The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [78]
He stopped, suddenly alert to some immediate impression. The vague features relaxed; the teeth shone.
“Ah! Godahl, my friend!” he cried. He turned and advanced deliberately through the crowd that opened a path in front of him. Those wonderful hands reached out and touched Godahl on the arm, without hesitation as to direction.
Godahl could not repress a smile. Such a trick was worth a thousand dollars a week to the front of the house; and nobody knew better than the great Malvino the value of advertising. That was why he walked Broadway unattended twice a day.
When he spoke it was in French. “I am sickened of them all,” he said, sweeping his cane in a circle to indicate the gaping crowd straining to catch his words. “See! We have at hand a public chauffeur with nothing better to do than to follow in the wake of the Great Malvino. Godahl, my friend, you are at leisure? Then we will enter.”
And Godahl, playing his cards with enjoyment and admiration as well, permitted the blind man to open the door and help him—Godahl, possessing five senses—into the cab; pleased doubly, indeed, to note that the magician had managed to steal his wallet in the brief contact. “To the park!” ordered Malvino, showing his teeth to the crowd as he shut the door.
Godahl had known Malvino first in Rome. The great of the earth gravitate toward each other. No one knew how great Godahl was except himself. He knew that he had never failed. No one knew how great Malvino was except Godahl. Once he had attempted to imitate Malvino and had almost failed. The functions of the third finger of his left hand lacked the wonderful coördination possessed by the magician. Malvino knew Godahl as an entertaining cosmopolitan, of which the world possesses far too few.
“I would exercise my Eng-lish,” said the mask, “if you will be so good, my friend. Tell me—you know the lake shore in that city of Chicago?”
“As a book,” said Godahl. “You are about to parade there—eh?”
“I am about to parade there,” replied Malvino, imitating the accents of the other. “Therefore I would know it—as a book. Read it to me—slowly—page by page, my friend. I walk there shortly.”
Godahl possessed, first of all, a marvelous faculty of visualizing. It was most necessary, almost as much so in fact for him in his profession as for Malvino in his—Malvino without eyes. In a matter-of-fact manner, like a mariner charting some dangerous channel, he plotted the great thoroughfare from the boulevard entrance to the Auditorium. The other listened attentively, recording every word. He had made use of Godahl in this way before and knew the value of that man’s observations. Then suddenly, impatiently:
“One moment; there is another thing—of immediate need. The Pegasus Club? We are passing it at this moment—eh? You are one of the—what is it they say?—ah, yes, the fifty little millionaires—ha-ha!—yes?”
Godahl looked out of the window. Indeed, they were passing the club now. They had been proceeding slowly, turning this way and that, halted now and again or hurried on by traffic policemen, until now they were merely a helpless unit in the faltering tide of Fifth Avenue; it was past five in the evening and all uptown New York was on the move, afoot and awheel.
It was said of Malvino that he would suffer himself to be whirled round twenty times on being set down in some remote neighborhood of a strange city, and with the aid of his cane find his way back to his hotel with the surety of a pigeon. But even that faculty did not explain how he knew they were passing a certain building, the Pegasus Club, at this moment. Unless, thought Godahl—who was better pleased to study the other’s methods than to ask questions—unless the sly fox had it recorded in his strange brain-map that