Bibi—His Mark. Achmed Abdullah

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СКАЧАТЬ coffee flavored with cognac in a little cafe of the Rue de Turbigo, he read about the corpse and the knife in the morning issue of the Petit Parisien, and arrived at Dieppe just two jumps ahead of the police, increasing the distance to three jumps by the time he reached London, where, head first, like a rat, he bored into the dank purlieus of Soho.

       He felt not at home there; neither in Soho nor in Pimlico, nor in the scraggly, smoky, jerry-built whole of the East End, including the maze of the docks whence men go down to the sea in ships. Later on he always referred to London as a singularly tough, stringy, and discouraging leg of mutton, and he heartily condemned the methods of his EngHsh confrères.

      "Tiens," he would say, "one takes pride in one's business, be it—well—tailoring or bleeding a citizen. And there, in London? Pooh! A brick bounced off somebody's dome! A loaded rubber bludgeon flattening a silk tile! And they call that turning the trick! These English have no imagination, and I, mon vieux, I was not happy there!"

      So he left London.

      But here, too, the full tale of it is clouded, nebulous, overcast with a haze of sordid romance.

      For, strangely, a six days' sensation, consisting in garroting, frisking, and painful injuries suffered by a Member of Parliament on a clear evening in full view of Whitehall Street, and resulting in the heckling of the Cabinet by the purple-faced Tory Member for East Gravesend, who started with demanding a thorough reorganization of Scotland Yard, and ended by clamoring for the immediate resignation of Asquith and the little Welsh attorney—this six days' sensation happened to coincide with Bibi the Killer's shipping out of green Southampton to the New World.

      As a stoker! And since never before in all his life had he done a stroke of what the world, rightly or wrongly, calls honest labor, since the animal instinct of self-preservation taught him that here, on board this tight, workaday ship, Bibi the Killer had to be Bibi the Stoker, or—by Gawd! yer shirkin', sneakin', bloody swab of a frog-eater!—the third engineer wanted to know the reason why he felt like a caged, helpless beast.

      Thus, when land came in sight, his old spirit asserted itself. Like the flash of the free iron, swung away from the clogging, rusting scabbard, it jerked out. And he sniffed greedily when the shore wind brought the warm reek of New York out to the low-flung drab of Sandy Hook, where the ship was riding to both sea-anchors waiting for the impertinent chug-chug-chugging of the customs launch, and remarked to a fellow stoker, a Frenchman like himself, that he expected to gut this transatlantic town of gold and diamonds and pearls as a fish-woman in the Halles Centrales guts a mackerel.

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