Never-Fail Blake

by Arthur Stringer

  II

  It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie"Blake first found himself in any way associated with that arm ofconstituted authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man,on that occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about anarmful of evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerantpickpocket. The fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Lawwas behind him when he was pushed happy and tingling through a transomto release the door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps aforeshadowing of that pride which later welled up in his bosom at thephrase that he would always "have United Decency behind him," as thesocial purifiers fell into 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,from that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his faceand correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence andpetty authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been moreprofitable. Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved notransom-born thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checkerhe was at least the master of other men.

  His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotonyof night-watchman service, followed by a year as a drummer for anEastern firearm firm, and another year as an inspector for aPennsylvania powder factory, had infected him with the _wanderlust_ ofhis kind. It was in Chicago, on a raw day of late November, with alake wind whipping the street dust into his eyes, that he had seen thehuge 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 inwith the 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 oneof the "scab" train crew to move perishable freight, for the WisconsinCentral was then in the throes of its first great strike. And he hadgone 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-columnphoto. For the strikers had stoned his train, half killed the "scab"fireman, stalled him in the yards and cut off two thirds of his carsand shot out the cab-windows for full measure. But in the cab with anIrish engine-driver named O'Hagan, Blake had backed down through theyards again, picked up his train, crept up over the tender and alongthe 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 thelast 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 revolverat a last pair of strikers who were attempting to manipulate thehand-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 intoan open 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 thathiring agency, not above subornation of perjury, by testifying in acourt of law to the sobriety of a passenger crew who had been carrieddrunk from their scab-manned train. So naively dogged was he in hisstand, so quick was he in his retorts, that the agency, when the strikeended by a compromise ten days later, took him on as one of their ownoperatives.

  Thus James Blake became a private detective. He was at firstdisappointed in the work. It seemed, at first, little better than hisold job as watchman and checker. But the agency, after giving him athree-week try out at picket work, submitted him to the further test ofa "shadowing" case. That first assignment of "tailing" kept himthirty-six hours without sleep, but he stuck to his trail, stuck to itwith the blind pertinacity of a bloodhound, and at the end transcendedmere animalism by buying a tip from a friendly bartender. Then, whenthe moment was ripe, he walked into the designated hop-joint and pickedhis man out of an underground bunk as impassively as a grocer takes anegg crate from a cellar shelf.

  After his initial baptism of fire in the Wisconsin Central railwayyards, however, Blake yearned for something more exciting, forsomething more sensational. His hopes rose, when, a month later, hewas put on "track" work. He was at heart fond of both a good horse anda good heat. He liked the open air and the stir and movement and colorof the grand-stand crowds. He liked the "ponies" with the sunlight ontheir satin flanks, the music of the band, the gaily appareled women.He liked, too, the off-hand deference of the men about him, fromturnstile to betting shed, once his calling was known. They were allready to curry favor with him, touts and rail-birds, dockers andowners, jockeys and gamblers and bookmakers, placating him with anoccasional "sure-thing" tip from the stables, plying him with cigarsand advice as to how he should place his money. There was a tacitunderstanding, of course, that in return for these courtesies hisvision was not to be too keen nor his manner too aggressive. When hewas approached by an expert "dip" with the offer of a fat reward forimmunity in working the track crowds, Blake carefully weighed thematter, 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 thatbay-rum scented youth's pocket, and secured a conviction that brought aletter of thanks from the club stewards and a word or two of approvalfrom 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. Hewas sober; he was dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness ofthe unimaginative. He wanted to get on, to make good, to be more thana 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 upfreight-car thieves, he was given occasionally "spot" and "tailing"work to do. Once, after a week of upholstered hotel lounging on adivorce case he was sent out on night detail to fight river piratesstealing 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 ofthe underworld. He saw that all his future depended uponacquaintanceship with criminals, not only with their faces, but withtheir ways and their women and their weaknesses. So he started agallery, a gallery of his own, a large and crowded gallery betweenwalls no wider than the bones of his own skull. To this jealouslyguarded and ponderously sorted gallery he day by day added some newface, some new scene, some new name. Crook by crook he stored themaway there, for future reference. He got to know the "habituals" andthe "timers," the "gangs" and their "hang outs" and "fences." Heacquired an array of confidence men and hotel beats and queer shoversand bank sneaks and wire tappers and drum snuffers. He made a mentalrecord of dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers, ofpanhandlers 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 alsogrew into an acquaintanceship with ward politics, with the namelessPower above him and its enigmatic traditions. He got to know theTammany 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 oneaccused him of being too refined for his calling. Through a mind suchas his the Law could best view the criminal, just as a solar eclipse isbest viewed through smoked glass.

