The Blue Pear

Front matter

THE BLUE PEAR

By Arthur Stringer

DURKIN sat at the café table, smoking, his watch in his hand. It was already seven minutes to four. As the seventh minute slipped into the sixth, and the sixth into the fifth, some first, vague sense of impending disaster stole over him.

II

“It's the Blue Pear,” she said, hesitatingly, wondering how to begin.

“And just what is that?”

“You have never heard of the Blue Pear?”

“Never!”

“But you wouldn't, of course—most of it happened after you had sailed. The Blue Pear, Jim, is a diamond. It's a diamond that you and I, in some way or another, have got to get back!”

“To get back? Then when did we lose it?”

“I lost it. That's what I've got to tell you.”

“Well, first tell me what it is.”

“It's a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, tinted with the same pale-blue coloring as the Hope diamond. That's how it came to get its name. But the odd thing about it is that, when it was cut in Amsterdam, rather than grind away a fifteen-carat irregularity, it was left in a sort of pear-shape. Even before it was mounted by Lalique, it sold in Paris for well over four thousand pounds. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, it brought something like five thousand pounds. There it was given to a French actress by a Spanish-American coffee-king. It was an African stone in the first place.”

“But what's all this geography for?” asked Durkin.

“Wait, dear, and you'll understand. The coffee-king quarreled with the Paris woman. This woman, though, smuggled the stone back to France with her. It was sold there, a few months later, for about one-fourth its market value. Still later, it was bought for a little under six thousand pounds, by the late Earl of Warton, who gave it to his younger daughter, Lady Margaret Singford, when she married young Cicely—Sir Charles Cicely, who was wounded in the Boer War, you remember. Well, Sir Charles didn't like the setting—it had been made into a marquise ring of some sort—so he took it to René Lalique's workshop, in Paris, and had it mounted after his own ideas.”

“But who is Lalique?”

“A French l'art nouveau goldsmith—the Louis Tiffany of the Continent. But I've a lot to tell you, Jim, and only a little time to do it in, so we shall have to cut out these details. Lalique made a pendant out of the Blue Pear, hung on a thin gold stem, between little leaves of beaten gold, with diamond dew-drops on them. Well, four weeks ago the Blue Pear was stolen from Lady Margaret's jewel-case. No, Jim, thank you, not by me; but, if you'll wait, I shall try to explain.

“I hardly know now what made me do it—it was ennui and being lonesome, I suppose. But I had detective-agency cards printed, and went straight to the Cicelys. Lady Margaret wouldn't see me; she sent down word that the reward of a thousand pounds was still open and that there was no new information. But I saw her at last—I sha'n't explain just how. Before very long I found out something rather remarkable—I mean the fact that Lady Margaret wanted to drop the case altogether, and was rather trying to blind Scotland Yard and the police. And that started me thinking.

“Before the end of the week, I found out that Lady Margaret's young brother had made a mess of things at Oxford, had been mixed up later in a row at Monaco, and had decided to try ranching in the Canadian Northwest. I had already booked my passage on the Deutschland, but the whole thing was too alluring, and, when I found young Singford was sailing that week on the Teutonic, I succeeded in getting a berth on that steamer. Jim, as soon as I saw that wretched boy on deck I knew I had guessed right, or almost right. Oh, I know them, I know them! I suppose it's because I've been mixed up with so many of them. But there he was, as plain as day, a criminal with stage-fright, a beginner without enough nerve to face things out. I rather think he may have been a nice boy at one time. And I know just how easy it is, once you make the first little wrong turn, to keep on and on and on, until you daren't turn back, even if you had the chance to.”

“And you took pity on him?” inquired Durkin; “or merely vivisected him—at a distance?”

