Tales of Chinatown | Page 2

you know?"
Poland bent farther over the table.

"Chinatown's being watched again. I heard this morning that Red Kerry
was down here."
Cohen laughed.
"Red Kerry!" he echoed. "Red Kerry means nothing in my young life,
Jim."
"Don't 'e?" returned Jim, snarling viciously. "The way he cleaned up
that dope crowd awhile back seemed to show he was no jug, didn't it?"
The Jew made a racial gesture as if to dismiss the subject.
"All right," continued Poland. "Think that way if you like. But the
patrols have been doubled. I suppose you know that? And it's a cert
there are special men on duty, ever since the death of that Chink."
Cohen shifted uneasily, glancing about him in a furtive fashion.
"See what I mean?" continued the other. "Chinatown ain't healthy just
now."
He finished his whisky at a draught, and, standing up, lurched heavily
across to the counter. He returned with two more glasses. Then,
reseating himself and bending forward again:
"There's one thing I reckon you don't know," he whispered in Cohen's
ear. "I saw that Chink talking to Lala Huang only a week before the
time he was hauled out of Limehouse Reach. I'm wondering, Diamond,
if, with all your cleverness, you may not go the same way."
"Don't try to pull the creep stuff on me, Jim," said Cohen uneasily.
"What are you driving at, anyway?"
"Well," replied Poland, sipping his whisky reflectively, "how did that
Chink get into the river?"
"How the devil do I know?"

"And what killed him? It wasn't drowning, although he was all swelled
up."
"See here, old pal," said Cohen. "I know 'Frisco better than you know
Limehouse. Let me tell you that this little old Chinatown of yours is pie
to me. You're trying to get me figuring on Chinese death traps, secret
poisons, and all that junk. Boy, you're wasting your poetry. Even if you
did see the Chink with Lala, and I doubt it-- Oh, don't get excited, I'm
speaking plain--there's no connection that I can see between the death
of said Chink and old Huang Chow."
"Ain't there?" growled Poland huskily. He grasped the other's wrist as
in a vise and bent forward so that his battered face was close to the pale
countenance of the Jew. "I've been covering old Huang for months and
months. Now I'm going to tell you something. Since the death of that
Chink Red Kerry's been covering him, too."
"See here!" Cohen withdrew his arm from the other's grasp angrily.
"You can't freeze me out of this claim with bogey stuff. You're listed,
my lad, and you know it. Chief Inspector Kerry is your pet nightmare.
But if he walked in here right now I could ask him to have a drink. I
wouldn't but I could. You've got the wrong angle, Jim. Lala likes me
fine, and although she doesn't say much, what she does say is straight.
I'll ask her to-night about the Chink."
"Then you'll be a damned fool."
"What's that?"
"I say you'll be a damned fool. I'm warning you, Freddy. There are
Chinks and Chinks. All the boys know old Huang Chow has got a
regular gold mine buried somewhere under the floor. But all the boys
don't know what I know, and it seems that you don't either."
"What is that?"
Jim Poland bent forward more urgently, again seizing Cohen's wrist,
and:

"Huang Chow is a mighty big bug amongst the Chinese," he whispered,
glancing cautiously about him. "He's hellish clever and rotten with
money. A man like that wants handling. I'm not telling you what I
know. But call it fifty-fifty and maybe you'll come out alive."
The brow of Diamond Fred displayed beads of perspiration, and with a
blue silk handkerchief which he carried in his breast pocket he
delicately dried his forehead.
"You're an old hand at this stuff, Jim," he muttered. "It amounts to this,
I suppose; that if I don't agree you'll queer my game?"
Jim Poland's brow lowered and he clenched his fists formidably. Then:
"Listen," he said in his hoarse voice. "It ain't your claim any more than
mine. You've covered it different, that's all. Yours was always the
petticoat lay. Mine's slower but safer. Is anyone else in with you?"
"No."
"Then we'll double up. Now I'll tell you something. I was backing out."
"What? You were going to quit?"
"I was."
"Why?"
"Because the thing's too dead easy, and a thing like that always looks
like hell to me."
Freddy Cohen finished his glass of whisky.
"Wait while I get some more drinks," he said.
In this way, then, at about the hour of ten on a stuffy autumn night, in
the crowded bar of that Wapping public-house, these two made a
compact; and of its outcome