  He could hobnob with bartenders and red-lighters, pass unnoticedthrough a slum, join casually in a stuss game, or loaf unmarked abou
t astreet corner. He was fond of pool and billiards, and many were theunconsidered trifles he picked up with a cue in his hand. His face,even in those early days, was heavy and inoffensive. Commonplaceseemed to be the word that fitted him. He could always mix with andbecome one of the crowd. He would have laughed at any such foolishphrase as "protective coloration." Yet seldom, he knew, men turnedback to look at him a second time. Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, hecould have passed, under his slightly tilted black boulder, as a truckdriver with a day off.

  What others might have denominated as "dirty work" he accepted withheavy impassivity, consoling himself with the contention that its finalend was cleanness. And one of his most valuable assets, outside hisstolid heartlessness, was his speaking acquaintanceship with the womenof the underworld. He remained aloof from them even while he mixedwith them. He never grew into a "moll-buzzer." But in his rough wayhe cultivated them. He even helped some of them out of theirtroubles--in consideration for "tips" which were to be delivered whenthe emergency arose. They accepted his gruffness as simple-mindedness,as blunt honesty. One or two, with their morbid imaginations touchedby his seeming generosities, made wistful amatory advances which hepromptly 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 hisnature was that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility indeceit, which made him the success he was. He could always meet acrook on his own ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities toeliminate. He mastered a secret process of opening and reading letterswithout detection. He became an adept at picking a lock. One of hisearlier successes had depended on the cool dexterity with which he hadexchanged trunk checks in a Wabash baggage car at Black Rock, allowingthe "loft" thief under suspicion to carry off a dummy trunk, while hecame into possession of another's belongings and enough evidence tosecure his victim's conviction.

  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-hammerin the final mix up when he made his haul. He did not shirk these mixups, for he was endowed with the bravery of the unimaginative. Thisvery mental heaviness, holding him down to materialities, kept hiscontemplation of contingencies from becoming bewildering. He enjoyedthe limitations of the men against whom he was pitted. Yet at times hehad what he called a "coppered hunch." When, in later years, anoccasional criminal of imagination became his enemy, he was often at aloss as to how to proceed. But imaginative criminals, he knew, wererare, and dilemmas such as these proved infrequent. Whatever hisshift, or however unsavory his resource, he never regarded himself ason the same basis as his opponents. He had Law on his side; he was theinstrument of that great power known as Justice.

  As Blake's knowledge of New York and his work increased he was givenless and less of the "rough-neck" work to do. He proved himself, infact, a stolid and painstaking "investigator." As a divorce-suitshadower he was equally resourceful and equally successful. When hisagency took over the bankers' protective work he was advanced to thisnew department, where he found himself compelled to a new term of studyand a new circle of alliances. He went laboriously through records offorgers and check raisers and counterfeiters. He took up the study ofall such gentry, sullenly yet methodically, like a backward scholarmastering a newly imposed branch of knowledge, thumbing frowninglythrough official reports, breathing heavily over portrait files andpolice records, plodding determinedly through counterfeit-detectormanuals. For this book work, as he called it, he retained adeep-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 beganhis 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 ofpossibilities and the gradual narrowing down of his field. But acrossthat ever-narrowing trail the accidental little clue finally fell, andon the night of the final raid the desired plates were captured and thenotorious and long-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 anofficial with the weight of the Federal authority behind him. Hebecame an investigator with the secrets of the Bureau of Printing andEngraving at his beck. He found himself a cog in a machinery thatseemed limitless in its ramifications. He was the agent of a vast andcentralized authority, an authority against which there could be noopposition. But he had to school himself to the knowledge that he wasa 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 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 thepatrolman 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 trueworth by both his fellow workers and the world in general.

