Calculating and self-absorbed, Groll was yet not of those gamblers who, staking all at each leap, infrequently arrive through desire and infatuated confidence to heights seemingly beyond their force. He moved slowly to his end, with that unhuman oriental patience which, allied to the imagination of the American, forms in its rare conjunction characters that death alone can thwart. He knew how to bide his time without, as commonly occurs, the waiting consuming him. At thirty-eight, age when the American reckons his life a success or a failure, he had not lost a whit of his complacency. He had never known youth, he had not therefore been disturbed by its pangs for instant preeminence.
With all that he was approaching forty a shyster lawyer, living on the blackmail he shared with the police. The future did not seem to hold anything further. Nevertheless, he had forced a career even out of this slough of petty misery. He had begun by examining carefully the problem of vice and the law, asking himself anxiously if the system of blackmail was transitory. He soon became convinced that so long as public sentiment would not admit that vice exists and legalize it, vice must exist through corruption. He then conceived an audacious plan, which was no less than to unite under one system, with himself as the head, all the traffic in blackmail which then filtered through a thousand intersecting channels. The man who could achieve such an organization, he saw would dominate the city so long as he was content to remain obscure. Towards this end he had moved irresistibly, picking his associates and his agents, biding only the moment when his fortune would permit him to launch the system on a grand scale. So well had he locked up in his own breast the secret of this gigantic plan that Bofinger himself did not suspect it.
In character he was frugal, temperate, and peaceful, without vices or distractions, qualities which in another man would have been virtues, so strangely does the controlling motive determine betwixt virtue and vice. Born three centuries ago he might have been a bigot, pursuing religion with the same fanaticism which he brought to the conquest of his present design.
Bofinger continuing to defend himself, Groll interrupted decisively:
"One is never strong enough to be confident. Only a fool feels secure. Talk to Ganzler who is one of us—but not to LeBeau, who for a sensation might write us up and bring everything tumbling about our ears! Also don't show your hand! Play close to your chest." He stopped, considered his associate, and perceiving the reproof was felt, added: "Now for business. What did they say at that new joint in Eighteenth Street?"
Bofinger, who had taken his scolding like a guilty schoolboy, hastened gratefully to the opening, saying:
"They won't give up a cent."
"Did you make clear our pull?"
"Yes."
"What, do they think they can operate in this district for nothing?"