CHAPTER XXVIII

President Orski Pays a Secret Call

President Alexis Orski of the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company was wont to consult, on all matters of law appertaining to himself or the company in which he owned a two-thirds controlling interest, an extremely high-priced and ultra-brilliant lawyer named Moses I. I. Cohenstein, in the 160 North LaSalle Street Building. The first “I” in Mr. Cohenstein’s name stood for Isaac, and the second “I’ for Israel, and Mr. Cohenstein, who was reported to be a great lover of rnushrooms, held forth, curiously enough, at the huge building at the mouth of the old ancient LaSalle Street tunnel, now rented by the city of Chicago to the National Mushroom Growing Concern, Incorporated, who grew millions of succulent mushrooms in the cool damp two-blocks-long tube where surface street cars used to grind their way down, under, and up from under the Chicago River. However, Mr. Orski, whenever he wished consultation upon matters involving jus civile or lex scripta did not call upon Mr. Cohenstein, but Mr. Cohenstein, his legal books piled under the arm of an anaemic-looking clerk, drove with his acolyte in state, in his Rolls-Royce, to Mr. Orski’s offices in the Cubist Building.

So it was somewhat unusual today that Mr. Orski, who kept his own expensive Cressop-8 car parked in a garage one floor beneath the roof of the Cubist Building, was preparing to call upon another attorney entirely, and on foot as well!

Indeed, it was more than unusual considering that today, of all days, he was dog tired—even beginning to be a bit hungry as well—and conscious of a general sense of irritation. All day long, it seemed, important callers had been trooping in and out of his private office; all day long he had been giving wearisome conferences at the expense of a continually accumulating litter of work scattered over his porcelain-like black onyx desk. But because a mysterious call coming in upon a certain private line which entered his office without going through the company switchboard, a call which had arrived just as the hands of his little electric desk clock pointed to 4:14, proclaimed that Mr. Studdlegate had information for Mr. “Van Allen,” Mr. Orski put on his hat in a hurry and prepared to desert his littered desk in entirety, and with the greatest of celerity.

That is to say, however, not without a single critical glance at his sartorial make-up in the tall pier glass in one corner of the room, which glance showed a very well-kept gentleman of possibly anywhere from 50 years to something more, cheeks pink and rubicund from much daily exercise and swimming in the tank of the Chicago Athletic Club, especially pink, indeed, against the neatly trimmed black hair, black mustache, and pointed black Vandyke beard, all just barely touched with gray, that covered the entire lower part of his face. In spite of the expensive $12 American velour hat, the shaggy dark eyebrows surmounted a countenance that was that of the typical Russian gentleman of the higher class in those days long, long before St. Petersburg had commenced to go through an entire evolution of names, a countenance that was lean, ascetic, harsh, and chief among the features of which was the narrow hawklike nose.

Satisfied, apparently, that he presented the appearance of the well-groomed business man, he took up a slender polished black walking stick whose slenderness was but a psychological subtlety intended to convey to the world the vigor in him, and to belie as well the touch of gray in his black beard and hair, and thus accoutred he stepped briskly from his private office, passed through the black porcelain railing cutting off his offices from all outsiders, and gave a few words of instruction to the little blonde girl who sat there, about the probable time of his return. This essential matter completed, he took himself out and down the outside corridor to a round bullet-shaped elevator, and was dropped almost instanter with breath-taking speed, to a downstairs foyer of huge black and white blocks of cement which spelled the motif of the Cubist Building and took the place of the tiny marble-block tessellations of a decade ago.

He paused a bare second undecidedly facing the Randolph Street exit and the Clark Street exit, and then went out the latter, without bothering to look back at the tall squarish building surfaced with big black enameled panels, in which at regular intervals a panel was supplanted by a window of identical shape and size, an expanse of glittering shining black in which a lone three or four scattered panels had been made of pure white enamel to emphasize the ebony jetness of all the rest. He walked north, then turned west on Lake Street, an ancient thoroughfare on which not a new building had been built for thirty years because of the rattling, screaming, roaring L-Road, and which now, thanks to the triple-decking of the L-structure on that narrow street so that it could carry six 12-car trains at any point, at any instant, was an inferno of noise to any window which might front upon it. Indeed, Lake Street pictured Chicago as it had been in that so-called mauve decade; and the building with stone arched doorway into which Alexis Orski turned shortly, with its three ancient worn stone steps leading off the sidewalk, its windows with rounded tops and gingerbreaded keystones, was a bit of the ’90’s belligerently holding a toe-hold in the glorious and progressive ’40’s!

The soapstone arch across the entrance, yellow and badly pitted by the acids created by Chicago’s smoke joining Chicago’s damp, still proclaimed it to be the Grover Cleveland Building, and there was, of course, not an elevator in it, much less an escalator, which caused Mr. Orski’s lips to curl scornfully as he wound his way up the great stone stairway, ’round and around, one lean long hand, with its manicured finger nails, on the curving balustrade of polished wood.

He seemed to know, however, exactly where he was going, for on the top and fourth floor—and he was quite unwinded by his steep climb—he turned to his right along a wooden floored hallway, past several doorways of glazed glass, and finally stopped in front of one which read:

Anixter Studdlegate

Attorney and Counselor-at-Law

He turned the handle of the door and went in. An ancient law office confronted him, with no antechambers entering onto it whatsoever; one wall was filled entirely with law books on open shelves, the other was taken up by a vast filing cabinet of hundreds of small brown wooden drawers all of which drew out horizontally, and all of which had oval labels, yellow with age, describing the classification of their filed contents. A curio of curios, fit only for a North Michigan Boulevard antique shop, hung slightly askew from the ceiling—a gas chandelier, its brass today green with age and verdigris, but still able to bear gas tips surrounded by globes none of which matched each other. At a rolltop desk near the window, past which the L-trains on the upper level of the triple-decked steel structure outside roared monotonously at regular intervals, sat a little old gentleman with bat-wing collar, partly bald head, and checkered vest. He was in his shirtsleeves, but wore black sleeve protectors. A girl with thick spectacles and bony knees protruding from under her short skirt tapped near the door on an antique typewriter requiring finger strength instead of electro-motive power to make its clattering letter-levers register their noses against the paper on which they rose and fell.

