“Don’t you and the pater keep going down to business, Steve? Pater
could buy ten strings like Dot’s, if he’d a mind to, of course; but I
never saw him refuse a chance to pick up a few thousand more. What’re
you going to do, Steve?”
“That’s what I was down here for, thinking it out.”
“Get the money, Steve. Draw it yourself from the bank. He’ll have you
watched so he’ll know whether you have. Then have it; and tell nobody
else but go to meet him.”
“Alone?”
“I’ll be there. Now, don’t you see?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
“Great! Your hand on it, Steve!”
I gave it and he grabbed me. “Now I’ve got to go. Hamlet’s father’s
ghost has nothing whatever on me! For a certain term, I can walk the
night; then, ‘fare thee well!’ One minute; suppose you meet my friend
before I do, don’t forget; don’t bother him with the battles of the War
of 1812 or San Juan Hill or test him on Hamlet. Just try to interest
him, till I arrive.”
He stepped from me. “Don’t follow,” he asked, and I let him go; and
once more, when he was gone, I wondered what I knew. Two of them there
were, he said; but I had not yet seen two.
Why could not both be Jerry--clever, quick-seeing Jerry? Suppose he had
known, after he’d met me in the room beside the river, that I was bound
to doubt and waver; and so he’d come with this scheme, this clever
scheme, to lead me on and make me give my word. Anyway, here I was with
my word given and my hand on it.
IV
I SIT IN ON FATE.
I got the money next day; I took it myself from the bank. Also I got my
revolver and spent the evening in the city. About half an hour before
ten, I went to our offices and roused the watchman to let me in. I
pretended to work for a while and then let myself out the river door
and started down the black, narrow walk above the water.
No one was anywhere about at that hour; not a window in the walls on
either side was alight. Ships slid in and out; one minute deckhands,
sailors and mates on watch would glide by within ten feet of me; the
next I was alone with black, locked doors on one side, the water on the
other.
I heard my name whispered in Jerry’s voice. “You’ve got it?” the voice
said; and some one was beside me.
This was Jerry of the Mackinaw coat, of the basement room and of the
companionship of Christina. If he were Keeban, I must hold him; I must
not question nor show doubt. If he were Jerry, I had nothing to do.
“Here I am, Jerry,” I said.
“Give it to me.”
I kept him walking beside me until the faint light, which trickled down
over the bridge at the end of the block, showed me his face, Jerry’s
face; but, for all of that, also Keeban’s.
“Satisfied now?” he asked me, laughing. “Come, Steve!” And he put his
hand on my wrist. I drew back, thinking that, if he were Keeban, he’d
murder me for ten thousand dollars if, for her necklace, he attacked
Dorothy Crewe. I had my hand on my revolver, yet he had the advantage
of me, for he could strike without warning and I must wait to see what
he meant to do.
Down the river, a steamer blew for bridges; and, “Come now!” he said
again to me.
Then some one else was there; some one else of his sort and burly in a
Mackinaw coat; and my wrist was my own; no one had hold of me.
They were grappled together and together went down.
“Stay out of this, Steve!” Jerry’s voice said to me; and some one
choked; some one gasped for breath. I bent over them and in that
trickle of light from the bridge, I saw a face--one face, Jerry’s. I
could not see the other. Then they turned; the one on top was on the
bottom but they were over again before I could see. There was Jerry’s
face once more.
“Stay out, Steve!”
They were throttling each other as they rolled; they came to the edge
of the water and I pulled them back, hauling on one and dragging the
two.
A light was coming; soon I would see; for the boat, which had been
blowing for the bridges, was slipping up. I looked about to it; and
something happened; a splash below me. One of the two was gone; the
other, gasping, stood on the edge of the timbers, staring down and
moving along this way and that while he watched.
I had my gun out now and shoved it against him.
“Steve, you old fool,” he cried. “He broke my hold; he’s in the water!
Watch; where is he?”
“You tell me this,” I came back at him. “What was the book we kept
first in the case at the edge of your bed? What were you always
reading? Damn you, tell me quick!”
He laughed, sucking for breath. “‘Westward Ho,’ Steve, you old fool!”
“And the next one? You hardly knew which was better.”
“‘Kidnapped!’”
“Jerry!”
“Here’s the boat!” Jerry cried. “Damn him, he’ll get away!” For the
big hull, with her lights, her sprays of steam, her splash of screws,
was beside us. “He’s swum under water to the other side; he’s come up
there. He’s got away,” Jerry finished.
