CHAPTER XXIX

In Which One Carr Halsey Assumes the Mantle of Anonymity

Carr Halsey, dismounting from his taxicab in front of the Cubist Building at a quarter after five, whence he had ridden in ten minutes from Bush Bourse a mile or so to the north, paid off his driver and turned towards the low Randolph Street entrance of that great structure of black enameled panels. Had he not been held up for five minutes at the river, at the very one of the last existing movable Chicago bridges, till a small Norwegian ocean liner, bound by way of the St. Lawrence seaway via the Chicago River for New Orleans, his brief drive would not have taken more than half of the ten minutes it had used up. He entered the building under the three parallel wavy rows of high-powered electric bulbs which marked that one of its entrances which opened on Chicago’s Rialto, and consulting the bulletin board, a series of four which was laid out on the four vertical sides of a giant six-foot black cube pivoted on a vertical standard and revolving continuously around and around so that any and all could utilize it, found that the Ajax Company held forth on the 8th floor. A second later he was being whisked to that floor in a bullet-shaped car that seemed to depart from the foyer and arrive at the 8th floor in one and the same instant.

With the faintest suggestion of an ironic smile on his lips, a smile tempered only by the remembrance of his dead friend lying back in Bush Bourse on that cold white laboratory floor, he proceeded along the dark-tinted cement corridor, maculated here and there in the most irregularly placed areas with a huge square tile of pale red, in full concordance with the motif of the Cubist Building, and within the fraction of a minute stood before a wide doorway, framed in either ultra-simple black ebony-like wood or synthetic black onyx, whose gold-lettered black placard swinging a few inches below its lintel, read:

OFFICES OF THE AJAX ELECTRICAL

MANUFACTURING COMPANY

Alexis Orski, President.

He walked in through the open door, which showed a large set of bewilderingly connected offices whose main portal was not altogether unlike that of his uncle’s private suite in the Lindbergh Building, insofar as it possessed a railing! The railing, however, was a square black synthetic onyx affair held up firmly by sturdy square-sectioned black palings of the same material, making it into a sort of modernistic garden fence. The office floor in back of it was a floor of dull cement, with here and there a square of pale green in it, and carrying a considerable number of desks with workers, their noses low before their work. To the left of its main working space was a series of private offices, with closed doors, on the glazed glass of one of which were the words MR. ORSKI. There were several more of such private offices to the back. And to the right of the general workroom were some much larger chambers, with a hint of draughting boards visible through their open doors. No gloomy Cerberus like the seedy archaic Babson greeted visitors here, Halsey perceived critically, but a charming refreshing little blonde girl, with her daintily rouged knees showing—as was the mode—through the railing pickets, was seated at a slender black enameled table which matched exactly the long black onyx bench built into the wall itself outside of that railing—a bench on which visitors might chill their anatomies as they waited for various executives of the Ajax Company. And as he stepped up to the railing, Halsey reflected curiously that the Cubist Building should, by rights, have been called the Black Enamel Building!

To his query “Is Mr. Orski, your president, still here?” the blond girl gave courteous attention. But she frowned a bit as he added, to forestall any evasions: “I called up a short while ago, and was informed he was—or would be.”

“Well—he is,” she admitted, without even glancing back over her right shoulder at that glazed panel which carried the name of Mr. Orski. “He just came in about ten minutes ago, but he can positively see no one for the balance of the working day. Mr. Orski has had a very trying and busy day,” she added, “and is far behind on his work.”

“I wished to see him, at the most, but a single minute,” said Halsey frowning. “My matter is of the utmost importance, too,” he added as a bait. “Mr. Orski will assuredly wish to see me, I am certain.” Of which he was, unfortunately, not at all certain.

She smiled a bit skeptically. “Lots of people say that,” she countered. She grew grave, but remained withal friendly, “Mr. Orski,” she explained, in a lowered tone of voice, “has been closeted with people the livelong day—I doubt whether he even got his lunch today. But if you think your business is really important—well—I’ll—I’ll let you sell him on that!” She thrust a small square tablet of white paper, held in a gold-plated spring clamp holder on a polished mahogany board, towards him. A gold ink-pencil was attached to the board by a slender chain. “Just write out the nature of your business, briefly please, and I’ll show it to Mr. Orski. Those are his orders when he does not wish to see people personally.”

A tired man—a man who has been confined more or less to the cramped confines of his office most of the day—is likely to refuse an interview even to the president of the United States, Halsey realized full well, as he took up the ink-pencil. So he saw that in addition to retaining his anonymity, as he exactly anticipated doing, he had better state this errand of his concisely and interestingly. Poising the pencil above the pad but a second, he wrote hurriedly on the topmost of the thin rice-straw paper:

As a Chicago newspaperman of some standing I take the great liberty of requesting a brief favor from a downtown business man of high standing. If you would oblige the undersigned with a translation of these few Russian characters, by virtue of your conversance with that language, you would confer a great favor upon:

“SPORTFELLOW” of the Morning Sun.

He handed the girl back the pad and ink-pencil. Then he inserted his fingers into his vest pocket and withdrew the crude brass disk he had picked up at the scene of Proctor’s murder. “Just hand him this short note and this object,” he directed, “and I’ll wait.”

She rose, and with the medal and the note in her hand went back to the ground glass cage. She opened the door very quietly and unobtrusively. Halsey, sitting now on that cold bench of synthetic black onyx, back of the railing of the same material, caught a glimpse of a man who might have been anywhere in his early 50’s, or his late 50’s, leaning back in a swivel chair with a telephone instrument to his lips and ear. Halsey could not see the man directly, because the latter’s back was turned entirely to the door, and turned almost as much even to the open slide on the right side of his desk, but the waiting visitor on that black bench could catch a glimpse of the speaker’s face in a tall pier glass which stood in a corner of the room facing desk, chair, and phone. Halsey’s hasty glance in that pier glass, unobserved because he himself was far away, and because, too, the speaker was gazing downward as he talked, showed a face heavily covered with neatly trimmed black hair, black mustache, and pointed Vandyke beard, all tinged with a bare touch of gray. A pair of shaggy dark eyebrows surmounted a countenance that was typically that of the Russian gentleman of the higher class, narrow, ruthless in demeanor, and the most striking characteristic of which was the hawklike nose. The lips that spoke almost inaudibly into the hushaphone attachment on the instrument, were markedly thin. The girl herself, he could not help but note at the same time, was pausing undecidedly in the open doorway, but appeared to gather from the tenor of the telephonic conversation which she, at least, could overhear, that it had only just begun and was due to continue for some while, for she tiptoed forward in the rear of the much-occupied executive, laid the note on the open slide of the latter’s desk, quite back of his line of vision, placed the brass disk on one corner of the square of paper, and quietly withdrew. She closed the door very silently, and returned to her table.

“Mr. Orski is busy,” she announced across the railing to the lone visitor, “as you can see for yourself. I left your note and the brass article you gave me on his desk. He’ll be finished, I think, in a few minutes.” She dropped down into her chair. “I’m afraid, though,” she added troubledly, “that—that he’ll be angry with me. He told me positively no more visitors or outside details today. And—” She looked worried.

“I’ll take the entire blame,” Halsey said confidently, “for any interruptions you’ve contributed to your employer’s work—that is, if he is put out at all.” And he settled back on that cold bench, one hundred percent certain that he would get what he came after, and wondering what the translation of the string of Russian characters on that brass disk would tell.