The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  Fortunately, conversation was limited to a barter system of smoking materials and flasks of paint-strip whiskey, and one lively auction over a paperbound novel, filthy and tattered, begun by an entrepreneurial fellow who wore a bandanna over one side of his face, ruined by grapeshot on some forgotten field; boredom was the overpowering complaint on that endless trek. The story—The Prairie Rose, or A Maiden’s Journey Among Savages—eventually sold for two cents and a half-consumed plug of Levi Garrett’s. Johnny admired the title.

  In St. Louis, he spent his stake on a shave, a bath, laundering, a press, and a room above a printing shop on Pike Street. A wallet lifted in bustling pedestrian traffic yielded a slim bounty, from which he paid his landlord, the printer, to provide him with twenty-five cards printed on good stock:

  J. T. VERMILLION, ESQ.

  The Prairie Rose Repertory Company

  The printer fingered the notepaper upon which the order was written. “What about an address?”

  “I hope for better quarters presently.”

  The first to receive his card was a banker named Argyle, whose name Johnny had read in an advertisement in the Dispatch. Explaining that he had no appointment, the visitor sent the card into his office through Argyle’s private secretary, a thin young man, pale as porcelain, who wore his spectacles on a black ribbon pinned to his waistcoat, and sat down to read Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and wait. At the end of two hours, during which a procession of roseate gentlemen in boiled collars passed in and out through the private door, he was granted an audience of five minutes. He found Argyle, an emblem of the type in white sidewhiskers and a liverish hue, behind a leather-topped desk looking quizzically at his card. Introductions were brief, and Johnny lost no time in placing his proposition before the banker.

  “Young man,” said Argyle, “the theater is an unstable enterprise. This institution—”

  “Pardon the interruption. Are you not related to Walter C. Argyle, the Chicago financier?”

  “Walter was my brother. He is deceased.” The liver went gray around the edges.

  “The same Walter Argyle who threw himself beneath the wheels of the Michigan Central at Union Station in eighteen fifty-nine?”

  “A tragic accident.” He stole another glance at the card. “Vermillion. The Chicago Vermillions?”

  “On my mother’s side, actually. My father was S. A. McNear.”

  There was now no trace of healthy organ meat in the banker’s face. “I—I understood he had no offspring.”

  “That was his conceit. I was a disappointment. However, I apprenticed to him for three months in fifty-nine. Your brother was a valued contributor to the party, right up until his partners learned their own contributions got no closer to the Douglas campaign chest than his office. The money never surfaced. There was talk of an unknown accomplice, but those rumors died out, as they will when there is no foundation. I hope I’m not upsetting you with these unhappy recollections.”

  Peter Argyle was a man with a keen grasp of the realities. It was this instinct that had led him to St. Louis, and to shift his allegiance to the Republican Party a full year before the election of Ulysses S. Grant. Without further conversation—indeed, before the five minutes allotted to the interview had elapsed—he signed and handed the young man a bank draught in the amount of five hundred dollars.

  St. Louis, it developed, was fertile ground for past guilty associations. Johnny was not always successful. He retired from one second-floor office when the man behind the desk rose and offered to propel him through the window, and there was an anxious moment near the levee when the newcomer had reason to be grateful for the rough education he’d received on Blue Island; he blacked the eye of one attacker and scaled a fence to elude his partner. Others were more cooperative; some negotiated. At the end of his first week on the Mississippi, Johnny Vermillion had reason to close old accounts with his late sire and to open the door to a suite of comfortably furnished rooms on Fifth Street. The time had come to begin assembling his troupe.

  Here, as it had in the form of Buntline’s toe, fate prodded him. Struggling against the pedestrian flow on Market Street following a successful interview with a regional vice president of the Santa Fe Railroad, he bumped into a petite lady in a becoming white dress, tipped his hat to her in apology, and fought his way upstream for a hundred yards before he realized a roll of banknotes was missing from his inside breast pocket. The railroad man had paid him in cash. Instantly he reversed directions and gave chase.

