The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What would they entail?”

  “Have you studied fencing?”

  6

  Cornelius Ragland tested the tensile strength of the Prairie Rose. April Clay was bemused by the naïve, eminently seductible young man who claimed Baltimore as his home, but whose infirmity had prevented him from serving with the Southern Confederacy. Major Davies, who distrusted all things French, including their support of the South, thought him a bad risk. Mme. Mort-Davies, a trouper since her birth in the Gold Ribbon Theater in Atlantic City, saw potential in his guilelessness, but wondered if he had the stamina to withstand a prolonged tour. Johnny Vermillion brushed aside all objections.

  “This conversation is pointless,” he said. “I’ve told him he’s hired.”

  “We don’t even know if he can act,” said April.

  “I don’t know if you can, dear. You’ve all expressed your opinions as artists of the stage, which is an attitude I encourage. However, you’ve overlooked young Mr. Ragland’s principal value to our company of players.”

  “His writing talent?” The Major blew out his moustaches. “A monkey can scribble.”

  “The Diplomat Deposes is evidence of that. I’m not referring to his literary skill.”

  “Certainly not his presence,” said Mme. Mort-Davies. “He is barely there.”

  “That can be manufactured. But you’re right; it isn’t that either.”

  “What, then?” demanded April.

  “He and I are roughly the same height.”

  This announcement was met with the silence of selfrecrimination. With proper coaching, particularly as to posture—identical costumes, and an expert application of makeup, Johnny and Cornelius could stand in for each other onstage while the man the audience thought it was watching stole away to perform elsewhere. In the flurry of rehearsals and arrangements, the troupe leader alone had remained on mission.

  “Mind he doesn’t turn sideways,” grumped the Major. “He’ll vanish into the backdrop.”

  They engaged the tumbledown Empress Theater for their debut. It was located near the levee—a factor of prime importance—and the rental fee agreed with their budget. The purchase of duplicate costumes, and of material for the versatile Mme. Mort-Davies to add certain features to those costumes that could not be duplicated, had strained their resources, to say nothing of the cost of hand properties. These included foils, a brace of duelling pistols, and a Colt revolver large enough to impress patrons in the back row and cashiers at close range. The costumes were Elizabethan. The Major, a superstitious old thespian, held that no successful season had ever begun without a Shakesperean comedy; he would not budge from the position, and so Cornelius Ragland’s original scripts were laid aside in favor of selections from Twelfth Night, scaled down to the size of the company. April squealed in delight. She’d seen Ada Rehan on tour in the role of Viola and since then had worshipped at her shrine.

  “You’ll have more than her measure your first time out,” Johnny said. “I’ll warrant Rehan never played Maria in the same production. You’ll make a fetching sailor as well.”

  He assigned the Major to the role of Sir Toby Belch, with a walk-on as a priest. The Madame—Lizzie, as Johnny made bold to address her—fitted Shakespeare’s description of Oliva quite nicely, and would wear whiskers as Viola’s sea-captain friend. Cornelius, who had no stage experience, was confined to the part of young Sebastian, which would be challenge enough; although he would double for Johnny as Orsino for one brief scene.

  “And who will you play other than Orsino?” April asked.

  “So far as the printed programme is concerned, I shall appear in a variety of undemanding roles apart from the lead, but the programme is a fraud. I shall perform only two.”

  She asked what was the other. He smiled.

  “You won’t find him in the dramatis personae.”

  Rehearsals were intense, and twofold: This troupe must not only block out movements and commit the Bard’s lines to memory, but also practice switching costumes backstage. Many a long night was spent in a swirl of flying fabric until, within seconds, countess became captain, lady fell to maid, knight ordained himself priest, Viola’s brother became her lover. This last transformation was performed with the most ease, as they had managed to procure duplicate costumes for Orsino and Sebastian, and the pair had only to exchange sashes to complete the substitution. With the plume of Johnny’s hat covering half of Cornelius’ face, and with his back turned toward the audience for most of the scene, the illusion was satisfactory. Madame Lizzie, a gifted scold, berated the former secretary to stand straight and dissemble his stoop. She was also a talented seamstress, and with scissors and string had reengineered all the one-of-a-kind costumes so that they came off with a twitch and refastened in a twinkling.