“Not altogether—but first I must tell you of the second dilemma. Before we sailed, and the first day out, I thought it best to keep to my cabin—you know why, of course. After all, this is such a little world when the Central office is after you! That was precisely what I thought, only a good deal harder, when I sat down to dinner, the second day out, and glanced across the table. You remember my telling you about my first trouble in America, when I was a shrinking and pink-cheeked young English governess, and never knew a bold thought or a dishonest act? Do you remember my describing the woman—it's always a woman who is hard on another woman!—who accused me of—of having designs on her husband? Her husband, a miserable, oily, little Hebrew diamond-merchant who twice insulted me on the stairs of his own house, and I had to swallow it without a word! Well, it was that woman who sat across the table from me. They had put me at the captain's table—my London gown, you see, looks uncommonly well. But there was that woman, a little more faded and wizened and wrinkled, looking at me with those beady old hawk-eyes of hers; and I knew there was trouble ahead.

“A war-correspondent, who had been nice to me, had brought up about everybody at our table worth while, and introduced them to me that night before going down. So, when I saw that yellow face and those hawk-eyes, I knew I had to think hard and fast.

“'Are you not the young woman,' she said, in a sort of nasal scream of indignation, 'are you not the young woman whom I once employed as a governess and discharged for misconducting herself with—er—with the other servants?'

“I was so busy trying to be cool that I didn't bother thinking out an answer, though I did want to say it was not a servant, but her own devoted husband. I kept on talking to the captain, deciding to ignore her icily. But that yellow hag deliberately repeated her question, and I heard the war-correspondent gasp out an indignant 'My God, madam!' and saw the captain's face growing redder and redder. So I went on sweetly, and asked the ship's doctor if intoxication was getting commoner on the high seas. Then she began to splutter and tremble. I kept looking at her as languidly as ever, and a steward had to help her away.

“But she knew she was right. And she knew that I knew she knew. Though I had all the men on my side, and the captain cheerfully saw to it that she was moved down among the commercial travelers and the school-ma'ams, I knew well enough that she was only waiting for her chance.

“It didn't change the face of things, but it upset me, and made me more cautious in the way I handled young Singford. In some way, I felt sorry for the poor devil. I thought a little sympathy might perhaps soften him, and make him tell me something worth while. But he had too much good old English backbone for that. And, although he told me I was the best woman he ever knew, and a little more solemn nonsense like that, I at last had to go for him very openly. It was a moonlight night—the sea air was as soft as Summer. We were standing by the rail, looking out over the water. Then I made the plunge, and very quietly told him I knew he had stolen his sister's diamond pendant, and that for two days he had been thinking about committing suicide.

“I watched his hand go up to his breast-pocket—the moon was on his terrified young face—and I came a little nearer to him, for I was afraid of something—I tried to tell him there was no use jumping overboard, and none whatever in throwing the Blue Pear there—that would only make things past mending, forever. Besides, he was young, and his life was still before him. I talked to him—well, I believe I cried over him a little. And finally, without a word, he reached in under his coat, and there in the moonlight handed me the Blue Pear. I gave him my word of honor it would be taken back to his sister, and even lent him twenty pounds. That was the night before we came up the Bay.

“I slipped down to my cabin, and turned on the electric-light. Then I opened the little case and looked at my pendant. You know I never liked diamonds, they always seemed so cold and hard and cruel—well, as though the tears of a million women had frozen into one drop. But this Blue Pear—oh, Jim, it was a beautiful thing!”

“It was—good heavens, you don't mean2?”

“Shhhh! Not so loud! Yes, that is just it. There I stood trying it in the light, feasting on it, when a voice said behind me, a voice that made my hair creep at the roots, 'A very unsafe stone to smuggle, young lady!' and there, just inside my door, stood the yellow hag. She had stolen down, I suppose, to nose among my luggage a bit. I could have killed her—I almost did try it.

“We stood staring at each other; it was the second battle of the kind on board that ship. I realized she had the upper hand in this one. I never saw such envy and greed and cruelty in a human face, as she ogled that stone.

“It seemed to intoxicate her—she was drunk to get her hands on it—and she had enough of her own, too. So, once more, I had to think hard and fast, for I knew this time she would be relentless.

“'No, I sha'n't smuggle it,' I said, in answer to her look.

