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The matter was handled as Dad ordered; the lawyer’s clerk went to court, and came back and reported that the prisoners had appeared, but Chaim Menzies had not been among them. His case had been taken over by the Federal authorities, because it had been discovered that he was born in Russian Poland, and it was proposed to cancel his naturalization papers and deport him. Chaim had been transferred to the county jail, another condemned structure, fully as dingy and filthy as the city jail. There was no longer anything you could do about it, because in these deportation cases the courts were refusing to intervene, holding them to be administrative matters. The Democratic attorney-general had failed in his effort to get the nomination for president by his campaign against the reds, but the machinery he had set going was still grinding out misery for guilty and innocent alike.
So here was some real trouble for Bunny! Over at the Menzies home was Rachel, white-faced and pacing the floor, and Mamma Menzies wailing and tearing her clothing. It was impossible even to get word to poor Chaim—he was “incommunicado”; indeed, he might already have been put onto a train for the east. After that there would be no chance for him whatever—he would be dumped onto a steamer for Dantzig, and there turned over to the Polish “white terror.”
Bunny insisted that something must be tried, and so Mr. Dolliver called in a couple of still more expensive lawyers—at Dad’s expense—and they debated habeas corpuses and injunctions and other mystical formulas, and made out a lot of papers and tried this court and that, all in vain. Meantime, in response to frantic commands from his son, Dad broke the speed laws from Paradise; and when he arrived, there were Bunny and his Jewish girl-friend waiting on his front-porch. They dragged him into his den and made him listen to a disquisition on the difference between the right and left wings of the Socialist movement, with a complete description of the activities of a literature agent of the Socialist party. In the middle of it Rachel burst into tears, and sank down upon the sofa; and Dad, who was really no more able to stand a woman weeping than was Bunny, went over and patted her on the shoulder, and said, “There, there, little girl, never mind! I’ll get him out, even if I have to send a man to New York!”
So Dad stepped out and sped away in his car. That was about lunch-time—and a little before three o’clock of that same day, who should emerge from a taxi-cab in front of the Menzies tenement but Chaim himself, dirty and unshaven, but smiling and serene, and ready to continue his labors for his “cloding vorkers”! He hadn’t the least idea how it had happened; the keepers of the county jail had volunteered no information as they turned him loose, and Chaim had not stopped for questions. He never did know, and neither did his daughter, for what Dad told Bunny was strictly confidential, a bit of oil men’s secret lore.
“What did I do? I called in an old friend of ours, Ben Skutt.”
“Ben Skutt!” Bunny had not thought of their “lease-hound” for years.
“Yes, Ben is high up in this defense business now, and he did it for me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Tell him? I told him one grand.”
“One what?”
“That’s bootlegger’s slang. I gave him five hundred dollars, and said, ‘Ben, go and see the man that’s got that old kike in jail and tell him to turn him loose, and then come back to me and I’ll give you another five hundred!’ ”
“My God!” said Bunny.
And Dad took a couple of puffs at his big cigar. “Now you see why we oil men have to be in politics!”