Of course we waited till the ship was past and waited and searched long
after but found no one for our trouble.
“Where’s the money?” Jerry asked me then. “You didn’t give it to him?”
“He’s the one that met me first?” I said.
“Yes; of course. Did you give it to him?”
“No; I didn’t have it. I’m not the complete fool, Jerry. I got it from
the bank and left it in our office.”
“Let’s go there.”
We entered our building by the river door and went up the back way to
my office. Jerry knew those stairs; he knew where to turn in the dark;
he found the light switch by feel and without fumbling. There was not
the slightest doubt, when the light came on, that I was with my brother
Jerry. My trouble was simply had I been with any one else?
Of course I had seen some one else in a Mackinaw coat who had fought
with Jerry; but all I saw was his size and his coat; I never saw,
together, two faces which were Jerry’s. I could not help thinking this
as we sat down; I could not help wondering if all that business down
there beside the river was a set stage play of Jerry’s to fool me.
He opened the drawer where I kept cigarettes and took one and lighted
it. “How’re sales?” he asked me.
“Oh, fair.”
“Tell me, did Smetsheen, in Minneapolis, pay his account?”
“In full, yesterday. You keep on thinking about the office, Jerry?”
“To tell the truth, not once till just now.”
“Where have you been keeping yourself?”
He smiled. “Moving mostly.” He walked to the door of the room which had
been his office and looked in. “Who’s there now?”
“Nobody.”
“Not waiting for me?”
“I am,” I said.
He shut the door, running his finger over the space where they’d
dissolved the gold letters of his name. “They’re right,” he commented.
“I’ll never be back--to stay; that is unless I’m caught before I catch
Keeban. He had a good idea for me on that money, Steve; I can use it.
Got it here?”
I nodded.
“Want to give it to me?”
“There’s a squeal set against you which you’ve got to square?” I asked.
“Who told you that?”
“Christina.”
“Haven’t you got us mixed now?” He looked at me.
“Maybe,” I said, boldly.
He got up. “Keep your damn money. By God, you, Steve----”
I got up and pushed him down into his chair. “I don’t deserve that. You
know it.”
He laughed. “You sure don’t. Old Top, I had a hundred on me that night
at the station; it’s spent. Problem; how to live? Bigger problem; how
to entertain? I might blow a peter, work a second story, stick up a
store, scratch some paper; but non-felonious endeavor, old Bean, is
absolutely closed to me. I’ll come to some of the big-time stuff; I’ll
have to, if I keep my place; but I can’t help a certain prejudice in
favor of postponing it as long as possible. Meantime, I’ve simply got
to entertain. I’m supposed to have rocks worth a quarter million, you
see.”
“You mean, in the underworld, of course you’re Keeban.”
He laughed. “Underworld’s good, Steve. Marvellous how the human race
laps up that ‘up’ and ‘down’ rot. We simply have to have it, heaven and
hell, above and below. Who believes in either as a place? Think it out
a second, Steve; where, exactly, d’you suppose is the underworld?”
“Why,” I said. “South State Street, partly; and part of the west side.
Down in New York along the Bowery, in spots, and near the east end
docks.”
Jerry shook his head, still smiling.
“Where is it, then?” I retorted.
“Where’s hell, Steve, these days?”
“Why,” I said, “within one.”
“That’s it; there’s where’s the underworld, too. Among those who carry
the underworld within their breasts, I’m Keeban; and therefore needing,
more or less immediately,” his tone trailed off practically, “as much
of ten thousand dollars as you’ve got in that peter behind you and
which you feel inclined to give. It’ll go to good use, Steve; great
use! No sense trying to tell you now. Take Christina, for an example.
You saw her last night.”
“Of course.”
“Recognize her?”
“No,” I said, but I wondered; and at his hint, something stirred in my
memory.
“Think red hair, not yellow.”
I couldn’t, to any use; yet now I was sure I had seen her. More
than that, I’d known her, and I groped for her name and her right
association, in my memory.
“Who is she, Jerry?”
He shook his head. “Not now.”
“Where’d I meet her before?”
He smiled again. “In the underworld, one time you went there.”
“You mean that time you and I went down South State Street to----”
“There you go, thinking up a place again, whereas, old Top, the place
was most proper; polite, in fact, and almost in our highest circles.
The only underworld about was the bit she packed with her; but it was
quite a bit, believe me. And it’s growing.”
“That means,” I guessed, “something’s going to happen where she is?”
Jerry looked away and thought and looked again at me. “That’s one place
something’s fairly sure to happen soon; of course, there are several
others. It’s funny, Steve, to see ourselves now.”
