Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Action and Adventure
On his way to Bellevue to meet the commissioner he telephoned Von Reithmann, authority on pellagra, sleeping sickness and forms of narcotic depression.
“It looks like henbane-hyoscine,” pronounced the scientist. “Not the usual variety—
Hyoscyamus niger
—probably a tropical variety, more powerful, more deadly. Ordinary henbane is a powerful poison. These men are sinking into a death coma.”
He looked again at their eyes, more expertly than the interne had done, shook his head.
“Two of them are pretty far along,” he pronounced. “I doubt if we can get them back. All tissues attacked. Their eyes are gone. This one is younger, he seems more vital. We can try stimulants on him. We’ll start with adrenalin. It is possible he may talk,” he added. “His tongue and palate are in better condition than the others. Ah!”
He had been feeling the pulses of the two others simultaneously. Now he bent down, set his head against the chest of one, called for a stethoscope. To both they gave deep injections of adrenalin, but they were gone to the Land of Shadows. He worked with the doctors in attendance on the younger subject.
Manning, forewarned, hoping for some such thing to take place, had brought a microphonic attachment by which he could hear the merest whispers. A nurse volunteered to take down the notes he gave, just as they might come from the patient, to be interpreted later.
It was hard to piece together those vague and disconnected mutterings that followed the administration of the stimulants. The man’s will strove to make communication. His shattered nervous system failed to plug in on his cerebral connections, his glands could no longer supply the galvanic fluids, save weakly and spasmodically; but a gleam came into Manning’s eyes as he listened.
To the rest they sounded like ravings. Talk of a subterranean place where men worked as prisoners under the will of a fiend. Men who had no longer names, but only numbers, who were under the thrall of Him who ordered their tasks. Talk of a circular room of steel, draped with golden tapestries, of mysterious music, of a Being who wore a strange mask over his hawklike features, who laughed mockingly as Satan.
The Griffin!
Manning had heard that jeering laughter, the mysterious music, over the telephone that transmitted the Griffin’s menacing messages, instruments synchronized by him so that they were, for the time, private lines. He would well imagine the underground laboratory, the men enslaved there, the circular chamber of steel. He had seen the man in the strange mask.
But he could not prompt the man, could not get questions through to his failing brain. The mutterings ceased. Von Reithmann and the rest tried to restore him, but it was useless. The narcotic had done its work too thoroughly. One of the Griffin’s men had been in their hands. Others, when captured, had refused to talk. This one had slipped through. They were no nearer the Griffin’s real name—if indeed the man had known it—or the place where he made his lair.
“An autopsy may determine the poison,” Von Reithmann was saying. Manning paid scant attention. Analysis would not mean anything to him. The stuff had not been bought where it could be traced. It had been infused perhaps by one of these men, one of the two who had chemical stains on their fingers, it might be the one who had babbled and then died.
Manning was thinking, following up the thought. For some reason these men had been deliberately discarded by the Griffin. In some way they had displeased him—failed him. Only one with a hidden well of vitality had to some extent survived his intentions. To leave them dying, but not dead, to mock at the efforts of doctors to restore them while they guessed at police headquarters as to motives; was the sort of jest that pleased the Griffin and tickled his grim sense of humor.
But—why should he have such supreme control over men whose mental capacity seemed so superior?
Because he had something on them. There were plenty of chemists, doctors, scientists, men high in engineering and all the professions who had fallen, been expunged from the society of their fellows and the practice of their callings by some lapse, some error that had, in all likelihood, branded them as felons.
They would have records.
He handed on his deduction to the commissioner of police, recommending finger-prints to be taken, the Identification Bureau put to work, requests broadcast for reports.
The prints were sent out by radio-print, but the answers were found at Centre Street.
They had their names, their records, up to the time that they had disappeared below the surface. One a chemist, one an ex-surgeon and general practitioner, the other a well-known consulting engineer. No need now to publish them. They threw light on the Griffin’s methods, explained something of his seemingly infernal genius. The man was not omniscient. He had the cunning brain of one inflicted with grandiose dementia, he could plan evil, and these castaways of civilizations worked out his problems. Now their lips—and the lips of headquarters, were sealed by their death.
“There might have been some sort of minor mutiny,” Manning said to the commissioner. “They may have rebelled against something that the Griffin contemplated as too horrible to even barter their lives against. So he made examples of them, had them conveyed unconscious to the Driveway. I wouldn’t give out anything to the press about the Griffin.”
The commissioner shook his head.
“The less the public hear of that scoundrel the better,” he said. “Sends a wave of hysteria out that is like the circles from a rock in a millpond, extending to the outer edges of the community. It even affects the stock market. And, above all, it pleases the Griffin. Notoriety is his favorite nutriment. I shall not even give out the identity of the poor devils who have paid their penalties. No sense in making their families suffer. The Griffin is like a ghost, Manning. We seem to clutch him and our fingers close on thin air.”
“I’ll grip him yet,” said Manning slowly. “And, when I do, I’m not going to let go—alive or dead.”
II
THE telephone in Manning’s suite of offices, on the outer door of which he was announced as a consulting attorney, rang with that peculiar vibration he had grown to know so well and, not so much to dread as to listen to with nerves suddenly taut, his spirit arming itself for sinister adventure.
It never rang in that fashion but when he was in his private room. He knew that the Griffin had means of watching his ordinary comings and goings—no especially difficult matter. It never rang, so far, but what it presaged death and disaster. It took a sturdy man with a strong will to not lose heart in these encounters, always fatal to some worthy and notable person.
