Tales of Chinatown by Sax Rohmer


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Page 3

"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 and of the next appearance of
Cohen, the Jewish-American cracksman, within the ken of man, I
shall now proceed to tell.




II

THE END OF COHEN



"I've been expecting this," said Chief Inspector Kerry. He tilted
his bowler hat farther forward over his brow and contemplated the
ghastly exhibit which lay upon the slab of the mortuary. Two
other police officers--one in uniform--were present, and they
treated the celebrated Chief Inspector with the deference which
he had not only earned but had always demanded from his
subordinates.

Earmarked for important promotion, he was an interesting figure
as he stood there in the gloomy, ill-lighted place, his pose that
of an athlete about to perform a long jump, or perhaps, as it
might have appeared to some, that of a dancing-master about to
demonstrate a new step.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Fri 29th Mar 2024, 2:08