pairs of eyes and three guns, the boys were rubbing at their loosened hands, trying to revive feeling in the numbed fingers. “Never mind the calisthenics,” Grace ordered. “Get going. Barrack, you go ahead of them.” Upstairs, in the kitchen, Grace spoke again briefly. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to inconvenience you for a while,” he said with a pretense at politeness. “It’s your own fault for sticking your noses into something that’s not your business. But the inconvenience will be temporary if you behave yourselves.” “But make one move,” Barrack added, gesturing with his gun, “and you’ll be worse than inconvenienced.” “Follow him,” Grace then ordered the boys, indicating Barrack. When the boys emerged onto the sidewalk they looked quickly around. The nearest human being in sight was a man nearly a hundred feet down the street, with his back turned toward them. They didn’t need the reminder of the guns prodding into their backs to know how futile it would be to attempt to run for it. “Get in here.” Barrack lifted the tarpaulin at the back of a small delivery truck and pointed inside. The interior of the little truck was dark and smelled overpoweringly of fish. Ken and Sandy sat side by side on a couple of empty fish crates, with Ken close against the driver’s closed cab. The canvas walls of the truck fluttered against their backs. Barrack crawled in after them. The flashlight in his hand held them in a steady beam. He dropped the tarpaulin. “O.K., Cal,” he said. The tarpaulin was tied in place, the truck engine started, and the vehicle moved off. Sandy leaned forward, an inch at a time, until he half shielded Ken from Barrack’s view. Ken found a stub of pencil in his pocket. He drew out one of the half bills, with infinite care, and without daring to look down at it scrawled two words that he hoped would be legible. Sandy was supplying additional cover by making conversation. “You’ll be picked up by tomorrow morning—at the latest,” he said cheerfully to Barrack. “Let me worry about that.” “O.K. It’s your neck.” Ken forced his fingers between the canvas wall and the side of the truck, the bit of paper held between them. Then he let go and drew his hand back again. A gust of air had struck his neck as he thrust at the canvas. Sandy tensed. He had felt it too. Ken hoped that Barrack’s coat collar was high enough so that he hadn’t noticed. He reached for another torn bill. Sandy kept talking. One by one Ken scribbled on the bits of paper and pushed them down the crack alongside the tarpaulin. Each time he did so the wind blew in, sharp and cold, and he held his breath. But Barrack apparently didn’t feel the draught. When Ken finished the halves in his own pocket he reached for those in Sandy’s, thankful that they happened to be on the side next to himself. “What’s the penalty for counterfeiting these days?” Sandy asked Barrack. The cheerfulness in his voice indicated to Ken that he had felt Ken’s hand—that he knew the sixth bit of paper was on its way outside. Barrack didn’t answer. “Six?” Sandy pressed. “Years, I mean,” he added quickly. Ken shoved one more paper outside. “Seven maybe.” Sandy seemed to be considering, until another cold draft struck their necks. “Or eight,” he said. Barrack was still silent. The truck swerved sharply and stopped a moment later. “We can settle on ten, I guess,” Ken said. “That’ll hold him for a while.” Sandy risked a quick pat on his arm in congratulation. The rear tarpaulin was lifted. “Get out,” Cal said. Barrack backed out first, his gun always ready, and stood guard while the boys lowered themselves to the ground. The moment they left the protection of the truck a bitter wind hit them. They were back on the pier again. Ken and Sandy were prodded up the ladder which led to the deck of the barge they had hurriedly left not long ago. But this time the little cabin of the barge, when they were thrust into it, lacked the cozy air they had envied earlier. Nothing had been changed. Cal’s coffeepot still stood on the stove. But now, somehow, the cramped little room seemed to smell of danger. Cal retied their hands again immediately, and as tightly as he had the first time. Then he bound their feet together, crossing their ankles first so that bone pressed against bone and the boys were as helpless as trussed chickens. And finally, with cruel pleasure, he added a large patch of adhesive plaster over their mouths. Then Sandy was thrown into the lower bunk, and Barrack and Cal picked Ken up and tossed him into the upper one. “You know what to do?” Grace asked Cal. “I know, all right.” Cal began to turn down the lamp. “And they’ll be perfectly safe here until I take the truck back.” Three pairs of footsteps moved toward the door. It was opened and shut, and the boys could hear it being locked from the outside. Silence settled down heavily in the little room. Outside a tugboat hooted sorrowfully. The stove clinked once. Otherwise only the ticking of a clock marked the stillness. Ken grunted as loudly as he could past the plaster over his mouth. Sandy grunted in answer. Ken grunted again—an uneven series of sounds. A moment later Sandy did the same. Interpreted into the dots and dashes of the Morse code, the noises meant “O.K.” Sandy was letting him know that he too realized they could communicate. “B-I-L-L-S G-O-N-E,” Ken spelled out laboriously. He felt certain Sandy was already aware of that, but to tell him so gave Ken the comfort of contact. “G-O-O-D,” Sandy grunted back. They had done what they could. Before noon, Ken hoped, there should be a small stream of people hopefully applying to one bank or another, asking if the torn bills they had found might be replaced by whole ones. And soon afterward—if all went well—a small army of police and Treasury agents would be combing the lower east side area of New York. Ken wondered if he should have written “Tobacco Mart” on some of the bills. It might have directed police attention to the spot. But, on the other hand, it might instead have sent the finders of the bills to Grace’s headquarters, and that would have defeated Ken’s purpose. The minutes dragged by in the dark. Suppose, Ken found himself thinking, that none of the bills were picked up? Or that none of the finders were hopeful enough of being able to cash in on them to take them to a bank? If he and Sandy weren’t rescued by morning, would they ever be rescued? But we will be, Ken told himself. Everything will work out the way it should. The police would notify Richard Holt when they found his name scribbled on the bills, and Ken’s father would drive the investigation forward at top speed. “By noon—by afternoon at the latest,” Ken kept repeating to himself, “we’ll be free. And Grace and his gang will be behind bars.” He wished he could signal his hope and confidence to Sandy, but the effort seemed more than he could manage. He ached in every muscle. His hands and feet were beginning to pain agonizingly from the tight bonds. The minutes lengthened into hours. Ken had no idea what time it was when Cal returned, looked at them briefly, and went out again to pace back and forth on the aft deck. Suddenly there were sounds of men calling back and forth. The barge lurched once, and seemed to shift. It bumped into something with a solid thud. Ken tried to heave himself into a sitting position, but it was impossible. He began to grunt frantically. “M-O-V-I-N-G,” he spelled out. Sandy answered with one word. “Y-E-S.” There was no need to try to say more. Both of them realized that when—or if—the police came to the dock the next morning in search of them the barge and its captives would no longer be there. <div class='pbb'></div> <hr class='pb c000' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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