  It was not until the occasion when he had run down a gang ofWilliamsburg counterfeiters, however, that his name was conspicuouslyin print. So interesting were the details of this gang's operations,so typical were their methods, that Wilkie or some official underWilkie had handed over to a monthly known as _The Counterfeit Detector_a full account of the case. A New York paper has printed a somewhatdistorted and romanticized copy of this, having sent a woman reporterto interview Blake--while a staff artist made a pencil drawing of theSecret Service man during the very moments the latter was smilinglydenying them either a statement or a photograph. Blake knew thatpublicity would impair his effectiveness. Some inner small voiceforewarned him that all outside recognition of his calling would takeaway from his value as an agent of the Secret Service. But his hungerfor his rights as a man was stronger than his discretion as anofficial. He said nothing openly; but he allowed inferences to bedrawn and the artist's pencil to put the finishing touches to thesketch.

  It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural circuitiveness,operated to save him. When the inevitable protest came he was able toprove that he had said nothing and had indignantly refused aphotograph. He completely cleared himself. But the hint of aninteresting personality had been betrayed to the public, the name of anew sleuth had gone on record, and the infection of curiosity spreadlike a mulberry rash from newspaper office to newspaper office. Arepresentative of the press, every now and then, would drop in onBlake, or chance to occupy the same smoking compartment with him on arun between Washington and New York, to ply his suavest and subtlestarts for the extraction of some final fact with which to cap anunfinished "story." Blake, in turn, became equally subtle and suave.His lips were sealed, but even silence, he found, could be madeilluminative.
Even reticence, on occasion, could be made to serve hispersonal ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering data without anyshadow of actual statement.

  These chickens, however, all came home to roost. Official recognitionwas taken of Blake's tendencies, and he was assigned to those caseswhere a "leak" would prove least embarrassing to the Department. Hesaw this and resented it. But in the meantime he had been keeping hiseyes open and storing up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory rumorand fact that might prove of use in the future. He found himself, indue time, the master of an arsenal of political secrets. And when itcame to a display of power he could merit the attention if not therespect of a startlingly wide circle of city officials. When a NewYork municipal election brought a party turn over, he chose the momentas the psychological one for a display of his power, cruising up anddown the coasts of officialdom with his grim facts in tow, for all theworld like a flagship followed by its fleet.

