Part 7

So much I had gathered from Jerry during the afternoon. The actual go-getter in any society is in the small minority; he, or she, supports a host of hangers-on; it is only the armchair dreamer who flatters himself that he who holds him up, who blows his safe, who forges his name, must be a fugitive, hiding and cowering between his sallies forth with gat, with “soup” or with pen. Of course, the gunman or the gerver goes about his business, keeps his hours, surrounds himself by friends and family even as you and I. He might frequent the Drake or the Blackstone for his pleasure, also, but it would be too suggestive of business. He, too, requires his leisure; so here he was with his friends at the Flamingo Feather.

Maybe a dozen knew what was on that night; not more than that, Jerry told me. He vanished, Jerry did, after we’d been there an hour, leaving me alone with ladies.

I danced, to mighty good music, with a crowned queen of Tudorish bodice, modified by electric lights on the sleeves; with a green-robed girl of red hair with amber lights on her comb; with a white-shouldered Cleopatra, lithe and soft in my arms.

I danced again with Cleopatra and, after midnight, a couple of times more and was having a better time with each encore. Also I was getting acclimated to the diverting atmosphere of that ball. Its manners, of course, were various and, as I explained to myself the different developments, each masker made for himself a personal interpretation of his rôle according to his costume; consequently I witnessed the Puritanical portrayed in contrast with the piratical between which extremes the private lighting plants extemporized pirouettes of their own.

There was plenty of cheek-to-cheek proximity of partners; plenty of knee to knee. Occasionally a floor committeeman pried a couple a few inches farther apart; but surely it is better to see that done than to observe the need ignored.

Jerry, unless he returned in some new costume, remained away from the floor; and I gave up momentarily expecting him. I got to having a good time on my own account, especially with Cleopatra.

I could not see her face between her brow and lips. Through her mask, I got glimpse enough of her irises to see that they were blue. Her forehead was smooth and white and pretty; intelligent looking, too. Her lips were bowed and smiled pleasantly and were not too much carmined; she had a fine little chin, pretty and also firm. She’d a lovely neck and shoulders, smooth as satin; and she’d small, strong little hands with beautiful, pink nails, and slender, shapely feet.

I’m not given to noticing quite so much about a girl; but with this one, I couldn’t help it. She was an alluring little crook. I suppose the vizor had something to do with it; the hidden always beckons a fellow on; but what kept me coming was the thought,--what was she doing there? What was her line or her lay? If she were merely a guest of this ball, whose guest was she?

Naturally, at a masque--and most naturally at that masque--people dispensed with introductions. She was Cleopatra and no one gave her a modern name; as Cleopatra she lacked a Cæsar, though many were present. She lacked even an Anthony; a Magellanic mariner seemed to be her rallying point. I don’t know why I called the gentleman Magellan; if he’d been huskier I’d have called him Columbus. Somehow I’ve always imagined Magellan quick and slight and more given to liquor than Columbus. This mariner was; given to liquor, I mean. Cleopatra bothered about him for a time and then blithely abandoned him, much to my benefit.

“What shall I call you?” she asked me. So far, we had got on without names.

“Erasmus,” I said, to try her as much as anything.

To my amazement, she knew the old boy. “Holbein would be thrilled by you.” And, as she danced with my arm about her, I could feel that she was sizing me up anew. I had said “Erasmus” as I might have said Claude or Skeezix; but since she knew Erasmus, naturally she wondered how I knew. Beets, my predecessor in these garments, would not have known; but Cleopatra had known for some time that I was not Beets.

About that time came a diversion; in fact, _the_ diversion. Sir Walter Raleigh, escorting an Elizabethan lady, appeared on the floor. Both were masked; but under the garb of Raleigh were the limbs of Jerry; and I knew the Elizabethan lady, too. Here was Christina, come to the ball.

I looked again at her Raleigh, with rapier at his side, dagger at his waist. Not Jerry, I told myself, with pulses thrilling; here was Keeban. This was what I was to expect; Keeban, to show off, had carried Christina to the ball. That day, she had won the last of her money; this night he had regained her, he was to take her away; but before going, here was his flourish, his defiance, his display!

