by Michael Sims
Subsequently, he decided that he had seen Babbing without any make-up, in the private appearance that he reserved for office use among his men. And he was assisted to this conclusion by his knowledge of the adventures of Nick Carter which he read on the street cars, in the subways, on the benches in the waiting room of the telegraph office, or wherever else he had leisure. And it was the influence of these Nick Carter stories that had brought him now to 1056 in his Sunday best, with his hair brushed and his shoes polished, as guiltily excited as a truant, having lied to his mother and absented himself from his work in the wild hope of getting employment—confidential and mysterious employment—in the office of the great Babbing.
He was a rather plump and sturdy youth of sixteen with an innocent brightness of face, brown-eyed, black-haired, not easily abashed and always ready with a smile. It was a dimpled smile, too; and he understood its value. In spite of his boyish ignorance of many things of immediate experience—such as famous detectives, for example—he knew his world and his way about in it; he met the events of his day with a practical understanding; and when he did not understand them he disarmed them with a grin. He was confident that he could get this job in the Babbing Bureau, in competition with any of the “boobs” who were waiting to dispute it with him, unless some one among them had a “pull.” Being an experienced New Yorker, it was the fear of the pull that worried him.
I
Barney, as a telegraph boy, had once been summoned to a dressing room in Daly’s Theatre, by an indignant star who had refused to entrust his message to any but official hands. And he had once been called to a grated office in the Tombs to take a tele gram from a prosperous-looking elderly gentleman in handcuffs. It was chiefly from the memories of these two experiences that Barney constructed his expectation of what he was to find when he should enter the private offices and operatives’ rooms of the Babbing Detective Bureau, to report for duty.
As, for example:—Babbing, in his sanctum, at a make-up table, gumming a false mustache to his lip; his dresser waiting to hand him a wig and a revolver; the room picturesquely hung with costumes and disguises, handcuffs and leg-irons, dodgers that offered rewards for desperate captures (“dead or alive”) and sets of burglar’s tools and the weapons of outlawry—the latter arranged decoratively on the walls after the manner of a collection of trophies.
And Barney’s better judgment accepted that picture from his inebriated young imagination without really knowing that he had accepted it—until he was called from the outer public office of the bureau into Babbing’s private room, and found the famous detective sitting at a table-desk, in a swivel chair, reading his morning mail like the manager of any successful business at work in the office of any successful business manager. “Sit down,” Babbing said, without looking at him.
Barney sat down, against the wall. He was conscious of the stimulating disappointment—the interested surprise in disillusion—that reality gives to the alert romantic mind. So to speak.
The office was as commonplace and average as Babbing’s conventional business clothes. There was nothing on the walls but some framed photographs of office groups. There was no furniture but the desk and the chairs. There was nothing on the desk but telephone instruments, pens and ink, paper-weights, and some shallow wire baskets that were filled with letters, telegrams and typewritten reports. There was, in fact, nothing interesting in the room but Babbing; and Babbing looked as uninteresting and ordinary as the room.
His letters had been opened for him, the pages flattened out, and the envelopes attached to them with paper-clips. His right hand reached a sheet from a wire basket at one side of the desk, and put it on the blotter before him; his left hand held it a moment for his eyes to read it, and then carried it to one of the baskets on the other side of the desk and dropped it automatically in its proper place; his right hand, meanwhile, had produced the next letter. His eyes moved only from sheet to sheet. “Did you tell your mother about the case you were on yesterday?”
“No, sir.”
The left hand passed a letter back to the right. The right hand dropped it in the waste basket. “What did you tell her?”
“I tol’ her I had a new job.”
“As a detective?”
“I was scared to tell her that. She ’d ‘a’ thought it was the same as a policeman.”
“Well?” The left hand pressed a call button. “Suppose she did?”
“She ’d ‘a’ thought I was goin’ to get killed.”
Babbing turned his head to look over his glasses at the boy. “Like your father?”
