Keeban

VIII A LADY DISCREDITS ME.

She was not in bed but was lying upon it in a negligee—a silk and lace, pink and white creation which was originally no garment of grief. She was pink and white herself, except for her bobbed hair of bronze and for her big eyes which were blue. She displayed a good deal of herself, especially the beauty of her bosom; she did this not with any evident design of the moment but probably upon the general principle that it was never a disadvantageous thing for her to do.

She was alone in the room when I entered and Fred Scofield, who came up with me, dropped back at the door. She gazed at me, making hardly a motion, and waited for me to open the meeting.

I did it formally, with that door open behind me; I said the stupid tosh I felt expected to say.

“Shut the door and sit down,” said Shirley.

The first part was important, so I did it; then I strolled to the foot of her bed and stood. She lay looking at me, one hand holding a cigarette box which she tapped with her fingers; but she wasn’t smoking.

I was realizing I had never met up with a murderess before—at least not with a girl who’d done her bit in a bump off for money.

Of course since I had, in my own right, a normal list of acquaintances of fair size, I knew a woman or two who’d shot friend husband; but the moving impulse was not financial. The widow—I mean the woman who immediately made herself the widow—in one case happened upon husband with another lady on the wrong landing; in the other case, she’d become peeved about something purely private and so highly sensational when sobbed out on the witness stand, and followed by an effective faint, that the jury not only justified her but acquitted her with cheers.

The widow Scofield, lying here on the bed before me, failed to fall in that same class in my mind. I doubted if she would in the emotions of any jury; and some doubt of this nature seemed to flit across the eyes of blue which kept watching me. She was gambling, if not with her life itself, at least with her liberty for life; and her stake, if she won, was the neat little sum of five hundred thousand dollars to enhance her joys of freedom.

Elsewhere in this house the aged youth, her husband, lay dead; and whatever was to happen, her chapter with him was concluded and she could not contrive to conceal from me a certain relief at that. Perhaps I imagined it, with my picture of her at her piano last night still haunting my mind; yet I’m not imaginative. I felt her saying to herself, as she gazed at me, “Well, whatever’s to come next, that’s over. Twenty-two with sixty-seven, rejuvenated!”

She said aloud to me, “What did you mean by the words on your card?”

“If you don’t know,” I said, “why did you change your mind, after you had the card, and send for me?”

She didn’t respond; she lay waiting, watchfully, and let me look her over and think her over with all the deliberation I wanted. She seemed to me not so slight as that Christina who’d met me at the river ledge with Keeban; but I knew enough about the effect of negligee, and of a figure loosed from a girdle, to allow for more fullness now. Her hair was bronze; but yellow over that bronze would have been easy enough to manage, especially in the dim light of that dock room. Her manner of speech had changed; yet I was wholly sure she was Christina.

At the next moment, she admitted it. “I know what you meant, Steve,” she said, speaking my name as she had in that room by the river. “You think you have something on me, do you?”

“You’re Christina,” I said.

“Right! Call in my step-son Fred and whoever else you care to; I’ve something to confess which I should have told the police this morning—but I didn’t. Yet it didn’t hurt anything to hold it back. Call him in!”

She sat straight and raised an arm and pointed to the door in some cabaret imitation of a grand gesture. “Open the door,” she ordered me.

I opened it and went out and found Fred. “She’s something to say to us,” I told him. I decided to include nobody else just then, though there were police enough everywhere and all keen to listen. Fred and I went into her room and closed the door. She motioned us to seats beside the bed as though she might be Madame Récamier on her couch receiving a couple of her lesser courtiers.

“Fred, I can tell more about the shooting last night; I’m going to do it,” she said, looking at Fred, not at me. “You can decide how much to give out to the police—to the ‘bulls,’” she added, deliberately blunting her speech and gazing at me. She swung back to Fred.

“I come from the cabarets, you know; maybe you’ve thought sometimes that I come from worse. Anyway, you treated me like you did.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fred and waited.

“That I didn’t come from worse wasn’t any fault of Jerry Fanneal. He was hot after me—hot after me.”

Here was the start of a counter-attack on me; I felt it and demanded, “When was that?”

“Oh, before I married; long before the big surprise to his swell friends and family when he threw Dorothy Crewe into the street. He was comin’ down to the cabarets for a long time. Didn’t you know it, Mr. Steve Fanneal?”

“Yes;” I said. “Often I went with him.”

“But often not; isn’t that so? Tell the truth!” This was a straight challenge.

“Sometimes not,” I granted.

“I guess not! Well, you should’ve seen some of those ‘sometimes.’ The boy was crazy; I seen it!” In her excitement, she was forgetting her “g’s” and the tenses she could speak correctly when she tried to; she was a cabaret Récamier now. “Clean crazy. He kept it under when he was back with his swells and you; but when he was down with us, he blew the lid some distance off, I’m telling you. I made him crazier than most, for he couldn’t get me. He thought I’d fall for money. Not me!

“I was glad to get married to a decent man, if he was a bit old; and glad to get away, believe me! Then we made the mistake of comin’ back. I didn’t want to, as you know; but the boys wanted father and me to cut down expenses. So we had to come. Anyway, with me married and Jerry mixed up with another skirt—and a swell one, too—I figured he’d forget his old grief about me. But you know what he did to his lady friend; well, when he’d made himself all lonely again, he seems to have got me back on his busted brain. Anyway, he sent word to me to come meet him.”

“How did he send word?” This was from me.

“Telephoned.”

“Why didn’t you inform the police?” That was another interjection of mine; and she came back at me through the wide, wide opening I’d left her. “Why didn’t you, when he slipped word to you to meet him?”

Fred failed to interrupt; he was too busy looking and listening. I reserved my reply and she went on:

“He mentioned to me that, if I set a squeal, I’d hear from it; also that I’d better meet him. He wanted money to get away. Of course he couldn’t sell those Crewe diamonds at any sort of price now; there was too much danger in handling them, with everybody watching for ’em; and too much loss if he had ’em cut. He wanted cash money and he thought I could bring it. Remember, a couple a weeks ago,” she said to Fred, “I tried to get some considerable cash from you?”

