The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley [best romance ebooks TXT] 📗

“Why,” cried Titania, “it makes his lovely nose look like the map of Florida.”

“How on earth did you happen to have these in your pocket?” asked Mrs. Mifflin, returning the glasses.

Aubrey was hard pressed for a prompt and reasonable fib, but advertising men are resourceful.

“Oh,” he said, “I sometimes carry them with me at night to study the advertising sky-signs. I’m a little short sighted. You see, it’s part of my business to study the technique of the electric signs.”

After some current event pictures the programme prepared to repeat itself, and they went out. “Will you come in and have some cocoa with us?” said Helen as they reached the door of the bookshop. Aubrey was eager enough to accept, but feared to overplay his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I think I’d better not. I’ve got some work to do tonight. Perhaps I can drop in on Monday when Mr. Mifflin’s away, and put coal on the furnace for you, or something of that sort?”

Mrs. Mifflin laughed. “Surely!” she said. “You’re welcome any time.” The door closed behind them, and Aubrey fell into a profound melancholy. Deprived of the heavenly rhetoric of her eye, Gissing Street seemed flat and dull.

It was still early⁠—not quite ten o’clock⁠—and it occurred to Aubrey that if he was going to patrol the neighbourhood he had better fix its details in his head. Hazlitt, the next street below the bookshop, proved to be a quiet little byway, cheerfully lit with modest dwellings. A few paces down Hazlitt Street a narrow cobbled alley ran through to Wordsworth Avenue, passing between the back yards of Gissing Street and Whittier Street. The alley was totally dark, but by counting off the correct number of houses Aubrey identified the rear entrance of the bookshop. He tried the yard gate cautiously, and found it unlocked. Glancing in he could see a light in the kitchen window and assumed that the cocoa was being brewed. Then a window glowed upstairs, and he was thrilled to see Titania shining in the lamplight. She moved to the window and pulled down the blind. For a moment he saw her head and shoulders silhouetted against the curtain; then the light went out.

Aubrey stood briefly in sentimental thought. If he only had a couple of blankets, he mused, he could camp out here in Roger’s back yard all night. Surely no harm could come to the girl while he kept watch beneath her casement! The idea was just fantastic enough to appeal to him. Then, as he stood in the open gateway, he heard distant footfalls coming down the alley, and a grumble of voices. Perhaps two policemen on their rounds, he thought: it would be awkward to be surprised skulking about back doors at this time of night. He slipped inside the gate and closed it gently behind him, taking the precaution to slip the bolt.

The footsteps came nearer, stumbling down the uneven cobbles in the darkness. He stood still against the back fence. To his amazement the men halted outside Mifflin’s gate, and he heard the latch quietly lifted.

“It’s no use,” said a voice⁠—“the gate is locked. We must find some other way, my friend.”

Aubrey tingled to hear the rolling, throaty “r” in the last word. There was no mistaking⁠—this was the voice of his “friend and well-wisher” over the telephone.

The other said something in German in a hoarse whisper. Having studied that language in college, Aubrey caught only two words⁠—Thur and Schlussel, which he knew meant “door” and “key.”

“Very well,” said the first voice. “That will be all right, but we must act tonight. The damned thing must be finished tomorrow. Your idiotic stupidity⁠—”

Again followed some gargling in German, in a rapid undertone too fluent for Aubrey’s grasp. The latch of the alley gate clicked once more, and his hand was on his revolver; but in a moment the two had passed on down the alley.

The young advertising agent stood against the fence in silent horror, his heart bumping heavily. His hands were clammy, his feet seemed to have grown larger and taken root. What damnable complot was this? A sultry wave of anger passed over him. This bland, slick, talkative bookseller, was he arranging some blackmailing scheme to kidnap the girl and wring blood-money out of her father? And in league with Germans, too, the scoundrel! What an asinine thing for old Chapman to send an unprotected girl over here into the wilds of Brooklyn⁠ ⁠… and in the meantime, what was he to do? Patrol the back yard all night? No, the friend and well-wisher had said “We must find some other way.” Besides, Aubrey remembered something having been said about the old terrier sleeping in the kitchen. He felt sure Bock would not let any German in at night without raising the roof. Probably the best way would be to watch the front of the shop. In miserable perplexity he waited several minutes until the two Germans would be well out of earshot. Then he unbolted the gate and stole up the alley on tiptoe, in the opposite direction. It led into Wordsworth Avenue just behind Weintraub’s drug store, over the rear of which hung the great girders and trestles of the “L” station, a kind of Swiss chalet straddling the street on stilts. He thought it prudent to make a detour, so he turned east on Wordsworth Avenue until he reached Whittier Street, then sauntered easily down Whittier for a block, spying sharply for evidences of pursuit. Brooklyn was putting out its lights for the night, and all was quiet. He turned into Hazlitt Street and so back onto Gissing, noticing now that the Haunted Bookshop lights were off. It was nearly eleven o’clock: the last audience was filing out of the movie theatre, where two workmen were already perched on ladders taking down the Tarzan electric light sign, to substitute the illuminated lettering for the