The Midnight Passenger | Page 7

City at last, and rejoiced to find in Leah's son, now a burly youth, a fit companion and second for his own craftily laid villanies. It was a capital for him, the legacy of her nurture and his own training.
Mr. Fritz Braun's broad white brow was gathered in an impatient frown as he strode out of Magdal's Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue and paced with dignity past all the minor notables of the street.
Hulking policemen, loquacious barber, marketman and newsdealer, small shop-keeper, and the saloon magnates, all knew the stolid reticent German who presided over the veiled mysteries of Magdal's.
The whole region of Sixth Avenue, between Twenty-third and Thirtieth, had its floating contingent of "sporting" men and women who well knew the crafty wisdom lurking behind the blue spectacles which veiled the pharmacist's piercing glances. Fritz Braun's "contingent" were a brood of the Devil's own children.
Fritz Braun was strangely three hours late upon this especial evening, but his step was evenly sedate as he entered Zimmermann's for his before dinner Kümmel. A prosperous figure was he in his mouse-colored top-coat of fashionable cut, his immaculate silk hat, with the red dogskin gloves, and the heavy ivory-headed cane.
With his antique cameo scarf pin, his coat collar turned up around his flowing golden beard, he was the very type of the sedate burgher of Dresden or Leipzig. And yet many a dark secret lurked in that busy brain of his.
A dozen necks were craned after him, though, as he silently left the saloon and caught the down-town car.
For from Greely Square to Eighth Street, from the cork room of Koster & Bial's to the purlieus of old Clinton Place, all the "off color" men and women of New York's "fly" circles knew and feared the steady eyes gleaming through the cerulean lenses.
"He's a deep one, the Professor," grunted the Hanoverian barkeeper. "Vat a lot 'e knows!" The Teuton rinsed his beer glasses with a vicious twirl as he exclaimed: "Like as not, choost so like, he's up to some new devilment! Niemand know vere 'e hangs out! He's a wonder, he is, dat same Fritz!"
But the pharmacist lost all his sedateness as he sprang out of the crosstown car after his transfer at Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue.
He was the nimblest crosser of the busy corner, and then gazed anxiously up and down the street, in front of the Restaurant Bavaria.
Wasting but a moment he smartly entered the café and then, with an air of proprietorship, entered a curtain-shaded alcove.
The waiter silently placed the carte du jour before him, and merely shook his head when Braun sharply demanded, "Any one here for me?"
A luxurious dinner was ordered, and the silent man was busied scanning the convives when Emil Einstein, cautiously entering without haste, furtively regarded all the diners.
They were the better class of artists--musical virtuosos, and floating foreigners of the Teutonic business circles of lower New York.
Frank, pleasure-loving continental women mingled freely with these materialistic Romeos, who preferred the comforting cuisine to the fiery and seductive cocktails of "The Opera" on the corner.
The artful Einstein was warily assuring himself that he was quite unknown to the convives before making his report to his real master and evil genius. For, young as he was, Emil Einstein well knew that the tyrant master, who had been his mother's cruel lover, might some day lure him on to the electric chair.
A guilty pride thrilled the depraved boy's heart to feel that he, alone, in all the crowded ward, knew what manner of human devil lurked behind those innocent-looking blue spectacles.
He had seen the ferocious grin which relaxed Fritz Braun's bearded lips into a cruel grin, as the sly lad made a gesture which indicated tidings of great joy. Einstein's dress and bearing was fully worthy of his respectable business station. He might well be taken for the precious "only son" of some well-to-do Jewish-American merchant.
Quick to learn, he had aped the mien of his American fellow employees, and his "educational evenings" at the "Irving Place," the "Thalia," and the "Germania" had given to his bearing what he fondly deemed an "irresistible social swing."
Greedy of pleasures, gluttonous and covetous, the young Ishmael ardently looked forward to a comfortable ill-gotten revenue at the hands of the man, who--through a skilful manipulation of the German janitor of the Western Trading Company's office--had obtained the place of office boy, "with substantial references," for the son of his cast-off paramour.
Leah Einstein had long forgotten the face of the reckless Polish country noble who was the real father of this budding criminal, and the lad himself but dimly discerned the drift of his Mephistophelian patron's proposed villainy.
Timid and cowardly at heart, the young waif would have shuddered had he known of the callous-handed and desperate murders which had shocked Vienna just before