Regulator, chapter 4

"An unscrupulous man might be tempted to intolerable liberties.”

In chapter 3, Charlie Antrim caught his man. Now he’s back in Chicago to get his next assignment at the Pinkerton office. What is this secret that he’s working so hard to keep?

by Frank Spring

Charlie Antrim did not entirely care for Chicago. He would freely admit that he had eaten some of the better meals of his life there and that whoever had built a lot of the bigger buildings down by the river obviously knew what he was doing. But he’d been often enough to know that the city was trying to kill its inhabitants for better than half the year, boiling their brains in their skulls when it wasn’t grimly and efficiently freezing them to death. Also, and more to the point, it was entirely too flat.

He was there now, though, in the familiar antechamber at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency’s headquarters on Washington St - the staff antechamber, away from the waiting accommodations offered to clients, whose delicate sensibilities had to be protected from unstructured encounters with the actual sausage-makers - and his reflections on what to make of his evening after he was done here were just taking a turn for the discreditable when a very tall, thin man in shirtsleeves appeared in the doorway. He softly intoned the word ‘Antrim’, identified himself as Nathaniel Cooke, and led Charlie back into the rabbit warren of offices.

Charlie could barely remember the layout of the building - it changed a lot anyway, as some new department or piece of equipment staked a claim to real estate - but the sounds were familiar as ever; above the hum of voices rose the clatter of typewriters, through it cut the persistent tick of the telegram operators, and underlying it all, only audible close to a few specific doors, was a sound Charlie had heard nowhere else - dozens of scissors on paper, the symphony of a company of clerks who clipped newspapers from around the country and farther afield, the relevant articles identified and filed according to a system proprietary to the Pinkertons and supposedly the brainchild of the Old Man himself.

Cooke eventually settled them into what was evidently his own office, a closet-sized space into which it seemed cruel to cram so tall a man. He struck Charlie as an unusual character for the Pinkertons; in shirtsleeves, his hair unkempt, and his face covered in something between stubble and a beard, he was - not disheveled, exactly, but decidedly informal. 

Charlie hadn’t known Allan Pinkerton personally - the Old Man had been dead and his sons, William and Robert, in charge of the Agency for years by the time Charlie joined - but he knew his reputation for a rigor that bordered on the maniacal (the Pinkerton maxim was “we never sleep” and the Old Man apparently lived the principle as a personal creed). It was hard to imagine him, or anyone who had spent much time around him, encouraging informality of any kind. 

Yet here Cooke was, peering affably through small round glasses and looking like nothing so much as a rather dreamy academic who, having passed through the perdition of being a jobbing lecturer, has just reached the point in his career where a chancellor has had a comfortable conversation with him about retaining his services in a more permanent capacity.

“Fine work with Geary,” began Cooke, his gentle voice only adding to the overpowering sense of this being a quiet chat with a writer of philosophy tracts (an experience Charlie had only had once, but which he felt might bear repeating provided certain conditions were met).

“Thank you. But I wouldn’t close that file just yet. Geary’s a slippery piece of work.”

Cooke smiled easily. “We had a cable from St. Louis this morning. That file is closed.”

Charlie gave a low whistle. “They even let him talk to a lawyer?”

“There must not have been much to say.”

“Masterson, too?”

“Masterson, too.” It figured. Charlie didn’t mind Masterson too much, but alas for poor Collum. He’d been funny, if nothing else.

Cooke’s voice brought him back into the room. “How did you work out your cover for this case, Mr. Antrim? The Texas cowboy?”

“It’s a life I’ve lived.”

“You haven’t used it in Kentucky before.”

There were reasons that he hadn’t, but if Cooke wanted to know them, as opposed to just letting Charlie know that he’d read his files or talked to his boss or both, he’d have to come out and say so.

“I was saving it for a special occasion.”

Cooke leaned ever so slightly forward and regarded Charlie intently; after a moment, he shrugged and leaned back.

“How did you pick them up from St. Louis?” he asked, producing a pipe and its attendants from his desk.

Moved by the urge for autobiography that can strike anyone who has exerted and achieved in solitude, Charlie almost told Cooke all about the frantic days and nights he’d spent ferreting through low dens on the less-traveled roads east of St. Louis, pouring dollars down barmen and whiskey down hoopleheads - it was always even money which would be more useful - until he’d caught Geary and Masterson’s trail. But Cooke evidently had access to his reports and in any case Charlie had a strict policy about confessional urges. 

“They needed money. Figured they’d either rob or gamble; if it was robbery, we’d hear soon enough. So I went where gamblers go. Didn’t take long.”

The pop of a safety match, the smell of phosphorous and aromatic tobacco. “Nicely done. Before we turn our attention from the past to the future, is there anything remaining from the Geary case that requires attention?” Cooke asked, his words mixing with the smoke.

Charlie shrugged. “Just a little administrative question, I can take it up with Summit -“

Samuel Summit had been Charlie’s boss for most of his time with the Agency, a small, grey man who gave the impression of stolid efficiency and offered almost no direction at all when Charlie was in the field, an arrangement that suited Charlie down to the ground.

“You and I are working together now,” Cooke interrupted with the respectful ease he might have employed to emphasize to his hostess that he really would prefer one lump of sugar instead of two.

“I trust Summit is well?” Charlie invited Cooke to be not quite so damn gnomic. 

“Mr. Summit is fine.” Cooke returned the invitation with regrets. “What did you want to bring to his attention?”

Charlie eyed up his new boss and weighed his options. Alright, fine. If this is how you want it.

“My stake in the poker game. The two hoopleheads we were playing with made off with it after the action started. Not that I blame them.”

