Clara

It took me a month to convince Clara that she was too beautiful and too fine a girl to work in Queen Lil's whorehouse. Thus on a night in May, Clara came to live in my attic room whose lone window overlooked the Chicago River and the bridge lights swimming in it like Coleridge's fiery snakes.

Clara arrived without a suitcase. She had taken my appeal that she leave everything behind and start life anew a bit more literally than I had meant it. Or maybe not. I had talked a great deal about reformation. Madame Lil Hamilton had finally cried out to Clara, "Get out of my house and take that idiot boy preacher with you! He's got all my girls sobbing between customers and yammering they want to be virgins again! Get the bastard out of here before we all starve to death!"

Did I love Clara or feel pity for her youth in harlot servitude? Who can remember the emotions of any long-ago amour? Lucky if a face and a name remain to mark a yesterday's bedroom. There is more detail to Clara than to most of such distant companions because she was part of one of the eeriest episodes of my Chicago newspaper days.

I was 18 (and a half) and had grown a mustache to give me an older look more befitting my activities. These included reporting for the Chicago Journal and attending all-night saloon debates on the rival merits of Anatole France and Dostoievsky, marriage and whoring, and other problems of the time. Only one topic was missing from our barroom seminars--foreign politics. A Greco-Bulgarian war was popping away, and uprisings in Africa, Asia and Mexico were claiming the reluctant attention of Mr. Martin Hutchens, our managing editor. Nevertheless, anyone speaking out on world affairs was tagged pronto as a dangerous bore and stiff-armed socially.

Let me put down a few program notes about the time of Clara and her flight from sin. They may help make my story more credible. There had been no world wars. No ideals had yet beamed on us with their death's-head grin. The young century wore a merry, untaxed look. People could get rich without cheating the Government. And the nation was able to enjoy the blessings of democracy without going bankrupt trying to cram them down every other nation's throat.

Not that we who lived in that era of pompadours and mandolins didn't have our problems. There were sides to take. It was a time devoted equally to the promotion of literature and fornication--and to their suppression. "It was a tough fight, Ma," says the fighter, "but we won."

I mention fleetingly the mental climate of that time before world wars because things happened then that can no longer happen. Such things as I relate in this story. Why? Because people are not the same. They are no longer bright apples on a tree, but a governmental mash of applesauce.

I introduced Clara to my landlady as my fiancée. I explained we were going to get married as soon as I got my next five-dollar raise which would skyrocket my weekly wage to $22.50. Mollified by my honorable plans, the landlady allowed Clara to share my cubbyhole room for an extra three dollars. With a weekly rent total of nine dollars, eight and a half remained between paydays for food, diversion and emergencies. Obviously, Clara's interest in me was not mercenary.

What was Clara like? I wrote in my diary at the time--I had decided to keep one like the De Goncourt brothers--"She looks more like an angel out of heaven than a whore out of Queen Lil's establishment."

Clara had a gentle face and a shy voice that stuttered slightly. Blonde braids were coiled on top of her head like Rowena in Ivanhoe. She wore a sort of mountain climber's suit of a heavy, invincible material. Its five-pound skirt menaced her slim ankles. And Clara's blue eyes were as innocent as if they had entered their sockets a half hour ago. There was no memory of sin in them.

My recollection of Clara's body is vivid, for it was the first of its kind to come under my notice. It was a delicate yet voluptuous body. Its every inch of paper-white skin was a whisper of modesty and a simultaneous sigh of lewdness. A (continued on page 88) Clara (continued from page 57) sort of Jekyll-Hyde body. After the most disorderly embraces it was able to assume a tender guise of virginity. There were no ruses. All Clara did was open her eyes and let a child look out of them again.

Things went well in my cubbyhole room for two weeks. Outside its window the rooftops of the city careened in the spring sun, and chimneys put smoky awning stripes in the sky. Tugboats strutted in the river attended by retinues of garbage scows. Sooty doves idled on my window ledge and uttered their bull-fiddle grunts which are called cooing. Clara fed them the remains of our liverwurst sandwiches, our sole sustenance.

My working hours were from six A.M. to three P.M., but whatever story I was covering I managed during that time to scamper once or twice up the stairs to my attic nest. I found Clara always in bed, dutifully reading a volume of the books I had bought for her--the collected works of Oscar Wilde and Alfred de Musset. You paid the book salesman who lurked on the edge of the reporters' local room a dollar down and 50 cents a week thereafter for each set. And you did your best on payday to dodge this strategist. What an ominous and magical figure in my life was this seducer with sets who robbed me of lunches and dinners and left me Balzac, Carlyle, Swinburne, et al. to devour instead.