Mr. Anixter Studdlegate, as he proved to be, arose immediately. He rubbed his hands together in a gesture of welcome, and nodded his shiny head.

“Won’t you be seated, Mr. Van Allen. Yes.” He turned to the spectacled young lady. “You may go for the day, Miss Apfelbaum. Yes, there’s nothing more of importance.”

Miss Apfelbaum, evidently understanding that the conversation which was to ensue was to be too private even for stenographers to overhear, gathered up her bony knees with alacrity, donned a great flapping hat, and left the office with admirable speed. Orski dropped down with leonine grace in a wooden armchair next the rolltop desk. Mr. Studdlegate arose, donned a shiny lung-tailed coat as though in honor of his visitor, and stepping to the door pressed the latch-button which would bar out further visitors today. Moreover he drew a black shade down over the glass, and, returning, also drew down both his windows and the shades thereof, which shut out the L-trains, but not the whole of their noise, and although the streets outside were still carrying shafts and patches of that cheerful afternoon sunlight, he lighted the four gas jets which seemed to possess tips, by the laborious process of first igniting by a match a wax taper held in an old-fashioned taper-carrier, and with that instrument conveying the flame to each jet in turn. At which operation, Orski, unnoticed for the moment by the much-occupied Mr. Studdlegate, shook his head in helpless bewilderment, utterly fascinated by the realization that another man could so continue to exist, year after year, decade after decade, in the rut of an era which Time had nearly erased.

Mr. Studdlegate, blowing out the taper, laid it across the top of his desk, a wisp of straight white smoke rising from its tip to curl away several feet above it. He sat down pompously in his own capacious swivel chair. Now the two men were comfortably alone, only the whistle of one of the four gas jets disturbing the brief quiet stretches existing between passages of the L-trains outside the closed, shaded windows. Mr. Studdlegate was the first to speak. He put his thumbs disgruntledly into the pockets of his checkered vest as he broke the silence.

“Now first of all, Mr. Orski,” he began embarrassedly, “you must realize—”

Orski’s eyes narrowed. “What!” he bit out. “Er—what do you mean, Studdlegate?” He paused helplessly, like a poker player who has checked a bet.

Mr. Studdlegate stuck out his lower lip as a man who has not been dealt fairly with. Then he spoke, but in a hurt tone of voice.

“Mr, Orski, solely through an accident I learned of the identity of the Mr. ‘Van Allen’ who consulted me on the work which I have been doing for you. Or at least trying, humbly, and in my humble way, to do. Let me, please, though, explain exactly how that accident came about. My Miss Apfelbaum, whom I just dismissed for the day in compliance with the manner in which you wished all our interviews to be conducted, happens to have a sister who works for the Chicago Telephone Company and who is one of the two confidential clerks in sole charge of the secret records of all unlisted phones. On the day you came in here to consult me on your particular problem, a very estimable Swedish gentleman whom I have known for many years—a quite erudite professor of botany in one of our high schools—also came in to consult me regarding the suing of his young wife for divorce. I give you these details, Mr. Orski, so that you may readily identify the case when it comes up in court in a few days, and, because of its somewhat salacious elements, onto the front pages of our scandal sheets, and thus assure yourself that I have done no spying upon you whatsoever. An accident, Mr. Orski, an accident, pure and simple. As I say, this estimable Swedish professor wanted to establish the name of a man to whom a certain unlisted phone number had been assigned by the telephone company—he had, you see, traced down a number of phone calls to his wife, he had had dictograph transcripts made of the conversations, but to corroborate certain points in his case and complete it, he required some clue to the name of the philanderer who was making various rendezvous with his wife. That phone number was, incidentally, Lake View 34672, and if you yourself should care to substantiate what I thus far have told you, you may look it up only to find that there is no record of it and that the company will also refuse you the information.”

Mr. Studdlegate paused. While obviously a much hurt and injured man, he was yet nevertheless manifestly anxious to ingratiate himself with this wealthy manufacturer, and he hastened on with his full and complete explanation:

“Well, Mr. Orski, since the telephone company does not furnish to anyone such information as we required, and is not compelled to do so even under a court order, I asked my Miss Apfelbaum to obtain it for us through her sister, the method of obtainance not to be used officially in the divorce case, however; I wished it so that I could subpoena this—this—this damned philanderer in this divorce case, and ask him on the stand whether the phone to which we had the dictograph records was not his, and maneuver him either into an impasse of guilty silence on the witness stand, or to an act of overt perjury if he dared to answer in the negative.”