  The lady was fast on her feet and graceful, but had shown faulty judgment in her choice of dress; like a marine rescuer fixing on the ripples where a swimmer has gone down, her pursuer kept his eyes on the white vision fluttering in and out among the duns and grays and blacks of business dress, toppling hats and jostling old gentlemen off their canes as he plunged ahead to close the gap. By the time he caught up with her, rounding the corner of Third, he’d lost his own hat, and his hair hung over his eyes. The scream he stifled by clamping his hand over her mouth and pushing her into a doorway was genuine fright. He stuck something into her ribs, or rather the stays that bound them.

  “A knife is a wicked weapon,” he whispered. “You have something that belongs to me.”

  She made a noise full of m’s against his palm. Pinned against the door by his weight, his hand covering the lower half of her face, she was warm, and tense as coiled spring. She glared fire at him from under a white hat with a sweeping brim, the veil pinned up on one side. It was a most becoming hat. He could feel her heart beating clear through him.

  The tension went out of her body all at once. She nodded. He withdrew his hand and turned it palm upward.

  Suddenly he stiffened. The object she drew from the reticule wound by its drawstring around her wrist pressed hard against his abdomen. It made a crisp snick when she thumbed back the hammer.

  “A pistol is a wicked weapon,” she said. “I’ll have yours.”

  He laughed and showed her the harmless card case in his other hand. Stepping back, he opened it and held up a card.

  She read it without taking it. The silver-plated derringer remained in place. “Where is your theater?”

  “All over this great land. Tell me you have not dined.”

  April Clay, neé Klauswidcsz, was the daughter of Polish immigrants, although she insisted her grandmother had belonged to a noble family in St. Petersburg. Her father was a prodigal, and had not been heard from in ten years; her mother had been dead for two. April was currently supporting herself at the Steamboat Theater, assisting a magician billed as Gandolphus the Great, with whom Johnny assumed she had a romantic arrangement, but apparently not a satisfying one financially.

  Johnny could hardly believe his good fortune. Here was a beautiful young woman with stage experience, her own demonstrated talent for sleight of hand, and none of the cumbersome baggage of honesty. If she could act—but what did that signify? She would look comely in ruffles and tights.

  They ordered the sauteed duck at the Planter’s House, with a dessert of roasted peaches served in champagne sauce—his first taste of that delectable libation since the day of his father’s funeral, and a harbinger of change. By the time the coffee was served, she had agreed to invest half of the money she had separated from Johnny into their joint venture, and also to pay the bill, as it had been the only cash he’d had on his person.

  He suggested they seal their partnership in his rooms, over the remaining portion of their bottle of wine. She declined sweetly. Commerce, she explained, was a difficult undertaking without the additional complication of a personal relationship. Thus, from the beginning, was set the tone for the association. He saw her to a hansom, and did not realize his card case was missing until he returned to his rooms.

  The next stage of recruitment presented more challenge. They needed character players, capable of comedy and drama, and versatile enough to support a multiplicity of roles. The dignity of age would supply authenticity and gravity, but good he
alth was crucial, to withstand the rigors of travel under often primitive conditions. Add to this the necessary cavalier approach to probity and virtue, and the difficulty increased. During the long days and nights that followed this declaration of their requirements, both Johnny and April wondered, fleetingly, whether honesty weren’t the simplest policy after all, if not strictly the best. It was a passing consideration as noted, gone with the sunrise.

  Separate and in tandem, they haunted the theaters and melodeons of St. Louis, taking in matinees and evening performances and comparing notes afterward. They avoided the popular shows in the bigger theaters, concentrating instead upon the barely respectable houses on the tattered fringes of the entertainment district, with no lines at the box offices and FINAL NIGHT plastered in an indolent diagonal across the performers’ names. This was Desperation Alley, where the weak and defeated straggled behind the herd, to be picked off by predators. It was also, unfortunately, a burial ground for the hack, the charlatan, and that pathetic breed of entertainer that should have never been allowed closer to the proscenium arch than the third row of the orchestra. The pair endured more banana-handed jugglers, broken-arched dancers, tone-deaf singers, overcautious acrobats, and harelipped elocutionists in one six-block area than in all the theaters of the East; April confided that she’d have put them all out of their misery (and hers) if her little Remington only had the range.

