NE day in August he discovered the truth of it. It was a little after six in the evening, and, following a wave of heat that had come down like crackling, red-hot spears, a rain-storm swept over from Jersey, driving the people to take shelter wherever they could.
The ideal weather to "turn the trick of Père Antoine," grinned Bibi I'Tueur, cracking his fingers to limber them for the grip and twist of the garrote.
Watching from a well-chosen strategical position in a dark doorway on Sixth Avenue, just above the Jefferson Market Court, where a mad, exuberant alley runs into an ancient maze of buildings at an exaggerated angle, to come out near Greenwich Avenue in a fantastic hodgepodge of mews, studios, and little shops where nobody ever buys, he saw a well-dressed, plump business man on a breathless gallop toward the Eighth Street Elevated Station.
Bibi did his work rapidly and neatly. He did not even have to use his knife—which made no difference to him either way, as it was money he wanted that night, and not the acrid tang of human blood.
Out of his hiding-place as quick and straight as a bullet! Foot crashing against chin; right hand squeezing the man's windpipe; left frisking his pockets—and off he was into the alley which he had thoroughly investigated earlier in the day.
But, running, twisting, turning, gliding, doubling, he found to his sorrow and discomfiture that, contrary to Paris, where the people would have helped him—him, Bibi l'Tueur!—here everybody's hand was against his.
A hue and cry.
"Stop thief!"
"Stop thief!"
"There he goes!"—echoed in a dozen languages; and they came from all directions—Poles and Calabrians and Russian Jews and Greeks and Slovaks—they were about him and pulled him down as hounds pull down a stag.
And—back to night court!
Only it so happened that the judge before whom he was brought this time was Moses C. Mandelson—who was a Jew, a scholar, and a self-made man; thus, by the same three tokens, a doer and a dreamer.
His was a strange theory, a stranger practise—for night courts. He held that judging was not synonymous with condemning, but with being just; and he had contempt, even hatred, for the buckram orthodoxy of precedent. The law to him was elastic, thus kindly.
He listened to the tale of the witnesses, the testimony of the policemen, and Bibi's surly replies.
"You are a Frenchman?" he asked.
"Yes."
Mandelson cupped his chin in his hands, studied the finger-print cards which had been brought from the little back room; then suddenly he looked up and spoke in a more peculiar—a more eccentric, his critics called it—manner than he had ever done in all his career.
"My friend," he said—and addressing the prisoners as his friends was another one of his oddities which he explained to his intimates by demanding how he could presume to judge people unless he felt friendly toward them—"the court will try to discover the bead of gold in the bottom of the blackened crucible which is your soul." (Did we mention that Mandelson was a Jew and a dreamer?)
He rose with a swish of his black, silken robe.
"Court temporarily suspended," he announced to the room in general, the scribbling reporters, the policemen waiting for their cases to be called, the special writers greedy for "sob" copy, the social-settlement workers, and the morbid habitués.
Then, again to Bibi:
"Follow me." And he stepped down from the dais and led the way to his private office, where, it was said, he judged more cases than in court; where, too, he smoked very excellent cigars.
"Your honor—please!" Detective Fitzgerald, who had made the arrest, tried to stop him. "The guy's dangerous, your honor! Better let me—"
"The court is able to take care of itself," smiled the judge, and he entered his office, followed by the Apache, and closed the door.
There they were—alone—judge and killer.
Instinctively, like a rangy, dusty, guilty-looking alley cat that senses the friendly intent of a stranger's outstretched hand, Bibi knew that the other was contemplating a kindly deed of some sort.
Wherefore he despised him.
On the other hand, he saw no reason why he should not take advantage of the little man's evident insanity, and so, sitting down across from the judge on the other side of the flat-top desk, he took an additional leaf out of the alley-cat's book of conduct.
He changed his growl into a purr.
Trusting, he looked, and confiding, and he tried his best to squeeze a tear from his wicked, arrogant eyes.