It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that “Jimmie” Blake
first found himself in any way associated with that arm of constituted
authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man, on that
occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an armful of
evening papers and at the same time “tail” an itinerant pickpocket. The
fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law was behind him when
he was pushed happy and tingling through a transom to release the
door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a foreshadowing of that
pride which later welled up in his bosom at the phrase that he would
always “have United Decency behind him,” as the social purifiers fell
into the habit of putting it.
At nineteen, as a “checker” at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had
learned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian, from
that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face and
correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and petty
authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more profitable.
Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no transom-born
thrills, no street-corner tailer’s suspense. As a checker he was at least
the master of other men.
His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony of
night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an Eastern
firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a Pennsylvania powder
factory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ of his kind. It was in
Chicago, on a raw day of late November, with a lake wind whipping the
street dust into his eyes, that he had seen the huge canvas sign of a
hiring agency’s office, slapping in the storm. This sign had said:
“MEN WANTED.”
Being twenty-six and adventurous and out of a job, he had drifted in with
the rest of earth’s undesirables and asked for work.
After twenty minutes of private coaching in the mysteries of railway
signals, he had been “passed” by the desk examiner and sent out as one of
the “scab” train crew to move perishable freight, for the Wisconsin
Central was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he had gone
out as a green brakeman, but he had come back as a hero, with a _Tribune_
reporter posing him against a furniture car for a two-column photo. For
the strikers had stoned his train, half killed the “scab” fireman,
stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds of his cars and shot out
the cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with an Irish
engine-driver named O’Hagan, Blake had backed down through the yards
again, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and along the car
tops, recoupled his cars, fought his way back to the engine, and there,
with the ecstatic O’Hagan at his side, had hurled back the last of the
strikers trying to storm his engine steps. He even fell to “firing” as
the yodeling O’Hagan got his train moving again, and then, perched on the
tender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver at a last pair of
strikers who were attempting to manipulate the hand-brakes.
That had been the first train to get out of the yards in seven days.
Through a godlike disregard of signals, it is true, they had run into an
open switch, some twenty-eight miles up the line, but they had moved
their freight and won their point.
Blake, two weeks later, had made himself further valuable to that hiring
agency, not above subornation of perjury, by testifying in a court of law
to the sobriety of a passenger crew who had been carried drunk from their
scab-manned train. So naïvely dogged was he in his stand, so quick was he
in his retorts, that the agency, when the strike ended by a compromise
ten days later, took him on as one of their own operatives.
Thus James Blake became a private detective. He was at first disappointed
in the work. It seemed, at first, little better than his old job as
watchman and checker. But the agency, after giving him a three-week try
out at picket work, submitted him to the further test of a “shadowing”
case. That first assignment of “tailing” kept him thirty-six hours
without sleep, but he stuck to his trail, stuck to it with the blind
pertinacity of a bloodhound, and at the end transcended mere animalism by
buying a tip from a friendly bartender. Then, when the moment was ripe,
he walked into the designated hop-joint and picked his man out of an
underground bunk as impassively as a grocer takes an egg crate from a
cellar shelf.
After his initial baptism of fire in the Wisconsin Central railway yards,
however, Blake yearned for something more exciting, for something more
sensational. His hopes rose, when, a month later, he was put on “track”
work. He was at heart fond of both a good horse and a good heat. He liked
the open air and the stir and movement and color of the grand-stand
crowds. He liked the “ponies” with the sunlight on their satin flanks,
the music of the band, the gaily appareled women. He liked, too, the
off-hand deference of the men about him, from turnstile to betting shed,
once his calling was known. They were all ready to curry favor with him,
touts and rail-birds, clockers and owners, jockeys and gamblers and
bookmakers, placating him with an occasional “sure-thing” tip from the
stables, plying him with cigars and advice as to how he should place his
money. There was a tacit understanding, of course, that in return for
these courtesies his vision was not to be too keen nor his manner too
aggressive. When he was approached by an expert “dip” with the offer of a
fat reward for immunity in working the track crowds, Blake carefully
weighed the matter, pro and con, equivocated, and decided he would gain
most by a “fall.” So he planted a barber’s assistant with whom he was
friendly, descended on the pickpocket in the very act of going through
that bay-rum scented youth’s pocket, and secured a conviction that
brought a letter of thanks from the club stewards and a word or two of
approval from his head office.
