The Shadow

by Arthur Stringer

  II

  It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie" Blakefirst found himself in any way associated with that arm of constitutedauthority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man, on thatoccasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an armful ofevening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant pickpocket. Thefortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law was behind him whenhe was pushed happy and tingling through a transom to release thedoor-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a foreshadowing of thatpride which later welled up in his bosom at the phrase that he wouldalways "have United Decency behind him," as the social purifiers fellinto the habit of putting it.

  At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake hadlearned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian, fromthat daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face andcorrectly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and pettyauthority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more profitable.Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no transom-bornthrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker he was at leastthe master of other men.

  His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony ofnight-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for an Easternfirearm firm, and another year as an inspector for a Pennsylvania powderfactory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ of his kind. It was inChicago, on a raw day of late November, with a lake wind whipping thestreet dust into his eyes, that he had seen the huge canvas sign of ahiring 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 withthe rest of earth's undesirables and asked for work.

  After twenty minutes of private coaching in the mysteries of railwaysignals, he had been "passed" by the desk examiner and sent out as one ofthe "scab" train crew to move perishable freight, for the WisconsinCentral was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he had goneout 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. Forthe 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 outthe cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with an Irishengine-driver named O'Hagan, Blake had backed down through the yardsagain, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and along the cartops, 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 thestrikers trying to storm his engine steps. He even fell to "firing" asthe yodeling O'Hagan got his train moving again, and then, perched on thetender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver at a last pair ofstrikers 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 anopen switch, some twenty-eight miles up the line, but they had movedtheir freight and won their point.

  Blake, two weeks later, had made himself further valuable to that hiringagency, not above subornation of perjury, by testifying in a court of lawto the sobriety of a passenger crew who had been carried drunk from theirscab-manned train. So naively dogged was he in his stand, so quick was hein his retorts, that the agency, when the strike ended by a compromiseten days later, took him on as one of their own operatives.

  Thus James Blake became a private detective. He was at first disappointedin the work. It seemed, at first, little better than his old job aswatchman and checker. But the agency, after giving him a three-week tryout at picket work, submitted him to the further test of a "shadowing"case. That first assignment of "tailing" kept him thirty-six hourswithout sleep, but he stuck to his trail, stuck to it with the blindpertinacity of a bloodhound, and at the end transcended mere animalism bybuying 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 anunderground bunk as impassively as a grocer takes an egg crate from acellar shelf.

  After his initial baptism of fire in the Wisconsin Central railway yards,however, Blake yearned for something more exciting, for something moresensational. 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 likedthe open air and the stir and movement and color of the grand-standcrowds. He liked the "ponies" with the sunlight on their satin flanks,the music of the band, the gaily appareled women. He liked, too, theoff-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 andbookmakers, placating him with an occasional "sure-thing" tip from thestables, plying him with cigars and advice as to how he should place hismoney. There was a tacit understanding, of course, that in return forthese courtesies his vision was not to be too keen nor his manner tooaggressive. When he was approached by an expert "dip" with the offer of afat reward for immunity in working the track crowds, Blake carefullyweighed the matter, pro and con, equivocated, and decided he would gainmost by a "fall." So he planted a barber's assistant with whom he wasfriendly, descended on the pickpocket in the very act of going throughthat bay-rum scented youth's pocket, and secured a conviction thatbrought a letter of thanks from the club stewards and a word or two ofapproval 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 NewYork, 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 wassober; he was dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness of theunimaginative. 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 didbodyguard service, he handled strike breakers, he rounded up freight-carthieves, he was given occasionally "spot" and "tailing" work to do. Once,after a week of upholstered hotel lounging on a divorce case he was sentout on night detail to fight river pirates stealing from the coal-roadbarges.

  In the meantime, being eager and unsatisfied, he studied his city.Laboriously and patiently he made himself acquainted with the ways of theunderworld. He saw that all his future depended upon acquaintanceshipwith criminals, not only with their faces, but with their ways and theirwomen and their weaknesses. So he started a gallery, a gallery of hisown, a large and crowded gallery between walls no wider than the bones ofhis own skull. To this jealously guarded and ponderously sorted galleryhe day by day added some new face, some new scene, some new name. Crookby crook he stored them away there, for future reference. He got to knowthe "habituals" and the "timers," the "gangs" and their "hang outs" and"fences." He acquired an array of confidence men and hotel beats andqueer shovers and bank sneaks and wire tappers and drum snuffers. He madea mental record of dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers,of panhandlers and dummy chuckers, of sun gazers and schlaum workers. Heslowly became acquainted with their routes and their rendezvous, theirtricks and ways and records. But, what was more important, he also grewinto an acquaintanceship with ward politics, with the nameless Powerabove him and its enigmatic traditions. He got to know the Tammanyheelers, the men with "pull," the lads who were to be "pounded" and thelads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the "Senator," andthe gangs with the fall money always at hand.

