Armenian reached the corner of an alley where there was a light, two men came up and spoke to him, moving a little apart so that he was between them. The boy would have kept walking apparently paying no attention to them, but one checked him by stretching an arm out in front of him. The other man took his right hand out of his pocket and flourished it in the boy’s face so that the nickel-plated knuckles on it twinkled in the light. The boy ducked swiftly under threatening hand and outstretched arm, and went on across the alley, walking, and not even looking over his shoulder at the two men who were now closing on his back.
Just before they reached him another reached them—a broad-backed, long-armed, ape-built man I had not seen before. His gorilla’s paws went out together. Each caught a man. By the napes of their necks he yanked them away from the boy’s back, shook them till their hats fell off, smacked their skulls together with a crack that was like a broom-handle breaking, and dragged their rag-limp bodies out of sight up the alley. While this was happening the boy walked jauntily down the street, without a backward glance.
When the skull-cracker came out of the alley I saw his face in the light—a dark-skinned, heavily-lined face, broad and flat, with jaw-muscles bulging like abscesses under his ears. He spit, hitched his pants, and swaggered down the street after the boy.
The boy went into Larrouy’s. The skull-cracker followed him in. The boy came out, and in his rear—perhaps twenty feet behind—the skull-cracker rolled. Jack had tailed them into Larrouy’s while I had held up the outside.
“Still carrying messages?” I asked.
“Yes. He spoke to five men in there. He’s got plenty of bodyguard, hasn’t he?”