Fred admitted that.

She said, “That was to give to Jerry Fanneal. I got afraid of him. I wanted him to get out. When I couldn’t raise the cash, I said I’d help him get it from his own family; and so I put up the talk for him to Steve Fanneal.”

“What?” said Fred.

She had to tell him again and when she was through she referred Fred to me. “Let him tell it now.”

She had me in the hole; and she knew it; and Fred saw it. I had no chance at all of convincing Fred that the man I met with her was not Jerry but Keeban. Here was she denying, like everyone else, that Keeban could exist; here was she explaining how Jerry had come to do this murder. I knew better than to try to tell my story.

Shirley carried on. “Jerry and I met him and he got the money. Ten thousand in cash, wasn’t it?” she examined me. “If he denies it, Fred, ask the teller in his bank—last week Thursday he got it.”

“Did you?” asked Fred.

“I did,” I said.

He nodded to Shirley. “Go on.”

“He gave it to Jerry to go away.”

“That’s right?” Fred asked me.

“That’s right,” I had to admit.

Shirley continued, “Then Jerry wanted me. He’s crazy, you see. Sometimes he’s all right, like anybody else; then he’s like when he took that necklace from Dorothy Crewe and tossed her into the street. He said he’d get my husband and then me. Isn’t that true? Didn’t you know Win was in danger?” Again she was at me.

“Yes; but——”

“But you tried to stop it, of course; with wonderful success! Well, I’ve nothing on you there, I tried to stop it too!”

Then she broke into crying; and a great chance I had. There she was, a girl all white and pink in her negligee; and tears, real tears! I got out and was lucky to be able to get.

IX I SEEK THE UNDERWORLD.

For sketching a situation, no one ever touched Shakespeare; and he has a line which certainly described my state of dignity during the next days. It’s in “Julius Cæsar”; Anthony has just been saying, in some well chosen words which escape me for the moment, how important and prominent a citizen Cæsar was before his last meeting with Brutus, whereas afterwards there was “none so poor to do him reverence.”

That’s the description which struck me. Lord knows, I was no Cæsar, not even in Chicago; so my fall was not so far, yet the reception at bottom was much the same.

Of course, if you call the incorrigible habits of house servants “reverence” I still had some from them; at least, they kept calling me “sir” and “Mr. Stephen” and somebody sneaked in when nobody else was looking, and turned down my bed, and Warner drew my bath and saw to my shirts. Down at the office, Miss Severns continued to take my letters in a resigned sort of way; but, in general, I was the joke of everybody that knew I still believed in Jerry.

For a while the police watched me, on the theory that Jerry, after having worked me for ten thousand following his attack on Dorothy Crewe, would probably come back and get me to give him twenty now; but he didn’t. So the “bulls” left me alone to go wandering off, as soon as I dared, into the northwest morass of Chicago in search of Klangenberg.

I had that territory as part of my sales district in the days after I had finished college, when father was starting me out in the bean business.

Previously I had gathered, in a theoretical way, that people who went to Princeton or elsewhere to college in the east, and their parents, sisters and other relatives could not provide the number of appetites, locally and in the surrounding States, to account for everything we sold. Not at all; it was perfectly plain that we must sell to any number of people of sorts one would never meet in the general round of sleeping and breakfasting on Astor Street, driving to the office, lunching at the club, and dining on the Drive and dancing at the Casino. In fact, father took occasion to impress upon me that the caviar and truffle trade of Fanneal and Company would barely pay club dues; what bought motors and butlers and opera boxes was the business in beans—plain baked beans, with or without tomato sauce. And the habit of dinner dances, jaunts to England and the Continent had become family pleasures to the Fanneals solely because a large proportion of the populace living on streets which only by error would ever be listed in mother’s address book had taken to the taste of our soups and spaghetti in preference to the purées and macaroni put out under other brands.

Naturally this started me out upon my first unconducted tour of the tenement highways in a chastened and interested frame of mind.

My generation began growing up just in the ebb of the worst lot of social bunk which ever spread over this nation. The last wave of the muck which taught that, if anybody had a million, he took it from the poor by some scheme of social pickpocketing was just subsiding. Some of it splashed over my youthful boots; I remember, particularly, a cheerful cartoon which the Bolshevists still brandish probably, and which pictured a lot of us dancing on a ballroom floor which was supported on the bent backs of bowed-over men, women and children. To give it a dramatic touch, the muscular fist of a revolutionist below had broken through the floor and thrust up into the ballroom to the consternation of the degenerate dancers, meant to be us.

One thing is to be said for the experiments in Russia recently; they’ve made that sort of tosh ridiculous; they’ve at least suggested, to the brain open to any sort of observation, that the direction and the judgment and the initiative exercised by a man who organizes and builds up a business and keeps it going are in themselves productive factors just as necessary as labor itself and entitled, fairly, to big reward.

Father always taught me that this was where we got ours; we earned it. So when I explored Halsted Street, I did not suffer from any parlor-socialist conviction of personal guilt for housing conditions and juvenile delinquency simply because I was selling these people soup at a profit, net to us, of seven eighths of a cent a can. Naturally I took things as they were, thought about them as little as possible, gave a little more to the United Charities and the Salvation Army, and kept as far away as I could after my city salesman period was past.

Here I was going back again and with a decidedly new interest in these streets of narrow, dingy, clapboard, three-story dwellings, of drab and dun brick fronts, serving for a shop on the ground level and a dozen tenements above; of “lofts” and ancient cottages—ancient for Chicago—moved back, end to end, behind the buildings now holding the edge of the sidewalk.

I came to a place where the street, following this generation’s level of the city, stands above the ground of original days; the walks and roadway are graded up, leaving the disconsolate, paint-specked homes of the first customers of Fanneal and Company down on the dirt where were thrown fifty years ago, as now, our empty cans and papers. The land is so low that the street rises almost even with the second floors; one has to descend rickety steps to reach the doors of gray, ill-lit emporiums of every sort which witness, by their very being, to the amazing force of the proclivity to patronize a neighbor. Half a league from Marshall Field’s, preposterous, mediæval peddlers whined under windows shut to the chill smokiness of December city haze; women raised the sash and, after bargaining, bought. Half a block from a motor factory, a blacksmith hand-pumped his bellows to blow coals into heat for shoeing a huckster’s horse; fortune tellers beckoned and won business.

