“All right,” I encouraged him in his foolishness. “You go there. That’s an excellent hiding place. Now if I want to get a Chinese boy to you with a message, how will he find you?”
“There’s a flight of steps to the left as you go in. He’ll have to skip the second and third steps, because they are fitted with some sort of alarm. So is the handrail. On the second floor you turn to the left again. The hall is dark. The second door to the right—on the right-hand side of the hall—lets you into a room. On the other side of the room is a closet, with a door hidden behind old clothes. There are usually people in the room the door opens into, so he’ll have to wait for a chance to get through it. This room has a little balcony outside, that you can get to from either of the windows. The balcony’s sides are solid, so if you crouch low you can’t be seen from the street or from other houses. At the other end of the balcony there are two loose floor boards. You slide down under them into a little room between walls. The trapdoor there will let you down into another just like it where I’ll probably be. There’s another way out of the bottom room, down a flight of steps, but I’ve never been that way.”
A fine mess! It sounded like a child’s game. But even with all this frosting on the cake our young chump hadn’t tumbled. He took it seriously.
“So that’s how it’s done!” I said. “You’d better get there as soon as you can, and stay there until my messenger gets to you. You’ll know him by the cast in one of his eyes, and maybe I’d better give him a password. ‘Haphazard’—that’ll be the word. The street door—is it locked?”
“No. I’ve never found it locked. There are forty or fifty Chinamen—or perhaps a hundred—living in that building, so I don’t suppose the door is ever locked.”
“Good. Beat it now.”