EVERY MAN'S SHADOW
The deeper the young lawyer probed into the mass of corruption Bivens
had placed in his hands the more profound became his surprise. At first
he was inclined to scout the whole story as an exaggeration invented in
the fierce fight with financial foes.
It was incredible!
That men whose names were the synonyms of honesty and fair dealing, men
entrusted with the management of companies whose assets represented the
savings of millions of poor men, the sole defense of millions of
helpless women and children--that these trusted leaders of the world
were habitually prostituting their trusts for personal gain, staggered
belief.
He delayed action and began a careful, patient, thorough investigation.
As it proceeded, his amazement increased. He found that Bivens had only
scratched the surface of the truth. He found that the system of fraud
and chicanery had spread from the heads of the big companies until the
whole business world was honeycombed with its corruption.
New York, the financial centre of the Nation, had gone mad with the
insane passion for money at all hazards--by all means, fair or foul.
The Nation was on the tidal wave of the most wonderful industrial boom
in its history. The price of stocks had reached fabulous figures and
still soared to greater heights. Millionaires were springing up, like
mushrooms, in a night. Waiters at fashionable hotels, who hung on the
chairs of rich guests with more than usual fawning, were boasting of
fortunes made in a day. Broadway and Central Park and every avenue
leading to the long stretches of good country roads flashed with
hundreds of new automobiles, crowded with strange smiling faces.
Two months had passed since Bivens placed in the District Attorney's
hands the document which was destined to make sad history in the annals
of the metropolis. Stuart felt that the time had come to act. It was
his solemn duty to the people.
He sat in his private office in one of the great skyscrapers down town
holding in his hand a list of the men he was about to ask the Grand
Jury to indict for crimes which would send them to prison, exile and
dishonoured death. It was a glorious morning in May. The window was
open and a soft wind was blowing from the south. The view of the blue
expanse of the great harbour and towering hills of Staten Island in the
distance was entrancing. The south wind filled his heart with memories
of high ideals, and noble aspirations born in his own land of poverty
and want.
His people in the South had known the real horrors of want, had fought
the grim battle, won an honest living and kept their lives clean and
strong. And just because they had, his heart was filled with a great
pity as he read over and over again the illustrious names he was about
to blacken with the stain of crime. He thought of women in sheltered
homes up town whose necks would bend to the storm; of the anguish of
old-fashioned fathers and mothers who could think no evil of their own,
whose spirits would droop and die at the first breath of shame. He rose
at last with calm decision.
"I've got to do it--that's all. But before I do, I'm going to know one
or two things beyond the shadow of a doubt."
He seized his telephone and made an appointment to call at once on
Bivens.
The financier extended his delicate hand and with a cordial smile led
Stuart to a seat beside his desk. The only sign he betrayed of deep
emotion was the ice-like coldness of his slender fingers.
"Well, Jim, you've completed your very thorough investigation?"
"How did you know I was making a thorough investigation?"
Stuart looked at Bivens with a quick movement of surprise. The little
man was gazing intently at the ceiling.
"I make it my business to know things which vitally interest me. You
found my facts accurate?"
"Remarkably so."
"And you are ready to strike?"
The black eyes flashed.
"When I have confirmed some statements you have made in your story
concerning the private life of these men. How do you know the accuracy
of the facts you state in a single line, for instance, about the
private life and habits of the president of a certain trust company?"
A cold smile played about Bivens's mouth for a moment.
"You don't suppose I would make a statement like that unless I know it
to be true?"
"I found all your other facts correct. This I haven't been able to
verify. You make it incidentally, as though it were a matter of slight
importance. To my mind it's the key to the man's character and to every
act of his life. How did you discover it?"
"Very simply."
Bivens walked to his door, opened it, looked outside, stepped to one of
the great steel safes and drew its massive doors apart. He pulled a
slip from a cabinet fitted with a card-case index, noted the number,
replaced the card, opened another door and drew out a manuscript
notebook of some three hundred pages of type-written matter. Each page
was written without spacing and contained as many words as the average
page of a printed novel. On the back of the morocco cover was printed
in plain gold lettering:
"THE PRIVATE LIFE OF NO. 560."
He handed the volume to Stuart, closed the safe, and resumed his seat.
