Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Mardi Desjardins and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Canada Team athttps://www.pgdpcanada.net
THE SHADOW
BY ARTHUR STRINGER
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1913
Copyright, 1913, by The Century Co. _Published, January, 1913_
THE SHADOW
I
Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the dooropened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.
"Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.
The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfullytoward his table desk.
"Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the deskend. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor ofambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.
The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll ofher hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desktop.
"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than aquestion. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense oftimidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left theshadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense ofpower. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty,though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful ashers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, hadnot a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity. There was nothingoutwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doublydangerous as a law-breaker.
Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargicbeefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his headand looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows.He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes,with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowingpupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to thebrain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimesthe whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.
Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip curvedoutward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first glancethe appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful,contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into one ofIshmael-like rebellion.
Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown, andartfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It seemed tostand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which to beproud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was dailyplaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulousattentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundancewas braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricatestructure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins,just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding itsephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, asthough it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotionto an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of beauty.
He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at thetime of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of herassociation with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trainednurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted himat every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To effect this he hadwhisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospitaland sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aidtreatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to bebetrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, andBlake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on hisinvestigation, showed "Doctor Callahan" to be Connie Binhart, the con-manand bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.
He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson ofthe Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris,involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery.The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she hadsmiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But asshe sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail bodyso arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way touched his lethargicimagination. She showed herself to be of finer and keener fiber than thesordid demireps with whom he had to do. Shimmering and saucy and debonairas a polo pony, she had seemed a departure from type, something above themeretricious termagants round whom he so often had to weave hisaccusatory webs of evidence.
Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved inthe Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon, fromwhom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a bulletthrough his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had straightwaybeen brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the production ofher dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked upon as a murder.
Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner,alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three longhours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing andsnake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of hisinhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He hadbulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He had third-degreedher into cowering and trembling indignation, into hectic mentaluncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well passed, he had marshaledthe last of his own animal strength and essayed the final blasphemousVesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous breakdown, the ultimatecollapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped, abandonedweeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward and caught at his arm andclung to it, as though it were her last earthly pillar of support. Herhuge plaited ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown ropes longer thanhis own arms, and he, breathing hard, had sat back and watched them asshe wept.
But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came about henever quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fashion, thatthis scene of theirs, that this official assault and surrender, was insome way associated with the climacteric transports of camp-meetingevangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on inrhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotionalsurrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides ofpassion. What it was based on, what it arose from, he could not say. Butin the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest he had watched herabandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And as he watched, a vagueand troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter along his limbs, and firedsomething dormant and dangerous in the great hulk of a body which hadnever before been stirred by its explosion of emotion. It was not pity,he knew; for pity was something quite foreign to his nature. Yet as shelay back, limp and forlorn against his shoulder, sobbing weakly out thatshe wanted to be a good woman, that she could be honest if they wouldonly give her a chance, he felt that thus to hold her, to shield her, wassomething desirable.
She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer downover hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as hisheavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she hadgone with the promise of his protection.
The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, mighthave left that promise a worthless one, had n
ot the prompt evidence ofSheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than he hadexpected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" atHeadquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day, forthe first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.
Two weeks later he startled her with the declaration that he wanted tomarry her. He didn't care about her past. She'd been dragged into thethings she'd done without understanding them, at first, and she'd kept onbecause there'd been no one to help her away from them. He knew he coulddo it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to bring it out!
A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marryingkind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in hisgroping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to him,that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south of Harlem.
This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which he foundhard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what he had said,that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for a moment, in fact,she had been swept off her feet.
Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across herabandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbed theSecond Deputy.
"You're--you're not tied up already, are you?" he had hesitatinglydemanded. "You're not married?"
"No, I'm not tied up!" she had promptly and fiercely responded. "Mylife's my own--my own!"
"Then why can't you marry me?" the practical-minded man had asked.
"I could!" she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Then shehad stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. "I could--ifyou only understood, if you could only help me the way I want to behelped!"
She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leaveher very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet to enfoldthat warm mass of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.
She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long asit did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he wasstill as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed by theseemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, in whichshe proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up his airydreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. He grewheavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When she pleaded withhim never to leave her, never to trust her too much, he patted her thincheek and asked when she was going to name the day. From that finalityshe still edged away, as though her happiness itself were onlyexperimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them to deliveritself of a bolt.
But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even inher moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go awaytogether, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at herchildishness.
It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks ofalternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks of inebriationto him, he was called out of the city to complete the investigation on aseries of iron-workers' dynamite outrages. Daily he wrote or wired backto her. But he was kept away longer than he had expected. When hereturned to New York she was no longer there. She had disappeared ascompletely as though an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed her up.It was not until the following winter that he learned she was again withConnie Binhart, in southern Europe.
He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, heclaimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself, hadheld the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there hadbeen no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an eye-blinkof conscious embarrassment. Yet it was good to remember that ConnieBinhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and ground fine,and ground to a finish.
"What did you want me for, Jim?" the woman was again asking him. Shespoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude were subtlereservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. Ineach lay the power to uncover, at a hand's turn, old mistakes that werebest unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave audacity about thewoman. She was not really afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy had torecognize that fact. This self-assurance of hers he attributed to therecollection that she had once brought about his personal subjugation,"got his goat," as he had phrased it. She, woman-like, would never forgetit.
"There's a man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where he is."Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desk top.
"Yes?" she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as anactress with a role to sustain, a role in which she could never be quiteletter-perfect.
"It's Connie Binhart," cut out the Second Deputy.
He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.
"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewedabout to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through herpretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates ofthat ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.
"I guess," he went on with slow patience, "we know him best round here asCharles Blanchard."
"Blanchard?" she echoed.
"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we've been looking for, for seven monthsnow, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off ahundred and eighteen thousand dollars."
"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.
"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room whenthe rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the sidestreet, a band hired for the occasion."
"When was that?" demanded the woman.
"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song wearinesssuggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.
"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.
Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as toher complicity.
"I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on thetwenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went toCherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.That's not what I'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is, now,to-day."
Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word wasspoken. But a contest took place.
"Why ask _me_?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only tooplain that she was fencing.
"Because you _know_," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irisedeyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly accumulatingconsciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He could detect achange in her bearing, in her speech itself.
"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"
"But I've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I'm going to."
She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its earlierarrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She was notaltogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources which he couldcommand.
"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."
The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly heignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at thewoman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and lefthand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru gloves for the cable.
"You know me," he began again in his deliberate and abdominal bass. "AndI know you. I've got 'o get this man Binhart. I've got 'o! He's been outfor seven months, now, and they're going to put it up to me, to _me_,personally. Copeland tried to get him without me. He fell down on it.They all fell down on it. And now they're going to throw the case back onme. They think it'll be my Waterloo."
He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as the cackle of a guinea hen."But I'm going to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if they thinkthey can throw
me on that, I'm going to take a few of my friends alongwith me."
"Is that a threat?" was the woman's quick inquiry. Her eyes narrowedagain, for she had long since learned, and learned it to her sorrow, thatevery breath he drew was a breath of self-interest.
"No; it's just a plain statement." He slewed about in his swivel chair,throwing one thick leg over the other as he did so. "I hate to hollerAuburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but I'm going--"
"Auburn?" she repeated very quietly. Then she raised her eyes to his."Can you say a thing like that to me, Jim?"
He shifted a little in his chair. But he met her gaze without a wince.
"This is business, Elsie, and you can't mix business and--and otherthings," he tailed off at last, dropping his eyes.
"I'm sorry you put it that way," she said. "I hoped we'd be betterfriends than that!"
"I'm not counting on friendship in this!" he retorted.
"But it might have been better, even in this!" she said. And the artfullook of pity on her face angered him.
"Well, we'll begin on something nearer home!" he cried.
He reached down into his pocket and produced a small tinted oblong ofpaper. He held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger, so thatshe could read it.
"This Steinert check'll do the trick. Take a closer look at thesignature. Do you get it?"
"What about it?" she asked, without a tremor.
He restored the check to his wallet and the wallet to his pocket. Shewould find it impossible to outdo him in the matter of impassivity.
"I may or I may not know who forged that check. I don't _want_ to know.And when you tell me where Binhart is, I _won't_ know."
"That check wasn't forged," contended the quiet-eyed woman.
"Steinert will swear it was," declared the Second Deputy.
She sat without speaking, apparently in deep study. Her intent faceshowed no fear, no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any kind.
"You've got 'o face it," said Blake, sitting back and waiting for her tospeak. His attitude was that of a physician at a bedside, awaiting theprescribed opiate to produce its prescribed effect.
"Will I be dragged into this case, in any way, if Binhart is rounded up?"the woman finally asked.
"Not once," he asserted.
"You promise me that?"
"Of course," answered the Second Deputy.
"And you'll let me alone on--on the other things?" she calmly exacted.
"Yes," he promptly acknowledged. "I'll see that you're let alone."
Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then shedropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation.
"Binhart's in Montreal," she said.
Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on.
"He's been in Montreal for weeks now. You'll find him at 381 King EdwardAvenue, in Westmount. He's there, posing as an expert accountant."
She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash of indecision. So shereached quietly down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging through itscontents for a moment or two. Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.
"You know his writing?" she asked.
"I've seen enough of it," he retorted, as he examined the typewrittenenvelope postmarked "Montreal, Que." Then he drew out the inner sheet. Onit, written by pen, he read the message: "Come to 381 King Edward whenthe coast is clear," and below this the initials "C. B."
Blake, with the writing still before his eyes, opened a desk drawer andtook out a large reading-glass. Through the lens of this he again studiedthe inscription, word by word. Then he turned to the office 'phone on hisdesk.
"Nolan," he said into the receiver, "I want to know if there's a KingEdward Avenue in Montreal."
He sat there waiting, still regarding the handwriting with stolidlyreproving eyes. There was no doubt of its authenticity. He would haveknown it at a glance.
"Yes, sir," came the answer over the wire. "It's one of the newer avenuesin Westmount."
Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the receiver. The woman facinghim did not seem to resent his possible imputation of dishonesty. To besuspicious of all with whom he came in contact was imposed on him by hisprofession. He was compelled to watch even his associates, his operativesand underlings, his friends as well as his enemies. Life, with him, was a_concerto_ of skepticisms.
She was able to watch him, without emotion, as he again bent forward,took up the 'phone receiver, and this time spoke apparently to anotheroffice.
"I want you to wire Teal to get a man out to cover 381 King EdwardAvenue, in Montreal. Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man out thereinside of an hour, and put a night watch on until I relieve 'em."
Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short message ona form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. Hecarefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.
"Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away," he said to theattendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair, with athroaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at the woman withunseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrust deep in hispockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as though assenting tosome unuttered question.
"Elsie, you're all right," he acknowledged with his solemn andunimaginative impassivity. "You're all right."
Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He wasstill a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard himas the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.
"You've helped me out of a hole," he acknowledged as he faced herinterrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. "I'm mighty glad you've doneit, Elsie--for your sake as well as mine."
"What hole?" asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There wasneither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something in herbearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted strangelywith the gruffness of the Second Deputy's voice as he answered her.
"Oh, they think I'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They've got theidea I'm out o' date. And I'm going to show 'em a thing or two to wake'em up."
"How?" asked the woman.
"By doing what their whole kid-glove gang haven't been able to do," heavowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptlyrelaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from hiskennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment thatBlake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk endthe watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It wasas though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She acceptedthe movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair andquietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil shestood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked athim with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that hasbeen pointed out to them as historic.
"You didn't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as shepaused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.
"D'you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made afinal and lingering study of it.
"I'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her eyes,he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to herpocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that smallscrap of paper.
Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguelydisturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasonsfor taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at anytime actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of caringfor anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the time when somuch might have depended on its answer.
The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed itshut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the other.And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph Never-Fail Blakelet his thoughts wander pleasantly back o
ver that long life which (and ofthis he was now comfortably conscious) his next official move was aboutto redeem.