The audience safely out of the way, his fellows came pouring up the stairs from below, and another group came clattering down from the roof. The cordon had tightened into a knot gathered there under the projection room door. Merrill, very white and still, just pointed to it without a word.
III
The captain took the situation in at a glance. “Okay, it’s all over now but the shouting,” he nodded grimly. “But it’s going to be pretty messy.” He began spitting orders right and left. “Close up all those side exits. Bring up those gas bombs. Spread yourselves out. Don’t gang up here. He’s liable to pop out again and take half of you with him.”
The whole place started to swim in front of Merrill’s eyes. He saw them pick up the operator, announce he had a broken collar-bone, and carry him downstairs. He saw them bring up two Tommy-guns, set one up on each arm of the stairs at floor level, tilted to command the projection room door from each side of the mezzanine.
The captain said: “Lug that acetylene torch up on the roof. Cut a hole down on top of him. Take the manager with you — he’ll be able to locate the right spot for you.”
A livid little man was hustled toward the companionway Merrill had climbed earlier, protesting: “My house! My beautiful house! What’ll the owners say when they hear?”
“You, Ober, you’re supposed to be good,” was the next command. “Go down on the main floor and when I give the word have yourself a pot-shot at the camera sights or whatever other openings there are in front. We might be able to let a little ventilation into him from that side. And now you two with the Tommies, have a try at this door from where you are. Let’s see if it’s bullet proof or not. Back, everyone—”
It was the man whose gun Merrill had borrowed, who stepped up and said, “He’s got Bill’s girl in there with him. For God’s sake, Cap, you’re not gonna—”
The captain whirled on Merrill furiously. “What’s the matter with you anyway? Why didn’t you speak up? Is that what you been standing there looking so scared about?”
Merrill’s knees were about ready to buckle under him; he ran his hand through his hair a couple of times as though he couldn’t think straight any more. “We were gonna be married in June,” he said wildly. “I thought I was only bringing her to a movie show—” His voice died away forlornly.
“Ahrr, damn wimmen anyway!” the captain snapped unreasonably.
There was a sudden silence. None of the men moved. The orders hung fire. Then abruptly a bell jangled somewhere nearby. A second time, then a third.
“What’s that?” said the captain, looking all around him.
The manager, held under duress at the roof steps, came forward frightenedly. “That’s him! That’s the projection room trying to get me in my office, not the house phone: Three rings — he must have read the signal on the wall in there! He must want to tell you some—”
“All right, get in there and show us how it works!” The captain gave him a push behind the shoulder. He and Merrill and one of the others followed him into his private sanctum and stood watching, while he unhooked a hand set and pressed a button on the edge of his desk. He held the phone frightenedly out toward the captain as though afraid it would bite him. “Here... you... you better talk to him!”
The captain snatched the instrument away from him. They all stood waiting tensely. “Can you hear me in there?” he snapped.
His jaw set at the answer. He muffled the thing against the desk top with a bang. “Safe conduct or he’ll bump the doll,” he repeated for their benefit.
Merrill looked haggard. His breath sang in his chest like a windstorm. The captain stole a sidewise look at him. “All right,” he muttered to the other man, “he wins. We’ll get him the minute he lets go of her, anyway!”
But the three of them shared a single unspoken thought: “He won’t let go of her — alive.”
The captain lifted the phone again. He was stony faced, and couldn’t bring himself to speak for a minute. Finally he swallowed hard, gritted out: “So you want a safe conduct, Chink-eyes!”
The answering voice was audible but indistinguishable; like a file rasping against metal.
The captain’s face was red with humiliation; he turned his back on the three standing listening. “I see — as far as the storm canopy over the sidewalk out front,” he said in a trembling voice. “And I’m to call my men off—”
“This is hard to take,” muttered the detective standing beside Merrill.
“And how do we know you’ll keep your word?” the captain said.
“He won’t, and we all know he won’t!” Merrill groaned. “He’ll drag her off with him some place and shoot her down like a dog the minute he gets in the clear, to pay us back for a close shave like this! We’re bargaining over a corpse; she’s been dead from the minute I left her alone in that seat next to him!”
The captain muttered, scarcely above a choked whisper, “Okay, Chink-eyes, you win this round — we’re pulling in our horns.” He threw down the instrument and slumped into a chair for a moment, shading his eyes with one hand. “This is my finish,” he breathed. “I’ll be broken for this!” And then his voice rose to a roar. “But what else could I do? Answer that, will you? What else could anyone do?”
He stood up again, pounded his fist on the desk. “There’s still one chance we got left of outsmarting him in the long run! He ain’t letting go of her out there. He’ll get her out in front, and he’ll Hag a cab and yank her in it with him, that’s his only way of making a clean getaway, of shaking us off. That’s what we gotta figure on, anyway; he’s a rat, and you don’t bank on a rat’s promises. All right, Merrill, this’ll be your job! You get out there now ahead of him, rake up a cab, and be waiting down the street in it — in the driver’s seat.
“Watch your timing at that wheel. If you can be coasting along slow when he comes out, instead of standing still waiting, it’ll look that much better. Don’t try nothing on your own, now — you’ll only lose him for us! Hop to it! He’ll bleed for this — later.”
He turned and marched out, gave crisp orders to the men outside, his face expressionless as though this wouldn’t go down as the blackest night in police annals for all time to come. “Call them down off the roof with that blow torch. Get down to the main floor with those Tommies. Clear the mezzanine! Everybody down to the orchestra floor. Line up down there by the stairs. Put your guns away and don’t anybody raise a hand. There’s a girl’s life at stake!” He called in to the manager behind him: “Put the house lights on, every last one of ’em. We don’t want any shadows hanging around to bungle things up for us.”
The manager scurried across to a control box; frantically pulled down switches right and left. The theater outside blazed to a noonday brightness.
Merrill had vanished.
The faces that met the captain’s and turned away to carry out the incredible orders, were pictures of amazement, stifled by discipline. Not a word was said. The bitterness of the pill he was having to swallow was only too evident on the “old man’s” countenance.
“Must be some kind of a come-on, to get him out of there,” one of the policemen breathed, backing a machine-gun downstairs.
“Na, it’s the girl.”
“But she’s a goner anyway! He’ll only do it out on the street afterwards—”
They all knew it instinctively, even the “old man” himself. But she had to have her chance. She was a girl, and she was Bill’s girl. The almost certainty of her death mustn’t be turned into a dead certainty, not while there was the slightest means within their power of pulling her through. Which didn’t prevent the lot of them from wishing heartily she’d never been born at all. Or had been born in China.