  Bald head streaming, the Major groped in vain for a handkerchief. He’d forgotten he was dressed as a priest and that the cassock had no pockets. “At this point, we could empty five safes during the first performance.”

  “We’ll start with one, during the last,” Johnny said. “We’re virgins, don’t forget.”

  Twelfth Night—An Abridgment opened at the Empress the second week of October 1873, to uninspired reviews from a press that had seen Henry Irving in a full-scale production of the same play. Audiences trickled in, as did water; the sky wept through all six performances, the roof leaked, and at times it seemed more seats were occupied by buckets than people. None of the city papers mentioned the show’s closing, at the end of the Monday matinee. They needed the space to report the daring daylight robbery of the steamboat Czarina Catherine by a lone bandit that afternoon. The vessel had docked at St. Louis to take on fuel and passengers, one of whom, described as a tall man in a long coat with the collar turned up and the brim of his hat turned down, produced a large revolver in the purser’s cabin and demanded the contents of the safe. The purser, alone at the time, complied, and the mysterious stranger left carrying six thousand dollars in a satchel, an amount deposited for the most part by professional gamblers hoping to squeeze one more profitable season out of a mode of transportation made obsolete by the railroads.

  The owner of the Empress, more tidy in his dress and grooming than in his finances, clucked over the Prairie Rose receipts, a disappointing four hundred dollars and change. “You didn’t even make back your investment.”

  Johnny was sanguine. “St. Louisans are overentertained and jaded. I expect a warmer welcome out West, where diversions such as ours are rare. And the weather will be kinder in the dryer reaches.”

  “People starve to death on the plains.”

  “You underestimate our little party. We intend to develop a system for living off the land.”

  You’ve seen it before: a succession of stoked boilers streaking toward the screen, intercut with close-ups of charging wheels and plunging drive rods. On the soundtrack, short cello strokes imitate the chomping of pistons and steam whistles blast from the brass. Depot signs loom at us from the far perspective: KANSAS CITY; OMAHA; SIOUX FALLS; CHEYENNE; SALT LAKE CITY. Quaint old-fashioned broadsheets spin and stop long enough to display headlines: BOLD ROBBERY OF THE FARMERS TRUST (Kansas City Times); LONE BANDIT HOLDS UP STOCK SHOW (Omaha Herald); WELLS, FARGO OFFICE RAIDED (Sioux Falls Journal); CATTLEMAN’S BANK STRUCK BY DESPERADO (Cheyenne Leader); MORMONS FORM VIGILANCE GROUP FOLLOWING OVERLAND OUTRAGE (Deseret News). Solitary figures in big hats and bandannas appear and dissolve, gesticulating with a revolver (can there be just one?). They are tall and short, comically fat and thin as water, substantial and slight. We pan past actors in elaborate costumes making faces, fencing, and soliloquizing, across a row of frightened clerks and cashiers raising their hands, around an auditorium filled with people clapping hands, dissolve to a pair of hands scooping piles of money into gunnysacks and satchels. Stacks of banknotes and gold coins grow before our eyes. Bottles of champagne foam over in the dressing room of some frontier theater—steer horns hung among the generic collage of playbills and atomizers�
�where our little band has gathered to commemorate the success of their inaugural tour. And out.

  We leave them, reluctantly, for another establishing shot of Chicago. This time, the stockyards and slaughterhouses are in place, and a great many more buildings constructed of brick, so we’ll have no more nonsense about great fires. We dolly in toward an imposing edifice of gray stone and a brass plate mounted at eye level, engraved with the omniscient eye of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and this legend:

  PINKERTON NATIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY

  “We Never Sleep”

  Well, you knew it had to make its appearance sometime.