The reading was part of Clara's reformation. I read aloud to her for hours, intoning Swinburne and Browning as if they were missionaries with incantations. But Clara did most of her reforming in my arms. Between embraces, I asked her questions and learned from her soft tearful answers the statistics of her life as a prostitute. I found her confessions unbelievable. Looking at Clara's body, delicate and dreamy as a Botticelli nude, I threw its past away.

As I dressed each dawn, with Clara asleep, I felt from some point of view I can no longer understand, that our night of lovemaking had restored Clara's purity. A man of any age can persuade himself that a woman's thighs are altar rails, and that her passion is the hosanna of virtuous love rather than the wanton tumult of nerve endings. But a young man! A Jason on his first quest! There's a genius for losing his way. The truth of a woman is as distant from his mind as the farthest star. Put him in a woman's arms, and no lunatic is further from reality. But there is this to say for him--truth and reality will seldom bring him half as much delight.

Away from Clara, I remembered only one sentence out of our question-and-answer periods: "No m-man will ever t-touch me again, except you." What better words had Tristan or Abelard ever heard?

In our third week a penny's worth of sanity trickled into my head. It happened one night while a thunderstorm blazed and cannonaded outside our bedroom, and flung pebbles of rain against its window. The noisy storm brought an unfamiliar mood into our cubbyhole. Clara's nudity beside me lost its Botticelli dreaminess and became a lightning flash. The child look left her eyes and desire glittered in them--a sort of beggar's hunger that must panhandle in bed. Her nails bit at my arm as she greeted each thunderclap with a throaty laugh. The penny's worth of sanity told me that our bed was not a large enough world for Clara's reformation.

"How would you like to be a newspaper reporter?" I asked.

It was an eventful question.

•••

Mr. Martin Hutchens, the pink-cheeked, silver-haired managing editor of the Journal seemed to me the most distinguished man in the world. Despite his whiskey voice and hung-over tremor, I considered him superior to the President of the United States--and I may have been right. Drunk or sober, Mr. Hutchens had never been heard to speak an uncourteous word.

During the 15 minutes Clara and I stood beside his fenced-in desk, Mr. Hutchens remained gallantly on his feet and listened to my lies with so warm and trustful a smile that I burned with shame from tip to toe. That I could revere Mr. Hutchens so deeply and tell him so many lies about Miss Clara Van Arsdale is another proof of the shady ways of the reformer.

I had made up the name Van Arsdale, thinking it might appeal to Mr. Hutchens. It did. I madeup also the information that Miss Van Arsdale was a graduate of an Eastern university and a niece of the fine lady novelist, Edith Wharton, in whose footsteps she was hoping to follow.

Clara became the Journal's first girl reporter at $12 a week. This was the established salary for the launching of journalists. A placard over the water cooler offered the printed information--Any reporter who is worth more than $35 a week does not belong on my newspaper. John C. Eastman, Publisher.

Clara was given a desk in the small office at the limbo end of the large local room.

"Keep the door closed," Mr. Hutchens cautioned her, "and you will not be bothered by the verbal habits of my staff. Journalism is a high calling, but I'm afraid it has a low vocabulary."

Clara's office belonged to Doc Knapp, our editorial writer. He was a lanky, red-whiskered sage imported from the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado to handle the Greco-Bulgarian war and other distant confusions. He wrote rhapsodically about the Greeks and their immemorial love for freedom, and had only snarls for the Bulgarians. The Journal bloomed with large advertisements of cigarettes and wines of Greek manufacture. Nevertheless, I held, with the rest of the staff, that Doc Knapp was out of place on a newspaper. Who the hell wanted to read about Greeks, Bulgarians, Englishmen and Russians, when they could read about Chicagoans!

"You don't have to worry about ever seeing Doc Knapp," I assured Clara, "because he never comes to his desk until after supper. He can't think unless it's quiet, he told me. But if you should meet him just act as if you were talking to a minister. He isn't really one, but editorial writers are almost the same as ministers of the Gospel in their general outlook."

I noted the tufted black-leather couch that stood against the office wall, and explained its use to Clara, "Doc Knapp always lies down on it to brood for a half hour before writing an editorial."