“From where you are, you mean?”
“That’s it. Take me, for instance, as I was. Down there, in the east
end of New York, was my particular friend, Keeban. I knew nothing of
him; he knew nothing of me, probably, till a bunch from Princeton ran
onto him and took him for somebody they knew. They sure must have
puzzled him, but they started something in his head which he half tried
out by ‘touching’ another Princeton bunch for a hundred and getting it
from Davis. About that time--as long as eight years ago--Keeban ‘marked
up’ me.”
“‘Marked up?’” I repeated.
“Marked up my name on his board as good game for attention when he
could get around to me. What made him put it off so long, I don’t
know; probably he’d a lot of prospects chalked on his board ahead of
me; probably he felt he’d wait until he could put in the time to make
proper preparation to appear as me. He guessed he had a great chance
for a big haul; and--he made it.”
Jerry went pale and looked down. “There’s many more marked up on
Keeban’s board and on others’. I know some of the names marked up and
something about what’s going to occur to them. It’s a little like
sitting in on fate, Steve,” he said, color coming back to his face, “to
see this man’s number and that creeping up to the top of the board; to
a limited extent, one knows what’s behind to-morrow, what’s going to
happen. Here’s a man you know and I know and, to all appearances, he’s
sitting secure; but on Harry Vine’s board, we’ll say, his number is up
toward the top. He doesn’t guess it and you can’t nor anybody else in
the city; but at a certain time, and at a certain place and exactly in
one way, he’s going to die; and that’s all there is to it.”
“Who’re you talking about, Jerry?” I demanded.
He changed swiftly. “Nobody; just talk. What was I up here for,
anyway?”
“I left the money up here,” I reminded. “We came up to get it.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
I turned to the safe and spun the combination. When I touched the
banknotes, I thought to compromise with myself, give him some but not
all. Like Jerry, he guessed it.
“All or none, Steve,” he said.
I gave him all.
“That’ll be useful.”
“Wait!” I held him.
“Want it back?”
“No. You’re sitting in on fate, you said,” I went at him. “You know
what crimes are going to be committed; then why don’t you stop them?”
He laughed. “After I’d stopped the first, wouldn’t I soon cease to
know? Old Top, a man in my position has rather to pick and choose.
He can stop one, perhaps; then let it be a good one! Besides, that’s
not my business now; I’m getting Keeban. Yet, if certain names get to
the top of the board, I’ll call you--perhaps. On your own wire. Now
Hamlet’s father’s ghost again. G’night, Steve.” He left me.
Sometimes, when I thought it over, I believed Jerry and Keeban,
separate people, had met me that night; sometimes I was sure that Jerry
had worked ten thousand dollars out of me. I would analyze his talk
and realize how he led me along, shifting from direct discussion of
the money to his hints about Christina and the numbers coming “up” and
then, after making me interested in this, how he got the money from me.
But one thing was true and undeniable; I did know Christina. Many times
during the following days I tried to place her, but never did until
that call reached me about the next “number up.”
V
THE UNDERWORLD INTRUDES.
It came completely out of the blue. Ten minutes to twelve, noon, was
the time; and no doings could have been more dull and drab than mine
the minute before the buzzer under my desk rattled my “personal” call.
This meant my private wire, which did not run through the office
switchboard and which had no published number in the telephone book;
so, when my buzzer jerked, Miss Severns always left the call to me and
quietly rose and vanished from my room.
She always acted as though I owned some enormous, private intrigue
into which her ear must not pry, whereas the truth was that line never
carried any conversation more bizarre than my mother’s voice reminding
me to meet Aunt Charlotte on the Lake Shore Limited; or perhaps mother
wanted to be sure I had my rubbers; or else Jim Townsend might be
after me for a round of golf at Indian Hill. Consequently I liked the
compliment of Miss Severns’s silent disappearance; but I bet she knew
the truth. Anyway, now she got out and so I was there alone.