Cooke leaned back. “I’m sure you know the Agency’s policy on reimbursing gambling losses -” he began.

“I do. There isn’t one.” If Cooke needed a lesson on the dangers of bullshitting a bullshitter, Charlie was happy to oblige. “I know it’s ‘discouraged’, but that it’s at the discretion of the supervising senior agent. And you know - and if you don’t know you should ask Summit - that there aren’t many better ways to spend a long time around a mark than at a poker table. Faro, too, but poker’s better. More personal. And I know the Agency doesn’t want a blanket policy that discourages agents from doing anything they can to obtain information. Which is why there is no official policy.”

Cooke shrugged. “The potential for abuse…“

“Oh, certainly. An unscrupulous man might be tempted to intolerable liberties.” 

“I take it you have no proof that while you were apprehending Geary the, hm -“

“Hoopleheads.”

“Gentlemen made off with your stake?”

Charlie gave the man his most winning smile. “None at all.”

“How much are we talking about?” Cooke asked. Charlie told him.

For a moment, the professor looked as if he was about to give Charlie a failing grade or worse. But Cooke burst out laughing, scribbled on a piece of paper, and gave it to Charlie with the instruction to take it to the bursary.

“Thank you, Mr. Cooke.” 

“Not at all, Mr. Antrim. Now, is there anything else” a touch of exasperation “from the Geary case?” 

“No, sir.” 

“Bully.” Cooke slid a piece of paper across the desk to Charlie. “To your knowledge, is there anyone in the states and territories listed here who would be able to identify you and knows of your occupation with the Agency? Other than Mr. Garrett, of course.”

Charlie looked up from the list. “This is most of the West.” 

“So it is.”

“We already have offices out there.”

“Not with the number of agents we need to meet rising demand,” said Cooke. “And, I should say, the right kind of agents. The Agency has asked me to see to a new disposition of agents that will better serve the growing demand for our services.”

So that was it. Mining companies having some local difficulty with their workforce, most likely, or perhaps a light brush war or two. Good for business. 

“But,” Cooke continued, “it’s no good sending a man of your particular talents to a place where he’ll be recognized outright. You were in Texas and Oklahoma during your previous career?” - well, that was one word to describe ten years on the hurricane deck of a Spanish pony; Charlie nodded - “and so we have to ask: is there anyone in the West capable of recognizing you in a way that would endanger your ability to serve our clients?”

Well, shit. 

Shit.

It is a testament to the surprise, not to say distress, in Charlie’s heart at that moment that he considered telling the truth, an approach as distant from his usual character as his physical being was from the surface of the moon. 

It would start with a broad, somewhat sheepish smile. 

Why, sir, thank you for asking, but I must tell you it was not merely by whim that I sought out assignments in the East after I joined the Agency. In faith, I have not been much west of the Mississippi since I became a Pinkerton for good reasons. Very good reasons. Good, plain reasons that anyone might understand, which I’d rather not get into just now but suffice to say they are of let’s call it a mortal nature, and can we leave it at that? There’s a good fellow. 

Top it off with a good-natured wink.

Charlie sized up Cooke and decided that this approach would be an excellent way to end both this interview and his employment as a Pinkerton. So it had efficiency on its side, at least.

The Agency was not a military service, but a fair proportion of its agents were veterans of either side; though the founder had been a Union man, the Agency preferred the practical benefits of hiring whoever it liked to the burdensome indulgence of having principles. The presence of so many military men combined with the simple, harsh necessities of the job at times produced a vaguely martial character in the Agency, and refusing orders was simply not done. 

The next obvious choice was to lie. Why, yes, my career has been much remarked upon out West; during the long winter evenings from Cheyenne to Juarez they talk of little else. 

Charlie’s mind sped through various possible inventions - phantom radical unionists, brought to grief by Charlie’s work in West Virginia and fled to the Rockies, gathering nightly to throw darts at a drawing of his face; fictional hard men from Kentucky who’d narrowly escaped his clutches but had gotten a full, long look at him and no doubt meditated on the image every night, vowing revenge; a nonexistent woman with whom he had been regrettably indiscreet, to his present shame and chagrin, while overtaken with drink, and who’d first in romance then malice told him she’d never forget his face - that might get him off the hook.

Useless. To carry off that kind of lie, against a mark he’d just met, a senior Pinkerton no less… Charlie doubted he had the skill. 

He could quit, just walk out of the only job he’d ever been good at that didn’t involve endless days of heat and dust and riding with parts of you broken and all of them hurting, casually replaceable and with no future before you except the day you simply couldn’t do it anymore.

It might come to that. But.

His hand strayed to a seam of white scar where his neck met his left shoulder. A memory of the time before he wore the name Antrim flooded his mind and for a moment he could feel the warm sun and hear the sound of the cottonwood leaves in the breeze and feelings long banished were so real and raw that he almost gasped with the pain.

“Mr. Antrim?” Cooke’s voice broke through mist.

He didn’t know who out West was alive who’d remember him, except for a handful of people whom he could easily avoid because he knew where they lived, they being his family and all.

And as far as he knew, no one out West knew him for a Pinkerton.  To the few not-family who knew his face, he was Charlie Antrim, Texas cowboy. He could handle them. If someone else recognized him, really recognized him, well, he’d make that hard choice when he came to it.

“No,” Charlie heard himself answering, his hand dropping back to his side. “No one knows me out there.”

Subscribe to The Experiment to keep up with future chapters of Regulator. Check out Frank Spring’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” For legal reasons, I want to make clear that Frank Spring owns the rights to Regulator, free and clear. Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.

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