•••

With Clara on the staff, I became the busiest reporter in town. I had two assignments to cover almost simultaneously, my own and hers. Clara was too timid to ask questions of strangers, and too confused by her new profession to understand what any news source might say to her. I asked the questions, jotted down the answers, darted into the Coroner's office in the County Building where an unbroken typewriter was available, typed out a story for Clara and escorted her to the Journal, reading it aloud to her in the street.

Clara entered the local room five minutes ahead of me and enclosed herself in her office. After a half hour of invisibility she came out and headed gracefully, copy in hand, for Mr. Eddie Mahoney, the city editor.

I had worried about Mr. Mahoney. He was a black-haired Irish type of cynic. Unlike Mr. Hutchens, he considered journalism a catch basin for hooligans, barflies and minor swindlers. On the subject of women, Mr. Mahoney was full of masterly invective.

But my worry soon left me. The bitter, sarcastic Mr. Mahoney, no less than Mr. Hutchens, was charmed by Clara. He addressed her in a sort of small boy's voice and was always the gentleman.So was the rest of the staff.

All was gay in my life except for a looming money problem. Our joint salaries of $29.50 a week were enough for (continued on page 122) Clara (continued from page 88) subsistence, but not for crises. The crises were Clara's mountain climber's suit, and her total lack of other wardrobe.

With the weather heating up, Clara's continued appearance in her armor of blue serge made her seem eccentric, as if she were a Laplander unable to adjust to the ways of our Temperate Zone. It wasn't only a change of suit Clara needed. She needed also shoes, dresses, underthings, stockings, hairbrushes, combs, hats, handkerchiefs, an umbrella and an assortment of make-up articles.

Clara begged me to let her quit the Journal and just lie in bed, reading and waiting for me--which she could do without any additional wardrobe.

"When winter c-comes," she said, "you can b-buy me a flannel nightgown like I used to wear at home. And a pair of slippers with f-fur on them. That's all I need."

But I insisted she continue in her new career. Why, I don't know. I was the chief victim of my deception, having to work twice as hard and growing increasingly jumpy lest my villainy be exposed. The thought of what Mr. Hutchens would say when he found out made my head swim several times a day. But for some reason, lost in the mystery of youth, it was necessary that I continue as a shuddering Pygmalion. And that Clara stay a journalist.

I started on a money-borrowing spree. Since most of the reporters I knew were on a similar quest, my pickings were lean--a dollar here, a half dollar there. I had figured I needed at least a hundred dollars--a sum of money as remote as the canals of Mars. Covering two assignments simultaneously, prowling the saloons and press rooms like some shameless moocher, cutting my day's eating down to a single liverwurst sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate, I grew hollow-eyed, green-skinned and unbarbered. Mr. Mahoney, whom I tackled for a loan (or advance) of $25, said to me, quietly, "You are mad. If anybody in the newspaper game had $25, he would retire."

And here, finally, the episode appears that was to keep Clara sharp in my memory.

I was in the Criminal Court Building's press room trying to win some money in a penny ante poker game fiercely waged by five insolvent players, when Charlie MacArthur of the Tribune appeared in the doorway and called my name. Despite cries of rage from the gamesters, I pocketed three dimes' profit and joined Charlie in the commodious and seedy hallway.

I'll try to write of Charlie so that he won't turn in his grave, for he was always a sensitive fellow with a shudder for overstatement. Of all the young journalists drinking and slugging their way to fame in that day, Charlie was one of the most popular and attractive, despite his being six months my junior. Curly black hair, smoky eyes, a pointed nose, sledgehammer fists, a capacity for alcohol that won a nod from the old-timers--these were Charlie MacArthur. Plus a firecracker mind and a vocabulary sired by the poets.

In the hall Charlie said, "A week from this Friday, Frank Piano is going to pay his debt to society on the gallows. And it seems that this doomed Etruscan is mysteriously fond of you. So I am ready to go partners with you in a certain enterprise. But let's discuss it elsewhere."

In the basement barroom, "Quincey No. 9," Charlie revealed to me that a drug called adrenaline had been lately discovered by science and that this drug could restore a hanged man to life if administered within five minutes after he had been pronounced officially dead.

"As you see," said Charlie, "that opens quite a field."

"I don't think we can get much of an advance out of Frank Piano," I said. "He's broke worse than I am."

"What a business head!" Charlie sneered. "It's like going into partnership with Will of the Mill. Will you listen, and not interrupt?"