  Blake, in those days, was a good "mixer." He was not an "office" man, andwas never dubbed high-brow. He was not above his work; no one accused himof being too refined for his calling. Through a mind such as his the Lawcould best view the criminal, just as a solar eclipse is best viewedthrough smoked glass.

  He could hobnob with bartenders and red-lighters, pass unnoticed througha slum, join casually in a stuss ga
me, or loaf unmarked about a streetcorner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were the unconsideredtrifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face, even in thoseearly days, was heavy and inoffensive. Commonplace seemed to be the wordthat fitted him. He could always mix with and become one of the crowd. Hewould 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 slightlytilted black boulder, as a truck driver with a day off.

  What others might have denominated as "dirty work" he accepted with heavyimpassivity, consoling himself with the contention that its final end wascleanness. And one of his most valuable assets, outside his stolidheartlessness, was his speaking acquaintanceship with the women of theunderworld. He remained aloof from them even while he mixed with them. Henever 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 acceptedhis gruffness as simple-mindedness, as blunt honesty. One or two, withtheir morbid imaginations touched by his seeming generosities, madewistful amatory advances which he promptly repelled. He could afford tohave none of them with anything "on" him. He saw the need of keeping coolheaded and clean handed, with an eye always to the main issue.

  And Blake really regarded himself as clean handed. Yet deep in his naturewas that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility in deceit,which made him the success he was. He could always meet a crook on hisown ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to eliminate. He mastereda secret process of opening and reading letters without detection. Hebecame an adept at picking a lock. One of his earlier successes haddepended on the cool dexterity with which he had exchanged trunk checksin a Wabash baggage car at Black Rock, allowing the "loft" thief undersuspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while he came into possession ofanother's belongings and enough evidence to secure his victim'sconviction.

  At another time, when "tailing" on a badger-game case, he equippedhimself as a theatrical "bill-sniper," followed his man about withoutarousing suspicion, and made liberal use of his magnetized tack-hammer inthe 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 verymental heaviness, holding him down to materialities, kept hiscontemplation of contingencies from becoming bewildering. He enjoyed thelimitations of the men against whom he was pitted. Yet at times he hadwhat he called a "coppered hunch." When, in later years, an occasionalcriminal of imagination became his enemy, he was often at a loss as tohow to proceed. But imaginative criminals, he knew, were rare, anddilemmas such as these proved infrequent. Whatever his shift, or howeverunsavory his resource, he never regarded himself as on the same basis ashis opponents. He had Law on his side; he was the instrument of thatgreat power known as Justice.

  As Blake's knowledge of New York and his work increased he was given lessand less of the "rough-neck" work to do. He proved himself, in fact, astolid and painstaking "investigator." As a divorce-suit shadower he wasequally resourceful and equally successful. When his agency took over thebankers' protective work he was advanced to this new department, where hefound himself compelled to a new term of study and a new circle ofalliances. He went laboriously through records of forgers and checkraisers and counterfeiters. He took up the study of all such gentry,sullenly yet methodically, like a backward scholar mastering a newlyimposed branch of knowledge, thumbing frowningly through officialreports, breathing heavily over portrait files and police records,plodding determinedly through counterfeit-detector manuals. For this bookwork, as he called it, he retained a deep-seated disgust.

  The outcome of his first case, later known as the "Todaro National TenCase," confirmed him in this attitude. Going doggedly over thecounterfeit ten-dollar national bank note that had been given him aftertwo older operatives had failed in the case, he discovered the word"Dollars" in small lettering spelt "Ddllers." Concluding that only aforeigner would make a mistake of that nature, and knowing the activityof certain bands of Italians in such counterfeiting efforts, he began hisslow and scrupulous search through the purlieus of the East Side. Aboutthat search was neither movement nor romance. It was humdrum, dogged,disheartening labor, with the gradual elimination of possibilities andthe gradual narrowing down of his field. But across that ever-narrowingtrail the accidental little clue finally fell, and on the night of thefinal raid the desired plates were captured and the notorious andlong-sought Todaro rounded up.

  So successful was Blake during the following two years that theWashington authorities, coming in touch with him through the operationsof the Secret Service, were moved to make him an offer. This offer hestolidly considered and at last stolidly accepted. He became an officialwith the weight of the Federal authority behind him. He became aninvestigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving athis beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery that seemed limitless inits ramifications. He was the agent of a vast and centralized authority,an authority against which there could be no opposition. But he had toschool himself to the knowledge that he was a cog, and nothing more. Andtwo things were expected of him, efficiency and silence.