Barney smiled an apology for the absurdity of mothers. “Yes, sir.” A clerk opened the door. Babbing tossed a letter across the table to him. “Find out who that fellow is. Right away.”
The clerk reported: “Mr. Snider has just come in.” Babbing continued with his reading. The clerk went out, ignored even by Barney—as the commander’s civilian secretary would be ignored by a young uniform.
“So you told her what?”
“I tol’ her I was waitin’ in an office with a tele gram yeste’day, ’n’—They wanted an office boy, ’n’—They offered me twelve a week. An’ I took it.”
Babbing apparently forgot him in the perusal of a two-page letter closely typed. His eyes parted with it reluctantly. “Did you tell any one else?”
“No, sir.”
“I see,” Babbing said. And Barney was not aware that he had stood a test of character and passed an examination in discretion. He had no suspicion that Babbing’s absent-minded manner was almost as much a disguise as if it had been put on with spirit-gum. He was waiting for Babbing to finish with the letters and direct him to his work.
“Don’t use the public office, hereafter,” Babbing said. “Come in at 1056.” He turned to a ’phone. “Tell Snider I’ll see him.” He pressed a call button. “You’ll have to start by learning to speak the English language,” he admonished Barney. “We haven’t cases enough on the Bowery to keep you working where people say ‘I toler I was waiten’ when they mean ‘I told her I was waiting.’ ” He changed the switches on an office ’phone. “Bring me my schedule.” He said to Barney: “Stay where you are. I’ll have something for you in a moment.”
Doors began to open, unexpectedly, on all sides. A stenographer appeared, with a note book, sat down to face Babbing across the desk, and prepared himself and his fountain pen to take dictation. Archibald, the office manager—a grizzled old man, with the lean mouth of a prelate—brought a list of Babbing’s appointments for the day and discussed them with him, deferentially. An operative, who proved to be “Chal” Snider from Chicago, drifted in as if he were casually interested, and shook hands with “The Chief,” and drew a chair up at one side of the desk, and made himself at home, with his ankle on his knee and his hat on his ankle. The day’s work had begun.
To Barney, watching, it became as bewildering as the smoothly intricate activity of a complicated machine. Babbing dictated letters in a leisurely undertone that was continually intermitted for telephone calls, the arrival of opened telegrams, corroboratory references to filed records, consultations with Archibald, directions to operatives, and above and around and under it all an interested reciprocation of talk with Snider. “Hello? Yes. Where are you? Have you got the goods on him? I see. Who’s with you? Can you get in to see me? I ‘ll relieve you with Corcoran. Three-thirty this afternoon.” … “Take this. William P. Sarrow, and so forth. Dear Sir. Yours of the fifteenth. Regret that I’m unable to meet you and so forth. Previous engagements in Chicago on that date. Suggest the twenty-seventh.” … “Wire that fellow to stop sending me telegrams or he’ll queer the whole plant. Sign it Adam Hansen.” … “Yes, Chal? Did he bite?”
And because Snider was telling a connected story—a patiently connected story in spite of all distractions—Barney’s confused attention slowly concentrated on him.
Snider was becoming bald; his hair was parted down the middle with mathematical precision, as perfectly
aligned as the ribs and backbone of a kippered herring. He spoke rather mincingly, smiling, but never moving his hands. He had an air of pudgy inertia—an inoffensive sedentary air, good-natured—and a look of credulity. He made a specialty of confidence men. He was telling about one who had been operating in Chicago under the name of Charles Q. Palmer.
Palmer had advertised, in the want columns, that he wished to buy a hotel property in Chicago, and the owner of the old Stilton House had answered the ad. Palmer was living in splendor at the La Salle; the owner of the Stilton lunched with him there, talked terms, and convinced himself that Palmer had money and knew something about the hotel business. They inspected the moribund Stilton House together. Palmer saw possibilities in it. He paid $200 for a two weeks’ option on the property and took the only good room in the house, in order to audit the books at his leisure and consider a plan of business rehabilitation. The proprietor assisted him, deferred to him, flattered him, and secretly chuckled over him. A price of $50,000 was agreed upon. Palmer affected a brand of expensive Havana cigars, called Padages Palmas; and the proprietor added a box of them to his show-case stock for Palmer’s use. They became as intimately friendly as it is possible to become in a business deal where the seller has to maintain a consistent indifference because he is getting too much for his goods.
