THE UNDERWORLD
It was Jim Bartow, the man who had occupied cell No. 1 of the
punishment block, back there in San Pedro. Not a bad sort. He had
tried crime as an experiment. The experiment had failed.
Craig answered a signal, and without haste, with all that elaborate
but stealthy watchfulness which Craig himself had learned was as
much a part of the lives of the hunted in big towns as it was in the
jungle, he and Bartow were outside.
“This way,” said Bartow.
He led the way down a narrow passage at the side of the building they
had left. They came into a dark yard. Here Bartow listened long. He
beckoned Craig to follow.
There was much of the jungle beast about this guide, Craig reflected.
His shoulders sloped. His strength and agility were disguised by an
apparent looseness and weakness of build. It was the head that made a
difference. Bartow’s head also contained a sort of thinking machine,
said Craig to himself, and it was working now.
“I came there to warn another pal of mine,” said Bartow, after a
while. “I got the tip straight that the bulls were out to-night for
an old-fashioned clean-up, all over the town, on account of that mess
you was in to-day over at the wood yard. You’re great.”
From the back yard of the saloon they had come into the rear areaway
of a block of tenement buildings. They went through the basement of
these into a shabby and shadowy street. They crossed this to a vacant
lot. At the next street they stopped. Not more than a couple of
hundred yards away a patrol wagon had halted near the curb. Policemen
were piling out of it.
“The tip was straight,” breathed Bartow.
Craig didn’t speak.
Bartow, by a roundabout course, had brought Craig to a tumble-down
shanty in the corner of a vacant lot. There he lit a lantern and
started to make coffee over a smelly oil stove.
“Me, I’m no good,” Bartow explained indulgently. “I got started
too late. The live ones, like in every other line, are specialists
these days. Am I right or am I wrong? The yeggs are yeggs. The
Dutch-house-men are Dutch-house-men. But you--holy smoke! I been
reading what the papers been printing about you--you’re an all-round
genius.”
“I hope you lay off the crooked stuff, Bartow,” said Craig, out of
his reflection.
“Sure.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Night watchman.” And Bartow vaguely indicated the cabin and the
vacant lot beyond. “It’s a political job.”
“Political?”
“Sure.” He gave Craig a survey of the situation. Almost every one
would be taken care of, until after election. The election was going
to be close. The reformers were getting together. “All any one has to
do to get a job,” said Bartow, “is to see Artie the lawyer.”
“Who’s he?”
“The man who hands out all the jobs and looks out for the ’bos and
the crooks.”
“That’s me,” said Craig.
Bartow laughed. “I guess you won’t be broke for long,” he said.
“Still, you’d better see Artie if you’re thinking of staying in
Chicago for a while. He’ll see that the dicks leave you in peace, at
least until after election.”
It was early morning when Craig found the Jake Exchange Bar, which
Bartow had informed him was the throne room of the lawyer he had come
to seek. The bar was a heavy and glittering oasis in the midst of
a crowded but dull and squalid neighborhood. And, early as it was,
Artie was there, like a good magistrate, ready to straighten out the
human tangles of the night.
Craig looked at him with interest--a small man with a keen but
degenerate face, a sagging lower lip and flapping ears, a big, soft,
pendulous nose; only his eyes were hard, glittering hard, and small
and cynical, and yet with something very human back of them--his vast
fund of purely human wisdom, perhaps.
Artie was leaning against the bar in a disconsolate attitude as
Craig drew near him. Artie hadn’t raised his head, but Craig knew
that he had been observed. Craig even felt a certain liking for this
chancellor of the underworld. At least, here was an intelligence.
There _was_ an underworld, Craig told himself, a little later on.
Artie had given him a card with a name scribbled on it, and this was
to serve him as a passport should the guardians of the law try to lay
hands on him.
He passed through crowded streets. He saw the cars crowded with
those who were going to work. Other crowds were about him--intent,
clean, human, faithful, brave. And these were the people on whom
that underworld battened--these girls and boys, men and women,
who worked--worked--worked! They didn’t know it, but he would be
fighting for them, from now on, forever. So he told himself. And it
was from this thought that his courage came.
Then Craig took an elevator to a small anteroom on one of the upper
floors of a skyscraper. From beyond the door there came a click of
typewriters, a vague smell of paper and ink. An office boy, with an
eye for Craig’s old clothes, asked him whom he wanted to see.