  The window we creep through on this occasion belongs to a small, sparsely furnished office and a man seated behind a desk, industriously clipping an L-shaped hole out of a newspaper with a pair of shears. He places the cutting on a stack to his right, stuffs the rest of the newspaper into a wire wastebasket packed already to bulging, and slides another newspaper off the stack to his left. The only decoration in the room is a portrait, overpoweringly large in a massive gilt frame, of a resolute face with a Quaker beard on a sloping body buttoned tightly into a three-piece suit, glaring over the man’s shoulder from the wall behind the desk. We shall meet him in the flesh presently.

  The man doing the clipping is named Philip Rittenhouse, and he is not popular at Pinkerton headquarters. Numerous times he has made use of his authority to cancel leaves of absence upon short notice, and his humor is of that sarcastic bent that rarely endears. Moreover, he is an ugly man. Absolutely clean-shaven, including his head, he has deep hollows in his temples that throw his brow into prominent relief, pale and gleaming like polished bone. His nose has a predatory hook ending in a barb, and although his teeth are quite good, he bares them only on one side when he smiles, like a dog snarling over its dish. Thick lids sheath his eyes; it is because of these that a departing operative referred to him as “Reptile house.” Those who stayed behind have shortened it to “the Reptile.”

  He has, in fact, only one admirer in all the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and that is Allan Pinkerton himself, the subject of the portrait on Rittenhouse’s wall. For the Reptile is an uncommonly fine detective. Seldom leaving his office, working almost exclusively by wire and through the post, moving his field agents about like pieces on a board, he has broken a coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania and brought to justice sixteen fugitives whose names marred the lead columns of newspapers throughout the United States and its territories for months. This in itself might have attracted the old man’s attention, but not necessarily his affection. That, Rittenhouse has secured by refusing to communicate with the press when a major case is closed, referring all requests for interviews to Mr. Pinkerton or one of his sons. The challenge in the agency is to rise to a level approaching genius without casting a shadow across the face of its legendary founder, and the bald man in the little office has met it to the degree that if one of Mr. Pinkerton’s male offspring developed a dislike for him and demanded his father to choose between them, Rittenhouse himself would not place a wager upon the decision.

  He has contributed significantly to the stack of cuttings, diminished substantially the pile of unmutilated newspapers, and altered the shape of his wastebasket beyond all hope of restoration, when the patriarch of the Pinkerton clan, somewhat grayer than his painted image but if anything more resolute in appearance, opens Rittenhouse’s door and steps inside. He never knocks, and none of the doors in the building contains a lock to bar him from entering its remotest corner.

  Pinkerton observes Rittenhouse’s project. “I’d wondered about that item in your budget: subscr-riptions.” If anything, the old man’s Glasgow burr has increased in prominence during his three decades in America.

  The Reptile’s manner is familiar, but respectful. “You mustn’t be a Scotchman in this. They whisper in my ear from a thousand miles away, and seldom raise their rates. Unlike paid informers.”

  “Rest your eyes from the small print a moment and tell me what you think of this.” Pinkerton draws a square of yellow flimsy from his watch pocket and places it between the stacks on the desk.

  Rittenhouse does not pick up the folded telegram. A man with inexhaustible patience for details, he has none for redundancies. He asks what’s in it.

  “It’s from Mr. Hume, of Wells, Fargo, and Company. He wants us to look into a robbery that took place at a freight office in Dakota Territory last month. The bandit made off with thirteen thousand in gold.” He waits, but no response is forthcoming. “That’s bandit, not bandits. There seems to have been a r-rash of this lone wolf sort of thing out that direction.”

  “Hume is their chief of detectives. Good man. Why does he need our help?”

  “His hands are full with gangs: the James-Youngers and the Reno brothers and this fellow Brixton and his band. Hume’s people are spread thin. That leaves a gr-reat many holes for a one-man crime wave to slip through.”

  “Shall I close them?”

  “Not your usual way, Philip. Stagecoaches are on their way out. This agency’s personnel is committed to the railroads and banks, so there will be none of this broadcasting agents about like seeds just to close one case. One man is responsible, and one man may ferret him out where an army may not. I want you to go to Sioux Falls and handle it personally.”

