The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (43 page)

There was a half-column account of the robbery—it was evident that a gang was operating in the neighborhood, said the paper, for it was the third within a week, and the police were apparently powerless. The victim was an insurance agent, and he had lost a hundred and ten dollars that did not belong to him. He had chanced to have his name marked on his shirt, otherwise he would not have been identified yet. His assailant had hit him too hard, and he was suf fering from concussion of the brain; and also he had been half-frozen when found, and would lose three fingers of his right hand. The enterprising newspaper reporter had taken all this information to his family, and told how they had received it.

Since it was Jurgis’s first experience, these details naturally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed coolly—it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. “It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow every time,” he observed.

“Still,” said Jurgis, reflectively, “he never did us any harm.”

“He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that,” said his friend.

 

Duane had already explained to Jurgis that if a man of their trade were known he would have to work all the time to satisfy the demands of the police. Therefore it would be better for Jurgis to stay in hiding and never be seen in public with his pal. But Jurgis soon got very tired of staying in hiding. In a couple of weeks he was feeling strong and beginning to use his arm, and then he could not stand it any longer. Duane, who had done a job of some sort by himself, and made a truce with the powers, brought over Marie, his little French girl, to share with him; but even that did not avail for long, and in the end he had to give up arguing, and take Jurgis out and introduce him to the saloons and “sporting-houses” where the big crooks and “hold-up men” hung out.

And so Jurgis got a glimpse of the high-class criminal world of Chicago. The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the business men and expended by this army; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drinks were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash. And this army of graft had, of course, to be maintained the year round. The leaders and organizers were maintained by the business men directly,-aldermen and legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the city, or else lived off the populace directly. There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office-boy to the head of a city department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this had brought the “madames” into the combination. It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the pool-room man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting “graft,” and was willing to pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak-thief, and the receiver of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake-doctor and the usurer, the beggar and the “push-cart man,” the prize-fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track “tout,” the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person,—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, and the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon. “Hinkydink” or “Bath-house John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the “gray wolves” of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and prize-fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and hold-up men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour’s notice.

A month ago Jurgis had all but perished of starvation upon the streets; and now suddenly, as by the gift of a magic key, he had entered into a world where money and all the good things of life came freely. He was introduced by his friend to an Irishman named “Buck” Halloran, who was a political “worker” and on the inside of things. This man talked with Jurgis for a while, and then told him that he had a little plan by which a man who looked like a workingman might make some easy money; but it was a private affair, and had to be kept quiet. Jurgis expressed himself as agreeable, and the other took him that afternoon (it was Saturday) to a place where city laborers were being paid off. The paymaster sat in a little booth, with a pile of envelopes before him, and two policemen standing by. Jurgis went, according to directions, and gave the name of “Michael O‘Flaherty,” and received an envelope, which he took around the corner and delivered to Halloran, who was waiting for him in a saloon. Then he went again, and gave the name of “Johann Schmidt,” and a third time, and gave the name of “Serge Reminitsky.” Halloran had quite a list of imaginary working-men, and Jurgis got an envelope for each one. For this work he received five dollars, and was told that he might have it every week, so long as he kept quiet. As Jurgis was excellent at keeping quiet, he soon won the trust of “Buck” Halloran, and was introduced to others as a man who could be depended upon.

This acquaintance was useful to him in another way, also; before long Jurgis made his discovery of the meaning of “pull,” and just why his boss, Connor, and also the pugilist bartender, had been able to send him to jail. One night there was given a ball, the “benefit” of “One-eyed Larry,” a lame man who played the violin in one of the big “high-class” houses of prostitution on Clark Street, and was a wag and a popular character on the “Lêvée.” This ball was held in a big dance-hall, and was one of the occasions when the city’s powers of debauchery gave themselves up to madness. Jurgis attended and got half insane with drink, and began quarrelling over a girl; his arm was pretty strong by then, and he set to work to clean out the place, and ended in a cell in the police-station. The police-station being crowded to the doors, and stinking with “bums,” Jurgis did not relish staying there to sleep off his liquor, and sent for Halloran, who called up the district leader and had Jurgis bailed out by telephone at four o‘clock in the morning. When he was arraigned that same morning, the district leader had already seen the clerk of the court and explained that Jurgis Rudkus was a decent fellow, who had been indiscreet ; and so Jurgis was fined ten dollars and the fine was “suspended”—which meant that he did not have to pay it, and never would have to pay it, unless somebody chose to bring it up against him in the future.

Among the people Jurgis lived with now money was valued according to an entirely different standard from that of the people of Packingtown; yet, strange as it may seem, he did a great deal less drinking than he had as a working-man. He had not the same provocations of exhaustion and hopelessness; he had now something to work for, to struggle for. He soon found that if he kept his wits about him, he would come upon new opportunities; and being naturally an active man, he not only kept sober himself, but helped to steady his friend, who was a good deal fonder of both wine and women than he.

