Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/478

 Terminology in blackmailing is so large that it needs a dictionary. In France the blackmailer is called a "chanteur", his methods "chantage"—now international words—and a melancholy tune it is that the victim "sings"! In Italian, the same terms are translated, or called "estorsione", though Italy happily knows little of them very cruelest art. In German-speaking countries blackmail is "Rupferei", "Erpressung" and so on, in common nonprofessional comment.

In cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, sometimes operate regularly organized cliques of rascals; either similisexual prostitutes, or in touch with such. These lay traps for the homosexual, concoct plans for terrifying him, and live by such industry. The demands on the victim are large or small, repeated or not, according to his social station, to his estate, to skill in keeping him in postal-distance or interview-distance; and to success in frightening him into continued yielding. It may seem incredible, but instances are not rare in which bank-accounts of large size, fortunes and estates, have dribbled away by "bleeding" a victim. Thousands of pounds,francs, marks, florins, dollars, have passed into a blackmailer's pockets, when a fly of the right sort is in this spiderweb. The victim sometimes can escape soon, by luck or pluck. But this is not the rule, one fears. Over and over, too, we hear that a secret which destroys a victim's estate or life has been disposed of to some "pal" of the original "Erpresser", and is to be "worked" further; with new devices of villainy.

What can the average victim do to escape? Despairing, fearing social disgrace and a prison's cell, perhaps already mulcted for more money than he can afford and dreading the next demand—how can he win out? Possibly a single hour, nay, a few minutes