That head office, seeing that they had a man to be reckoned with,
transferred Blake to their Eastern division, with headquarters at New
York, where new men and new faces were at the moment badly needed.
They worked him hard, in that new division, but he never objected. He was
sober; he was dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness of the
unimaginative. He wanted to get on, to make good, to be more than a mere
“operative.” And if his initial assignments gave him little but
“rough-neck” work to do, he did it without audible complaint. He did
bodyguard service, he handled strike breakers, he rounded up freight-car
thieves, he was given occasionally “spot” and “tailing” work to do. Once,
after a week of upholstered hotel lounging on a divorce case he was sent
out on night detail to fight river pirates stealing from the coal-road
barges.
In the meantime, being eager and unsatisfied, he studied his city.
Laboriously and patiently he made himself acquainted with the ways of the
underworld. He saw that all his future depended upon acquaintanceship
with criminals, not only with their faces, but with their ways and their
women and their weaknesses. So he started a gallery, a gallery of his
own, a large and crowded gallery between walls no wider than the bones of
his own skull. To this jealously guarded and ponderously sorted gallery
he day by day added some new face, some new scene, some new name. Crook
by crook he stored them away there, for future reference. He got to know
the “habituals” and the “timers,” the “gangs” and their “hang outs” and
“fences.” He acquired an array of confidence men and hotel beats and
queer shovers and bank sneaks and wire tappers and drum snuffers. He made
a mental record of dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers,
of panhandlers and dummy chuckers, of sun gazers and schlaum workers. He
slowly became acquainted with their routes and their rendezvous, their
tricks and ways and records. But, what was more important, he also grew
into an acquaintanceship with ward politics, with the nameless Power
above him and its enigmatic traditions. He got to know the Tammany
heelers, the men with “pull,” the lads who were to be “pounded” and the
lads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the “Senator,” and
the gangs with the fall money always at hand.
Blake, in those days, was a good “mixer.” He was not an “office” man, and
was never dubbed high-brow. He was not above his work; no one accused him
of being too refined for his calling. Through a mind such as his the Law
could best view the criminal, just as a solar eclipse is best viewed
through smoked glass.
He could hobnob with bartenders and red-lighters, pass unnoticed through
a slum, join casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked about a street
corner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were the unconsidered
trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face, even in those
early days, was heavy and inoffensive. Commonplace seemed to be the word
that fitted him. He could always mix with and become one of the crowd. He
would have laughed at any such foolish phrase as “protective coloration.”
Yet seldom, he knew, men turned back to look at him a second time.
Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, he could have passed, under his slightly
tilted black boulder, as a truck driver with a day off.
What others might have denominated as “dirty work” he accepted with heavy
impassivity, consoling himself with the contention that its final end was
cleanness. And one of his most valuable assets, outside his stolid
heartlessness, was his speaking acquaintanceship with the women of the
underworld. He remained aloof from them even while he mixed with them. He
never grew into a “moll-buzzer.” But in his rough way he cultivated them.
He even helped some of them out of their troubles—in consideration for
“tips” which were to be delivered when the emergency arose. They accepted
his gruffness as simple-mindedness, as blunt honesty. One or two, with
their morbid imaginations touched by his seeming generosities, made
wistful amatory advances which he promptly repelled. He could afford to
have none of them with anything “on” him. He saw the need of keeping cool
headed and clean handed, with an eye always to the main issue.
And Blake really regarded himself as clean handed. Yet deep in his nature
was that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility in deceit,
which made him the success he was. He could always meet a crook on his
own ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to eliminate. He mastered
a secret process of opening and reading letters without detection. He
became an adept at picking a lock. One of his earlier successes had
depended on the cool dexterity with which he had exchanged trunk checks
in a Wabash baggage car at Black Rock, allowing the “loft” thief under
suspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while he came into possession of
another’s belongings and enough evidence to secure his victim’s
conviction.