I had nothing at all on my mind; I had been just finishing a letter
to Red Wing about those five carloads of Minnesota potatoes which we
had found somewhat nipped by frost and I’d begun the phrasing, in my
head, of a crisp, businesslike note to Baraboo, Wisconsin, about a
shipment of presumably dried lima beans which must have been caught in
the rain somewhere. From which you may gather that Austin Fanneal and
Company are wholesalers, packers, canners and jobbers of food; a sound
profitable business and socially absolutely all right in Chicago, but
still it’s not the most enthralling pursuit here. I must admit it had
its dull spots, even for me; but I was up to my eyes in it; for, as
I’ve mentioned, I was the only child; father was over sixty; and I knew
that some day I must carry on. So there I was cheerily concentrating on
the most polite yet effective phrase for telling the Baraboo commission
house that their beans had got wet; and the world was to me a wan
expanse of farmers dragging bean vines, Wisconsin warehouses, city
grocery stores and delicatessens and flat buildings full of clamorous
families shrieking for food. Then that buzz; Miss Severns on her feet
and out of the office; the door shut and, as I spoke, I heard Jerry’s
voice:
“Steve!”
“Old fellow, hello! Where are you?”
That was a foolish question, I knew before I got it out. He disregarded
it entirely.
“Put your mind on Winton Scofield, Steve. Don’t let him ride home in
his own car to-night; make him take a taxi.”
“Why?” I cut in before taking time to think. Of course, Jerry could not
tell me. It was perfectly plain from his voice that, wherever he was,
he had only a few seconds in which to speak to me; and if anything was
plainer, it was that his situation precluded explanations.
“Make him!” Jerry repeated quickly. “And don’t let him know he’s being
made. Don’t say a word of this to any one, whatever happens!”
And the wire at the other end went dead; but I continued to hold the
receiver until central’s voice briskly inquired, “Number, please?”
So I hung up and sat staring down on the pile of correspondence about
potatoes and beans and canned cherries; but my world was no waste of
brown bean stalks and pickley delicatessen shops; nor was my world the
usual dreary array of my own social sort,--those who have big homes
on the Lake Shore Drive and on Astor Street and in Winnetka and Lake
Forest; who have coveys of servants, of course, and put up a parade
of cars and clubs and country places and everything else that looks
impressive from outside but inside is duller than Deuteronomy.
They’ve pretty sets of silver and gold things about, naturally; and
they’ve a good deal of platinum, too, with diamonds and rubies and
sapphires and those green stones--oh, emeralds--stuck in. They’ve big
bank accounts and a lot of other venal environment too tiresome to give
you a thrill until you hear, all of a sudden, it has unduly tempted a
gentleman from a stratum quite different but yet extremely adjacent to
your own and the gentleman is likely to use some exceedingly direct,
not to say personal, methods of getting your environment--and you.
For that was what Jerry’s call meant. Win Scofield’s name had crept to
the top of somebody’s board in the free society of the gentlemen--and
their lady friends--of the “gat” and the “soup job,” the “Hunk”
and the “bump off”; in that region, where Jerry had gone, Winton
Scofield’s number was “up”; he had been chalked for a “croaking.”
And as I sat there staring and wondering why and how, suddenly I
ceased to have difficulty in thinking red hair, instead of yellow,
upon Christina, the riverside companion of Keeban. I “placed” her and
knew her name and her association and where I had met her; for she
was Winton Scofield’s wife. Of course she was; that was it! What an
extension of the underworld into the polite world of my own!
Of course I realized that, as Jerry had said, I was thinking like
a child; for the underworld’s not a compact, separate region; its
territory is wherever its citizens set foot; and this may be at your
office door? At the threshold of your servant’s hall? On the step of
your town car? Who knows? For obviously it’s not a place at all but a
contact, an association, a habit of conduct, an attitude toward life
and, more than incidentally, toward death. Why should I be surprised
that a citizeness had staked out a claim in the Scofield mansion?
I tried not to be. “Old Win Scofield!” I thought. He was sitting
secure, if any one was, you’d say. But somewhere else Jerry was
sitting in on fate; he’d seen Win Scofield’s number come up to the top
of the rack at Keeban’s club; and his ’phoning me meant that an unusual
job was up. For Jerry had told me he would pick and choose and not try
to stop a job, unless it was a good one.
“Say not a word to any one,” he’d told me; I took that to mean not to
say he’d warned me. It couldn’t mean that I wasn’t to get information.
So I took up my ’phone and called Fred, who was my particular friend in
the Scofield family.
Winton, the old man, was his father; of course Christina, of the
alterable hair, wasn’t Fred’s mother; she was his father’s fourth, or
fifth wife.
There was rather a lot of unpaid publicity about him when he got her;
and it turned on him, rather than on her, because he’d fallen for that
rejuvenation operation and, of course, he tried to have it secret.
