The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  “On your own guard, you Gallic Attila. I’m through for the day.” Johnny racked his épée and fished out a handkerchief.

  Still, he progressed. He lost fat, although he had little surplus at the start, gained muscle, and straightened his posture; April commented on it at the end of his first week, before she learned what he’d been about. His reflexes improved rapidly, as they had to if he were to avoid decorating his face and torso with sticking plaster after each session, as he had after the inaugural. He was sore and sprained throughout that opening week, but ten days in he’d begun to acquire the kind of agility and economy of movement he’d only been able to affect onstage, naturally and without thought. Oddly enough, he first became aware of this not while fencing with Anatole, but on the ballroom floor, where a turn with the pretty daughter of a wealthy importer led quickly to her boudoir upstairs, where he could hear the violins still simpering below, and smell the smoke from her father’s cigar in the sitting room of his chamber down the hall, where (she said) he was busy writing an eloquent letter to President Grant on the subject of tariffs. Johnny had never closed a seduction so promptly nor with so little conversation. Throughout that hour, he wondered at England’s obsession with pugilism, when fencing was so much more rewarding. Monsieur Anatole was puzzled, and awkwardly pleased, when at the end of the course his student presented him with a splendid gold Swiss watch engraved with the master’s initials; Valèry scowled.

  Much later, in another hemisphere, Johnny Vermillion would ponder whether he ought to have given him much more. A watch, however beautiful and well-crafted, seemed poor payment for a life even so discreditable as his.

  Allan Pinkerton loved to walk. The wiry fifty-six-year-old’s morning constitutional was the delight of those visitors to Chicago who refused to leave the city until they had caught a glimpse of the internationally famous detective, and the bane of those subordinates who preferred to meet with the chief in the library of a gentlemen’s club downtown, in leather chairs with snifters at their elbows. He conducted these conferences on the trot, swinging his stick and covering several miles of park and macadam without loss of breath. Nine years hence, that walk would end his life, when he would trip, bite through his tongue, and owing to careless treatment develop a fatal infection, making his the only documented case in history of a man having bitten himself to death.

  But in the late spring of 1875, the rugged Scot was in the glory of good health, and Philip Rittenhouse, who had balked at neither the misery of three days aboard the stage aptly christened the Bozeman Bonebreaker nor a week of dysentery brought on by the chicken and dumplings served at Ma Smalley’s boardinghouse in Omaha, found himself hard-pressed to keep up with his superior. The trek lacked the adventure of life on the border, with a subtext of sadism on the part of its instigator; for the man who coined the phrase “We never sleep” secretly loved to torture those in his employ, including the two who shared his blood. His sons, William and Robert, longed for his decline and their opportunity to remake the agency in their image, with due public obeisance to the old-world individualism of its illustrious founder.

  Rittenhouse lifted his bowler to mop his bald head with a scarlet handkerchief, his only ostentation, and new since his Western sojourn—a sort of personal Order of the Garter for services rendered unto the goddess Justice. Those who called him the Reptile would gawk at the spectacle of his perspiring under any circumstances, including the old man’s dreaded constitutional.

  “I fail to see why you called me out of the office,” said he, “unless the prospect of deadly apoplexy looks better to you than paying my pension.”

  “I ought to dismiss you for that. No one speaks to me so, including my sons. I sometimes wish they would.”

  “They’re in a precarious position. You might decide to leave the agency to the boy who cleans the water closets, and they’ll have to go to work.”

  “That is unjust. William at least is a top-notch detective. I know you’ve had your problems with him, but for my sake you might try to be insincere. I called you out here because I don’t want to embarr-rass you in the hearing of your colleagues. Jim Hume has been after me over Sioux Falls. That was your assignment.”

  “It still is, unless you’ve decided to take it out of my hands. Some cases take time to resolve, in spite of the lesson of those dime novels you write.”