I came upon Klangenberg’s and descended into an environment of delicatessen where a madonna of the gray shawl—did Raphael or Leonardo ever paint one; if they didn’t, it was because they didn’t see one—was watching a patented pointer waver before the divisions of a cent on the automatic calculator above the scale which weighed her purchase of pig’s feet. A boy picked them up with unclean hands, wrapped them untidily and made change, almost in one motion, on a register which printed a receipt and said with flashing light, “come again; thank you.”

The place was heated by a stove before which sat a male model for Rembrandt, if he wanted to paint the “Dyke-keeper” or somebody else strong and dour looking who might wind himself in a muffler.

This was not Klangenberg; at least it was not the complainer about pineapples who had spoken to me of “Kidnapped” and “Westward Ho.” Accordingly, after the Madonna had climbed to the street, I asked the boy for the proprietor.

The “dyke-keeper” turned about, as though his interest in me began with my voice.

“Who wants to see him?” said the boy.

For the emergency—if you don’t feel there was one, it’s my failure to give you the dyke-keeper—I improvised and benefited by borrowing from Klangenberg himself.

“I’ve come to see him about his complaint on those pineapples,” I said.

“What pineapples?” the youth asked.

“I want to see him personally,” I replied. “Is he here?”

“Maybe,” said the boy and locked the cash register before vanishing rearward. Once he reappeared, evidently to view me for the purpose of checking up on my description; he said nothing but after another minute he came back and told me, “He’ll see you day after to-morrow.”

“What time?” I said.

“This time will do.”

I thanked him, while he unlocked the cash register for the resumption of business.

One matter was off my mind when I went away; this was my qualm as to whether I ought to inform the police of Jerry’s connection with Klangenberg. They would pick up mighty small change at that address, I thought; and when I returned two days later, I was sure of it.

Though I entered the door at the precise time of my appointment, neither the boy nor the dyke-keeper was there; a little girl of ten years tended the cash register and piled the computing scales with noodles. This child gave me no particular attention until she had cleared the shop of customers, when she said, “That’s the door back there.”

I went through it to an area between the shop and an old moved-over frame building. Some one—I didn’t know who—relieved the child in the shop, for she came out to me and led me through a shed where a horse was stabled. We sidled about another shed and climbed a tunnel of wooden stairs, built on the outside of a clapboard house, and roofed and walled against the weather.

“That’s the door,” the child said, when we came to the top; obviously she was speaking, as well as guiding, by instructions. She halted and I went on and knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said Jerry’s voice; and I opened and found Jerry before me.

X AND LEARN THE WAYS OF ITS LOGIC.

He had just risen from a bed upon which he had been seated,—a plain, white, iron bed with a red quilt. He looked me over and, welcoming me, waved me to a chair, a plain, wooden chair, not new.

The room was ordinary with striped, cheap paper on the walls; it had a floor of soft wood with a circle of rag carpet; besides the bed and chair, there was a washstand boasting of a bowl and pitcher. Altogether these were the furnishings which a person reared on Astor Street knows to exist but which he has seen only when he has happened to pass an express wagon heaped with the effects of a Halsted Street moving or when, detouring by some strange road, he comes upon the fruit of an “eviction.”

By some amazing transmutation, the man before me fitted the furnishings as he fitted the too “tailored” suit, too narrow in lapels, too belted at the waist, too conspicuously “patch pocketed.” He wore a shirt of too obvious silk and overdecorated shoes; and he wore them as if he had been bred to aspire to them and to nothing else.

A look at him and I knew why the police, in all the time they had searched since the robbery of Dorothy Crewe, had never picked him up. They had been searching for an Astor Street resident in some such garments as Jerry had worn by the river; they had expected him, when casting off his accustomed clothes, to don rough, contrasting attire; no one would have expected him to outdo, in his garb, himself as he had appeared before. I, least of all.

Now I understood that this must be his costume when in daytime he had to risk the streets; and I believed that a dozen detectives might meet him, give another glance at his face, but after looking him over, they would laugh at themselves for suspecting him. “Here’s a Halsted Street flash,” they would say, “trying to make himself look like an Astor Street swell. Jerry Fanneal, of Astor Street, would never do that.” An officer, bringing in such a man, would make himself the smile of his station.

You would think that I would have said to myself, “This is Keeban.” But the fact was I didn’t suspect him; I was sure at once that he was Jerry. Noticing him more closely, I observed that he had carried his change of caste even into the cut of his hair. No longer was it “feathered” in back in the manner of a University Club barber; he was clipped and shaven on the neck with his hair thickening toward the top till it became almost a tossing mane on the crown.

“This is your room, Jerry?” I said. I’d been wondering all the time where and how he’d been living.

“Mine just now,” he replied, looking up and down me. His eyes seemed to find satisfaction in the sight of me; but he did not give me his hand; he did not come closer to me than ordinary nearness in the room made inevitable. I realized that he was deliberately holding away from me and I realized why. Here he was not only hiding from the police, with his life hanging upon every risk of recognition, but here he was also playing the part of Keeban; and he could enter no more deadly undertaking than this of impersonating Keeban, Harry Vine, and going out among Keeban’s people.

Of course he could have attained this perfection of nuance only through constant keeping to it and he would be foolish to endanger it by jumping in and out of character with each opening of his door.

“We can talk here?” I asked.

“What is it?”

It was so much, so many things, that I could lump them all only in the obvious, emotional statement, “I’ve come to see you.”

“Why?”

Since he seemed to demand a practical reason, “Shirley Scofield is being paid the insurance money to-day.”

He knew that. “Yes, she got a bunch of it this morning, some yesterday and some a couple of days ago. That’s why you tried to look me up day before yesterday, was it?”

“Partly,” I said.

“That’s all right about her getting the money.”