From Mr. Studdlegate’s vehemence, it was plain that he liked nothing better than to punish all philanderers and breakers of domestic hearthstones. He went on speaking. “The fellow is a lingerie buyer for one of our big department stores—and I expect to put the damned wife-stealing rascal on the front page of all our newspapers next week where he belongs, or else catch him on perjury. And I—but let that go, Mr. Orski. What I’m trying to convey is that I had the number you gave me as Mr. ‘Van Allen,’ and the number of this lingerie buyer, given me by my Swedish botanical friend, each written out on a separate slip of paper, and each in a separate pigeonhole of my desk.” Mr. Studdlegate drew forth two penciled slips in corroboration of his story. “I forgot, however, that I had reversed them, and in instructing Miss Apfelbaum to privately obtain this information for me, she took home at first the wrong slip—and before we had straightened out the mistake I was to learn, unwittingly and unwillingly, you may be assured, that the phone number you gave me belonged to Mr. Alexis Orski, in suite 814 of the Cubist Building.” He paused, with both pudgy hair spread out in a helpless apologetic gesture. “Mr. Orski, I wouldn’t have pried into your business in a hundred years, but when the information accidentally came to me, I felt—er—I felt—er—as—”

Orski laughed grimly, “You just naturally felt, Studdlegate, that your dignity as a barrister, or solicitor, was being affronted, Eh? Well, hm—” He nodded his head as one accepting the tricks and turns of chance. “Well, Studdlegate, I am a big business man—president of the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company in that building—and I admit that I did very much wish to keep my identity in this matter—the one between you and me, that is—a secret even from you. That, of course, was so that if what I have been doing here, or rather having you do for me, should ever by any chance subsequently leak back to the party involved—yes, the Big Fellow himself—he would have no one on which to vent any—well—er, spleen. That’s the reason I gave you the name ‘Van Allen’ and no address.”

“Which was quite all right,” said Mr. Studdlegate, a little mollified now, “except Mr. Van—that is, Mr. Orski, it prevents me from handling your problem to the best of advantage, and from advising you legally to the best of my ability.”

“Possibly,” admitted Orski, but in a very noncommittal tone, it was to be conceded. “Anyway, we’ll let it stand. My right name is Orski, then, and I’m located in the Cubist Building. I think you’ll keep my confidence—after all, you’re my attorney in this affair. And then, too I shall of course have other work to give you from time to time.” Mr. Studdlegate nodded his shiny head most vehemently. His dignity was now quite appeased, and largess in the way of further legal work was being proffered him on a golden platter. Orski, however, with a glance at his wristwatch, forged directly on to the matter at issue. “And now, Studdlegate, since all that’s settled, since you called me over, you naturally have something for me on that matter of ours. What have you got?”

“Well, it’s just, Mr. Orski,” Mr, Studdlegate said, fumbling in the pigeonhole of his old desk for a large legal-size envelope, “that I have the report, and—”

Orski leaned forward in his chair, his face curiously rapt, his rubicund cheek resting against the tip of a manicured finger.

“And—he is a Russian?” he asked.

Mr. Studdlegate shook his head—that is, but partly. “Not determinable,” he stated. “He’s—but here, Mr. Orski—read it yourself.”

Orski withdrew the communication from the envelope. It consisted of two bond sheets of paper. The first and front one bore the embossed title “International Detective Agency,” situated in the old London Guarantee and Accident Building, and showed two hands interlocked across a set of ripples, the latter no doubt representing the Atlantic Ocean. It read:

Sol 16th, 1942.

Mr. Anixter Studdlegate,

Grover Cleveland Building,

Chicago.

Dear Mr. Studdlegate:

We beg to acknowledge receipt of the $100 covering our investigation for you, and to render you the following information, with the necessary data by which it may be followed further, at, of course, an additional cost.

The individual you specifically ask about, i. e., Steve Mala, known in police circles as “Big Shot” and who is just now avowedly the gangster king of Chicago, comes from Poland. The name he uses today is a contraction, or Americanization, of the name Stefan Malachovsky, under which he entered America in 1927 as a youth of 20. In the ineffectual efforts made to deport him some ten years back when he was a booze runner for Capone, the underworld lord of that day who you will recall was arrested on South State Street last week for begging, the U. S. Department of Justice directed its preliminary efforts toward sending him to Poland, the putative country of his origin.

As you may or may not know, however, if you are not engaged in criminal law practice, Mala or Malachovsky, brought with him in 1927, when he came to the United States from Poland, an invalid father, Gregor Malachovsky, who has been confined to a wheel chair these many years. This father, being an invalid, did not attempt to enter as a Polish immigrant with the quota from Poland, as it is probable that by virtue of his particular infirmity he would have been considered ineligible, but entered solely on a 3-months’ visitor’s visa under $500 bond. Once in America, however, the father, while Mala or Malachovsky (the younger) was still under age, took out United States citizenship papers. Due to laxity on the part of the Bureau of Immigration in following up visitors’ visas, he was not disturbed, his citizenship papers matured, and he became a full-fledged American citizen. Since all this happened in the old immigrational regime when children automatically took the citizenship of their fathers, Mala (the younger), by this operation, at the same time became a full-fledged American citizen. The court subsequently upheld the older man’s citizenship; therefore Mala, the younger, the gangster, was not deportable, and is not today.

Such sparse records as are obtainable on him (and also his father) are, as the Department of Justice ascertained ten years ago, municipal and local records in Poland, but all are of dates subsequent to the year 1910 when a great number of political refugees who had fled with their children from Russia to Poland remained and took up Polish citizenship. No local records were apparently findable of a date prior to this. This fact in itself, however, proves nothing, as European local and township records are few and not altogether trustworthy. The only records of any significance in connection with your specific inquiry would be Polish citizenship, or Polish birth records. In view, however, of the fact that the Department of Justice’s transcripts are available to us in the case of all “Public Enemies,” we are in a position to state that the details of that migration from Russia which could have (or which may not at all have!) placed Mala and his father in Poland, cannot be investigated to any worthwhile degree, since the Warsaw National Detective Agency, employed for this purpose, has available to it no data covering a considerably large period, due to the destruction in 1913 of all Polish naturalization records in the big Warsaw Naturalization Bureau fire, as well as of all birth registrations of Warsaw Poles which were in a wing of the same building.