  “Those are case histories. There is a great deal more to the detective business than apprehending criminals. The good will of the public is an invaluable source of unpaid information, and fear of retribution is a deter-r-rent to crime.”

  “Forgive me if I speak outside my station, but if we deter crime, do we not risk putting ourselves out to pasture?”

  “I’m not hosting a debate,” Pinkerton snarled. “Where does the investigation stand at present?”

  “All over. I know from newspaper advertisements that Evelyn and Elizabeth Mort-Davies are performing in California, but if they’re breaking the law, it’s in too small a way to appear in the news columns. Cornelius Ragland seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, but then he was barely here to begin with. John Vermillion and April Clay have vanished also. I suspect they’re in South America, or abroad. They attract attention wherever they go, but the effect is delayed here by the separation of culture and distance. It’s possible the Prairie Rose has disbanded permanently.”

  “If that’s the case, I advise you to swear out a complaint with the authorities in California against the Davieses and have them taken into custody. A rigid fare of bread and water ought to loosen the Major’s tongue at least, if he’s as fat as you say.”

  “He may know nothing of the others’ whereabouts; in which case the publicity of the arrest will drive the rest deeper underground. I said it’s possible they’ve split up for good. Such a move upon our part would make it a certainty.”

  “Suggest an alternative.”

  “The theatrical season begins again in the fall. We have crimes enough to occupy us until then. Ace-in-the-Hole and Turkey Creek struck within a few miles of each other in Wyoming Territory just last month.”

  “Each sustained a casualty, our confidential informants told me. Their luck has turned.”

  Rittenhouse was surprised. “I wasn’t aware we had informants there.”

  “If I reported them to everyone in the agency, they wouldn’t be confidential for long. We’ll have ever-ry last man rounded up in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile the Davieses may slip through our fingers. Swear out that complaint.”

  They’d stopped to let a streetcar pass. Rittenhouse wiped off his scalp again and used the handkerchief on the sweatband inside the crown of his hat. Then he put it back on, reveling in the cool touch of the leather against his skin.

  “Suppose we leave the authorities out of it for now and I investigate them in person,” he said.

  “Your last foray into the field was not a resounding success.”

  “I disagree. Before I made it, we thought a lone bandit had stuck up the Wells, Fargo office in Sioux Falls. Now we know the names of all the accomplices and have connected them with at least five other robberies, including one we didn’t know about in St. Louis, which I suspect was their first. Thanks to reviews and advertising and my interviews, we know a good deal more about them than we do about Ace and Turkey Creek, not counting what you’ve heard from your phantom informants. Theirs may be the first criminal enterprise in history to employ the techniques of a press agent.”

  The streetcar had moved on, but the strollers had not. Pinkerton turned to study him. “What could you learn from the Davieses that sworn law enforcement could not?”

  “Nothing, perhaps. Everything, possibly; but only if I went inside.”

  “Undercover?” The old man made an explosive noise, which for him was laughter. “Will you juggle, or sing opera, or teach a bear to dance?”

  “Now would be an opportune time to inform you that my father was a theatrical booking agent on the vaudeville circuit. He represented people
who did all those things and more, and I ran his errands until age fifteen. If you’ll stake me to an office in Portsmouth Square and a couple of hundred for advertising and promotion, I’ll manage the rest.”

  The voyage home was gentler than the one out. The sun was strong on the top deck, the motion of the waves soporific. In adjoining deck chairs, April half dozed over a book while Johnny sipped gin and bitters, a taste he’d acquired in London. A gull perched on the railing looking for crumbs and, detecting none, took its leave, flapping indignantly. The sound awakened April, who sighed and found her place on the page. Johnny peeped at the title stamped in gold leaf on the spine: La Vie de Jeanne D’Arc. “Research?”

  She started a little and looked at him as if she’d forgotten he was aboard. “Mm-hm.” She resumed reading.

  “If the ship’s library has Shakespeare, you might want to give Anne Page a look. Remember, we’re opening with The Merry Wives.”