“You pay duty—a thousand, two thousand dollars!' she gasped at me, still keeping her eyes on the stone, flashing there in the light. 'Given to you,' she hissed, 'by some loving father whose child you guided into the paths of wisdom? Oh, I know you, you lying hussy! It's mine!' she cried, like a baby crying for the moon. 'It's mine! You—you stole it from me!'”

She paused, at the memory of the scene, and Durkin stirred uneasily on the seat.

“What made the fool say that?” he demanded.

“Why, she meant that she intended to claim it, insinuating that she would see that it was declared at the wharf if I kept it, and arguing that I might as well lose it quietly to her, as to the treasury officers. I knew in a flash, then, that she didn't know what the Blue Pear was. I closed the little gun-metal case with a snap. Then I put it, Blue Pear and all, in her hand. She turned white, and asked me what I meant.

“'I'm going to give it to you,' I said, as coolly as I could, making a virtue of what I felt was going to be a necessity.

“She tore open the case, looked at the stone, weighed it in her fingers, gasped a little, held it to the light again, and then turned and looked at me.

“'This pendant was stolen!' she cried, with sudden conviction. She looked at the stone again—she couldn't resist it.

“'You might call it the Robin's Egg, when you have it recut!' I told her.

“She gave a jump—that was what she was thinking of, the shrewd old rascal. She shoved the case down in her lean old breast.

“'Then you will smuggle it in for me?' I asked her.

“'Yes, I'll get it through, if I have to swallow it!'

“'And you will keep it?' I asked; and I laughed, I don't know why.

“'You remember my house?' she cried, with a start.

“'Like a book!' I told her.

“'But still I'll keep it!' she declared.

“It was a challenge, a silly challenge, but she didn't seem to realize that keeping the Blue Pear was like trying to conceal a white elephant, or attempting to hide away a mountain. Then that cruel, old, avaricious, over-dressed, natural-born criminal had her turn at laughing—a little hysterically, I think. And, for a minute or two, I felt that all the world had gone mad, that we were only two gray, gibbering ghosts talking in the enigmas of insanity, penned up in throbbing cages of white-enameled iron.

“I followed her out of the cabin, and walked up and down alone in the moonlight, wondering if I had done right. At the wharf, I fully intended to risk everything and inform on her, then cable to the Cicelys. But she must have suspected something like that—my stewardess had already told me there were two treasury department detectives on board—and got her innings first. For I found myself quietly taken in charge, and my luggage gone over with a microscope—to say nothing of the gentle old lady who massaged me so apologetically from head to foot, and seemed put out to find I had nothing more dutiable than an extra pair of French gloves.”

“Had you expected this before-hand?” interposed Durkin.

“Yes, the stewardess had told me there was trouble ahead—that's what made me afraid about the Blue Pear. Just as I got safely through customs, though, I caught sight of the yellow hag despatching her maid and luggage home in a four-wheeler, while she herself sailed away in another. I felt so sure she was going straight to her husband's store—Isaac Ottenheimer & Company, the jeweler and diamond man on Fifth avenue, you know—that I scrambled into a hansom and told the driver to follow my friend to Ottenheimer's. When we pulled up there, I drew the side-curtains and watched through a quarter-inch crack. The woman came out again, looking very relieved and triumphant. And that's the whole story, only2”

She did not finish the sentence, but looked at Durkin, who was slowly and dubiously rubbing his hands together, with the old, weary, half-careless look all gone from his studious face. He glanced back at the woman beside him, admiringly, lost himself in thought for a moment, and then laughed outright.

“You're a dare-devil, Mame, if there ever was one!” he cried, and then suddenly grew serious once more.

III

Four hours later, in that shabby little oyster-house often spoken of as “The Café of Failures,” and lying less than a stone's throw from the shabbiest corner of Washington square, Miss Mabel Chandler met by appointment a stooped and somewhat sickly-looking workman carrying a small bag of tools. This strange couple sought out a little table in one of the odorous alcoves of the oyster-house, and talked at great length and in low tones over an unexpectedly generous dinner.