“You mean she wasn’t in the scheme to get the money?”

He spoke to me now like Jerry of Astor Street days, I was always slower of wit than he and he was used to telling me obvious things as he did now. “Of course she was after the money, Steve.” He stopped a moment and then said, “But not that way.”

“What way?”

“By the ‘bump off’; she wasn’t up to it. That was shoved on her, Steve; and she’s sore.”

“At whom?”

He tapped his chest. “Our friend. Sit down, Steve.”

I sat on the chair; he on the bed.

“He’s traveling fast, Steve.”

“Who?”

Again he said, “Our friend. So far as I can trace him back, he hadn’t been worse than a ‘gun’ up to that job on Dorothy Crewe; that was a borderland act for him. He started it out like a ‘gun’ and finished up rough. With Win Scofield, he was all the way a ‘gorilla’!”

“Gunman you mean by ‘gun’?” I asked.

“Almost the opposite, Steve. A ‘gun’s’ a guy who gives action to his brain instead of to his cannon; he gets by without the shootings. A gorilla’s a guy that goes in for the rough stuff. A girl doesn’t worry when she’s got a good ‘gun’ for her gentleman friend; she’s personally as safe with him as with any church warden. He hasn’t any hankering for doing a croak; and he hasn’t any habit of getting out of his troubles that way. But when a guy that a girl goes with takes to being a gorilla, the skirt’s got to watch her step with him. She knows it.”

“Where is he now, Jerry?”

“Do you suppose I know?”

“You must know more than I do.”

“That’s right.” He tossed me a box of cigarettes. “Smoke if you want. Nobody’ll come for a while. I allowed us a little time, particularly so you may become better acquainted with my friend—” again he tapped his chest—“Keeban, my childhood companion, more recently the robber of Dorothy Crewe and the bumper off of old Win Scofield. He seems not to be indigenous to Chicago soil, Steve. Assuming that he was—and therefore is—a twin of mine, it is likely that my parents were merely visiting here when they loosed me in the park, and you and I met, old Top. Anyway, they must have moved on to New York, for my friend made his reputation there.

“I haven’t been able to gather anything about my own people—no more than you can judge from him and me. Maybe they turned us both loose at the same time and I walked into the hands of a wholesale grocer while a gerver picked him up.”

“Gerver?”

“Safe-blower, Steve. My friend seems to have made his start as a ‘peterman’ and then branched out. He’ll blow a peter yet, they say, to keep his hand in; and he packs with him, when he thinks he’ll find trouble, the peterman’s tube of his trade—a little, corked bottle of soup for emergencies, Steve. Nitro-glycerine, that’s all. Interesting idea, what?”

“The nitro?”

“No, that the difference between us is the direction we wandered when we got loose—or were turned loose—twenty-five years ago in Lincoln Park. I walked straight into the bean business and he into blowing safes. Was that all there was to it—the angle our feet took across the grass in the park? What do you think, Steve?”

I shook my head.

“A man likes to think with Shakespeare that he is master of his fate,” Jerry went on, “and that fault or strength is in himself, not in his stars. There is no bunch of bunk I hate worse than that environment is to blame for crime and the individual has almost nothing to do with it.”

“Give Shakespeare credit for thinking it out further,” I said. ‘Julius Cæsar’ always was a favorite of mine and one thing I knew. “He said, ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’”

Jerry nodded. “That’s right. My friend’s clever; he can see now, if he couldn’t when he was younger. Then there’s something else—a twist in his brain that’s not in mine? Yet I don’t know: maybe we’re identical, inwardly as well as outside. Maybe the difference is that I never knew what it was to want without being able, lawfully, to get. The cards are stacked in this game of civilization which we play.”

That hit one of my pet ideas, as I’ve mentioned; so I objected, “No, they’re not.”

“I remember what you think, Steve. I liked to think it too; but now I’ve gone from the side the cards favor to the side that gets the worst of the deal. What in the devil is law, Steve?”

“Law?” I said.

Again he laughed. “You said that, old Top, as though I’d asked ‘What is the sun?’ It shines on you so, Steve; to ask about it is to you the acme of foolish questions; but it’s not to the man who’s brought up under the cloud. What is law? I never even looked up a dictionary definition till I got talking to some of my present friends; now here’s just what Webster says: ‘A rule of conduct established by an authority able to enforce its will.’ That’s all there is to it—a set of rules drawn up by the first men on the ground, who’ve grabbed everything in sight, and who naturally want to perpetuate and increase their possessions. Hence they fix up a lot of rules in their favor which they call law. If you come along later, and are boob enough to believe it’s best to work with them, you’re a good lawful citizen; if you carry a few ideas of your own, and mean to get ahead without asking anybody’s permission, you’re a lawbreaker.”

That peeved me; he saw it and smiled.

“I’m quoting, Steve; quoting.”

“Quoting who?”

“Oh, philosophers with any number of aliases. There’s no philosopher like a flat-worker or a good gopher man. In the first place, they’ve plenty of time to think; their hours of actual effort are short, if rather intense; and between them are periods of leisure which may become decidedly protracted, if they’re picked up. Those who complain that the ancient Greek art of dialectics is declining simply confess the constriction of their acquaintance. Socrates—so I am convinced, Steve—was a burglar who’d served about two terms when he got so good that Plato picked him up, covered his past and wrote him down. Possibly you noticed in the delicatessen the other day a friend of mine not lacking in muscular development——”

“Oh, the dyke-keeper!” I said.

“What?”

I explained.

Jerry smiled; he knew my ways. “Any time you’re overwhelmed with fear that logic languishes, Steve, start a little argument with him. Now imagine a little boy, like me in my white dress the day you picked me up, walking into hands like his for education.”

“Oh, that’s what you’re getting to!”

“You’ve guessed it. Soon you’re likely to meet my friend Keeban again—under circumstances which I confess I can’t completely foresee; yet whatever they are, it can’t be anything but a help to better understand his point of view.

“Now here we are or were, Steve—my brother and I. I walked into the bean business, with its logic, such as it is. What is the end and aim of Fanneal and Company, Steve?”

