The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (7 page)

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

PINKERTON NATIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY
“We Never Sleep”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shall I close them?”

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

“Very well.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

“Yahoo!” cry his subordinates, galloping out of the dense stand of trees on the other side of the tracks. More bullets fly.

As several men board the train to pacify the paying customers, the rest take charge of the engineer, his fireman, and the fat conductor. They are herded out onto trackside and Brixton threatens at the top of his voice to blow their heads off if the guards in the mail car fail to open the door by the count of five. On “four,” hammers click. The door slides open then and the guards emerge with hands high. Foolishly, one lunges for the revolver in his holster. Brixton shoots from the hip. The guard snatches at his abdomen, drops his weapon, and tumbles to the cinderbed.

A bundle of dynamite makes its appearance. A match flares; the fuse is ignited. The spark travels ten feet and the door flies off a black iron safe embossed with a gold eagle. Sacks of coins, bars of bullion, and bales of banknotes—big, square, elaborately engraved
certificates, much more impressive-looking than our modern bills—vanish into canvas bags and saddle pouches. More cheers and shooting as the horsemen clatter away.

These are a few minutes in a day in the life of the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang, infamous in newspapers in both the East and West and in a flood of cheap novels printed in Chicago and New York City. Somewhere in a cattle camp or saloon or velvet parlor with a piano, an uncertain baritone is singing its ballad to a melody plagiarized from “Blood on the Saddle.”

Like so many others of his day, Jack Brixton's story began in Missouri, where he rode with the Bushwhackers, holding up Union trains, blowing windows out of banks filled with Yankee gold, taking target practice on Jayhawkers, and generally giving civil war a bad name. Witnesses say he left that crew because he considered Bloody Bill Anderson too lenient.

Accounts of how he spent the years between the end of the conflict and the spring of 1874, when his trail crossed with Johnny Vermillion's, are mostly hearsay. He's said to have rustled cattle in Texas, hunted Apache scalps in Arizona, shot a couple of dozen Mexicans south of the Rio Grande, and introduced the sport of lynching to Wyoming Territory. It was about the time the Wyoming story got around that people started calling him Black Jack.