Her heart was beating rapidly. For she had thought, as she
had stood up to leave the restaurant, that the fierce eyes of Chunda
Lal had looked in through the glass panel of one of the doors.
This gloomy house seemed to swallow her up, and the men who watched
wondered more and more what had become of the elegant figure,
grotesque in such a setting, which had vanished into the narrow
doorway--and which did not reappear. Even Inspector Kelly, who knew
so much about Chinatown, did not know that the cellars of the three
houses left and right of Ah-Fang-Fu's were connected by a series of
doors planned and masked with Chinese cunning.
Half an hour after Miska had disappeared into the little house near
the corner, the hidden door in the damp cellar below "The Pidgin
House" opened and a bent old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty
figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare
room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den
of the opium-smoker. This room, which was windowless, was lighted by
a tin paraffin lamp hung upon a nail in the dirty plaster wall. The
floor presented a litter of straw, paper and broken packing-cases.
Two steps led up to a second door, a square heavy door of great
strength. The old woman, by means of a key which she carried, was
about to open this door when it was opened from the other side.
Lowering his head as he came through, Chunda Lal descended. He wore
European clothes and a white turban.
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