  Success came to them both simultaneously—or almost.

  Johnny sat through a dreary afternoon bill at the Empress, a cramped collar box of a music hall that had survived the riverfront fire of 1849, and still smelled of char, as well as generations of cooked cabbage; tearing his programme into a string of paper dolls to keep himself from screaming profanities at the abominations onstage. With two acts remaining, he’d reached the end of his patience and got up to leave, only to be arrested at the door by a series of perfectly round vowels projected from behind the footlights. He turned around and watched a corpulent old fellow, in full dress with top hat and the scarlet sash of a dignitary, proclaiming his passion for a woman taller than himself and straight as a plumb, dressed in the simple gray of a mature maidservant with a white apron. The placard on the easel downstage right was redundant to the action: THE DIPLOMAT DEPOSES. The woman waited, hands folded before her apron, until he finished—and declined his proposal of marriage, wringing a collective gasp from the scattered audience, and general applause as the curtain rang down on the old gentleman with head hung low.

  The performance impressed Johnny less than the response from the orchestra; he found it mannered and laughable, as was its subject. The Diplomat Deposes had been around for years, an old dependable harness horse of the stage. His own school turn in Dr. Faustus had followed the one-act piece, and he had sat through three hideous versions in the last ten days alone. That a pair of actors whose best years were demonstrably behind them—he reckoned their combined age would stretch back to the Revolution—should manage to wring such a reaction from so jaded a gallery was remarkable. That their position near the bottom of a fifth-rate bill in a tenth-rate theater placed them in straits he considered approachable was encouraging. As a stagehand shunted the placard to the back, exposing the next and last, Johnny made haste to record the two names in his leather notebook.

  Ablaze with his discovery, he was exasperated not to be able to find April. The old dragon who stood sentry in the lobby of the women’s hotel where she lodged reported that she’d been out all day. Their preferred table at the Planter’s House, where they met regularly to commisserate, was occupied by a middle-aged German couple with faces as sour as braten. He decided that April was scouting an evening performance, but could find no mention of where in his notes. He returned to his rooms and paced the floor until the hour when the theaters let out.

  Back at the Planter’s, he drank a quick brandy and ordered another. It had not yet arrived when April swept in, ravishing in green satin, her cheeks afire with excitement. She was seated opposite him before he had time to rise. They both started speaking at once; stopped, laughed distractedly, and started again: “I’ve found what we’ve been seeking.”

  Johnny played the gentleman and sat back to hear her out. She’d been talking less than a minute when he lunged forward and grasped her wrists, cutting off both her circulation and her narrative. “Don’t tell me their names,” he said. “I shall guess. Major Evelyn Davies and Mme. Elizabeth Mort-Davies.”

  Nothing in their association, including accosting her on the street and threatening her with a knife, ever so astounded her in his presence. Her mouth formed an adorable crimson O and her unforgettable eyes widened to their full extent. He struck a mental photograph of the expression, and was loath to dispel it with an explanation; but theirs was a professional enterprise, with no place for egoism outside of costume. Through an oversight, Johnny and April had duplicated each other’s effort, attending both the matinee and evening performances of The Diplomat Deposes. It was proof of the unity of their vision that both had recognized the object of their goal when it presented itself.

  Ambuscaded at the stage door following the next day’s matinee, the Major and the Madame were sufficiently motivated by the beauty and charm of their admirers to join them for supper. Once again, dessert—pears this time, pan-fried and drizzled with maple syrup shipped at fabulous expense from New England—worked its magic. The Major, who claimed service with Queen Victoria’s horse guards before the Call drew him to the London stage, was hesitant in regard to the larceny, as his knowledge of law enforcement was based upon the compact efficiency of Scotland Yard, but by that time it was clear he was not the one who made the decisions in that union. Mme. Mort-Davies quizzed them closely concerning practical details. She’d been an acrobat and high-wire artist until age alone had directed her into spectacles less demanding physically, and she was far more interested in mechanics than risk. Accord was reached, and of morality no mention was made. Exchanging observations later in private, Johnny and April agreed that the Davieses’ account of their years on the circuit had been edited to remove a veritable cross-country crime wave of petty proportions.