“Why,” I said, “why to——”

“To what?”

“To sell good food.”

“Why?”

“Why, for people to eat?”

“Your effort is to increase the consumption of food, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“You do it for profit, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Now which is the fact—that most people, here in this country, eat too much or too little?”

“Too much.”

“Which is a decided detriment to health and longevity, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“Then the actual result of your business, which you steadily push for your own profit, is to lessen health and shorten life?”

I laughed now. But he was at me. “Why the laugh, Steve?”

“That’s bunk and you know it.”

“Where’s it bunk, Steve? Where’s the flaw? Where, if anywhere, did the fallacy creep in? Now let us leap to the safe-blowing business. What, my foster-brother Stephen, is the fundamental curse of this country at this time? I’m not asking you a question which seeks any strange or heathen answer. Let us take only the answer that the pulpit itself offers, let us quote not only Christ but the economists and sociologists of our own and other leading conservative universities. What has ruined more families, softened and destroyed the fiber of more individuals, especially the young—who above all should be preserved—than the accumulation of wealth? What else, Steve?”

I had no answer.

“Now where do men keep their accumulations of wealth?”

“In safes.”

“Exactly. So, in safes, lies the greatest danger to the individual and to society. Consequently, what else does he do, who removes the contents of the safe and dissipates it, than protect the accumulator and society from the increasing menace of that wealth which, left in the accumulator’s hands, would grow and grow till it destroyed all? Who is the friend of society, Steve—he who confesses to increasing the staggering sum of degenerative diseases brought on by overeating which he encourages for his own profit, or he who, at tremendous risk to himself, and with no hope of public favor when he succeeds, yet sets himself to strike and strike again and again at the very source of danger and decay?”

Jerry caught his breath. “Let us remain for a moment, Steve, not in the school of Astor Street but in that of my brother, Keeban.

“I’ve often wondered, particularly during these last days, what went through his head when he first discovered me. He got a hint of my existence, you know, when we were at Princeton. He could have guessed where I was; and maybe he came out a time or two, to look me over. I wonder what he thought of me. I was to him a ‘toff,’ I suppose; to him, I was running with those whom he despised. For hate and contempt comes into all this, Steve. You’ve got to work up your feelings to carry on any kind of war, and particularly the most personal war of all; you’ve got to talk atrocities and have your hymn of hate. So probably he started hating me.

“But he was curious about me, too, I bet. Of course he saw a big chance to make a great clean-up by suddenly becoming me some day—or night. There I was, identical with him; I bet, while he was watching and waiting, he wondered a lot about me.

“He even had a girl like mine; you saw that Christina looked like Dot. He came on here with Christina about six months ago and Win Scofield met her at a cabaret and went crazy over her. We know what happened from the Scofield point of view. From Christina’s and my friend’s—well, he told her to go to it, pick up a million or so and get out. Or maybe she’d do it nicely and legally, assert cruelty and get a divorce with whopping alimony in the most proper way.

“Then Fred and Kenyon thought they’d stop anything like that; they whipsawed the old man out of his control of the company when he was away and had him on an allowance when he got home. They thought they were awfully smart. All they did was sentence their father; that’s all. Meanwhile my friend turned some of his attention back to me, letting the well-known mill of the gods do its bit of grinding on the Scofield affair.

“Harrison Crewe was arriving in dear old Chicago with a nice necklace for daughter Dorothy. The newspapers not only appraised it but advertised its first appearance with all details. I was to escort daughter and necklace first to the Sparlings’ where there would be a wedding, after which the line of march would be down the Boulevard to the Drake. Probably my friend was still in Chicago; if he’d been called to New York on business, he must have jumped the Century and come back again with opportunity pounding on his door like that.

“Well, he arrived and we know what he did.”

Jerry looked down and then suddenly up at me. “Seen Dot recently, Steve?”

I nodded.

“She still thinks it was me?”

I had to nod again.

“You’ve seen her since—” his voice hardened and he finished, “the Scofield bump off?”

“Yes.”

“That was me, too?”

“She thinks, you see,” I said, “you’re no longer yourself.”

“Kind of her,” said he. “Very. Well, I’d gathered as much from the papers. I don’t blame her. Where were we?”

“He’d got the necklace.”

“Oh, yes; and Fred and Ken Scofield were informing their father’s wife that, after cutting off the old man with an allowance, they were also going to let his insurance lapse. Now, about that time, a queer thing was happening with that young wife—queer if you keep on staring at just what you see from Astor Street. Christina got a hankering for decency.”

“You mean she liked Win Scofield?”

“She liked being his wife—if only for the novelty. The old man, for himself, was nothing to her. She was crazy about Keeban.”

“Yet married Win Scofield.”

“‘My friend’ told her to. Probably he was coming to one of the times when he was getting tired of her, anyway; he took her up, off and on; off times, he picked up with other girls. So, till he wanted her again, he thought he’d park her with the Scofield family and let her gather half a million for him.”

“What did she think when she first saw you?”

“Oh, she knew about me, sure enough. Part of ‘my friend’s’ plan in planting her in society must have been to help his scheme with me; she was his inside wire on that job and went through with her end so smoothly that no one suspected, no one even mentioned her; she wasn’t even “Among those present” printed in the paper after the Sparling affair. Undoubtedly she’d have gone right through with the arrangement rigged on old Win, if ‘my friend’ had stuck to original prospectus; but Fred and Ken didn’t make that possible. And ‘my friend’, from his point of view, was left with no other course than to croak old Win. If he was to maintain any sort of discipline, he simply had to do it.”

“Discipline of whom? Shirley?”

“For one, among others. My brother,” said Jerry, avoiding his previous euphemism of “friend” and speaking with a queer timbre of pride, “had a leadership to maintain and improve, a certain record of success to conserve. A man in his position must, above every one else, save his face; he can let no one smile at him. Here he had let his girl go to old Win Scofield to make him some money and Win’s sons had made it impossible, unless somebody croaked Win; so Win had to be croaked; not merely for the money, but to save ‘my friend’s’ face.

