The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 4
IV
THE unpretentious, brownstone-fronted home of Deputy Copeland was visited, late that night, by a woman. She was dressed in black, and heavily veiled. She walked with the stoop of a sorrowful and middle-aged widow.
She came in a taxicab, which she dismissed at the corner. From the house steps she looked first eastward and then westward, as though to make sure she was not being followed. Then she rang the bell.
She gave no name; yet she was at once admitted. Her visit, in fact, seemed to be expected, for without hesitation she was ushered upstairs and into the library of the First Deputy.
He was waiting for her in a room more intimate, more personal, more companionably crowded than his office, for the simple reason that it was not a room of his own fashioning. He stood in the midst of its warm hangings, in fact, as cold and neutral as the marble Diana behind him. He did not even show, as he closed the door and motioned his visitor into a chair, that he had been waiting for her.
The woman, still standing, looked carefully about the room, from side to side, saw that they were alone, made note of the two closed doors, and then with a sigh lifted her black gloved hands and began to remove the widow's cap from her head. She sighed again as she tossed the black crepe on the dark-wooded table beside her. As she sank into the chair the light from the electrolier fell on her shoulders and on the carefully coiled and banded hair, so laboriously built up into a crown that glinted nut-brown above the pale face she turned to the man watching her.
"Well?" she said. And from under her level brows she stared at Copeland, serene in her consciousness of power. It was plain that she neither liked him nor disliked him. It was equally plain that he, too, had his ends remote from her and her being.
"You saw Blake again?" he half asked, half challenged.
"No," she answered.
"Why?"
"I was afraid to."
"Did n't I tell you we 'd take care of your end?"
"I 've had promises like that before. They were n't always remembered."
"But our office never made you that promise before, Miss Verriner."
The woman let her eyes rest on his impassive face.
"That 's true, I admit. But I must also admit I know Jim Blake. We 'd better not come together again, Blake and me, after this week."
She was pulling off her gloves as she spoke. She suddenly threw them down on the table. "There 's just one thing I want to know, and know for certain. I want to know if this is a plant to shoot Blake up?"
The First Deputy smiled. It was not altogether at the mere calmness with which she could suggest such an atrocity.
"Hardly," he said.
"Then what is it?" she demanded.
He was both patient and painstaking with her. His tone was almost paternal in its placativeness.
"It 's merely a phase of departmental business," he answered her. "And we 're anxious to see Blake round up Connie Binhart."
"That 's not true," she answered with neither heat nor resentment, "or you would never have started him off on this blind lead. You 'd never have had me go to him with that King Edward note and had it work out to fit a street in Montreal. You 've got a wooden decoy up there in Canada, and when Blake gets there he 'll be told his man slipped away the day before. Then another decoy will bob up, and Blake will go after that. And when you 've fooled him two or three times he 'll sail back to New York and break me for giving him a false tip."
"Did you give it to him?"
"No, he hammered it out of me. But you knew he was going to do that. That was part of the plant."
She sat studying her thin white hands for several seconds. Then she looked up at the calm-eyed Copeland.
"How are you going to protect me, if Blake comes back? How are you going to keep your promise?"
The First Deputy sat back in his chair and crossed his thin legs.
"Blake will not come back," he announced. She slewed suddenly round on him again.
"Then it is a plant !" she proclaimed.
"You misunderstand me, Miss Verriner. Blake will not come back as an official. There will be changes in the Department, I imagine; changes for the better which even he and his Tammany Hall friends can't stop, by the time he gets back with Binhart."
The woman gave a little hand gesture of impatience.
"But don't you see," she protested, "supposing he gives up Binhart? Supposing he suspects something and hurries back to hold down his place?"
"They call him Never-Fail Blake," commented the unmoved and dry-lipped official. He met her wide stare with his gently satiric smile.
"I see," she finally said, "you 're not going to shoot him up. You 're merely going to wipe him out."
"You are quite wrong there," began the man across the table from her. "Administration changes may happen, and in—"
"In other words, you 're getting Jim Blake out of the way, off on this Binhart trail, while you work him out of the Department."
"No competent officer is ever worked out of this Department," parried the First Deputy.
She sat for a silent and studious moment or two, without looking at Copeland. Then she sighed, with mock plaintiveness. Her wistfulness seemed to leave her doubly dangerous.
"Mr. Copeland, are n't you afraid some one might find it worth while to tip Blake off?" she softly inquired.
"What would you gain?" was his pointed and elliptical interrogation.
She leaned forward in the fulcrum of light, and looked at him soberly.
"What is your idea of me?" she asked.
He looked back at the thick-lashed eyes with their iris rings of deep gray. There was something alert and yet unparticipating in their steady gaze. They held no trace of abashment. They were no longer veiled. There was even something disconcerting in their lucid and level stare.
"I think you are a very intelligent woman," Copeland finally confessed.
"I think I am, too," she retorted. "Although I have n't used that intelligence in the right way. Don't smile! I 'm not going to turn mawkish. I 'm not good. I don't know whether I want to be. But I know one thing: I 've got to keep busy—I 've got to be active. I've got to be!"
"And?" prompted the First Deputy, as she came to a stop.
"We all know, now, exactly where we 're at. We all know what we want, each one of us. We know what Blake wants. We know what you want. And I want something more than I 'm getting, just as you want something more than writing reports and rounding up pushcart peddlers. I want my end, as much as you want yours."
"And?" again prompted the First Deputy.
"I 've got to the end of my ropes; and I want to swing around. It 's no reform bee, mind! It 's not what other women like me think it is. But I can't go on. It does n't lead to anything. It does n't pay. I want to be safe. I 've got to be safe!"
He looked up suddenly, as though a new truth had just struck home with him. For the first time, all that evening, his face was ingenuous.
"I know what 's behind me," went on the woman. "There 's no use digging that up. And there 's no use digging up excuses for it. But there are excuses—good excuses, or I 'd never have gone through what I have, because I feel I was n't made for it. I 'm too big a coward to face what it leads to. I can look ahead and see through things. I can understand too easily." She came to a stop, and sat back, with one white hand on either arm of the chair. "And I 'm afraid to go on. I want to begin over. And I want to begin on the right side!"
He sat pondering just how much of this he could believe. But she disregarded his veiled impassivity.
"I want you to take Picture 3,970 out of the Identification Bureau, the picture and the Bertillon measurements. And then I want you to give me the chance I asked for."
"But that does not rest with me, Miss Verriner!"
"It will rest with you. I could n't stool with my own people here. But Wilkie knows my value. He knows what I can do for the service if I 'm on their side. He could let me begin with the Ellis Island spotting. I could stop that Stockholm white-slave work in two months. And when you see Wilkie to-morrow you can swing me one way or the other!"
Copeland, with his chin on his bony breast, looked up to smile into her intent and staring eyes.
"You are a very clever woman," he said. "And what is more, you know a great deal!"
"I know a great deal!" she slowly repeated, and her steady gaze succeeded in taking the ironic smile out of the corners of his eyes.
"Your knowledge," he said with a deliberation equal to her own, "will prove of great value to you—as an agent with Wilkie."
"That's as you say!" she quietly amended as she rose to her feet. There was no actual threat in her words, just as there was no actual mockery in his. But each was keenly conscious of the wheels that revolved within wheels, of the intricacies through which each was threading a way to certain remote ends. She picked up her black gloves from the desk top. She stood there, waiting.
"You can count on me," he finally said, as he rose from his chair. "I 'll attend to the picture. And I 'll say the right thing to Wilkie!"
"Then let 's shake hands on it!" she quietly concluded. And as they shook hands her gray-irised eyes gazed intently and interrogatively into his.