LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 4

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER FOUR

      SIX days later a funereal old figure came to a stop before a shabby- fronted house in a shabby New York side-street not far from Herald Square. He hesitated for a moment at the foot of an iron hand-rail, red with rust. Then he glanced pensively eastward toward Broadway, and then as pensively westward toward Eighth Avenue. Then the dolorous eyes blinked once more up at the sign-board which announced:

      MME. FATICHIARA

       Palmist and Astrologist

      The next moment the man in black ascended the broken sandstone house-steps and rang the bell.

      He stood in the doorway, pensive and dejected, with his rusty umbrella in his hand. About his arm was a band of crape, faded to a bottle green, and on his bespectacled face was a look of timorous audacity.

      He rang again, apparently quite unconscious of ​having been under scrutiny from a shrewd pair of eyes that stared out through the shuttered grille-work of the door itself. Then he sighed heavily, and was about to ring for the third time, when the door opened and he found himself confronted by a large negress who, while arrayed in a costume that was unmistakably Oriental, still bore many of the earmarks of Eighth Avenue origin.

      "Madame Fatichiara?" the visitor ventured, with a timid glance at the imperturbable turbaned figure.

      The negress solemnly nodded, stepped aside and motioned for him to advance. This movement was made with an arm far too athletic to be lightly disregarded. Then the door was closed behind him, and another door at the rear, suggestively presided over by a stuffed owl with two small ruby lights set in its head, was silently opened.

      The visitor sidled in past a screen embossed with a skull-and-cross-bones surrounded by an ample parade of what appeared to be interlocked copperheads worked in lemon-yellow. Then he edged about a bowl of goldfish suspended from a black tripod and found himself confronted by a silent and motionless woman in an ebony-black peignoir.

      This woman sat behind a table draped with black ​velvet, on which still another suggestively reptilious design was worked in beryl green, the emblem in this case being that of a diamond-back rattler engaged in biting its own tail. On the table behind which the woman sat as motionless as an Egyptian idol stood a green jade vase in which smoldered three Japanese punk-sticks. Beside it, on a bronze tripod embossed with snakes, stood a glass globe, iridescent in the shadowy and uncertain light of the curtained room. Facing it was a human skull on a black plush pad embroidered with the signs of the Zodiac, while behind the skull stood a planchette, a pack of green-backed playing-cards, a lacquer tray of what appeared to be "mad-stones," and an astronomical chart of the heavens, framed and under glass.

      The newcomer's pensive gaze, however, was directed more toward the woman than toward her significantly arrayed accessories.

      As this woman's figure was backed by the dusky curtains of a materializing cabinet, and her heavily massed hair was itself as dark as these curtains, the contrasting pallor of her face, well whitened with rice-powder, produced an impression that approached the uncanny.

      ​This impression of uncanniness was in no way mitigated by the blue pigment which had been added to the elongated eyelids or by the woman's studied attitude of languor and aloofness or by the fixed stare with which her mysterious and half-closed eyes accosted her crow-like visitor in rusty black.

      This visitor, however, dropped into a chair facing the young seeress. He regarded her and her surroundings with a nod of pensive approval. Then he took out a cigar and proceeded to light it.

      For one brief moment the mystic-eyed seeress watched that unlooked-for movement. Then she sank limply back in her chair.

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