"You may take that book with you, Jim," he said quietly. "I trust to
your honour not to reveal its contents except in the discharge of your
sworn duty as an officer of the law. You will find in it the record of
the distinguished president's private life for the past ten years
without the omission of a single event of any importance."
Stuart glanced through the book with amazement.
"How did you come into possession of such facts?"
"No trouble at all," was the easy answer. "It only requires a little
money and a little patience and a little care in selecting the right
men for the right job. Any man in the business world who thinks he can
do as he pleases in this town will wake some morning with a decided
jolt. The war for financial supremacy has developed a secret service
which approaches perfection. The secret service of armies is child's
play compared to it.
"Not only do I systematically watch my employees until I know every
crook and turn of their lives, but I watch with even greater care the
heads of every rival firm in every department of the industrial world
where my interests touch theirs.
"I not only watch the heads of firms, I watch their trusted assistants
and confidential men. In that big safe a thousand secrets lie locked
whose revelation would furnish matter enough to run the yellow journals
for the next five years.
"Every man who holds a position of trust and puts his hands on money
has his shadow. It's a question of business. The wholesaler must know
the character of the retailer to whom he extends credit. A trust must
know what its remaining independent rivals are doing, what business
they are developing, what big orders they seek. I must know, and I must
know accurately and fully what every enemy is doing, what he is
thinking, with whom he drinks, where he spends his time and how he
lives.
"Modern business is war, the fiercest and most cruel the world has ever
known. It is of greater importance to a modern captain of industry to
know the plans of his enemy than it ever was to the commanding general
of an opposing army."
"I see," Stuart responded, thoughtfully.
"There are men down there in the street now," Bivens went on dreamily,
"who are wearing silk hats to-day for whom the prison tailor is cutting
a suit. I have their records in that silent little steel-clad room.
It's a pitiful thing, but it's life. And, believe me, the realities of
our every-day life here are more wonderful than the wildest romance the
novelist can spin.
"Last year I had a man of genius at the head of one of my corporations.
Not the slightest suspicion had ever been directed against him. But my
men reported to me that he was supporting two establishments, besides
the one he kept for his family, and that in those two secret orchards
which he tended he was making presents of fine jewelry. An examination
of his office by experts revealed the fact that he was wrong. He was
bounced. He would have gone no matter what his accounts showed. It is
only a question of time and a very short time when such a man goes
wrong.
"The scarcest thing in New York to-day, Jim, is the man who can't be
bought and sold. The thing that's beyond price in the business world is
character--combined with brains. That's why I made you the offer I did
once upon a time to come in with me. There are positions to-day in New
York with a salary of half a million a year waiting for men who can
fill them. If I could find one man of the highest order of creative and
executive ability who would stand by me in my enterprises I could be
the richest man in the world in ten years."
Stuart lifted his eyes from the record he was casually scanning and
smiled into Bivens's dark, serious face.
The look silenced the speaker. The little man knew instinctively that
Stuart was at that moment weighing his own life and character by the
merciless standard he had set up for others. Judged by conventional
laws he had nothing to fear. He was a faithful member of his church. He
gave liberally to its work and gave generously to a hundred worthy
charities. He loved his wife with old-fashioned loyalty and tenderness
and grieved that she was childless. He stood by his friends and fought
his enemies, asking no quarter and giving none.
Yet in his heart of hearts he knew that, judged in the great white
light of the Eternal when all things hidden shall be revealed, he could
not stand blameless. He knew that while he had kept within the letter
of the law, his genius consisted in the skill with which he had learned
to divert other men's earnings into his own coffers.
And deep down in the depths of his memory there lay one particular deed
which lent colour to all that followed. He knew that however loftily he
might discourse at present about "character," "honour," "integrity,"
and "fair dealing," he had stolen the formula from his big-hearted
employer with which he had laid the foundation of his fortune. It was
the first half-million that came hard. It was this first half-million
that bore the stain of shame. He had justified it with fine sophistry
until he counted himself a benefactor to Woodman, but the grim fact
stood out in his memory with growing clearness as his millions piled up
with each succeeding year.
His other questionable acts on which the fate of millions had often
hung he had no difficulty in justifying. Business was war. In war it
was fair to deceive, to march in the night, to attack when least
suspected, to strike to kill, to destroy and lay waste the fairest
countries and starve your enemy into submission.