To conclusively determine, therefore, whether Mala—and, of course, his father—are Russian by birth and not Polish, it is necessary to investigate the problem from the Russian end alone, and for that reason it would be advisable to join forces with the Agency Russkovitch which you will be interested to learn now has available to it the old records of the Cheka of the Bolshevik days, as well as of the secret police of the Czaristic days. Such search would cover the case histories of the political malcontents of those days, their names and descriptions, and would also take in birth records as well in the Russian cities, under such names as Malovich, Malakow, Malachovsky, Malowicz, Malachev, etc., etc. It would focus its attention chiefly on the records of those malcontents who fled Russia into Poland and who were not tabulated by the secret police as ever returning.

The cost of this undertaking is not as excessive as it sounds, even in the matter of the examination of the birth records, for the search can be begun in the city of Kerenskygrad, and can be carried on down then to the smaller Russian cities in turn. If you—or your client, as we presume the case must be—are sufficiently interested, we can commence the institution of the search by a cablegram, and the initial retainer as an evidence of good faith would be $200. The whole cost, due to the favorably low rate now prevailing on Russian exchange, would not exceed $1000.

Very truly yours,

THE INTERNATIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY

per Henry Kosruh, Director.

“Well—for—for hitch-hiking on the Pacific Air Mail!” ejaculated Orski, using in his great disgust, a popular “flapper” expression of the day, and tossing the two sheets of paper angrily down on the rolltop desk. “They bring me—what? Nothing! No information whatever. They just send to the Department of Justice, copy off an old transcript of the attempted deportation proceedings against this fellow ten years ago, all of which deportation proceedings went askew because his father evidently produced U.S. naturalization papers at the last minute, and then they palm it off on us as a comprehensive and honest report and put out their hands for more money. It’s—it’s a come-on letter—to get more money. That’s all it is, I—I might as well have thrown my hundred dollars into the lake.”

“Well,” put in Studdlegate, and it was obvious that he felt bad at thus disappointing, even for an instant, what a moment before bid fair to become a rich client who would tender many little legal jobs outside of the regular routine of his manufacturing business, or even in it, moreover. “You see, Mr. Orski, there’s the matter of the burned Polish naturalization records—the burned Polish birth registrations, in Warsaw—the agency would, you know, be balked. As for the hundred dollars, it would cost this International Detective Agency easily that much alone to obtain—”

“Oh,” put in Orski wearily, “it isn’t the hundred dollars, Studdlegate. It’s—it’s the trying to buy a little succinct simple information, and the putting out of my money—and then getting—getting just a blank wall. And I’m used to getting what I want—because I generally have the price to pay for it. I didn’t set this fee. They set it. And I thought when they set it they’d get something conclusive for us.”

“Well, Mr. Orski, when you delegated me to inaugurate this odd investigation for you, I realized—and particularly, of course, after I learned accidentally that you were concealing your real identity—that you did not want to have it done through regular channels; and I did not make it a point to ask any further questions of you. But because I had a sort of prescience that this report might not give you the precise information you wanted, I just took it upon myself, Mr. Orski, to lay the rails a bit so I would be able to institute a few inquiries along a special channel of my own—oh, very discreet ones, Mr. Orski. Very discreet, I assure you. But first, Mr. Orski, may I frankly ask you exactly why you require this information?” He cleared his throat pompously. “As—as a lawyer, I think I am entitled to know all the facts of my client’s business in the particular affair in which I am acting.”

“Well—yes, you probably are, Studdlegate,” admitted Orski grudgingly. He shrugged his shoulders like a man who is endeavoring to minimize a certain evasiveness which he knows he is demonstrating. “There isn’t anything to tell, though, Studdlegate. Anything other than simply this: Steve Mala—yes, ‘Big Shot’ himself!—has visited me in person, in my office, in the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company, four times. Oh, always with his eternal bodyguard, of course. The three hard-looking blue-eyed hoodlums—dressed like fashion plates, too, each one of ’em!—sat outside of the office railing on the visitors’ bench while the biggest figure in the American underworld himself was closeted inside with me. I’ve no doubt he had another one posted down the corridor, and a couple more lounging downstairs in the lobby. It’s a rare thing, you know, Studdlegate, for the so-called ‘Big Shot’ himself to personally transact business of any kind.”

“‘Big Shot’ Mala,” put in Studdlegate reflectively, “is a very quixotic man, Mr. Orski. At times he is utterly inaccessible—even to his own lieutenants. At other times, he appears right at the Opera, sitting in full sight in a box, where he could be—er—bumped off, as the expression goes, were there—”

“Were there,” put in Orski with a mirthless laugh, “a single rival underworld king, as there used to be, or even one who might have a fair chance to unseat the Nero of Chicago’s vice, liquor, gambling, dope and—and racketeering.” He gave vent to another half-laugh. “I daresay, Studdlegate, that if anybody in the audience so much as leveled a gun at the Big Chief, the unlucky imbecile would be pinked off from several directions before he even drew a bead. He’d—however, you were asking me why my curiosity. Simply because, Studdlegate, he—Big Shot Mala—has visited me in person four times—four times, Studdlegate. I don’t understand it. Four visits.”

“He may have taken a liking to you, Mr. Orski,” proffered Mr. Studdlegate conciliatingly. “But what is the nature of his call? What explanation does he give as to his calling?”