  “Mm-hm.” She turned a page.

  “The Major will quite enjoy playing Falstaff, don’t you agree?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  He drained his glass and caught the eye of a steward, who came over for it. Johnny ordered another. The steward asked Mrs. Mc-Near if she cared for anything.

  “No, thank you.”

  When they were alone again, Johnny turned onto his hip. “If you’re disappointed about Rome, I’ll make it up to you in New York: a suite at the Astor, dinner at Delmonico’s. I understand Verdi has a new opera opening on Broadway. That’s at least a taste of Italy.”

  She said nothing, reading.

  He reached over and tipped her book forward. “Your French isn’t that good, dear. You’ve said more to the steward than you have to me. Is it Rome?”

  She placed the attached ribbon between the pages and closed the book. “I don’t give two snaps for Rome. That was your idea. Johnny, have you never thought of retiring?”

  “From the theater? I’m only thirty-one.”

  “You’re barely in the theater, but you could be in it a great deal more. Denver is not so snobbish as St. Louis. If we played there three weeks, we could make as much as we took from any safe, and we’d not have to worry about arrest, or such horrible creatures as that fellow who assaulted Lizzie and ran us out of the country.”

  “Perhaps. And where then? Someplace like Tannery, at fifty cents a head and all the hump steak we can stomach? You’re letting a few complimentary notices turn your head. We’re far more successful desperadoes than thespians.”

  “We could be better if we kept to it. If we spent as much time rehearsing Corny’s plays as we do preparing to commit felonies, we could put the Booths to shame. As it is we have some talent and only adequate skill.”

  “Bravado, certainly, and most of that onstage. You mustn’t be discouraged by a couple of minor setbacks. Look at those guerrillas the Jameses and Youngers, hunted in every corner of the land. The Pinkertons and the railroad detectives don’t even know we exist. Anyway, you knew the risks when you threw in with me.”

  She turned upon him the full force of her eyes. “We could be Mr. and Mrs. John McNear in truth. That’s your real name, after all. You must have realized by now how fond I am of you.”

  “My father had a buggy horse he was fond of. That didn’t stop him from having it shot when it broke a leg.”

  “Why must you bring your father into every serious conversation? He’s dead, dead, dead!”

  It was only the second time in their acquaintance he’d known her to display so much emotion without an audience looking on.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “I wish—” He broke off.

  “What do you wish?” she whispered, touching his arm. He felt an electric crackle: St. Elmo’s Fire, not uncommon in open seas.

  “I wish I were actor enough to know when you were performing.”

  Her expression did not change so much as congeal into something he could not hope to penetrate. She withdrew her hand.

  “Well, we don’t dock for a week. We’ll discuss this again.” She opened her book and returned to Joan of Arc.

  The steward cleared his throat. It was Johnny’s first intimation he’d returned from the bar. He turned back and accepted his drink.

  “Lifeboat drill in fifteen minutes, sir. Will you be participating?”

  Johnny squinted up at him. The sun was at his back. “Do they actually lower the boats into the water during the drill?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In that case, the answer is no.”

  “Very good, sir.” The steward bowed and left.

  IV

  The

  Final Section

  15

  In June 1875, the nation—or at least that part of it not engrossed by the scandals of the Grant Administration, or preparations for the American Centennial celebration to take place in Philadelphia a year later, or the surrender to U.S. forces by the Comanches at Fort Sill, or in converting to Christian Science after reading Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, or following The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—thrilled to sensational accounts in the press of the destruction of one of the West’s most notorious outlaw bands in the sleepy hamlet of Spanish Trot, Colorado Territory.