He put his arm about her, and, as they began to dance, I heard in the buzz of voices the whisper of his name. Here was Harry Vine, they were saying; here was Christina. Between them, they’d more than half a million; he’d put over his job just as he schemed it. Nobody could beat that boy; if they tried to, the sod for them.

It looked like madness for them to be here to-night; but madness marks the big job.

Here was Keeban, Harry Vine. He had boasted that he would bring his woman, whom some thought had gone away from him. Surely he had arranged his get-away with her; but before he used it, here he was proving that she was his.

But she wasn’t his! At least, so Jerry had told me. She’d come with him, but she was, in fact, no longer his. Something more was on to-night than that rapiered and daggered Raleigh expected. I danced with Cleopatra, watching them dance, and also I looked now for the reappearance of the other Raleigh, who was Jerry.

The number ended; now clapping; now encore. My arms circled Cleopatra; I clasped her. Keeban clasped Christina.

As I watched his arm go around her, so exactly as Jerry’s clasped his partner in the dance, I got another jerk. Maybe he was Jerry! Maybe what was to happen between Jerry and his “friend”, his brother, had happened outside. I sent that thought out of my head and watched them.

What a pair they made, she young, lithe, full of life, perfect in her soft proportions. I thought of how I had seen her singing that night before the shooting and how she received me--like Récamier, on her couch--afterwards. But here she was dancing another theme. And he, dancing with her, was quick, graceful, courtly. Clearly they had done this dance often together. Some one cried out a request and they went into a fancy figure.

The rest of us cleared a circle in the center of the hall; we danced slowly about the perimeter while they in the middle twined arms, turned, confronted each other, flung each other away and circled back to clasp again, dancing.

They had become so professional now, that, watching their steps, I forgot for the moment that he was the murderer of old Win and she had been old Win’s wife, in the plot for the Scofield money. Jerry had told me that, when the plot turned to murder of her husband, she had tried to stop it. Had they fallen out? Well, I should see. This was a time not to think, but to watch.

Some one switched the lights off. It proved the signal for those who had lights in their hair and on their dresses to gather inside the circle and give their soft, colored glows to Christina and Harry, dancing together.

He seized her, tossed her away, caught her again and, before again he tossed her, she altered the figure. As he caught at her, she eluded him and, laughing, she snatched at the sheath on his belt. She had his dagger; and the lights--blood-red, green and amber--glinted on the flashing blade as she bared it, drew back and thrust at him.

He caught her wrist, as girls about me gasped; he held and twisted at her hand but she broke his hold and darted away from him. He stood a moment, staring; then he grinned at her who, off at the edge of the circle, again was dancing as if that thrust at him, his snatch just in time, his twist and her breakaway all were part of the figure. But they weren’t. He knew; I knew; many others knew. There, in that flash of shining steel, she had stabbed at him to kill him.

Why? Jerry’s words to me gave at least a clue. He was her man, who had been a “gun” but who had become a “gorilla”; he had shot Win Scofield in her sight, slaughtered him before her. She had tried to stop that killing; and his murder of the old man in his house had been Harry Vine’s answer. Also he had served notice for her to come back to him; so she had done so,--to kill him.

This was what Jerry meant I should see; this was the vengeance of Shirley. Not vengeance alone; also an attempt at self-protection. She knew, going back to a “gorilla”, that sooner or later he would kill her. Perhaps she expected death from him only a little later that night. So she had struck there before them all and, failing, made her life surely forfeit. Now, without doubt, Keeban--Harry Vine--would kill her.

Not there, surrounded by that circle, as she would have slain him, had her thrust gone home. A girl kills a man that way; but not a man his woman. This rapiered Raleigh knew that. He made no motion to attack her; he merely watched her, and he grinned while she danced and tried to play it was all pretense.

Now her partner started toward her; and everybody watched him, and watched her, and nobody interfered. Nobody thought that, when he caught her, immediately and there he would kill her. I, at least, did not even imagine that. He was moving to capture her now and to carry her away; and, to these maskers in the circle, that was all his own affair as, to them, her stroke at him had been her business. I realized that had she sent the dagger home, no one would have touched her as no one, after she had failed and was doomed, would raise a hand to help her now.