“Now Shirley, on the square, tried to stop that; from the time I spoke to you, she was never against you. It’s right for her to have the insurance money that’s paid; she was not in the scheme of the croaking; nobody can ever show she was.”

“She accused you to me,” I said.

Jerry nodded. “I’ve seen the papers. You’ll see something else to-night. Win Scofield’s widow has her money; and Harry Vine, my friend and yours, Steve—Keeban, we called him—he’s saving his face. At the Flamingo Feather, the affair will be.”

“Flamingo Feather?”

“You don’t know it? Well, neither did I a few weeks ago. I dreamed, no more than you, that such a spot existed; yet to-night it’s my place of fate. For ‘my friend’s’ friends go there to-night, Steve, to see what he can show them. It’s a date; he’s got to be present. The Flamingo Feather’s a hall, Steve—one of those halls that the police raid with the reserves in force, with half a dozen wagons, or leave severely alone. There’s a masque ball on there to-night—with fancy figures and favors. There’s a celebration on, you see; and something to expect.”

“You going?”

“I? He’ll be there, I said. Do you want to chance it, Steve?”

XI THE THIEVES’ BALL.

The approach to the floor of the Flamingo Feather was past a bakery, a pawnshop, a drink parlor, all decorous and dreary. Then there was a door distinguished by a bracket extending a black, iron basket in which a yellow electric bulb glowed. Over the street, this and a single iron feather painted flame color made a flaunt of festivity. From the door stretched a hall, tinted Pompeian red and reaching toward gents’ smoking rooms and the placarded penetralia of ladies; upward led iron stairs to the ballroom, let by the hour or evening, at rates proclaimed on a card.

I realized, as I entered, that I had heard of this place—or at least of its sister ballrooms—scores of times. For here revelled those indefinite, intriguing organizations named, by their members, “The Apollo Pleasure Club” and “The Brothers of Byzas” (whoever he was) and “the Ten Terpsichoreans,” who from their handbill, pasted on the Pompeian wall, evidently hoped to enroll, at a dollar per gent (ladies with escort free) several hundred paying guests. In fact, few of the coming social functions, advertised in this hall, appeared to be exclusive. Yet I might be in error.

Judging from to-night’s bill, which simply said—“Special—To-night: Mask and Costume Ball; Get your tickets in Advance—Special”—one might assume a catholicity of welcome not sustained by the manner of two tall—and masked—gentlemen in the hall beside a little table at the foot of the stairs.

I did not doubt that to-night, at least, there had been an exercise of selection by whomsoever (they were not named on the notice) sold tickets in advance. And here, at the foot of the stairs, was a second inspection. Each masker, or at least one in every group, lifted his cover when passing the table. Jerry did that for the two of us; of course he had tickets and we were passed and, after checking our outer garments, we climbed to the ballroom where jazz was playing.

Jerry was a courtier in doublet and jerkin; he was Sir Walter Raleigh as much as any one else. I was a monk, Erasmus for choice, in robe and cowl; both of us, as I’ve suggested, wore masks; about us everywhere were maskers, wigged Colonials, Barbara Frietchies, Mary Pickfords, Cæsars, Cromwells, Charlie Chaplins; then there were Aphrodites, devils and sailors, sashed pirates, queens and kings addicted not so much to any particular personage or period as to an impression of the generically royal in their garb. Many, of both sexes, went in for mere fantastic innovation, concealing electric batteries under silk bodice or skirt, switching on green, red and blue lights in their hair, on their shoulders and elbows while they danced.

They betrayed a penchant for weaponry, too, keeping in decent concealment the short, blue-barrelled automatics of contemporary pattern but evidencing long, decorative—and yet not entirely useless—daggers, rapiers and curved cutlasses.

I had picked my costume partly on the presumption that it had enjoyed a smaller popularity than other offerings at Leventhal’s, lessor of garments; partly I was influenced by its exceptional qualities for concealment. There appeared to have been, among the gentlemen who would have been supposed to have obtained one of those tickets in advance, a peterman similar to me in height and familiarly known as “Beets”—I am not sure of the spelling, perhaps an “a” appertained—who had affected the monastic in earlier revels. He was, fortunately, a taciturn individual; so nobody expected me to talk much; and nobody talked much to me.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when we arrived, so the ball was already rolling; “the thieves’ ball,” the papers dubbed it afterwards; yet, of the three hundred persons in the hall at the hour of the swiftest rolling, not fifty actually were thieves. Not fifty were either thieves or worse; not if you counted both sexes, the shoplifters and lay “wires”, along with the “guns” and “gervers.”

So much I had gathered from Jerry during the afternoon. The actual go-getter in any society is in the small minority; he, or she, supports a host of hangers-on; it is only the armchair dreamer who flatters himself that he who holds him up, who blows his safe, who forges his name, must be a fugitive, hiding and cowering between his sallies forth with gat, with “soup” or with pen. Of course, the gunman or the gerver goes about his business, keeps his hours, surrounds himself by friends and family even as you and I. He might frequent the Drake or the Blackstone for his pleasure, also, but it would be too suggestive of business. He, too, requires his leisure; so here he was with his friends at the Flamingo Feather.

Maybe a dozen knew what was on that night; not more than that, Jerry told me. He vanished, Jerry did, after we’d been there an hour, leaving me alone with ladies.

I danced, to mighty good music, with a crowned queen of Tudorish bodice, modified by electric lights on the sleeves; with a green-robed girl of red hair with amber lights on her comb; with a white-shouldered Cleopatra, lithe and soft in my arms.

I danced again with Cleopatra and, after midnight, a couple of times more and was having a better time with each encore. Also I was getting acclimated to the diverting atmosphere of that ball. Its manners, of course, were various and, as I explained to myself the different developments, each masker made for himself a personal interpretation of his rôle according to his costume; consequently I witnessed the Puritanical portrayed in contrast with the piratical between which extremes the private lighting plants extemporized pirouettes of their own.

There was plenty of cheek-to-cheek proximity of partners; plenty of knee to knee. Occasionally a floor committeeman pried a couple a few inches farther apart; but surely it is better to see that done than to observe the need ignored.