“Well,” put in Orski somewhat hesitatingly, “he has—he has—yes—an explanation that can easily serve to account for his coming to my firm—and even in particular to me. It’s—well—it’s this: a truck driver of his who runs liquor into Chicago over one of the nocturnal routes has invented a device for ageing moonshine into liquor in twenty-four hours—a complicated mechanical gadget of some sort. He’s paid the man, he says, a huge sum for his device. What he’s interested in—so he says—is to see what we can do toward setting up several small private manufactories entirely outside of our regular business, and making him up 5000 of these things—in such a way that each plant can’t know what the other is making, and in such a way that a few confidential workers in his outfit can assemble them. Of course it’s illegitimate, Studdlegate. Legitimately illegitimate, I should say. He offers us a really fat royalty on every one we make. I doubt whether the U.S. Bureau of Prohibition could stop us—at least at this juncture—from making the thing up. The idea seems to be, therefore, for us to make ’em all up in a hurry—and then wash our hands of it, before our confounded Congress passes a law putting anybody into jail for ten years who manufactures one. Anyway, we—Mala and I—don’t get anywhere. He doesn’t produce the gadget, or a model of it, nor a working drawing, nor give any inkling of what it’s like or on what principle it operates. He seems only to want to put his feet on my desk, pull out expensive $1 cigars, smoke, discuss poetry, art, history, sports—he’s damnably well informed, too, Studdlegate—with but an occasional grammatical error or shadow of an idiom in his speech—and always sizing me up with those cold blue eyes of his.”

“He’s sizing you up,” put in Studdlegate, obviously confident of his own interpretation, “because he probably has a much bigger deal in mind than a mere whiskey-ageing gadget. Something, of course, where he needs manufacturing help. He’s probably got a really huge thing if he’s convinced you’ll play in with him. The Big Fellow works that way, Mr. Orski—he studies a man for a long time before he deals his cards.”

“Well, it’s confoundedly uncomfortable,” declared Orski. “And it somehow looks to me as though—but what’s this you say you have, Studdlegate, in addition to this punkerino detective agency report? Oh, not 100 per cent punkerino, perhaps—for it does show an apparent way to get more. For you’ve guessed by this time, I think, that I’m just curious enough to half believe the fellow imagines he knows me—or some fool thing like that. I’m Russian of course, myself. Only I can’t imagine what connection he could even dream could possibly exist between him and me. For though he’s about thirty-five years old, Lord, I’ve been in America since he’s been growing up from toys and building blocks in Poland. Or wherever he emanated from! And for the life of me, I—but what have you got additional?”

“Well,” stated Mr. Studdlegate, with pronounced satisfaction, “I had a client some few years ago on a civil matter—I don’t handle criminal cases at all—whose brother was then a confidential under-cover man for the Big Shot. Had admittance more than frequently right into the Big Shot’s own castle on the South Shore—or should I call it fortress? At any rate, the brother in question subsequently died in some shooting brawl, but I felt nevertheless that if I could find my ex-client I could with perfect safety and propriety dig up a few less publicized facts that he might have casually picked up from that brother. And so, when this not altogether satisfactory letter came in yesterday, I set my own wires immediately into operation, and succeeded after some half-day’s work in locating my ex-client. He’d moved quite a bit in the meantime, you see. I called him down here, and engaged him in conversation concerning his old civil case and various ramifications since growing out of it, but I drew him out, as one who is merely curious, on the subject of the more intimate phases of Big Shot Mala’s inside life. And I did get some things that, I think, are not altogether inconsequential in respect to your query. Nor altogether indicative of anything. One is this: Big Shot Mala speaks Russian fluently, at least.”

“Hm, you don’t say? Well—that’s something.”

“But nothing whatever conclusive, Mr. Orski, as in about another second you yourself will be asserting. For after all, I take it, thousands of Poles who have lived on the Russian border speak it—likewise their children.” He paused. “Well, so much for that. The additional facts are that he loves his father—the old man is about 60, more or less—more than anything on earth; there just doesn’t seem to be anything the old man could ask for, or want, that Big Shot Mala wouldn’t get him. The newspapers, my client says, have never to any extent emphasized this little-known side of the Mala household, in the way that it’s been known to just an exceedingly few people on the very inside of the organization. Mala, the younger, and Mala the older, talk in Russian, hours every day. When the gangster chief is away, he cables or writes his father every day.”

“Regular dutiful son, eh?” sneered Orski with more vehemence than the occasion seemed to demand. “Did you by any chance find out—well—find out what the old man’s paralysis is from? And how much of a paralysis it is?”

“Yes. He’s been paralyzed from the waist down—legs only—for at least thirty years. This suggests that it is possible that, if he were part of any migration from Russia into Poland, such as that migration of 1910, he might have been carried across the line by friends. There appear to be no relatives, however, by whom those things can be probed. Just the father Gregor, and the son Stefan. And they are as close as fathers and sons can be where the wife is long since dead, and there are no brothers or sisters. However, the degree of the elder Mala’s paralysis suggests its possible existence even further back than thirty years; if, then, he were Russian, Mr. Orski, that paralysis would serve as a valuable clue in the search of Russian police and political records, would it not, if you really think it is worth a thousand good dollars to follow up your mere puzzlement that much. The only explanation of this paralysis that my client’s brother ever heard was one which he heard from another gang member who claimed in turn to have heard it alleged that the old man was supposed to have caught a bullet in the spine in the Polish uprising of 1912 against Vice-Regent Nicholas—that he wasn’t even in the uprising—that he was an innocent bystander. This may not at all be the case, however. He might have gotten it in some political brawl in Russia, but his Polish naturalization may be defective, and so he would cover up his injury by assigning a Polish origin to it. I admit, Mr. Orski, that nothing we get is conclusive.”

“Hm.” Orski, as though he did not even hear the other, was ruminating aloud. “A bullet, eh? A shot in the spine? Now I had—well—half thought perhaps that this paralysis, of which I have seen only one or two brief newspaper mentions, was a deterioration of the spinal cord of some sort, perhaps an oncoming locomotor ataxia, or a myelitis. So it’s traumatic, eh?”