  “Very well.”

  Pinkerton’s thatched brows twitch upward. “I thought you might offer argument. You’ve been a fixture here since before they laid in the gas.”

  “That’s just it. I haven’t had a holiday in three years. That’s unhealthy.”

  “This is no holiday. Field work is exhausting, to say nothing of dangerous. It is also deadly boring; interviews with uncertain witnesses, dead ends, waiting hours for suspects who never appear. You must have the constitution for it.”

  “I’ve been exhausted and bored right here. A little danger sounds to me a nice tramp. I’ll make arrangements immediately.”

  “Draw what you need from Dorchester downstairs. I want reports by the week and a thorough accounting first of ever-ry month. Stay in boardinghouses wherever possible. I fail to see why a highwayman should take his chances with the Wrath of Pinkerton, when running a hotel allows him to do the same thing with impunity.”

  “Shall I draw a bedroll as well, and sleep out under the stars each night?”

  But Rittenhouse’s superior is impervious to his sting. “Don’t forget to requisition a pistol, though I caution you not to use it. Going into the field does not make you a field man. When you have your evidence and a location, turn them over to the local authorities for apprehension. Mind they give credit to the agency.”

  Following the old man’s departure, the Reptile thinks for a moment about underwear and Pullmans, then makes inventory of the cuttings he’s taken. They are from newspapers in St. Louis, Kansas City, the Tannery Blanket, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Cheyenne, and Salt Lake City; the week-old copy of the Deseret News arrived only that morning. He skims through the dense paragraphs once more, noting names, dates, and other salient material on a writing block in his own encryption, then drums the scraps together and slips them into a pasteboard folder upon which is displayed the Pinkerton Eye and a notation in his own tidy hand: Solitary Thief.

  From those same publications, he’s cut also dramatic reviews calling attention to a series of entertainments presented by a troupe of traveling actors skilled in the special requirements of a small company saddled with large casts of characters. These, too, he reads again, makes notes, and places the cuttings in a second folder labeled Prairie Rose.

  Closing the cover, he lifts his lip on one side to show his teeth. “One man.” He slides the two folders inside a leather briefcase that has seen all its wear so far traveling back and forth between that room and his cold-water flat on South Clark.

  II

  The

  Ace-in-the-Hole

  Gang

  7

  Before we forget Marshal F
letcher of Tannery, wise beyond his weight, let us move in tight on the bulletin board in his office and linger for a moment upon one of the prognathous, razor-challenged faces posted there. It’s a peculiarly savage likeness of a type once epidemic on the covers of Action Western and Flaming Lariat: jaw sheared off square at the base, boot-scraper beard, eyes like dynamiter’s drill holes in granite. The name beneath the pen-and-ink sketch is Black Jack Brixton, and it should come as no surprise that he’s wanted dead or alive. His activities include assault, armed robbery, murder, and burning entire towns to the ground.

  Dissolve to a real face, strikingly identical, in glorious Technicolor on a screen thirty meters wide: Brixton in the flesh, under a gray Stetson stained black with sweat, a blue bandanna creating a hammock for his aggressive Adam’s apple. His expression is intense. He is watching something we are not privileged to see until we cut directly to the explosion.

  In the enormous ball of smoke and fire and dirt, we pick out flying sections of steel rail and shattered oak ties, uprooted trees, and what may be a human body, flung high and flailing its limbs like a piece of shredded licorice before it disappears under a heap of earth and sawdust and pieces of sets left over from previous productions.

  As things clear, we see a locomotive hurtling toward the destruction. The engineer’s face, leaning out of the cab, pulls tense with shock. A sooty fist hauls back on the brake lever. The steel wheels shriek, spraying sparks. The cowcatcher grinds to a halt inches short of the bent and twisted ends of the rails. Steam whooshes out in a sigh of relief.

  “Yahoo!” cries Brixton, smacking his horse on the rump with the ends of his reins and firing his six-gun into the air for added incentive. The animal bolts, leading the charge down the hill.