Find the Clock

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  J. C. J.”

  “Most strange that man write out words on laundry,” Napoleon Foy commented to himself in his own native tongue. Vainly he tried to pick out the words, but failed to make anything out of them but the figures $50 and $2,000 which were slightly intelligible. He sat back on his stool, near the sorting and marking table, his slant eyes roving puzzledly from the little pot of black paint with its brush and the pad of red tickets on the counter near the door, to the open door of his living quarters, back of the partition. He was quite perplexed — so much so that he forgot utterly to complete the sorting and marking of several other bundles which lay underneath the table.

  At length Napoleon Foy proved himself worthy of the name of Napoleon — he recognized a situation when he saw it, and acted upon it. Rising from his stool he stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket and stepped into the back room of the store. There he climbed into a loose-fitting black blouse, and hunted around for his black skullcap. Once in the search he stopped in front of a huge wicker cage suspended from a brass chain hung from the ceiling; and containing a huge, and albeit, vicious-looking cockatoo feathered in all the vivid colors of the rainbow. The bird stopped munching its sunflower seed as Napoleon Foy put his finger close to the wicker bars of the cage and talked to it in a reproving voice.

  “You bad, wicked imp of the devil,” he said softly in his own tongue. “You bird with a thousand demons in your soul. To take a nip out of Charley Yat Gong’s head last night when he approached too close to your cage!”

  “Awk!” said the cockatoo, and much in refutation of Napoleon Foy’s bitter charge against him, he put his head against the bars of the cage and rubbed it lovingly up and down, coaxing for the lean, yellow forefinger to scratch it.

  “You imp,” said Napoleon Foy, “and do I still love you, because you are the only thing on this earth that loves me; but you devil — that you cannot be friends to my friends — that they must be in peril of their very life when they come too close to your cage. You disrupt the hospitality of a true son of Confucius — you make of you and me unwelcome hosts.”

  “Awk!” said the cockatoo, and in his eyes were only humility and contrition, the very antithesis of the fighting fury which filled his sunflower-seeded soul when any head, other than his master’s, approached too closely to his imprisoning bars.

  At length Napoleon Foy recalled where he had last placed his skullcap. He had hung it on a wooden hook in his great wooden cabinet, a cabinet which although still unfinished bore hundreds and hundreds of square inches of hand carving from Napoleon Foy’s own carving tool. The cabinet itself, rapidly developing into a valuable bit of Chinese art, was screwed into the wall some three feet distant from the cockatoo’s vicious beak. So, opening the swinging doors and securing the much-wanted headpiece, Napoleon Foy proceeded again through the opening in the plain pine partition of matched boards to the front of the store.

  He rode northward on a street car for a while, and when he got off he was in Chinatown, where he was soon ascending the steps of a pretentious-looking, stone-front house on West 21st place whose American architecture had been modified by beautiful Chinese stained-glass windows and a green-silk flag, bearing an enormous gold dragon, draped above the doorway. There he rang the bell and waited in the vestibule until the door was answered by a tall, lean Chinaman with very seamed, very quizzical, and very yellow face.

  “I would speak with the honorable Chi Tsung Liang,” said Napoleon Foy in his own tongue. “I am his humble servant — the laundryman for whom he secured the lease of my store.”

  “The honorable master is now at leisure,” said he of the quizzical face. “Will you step in?”

  At length appeared Chi Tsung Liang himself as though borne on a silent pall. His feet were encased in pearled sandals, on his head was a round skullcap embroidered with gorgeous flowers; a rich, kimono-like garment wonderfully embellished with silken green and scarlet butterflies, as well as tiny bits of pendent hand-carved jade, graced his none-too-robust form, and his calm, just face — the face of an aristocratic upper-caste Chinese of fifty or thereabouts — was adorned with a thin mustache, black as jet, which hung down on either side of the corners of his mouth; a mustache that appeared to be a compromise between the crisp American type and the long, flowing hirsute adornment of the Oriental lands. Napoleon Foy arose hastily.