“Yes, Mr. Orski, traumatic,” agreed Mr. Studdlegate, who showed by his answer his knowledge of medical terms. “Incurable. Mala the younger, my client was able to tell me, has had the biggest surgeons of Europe over here, always unobtrusively of course, and in many cases actually incognito. He brought, so my man told me, at a cost of $50,000, no less a person than Ober-Meister Professor Doctor van Graf, the famous spinal cord surgeon, clear from Austria. Von Graf’s ostensible visit to America was merely to study American clinics. In actuality, it was to pass a professional verdict upon Big Shot Mala’s father. All this, of course, was done in the years after Steve Mala rose higher in gangland than his old status of a $100-a-week liquor truck runner for Capone. At any rate—and this is inside stuff, Mr. Orski—he offered von Graf $500,000 if he could effect a surgical cure of his father’s case. But von Graf, it appears, could do nothing. A large number of the fibers of the elder Mala’s cord were, and are, as I am given to understand, severed at the point of the alleged injury.” Mr. Studdlegate paused. “All these facts, although they come to you and me via the higher-ups of the Mala Organization, come to us through hearsay on the part of my client who was not of the Organization himself. Whatever degree of verity we accord them, I can at least say that the facts are not supposed to be of record in police dockets nor in the usual run of detective agency reports, you see.”

“Quite—I do see,” agreed Orski, sneering again, and scowling at that report which conveyed nothing concrete. His tone of voice was plainly nettled, and it seemed almost as though he were nettled at the still finer degree of the later facts just now marshaled for his benefit by the little fussy obscure lawyer.

The silence between the two men became very great. Studdlegate broke it.

“Did you by any chance,” he asked curiously, “since you and Mala were so friendly—ask him whether he were Russian?”

“Of course,” bit out Orski. And he added scornfully: “And his answer was that he was not Russian—that he was Polish by birth and heredity.”

The little lawyer appeared to take no note of the bigger man’s scornful mien, but nodded quite understandingly, as it seemed. “Well,” he said, “as I think I remarked, the gangster chief’s answer to such a question is quite explainable. If the old man had sworn to Poland as his birthplace—say, Warsaw—when he came into the U.S.A. on a visitor’s visa, then his subsequent naturalization here was based on prior Polish citizenship. If it should come out today, however, that he were Russian, the absence of those burned records in Warsaw might give our Department of Justice a chance to re-open his old naturalization case, throw the burden of proof on him that he had first acquired Polish citizenship from Poland, and because he wouldn’t be able to prove it they might nullify his naturalization here. In that way the citizenship of Mala, the younger—Big Shot, I’m speaking of now—having been acquired from his father, would be immediately nullified, too, and the Department of Justice could just run the two Malas out of the United States, thus solving in a neat way a gangster problem that has always constituted a somewhat tantalizing dilemma, considering that Mala, the younger, unlike his famous predecessor Capone, by paying income tax on every ascertainable financial transaction, and perfecting new methods of keeping 9/10ths of his transactions unascertainable, keeps quite safe from the arm of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.”

“Yes,” agreed Orski, morosely, “you’re quite right, Studdlegate. Altogether too right, I fear. If the Malas, or Malachovskys, are not Polish, they must nevertheless stick to the Polish story, the two of them, to protect the younger Mala’s citizenship here.” He drummed lightly on his chair handle with his manicured fingertips, “Well, there doesn’t seem much more to say, does there? You’re worth two dozen detective agencies, however. Send me over a bill for your part of all this work, addressed to me care of my company, and I’ll write you a personal check. I’ll think overnight about this proposed Russian investigation. Hm! It—it does seem—doesn’t it?—rather ridiculous for me to investigate a mere caller at my office? But, confound it, Studdlegate, that steely glare in his blue eye—and that unusual friendliness on his part. They don’t seem to fit together. And I’ve heard that he has that disarming friendliness towards a man even when he hates him.”

“Oh well, Mr. Orski, he doesn’t hate you. He’d have no occasion to. Even if you turned him down flat on the manufacturing proposition, he still wouldn’t be in the least resentful. That particular characteristic of the man is a common tradition. Then, too, you’re not in his game—what we used to term some years ago, his—his racket. You’re not one of those class of people who get his warnings and, thanks to his city full of sharpshooters, are found subsequently in a ditch outside of the county, riddled with holes—their faces burned off with gasoline, their fingertips chopped off to boot.”

Orski looked pained at this meticulous enumeration of the things that could be done to a gangster gang-victim, after, during or even before the latter’s demise were completed. Then he appeared to dispose of such unpleasant pictures by reiterating Studdlegate’s own reasoning. “No—what you say is true. His field and mine don’t even touch. We—but that warning—what warning, Studdlegate?”

“We-e-ell—just that my client told me that those tales that used to appear in the press off and on were quite true. That when a recalcitrant or traitorous worker in gangland, or an aspiring would-be rival chief, was marked by the Big Boy for death, Mala always saw to it—or it was always so alleged—that the victim received a concise warning of some sort ahead of time. Just an ironic streak in the Big Shot’s brain, I suppose. True, the warning never really gave the victim anything but the thousandth of a chance to escape his fate, for eve if he succeeded by a slim piece of luck in eluding the Mala organization gunmen in Chicago, and fled to another city, Mala gunmen in the employ of the local crime organization there would catch him—and sometimes pot him just as he stepped off the railroad train at that end. No, Mr. Orski, you’re not in his game, his ‘racket’; that should be assurance to you that any mild antagonism he might ever come to feel toward you can’t possibly eventuate as do those real enmities in his own underworld where, when he puts his finger up, it’s ‘lights out’ for his victim. And,” Studdlegate added whimsically, “his enemies—or victims—get real advance warnings—not friendly talks on sport, art, and $1 Havana cigars!”

Orski looked only rueful however. Studdlegate went on talking.