At another time, when “tailing” on a badger-game case, he equipped
himself as a theatrical “bill-sniper,” followed his man about without
arousing suspicion, and made liberal use of his magnetized tack-hammer in
the final mix up when he made his haul. He did not shirk these mix ups,
for he was endowed with the bravery of the unimaginative. This very
mental heaviness, holding him down to materialities, kept his
contemplation of contingencies from becoming bewildering. He enjoyed the
limitations of the men against whom he was pitted. Yet at times he had
what he called a “coppered hunch.” When, in later years, an occasional
criminal of imagination became his enemy, he was often at a loss as to
how to proceed. But imaginative criminals, he knew, were rare, and
dilemmas such as these proved infrequent. Whatever his shift, or however
unsavory his resource, he never regarded himself as on the same basis as
his opponents. He had Law on his side; he was the instrument of that
great power known as Justice.
As Blake’s knowledge of New York and his work increased he was given less
and less of the “rough-neck” work to do. He proved himself, in fact, a
stolid and painstaking “investigator.” As a divorce-suit shadower he was
equally resourceful and equally successful. When his agency took over the
bankers’ protective work he was advanced to this new department, where he
found himself compelled to a new term of study and a new circle of
alliances. He went laboriously through records of forgers and check
raisers and counterfeiters. He took up the study of all such gentry,
sullenly yet methodically, like a backward scholar mastering a newly
imposed branch of knowledge, thumbing frowningly through official
reports, breathing heavily over portrait files and police records,
plodding determinedly through counterfeit-detector manuals. For this book
work, as he called it, he retained a deep-seated disgust.
The outcome of his first case, later known as the “Todaro National Ten
Case,” confirmed him in this attitude. Going doggedly over the
counterfeit ten-dollar national bank note that had been given him after
two older operatives had failed in the case, he discovered the word
“Dollars” in small lettering spelt “Ddllers.” Concluding that only a
foreigner would make a mistake of that nature, and knowing the activity
of certain bands of Italians in such counterfeiting efforts, he began his
slow and scrupulous search through the purlieus of the East Side. About
that search was neither movement nor romance. It was humdrum, dogged,
disheartening labor, with the gradual elimination of possibilities and
the gradual narrowing down of his field. But across that ever-narrowing
trail the accidental little clue finally fell, and on the night of the
final raid the desired plates were captured and the notorious and
long-sought Todaro rounded up.
So successful was Blake during the following two years that the
Washington authorities, coming in touch with him through the operations
of the Secret Service, were moved to make him an offer. This offer he
stolidly considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an official
with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became an
investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving at
his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless in
its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority,
an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had to
school himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and nothing more. And
two things were expected of him, efficiency and silence.
He found a secret pleasure, at first, in the thought of working from
under cover, in the sense of operating always in the dark, unknown and
unseen. It gave a touch of something Olympian and godlike to his
movements. But as time went by the small cloud of discontent on his
horizon grew darker, and widened as it blackened. He was avid of
something more than power. He thirsted not only for its operation, but
also for its display. He rebelled against the idea of a continually
submerged personality. He nursed a keen hunger to leave some record of
what he did or had done. He objected to it all as a conspiracy of
obliteration, objected to it as an actor would object to playing to an
empty theater. There was no one to appreciate and applaud. And an
audience was necessary. He enjoyed the unctuous salute of the patrolman
on his beat, the deferential door-holding of “office boys,” the quick
attentiveness of minor operatives. But this was not enough. He felt the
normal demand to assert himself, to be known at his true worth by both
his fellow workers and the world in general.
It was not until the occasion when he had run down a gang of Williamsburg
counterfeiters, however, that his name was conspicuously in print. So
interesting were the details of this gang’s operations, so typical were
their methods, that Wilkie or some official under Wilkie had handed over
to a monthly known as _The Counterfeit Detector_ a full account of the
case. A New York paper has printed a somewhat distorted and romanticized
copy of this, having sent a woman reporter to interview Blake—while a
staff artist made a pencil drawing of the Secret Service man during the
very moments the latter was smilingly denying them either a statement or
a photograph. Blake knew that publicity would impair his effectiveness.
Some inner small voice forewarned him that all outside recognition of his
calling would take away from his value as an agent of the Secret Service.
But his hunger for his rights as a man was stronger than his discretion
as an official. He said nothing openly; but he allowed inferences to be
drawn and the artist’s pencil to put the finishing touches to the sketch.