  “Honorable Chi,” he said in the tongue common to the two men of the same race, “you who have been the good father of our people in this city — I come to you on a strange errand. I do not know whether I consume your time foolishly or not, but you have always told us, your children, that caution in affairs of the Americans rather than rashness must rule.”

  “You have done quite right, Foy Yi,” replied the Chinese dignitary, ignoring the name of the French military genius which Foy had grafted on to his own cognomen. “Seat yourself on yonder comfortable teakwood armchair, and I will take up my position here at your side and hear what you have to tell.” He waited until the humble laundryman had been ensconced, and then with true courtesy took up a chair of his own. “Proceed, Foy Yi.”

  “Honorable Chi,” said Foy, “I can relate what I have to tell in words that are few. Last night when Charley Yat Gong — You know him, do you not? He works as waiter in Yuan Gow’s chop-suey restaurant.”

  “I know Charley Yat Gong,” assented the elderly Chinese. “A thrifty member of our race, and one who will some day own a great restaurant of his own.”

  “Charley Yat Gong and I,” continued Foy after this comment, “were playing hui-hiu-sip-soo in my back room Saturday night at about nine o’clock, and a man brought in a bundle of laundry. He left it. I wrote out a ticket for him. This morning while I was counting up the things in various bundles which came in to me Saturday, preparatory to immersing them in the suds that will make them clean and sweet again, I came upon words of writing upon a handkerchief. I cannot read the American writing, honorable Chi, yet I hesitated at calling in the drug seller on the corner nearest me, he who sells to me my sunflower seed for Ki Ki Yup Mo, my cockatoo. Then recalling the advice of every man of our race in Chicago — when in doubt go to our father, Chi Tsung Liang — I came to you. That is all, honorable Chi. Pray do not be angered if I come to you with trivialities. We are all of us strangers in a strange land.”

  “You did quite right, Foy Yi,” said Chi Tsung Liang. “Together we will inspect the writing.”

  Napoleon Foy lost no time in producing the handkerchief. He spread it out, the penciled message uppermost. Chi Tsung Liang leaned forward and putting upon his nose a great pair of horn-rimmed glasses which he took from some hidden pocket of his gorgeous blouse, read and pondered, read and pondered, perused and studied, till the Chinaman in front of him gazed curiously at his immobile face. At length the older Oriental looked up.

  “Whom have you told about this, Foy Yi?”

  “No soul,” said the laundryman. “Straight I came to you.”

  “That is well and good. What kind of a man brought it?”

  “A man not overly old — nor yet young. A strong, lusty fellow. A man who has not a great deal of wealth, for his dress was not the dress of wealth. Nor is he a laborer, will I venture. In his hand he held a street-car transfer which he laid carefully down upon the counter while he gave in his bundle. About a week before he had also left with me his laundry.”

  “You do not think he lives in that region, eh?” queried Chi Tsung Liang.

  Foy shook his head. “I do not, honorable Chi, from the manner in which he clung to his street-car transfer.”

  “Charley Yat Gong was behind the partition?” asked Chi. “He did not see the man?”

  “He did not see the man,” replied Foy.

  Chi Tsung Liang remained in deep reflection for several minutes. At length he rose, handkerchief in hand, and, taking it over to a very American-like, little desk in the corner of the room, copied in ink, painstakingly and meticulously, every word and letter of the message upon a sheet of thick
, creamy, parchment-like paper. Then he returned to Foy.

  “Foy Yi,” he said, “just what this message speaks of it is given neither to you nor to me to know,” he said. “One thing, however, that will be of great joy to you I shall tell you. The message states that to the man — yourself — who shall see that it is delivered shall the sum of fifty dollars be given. This is your day of fortune, Foy Yi, but forget not your tithe for our famine-stricken brothers in far-off China. So much for that. I am going to put this message into the hands of one who is more capable of handling it as it should be handled. I shall personally request that the fifty dollars mentioned therein be secured and turned over to you, Foy Yi. So have no fears upon this score. I think me that some strange conflict — a conflict involving much wealth — is taking place between Americans, but I confess that it is all obscure, I cannot fathom it.” He paused. “Now for your actions, Foy Yi. Have you a cabinet or some place of safe-keeping where this very handkerchief — message and all — can be placed away out of sight of anyone?”