I nodded.

"First, the procedure," said Charlie. "Doctor Francis Murphy is willing to cooperate to the full. He will be squatting in a private ambulance in the alley adjoining the hanging chamber. He will have a syringe in his hand, ready to revive the dead Mr. Piano with this new resurrection drug. We will then keep our Lazarus out of the public eye until I have filed the story to 20 leading newspapers of the nation, who will pay $50 apiece for an eyewitness account of this modern miracle. Which makes $1000 net. I am willing to go halves with you," Charlie sighed, "because I need somebody to mind the revived corpse until I get all the stories on the wire. If there's a leak, the AP grabs the story and nobody gets a penny."

"I get $500," I said, "no kidding?"

Charlie raised his right hand and nodded.

"What time are you through chasing fires?" he asked. I told him three o'clock.

"Perfect," said Charlie, "I don't start my activities for the Tribune until eight. So we'll have five hours every day till Friday to nail down any loose ends. Let's go."

"I can't start today until five o'clock," I said, "I'll meet you here at 5:15, "sharp.

Charlie grabbed my arm as I stood up, and spoke grimly. "Put this in thy bead-bag, Romeo--not a whisper to any dame, whoever she is. Or however reliable she seems. I want you to swear on that."

"I swear," I said, "so help me God," and was off.

I kept my oath. I told Clara only that I had formed a partnership with a genius named Charlie MacArthur which would keep me busy from three to eight every day. And that, inside of seven days, we were going to make a fortune.

Clara started weeping gently.

"I'm doing it for you," I said, "so you won't have to go around looking like Apple Annie."

"Th-then I won't s-see you for a whole week," Clara sniffled. "I'll die."

"You'll see me at eight P.M. every evening," I calmed her, "until dawn."

•••

I continued my double duties for the Journal, and joined Charlie at 3:15 each day. We worked well as a team, with an intellectual harmony that was later to make us play and movie collaborators.

We visited the death cell daily, in order to keep the doomed man in line. Frankie Piano was a lethargic type, hard to visualize as a run-amok husband who had stabbed his wife 29 times with a stiletto. I had written of it as the "Pin Cushion Murder."

"All I want from you is your cooperation," said Charlie.

"There's nothin' I can do," said Frankie, eying his cell bars.

"I'm speaking about after you're hanged," said Charlie. "Here's what we want--"

"It ain't right fer them to hang me," Frankie interrupted. "My lawyer proved how that fat bitch hollarin' day and night deprived me of my sanity. I never knew what I was doin' whenever I beat her up. My lawyer proved that, conclusive."

During his trial, Frankie had sat catching flies throughout the court sessions, but the jury had chosen to ignore this symptom of lunacy.

"What we want," said Charlie, "is your word of honor you'll stay put in the hotel room for five hours --"

Frankie looked confused.

"When?" he asked.

"After you're hanged and we cut you down and get you back in shape," said Charlie.

"What if the medicine don't work?" Frankie asked.

"You've got nothing to lose," said Charlie. "They're hanging you Friday, rain or shine. Doctor Murphy is coming here tomorrow to check on your general condition."

"What good can a doctor do me till after I'm dead?" Frankie argued.

"Are you going to cooperate or not," Charlie asked, "before and after the hanging? Let's have a straight answer."

"I'll go along," Frankie said, "don't worry."

"We haven't told your folks anything," said Charlie, "because we want your homecoming to be a big surprise."

"If that medicine works," Frankie smiled, "the first thing I do is fix that prosecutor bastard. I'll give you fellas a real pin cushion to put in the paper. Will I fix that state's attorney good!"

Frankie stood jabbing an imaginary stiletto into the air. Watching him, I asked Charlie, "Do you think the resurrection drug would work a second time on the same patient?" Charlie looked thoughtful.

Our next stop was Warden Jacobi, whose loyalty to our project needed daily bolstering. Sheriff Peter Bartzen, who presided over all hangings, was on vacation, catching muskellunge in Lake Kabetogama, Minnesota. We had checked on that. Thus, in the sheriff's absence, Warden Jacobi would be in full charge of our Friday event.

The sparrowlike Jacobi greeted us nervously and locked his office door behind us.

"I been thinking it over, fellas," Jacobi lowered his voice, "and I feel definitely I ought to wire Pete Bartzen about this whole thing. You know how touchy he is about gettin' full credit for any hangin'; even when I do all the work. Yeah, boys, I got to wire him."