All this had flashed through Bivens's imagination when Stuart smiled,
and in spite of his conscious dignity and power, he had fallen silent.
The smile had made him nervous. He wondered vaguely what was in the
mind of the tall quiet man that provoked a smile at such a serious
moment.
He wondered particularly whether the lawyer could have suspected his
hobby, for he had one of the most curious--a collection of historic
material on the origin of American fortunes. The origin of his own had
early made Bivens suspect that all great fortunes which had mounted
into millions, like his own, may have been built in their first
foundations on fraud. He wondered if Stuart had by any accident
stumbled on this information. Even if he had he could not understand
his real motive in such an investigation, and yet the lazy smile with
which he looked up from that record was disconcerting.
Bivens waited for him to speak. The moment was one big with fate.
Stuart was about to reach a decision that would make history. No one
knew so well its importance as the keen intellect that gleamed behind
the little black eyes watching with tireless patience.
Bivens was the one odd man in a thousand who knew that big events were
not to be found in earthquakes, tornadoes and battles. He had long
since learned that the events which shake the world are always found in
the silent hours when the soul of a single man says, "I will!"
Below he could hear the roar of the city's life. On the Curb brokers
were shouting their wares with their accustomed gusto. On the floor of
the Exchange the tide of business ebbed and flowed with the fierce
pulse of an apparently exhaustless strength. Men bought and sold with
no fear of to-morrow. Yet a single word from the lips of the tall,
clean-shaven young officer of the law and a storm would break which
might tear from the foundations institutions on whose solidity modern
civilization seemed to rest.
The silence at length became suffocating to Bivens. He moistened his
lips and drew his smooth fingers softly over his silky beard.
"Well, Jim," he said at length. "You are going to act?"
In the moment's pause the little swarthy body never moved, his breath
ceased and every nerve quivered with the strain and yet he betrayed
nothing to the man who sat before him, silent, thoughtful.
Stuart rose abruptly, his reply sharp and clear.
"Yes, I'm going to act."
"At once?"
"It's my duty."
Bivens grasped his hand.
"I congratulate you, Jim. You are going to do a big thing, one of the
biggest things in our history. You are going to teach the mighty that
the law is mightier. It ought to land you at the very top in politics
or any other old place you'd like to climb."
"That's something which doesn't interest me yet, Cal. The thing that
stuns me is that I've got to do so painful a thing. But my business is
the enforcement of justice. There's one thing I still can't
understand."
He paused and looked at Bivens curiously.
"What's that?" the financier softly asked.
"Why you of all men on earth should have put this information in my
hands. The honour of the achievement, if good shall come to the
country, is really yours, not mine."
"And you can't conceive of my acting for the country's good?"
Bivens's black eyes twinkled.
"Not by the wildest leap of my imagination."
The twinkle broadened into a smile as the lawyer continued:
"Your code is simple, Cal. There's no provision in it for disinterested
effort for others. Few financiers of modern times can conceive of a
sane man deliberately working for the good of the people as against his
own. In your face, there has never been any doubting, any perplexity,
since you made your first strike in New York. Behind your black eyes
there has always glowed the steady, deadly purpose of the man who knows
exactly what he wants and how he is going to get it. This time you've
got me up a tree. You have rendered the people a great service. You
have placed me under personal obligations. But how you are going to get
anything out of it is beyond me."
"Oh, I'll have my reward, my boy," Bivens answered jovially, as his
dainty fingers again stroked his beard, pressing his mustache back from
the thin lips, "and I assure you it will not be purely spiritual."
The door had scarcely closed on Stuart when Bivens pressed the button
which called his confidential secretary.
In a moment the man stood at his elbow with the tense erect bearing of
an orderly on the field of battle. The quick nervous touch of the
master's hand on that button had told to his sensitive ears the story
of a coming life-and-death struggle. His words came with sharp nervous
energy:
"Yes sir?"
The financier slowly drew the big cigar from his mouth and spoke in low
tones:
"A meeting of the Allied Bankers here in 30 minutes. No telephone
messages. A personal summons to each. They enter one at a time that no
one on the outside sees them come. You understand?"
"I understand."
Bivens raised his finger in warning. "Your life on the issue."
Trembling with excitement the secretary turned and quickly left the
room.