One thing led to another. In the saloon where Jurgis met “Buck” Halloran he was sitting late one night with Duane, when a “country customer” (a buyer for an out-of-town merchant) came in, a little more than half “piped.” There was no one else in the place but the bartender, and as the man went out again Jurgis and Duane followed him; he went round the corner, and in a dark place made by a combination of the elevated railroad and an unrented building, Jurgis leaped forward and shoved a revolver under his nose, while Duane, with his hat pulled over his eyes, went through the man’s pockets with lightning fingers. They got his watch and his “wad,” and were round the corner again and into the saloon before he could shout more than once. The bartender, to whom they had tipped the wink, had the cellar-door open for them, and they vanished, making their way by a secret entrance to a brothel next door. From the roof of this there was access to three similar places beyond. By means of these passages the customers of any one place could be gotten out of the way, in case a falling out with the police chanced to lead to a raid; and also it was necessary to have a way of getting a girl out of reach in case of an emergency. Thousands of them came to Chicago answering advertisements for “servants” and “factory hands,” and found themselves trapped by fake employment agencies, and locked up in a bawdy-house. It was generally enough to take all their clothes away from them; but sometimes they would have to be “doped” and kept prisoners for weeks; and meantime their parents might be telegraphing the police, and even coming on to see why nothing was done.
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Occasionally there was no way of satisfying them but to let them search the place to which the girl had been traced.

For his help in this little job, the bartender received twenty out of the hundred and thirty odd dollars that the pair secured; and naturally this put them on friendly terms with him, and a few days later he introduced them to a little “sheeny” named Goldberger, one of the “runners” of the “sporting-house” where they had been hidden. After a few drinks Goldberger began, with some hesitation, to narrate how he had had a quarrel over his best girl with a professional “card-sharp,” who had hit him in the jaw. The fellow was a stranger in Chicago, and if he was found some night with his head cracked there would be no one to care very much. Jurgis, who by this time would cheerfully have cracked the heads of all the gamblers in Chicago, inquired what would be coming to him; at which the Jew became still more confidential, and said that he had some tips on the New Orleans races, which he got direct from the police captain of the district, whom he had got out of a bad scrape, and who “stood in” with a big syndicate of horse owners. Duane took all this in at once, but Jurgis had to have the whole race-track situation explained to him before he realized the importance of such an opportunity.

There was the gigantic Racing Trust. It owned the legislatures in every state in which it did business; it even owned some of the big newspapers, and made public opinion—there was no power in the land that could oppose it unless, perhaps, it were the Pool-room Trust. It built magnificent racing parks all over the country, and by means of enormous purses it lured the people to come, and then it organized a gigantic shell-game, whereby it plundered them of hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Horse-racing had once been a sport, but nowadays it was a business; a horse could be “doped” and doctored, undertrained or overtrained; it could be made to fall at any moment—or its gait could be broken by lashing it with the whip, which all the spectators would take to be a desperate effort to keep it in the lead. There were scores of such tricks; and sometimes it was the owners who played them and made fortunes, sometimes it was the jockeys and trainers, sometimes it was outsiders, who bribed them—but most of the time it was the chiefs of the trust. Now, for instance, they were having winter-racing in New Orleans, and a syndicate was laying out each day’s programme in advance, and its agents in all the Northern cities were “milking” the pool-rooms. The word came by long-distance telephone in a cipher code, just a little while before each race; and any man who could get the secret had as good as a fortune. If Jurgis did not believe it, he could try it, said the little Jew—let them meet at a certain house on the morrow and make a test. Jurgis was willing, and so was Duane, and so they went to one of the high-class pool-rooms where brokers and merchants gambled (with society women in a private room), and they put up ten dollars each upon a horse called “Black Beldame,” a six to one shot, and won. For a secret like that they would have done a good many sluggings—but the next day Goldberger informed them that the offending gambler had got wind of what was coming to him, and had skipped the town.

 

There were ups and downs at the business; but there was always a living, inside of a jail, if not out of it. Early in April the city elections were due, and that meant prosperity for all the powers of graft. Jurgis, hanging round in dives and gambling-houses and brothels, met with the heelers of both parties, and from their conversation he came to understand all the ins and outs of the game, and to hear of a number of ways in which he could make himself useful about election time. “Buck” Halloran was a “Democrat,” and so Jurgis became a Democrat also; but he was not a bitter one—the Republicans were good fellows, too, and were to have a pile of money in this next campaign. At the last election the Republicans had paid four dollars a vote to the Democrats’ three; and “Buck” Halloran sat one night playing cards with Jurgis and another man, who told how Halloran had been charged with the job of voting a “bunch” of thirty-seven newly landed Italians, and how he, the narrator, had met the Republican worker who was after the very same gang, and how the three had effected a bargain, whereby the Italians were to vote half and half, for a glass of beer apiece, while the balance of the fund went to the conspirators!