She knew it also; and she looked to no one for aid. She merely danced away, his dagger in her hand, smiling and still playing at pretense.

Fingers circled my wrist; they were Cleopatra’s. Small, strong, intense fingers they were, half holding, half warning me.

I had not been aware that I betrayed, through my mask and cowl, the impulse which heated me. Of course I wanted to help that girl who had struck and failed; I wanted to seize him who grinned and stole upon her, and of course I knew I could not; and those slim fingers circling my wrist doubly warned me. Here was business between two persons--girl and man--which was their own. She still had chance to strike again and kill him, if she could; he had his right to capture.

She circled away and he followed about the edge of the ring, not gaining upon her. Suddenly he snatched a cape from the shoulders of a watcher; he wound it about his left arm and, with that arm forward to take her stab, he darted on her.

He did it so quickly, so surely, that it seemed prearranged. For the moment, it seemed that the motion must have been practiced and it was all play. Then he was on her; she made a stab and he caught it on that bundled cape. With his other hand, he had her wrist; he had her. No acting in that; no possible pretense.

It was not play; he had her! The circle knew it was not play; some of them would surely save her. I must have jerked again; for Cleopatra’s fingers pressed tighter on my wrist.

“Where’s Jerry?” I thought. “What’s he doing?”

The light was lessening. A girl switched off the glows which burned upon her head and dress; another did the same; another. “Lights!” somebody called; but before the room lights could go on, other dancers had darkened the colored bulbs they wore.

The dagger rang on the floor; and, as she dropped it, Christina surprised her partner out of his hold on her. She darted back. The circle behind her opened and closed. She was through and the circle was all dark. Then some one screamed.

At that instant, I was sure it was Christina; I was sure he had her again. Then, I did not know. There was a whistle outside. “The bulls--bulls--bulls.”

Cleopatra’s fingers freed my wrist. I groped for her but she was gone. “Bulls--the bulls” men and girls said. No one cried again for lights; no one turned them on. In the dark, I felt streams of escape in opposite directions. Outside somebody was shooting; came shouts; now the clanging of patrol cars. Surprise was gone.

I felt myself sucked into an eddy of escape repulsed from one side and cast upon the other. We reached air and iron stairs. Pistols flashed before us; our van cleared the way. I came down to the alley pavement and stumbled over a man shot or fallen. I crossed the alley and reached a passage. A girl’s hand led me through and, a block down, we found refuge.

I didn’t know the girl. I never saw her face. It was dark and she left the shed before me. I dropped my robe there; and when I walked out, the circle of capture had closed and was still contracting, not expanding. The police took, altogether, thirty-six persons,--twenty girls, sixteen men.

The “bulls” booked them all but proved able to hold nobody. They showed prison records against seven but nothing then “out” against any one. The pick-up, as shown on the picture pages, included a Tudor queen, two of the lighting plants, a pirate, a Turk, a Cæsar but not Cleopatra; not even Magellan. Not the Elizabethan Christina, not Raleigh, either Jerry or Keeban.

The raid was made to get Jerry and Christina; for some one had tipped it that they’d be at the Flamingo Feather. The tip told even the time.

I kept wondering about that tip and who gave it. Not Jerry, I thought; but where, during the end of that evening, was Jerry? And I considered that it was only after he had gone that Keeban had come in,--or the man in mask whom I’d called Keeban, and who did that dagger dance with Christina.

She’d told me, at that time when she lay on her bed like Madame Récamier, that Jerry had killed old Win; she showed no knowledge at all of Keeban.

You’ll understand I kept my thoughts to myself; and I kept to myself that I’d danced at the Flamingo Feather that night of “the thieves’ ball,” which was raided. The newspapers, always keen for the colorful, played up the pictures they took of those twenty girls and sixteen “crooks” in costume; but the papers did not even know of that dagger dance. Much less could they give news of the final consequence of it.