“You say it's a Brandon & Stark eight-ton vault; but can't you give me something more definite than that to work on?” the man was asking of the girl.

“Only what I've told you about its position; I had to watch out for Ottenheimer every minute I was in that store.”

“I see. But while I think of it, providing we do find the stone there, do we turn it over again, or2?”

“I gave my word of honor, Jim!”

The shadow of a smile on his face died away before her unyielding solemnity.

“Oh, of course! There is a thousand pounds on it, anyway, isn't there?”

She nodded her head in assent.

“But I think we've got our trouble before us, and plenty of it, before we see that thousand pounds,” he said, with a shrug.

“The time's so short—that is the danger. As I was on the point of telling you, Ottenheimer has an expert diamond-cutter in his shops.”

“And that means he'll have the apex off our Pear at the first chance, and, ergo, it means hurry for us. But tell me the rest.”

“Ottenheimer himself owns, I discovered, the double building his store is in. He has his basement, of course, his ground-floor show-room and store, and work-rooms, and shipping department, and all that, on the second story. Above them is a lace importer. On the top floor there is a chemical fire-apparatus agency. In the south half of the building, with the hall and stairway between, is an antique-furniture store, and above them a surgical-supply company. The third and top floors are taken up by two women photographers—their reception-room on the third floor, their operating-room, and that sort of thing, on the top floor, with no less than two skylights and a transom opening directly on the roof. I arranged for a sitting with them. That is the floor we ought to have, but the building is full. Three doors below, though, there was a top, back studio suite to let, and I've taken it for a month. There we have a transom opening on the roof; I looked through, merely to see if I could hang my washing out sometimes. But barring our roof off from Ottenheimer's is an ugly iron fencing.”

“Did you get a chance to notice their wiring?”

“The first thing. We can cut in and 'loop' their telephone from our back room, with thirty feet of number twelve wire.”

“Then we've got to get in on that line, first thing!”

He ruminated in silence for a minute or two.

“Of course, you didn't get a glimpse of the basement, under Ottenheimer's?”

“Hardly, Jim. We shall have to leave that to the gasman!”

And they both laughed a little over the memory of a certain gasman who short-circuited a private line in the basement of the stock-exchange building and, through doing so, upset one of the heaviest cotton-brokerage businesses on Wall street.

“Did you notice any of the other wires, power circuits, and that kind of thing?”

“Yes; but there were too many of them! I know, though, that Ottenheimer's wires go south along our roof.”

“Then the sooner we give a quiet ear to that gentleman's conversation, the better for us. Have you had any furniture moved in?”

“It goes this evening. By the way, though, what am I just at present?”

Durkin thought for a moment, and then suddenly remembered her incongruous love for needlework.

“You'd better be a hard-working maker of cotillon-favors, don't you think? You might have a little showcase put outside.”

She pondered the matter, drumming on the table with her impatient fingers.

“But how is all this going to put us inside that eight-ton safe?”

“That's the trouble we've got to face,” he laughed back at her.

“But haven't you thought of anything?”

“Yes. I've been cudgeling my brains until I feel light-headed. Nitro-glycerine I object to—it's so odiously criminal, so abominably crude, and so disgustingly noisy. And it's brain we've got to cudgel, and not safe-doors. Now, speaking as an expert, by lighting, say, a piece of sulphur, and using it as a sort of match to start combustion, I could turn on a stream of liquid oxygen and burn through that safe-steel about the same as through a pine board. But the trouble is in getting the oxygen. Or a couple of gallons of liquid air, say, poured on the top of the safe, ought to chill the steel so that one good blow from a sledge would crack it. Or by tapping an exceptionally strong power-circuit somewhere, I could fuse portions of the steel with electricity, and cut it away like putty. But all that, you see, is mechanical and coarse; and it all has its drawbacks, too.”

“Then what can we do?”

“Use these thick heads of ours to advantage—think, not pound, our way in. Mame, we've got to get at that safe as Ottenheimer himself would!”