Naturally the newspapers learned and, as a result, Win Scofield
fled the town as soon as the hospital let him out. As secretly as
possible--that is, with only a few friends besides newspapermen and
film news service photographers present--he’d married Shirley Fendon, a
girl he’d met at a cabaret. Of course, being sixty-seven or so and she
twenty-two, he took her to Paris; but recently he’d slunk back to his
home city.
Now it had never occurred to me until this moment that, in the general
excitement over Winton’s rejuvenation, nobody asked much about Shirley.
The spotlight simply wasn’t swung her way.
There she was where several wives--three or four, I couldn’t
remember--had been before her and where, if rejuvenation really meant a
return to old Win’s youth, several more would stand again.
The sons--they were Kenyon and Fred, about my own age and both by the
original Mrs. Winton Scofield--astutely realized this and did a little
deal in self-defense. They took over the grain business, when the old
man was honeymooning, retiring father on an income, leaving him no vote
or interest in the firm which a wife, past or present or future, could
attach.
Perhaps this had something to do with his floating back to Chicago;
perhaps his present wife worked that for purposes about to become
plainer.
I arranged for Fred to lunch with me and, as tactfully as possible, I
brought up the subject of father.
When you’ve a pater who’s been flattered with the spread of news print
that had been lavished on Winton Scofield, he’s a bit difficult to
mention; but I managed to drift in a remark about him and I certainly
detonated something. Fred had been storing too much inside of him
concerning father and had required only the gentlest tap on the fuse to
cause him to explode.
“Isn’t he absolutely ludicrous!” Fred shot at me. “Age, damn it, Steve,
age is no disgrace. It ought to be the noblest, most dignified stage of
a man’s development. What does Shakespeare say about age, ‘His silver
hairs will purchase good opinion!’ And Byron----”
I let him rave on as it seemed to relieve him; I knew he wasn’t talking
to me so much as he was rehearsing father.
“--he dyed his silver hairs twenty years back; and about the time the
tango came in, he began pumping his face full of paraffin. Occasionally
some of it slipped down in his cheek toward his chin.--Now I suppose
you’ve heard of his rejuvenation operation.”
I thought for a while and admitted that I had. “Wasn’t it a success?” I
ventured.
“A howling one--with father. He’s so young now he shouldn’t be married,
legally, not having his parents’ consent. He ought to go back and start
over at Andover Academy; in about four years, he’ll be ready for Yale
once more. Young? We’re the old men, Ken and me, Steve! He’s sure he’s
just fifteen; well, he surely acts it.”
After this, I felt I could inquire, without seeming too personal,
“How’s he getting along with his new wife?”
Fred jumped. “Good God! He hasn’t married again since yesterday
morning? I saw him then and----”
“No,” I said. “I meant Shirley Fendon.”
“Oh, you call her new?” Fred comprehended my peculiar point of view.
“He’s had her going on three months now.”
“There’s trouble between them?” I persisted.
“Of course,” said Fred, “being twenty-two, she’s a little old for him,
but they do bunny-dip beautifully together.”
“Who was she?” I kept after Fred.
“Who? Shirley? Why, you just said her name; Shirley Fendon she was.”
“Wasn’t that just her cabaret name?” I inquired.
“Well,” said Fred cautiously, “why go back of that? We were willing not
to.”
“You’ve met any of her friends?”
Fred shook his head. “That, at least, has been spared us.”
I steered the talk around so I could ask after a while, “Your father
goes down to business now?”
“You bet not! We see to that.”
“Then what does he do?”
“When he manages to break away from Shirley? Well, in spite of his
youth, he keeps up with some of his old friends; he likes his rubbers
of bridge, you know; so every other evening or so you’ll find the young
chap down at the club at his old place among the unrejuvenated.”
“To-night, for instance?”
“Friday; let’s see,” Fred considered. “Yes; he’ll be there to-night;
why?”
Of course I didn’t tell him and I was more careful with my next remarks
which finally drew out the information that, on the nights when he
played bridge, Shirley, his wife--Christina, that was--herself drove
down with the chauffeur to bring him home.
That made one thing clear to me, which was that the ride which Winton
Scofield must not take in his car to-night was the ride he would take
with his wife. I wanted to tell it all to Fred; but Jerry had warned me
not to.
I was feeling quite comfortable over Jerry that day; I figured he
must be all right or he’d never have ’phoned me that warning. When I
returned to my office, I merely went through the motions of business
while I was waiting, really, for Jerry to call me again; but he did
not. So I set to working up a simple, obvious sort of scheme that any
one, in my place, might resort to. Likely enough, I thought, Jerry
would be satisfied with such a scheme; he would expect about that much
of me.