“The thing that sticks in his crop,” Snider said, “is those millionaire cigars. Palmer smoked two boxes of them. The old mail squeals about it worse than anything.”
“What are they? A perfecto?” Babbing asked, with the air of a teetotaler showing curiosity about wines.
“No,” Snider explained, “they’re like a panatela, only longer. They’re a little longer than a lead pencil and about as thick. They’re some smoke.”
Babbing gave Archibald a tele gram that he had been reading. “Wire them I can’t take it up personally, but if they’ll turn it over to our branch office there, I’ll be on later, to direct the investigation … What was it, Chal? The same old game?”
“Sure.” Snider smiled. “At noon on the fifteenth, the day the option expired, he bought the hotel with a New York draft for fiftyfive thousand, and opened an account at the old man’s bank with a check for the extra five thousand which the old man wrote. He was carrying a little black handbag full of furniture catalogues and decorator’s estimates and plans he had drawn for remodeling the ground floor of the Stilton. He got five hundred under the old man’s nose, put it in the bag, and went off to make a deposit with the contractor who was to do the remodeling. One of the boys from the hotel happened to be at the Central depot about three o’clock and he thought he saw Palmer going through the gates; but he didn’t speak of it until the old man began to worry because Palmer hadn’t turned up for dinner. He was afraid Palmer had been black-jacked!
“Next morning, he found out, at the bank, that Palmer had drawn all but fifty dollars of his five thousand. And the New York draft turned out to be phoney.
“They brought the case to us, but Palmer had made a clean getaway. There was nothing in his trunk but some hotel sheets and bundles of old newspapers to give it weight. Our boys are at work on it.”
Babbing had finished his correspondence. He began to walk up and down the room in an idle interval. “He’s probably in town here, now.”
“What makes you think so, Chief?”
“Why didn’t you wire us? That three o’clock train is one of the slowest on the line. It doesn’t get here till eight-thirty next night.”
“We didn’t have the case till late yesterday morning. And there was nothing to show he came this way.”
“He’d arrive last night. Did you get a good description of him?”
“Yes, but he was wearing a beard and mustache.”
“How old?”
“They say about thirty-five, and heavy—a hundred and seventy or may be more. Five foot eight or nine. Dressed to look like a prosperous hotel man. Light eyes, bluish gray. Nothing peculiar about him.”
Babbing was standing at the window looking out over the lower roofs of wholesale houses to the ferries of the North River and the docks and chimneys of the Jersey shore. It was an invitingly clean and bright Spring day. “I’d like to try a long shot at that fellow,” he said. And little Barney’s heart leaped with the blind instinct of a setter pup who sees preparations for the hunt.
Snider took his hat from his ankle and his ankle from his knee. “At Palmer?”
Babbing drifted back to his desk and sat down.
“Got a hunch, Chief?”
Snider asked it in the wistful manner of envy interrogating the inscrutable. Babbing stared at him, thoughtfully. Snider blinked and waited. Babbing said, at last: “It was raining hard last night at eight-thirty … He wouldn’t shave on the train.”
Snider put his hat on the floor and leaned forward intently. “We couldn’t run out all the barber shops in town, could we?”
“He’d go to a hotel, and get it off in his room.”
Snider’s expression indicated that there were almost as many hotels as barber shops.
Babbing glanced at his watch. “I can locate him in an hour if I can locate him at all.” He rose briskly. “Explain to Archibald. I’ll ’phone to tell you where I am, as soon as I get in touch with anything. Where’s my bag? Dump those reports into it.” He opened the door of a clothes closet in a corner by the window and took out a soft black felt, a black raincoat, and an umbrella. He put on the coat, and it looked as provincial as a linen duster. He shook out the rolled umbrella, untidily. “Come on, boy,” he said to Barney. “Carry that bag.” Barney grabbed it eagerly. “This is no day to be in school, is it?” Babbing said to him at the door. And Barney’s throat was so choked with excitement that he could only gulp and grin.
