The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The dark hall was a swirling vortex of the morbidly curious. Men and women swarmed the place and fought for a glimpse into the room of tragedy. Police threw them back roughly. Children clung to their mothers’ skirts crying out their fear. Irene shrank from sight in a corner.

In time the police herded the neighbors into their own quarters, and quiet reclaimed the building.

Irene crept fearfully down the hall. A policeman guarded the door to Armand’s room. Irene stood there for a minute gazing dully, dry-eyed, at the door. The policeman waved an enormous nightstick and ordered her to be gone.

Irene walked slowly to the street door. She flung a last startled glance over her shoulder and fled down the street. Her spindling legs revealed amazing fortitude and carried her miles from that East End flat.

That night she fell in with a crippled beggar. Outcast, nearly helpless, the discovery of a bit of humanity more wretched than himself was flattering. The beggar took Irene to a basement. She made peasoup for him, and he rewarded her with two blankets.

Irene told him her story and the beggar reciprocated with the tale of a thrilling flight from a crime that had ended when a freight train ground off his two legs. He told her further tales of glorious days and nights in the underworld. He promised to learn the name of the detective who had killed Armand and murder him.

Irene took courage from his brave tales.

“Non!” she exclaimed passionately, “you find the name, and I will kill him!”

There were no truant officers to evade. Irene cooked peasoup for “Sticks” Grady until he died of acute alcoholism three years later.

Irene was sixteen, but looked twenty. She was tall, too thin, but pretty in a hard way. Her eyes were smoldering bits of repressed hate. Her cheek bones were too prominent, and her lips were thin and straight. Sticks Grady had trained her well, and Irene was ready for crime.

She experimented with shop-lifting, snatching purses, and picking pockets, then tried burglary and found it most profitable. She could move through a house with the fleet grace of a shadow. Against the hazards of capture she carried a small stiletto — a weapon essentially feminine, but with the deadly possibilities of a cobra. The blade was a scant three inches in length and came to the point of a needle. Irene meant one day to strike that point to the heart of a detective named Jean Duret, who, Sticks Grady had informed her, was the slayer of her father.

In time her life drew Irene into contact with other thieves. She was cunning and ambitious and organized a band. Irene lived with her companions in an old three-story stone building on St. Paul Street. The house was two hundred years old and ran back to an ancient cobbled street named St. Amable. The windows were few and narrow. They had originally been protected with thick iron shutters to withstand the arrows and bullets of the Iroquois. Fragments of these shutters still clung to rusted hinges.

Irene rented the two upper floors and professed to run a lodging house for sailors. For fifty years the ground floor had been occupied by a snuff manufacturer, but now that part of the building stood vacant, giving Irene’s band the run of the whole place. The cellar was a deep, dark pit that smelled foully of the river. A small section of the flagged floor of the cellar was a trapdoor that opened down into a tunnel which Irene had heard was once part of the early fortifications of the city. Irene marked that tunnel for the tomb of the detective, Jean Duret.

Her band of thieves held up ships’ officers on the dimly-lighted streets leading to the river. They occasionally lured drunken seamen to the grim, iron-shuttered house on St. Amable; robbed them, and threw their senseless bodies into deserted alleyways or abandoned warehouses. With one or two of the more skillful, Irene swept uptown on forays on the rich. She was surprisingly lucky, and the gang prospered.

It was on a night that Irene sat in her room weaving mental webs to ensnare the detective, Jean Duret, that a stranger hammered on the St. Amable Street door.

Irene’s eyes peered through the perforations in a rust-eaten iron shutter. She saw a big man, wide of shoulders, but not stout. He was dressed in a pair of cord trousers and a blue flannel shirt. She could not see his face.

A frown of perplexity crossed Irene’s forehead. It was not some fool thinking to rent a room, because the only lodging sign was an inconspicuous one on the St. Paul Street side of the house. The knocking on the door persisted. Irene was alone. She drew the stiletto from her breast and swiftly descended the foot-worn stairs.

“Who is there?” she demanded.

“It is I, Le Loup. I come from Desfarges!”

“ ‘Le Loup,’ ” Irene repeated. “I don’t know you.”

“You know Desfarges. Desfarges, of the Black Water Tavern?”

“Yes.”

“Then open this cursed door! Is it not enough that Desfarges has sent me?”

Irene opened the door doubtfully. The tall stranger entered and closed and locked the door. “My card, miss!”

Irene looked deep into the man’s eyes. Her glance dropped uncomfortably. The lines of that long, lean face were ruthlessly hard. A knife slash that began near the right ear ended at the fellow’s mouth. There was a sardonic twist to the other side of his mouth. Thick cords stood out upon his neck. His cleft chin was outthrust in swagging bravado. “My card, miss!” he repeated with a distorted grin.