They looked at each other for a minute of unbroken silence, the one trying to follow the other's wider line of thought.

“Well, there's where our fun comes in, I suppose,” said Mame, valiantly, feeling for the first time a little qualm of doubt.

Durkin, who had been plunged in thought, turned to her with a sudden change of manner.

“You're a bad lot, Mame!” he said, warmly, catching her frail hands in his own.

“I know it,” she answered, wistful-eyed, leaning passively on her elbows. “But some day I'm going to change—we're both going to change!” And she stroked his studiously bent head with her hand, in a miserably solicitous maternal sort of way, and sighed heavily once or twice, trying in vain to console herself with the question as to why a good game should be spoilt by a doubtful philosophy.

IV

Entrenched in her little top-floor studio, behind a show-case of cotillon favors, Miss Cecelia Starr sat in her wicker rocker, very quietly and very contentedly, sewing. She felt that it had been an exceptionally profitable day for her.

Three hair-pins and a linen handkerchief held a watch-case receiver close over her ear, after the style of the metallic ear-bands of a central-office operator. Leading from this improvised ear-band and trailing across the floor out into her private room at the back, ran a green, cloth-covered wire. This wire connected again with an innocent-looking and ordinary desk-battery transmitter, rigged up with a lever-switch, and standing on a little table next to the wall, up which might be detected the wires that since ten o'clock that morning had tapped and bridged the general wire connecting the offices of Ottenheimer & Company with the outside world.

From time to time the members of that firm went to their telephone, little dreaming that a young lady, decorously sewing velvet scissor-cases on a studio top-floor of another building, was quietly listening to every message that passed in and out of their bustling place of business. It was a strange medley of talk, some of it incoherent, some of it dull, some of it amusing. Sometimes the busy needle was held poised, and a more interested and startled expression flitted over the shadowy violet eyes of Miss Cecelia Starr. At such times she vaguely felt that she was a disembodied spirit, listening to the hum of a far-away world, or that she was an old astrologer, gazing into some mystic and forbidden crystal. Still again as she listened, she felt like an invisible eagle, poised high in ethereal emptinesses, watching hungrily a dim and far-off sign of earthly life and movement.

Suddenly, from the street door sounded the familiar two-three ring of Durkin. This door remained open during the day, and she waited for him to come up. She went to her own door, however, and laughed girlishly as he stepped into the room, mopping his moist forehead. There was a very alert, nervous, triumphant expression in his eyes, and, once again, the feeling swept over her that it was now only crime, and crime alone, that could stimulate into interest and still satisfy their fagged vitalities. It was their one and only intoxication, the one thing that could awaken them from their mental sloth and stir them from the shadowy valley of disillusionment.

Her quick eye had taken note of the fact that he wore a soiled blue uniform and the leather-peaked blue cap of a Consolidated Gas Company employee, and that he carried with him a brass hand-pump. He laughed a little to himself, put down his pump in one corner of the room, and allowed his fingers to stray through his mutilated Vandyke, now a short and straggly growth of sandy whiskers. Then he turned to her with an unuttered query on his face.

“I was right,” she said, quietly, but hurriedly. I

“I never really doubted it!”

“Ottenheimer has a private drawer in the vault. It's in that. His wife telephoned down very cautiously about it this morning. A little later, too, Ottenheimer was called up from a Brooklyn drug-store, by a Mrs. Van Gottschalck, or some such name, who said her husband was still in bed with the grip, and couldn't possibly get over until Monday. This man, you see, is Ottenheimer's diamond-cutter.”

“Thank heaven! That gives us a little more time!”

“Three days, at least. But what have you done, Jim?”