“No, Mr. Orski, he’s thinking of some such stunt as putting out that moonshine-ageing gadget on a much huger scale than he has outlined to you—perhaps 50,000 of them, all to be cached, in various places, so that every time a still is raided and confiscated, the organization’ll have an inexhaustible supply of the devices to draw from. He works just that way. You know it. I know it. Using huge ranges of men, power and money. He’s feeling you out on a proposition for manufacturing those devices on a great big scale—or else he’s using the gadget as a symbol, by which to negotiate only, for some sort of apparatus even bigger than it is itself. It isn’t I who should tell you your business. But Mala—‘Big Shot’ Mala—will pay mighty well—for whatever you may ever make up for him. And the order undoubtedly will come to you through very legitimate channels. In such a way too, I’ll warant, that you’ll have a perfect legal defense if you do make the goods. And once made up—you can wash your hands of the whole thing, you know.”

“Yes, I suppose,” said Orski. “Yes, of course.” But he was very abstracted as he commented. He glanced at an old-fashioned glassed-in office clock, ticking away in one corner of the office. It was ten minutes of five. He rose. “Well, I’ll be running back to my office then. I’ll think about the thing overnight, Studdlegate. Maybe I’ll just disabuse my mind of it entirely. After all, a thousand dollars is a confoundedly expensive price just to satisfy one’s curiosity.” He straightened out his brown velour hat on his head. “Yes, maybe I’ll disabuse my mind of the matter altogether. Probably I’ve just been unduly disturbed by the confounded beggar. I’m—I’m not used to receiving calls—from Chicago’s underworld royalty. No. Decidedly not.” He rose. “Oh—let’s have another glance at that agency report.” Half leaning against his slender cane, he picked up the first of the two sheets of bond paper and ran his eyes immediately to one point of it only.

“Gregor? Hm! So that’s the old man’s name? Mighty Muscovitic name that, anyway.”

“Isn’t it Polish as well, Mr. Orski? I think I had a client once—”

“Yes,” interrupted Orski, tossing down the sheets. “It is Polish—as well. Well, good-by, Studdlegate. Mum’s the word between us on all this. Send your bill. And I’m going to toss you a bit of extra work from now on, stuff that our regular attorney wouldn’t want to bother with.”

Mr. Studdlegate, quite other than being insulted by this open thrust at his abilities, beamed unctuously. He rose and rubbed his hands together happily.

“I thank you, Mr. Orski. I shall be honored, indeed. I am always at your service, rest assured.”

And Orski, standing not further upon the order of his going, departed the old chandelier equipped office, and was soon out on Lake Street again under the shrieking steel lacery of the triple-decked L-road.

He was not, apparently, yet satisfied about matters in his own mind, for his hawklike face was screwed up into a deep frown of cogitation as he trudged along. “Never knew a Gregor Malachovsky in my life,” he was commenting to himself, “But then, of course, it could be that—” He broke off his train of reflections to cross with the traffic at Clark Street. And at 5 o’clock exactly he was turning back into the Clark Street entrance of the Cubist Building.

He made his way in a brown study back to his offices, turned in unsmilingly past the comely blonde young temple Cerberus he employed to guard his office portal, and went straight back into his ascetically furnished private office, where he hung up his velour hat on a vertical coat standard, and with hands clasped behind him stood at one of his spacious windows staring out across Randolph Street at the blazing panes of glass caused by the sun, now getting a bit down into the northwest sky, and red-tinged as well, reflecting from the windows of the new Amalgamated United States Bus Lines Building, each window turned seemingly for the instant into a malevolent red eye.

And standing thus but for a few minutes, he sighed a deep sigh as of a man sorely troubled in mind and spirit. Of a sudden, however, he left the window and returned to his black onyx desk. Drawing out its center top drawer, which came out smoothly and silently on its ingenious ball-bearing equipped slides, he took from it a generously sized newspaper clipping in which a full two-column photo of himself, unadorned by any hat, stared forth at him. It was an inside news article, both the folio number and the portion of the dateline remaining at its top showing that it had occupied a right-hand top corner on page 3, and that it had been published within the last four weeks. Underneath the photo-picture were the words “Alexis S. Orski, President of the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company,” and underneath it, in turn, was a news-story headed:

ELECTRICAL MAN NAMED AS LIKELY NEW

HEAD OF CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

The brief story itself detailed how the warring factions in the Chamber of Commerce had nearly decided upon him as its president for the year extending from the Fall of 1942 to the Fall of 1943, and what had been at best an inutile story, since a benign banker had ultimately been elected, detailed his coming to Chicago from Russia, his establishing himself by buying out the little Ajax Corporation, and the tremendous building of the company which he had accomplished in these several decades. Instead of thawing out at the many and sundry encomiums to his business sagacity, Orski seemed to grow even more unhappy and troubled than before he had withdrawn the clipping.

Shaking his head deprecatingly at it, he laid it out on the cool surface of his black onyx desk.

Now, with an intricate seven-tumblered Yale key attached to the gold ring which carried his many other keys, he unlocked a finely constructed lock-drawer far down in the lower right hand corner of his desk, Lifting up from its bottom an ingenious thin black enameled panel which at first glance appeared but to be the very bottom itself of the onyx drawer—a simple panel which Orski himself had had made in a little obscure shop on the West Side, paying out good money for it when his own thousands of machines on the Southwest side could have just as well constructed it, he took out from underneath the panel a single flat object: the faded bust photograph of a young man, of not more than 20. Not so faded, however, but that it showed, gleaming whitely on the chin of the sitter, a vivid, even strange, partly raised crisscross scar, as of a double wound made by the swift forward and backward slice of a fencing saber. And that that young man was Orski himself was indisputable as he laid it directly alongside the recent newspaper reproduction of himself, and compared them feature by feature, as he had done more than once in the past weeks. The same jet black hair, inclined a bit to crinkle; the same wide-set coldly calculating eyes, the same thin lips, the same aristocratically high cheekbones, the same hawklike nose; only the Vandyke beard, mustache and neat hirsute adornment connecting the two, were missing in the younger man; and the whitely gleaming, partly raised, crisscross scar, therefore, was entirely shrouded from view in the older. The collar of the sitter, too, was different. Younger, yes—but simply an earlier edition of the successful American business man who now gloomily surveyed the two pictures.