Snider, seeing them go, had the puzzled eyebrows and the doubtful smile of the man who does not believe that you can do it but would like to know how you propose to begin. To find, in the city of New York, a swindler whom you have never seen, of whom you have no accurate description, who may not have come to New York at all, and who will be carefully concealing himself if he has come!
II
No such doubts as Snider’s occupied Barney’s mind, of course. He had other things to think of. He had his first ride up Broadway in a taxi-cab, for instance—whirring along in a bouncing rush of luxury whose incredible cost grew on the taximeter so fast that it took his breath away like a Coney Island chute, and he held back against the cushions, with his eyes on the dial, delightfully appalled. And he had the confused emotions of being outfitted in a round felt hat, such as college boys are supposed to favor, and a pair of enameled-leather shoes, which Babbing bought for him in a Broadway shop while the cab waited at the door. Two dollars for the hat and five dollars for the shoes! Gee! And then the meter began again—measuring Fifth Avenue in dimes.
He had been aware in the shop that Babbing was posing as his father and enjoying the part; and he had had an awful moment of fear that there might be holes in his stockings when the clerk unlaced his shoes. There were none. A woman, whom he vaguely recalled as his mother, had darned those stockings for him in a Cinderella world that had since been lost in the whirr of a fairy godfather’s golden chariot. He caught Babbing smiling at him in the chariot; and he snickered excitedly.
When the cab stopped, Babbing reached for the handle of the door and said, “Keep right up with me, now, but don’t open your mouth”; and Barney stepped out of the cab as if it had been an aeroplane, and found himself on the earth again, in front of the Hotel Haarlem on 42nd Street near the Grand Central station. He defended Babbing’s satchel from the doorman while Babbing ransomed himself from the taximeter.
The detective, in his raincoat, with his umbrella, wandered into the gilded lobby of the Haarlem, looking about him simply. He found the cigar stand, and approached it, with Barney, as if it were a booth at a county fair. The clerk saw them coming. It showed in his face.
Babbing said: “Padages Palmas.”
Th
e clerk did not move. He was New York accosted by the provinces. “What did you say?”
Babbing regarded him a moment, mildly thoughtful. He cleared his throat. “Young man,” he said, “I want a seegar called the Padages Palmas. It’s a fairly well-known Havana, but the easiest way for you to tell it, when you see it, is to read the name on the band around the middle.”
The clerk had turned his back to get a box from the shelves behind him. His ears were red.
“Yes,” Babbing said, “that’s the one. Are these fresh?”
“I opened it myself yesterday.” The box was still full.
“I don’t much like them fresh.”
The clerk tried to look his indifference. “We don’t keep—” “You can keep four of those,” Babbing cut in cheerfully and passed on. Barney followed him. And Barney could feel the clerk’s eyes witheringly on his back.
This was good fun, but Barney did not see the drift of it. When they issued on 42nd Street again and started to cross towards the Beaumont, he began to understand.
They mounted the Beaumont’s marble steps together and approached the cigar counter. The clerk, here, was an older man who was perhaps accustomed to serving millionaires in shabbiness. Babbing found the box in the showcase and pointed to it. The clerk whisked it out deftly. Babbing took two. “Do you sell many of these?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Quite a number.”
“How many?”
“Well, I couldn’t say, exactly. I’ve sold six this morning.”
Babbing was slow about getting the cigars into his waistcoat pocket; and he was slow about getting his money out. “Six, eh? Counting mine?”
“Yes. Another gentleman took four.”
“I’ll bet that was Charlie,” Babbing commented to Barney. “Clean-shaven man with blue eyes?” he asked the clerk. “Heavy set?”