“The man who wrote this,” said Craig, and he showed the pages of the
Sunday story he had read.
“What do you want to see him for?”
“To give him a better story.”
“You got to see the Sunday editor,” said the boy, “and he ain’t here.”
Craig was about to turn away, when a tall young man with sandy hair
and hazel eyes stepped from the elevator. The young man looked at
Craig with a friendly but frank curiosity.
“Who is it for?” he asked.
“The Sunday editor,” Craig answered for himself.
“What do you want to see him about?”
“I had a story.”
“What sort of a story?”
“About”--Craig smiled--this man not much older than himself was easy
to talk to--“well, all about this matter of San Pedro, and the mob at
Fairhaven. You see, I’m the man----” Craig paused. “May I ask who you
are?”
The office boy almost fainted--twice: once when he heard Craig’s
statement, again when he heard Craig’s question.
Said the young man with the gray eyes and the sandy hair: “I’m
Courtney.”
“Connected with the paper?”
“Why, yes. I happen to own it. Come on in.”
It wasn’t merely an inheritance of great wealth that had made
Richard Courtney a man of prominence in the newspaper business, any
more than it was the good salaries he paid that made his paper a
power in politics. A year or so of journalism made cynics out of most
men. It had made no cynic of Courtney. His interest in humanity had
survived a half dozen years of exceedingly active politics.
With an air of nonchalance he conducted Craig through a large
room where young men sat in their shirt sleeves hammering at the
typewriters Craig had heard.
Some of them looked up, then went on with their work. It was nothing
new for the chief to come in with a man in old clothes. He was always
doing that. He had all sorts of friends. And some said it was a pose.
But stories often resulted--queer stories of obscure tragedy, or
humor, or of the underside of movements in mines and wheat fields,
forests and shipping.
The chief and his caller disappeared into the former’s private
office. They hadn’t been there long before the buzzer rang. The
office boy who answered the call came back and summoned the boy in
the anteroom. The boy from the anteroom entered the private office
and stood at awed attention. The chief and the ragged caller were
smoking, had the appearance of friends.
“Benny,” said the chief, “what did this gentleman say about himself
just now at the door?”
“Nuttin’,” said Benny, with prompt intuition.
“You’ll make a good newspaperman, Benny,” said the chief seriously.
“If any one asks you, tell them the same thing. Go tell Mr. Barden
that I said he’s to raise your pay. That’s all. And now----” The
chief had turned again to Craig.
“I’d feel better about this,” said Craig, after a time, “if I were
earning my own money. I want to work. I’m crazy to work. I’m an
engineer--or expect to be one. I don’t want gifts.”
“Gifts,” said Courtney. “Are you aware what a story like this will be
worth to a property like mine?”
“No, I was thinking only of its value to the community and myself.
Meanwhile, I want to work.”
Courtney regarded his visitor thoughtfully. He said:
“Work for me for a week or a month. There’s no time to lose, if we
are to get Wolf up from Mexico, locate Leamy, and bring him back.
Anyway, to do the thing right you’ll need more money in the next
thirty days or so than you could ever earn and be honest.”
“How do you know”--Craig hesitated for a moment before completing the
question--“that I am honest?”
“How do you know”--Courtney also hesitated--“that I’m honest myself?”
“It’s a case of trust,” said Craig. “When I came here, I was merely
trusting myself and people in general. I was going to tell my story,
tell what I was trying to do, what I had done in the past, and
expected to do in the future.”
“That was a good scheme, too,” said Courtney. “It always is, if a
fellow’s straight. But so few of us are straight enough. And, anyway,
you can always do that later on if things don’t go the way we expect
them to. Is it all understood?”
“I think so.”
“Let me repeat: First, to the cashier with your order for funds.
Second, what you need in the way of clothes and things. Third, a room
at the Ritz-Astor----”
“As Daniel Craig.”
“As Daniel Craig, and fourth, a conference to-night--formal dress--in
suite No. 53 with the district attorney. From this time on none of
us must ever be seen together.”
Those friends were right who said that all of Richard Courtney’s
brains were not under the hats of high-priced editors. Craig felt
that this was the truth as he stepped into the street. He had
Courtney’s money in his pocket. In exchange for this Courtney
had only his word. Yet Courtney had somehow divined that he,
Craig--escaped convict, “Napoleon of the Underworld”--held that given
word more precious than his eyes.