"And lose your one chance to go down in history," Charlie said.

"As what?" Jacobi inquired.

"As the man who officiated at the biggest scientific miracle of our time," Charlie said slowly. "Your name will be in headlines from coast to coast." He quoted one--"Warden Jacobi Aghast At Walking Corpse."

"What if Bartzen suspects I knew about the miracle in advance and didn't inform him?" Jacobi asked.

"How's he going to suspect?" I demanded.

"My puttin' the noose knot in the wrong place," said Jacobi, "so Frankie only chokes to death."

"What the hell you talking about?" Charlie said. "You haven't broken a single neck since you been in office. Just suffocations."

I added, "Look, Warden, have I ever let you down and put a single word in the paper about your cells being jammed with whores on Saturday nights--and five dollars extra for any prisoners wishing to use the couches in this very office?"

"You're right," said Jacobi, "the hell with Peter Bartzen."

My only worry during these days of nailing down loose ends was Clara. She greeted me each evening at eight with a forlorn look. Her eyes filled with tears as we embraced. Touched by such devotion, I promised lyrically never to leave her side after Friday morning. Clara buried her face in the pillow, too overcome to look at me. I fell asleep thinking that no man had ever been more loved than I in my attic room that overlooked the river with the bridge lights swimming init like fiery snakes.

•••

On Thursday Charlie was an hour late at Quincey No. 9. He came in finally with an air of aloofness. Sitting at our table, he started fishing telegrams out of his pockets.

"Care to look at these?" he asked.

I looked. They were 23 acceptances sent in over the Tribune's private wire and typed out by Charlie's telegrapher ally, who had been promised five percent of our bonanza for his secret services. The language of the telegrams was almost identical--"Will take 1500 words on resurrection of dead man by new miracle drug in presence of official eyewitnesses stop will pay wire charges and pay you $50 after story in print." And each telegram was signed by a managing editor.

"You will notice," said Charlie, "not a word about any hanging. No leak. Everything shipshape."

I regarded my partner with some awe. I had never seen a finer business head in action.

"That winds things up till the hanging," said Charlie. "Let's drink to Doctor Murphy and his syringe."

"I'll see you at five A.M. in the death cell," I said, and stood up.

"From the way you act," Charlie said, "you might as well be married to somebody. Go on, scoot. You'll be late for the chain gang."

I scampered up the four flights to my room. It was four o'clock, the first afternoon rendezvous with Clara in a week. But Clara was missing from the room. The empty bed smote me, and I stood desolate in the doorway. My bewilderment finally subsided. Obviously Clara was still at the paper, detained by Mr. Hutchens and his reminiscences. He had recently started telling her of his youthful literary activities on the New York Sun.

I hurtled down the stairs into the spring afternoon and headed on a run for Market Street. I sprinted every other block of the mile to the Journal. I arrived winded and started slowly up the stairway to the local room on the second floor. Halfway up I paused. Somebody was yelling in the local room. I recognized Mr. Hutchens' voice, roaring out words that impaled me against the stairwell.

"You dirty bawd!" Mr. Hutchens was yelling, "you filthy Jezebel! Take your vile carcass out of my newspaper office, Miss Van Arsdale! Out! Out, you miserable harlot!"

Mr. Hutchens had found out. A figure darted out of the local room and came rapidly down the stairs. It was Mr. Mahoney.

"Come on, kid," Mr. Mahoney grabbed my arm, "beat it--for your life!"

"I got to protect her," I said.

As Mr. Mahoney pulled me along down the stairs, I heard Mr. Hutchens crying out. "Put on your clothes, Miss Van Arsdale, or by God, I'll turn you over to the police."

Mr. Mahoney pushed me into a saloon. We sat in a booth.

"Leave the bottle on the table," Mr. Mahoney said to the bartender, "and if anyone asks for me, I'm not here."

I sat staring as I had often seen occupants of the death cell do.

"You brainless bastard!" Mr. Mahoney said, "I ought to knock your ears off, myself."

I nodded. Mr. Mahoney started suddenly to laugh.

"God Almighty!" he said, "it was the nuttiest scene I ever saw in my life! Right out of Petronius! Where in hell did you dig up Miss Van Arsdale?"

"Queen Lil's," I said. "I was reforming her."

"For God's sake, don't faint on me!" Mr. Mahoney said, sharply. "Start drinking and I'll bring you up to date on Miss Van Arsdale. I'll try not to laugh." Mr. Mahoney quoted, "He jests at scars who never felt a wound."

