Jimmie Dale's lips thinned again. Well, Burton's acquaintance
was still to be made! It was a curious trio--and it was dirty work, more
raw than cunning, more devilish than ingenious; blackmail in its most
hellish form; the stake, at the least calculation, a cool half million.
A heavy price for a single slip in a man's life!
He brought the car abruptly to a halt at the edge of the curb, and
sprang out to the ground. He was in front of "The Budapest" restaurant,
a garish establishment, most popular of all resorts for the moment on
the East Side, where Fifth Avenue, in the fond belief that it was seeing
the real thing in "seamy" life, engaged its table a week in advance.
Jimmie Dale pushed a bill into the door attendant's hand, accompanied by
an injunction to keep an eye on the machine, and entered the cafe.
But for a sort of tinselled ostentation the place might well have been
the Marlianne's that he had just left--it was crowded and riot was
at its height; a stringed orchestra in Hungarian costume played what
purported to be Hungarian airs; shouts, laughter, clatter of dishes,
and thump of steins added to the din. He made his way between the
close-packed tables to the stairs, and descended to the lower floor.
Here, if anything, the confusion was greater than above; but here,
too, was an exit through to the rear street--and a moment later he was
sauntering past the front of an unkempt little pawnshop, closed for
the night, over whose door, in the murk of a distant street lamp, three
balls hung in sagging disarray, tawny with age, and across whose dirty,
unwashed windows, letters missing, ran the legend:
IS AC PELINA Pawn brok r
The pawnshop made the corner of a very dark and narrow lane--and, with a
quick glance around him to assure himself that he was unobserved, Jimmie
Dale stepped into the alleyway, and, lost instantly in the blacker
shadows, stole along by the wall of the pawnshop.
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