Achmed Abdullah

“ He knew what he was going to do for a living. He was Slit-Eye. He was an Apache, a killer. But, mated to his four-square Chinese commonsense, was an even more ruthlessly logical French commonsense; and by the token of it he told himself that he was in a strange land. First he would have to survey what he was pleased to call his place of business, the streets and houses and shops where—to quote him literally, and be it remembered that he thought in French as much as in Chinese—the bourgeois fattened their swollen livers and reddened their indecent noses. ”

“ Another portion o' chow mein!"
"Git a move on, Slit-Eye—before I slit yer throat!"
So the days swung into weeks and the weeks into months, while his money accumulated and his body filled out, nearly blotting the thin, sharp lines of sensuous cruelty that ran from nostril to mouth, with the solid meats of Nag Hong Fah's generous kitchen; while his feet, carrying the extra weight, lost their furtive, gliding tread; while his heart, formerly flushed and congested with stark brutality, was now like driftwood on the tide of his love. ”

“ Since he never before had done a stroke of what the world, rightly or wrongly, calls honest labor, since, on the other hand, he learned on the first day outbound that here, aboard this tight, bitter ship, Slit-Eye the Apache had to be Slit-Eye the Stoker or else—"by Christ's holy ears! yer shirkin', bloody swab of a Chink-faced, frog-eatin' French son-of-a——!"—the third engineer would know the reason why, he felt like a caged beast. ”

“ Yet, ugly, a half-breed, he had a way with the women, and was an unchallenged leader among men in the cramped, greasy old streets and alleys back of the Central Market Halls of Paris.
For, though an Apache, a robber, by trade, he was a killer by instinct and preference.
Comparatively undisturbed by the police, he followed his chosen career until a new and ambitious prefect decided on a municipal house-cleaning. Unfortunately for Slit-Eye, this coincided with the discovery of a well-dressed Paris stockbroker robbed and murdered in a dark alley not far from the Rue Verderet. ”

“ Fifth Avenue, with its proud, self-conscious sweep of asphalt picked out in a gentle curve of lights, with its immaculate, slightly snobbish flanking of shops, its human throng, leisurely and restless at the same breath, its well-fleshed, muscular police that stemmed the tide with a gesture of white-gloved hands, he dismissed at once as dangerous, and therefore unpracticable. ”

“ It had been so in Paris, in his quartier. He remembered Thérèse, his first girl. She had moved into his rooms, at the far corner of the tortuous, tragic Rue de la Ferronnerie, the day after he had knifed Eloi le Michet, the gang leader of the Outer Boulevards.
Gwendolyn Tza knew him as a half-breed who did odd jobs about the Bowery shops and saloons and who spent his meager dollars in buying her icecream sodas and taking her to motion picture theatres and Coney Island. She did not know him as Slit-Eye, the Apache, the killer. He told himself that he knew women; women liked the conqueror. ”

“ For here his shrewd, calculating slit-eyes beheld everything for the profitable pursuit of his sinister vocation: the corner saloons with their lurking, furtive side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through its warren; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting wedgewise into the packed, greasy wilderness of brick and stone ”

“ To his dying day Slit-Eye protested that, in this instance at least, he was innocent. Only it happened that the knife which had been stuck neatly between the bourgeois' third and fourth ribs was marked with Slit-Eye's initials, and it was more than doubtful that the police would accept his alibi: namely, that he had loaned his dagger to a casual acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who had needed it to cut off the rind of a particularly tough wedge of Port du Salut cheese. ”

“ Later on he always referred to London as a singularly tough, stringy, and discouraging leg of mutton, and he heartily condemned the methods of his English confrères.
"Tiens," he would say, "one takes pride in one's business, be it—well—tailoring or bleeding a citizen. ”