There was no ban now; but 806 was not to be offered to a guest without good excuse for so doing. The excuse had worked excellently tonight. Henry Arnaud had insisted upon an eighth-story room; he had received the only one available.
The clerk’s eyes scanned the lobby. He wanted to be sure that the issuing of Room 806 had caused no comments. Many of the guests at the Aldebaran were permanents who might talk about the fact that Laird had lived there almost until the time of his murder.
One man who had been reading a newspaper was strolling from the lobby; no others showed any sign of activity.
MEANWHILE, Henry Arnaud had reached Room 806. The room occupied a corner of the hotel. One window opened on the front street; the other covered a vacant lot.
The room was small. It had no bath. A large wardrobe stood in the corner, in lieu of a closet. The only modern touch to this room was a reading lamp on a small table beside the single bed.
Yet Arnaud did not appear dissatisfied with his quarters. He tipped the bell boy and carefully locked the door after the attendant had left the room. He seated himself in a chair beside the bed. He took an old newspaper from the pocket of his light overcoat.
As Arnaud spread the paper, his eyes rested upon a paragraph relating to the death of Stephen Laird. It was an exact account of the man’s demise, and gave the conductor’s version of everything he had heard the dying man say.
What was the meaning of the statement, “Tag A,” the last message that Laird had tried to give? That was a mystery. The newspaper paragraph also stated that the envelope scrawled with 806, Aldebaran Hotel, had been found in the dead man’s pocket.
Henry Arnaud smiled as he scanned that notice. It explained his presence here tonight. He had chosen this room by design, not by accident.
The light that shone upon Henry Arnaud’s face revealed a countenance that was both distinctive and unusual. Henry Arnaud was possessed of firmly molded features that appeared almost as if they had been chiseled by a human hand. They gave a quiet, motionless expression to his countenance.
One could not have told the age of this man. Forty years might have been a fair estimate, but its accuracy could not have been more than speculative.
He was a being with a human mask, whose face became more inscrutable as it was examined closer. In the proximity of the light, it was even more impressive than in the poorly illuminated lobby. Arnaud’s eyes were an amazing factor. They sparkled with a glow that boded mystery.
Slowly, Henry Arnaud raised his hand and extinguished the light beside the bed. The room was now in total darkness. No sign existed of its human occupant.
Henry Arnaud had not stirred from his chair. But now, his eyes were turned toward the window.
Blocks away, they saw the glow of an illuminated district. Henry Arnaud was looking toward the strangest and most fascinating district of America — San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The lights from that cluster of steep-pitched streets betokened a merging of Occidental invention with the glamour of the Orient. There, within sight of this hotel, dwelt the largest settlement of Chinese outside of China itself.
Electric signs glowed with Chinese characters. These were accompanied by English words. It was upon one such sign that Henry Arnaud’s eyes were focused. This sign bore the large words:
MUKDEN THEATER.
The sign itself was a bizarre Oriental creation. Rows of colored lights crawled dragonlike from the lower corners until they reached a glittering ball of resplendent incandescents near the top of the sign.
Above these was a small circle of yellow lights that did not move. From the center of the circle shone two lights of green, placed side by side. They seemed a challenge to the man who watched them from the window of the hotel.
An imaginative person — had Henry Arnaud been such — might have sworn that those lights were staring back at him.
Click! The lamp came on in the room. Henry Arnaud arose from his chair and walked about. He doffed his coat and vest. He removed his collar and necktie. He went to the telephone and ordered ice water.
When the bell boy arrived, Arnaud opened the door and stepped into the hall to receive the pitcher. He yawned as he tipped the servitor.
“Leave a call at the desk for me,” he said. “Tell them seven thirty — and to keep on ringing until I wake up. I’m dead tired. I’ll be sleeping soundly ten minutes from now, and it takes lots of noise to arouse me.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the bell boy.
The door closed. The lock clicked. The bell boy returned to the elevator and stood waiting in the deep silence of the hall.
The Aldebaran was a gloomy hotel. When the bell boy had gone down in the elevator, the place was as still and as morbid as a morgue.
ACROSS the hall from Arnaud’s room, a door was ajar. Eyes were peering through the crack of that door — eyes that stared with a sinister purpose. They were glued upon the single exit from Arnaud’s room. They were waiting and watching, making sure that the guest in 806 did not leave.
Now a figure appeared from the door. It was a grotesque, crouching figure that crept slowly forward, making no noise as it advanced. The clothes that it wore were dark; but the face above them bore a yellow tinge.
In action, although not in guise, this creature bore the semblance of a Chinaman. His hands were close against his breast.
He listened outside the door of 806, his face now hidden from the light. This was a secluded portion of the hall. Yet the crouched man seemed ready to slide back to the other room at the first sign of an approaching person.
Within the room, Henry Arnaud again stood in darkness. The only indications of his presence that reached the man outside were the sounds that he made.
The clasps of the bag clicked as Arnaud undid them. He coughed slightly as he removed articles of apparel from the bag. The door of the wardrobe banged dully as he pushed it shut. Then the bed creaked as Arnaud flung himself upon it.
The noise of his breathing was interrupted occasionally by a slight cough. Then those sounds decreased, and there were steady minutes of prolonged silence.
The man outside the door was listening intently. With the subsidence of all sound, he moved, surely, but cautiously.
One hand came from his body. Deftly, he inserted a pass key in the lock of the door. The key turned. The other hand was upon the knob.
Softly, steadily, the door of Henry Arnaud’s room opened until it was ajar like that of the room across the way.
In this end of the hall, the light was dim and obscure. Even so, the filtering rays might have attracted the attention of a man awake upon the bed. But there was no sign to show that Henry Arnaud had stirred.
The sinister approacher took this as a good sign. He stepped softly into the room, and closed the door behind him.
He crept around the foot of the bed, and passed slowly by the half-opened window. He was close to the floor; the dim, reflected glow from Chinatown was not sufficient to betray the presence of the sneaking native who had come from that section of the city, to be here tonight.
But those vague rays of light did tell something of the man’s purpose. Something gleamed in one of the creeper’s hands. It was the blade of a long, vicious knife — the silent weapon of a noiseless assassin.
The crawling Chinaman stopped at the table by the head of the bed. He listened there; then loomed upward. His body extended over the bed. His knife was in his right hand, ready to deliver a well-aimed thrust. His left hand gripped the cord of the table lamp.
The hovering creature was one who planned his purpose well. He was ready to perform two operations simultaneously. That hand toying with the cord was prepared for its duty.
When the light came on, the knife blade would descend swiftly toward a vital spot before the sleeping victim could become cognizant of danger.