Then he began, "Doc Knapp came to work several hours early today. He was toting an armload of books on Greek culture. And he says to me, 'I have some important research to do, Eddie, and I don't want to be disturbed.' Whereupon, Doc entered his office and found Mr. Bolger, head of the composing room, banging a naked lady on his couch. A second gentleman from the composing room was also present. He was sitting in Doc Knapp's editorial chair, waiting his turn. I think it was our Mr. Peebles. At least, I saw a fat man with a bald head and his pants off getting the hell beat out of him by Doc Knapp.

"Mr. Hutchens appeared at the door, full of bewilderment. He thought the Bulgarians were striking back at Doc. It took a while to piece the true story together. Doc Knapp kept emitting howls like a mountain lion and threatening to lay waste to the entire composing room. It seems that nearly all of Local 912 had been befouling his sanctum."

Mr. Mahoney downed another drink and shook his head.

"Kid, reforming a woman is tops in waste effort," he said; "You might as well try to build a house in a mirage. The female, from birth onward, is a mist of lies. And her white belly is a shrine for swindle and delusion." Mr. Mahoney drank again and chuckled. "I'm sorry, kid, to belittle your despair with my low laughter, but it can't be helped. I'll never forget Mr. Hutchens' face when he saw Miss Van Arsdale, his girl reporter, lying mother naked on Doc's couch with two five-dollar bills clutched in her lily hand--"

Mr. Mahoney went on for some time. I sat frozen and swallowed my drinks with difficulty.

Mr. Mahoney's voice and words are clear across the many years, but my recollection of Frank Piano's hanging is almost without detail--except one. I'll come to it shortly. I can remember that I sat the next dawn numbed from a night of drinking, staring at a gallows crowded with figures, among them Frank Piano. The figures vanished and Frankie became a white-robed, white-hooded figure choking to death at the end of a rope.

"Wake up," Charlie whispered beside me. "You're going to have to help carry him to the ambulance in the alley, because Jacobi says he wants to keep his skirts clean. Did you notice Frankie winking at us before they put the hood on him?" Then Charlie added, "Moses in the Mountain! Look who's here!"

Sheriff Peter Bartzen was walking across the room toward the gallows. Two hefty deputies walked behind him. The gray-haired, stocky Bartzen stopped at the gallows and stood puffing on his pipe as he watched the white bundle turn slowly and inflate for a last time. Doc Springer, the coroner, stepped forward and examined the motionless white bundle through a stethoscope.

"I pronounce him dead," Doc Springer spoke up, "time, 11 minutes on the nose."

"Cut him down," said Bartzen. "Under the laws of this state, I'm claiming the body."

Charlie and I joined the group under the gallows. Charlie did most of the talking. He finished an eloquent plea for Frankie's body with the vow that Sheriff Honest Pete Bartzen would be given sole credit in the story, and that Jacobi's name would not even be mentioned.

"I don't do business with proved double-crossers," the sheriff said. "I had to cut short my vacation to get here in time to prevent you from making a laughing stock of Cook County."

The two deputies carried Frankie's body out of the hanging chamber. A few minutes later Frankie Piano was on his way to the Cook County Hospital, with the Sheriff sitting next to him. Charlie and I followed in a call. Sheriff Bartzen was waiting for us outside the surgery door.

"You can't go inside," Bartzen said. "There's an autopsy clinic going on. An anatomy student has just cut off Frank Piano's head. And now they are going to dissect him, as authorized by the laws of the State of Illinois." Bartzen lit his pipe and grinned a she added, "Maybe you two clowns will think twice before you try to double-cross Pete Bartzen again."

"Who notified you?" I asked.

"My loyal friend, Warden Jacobi," Bartzen answered.

•••

A week later, I lay in my cubbyhole bed, reading. All was well in my world. Outside my window, the spring night was a ballet of shadows and rooftops. That king of gentlemen, Mr. Hutchens, had forgiven me and allowed me to resume the high calling of journalism. I had been betrayed and made ridiculous by a pathetic strumpet with a gentle face and an uncontrollable lust. But the evil doings of Clara Van Arsdale were as unreal and harmless as the fiery snakes that swam under the lighted bridges.

And I preferred the new occupant of my bed--the complete works of Guy de Maupassant, 18 volumes bound in light-blue covers with titles in gold lettering.