In my mind, when I thought of it, Keeban had caught Christina. In my mind, he had her somewhere wholly in his power; at his own time, in his own manner, he would punish her. Imagining this, I would get up and walk about; I felt I had to do something. But where were they? Where was Jerry? If he were not the Raleigh who had returned; if he were not the man who had danced, where had he gone? What had happened to him?

I learned, during those days, the completer truth of what Jerry had told me of the underworld. It wasn’t a place; not at all. For the places, they all remained. There was the Flamingo Feather, dull and drab by daylight with its door beyond the bakery, the pawnshop, the soft-drink parlor; its light was out; its iron basket rusted and filled with wet, melting snow. At night “The Apollo Club”--giggling clerks--consorted there; and then “The Brothers of Byzas,” who, if he was like his kin, was a teamster, apparently.

Gone, gone from the Flamingo Feather were my friends of the masque, vanished as wholly as yesterday’s snow from the basket over the door.

Nor could Klangenberg’s help me. There was the door within which stood shelves heaped with delicatessen; but a strange child pondered over the keys of the cash register which invited “come again.” He knew nothing of Klangenberg who had “gone away.” Not even the “dyke-keeper” remained.

Exploring the alley alone, I penetrated to the hooded stairs atop which Jerry had greeted me. Now an old wigged woman, crippled and fluent of Yiddish, kept vigil there.

I sought Leventhal, the lessor of my Erasmus garb cast off in that shed and never recovered. I came offering cash to pay for the robe. He took the money, shaking his head; he would remember neither the robe nor me. There was no tracing, through him, of others who wore his clothes that night. They were vanished like Villon’s lovers:

Alas for lovers! Pair by pair The wind has blown them all away; The young and yare, the fond and fair, Where are the Snows of Yesterday?

Young and yare; that was Cleopatra! Where was she? Who was she? More than who, whose might she be? Well, what good for me to wonder and worry? What good to feel, by remembrance, the softness of her hand in mine when we danced; and then the iron warning of her fingers on my wrist! What good to see in mind the beauty of her shoulder and the smallness of her foot. They were gone, all gone; and, if I looked at the whole business sensibly, I would see that somehow, in ways not yet entirely clear, I had been of service in the game of getting for Christina and her man insurance of five hundred thousand with which they had got away; or he had, after taking it from her.

XII

I DISCOVER “THE QUEER.”

Then Tom Downs was getting married and he asked me to usher, so there I was in Caldon’s, picking out an after-dinner coffee set to be sent to the bride; and a lot I knew about breeds and varieties of Hepplewhite and Colonial and Queen Anne. Now if setter dogs could only be wedding presents, or beans, I’d be right on the spot; or a bag of Rio coffee would be all right; but the coffee container never meant anything to me. So I was about to judge by the good old way, which has proved such a help to the high cost of living, and order the most expensive when I heard a voice that I knew and turned about.

She wasn’t speaking to me but to the clerk at the watch-repair counter, which was just opposite the coffee sets:

“Bad?” she was saying. “Oh, you must mean counterfeit. Did I really have one? How interesting; please let me see.” And she put a small gloved hand across the counter for the bank note which he held.

A new twenty, I noticed it was, and then I looked again at her. Without any doubt, I knew her voice; I was absolutely certain I’d talked to her; but her face was a complete surprise to me. A pleasant surprise, right enough; she was rather a little thing, slender but with rounded neck and arms, in actually beautiful proportions; about twenty-two in age, I guessed. She had nice, clear white-and-pink skin; good, bold little mouth and a sort of I-dare-you-chin. Her nose turned up the barest trifle, darned attractively, and though I couldn’t from the side get a view of her eyes, it was pretty plain they weren’t easy ones to meet. Anyway, that clerk wobbled before her as he apologized that the government that week had just warned the banks and all big business houses in Chicago that new and unusually dangerous counterfeits of twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Notes were in circulation.

“Dangerous?” said my friend. “You mean the ink’s poisonous or something like that?” She seemed glad she had her gloves on.

The clerk laughed. “Oh, it’s quite safe that way, Miss Wellington. They mean, it’s an unusually good job of counterfeiting; very hard indeed to detect. In fact, they say in this case the printing and coloring is actually perfect, to all practical purposes. It is only the paper which is enough off so that an expert, like our cashier, suspected it.”

Miss Wellington opened her hand bag. “How interesting! But would you ask your clever cashier to look over these bills for me to make sure they’re all right? Why, what a frightful place Chicago is; I got in just this morning from Denver and bought a few things at Field’s and along Michigan Avenue, breaking a hundred-dollar bill somewhere, I can’t remember exactly where, and getting change----”

I heard, of course, but didn’t actually pay any attention to the rest she was saying. Miss Wellington of Denver! Now I didn’t know any Miss Wellington of Denver or any other place; but I did know that girl; her voice, anyway. She certainly had talked to me; and also, I was sure, I knew her hands and her figure, if I didn’t know her face. She had one glove off now, feeling the texture of the counterfeit bill in comparison with the others in her hand bag, which proved to be quite all right. Yes; I knew that pretty, slender, strong little hand.

She was going out now, after having given to the cashier--who had come up--the information that she _thought_ she had broken her hundred dollars at Field’s and got her change there and supplying him with her Chicago address as the Blackstone Hotel.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said the coffee-set salesman, “did you make a choice?”

“Oh, shoot along the Queen Anne,” I said; and with the word “queen” something caught me.

“What name, sir?” said the salesman.

“Cleopatra,” I said, for I had it; and I got under way without worry over the impression I was leaving behind me. For now I had placed Miss Wellington of Denver, and I knew why I was familiar with her voice, with her hands, with her figure, and also why her face was a surprise to me. For she was Cleopatra, my ci-devant partner of the dances at the Flamingo Feather where I was ostensibly “Beets”, the safe blower in a hired Erasmus get-up, and she was mate to a lightly built Magellanic gent, who sopped up rather too much that evening and yet had proved nimble as any on the getaway.

I was absolutely sure of her; but she didn’t suspect me. I had been all swaddled in robes and cowls that night, you remember. Of course she’d heard my voice then, but she couldn’t have recognized it from anything I’d muttered at Caldon’s. I’m one of those mute buyers. So here I was, trailing her down Michigan Boulevard and wondering what in salvation to do.

From a Puritanical point of view, I had one plain duty; for I couldn’t feel the slightest doubt that Cleopatra there a few steps in front of me--present alias Miss Wellington of Denver--had never obtained that dangerous twenty in change. If she had just participated in any financial transaction at Field’s, I felt that Marshall III might just as well mark himself down twenty dollars or forty (or some higher multiple of twenty) on the total loss page of the day’s doings. Unquestionably I should, by all rules of citizenship, hand her over to the traffic officer at the approaching corner and ask him to blow his whistle to call the wagon.

On the other hand, my acquaintance with Cleopatra which now put me in position to suspect her (of course suspect doesn’t half say it) had been gained under circumstances which any one would call privileged. The whole fact of my presence at that dance was under a sort of sporting condition; and I couldn’t forget how this girl, herself, had held on to my wrist, warning me and keeping me out of trouble.

I actually owed something to her; but that wasn’t what I was thinking of, as I followed her. I was watching what a wallop she was as she went down the boulevard; much the neatest one in sight. She was rather small, I’ve said; and trim; wonderfully turned, she was, and dressed in plain, tailored things which always look the best, I think. I almost collided with a couple of my friends--girls--from up the Drive and around on Astor. We nearly crashed because they were looking, too. Everybody was gazing, at least a bit, at Miss Wellington; yet she wasn’t endeavoring at all to attract attention. Quite the opposite. She simply couldn’t help it.

She had me heeling her, therefore, without the least actual idea of handing her over to any one; but also without any intention of letting her go. For here I’d found her, after all that world of Jerry’s and of the Flamingo Feather had vanished into air.

I began to understand that of course they hadn’t really vanished. They’d been about--those queens and ladies, those sailors, pirates and lighting plants--but I simply had not known it when I saw them.