Jerry, unless he returned in some new costume, remained away from the floor; and I gave up momentarily expecting him. I got to having a good time on my own account, especially with Cleopatra.

I could not see her face between her brow and lips. Through her mask, I got glimpse enough of her irises to see that they were blue. Her forehead was smooth and white and pretty; intelligent looking, too. Her lips were bowed and smiled pleasantly and were not too much carmined; she had a fine little chin, pretty and also firm. She’d a lovely neck and shoulders, smooth as satin; and she’d small, strong little hands with beautiful, pink nails, and slender, shapely feet.

I’m not given to noticing quite so much about a girl; but with this one, I couldn’t help it. She was an alluring little crook. I suppose the vizor had something to do with it; the hidden always beckons a fellow on; but what kept me coming was the thought,—what was she doing there? What was her line or her lay? If she were merely a guest of this ball, whose guest was she?

Naturally, at a masque—and most naturally at that masque—people dispensed with introductions. She was Cleopatra and no one gave her a modern name; as Cleopatra she lacked a Cæsar, though many were present. She lacked even an Anthony; a Magellanic mariner seemed to be her rallying point. I don’t know why I called the gentleman Magellan; if he’d been huskier I’d have called him Columbus. Somehow I’ve always imagined Magellan quick and slight and more given to liquor than Columbus. This mariner was; given to liquor, I mean. Cleopatra bothered about him for a time and then blithely abandoned him, much to my benefit.

“What shall I call you?” she asked me. So far, we had got on without names.

“Erasmus,” I said, to try her as much as anything.

To my amazement, she knew the old boy. “Holbein would be thrilled by you.” And, as she danced with my arm about her, I could feel that she was sizing me up anew. I had said “Erasmus” as I might have said Claude or Skeezix; but since she knew Erasmus, naturally she wondered how I knew. Beets, my predecessor in these garments, would not have known; but Cleopatra had known for some time that I was not Beets.

About that time came a diversion; in fact, the diversion. Sir Walter Raleigh, escorting an Elizabethan lady, appeared on the floor. Both were masked; but under the garb of Raleigh were the limbs of Jerry; and I knew the Elizabethan lady, too. Here was Christina, come to the ball.

I looked again at her Raleigh, with rapier at his side, dagger at his waist. Not Jerry, I told myself, with pulses thrilling; here was Keeban. This was what I was to expect; Keeban, to show off, had carried Christina to the ball. That day, she had won the last of her money; this night he had regained her, he was to take her away; but before going, here was his flourish, his defiance, his display!

He put his arm about her, and, as they began to dance, I heard in the buzz of voices the whisper of his name. Here was Harry Vine, they were saying; here was Christina. Between them, they’d more than half a million; he’d put over his job just as he schemed it. Nobody could beat that boy; if they tried to, the sod for them.

It looked like madness for them to be here to-night; but madness marks the big job.

Here was Keeban, Harry Vine. He had boasted that he would bring his woman, whom some thought had gone away from him. Surely he had arranged his get-away with her; but before he used it, here he was proving that she was his.

But she wasn’t his! At least, so Jerry had told me. She’d come with him, but she was, in fact, no longer his. Something more was on to-night than that rapiered and daggered Raleigh expected. I danced with Cleopatra, watching them dance, and also I looked now for the reappearance of the other Raleigh, who was Jerry.

The number ended; now clapping; now encore. My arms circled Cleopatra; I clasped her. Keeban clasped Christina.

As I watched his arm go around her, so exactly as Jerry’s clasped his partner in the dance, I got another jerk. Maybe he was Jerry! Maybe what was to happen between Jerry and his “friend”, his brother, had happened outside. I sent that thought out of my head and watched them.

What a pair they made, she young, lithe, full of life, perfect in her soft proportions. I thought of how I had seen her singing that night before the shooting and how she received me—like Récamier, on her couch—afterwards. But here she was dancing another theme. And he, dancing with her, was quick, graceful, courtly. Clearly they had done this dance often together. Some one cried out a request and they went into a fancy figure.

The rest of us cleared a circle in the center of the hall; we danced slowly about the perimeter while they in the middle twined arms, turned, confronted each other, flung each other away and circled back to clasp again, dancing.

They had become so professional now, that, watching their steps, I forgot for the moment that he was the murderer of old Win and she had been old Win’s wife, in the plot for the Scofield money. Jerry had told me that, when the plot turned to murder of her husband, she had tried to stop it. Had they fallen out? Well, I should see. This was a time not to think, but to watch.

Some one switched the lights off. It proved the signal for those who had lights in their hair and on their dresses to gather inside the circle and give their soft, colored glows to Christina and Harry, dancing together.

He seized her, tossed her away, caught her again and, before again he tossed her, she altered the figure. As he caught at her, she eluded him and, laughing, she snatched at the sheath on his belt. She had his dagger; and the lights—blood-red, green and amber—glinted on the flashing blade as she bared it, drew back and thrust at him.

He caught her wrist, as girls about me gasped; he held and twisted at her hand but she broke his hold and darted away from him. He stood a moment, staring; then he grinned at her who, off at the edge of the circle, again was dancing as if that thrust at him, his snatch just in time, his twist and her breakaway all were part of the figure. But they weren’t. He knew; I knew; many others knew. There, in that flash of shining steel, she had stabbed at him to kill him.

Why? Jerry’s words to me gave at least a clue. He was her man, who had been a “gun” but who had become a “gorilla”; he had shot Win Scofield in her sight, slaughtered him before her. She had tried to stop that killing; and his murder of the old man in his house had been Harry Vine’s answer. Also he had served notice for her to come back to him; so she had done so,—to kill him.

This was what Jerry meant I should see; this was the vengeance of Shirley. Not vengeance alone; also an attempt at self-protection. She knew, going back to a “gorilla”, that sooner or later he would kill her. Perhaps she expected death from him only a little later that night. So she had struck there before them all and, failing, made her life surely forfeit. Now, without doubt, Keeban—Harry Vine—would kill her.