“Been trying to persuade the janitor of the Ottenheimer building that I was sent to pump the water out of his gas-pipes. But he was just as sure that I wasn't. I got down in his cellar, though, and had a good look about, before I saw it wouldn't do to push the thing too far. So I insisted on going up and seeing the owner about that order. There was an inside stairway and a queer-looking steel door I wanted to get my knuckles against. I started up there, but he hauled me back. I found out, though, that this door is made of one-inch, steel armor-plate. There's another door leading from the foot of the outer hallway into the cellar itself. But that's only covered with soft sheet-iron—more for fire than anything else. Fifteen minutes will get through that one, easily. It's the inner door that is the problem. I tried it with a knife-point—just one hard little jab. It took the end off my Rogers blade.”

“But is this door the only way in?”

“Absolutely; the rear is impossible, bricked-up; and the avenue itself is a little too conspicuous. The bolts of this door, as far as I can make out, slide into heavy steel cups sunk in solid cement, and are controlled, of course, from inside. Judging from the thickness of these, and the sound of the door, it would take either a pound of soap and nitro-glycerine on the one hand, or five hours of hard drilling on the other, to get through. We'll say seven hours, altogether, to get into the building. Then comes the safe, or, rather, the vault itself. I had a casual glance at that safe, this morning, before I got these duds on—dropped in to purchase an engagement-ring, but was altogether too hard to suit. It's a ten-tonner, I believe, and about as burglar-proof as it can be made. Nothing but a gallon of guncotton would make so much as a dent in it. But, here again, explosions are not in my line. We've got to use these wits of ours. We've got to get in that safe, and we've got to get through that door! I can't risk six hours of machine-shop work down there; and I'm still too respectable to drop into safe-cracking!”

“Well, the combinations of that sort of vault, you know, aren't often advertised on the ash-barrels.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we have got to get it by our own wits, as you say.

“The janitor, old Campbell, leaves the building about ten-fifteen every night. He's also a sort of day-watchman, I find. He's a pretty intelligent and trusty old fellow, absolutely unapproachable, from our standpoint. Another thing, too, the place is webbed with burglar-alarm apparatus. It would take another hour or so to get the right wires cut safely off. I hate to feel squeamish, at this time of the game—but that Ottenheimer safe does look uninviting!”

Mame walked up and down, with the little watch-case receiver and its hand-kerchief still crowning her heavy mass of dark hair, like a coronet, and green wires trailing behind her, like the outline of a bridal veil. She was thinking fast and desperately. Suddenly, she stopped in the midst of her pacing, and looked hard at Durkin.

“I've found it!” she said, in a feverish half-whisper. “We've got to do it!”

Durkin looked at her gloomily, still struggling with his own line of fruitless thought.

“Here, Jim, quick! Take this and listen.” She placed the receiver close to his ear as she spoke. “Now, that's Ottenheimer himself at the 'phone. Can you catch his voice distinctly? Well, do you notice what kind of a voice it is—its timbre, I mean? A plaintive-toned, guttural, suave, mean, cringing sort of voice! Listen hard! He may not be at the 'phone again to-day. Is he still talking?”

“Yes, the old scoundrel! There, he's finished.”

“What was it about?”

“Just kicking to some one down in Maiden Lane because Judge Hazel of the district court has overruled the board of appraisers and imposed a ten per cent. ad valorem duty on natural pearls coming in.”

“But his voice—Jim, you have got to learn to imitate that voice!”

“And then what?”

“Then cut in, presumably from Ottenheimer's own house, and casually ask, say, Phipps, the junior salesman and head of the shipping department, just what your safe combination happens to be. It has slipped your memory, you see!”

“And Phipps, naturally, will ring up central and verify the call.”

“Not at all! At the first sound from him we shall cut his wire.”

“Which cuts us off, and gives us away, as soon as a special messenger can deliver a message and a lineman trace up the trouble.”

“Then why cut him off at all? If that's too risky, should the worst come to the worst, we can tell central it's a case of crossed wires, bewilder her a bit, and then shut ourselves off.”

“I believe you've almost got it.”

“But can you get anywhere near that voice?”

“Listen, Mame, how's this?”

He drew in his chin, half laughingly, and throwing his voice into a whining yet businesslike guttural, spoke through an imaginary transmitter to an imaginary Ottenheimer.