And his eyes, resting with a faraway look on that crisscross scar, his mind wandered willy-nilly, as it were, back to a sunny gymnasium in Moscow, in days far gone, to a picture of two boys fencing friendlily without masks, or even buttons on their foils; of a sword whipping lightning-like—blood—and the pride of him who ever after bore the putatively honorable scar of an encounter between gentlemen’s sons! Nikolai Ramzin—that was the boy’s name. A gentleman’s son Nikolai had been, indeed. And he had come, in time, to be a big figure in the Soviet Union—and today?—buried near Lenin’s tomb, never even to see the new Russian Republic that had risen from the Bolshevik ashes. But, staring down at the younger of the two pictures, Orski brought his mind sharply back from wandering in the dim hallways of the past, and shook his head accusingly at both of the faces which looked up at him.

“Gad,” he muttered, “we all come into this old world with a certain unmistakable stamp to our features, and we carry it straight to our grave. That nose—my grandfather’s, that was—those lips, my mother’s—those cheekbones, my father’s—they’re all like the notches on a Yale key—and taken together they make up one and one only physiognomical Yale key in the entire world.” He shook his head. “There’s no doubt that the one picture is the other, all right, all right. One the romanticist, the other a little older, a little grayer, a little more bearded—the realist. That’s all.” He sighed reluctantly.

And staring fixedly down at the two pictures, half leaning on his right hand planted, fingers apart, on the onyx desk, his eyes fell on the somewhat thickened second joint of the right index finger of that hand, a defect which, although almost unnoticeable in itself, prevented that finger from completely crooking itself.

“And then,” he added disquietedly, “there’s—there’s this!” He tried somewhat clumsily to crook the finger, but it would bend only through a slight angle. “Hm! Now I wonder if it was pure chance that Mala asked me on that last visit to clench my fists and put them in the defense position so he could show me the trick blow that Smoke Hercules knocked out Samson Stirpo with in that last championship fight? Gad, it must have been! The fellow is as daft on sporting life and fistic bouts as he is on opera and poetry. It must be—still, damn it, I—I couldn’t clench my right fist.”

He shook his head weariedly. It was plain that he was beset with the most curious crossword puzzle of his life, one that several times already he had given up. He sighed.

“I—just think,” he said at length, “that I’ll kick in with that money to the agency. What’s—what’s a mere thousand dollars to—to peace of mind? Once and for all, I’m going to find out, by God, whether Steve Mala and Gregor Mala are a Polack bootlegger and his invalid father, trying to do a little illegitimate mechanical manufacturing on the side, or whether by some chance they’re—” He shook his head. “Preposterous! Preposterous! But peace of mind is worth something. Peace of mind—gad, it’s worth everything. Yes, I’ll do it.”

He rang for his little Cerberus. She appeared. He was busy already, writing in a personal checkbook, a check for $200. He waved it in the air to dry.

“Imogene, you live on Independence Boulevard, do you not?”

“Yes, Mr. Orski.”

“Well, Imogene, I want you tonight on your way home to call at No. 1414. Easy to remember that, isn’t it? Give this check to a Mr. A. Studdlegate, an attorney living at that number. Tell him verbally the following message: To go ahead with Mr. Orski’s matter, and to so instruct the other party immediately tonight over the phone.”

“Yes, Mr. Orski. Mr. A. Studdlegate. 1414? He’s to go ahead, and to instruct the—the other party tonight immediately on the phone.”

“Correct. And—wait—Imogene—I will see no one else tonight. My desk is covered with enough litter of work as it is. I’ve an engagement for a swim at the Chicago Athletic Club at 8, and a dinner engagement at 9 at the College Inn, and as it is I’ve enough work here to knock out swim and dinner both, confound it. All right, Imogene. I’ll see nobody. Don’t forget, please.”

She nodded her xanthic head, and withdrew.

He sat down in his swivel chair, and with his back to the door drew over some of the mass of papers all laid out in various groups on his desk, chief of which was a large intricate blueprint. And at that moment, his official telephone bell rang. He drew it over to him slowly with a hopeless sigh. He raised the single instrument off its pivoted support, and grunted a single gruff “Hall-o!”

“Levenson speaking, Chief,” came a voice, the words tumbling one over the other. It was an excited voice. “Have you seen the first newspapers on the stands downtown?”

“No, Levenson. I’ve been busy on—well—on a curious personal errand.”

“Then, Chief, you’ve missed what’s the biggest piece of news you ever missed in your life, so far as your affairs are concerned. Chief, we don’t have to work in the dark any longer on that needle-in-a-haystack hunt of ours. Our man Hemingway is wanted for murder—and every police squad-car and detective in America is now looking for him. And last but not least I’ve everything sewed up to a fare-you-well with Captain Duffy of the detective bureau to hand him to you first of all for a little bit o’ sales negotiation the minute they’re done beating hell out of him on the murder. Do you see what it means, Chief? It means that old man Halsey is holding an empty sack. It means, Chief, that when this guy Hemingway stove in the skull of a fellow up on the near North Side today with a stone pestle, he knocked a hundred and sixty thousand cold dollars into your hand. He’s got to scrape the bottom of the kettle now for a defense fund. And you get to see him first. Got it, Chief? It means that the stock of the American Projectiscope Company ain’t worth a red cent a share right this minute. You’ve won, Chief. You won a fortune, and you’ve won it hands down!”