  The James and Younger brothers were still at large, and would continue to commit depredations to the entertainment of Eastern readers weary of the dismantlement of the Tweed Ring in New York City for another year, when a similarly spectacular end awaited them in Minnesota. It was not them, then, who completed their bloody cycle in Spanish Trot, nor the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang; but the Turkey Creek Outfit, who would fade from history in the shade of Northfield, Little Big Horn, and the assassination of Wild Bill Hickok, all in 1876. (“I see no mystery in that,” Bernard DeVoto would comment, two generations later. “Spanish Ridge, yes; perhaps even Spanish Fly. But Spanish Trot? I think I had a touch of it in Juarez.”) There is no accounting for the choices made by posterity, as witness the inexplicably enduring legend of Billy the Kid, who in his only surviving photograph looks like the offspring of an incestuous relationship in the Appalachins, wearing a silly hat.

  For a season, however, Turkey Creek in extremis offered all the active ingredients necessary to create an American myth: a daring daylight raid on a bank, the murder of an employee who in confusion transposed two digits in the combination of the vault, and a headlong plunge by the gang out the front door into a maelstrom of lead supplied by a determined citizens’ committee that had been anticipating the visit for weeks. Interestingly, the information had come courtesy of the same gang member who had lost three fingers to a premature explosion of dynamite during the assault on the Santa Fe Railroad near Bitter Creek, Wyoming Territory, one month before, and who at the time of the bank disaster was recovering from his injury in Cheyenne. George Adam Cedarcrest, normally a fair hand with a powder charge, was an operative in the employ of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. According to conventional wisdom, his conflict of interest had played an important part in his carelessness on that occasion. It also spared him his life, as Allan Pinkerton had turned over his intelligence to the local authorities to avoid tying up his agents for an indefinite period, and citizens’ committees were not known to discriminate between friend and felon in the heat of fire.

  Cedarcrest, whose maimed hand, together with his brief fame, had rendered him unsuitable for undercover work, was assigned to the file room in the San Francisco office, where he stayed until his retirement in 1891. Twenty-five years later, he died in the midst of negotiations with Famous Players-Lasky to adapt his self-published memoirs to the screen. The film was never made, and thousands of unsold copies of the book went back to the pulp mill. The rest of Turkey Creek found longer lasting recognition of a sort in 1974, when Time-Life Books published a picture of their corpses, arranged on planks for purposes of identification in Chicago, in its series on the Old West. The caption referred to them merely as a “bandit gang, ambushed by vigilantes in Colorado.” (Black Jack Brixton, who saw the shot dis
played in the window of a photographer’s studio in New Mexico sometime after the disaster, noted a dirty toe poking out of a torn stocking, and laid in a supply of socks. He determined never to embark on another robbery without putting on a fresh pair.)

  The other big story of that quarter, although it failed to inspire exclamatory headlines in the first column, proved more nourishing over the long run, in the form of journalistic speculation on slow news days. The disappearance of the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang, after a busy decade, puzzled authorities and was said to have created tension between Allan Pinkerton and the heads of all his Western field offices, who reported with palms spread that none of the sporadic episodes of rapacity that had taken place since the removal of one of their members from the jail in Table Rock bore their signature, and that nothing useful had been heard from any of the confidential informants they depended upon to keep track of itinerant marauders. A staple of frontier outlawry seemed simply to have floated off into outer space; a most unsatisfying end to an investigation that had claimed years and dollars far in excess of the amount Brixton and his followers had removed from banks, railroads, and express companies going back to the sack of Yale, Kansas, on April 10, 1865, twenty-four hours after the surrender of the Confederacy.

  Pinkerton ordered a relentless search of all the gang’s known haunts, beginning with Denver. An army of grim-faced men in bowlers invaded Nell Dugan’s Wood Palace with mauls and axes, punching holes in suspicious-looking walls, splintering locked doors, and demolishing a pump organ large enough to conceal a man behind its front panels, which it did not. Nell and her ladies of easy reputation followed the agents from room to room, slashing at their cigar smoke with Chinese fans, derogating their efforts in language colorful and cutting, and energetically attempting to seduce them away from their mission, with some success; three of the searchers did not report back to the Denver office until the next day, when they were summarily suspended for a month without pay.