  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 yearof laborious manipulation he found himself Third Deputy Commissionerand a power 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 oftwo evils, to pay the ordained price for his triumphs. Occasionallythe forces of evil had to be bribed with a promise of protection. Forthe surrender of dangerous plates, for example, a counterfeiter mightreceive immunity, or for the turning of State's evidence a guilty manmight have to go scott free. At other times, to squeeze confession outof a crook, a cruelty as refined as that of the Inquisition had to beadopted. In one stubborn case the end had been achieved by deprivingthe victim of sleep, this Chinese torture being kept up until theneeded nervous collapse. At another time the midnight cell of asuspected murderer had been "set" like a stage, with all theaccessories of his crime, including even the cadaver, and when suddenlyawakened the frenzied man had shrieked out his confession. But, as arule, it was by imposing on his prisoner's better instincts, such asgang-loyalty or pity for a supposedly threatened "rag," that the pointwas won. In resources of this nature Blake became quiteconscienceless, 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 heno longer resented being known as a "rough neck" or a "flat foot." Asan official, he believed in roughness; it was his right; and one touchof right made away with all wrong, very much as one grain of pepsinproperly 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 therethe better for all concerned. So Blake believed in "hammering" hisvictims. He was an advocate of "confrontation." He had faith in theold-fashioned "third-degree" dodges. At these, in his ponderous way,he became an adept, looking on the nervous system of his subject as anut, to be calmly and relentlessly gnawed at until the meat of truthlay 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 thefar-off ends of justice might not be defeated. He made frequent use ofwomen of a certain type, women whom he could intimidate as an officeror 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 steamersand barber shops, in pool rooms and anarchists' cellars. He also hadhis 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 theunderling with a half hour of blasphemous abuse. He had scant patiencewith what he called the "high-collar cops." He consistently opposedthe new-fangled methods, such as the _Portrait Parle_, and pin-maps forrecording crime, and the graphic-system boards for marking themovements of criminals. All anthropometric nonsense such asBertillon's he openly sneered at, just as he scoffed at card indexesand finger prints and other academic innovations which weredebilitating the force. He had gathered his own data, at great pains,he nursed his own personal knowledge as to habitual offenders and theiraliases, their methods, their convictions and records, their associatesand hang outs. He carried his own gallery under his own hat, and hewas proud of it. His memory was good, and he claimed always to knowhis 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 didnot 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-satisfiedtoiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he becamemore and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenchedin his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic,less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, hewas compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. Hispersonal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency tobecome both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lostsouls grew too intricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, newnames, new tricks tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more andmore on the clerical staff and the finger-print bureau records. Hisposition became that of a villager with a department store on hishands, of a country shopkeeper trying to operate an urban emporium. Hewas averse to deputizing his official labors. He was ignorant ofsystem and science. He took on the pathos of a man who is out of histime, touched with the added poignancy of a passionate incredulity asto 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 hedid. But he could not decide just where the trouble lay. And in hisuncertainty he made it a point to entrench himself by means of"politics." It became an open secret that he had a pull, that hisposition was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsen his methods.It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. It touched hiscarelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance withoccasional 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 murdererswithout a gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more thanthe 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'stime--and the man usually came. His appetite for the spectacularincreased. He preferred to head his own gambling raids, ax in hand.But more even than his authority he liked to parade his knowledge. Heliked to be able to say: "This is Sheeny Chi's coup!" or, "That's a jobthat only Soup-Can Charlie could do!" When a police surgeon hit on theidea of etherizing an obdurate "dummy chucker," to determine if theprisoner could talk or not, Blake appropriated the suggestion as hisown. And when the "press boys" trooped in for their daily gist ofnews, he asked them, as usual, not to couple his name with theincident; 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 ofdignity. He took them into his confidences, apparently, and made hisdisclosures personal matters, individual favors. He kept careful noteof their names, their characteristics, their interests. He cultivatedthem, keeping as careful track of them from city to city as he did ofthe "big" criminals themselves. They got into the habit of going tohim for their special stories. He always exacted secrecy, pretendedreluctance, yet parceled out to one reporter and another those dicta towhich his name could be most appropriatel
y attached. He evensurrendered a clue or two as to how his own activities and triumphsmight be worked into a given story. When he perceived that thoseworldly wise young men of the press saw through the dodge, he becamemore adept, more adroit, more delicate in method. But the end was thesame.

  It was about this time that he invested in his first scrap-book. Intothis secret granary went every seed of his printed personal history.Then came 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 ofthose magazine articles, he even made ponderous and painstaking effortsfor their repetition, at considerable loss of dignity. Yet he adoptedthe pose of disclaiming responsibility, of disliking such things, ofbeing ready to oppose them if some effective method could only bethought out. He even hinted to those about him at Headquarters thatthis seeming garrulity was serving a good end, claiming it to beharmless pother to "cover" more immediate trails on which he pretendedto be engaged.

  But the scrap-books grew in number and size. It became a task to keepup with his clippings. He developed into a personage, as much apersonage as a grand-opera prima donna on tour. His successes weretalked over in clubs. His name came to be known to the men in thestreet. 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 amacaronic volume bearing the title "Criminals of America," Blake notonly added his name to the title page, but advanced three hundreddollars to assist towards its launching.

  The result of all this was a subtle yet unmistakable shifting ofvalues, an achievement of public glory at the loss of officialconfidence. He excused his waning popularity among his co-workers onthe ground of envy. It was, he held, merely the inevitable penalty forsupreme 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 hisunderworld victims once had the temerity to cry out at him. "You thinkyou 're the king of the Hawkshaws! But if you were on _my_ side of thefence, you 'd last about as long as a snowball on a crownsheet!"