  He found a secret pleasure, at first, in the thought of working fromunder cover, in the sense of operating always in the dark, unknown andunseen. It gave a touch of something Olympian and godlike to hismovements. But as time went by the small cloud of discontent on hishorizon grew darker, and widened as it blackened. He was avid ofsomething more than power. He thirsted not only for its operation, butalso for its display. He rebelled against the idea of a continuallysubmerged personality. He nursed a keen hunger to leave some record ofwhat he did or had done. He objected to it all as a conspiracy ofobliteration, objected to it as an actor would object to playing to anempty theater. There was no one to appreciate and applaud. And anaudience was necessary. He enjoyed the unctuous salute of the patrolmanon his beat, the deferential door-holding of "office boys," the quickattentiveness of minor operatives. But this was not enough. He felt thenormal demand to assert himself, to be known at his true worth by bothhis fellow workers and the world in general.

  It was not until the occasion when he had run down a gang of Williamsburgcounterfeiters, however, that his name was conspicuously in print. Sointeresting were the details of this gang's operations, so typical weretheir methods, that Wilkie or some official under Wilkie had handed overto a monthly known as _The Counterfeit Detector_ a full account of thecase. A New York paper has printed a somewhat distorted and romanticizedcopy of this, having sent a woman reporter to interview Blake--while astaff artist made a pencil drawing of the Secret Service man during thevery moments the latter was smilingly denying them either a statement ora photograph. Blake knew that publicity would impair his effectiveness.Some inner small voice forewarned him that all outside recognition of hiscalling 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 discretionas an official. He said nothing openly; but he allowed inferences to bedrawn and the artist's pencil to put the finishing touches to the sketch.

  It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural circuitiveness, operatedto save him. When the inevitable protest came he was able to prove thathe had said nothing and had indignantly refused a photograph. Hecompletely cleared himself. But the hint of an interesting personalityhad been betrayed to the public, the name of a new sleuth had gone onrecord, and the infection of curiosity spread like a mulberry rash fromnewspaper office to newspaper office. A representative of the press,every now and then, would drop in on Blake, or chance to occupy the samesmoking compartment with him on a run between Washington and New York, toply his suavest and subtlest arts for the extraction of some final factwith which to cap an unfinished "story." Blake, in turn, became equallysubtle and suave. His lips were sealed, but even silence, he found, couldbe made illuminative. Even reticence, on occasion, could be
made to servehis personal ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering data without anyshadow of actual statement.

  These chickens, however, all came home to roost. Official recognition wastaken of Blake's tendencies, and he was assigned to those cases where a"leak" would prove least embarrassing to the Department. He saw this andresented it. But in the meantime he had been keeping his eyes open andstoring up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory rumor and fact thatmight prove of use in the future. He found himself, in due time, themaster of an arsenal of political secrets. And when it came to a displayof power he could merit the attention if not the respect of a startlinglywide circle of city officials. When a New York municipal election broughta party turn over, he chose the moment as the psychological one for adisplay of his power, cruising up and down the coasts of officialdom withhis grim facts in tow, for all the world like a flagship followed by itsfleet.

  It was deemed expedient for the New York authorities to "take care" ofhim. A berth was made for him in the Central Office, and after a year oflaborious manipulation he found himself Third Deputy Commissioner and apower in the land.