  At the older Oriental’s announcement of the stupendous sum of fifty dollars, the jaw of the younger Chinese had fallen open and there it had hung. At length he seemed to recover himself with a mighty effort, and made haste to reply.

  “A cabinet, honorable Chi? A cabinet! That same have I. A beautiful hand-carved thing. It is of stout wood, and it locks with a cunning key of shark’s bone.”

  “That is good. Lock this handkerchief away in your hand-carved cabinet — do not eradicate a single word of the message. Say nothing to anyone — even your friend Charley Yat Gong. I myself will put this into hands of the proper parties. You may feel satisfied, Foy Yi, that when Chi Tsung Liang handles this thing, it will be handled as it should be.”

  Napoleon Foy nodded his head enthusiastically. “Honorable Chi, your word in this strange land of still stranger customs is law to me and my brothers. Of the little father of Chinatown we ask no questions.”

  “That is well,” declared Chi Tsung Liang. He rose. “Go back to your work now, my son, and if by any chance this man returns for his laundry before you have been notified what to do, you will give him his bundle, correct as to charges, but deficient by this one handkerchief which will remain in your cabinet. Subsequently he may return to make claim upon you, and by that time we will agree what to do. In the meantime will I call in some one whose keen and youthful mind will throw light upon this very perplexing inscription.”

  And Napoleon Foy, his disturbed mind now at rest again because he had been with the little father of the Chinese in Chicago, was bowed out by the lean, toothpick-shaped servant and went back to his shop and his cockatoo.

  CHAPTER VI

  Dead Men Three

  JEFFREY DARRELL, coming into the Call city room at around five o’clock in the evening from a nondescript story which had successfully blocked itself at the other end till later in the evening, flung his hat upon the hook reserved for that purpose, and hastened over to the assignment book. But before he reached it, little Benny Taylor, the wizened boy who daily bore the brunt of every temperamental oscillation of those who collected the day’s news, crossed the room full of clacking typewriters, crept up to him and touched him timidly on the arm.

  “Mr. Darrell, that chink sittin’ over there on that bench wants to see you.”

  Darrell retracted his steps across the room to where the Chinaman sat.

  “Hello, Mo Kee,” he said. “How’s the world treating you?”

  The Chinaman looked up at him, then his lean face broke into a broad smile.

  “Lo, Jeff’ly Darr’l. I see you ‘member old Mo Kee, eh, from days when Tom Chi take you home for week end, eh?”

  “Of course I remember Mo Kee,” returned Darrell, smiling, dropping down on the bench next to the Chinese. He studied the other curiously for a second, then jumped straight to a conclusion. “Chi Tsung Liang wishes to see me?”

  “The master has inflomation for you,” declared Mo Kee mysteriously. “He say I bling you with me now right away. His pearl, O Ming Chi, my mistless, has the inflomation.”

  “But Chi Tsung Liang — where is he?” asked Darrell, as he rose to get his hat.

  “He go Philadelphia on business fi’ o’clock,” said Mo Kee, also rising. “He try get you on telephone wire, but you not here; so he has give inflomation O Ming Chi.”

  “Good!” said Darrell.

  A half hour later they dismounted from a car in the Chinese section — a section where stores filled with luscious melons and sad looking dried pop-eyed fish were interpersed with mysterious basements placarded with red posters bearing black hieroglyphs; and where from afar sounded the wailing of a gourd-like Chinese fiddle; a section whose entire male populace, all clad in black oilskin blouses, with hands in sleeves, seemed this day to be standing impassively about leaning idly against sun-covered walls — and shortly after they were turning up the stone steps of the great house to which Jeff Darrell in olden, golden days had often accompanied Thomas Chi, his university friend. A moment later Mo Kee had unlocked the front door and was leading the younger man into the old reception room.