It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural circuitiveness, operated
to save him. When the inevitable protest came he was able to prove that
he had said nothing and had indignantly refused a photograph. He
completely cleared himself. But the hint of an interesting personality
had been betrayed to the public, the name of a new sleuth had gone on
record, and the infection of curiosity spread like a mulberry rash from
newspaper office to newspaper office. A representative of the press,
every now and then, would drop in on Blake, or chance to occupy the same
smoking compartment with him on a run between Washington and New York, to
ply his suavest and subtlest arts for the extraction of some final fact
with which to cap an unfinished “story.” Blake, in turn, became equally
subtle and suave. His lips were sealed, but even silence, he found, could
be made illuminative. Even reticence, on occasion, could be made to serve
his personal ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering data without any
shadow of actual statement.
These chickens, however, all came home to roost. Official recognition was
taken of Blake’s tendencies, and he was assigned to those cases where a
“leak” would prove least embarrassing to the Department. He saw this and
resented it. But in the meantime he had been keeping his eyes open and
storing up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory rumor and fact that
might prove of use in the future. He found himself, in due time, the
master of an arsenal of political secrets. And when it came to a display
of power he could merit the attention if not the respect of a startlingly
wide circle of city officials. When a New York municipal election brought
a party turn over, he chose the moment as the psychological one for a
display of his power, cruising up and down the coasts of officialdom with
his grim facts in tow, for all the world like a flagship followed by its
fleet.
It was deemed expedient for the New York authorities to “take care” of
him. A berth was made for him in the Central Office, and after a year of
laborious manipulation he found himself Third Deputy Commissioner and a
power in the land.
If he became a figure of note, and fattened on power, he found it no
longer possible to keep as free as he wished from entangling alliances.
He had by this time learned to give and take, to choose the lesser of two
evils, to pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionally the
forces of evil had to be bribed with a promise of protection. For the
surrender of dangerous plates, for example, a counterfeiter might receive
immunity, or for the turning of State’s evidence a guilty man might have
to go scott free. At other times, to squeeze confession out of a crook, a
cruelty as refined as that of the Inquisition had to be adopted. In one
stubborn case the end had been achieved by depriving the victim of sleep,
this Chinese torture being kept up until the needed nervous collapse. At
another time the midnight cell of a suspected murderer had been “set”
like a stage, with all the accessories of his crime, including even the
cadaver, and when suddenly awakened the frenzied man had shrieked out his
confession. But, as a rule, it was by imposing on his prisoner’s better
instincts, such as gang-loyalty or pity for a supposedly threatened
“rag,” that the point was won. In resources of this nature Blake became
quite conscienceless, salving his soul with the altogether jesuitic claim
that illegal means were always justified by the legal end.
By the time he had fought his way up to the office of Second Deputy he no
longer resented being known as a “rough neck” or a “flat foot.” As an
official, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touch of
right made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsin properly
disposed might digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook. His natural
end was the cell or the chair, and the sooner he got there the better for
all concerned. So Blake believed in “hammering” his victims. He was an
advocate of “confrontation.” He had faith in the old-fashioned
“third-degree” dodges. At these, in his ponderous way, he became an
adept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as a nut, to be
calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truth lay exposed, or
to be cracked by the impact of some sudden great shock. Nor was the
Second Deputy above resorting to the use of “plants.” Sometimes he had to
call in a “fixer” to manufacture evidence, that the far-off ends of
justice might not be defeated. He made frequent use of women of a certain
type, women whom he could intimidate as an officer or buy over as a good
fellow. He had his _aides_ in all walks of life, in clubs and offices, in
pawnshops and saloons, in hotels and steamers and barber shops, in pool
rooms and anarchists’ cellars. He also had his visiting list, his
“fences” and “stool-pigeons” and “shoo-flies.”
He preferred the “outdoor” work, both because he was more at home in it
and because it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger cases. He
liked to step in where an underling had failed, get his teeth into the
situation, shake the mystery out of it, and then obliterate the underling
with a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience with what he
called the “high-collar cops.” He consistently opposed the new-fangled
methods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps for recording crime,
and the graphic-system boards for marking the movements of criminals. All
anthropometric nonsense such as Bertillon’s he openly sneered at, just as
he scoffed at card indexes and finger prints and other academic
innovations which were debilitating the force. He had gathered his own
data, at great pains, he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitual
offenders and their aliases, their methods, their convictions and
records, their associates and hang outs. He carried his own gallery under
his own hat, and he was proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimed
always to know his man. His intuitions were strong, and if he disliked a
captive, that captive was in some way guilty—and he saw to it that his
man did not escape. He was relentless, once his professional pride was
involved. Being without imagination, he was without pity. It was, at
best, a case of dog eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he had such
reverence, happened to keep him the upper dog.
Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied toiler
who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and
more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his
tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less
receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was
compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal
gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both
obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too
intricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, new names, new tricks
tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and more on the clerical
staff and the finger-print bureau records. His position became that of a
villager with a department store on his hands, of a country shopkeeper
trying to operate an urban emporium. He was averse to deputizing his
official labors. He was ignorant of system and science. He took on the
pathos of a man who is out of his time, touched with the added poignancy
of a passionate incredulity as to his predicament. He felt, at times,
that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did not
look on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just where the
trouble lay. And in his uncertainty he made it a point to entrench
himself by means of “politics.” It became an open secret that he had a
pull, that his position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsen
his methods. It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. It
touched his carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance
with occasional cruelty.
He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth which had grown up about
him, the myth of his vast cleverness and personal courage. He showed a
tendency for the more turbulent centers. He went among murderers without
a gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more than the
tradition of his office. He pushed his way in through thugs, picked out
his man, and told him to come to Headquarters in an hour’s time—and the
man usually came. His appetite for the spectacular increased. He
preferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand. But more even than
his authority he liked to parade his knowledge. He liked to be able to
say: “This is Sheeny Chi’s coup!” or, “That’s a job that only Soup-Can
Charlie could do!” When a police surgeon hit on the idea of etherizing an
obdurate “dummy chucker,” to determine if the prisoner could talk or not,
Blake appropriated the suggestion as his own. And when the “press boys”
trooped in for their daily gist of news, he asked them, as usual, not to
couple his name with the incident; and they, as usual, made him the hero
of the occasion.
For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point to be good to the press boys. He
acquired an ability to “jolly” them without too obvious loss of dignity.
He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made his disclosures
personal matters, individual favors. He kept careful note of their names,
their characteristics, their interests. He cultivated them, keeping as
careful track of them from city to city as he did of the “big” criminals
themselves. They got into the habit of going to him for their special
stories. He always exacted secrecy, pretended reluctance, yet parceled
out to one reporter and another those dicta to which his name could be
most appropriately attached. He even surrendered a clue or two as to how
his own activities and triumphs might be worked into a given story. When
he perceived that those worldly wise young men of the press saw through
the dodge, he became more adept, more adroit, more delicate in method.
But the end was the same.
It was about this time that he invested in his first scrap-book. Into
this secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history. Then
came the higher records of the magazines, the illustrated articles
written about “Blake, the Hamard of America,” as one of them expressed
it, and “Never-Fail Blake,” as another put it. He was very proud of those
magazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking efforts for
their repetition, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adopted the
pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, of being
ready to oppose them if some effective method could only be thought out.
He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters that this seeming
garrulity was serving a good end, claiming it to be harmless pother to
“cover” more immediate trails on which he pretended to be engaged.
But the scrap-books grew in number and size. It became a task to keep up
with his clippings. He developed into a personage, as much a personage as
a grand-opera prima donna on tour. His successes were talked over in
clubs. His name came to be known to the men in the street. His “camera
eye” was now and then mentioned by the scientists. His unblemished record
was referred to in an occasional editorial. When an ex-police reporter
came to him, asking him to father a macaronic volume bearing the title
“Criminals of America,” Blake not only added his name to the title page,
but advanced three hundred dollars to assist towards its launching.
The result of all this was a subtle yet unmistakable shifting of values,
an achievement of public glory at the loss of official confidence. He
excused his waning popularity among his co-workers on the ground of envy.
It was, he held, merely the inevitable penalty for supreme success in any
field. But a hint would come, now and then, that troubled him. “You think
you’re a big gun, Blake,” one of his underworld victims once had the
temerity to cry out at him. “You think you’re the king of the Hawkshaws!
But if you were on _my_ side of the fence, you’d last about as long as a
snowball on a crownsheet!”