  She lifted her glass. “To the Prairie Rose.”

  He shook his head. “That would be premature, and bad luck. We still need a second lead: a Tybalt. The prospect of Major Davies bounding about with a foil would provide comic relief where none is required, to say nothing of its effect upon the boards. We must appear to be legitimate.”

  “Oh, dear. More auditions.”

  “Take heart. Now that we’re four, we each need attend half as many.”

  Fate spared them even that ordeal. The next morning Johnny, deeply regretting last night’s overindulgence, stumbled out of bed in his nightshirt to answer the door and found himself facing a physical manifestation of his own fragile condition. The young man on the landing was a half inch shorter, disregarding his stoop, and underweight; sunlight seemed to shine through him as if he were made of bone china. His ears stuck out from his cropped head and a black ribbon dangled from his wire spectacles.

  “Mr. Vermillion, my name is Cornelius Ragland. We’ve met.”

  “I think you’re mistaken.” Johnny was on his guard. This fellow in his shabby suit, holding a shabby hat before him in both hands, bore all the marks of an extortionist, with his guilty evidence stuffed inside the even shabbier leather portfolio pinned under his left arm. Perhaps he’d been betrayed before he’d even begun.

  “I am Peter Argyle’s private secretary. I showed you into his office some weeks ago.”

  Johnny was certain now of his suspicions. He did not remember the fellow, but Cornelius Ragland appeared easy to forget even when he was standing in front of one. Argyle had been the Prairie Rose’s first reluctant investor; perhaps he’d left his transom open during their transaction, and here came his secretary to turn the tables. He did not represent Argyle. The banker had gotten off easy at five hundred dollars. He stood to lose far more by exposing their arrangement.

 
Abashed by Johnny’s silence, the visitor stammered ahead. “I—I couldn’t help but remember your card said you were with a theatrical company. I’ve been asking around for you ever since that day. Your address wasn’t on the card.”

  He drew the portfolio from under his arm, dropping his hat in the process. There was some funny stage business during which he dropped one, then the other in trying to retrieve it. Johnny wondered if he ought to crack the fellow on the head with a water pitcher while he was bent and search his case. Perhaps it contained Argyle’s canceled bank draught.

  He was muzzy-headed, however, and did not act. Upright again, Ragland untied the portfolio and sorted through the mass of foolscap inside. “Here is Sleepy Hollow, and The Count of Monte Cristo, and two of Dickens’, abridged of course. A full staging would consume several hours.”

  “What are Sleepy Hollow and The Count of Monte Cristo? What manner of game are you playing, Mr. Ragman?”

  “Ragland.” Red spots burned on the stranger’s cheeks. Johnny guessed he was consumptive. “They’re adaptations, Mr. Vermillion. Stage plays, based on great novels. I’m a playwright.”

  “I thought you were a secretary.”

  “That’s temporary. I—I’ve heard that repertory players are always in need of material. I thought—perhaps—” He muttered something apologetic and turned to leave. The tips of his ears had turned as red as his cheeks. He’d mistaken stunned relief for rejection.

  “One moment, Mr. Ragland.”

  The young man turned back swiftly, nearly losing his hold on his bundle of loose pages. He let his hat fall in order to grasp the case with both hands. Johnny’s misery fled before an urge to laugh. Ragland amused him to the bone.

  “We’re a small troupe. We ask everyone to pull a deal more than his own weight. If—and I mean if according to Mr. Webster’s definition of the word—if we decide to use your scribblings and employ you to scribble more, we will expect you to perform other duties as well.”