  Darrell gazed about him with strange emotions in his being. The old room had not changed much. In the shadows of evening it looked as colorful as in the far-gone days when it had been such a delight to him to go with Thomas Chi to the other’s Oriental home. The teakwood furniture, the great soft-blue rug, the fantastic carved grimcracks of the Far East, the beautiful tapestries held his interest, till at length from a panel-covered door stepped a Chinese woman. She snapped a button and an odd lamp in black and gold sprang into soft radiance. At her entrance Darrell arose at once. In true American fashion she held forth her hand. He took her small hand in his own.

  “Jeffrey Darrell,” she said, speaking in precise English, “it is long since I have met you.”

  He looked at her. Thomas Chi’s tiny mother had aged somewhat since those carefree days. For the Chinese woman Darrell felt almost the tenderness of a son, remembering how she had mothered him with attentions and Chinese delicacies in those days when he had known neither mother nor father himself.

  “I am pleased again to see O Ming Chi,” he said, using the Chinese form of salutation which he had been taught. “And I beg a thousand pardons that in these busy days of rush and hurry I have not come to call.”

  She smiled up at him. “It is American way,” was her only answer, containing not a word of bitterness, however. “Be seated, Jeffrey Darrell.”

  He seated himself after her, and she spoke to him in her soft Chinese voice.

  “Jeffrey Darrell, Chi Tsung Liang send Mo Kee to you because he have what he think might be news for you alone, and because he must leave for Philadelphia and cannot get you on the telephone. He returns not until Thursday night, so it is that I myself give to you the facts just as he gave them to me. They are brief.”

  In a few words she told him about Napoleon Foy’s visit. Then she gave him the copy of the strange message.

  “Message speaks,” she continued, “so says Chi Tsung Liang, of fifty dollars which is to go to Foy Yi. He tell me to ask you if message worth this money, you get, give to him, and he give to Foy Yi.”

  Darrell took the paper:

  “JOHN CHINAMAN: Take this message at once to Miss Rita Thorne, The Bradbury, somewhere on Independence Boulevard, Chicago, and collect $50 for yourself. R.T.: Pay John $50. You have letter from London. Secure immediately old alarm clock owned by uncle described in letter. Remember there were two similar clocks, one formerly used by servant. Pay anything — up to $2,000 cash you have — to get the right one of the two. Lock it fast in downtown safety vault. Then notify Catherwood you have clock and hold all cards. Try second-hand furniture store man named Schimski, North Wells Street. If not then clock is in possession of one Rees, on Grady Court. Make great haste. Do not delay. When you have it safe and fast tell C. Until then yours truly remains defunct.

  J. C. J.”

  Three times Darrell read the m
essage through. Then he looked up. His words were now the inquisitorial ones of the reporter who scents a story that is going to make interesting reading.

  “O Ming Chi, did I understand you to say that this Napoleon Foy himself did not know the customer who left the bundle?”

  The Chinese woman nodded.

  “According to Chi Tsung Liang, who ask him upon this point, he did not,” was her reply. “He recognize man as man that bring bundle once before and take away clean. Man not young, nor old, not wealthy nor yet poor.”

  “I see. He thinks that the man lives in that neighborhood, does he?”

  O Ming Chi’s almond eyes half closed. “Chi Tsung Liang say I to inform you partic’ly, Jeffrey Darrell, that Foy Yi tell him that man lay upon the counter a transfer — a street-car transfer — while he hand over bundle. When he leave shop, he take transfer with him.”

  Darrell pondered deeply for a moment or two, reading the message for the fourth time. One line — the very last line of the message — struck him with peculiar force. “Until then yours truly remains defunct.”

  He looked up. “Did Napoleon Foy mention to Chi Tsung Liang whether any other customers were in the laundry or not when this man came in or went out?”

  O Ming Chi nodded her head. “Chi Tsung Liang say I to tell you that. No customers, only Charley Yat Gong, who work as waiter in Yuan Gow’s restaurant. Charley Yat Gong in back room behind partition. Play hui-hui-sip-soo with Foy Yi. So Charley see nothing.” She paused, pondering. “I think sure I tell you everything, Jeffrey Darrell, which Chi Tsung Liang himself tell to me, and which Foy Yi tell to him.”