Not there, surrounded by that circle, as she would have slain him, had her thrust gone home. A girl kills a man that way; but not a man his woman. This rapiered Raleigh knew that. He made no motion to attack her; he merely watched her, and he grinned while she danced and tried to play it was all pretense.

Now her partner started toward her; and everybody watched him, and watched her, and nobody interfered. Nobody thought that, when he caught her, immediately and there he would kill her. I, at least, did not even imagine that. He was moving to capture her now and to carry her away; and, to these maskers in the circle, that was all his own affair as, to them, her stroke at him had been her business. I realized that had she sent the dagger home, no one would have touched her as no one, after she had failed and was doomed, would raise a hand to help her now.

She knew it also; and she looked to no one for aid. She merely danced away, his dagger in her hand, smiling and still playing at pretense.

Fingers circled my wrist; they were Cleopatra’s. Small, strong, intense fingers they were, half holding, half warning me.

I had not been aware that I betrayed, through my mask and cowl, the impulse which heated me. Of course I wanted to help that girl who had struck and failed; I wanted to seize him who grinned and stole upon her, and of course I knew I could not; and those slim fingers circling my wrist doubly warned me. Here was business between two persons—girl and man—which was their own. She still had chance to strike again and kill him, if she could; he had his right to capture.

She circled away and he followed about the edge of the ring, not gaining upon her. Suddenly he snatched a cape from the shoulders of a watcher; he wound it about his left arm and, with that arm forward to take her stab, he darted on her.

He did it so quickly, so surely, that it seemed prearranged. For the moment, it seemed that the motion must have been practiced and it was all play. Then he was on her; she made a stab and he caught it on that bundled cape. With his other hand, he had her wrist; he had her. No acting in that; no possible pretense.

It was not play; he had her! The circle knew it was not play; some of them would surely save her. I must have jerked again; for Cleopatra’s fingers pressed tighter on my wrist.

“Where’s Jerry?” I thought. “What’s he doing?”

The light was lessening. A girl switched off the glows which burned upon her head and dress; another did the same; another. “Lights!” somebody called; but before the room lights could go on, other dancers had darkened the colored bulbs they wore.

The dagger rang on the floor; and, as she dropped it, Christina surprised her partner out of his hold on her. She darted back. The circle behind her opened and closed. She was through and the circle was all dark. Then some one screamed.

At that instant, I was sure it was Christina; I was sure he had her again. Then, I did not know. There was a whistle outside. “The bulls—bulls—bulls.”

Cleopatra’s fingers freed my wrist. I groped for her but she was gone. “Bulls—the bulls” men and girls said. No one cried again for lights; no one turned them on. In the dark, I felt streams of escape in opposite directions. Outside somebody was shooting; came shouts; now the clanging of patrol cars. Surprise was gone.

I felt myself sucked into an eddy of escape repulsed from one side and cast upon the other. We reached air and iron stairs. Pistols flashed before us; our van cleared the way. I came down to the alley pavement and stumbled over a man shot or fallen. I crossed the alley and reached a passage. A girl’s hand led me through and, a block down, we found refuge.

I didn’t know the girl. I never saw her face. It was dark and she left the shed before me. I dropped my robe there; and when I walked out, the circle of capture had closed and was still contracting, not expanding. The police took, altogether, thirty-six persons,—twenty girls, sixteen men.

The “bulls” booked them all but proved able to hold nobody. They showed prison records against seven but nothing then “out” against any one. The pick-up, as shown on the picture pages, included a Tudor queen, two of the lighting plants, a pirate, a Turk, a Cæsar but not Cleopatra; not even Magellan. Not the Elizabethan Christina, not Raleigh, either Jerry or Keeban.

The raid was made to get Jerry and Christina; for some one had tipped it that they’d be at the Flamingo Feather. The tip told even the time.

I kept wondering about that tip and who gave it. Not Jerry, I thought; but where, during the end of that evening, was Jerry? And I considered that it was only after he had gone that Keeban had come in,—or the man in mask whom I’d called Keeban, and who did that dagger dance with Christina.

She’d told me, at that time when she lay on her bed like Madame Récamier, that Jerry had killed old Win; she showed no knowledge at all of Keeban.

You’ll understand I kept my thoughts to myself; and I kept to myself that I’d danced at the Flamingo Feather that night of “the thieves’ ball,” which was raided. The newspapers, always keen for the colorful, played up the pictures they took of those twenty girls and sixteen “crooks” in costume; but the papers did not even know of that dagger dance. Much less could they give news of the final consequence of it.

In my mind, when I thought of it, Keeban had caught Christina. In my mind, he had her somewhere wholly in his power; at his own time, in his own manner, he would punish her. Imagining this, I would get up and walk about; I felt I had to do something. But where were they? Where was Jerry? If he were not the Raleigh who had returned; if he were not the man who had danced, where had he gone? What had happened to him?

I learned, during those days, the completer truth of what Jerry had told me of the underworld. It wasn’t a place; not at all. For the places, they all remained. There was the Flamingo Feather, dull and drab by daylight with its door beyond the bakery, the pawnshop, the soft-drink parlor; its light was out; its iron basket rusted and filled with wet, melting snow. At night “The Apollo Club”—giggling clerks—consorted there; and then “The Brothers of Byzas,” who, if he was like his kin, was a teamster, apparently.

Gone, gone from the Flamingo Feather were my friends of the masque, vanished as wholly as yesterday’s snow from the basket over the door.

Nor could Klangenberg’s help me. There was the door within which stood shelves heaped with delicatessen; but a strange child pondered over the keys of the cash register which invited “come again.” He knew nothing of Klangenberg who had “gone away.” Not even the “dyke-keeper” remained.

Exploring the alley alone, I penetrated to the hooded stairs atop which Jerry had greeted me. Now an old wigged woman, crippled and fluent of Yiddish, kept vigil there.

I sought Leventhal, the lessor of my Erasmus garb cast off in that shed and never recovered. I came offering cash to pay for the robe. He took the money, shaking his head; he would remember neither the robe nor me. There was no tracing, through him, of others who wore his clothes that night. They were vanished like Villon’s lovers: