Keeban (Little, Brown and Company)/Chapter 12
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 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.
Think of the time it took me to identify Cleopatra, whom I'd made my chief companion that night.
Now she meant to me, besides what she was herself, a chance for getting into touch again with all that world. I got to thinking particularly of her friend, Magellan, and looking for him in the offing. But if he were about, I didn't recognize him; she spoke to nobody and seemed not to be expecting any one. She just kept on down the boulevard, minding her own business and glancing, as any girl would, into show windows. Then suddenly she stopped, entered a store and, during the six seconds she was in ahead of me, she did an expert disappearing piece. She was gone; absolutely!
I stood and waited; I wandered about but drew a total blank. I taxied down to the Blackstone where she said she was staying. I thought I shouldn't have believed that; yet it was true. There she was registered—at least somebody was registered, "Doris Wellington and maid, Denver."
By a little casual questioning, I made sure it was she; and by my soul I couldn't help liking her the better for it. Not only was she stopping at our best, the Blackstone, but she had her own maid. "Doris Wellington and maid!"
She'd come in that morning from Denver; at least that was what she'd told the hotel. She was checking out to leave for New York by the Century that noon.
The hotel people, knowing me, naturally supposed me her friend. If she heard of my inquiry, I didn't know what she'd suppose, so I asked them not to mention it; and I beat it over to my bank to make ready for contingencies in case it proved true that she was on her way to New York by the Century.
Also I wanted to work up a little knowledge on the counterfeiting game; and I knew just the man to help me. Almost every big bank has its money crank. Old Wally Bailey holds the post at mine. His father founded the place and he has so much stock that, if the others won't make him vice-president, he'll have himself elected chief; so they all vote him vice, unanimously, at every election and put in half their thought between times at keeping him so busy at other ideas that he can't gum up the banking game by having any time for business.
They thank God over there whenever a well-raised check drifts in; they rush it right around to Wally for it'll make him forget to insult customers for a whole day at a time. A good forgery sometimes saves the other officers from practically all argument with Wally for a week; while if they can just get a good counterfeiting job to occupy him,—well, they hardly dare pray for good luck like that.
Everything was humming so and borrowers were looking so relieved when I wandered in that I knew Wally was happily engaged; and soon somebody told me the good news. Fresh and unusually deceptive counterfeit bank notes were in circulation. Wally wasn't at his desk; he was in the Directors' Room which he had to himself, and all that the others had to do to keep him harmless was to send him the new Federal Reserve notes as they were pushed into the tellers' windows.
I found him with a catch of seven bad ones already this morning, and the banking day yet was young; five twenties, he had on the table before him, and two fifties. He greeted me with a happy glint in his eyes and shoved the secret service circular at me.
"Read that first"; so I read.
"Twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Note on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; check letter 'A' plate No. 121; Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury; John Burke, Treasurer of the United States; portrait of Cleveland.
"This counterfeit is a steel-plate production, with the exception of numbering, and is a particularly close and excellent piece of work; even the scrollwork of the borders is uniform and good. The numbering is clean and clear, and appears to have been done serially, as no two notes yet received bear the same number. It is printed on special paper which when flat closely resembles the genuine, but is too brittle when creased.
"The face of the bill is unusually deceptive, the seal and numbering being particularly good; the faults in the portrait are actually microscopic, consisting in a slight broadening of portrait of Cleveland; the texture of the paper, however, together with the frequent bunching of the silk fiber inserted, should detect this counterfeit."
Wally ecstatically brandished one of his twenties beside one of the fifties before me.
"They haven't got out the circular on the fifty yet; they just 'phoned round about it this morning; and I've these two already. Made by the same gang, you see. Same good seal and numbering; printed on the same paper; and also a steel-plate job. One of the old masters did that, Steve; spent weeks and weeks engraving that plate to make that reproduction. He's none of your modern, lazy, loafing photo-engravers running off notes on a hand press. That's a Janvier job, I know. A Chicago job, or a western job, anyway. I told Cantrell yesterday. But he still thinks it's a New York piece of work because the notes appeared down there first. The photoengraved jobs are done down there; but not pure art like this, I told him. Broadway can't produce it; look here." And he picked up a couple of fifty-dollar Federal Reserve notes and went on with his talk.
Up to that moment, money had just been money to me; of course I'd noticed, especially since the Federal Reserve notes began coming out, we'd been developing different varieties; and I was aware that each style had figures of its own and that some one—usually a particularly rotten penman—took it upon himself to sign each issue; also I had observed, as a matter of course, that our money ran to pictures of presidents, each labelled so you'd know him, and on the other side they printed unlabelled but occasionally exciting little scenes in green like the landing of Columbus or the wreck of the Hesperus. But the fine points of the art work had escaped me.
Now it appeared that the government hired expert engravers, not only for esthetic purposes but to make counterfeiting harder. Each issue was printed from steel plates, specially engraved and most particularly guarded. The paper also was specially made by secret process. Now, many years ago, occasionally a real artist and a patient and conscientious workman turned counterfeiter and cut a steel plate as good as the government's, and then, if he had a fair paper to print on and good ink, he gave the secret service a lot of trouble.
"Janvier, some of whose fine work was still in circulation when I started with the bank, was by all odds the best of these," Wally told me. "The secret service had got him about a year earlier; but his souvenirs were still coming in. His paper betrayed him; he couldn't make that; he had to use the best he could get and imitate the silk shred lines with colored ink; but his plates were almost perfect—even to the scroll work of the borders, which the government makes by special lathes; his seals and numbers were perfect, even under the microscope; and his portraiture wonderful. He served ten years and then got out and put another series of gold notes in circulation, almost a thousand twenties in spite of being watched, before they got him again for ten more years, at the end of which he engraved the famous 'living Cleveland' plate from which the big counterfeit issue of 1912 was printed.
"He was watched, of course; so he couldn't do the printing; he had to give the plate to others who got better paper but not good enough; and the government got them all. That trial was famous, Stephen; you must have read about it."
I shook my head regretfully; I was interested in football in those days. So Wally told me:
"The government could not connect Janvier with the printing of the money but accused him of making the plates. Janvier offered no defence; he knew the secret service had him, but his attorneys put up the claim that the plates hadn't been counterfeited at all; they claimed that the printers used government plates which had been stolen!"
"Wait now!" I asked Wally, an old headline with a picture trickling through my memory along with Brickley's drop-kick scores, "I did read that. Janvier—if that was his name—jumped up in the witness stand at that and stopped the lawyer; he said he didn't mind going back to jail but he'd be damned if he'd see his own work classed with government plates. When he engraved a portrait of a president, he made him look as if he had once lived instead of" my memory gave way just then so Wally finished for me:
"Instead of like a death mask with the eyes pried open. That was Janvier; so they sent him back to the Federal prison where they kept him till two years ago, when he went blind; they operated on him but couldn't help him; and, considering him harmless, released him. But he must have got back his sight; anybody can see that. Why? For nine years what have we had in the way of counterfeiting? Clumsy, photo-engravers' jobs. Some ordinary, dull dub takes a camera and photographs a government bill, makes a half-tone and smears it with green ink and runs off a batch of bills so coarse and blurred, compared to engraving from a cut-steel plate, that a child can spot it. That's the modern way; easy enough, but they're lucky to get a thousand dollars into circulation before the secret service has them behind bars. But here comes back a regular 'old master,' I say; looks like he's a quarter million passed already; and he's Janvier, if he did lose his sight two years ago. Cantrell doesn't think so; he thinks it's a new hand."
"Who's Cantrell?" I asked.
"He's a secret service expert working here on this particular job."
It was about ten minutes after this, while I was still there, looking and listening, that a girl, who proved to be Wally's private secretary, broke the monotony of the clerks bringing in bad twenties and fifties.
"Hello, Miss Lane," said Wally. "What have you?"
"Doctor Lathrom, sir," reported Miss Lane, glancing at a card in her hand.
"Lathrom, the big eye surgeon, Steve," whispered Wally to me. "I've had Miss Lane calling on the eye people since yesterday noon. Go on, Miss Lane."
"He operated in August of last year on a short, stocky man, French or Austrian, of about sixty-five, he thought, who gave the name of Gans and who was almost totally blind from double cataract which had been previously operated upon unsuccessfully. Doctor Lathrom restored his sight. I showed the doctor the picture of Janvier among six other pictures. He picked out Janvier's."
Wally struck his hands together. "I told Cantrell so. I told him it was another Janvier job; and that Janvier was in Chicago, too. He always cut his plates in Chicago. He couldn't work in the east."
"Does the doctor happen to remember anybody who might have been with this Gans?" I asked Miss Lane.
"Yes, sir. Not only Gans impressed the doctor, but his daughter, also. Since Gans was blind when Doctor Lathrom first saw him, she brought him to the doctor and made all the original arrangements. She was about twenty—he thinks; he remembers her for unusually attractive, of the active type. Dark hair; pert nose, he particularly recalled."
Wally wasn't paying any attention to this; he already had what he wanted and he was chatting on about the superior artistic inspiration of Chicago over Manhattan, even in counterfeiting.
"I told Cantrell it was a Chicago job on the plates, anyway; New York is a photo-engravers' town; an artist like Janvier couldn't cut a plate like that within five hundred miles of Broadway. He'd smear it, if he tried to. Maybe they printed in the east; or made the paper, there; probably did."
He was waiting for the switchboard operator to get a connection with the secret service so he could scream his news at them.
If he had learned what he wanted, I had, too. It was perfectly plain to me, of course, that my partner Cleopatra—Doris Wellington, with maid, from Denver—was this daughter of Janvier, engraver of government notes without the government's coöperation. Her bit in the business was—to employ the convenient phrase of the Flamingo Feather—to blow out the bad dough, to shove "the queer."
You may gather that this realization did not come exactly as a shock to me; in fact, I felt rather a relief. Participation in that affair at the Flamingo Feather might imply so many customs worse than the mere personal issue of money that I drifted back to the Blackstone with cheer. What I'd found about her family certainly might have been a lot worse; yes, a whole lot. She'd stuck with her father, evidently. I liked that.
"Miss Wellington," they called her at the hotel; that meant if Magellan or any other young man were about, he was keeping his distance. Miss Wellington proved to be in; she sent her maid down from her room to fetch her mail. The maid, who was as French-looking and demure as anybody's, went back and forth from the elevator with eyes down. She mailed a letter, which I didn't see, and obtained an envelope which bore the address of "The Antlers," Colorado Springs.
A guest hailed her. "Felice" he called her in Londonish tone. Obviously he was an Englishman; you might put him down as a polo player off his pony and in morning attire. He had on one of those pearl-gray velours from "Scott's," hatters to H. M. the King, Piccadilly and Old Bond Street. A genuine, that was; no counterfeit. I knew a bit about hats. His cutaway and shoes were from Piccadilly, too—from tailor and booter to H. M the King, also, or at least to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales. His manners were from the Mall. Apparently he was just arrived to meet Miss Wellington, having heard she'd dropped in from "The Springs." But I knew him; he had been the mariner at the ball who'd impressed me as being too light to class as Columbus. He was Magellan.
After he'd sent Felice up with the news he was here, he dallied before the elevators till Doris came down. She'd just left a mirror, evidently; smartness and style couldn't commence to suggest her. She was a stunner.
"George" she called him; and he called her "Doris"; and he led her into the main dining room for luncheon, taking a table at a window directly over the Avenue. I sat down alone a few tables away. It was nearly twelve; and they went at luncheon lightly,—cold lobster, mainly, I took the same and, to that extent, mingled. I didn't like George; not at all. I liked him even less than Magellan. He had a proprietorish way with him which was more irritating now that he was sober and out of costume.
She didn't exactly play up to him; she was polite, registering interest in what he said, watching the parade of motor cars and pedestrians below their window. Have I said it was a clear, chilly, pleasant winter day?
They never even so much as glanced idly toward the door through which Cantrell and his government men might come. They seemed to think nothing of that at all, and if either of them gave me a thought, neither showed it. I heard Doris, in her clear, quick, amused voice, telling to George how she had discovered a counterfeit twenty in her change at Caldon's.
They finished and George paid the check. I finished and followed them into the lobby in time to see Felice meeting Miss Wellington with a receipted bill for their accommodations. Appeared also handbags and a couple of small semi-trunks, semi suit cases of the "week-end box" variety. Porters piled the luggage in front of a taxi.
It became evident that George, having joined the party, was going right along. He got into the taxi after Doris and Felice. "Century" he said to the driver.
The taxis are thick about the Blackstone just before train-time for the Century to New York. I got a man without the least difficulty. "Century, sir?" he said.
"If that car goes there," I told him. "If it doesn't, follow it."