  If he became a figure of note, and fattened on power, he found it nolonger 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 twoevils, to pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionally theforces of evil had to be bribed with a promise of protection. For thesurrender of dangerous plates, for example, a counterfeiter might receiveimmunity, or for the turning of State's evidence a guilty man might haveto go scott free. At other times, to squeeze confession out of a crook, acruelty as refined as that of the Inquisition had to be adopted. In onestubborn case the end had been achieved by depriving the victim of sleep,this Chinese torture being kept up until the needed nervous collapse. Atanother time the midnight cell of a suspected murderer had been "set"like a stage, with all the accessories of his crime, including even thecadaver, and when suddenly awakened the frenzied man had shrieked out hisconfession. But, as a rule, it was by imposing on his prisoner's betterinstincts, such as gang-loyalty or pity for a supposedly threatened"rag," that the point was won. In resources of this nature Blake becamequite conscienceless, salving his soul with the altogether jesuitic claimthat 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 nolonger resented being known as a "rough neck" or a "flat foot." As anofficial, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touch ofright made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsin properlydisposed might digest a carload of beef. A crook was a crook. His naturalend was the cell or the chair, and the sooner he got there the better forall concerned. So Blake believed in "hammering" his victims. He was anadvocate of "confrontation." He had faith in the old-fashioned"third-degree" dodges. At these, in his ponderous way, he became anadept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as a nut, to becalmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truth lay exposed, orto be cracked by the impact of some sudden great shock. Nor was theSecond Deputy above resorting to the use of "plants." Sometimes he had tocall in a "fixer" to manufacture evidence, that the far-off ends ofjustice might not be defeated. He made frequent use of women of a certaintype, women whom he could intimidate as an officer or buy over as a goodfellow. He had his _aides_ in all walks of life, in clubs and offices, inpawnshops and saloons, in hotels and steamers and barber shops, in poolrooms 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 itand because it was more spectacular. He relished the bigger cases. Heliked to step in where an underling had failed, get his teeth into thesituation, shake the mystery out of it, and then obliterate the underlingwith a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patience with what hecalled the "high-collar cops." He consistently opposed the new-fangledmethods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps for recording crime,and the graphic-system boards for marking the movements of criminals. Allanthropometric nonsense such as Bertillon's he openly sneered at, just ashe scoffed at card indexes and finger prints and other academicinnovations which were debilitating the force. He had gathered his owndata, at great pains, he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitualoffenders and their aliases, their methods, their convictions andrecords, their associates and hang outs. He carried his own gallery underhis own hat, and he was proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimedalways to know his man. His intuitions were strong, and if he disliked acaptive, that captive was in some way guilty--and he saw to it that hisman did not escape. He was relentless, once his professional pride wasinvolved. Being without imagination, he was without pity. It was, atbest, a case of dog eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he had suchreverence, happened to keep him the upper dog.

  Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied toilerwho had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more andmore assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in histradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, lessreceptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he wascompelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personalgallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become bothobsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew toointricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, new names, new trickstended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and more on the clericalstaff and the finger-print bureau records. His position became that of avillager with a department store on his hands, of a country shopkeepertrying to operate an urban emporium. He was averse to deputizing hisofficial labors. He was ignorant of system and science. He took on thepathos of a man who is out of his time, touched with the added poignancyof a passionate incredulity as to his predicament. He felt, at times,that there was something wrong, that the rest of the Department did notlook on life and work as he did. But he could not decide just where thetrouble lay. And in his uncertainty he made it a point to entrenchhimself by means of "politics." It became an open secret that he had apull, that his position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsenhis methods. It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. Ittouched his carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogancewith occasional cruelty.

  He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth which had grown up abouthim, the myth of his vast cleverness and personal courage. He showed atendency for the more turbulent centers. He went among murderers withouta gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more than thetradition of his office. He pushed his way in through thugs, picked outhis man, and told him to come to Headquarters in an hour's time--and theman usually came. His appetite for the spectacular increased. Hepreferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand. But more even thanhis authority he liked to parade his knowledge. He liked to be able tosay: "This is Sheeny Chi's coup!" or, "That's a job that only Soup-CanCharlie could do!" When a police surgeon hit on the idea of etherizing anobdurate "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 tocouple his name with the incident; and they, as usual, made him the heroof the occasion.

  For Never-Fail Blake had made it a point to be good to the press boys. Heacquired an ability to "jolly" them without too obvious loss of dignity.He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made his disclosurespersonal matters, individual favors. He kept careful note of their names,their characteristics, their interests. He cultivated them, keeping ascareful track of them from city to city as he did of the "big" criminalsthemselves. They got into the habit of going to him for their specialstories. He always exacted secrecy, pretended reluctance, yet parceledout to one reporter and another those dicta to which his name could bemost appropriately attached. He even surrendered a clue or two as to howhis own activities and triumphs might be worked
into a given story. Whenhe perceived that those worldly wise young men of the press saw throughthe 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. Intothis secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history. Thencame the higher records of the magazines, the illustrated articleswritten about "Blake, the Hamard of America," as one of them expressedit, and "Never-Fail Blake," as another put it. He was very proud of thosemagazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking efforts fortheir repetition, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adopted thepose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, of beingready to oppose them if some effective method could only be thought out.He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters that this seeminggarrulity 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 upwith his clippings. He developed into a personage, as much a personage asa grand-opera prima donna on tour. His successes were talked over inclubs. His name came to be known to the men in the street. His "cameraeye" was now and then mentioned by the scientists. His unblemished recordwas referred to in an occasional editorial. When an ex-police reportercame 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. Heexcused his waning popularity among his co-workers on the ground of envy.It was, he held, merely the inevitable penalty for supreme success in anyfield. But a hint would come, now and then, that troubled him. "You thinkyou're a big gun, Blake," one of his underworld victims once had thetemerity 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 asnowball on a crownsheet!"