The audacity of the Griffin had grown to the point where he deliberately announced to Gordon Manning, as his adversary, the name of his next victim and the day on which he would surely die, despite all of Manning’s precautions, backed by the police force of New York. The methods of these tragedies, that left millions of people aghast as they read of them, were subtle and unique.
It was a challenge that the Griffin sought to liken to a game of chess. He would play it in this way, announcing his first moves to Manning, so long as it amused him, he announced. If Gordon Manning pressed him too far, too close, he threatened to eliminate him, to wreak his anger on the woman Manning loved, but had foresworn while engaged on the perilous mission he had accepted.
So long as the Griffin lived, love was out of the question for Manning. The girl had once been within those swift and far flung coils of the Griffin, like the tentacles of an octopus. Now she was free, yet she was threatened. Manning stood between love and duty, and relinquished the former for the girl’s own sake, even though he might lose her to another.
He took up the telephone unhesitatingly and immediately the deep tones of the Griffin came to him. And, as always, there was an undertone of music, mysterious, exotic.
“Ah, there you are, Manning. A busy day for you. It was clever of you to imagine that those three disobedient fools might be men of mine, I did not set the scarlet seal on their foreheads, for that is reserved for those I choose to annihilate for other reasons than that they refuse to carry out my own wishes. These three were squeamish. Now they are dead. One, it seems, babbled a bit, but what he could tell was negligible. And the drug I gave him instantly destroys full coördination of brain as well as body.
“A useful drug, very. It comes from the Caribbean. They use it in voodoo. An active alkaloid, not unlike scopolamine, but virulent in its breakdown of the tissues and leucocytes. Most interesting.
“You continue to amuse me, Manning. I trust you have sense of humor enough to appreciate that. My next selection for elimination is….”
Manning’s eyes narrowed during the deliberate pause. He refused to be annoyed at the Griffin’s derision of himself, but here was another victim marked down. It was his own special mission to prevent the crime—and to capture the Griffin.
“Edward Brooks, that meddler in international affairs,” went on the sonorous voice, “that self-advertising politician who has ambitions that will never be realized! That would-be diplomat! He would have been wiser to have kept to the manufacture of washing machines that made his fortune. He is a colossal egoist who shall be destroyed, inevitably, despite all your efforts, Manning, some time between midnight of the ninth of the month and midnight of the tenth. Now go to work, perfect your arrangements—and find yourself once more checkmated on the board. I shall be close by when it happens, Manning, depend on that. And it will furnish front page news.”
The voice ceased with a rumble of mocking laughter, the strains of mystic melody.
In that last sentence Manning read, as he had read before, much that was the key to the Griffin’s character. He was a dangerous madman. His own supreme conceit would be fed by those front page stories, while he charged the man he meant to kill with his own disease.
He claimed to give Manning every advantage in proclaiming his opening moves, but Manning knew that each crime was long thought out, perfected after an intimate study of the prospective victim’s habits.
There was a kink to the Griffin’s mind that may have been aggravated by the contemplation of some real or fancied injury that had set him against law and order, progress and enlightenment, made him a pseudo-iconoclast of all that was decent and honorable, a foe to justice and religion. Jealousy perhaps entered into it.
Here was Edward Brooks, millionaire manufacturer, it was true, and a man of sound sense and judgment, who had forged ahead by sheer merit. He had been ambassador abroad and served with distinction in various crises. He had aided materially the peace commissions and arms reduction boards. He was prominent in the Russian problem and the recognition question of the Soviet, the problems of Poland and the Balkans. He was the dark horse of one party for the presidency.
And the Griffin consigned him to oblivion as carelessly as a man might plan to remove some noxious vermin.
Manning sat staring out of his window, hardly seeing the towers of Manhattan, the bridges, the busy shipping of the great city he loved, infested by this monster. His face was lined and looked old in its leanness. He was in the prime of life and physical condition, but the strain of fighting the Griffin, or tracking him to his lair, of destroying this dragon against whom he was a modern St. George, had told upon him.
Always spare, he was worn to the quick in body and spirit. The burning resolve to rid the world of this perverted but powerful wretch burned high, like a consuming fever, devoured his sleep. His eyes shone with the light that also illumined the working of his brain. His hands were clenched until the knuckles showed white, little knots of muscles tossed along the lines of his jaw, veins stood out. The will of the man, defeated and enduring, gave a curious transparency and radiance to his well cut, determined features.
Manning did not meddle in politics, but he used them on occasion. Through the police commissioner he got in touch with a man powerful enough to secure for him a practically immediate interview with Brooks.
“He is laying a corner stone for the new Memorial Hospital in the Bronx,” said the man. “I’ll get in touch with him. If you can go directly you will be in time to see him before the ceremonies are over and you will find him ready to talk. I understand that this matter is imperative, Mr. Manning?”
“It is.” Manning took no public credit for his work against the Griffin. His failure and his ultimate success—of which he was steadfastly assured—reflected on the police commissioner. The man to whom he was speaking did not suspect the gravity of the occasion, and Manning did not enlighten him. Such matters were not to be talked of over the telephone.
He went down, got his powerful roadster from the garage and started north. He had plates, a card, a badge, and other matters that secured him right of way if he wanted them, and he used them to get through the heart of New York, to make sure of finding his man.
III
BROOKS was a big man in more ways than one. An astute one. He knew of Manning, he guessed on what errand he might have come, but he showed no tremor in his greeting, in his conducting of the ceremony.
“We will go back together to my hotel, Manning,” he suggested with cordiality. “I suppose there is nothing likely to interfere with that?”
His words showed Manning that Brooks knew. He admired the high courage of the man. It could hardly stiffen his resolve to save him, but it did enhance the diabolical nature of the Griffin’s plot. Here was the highest type of truly patriotic American, imperiled by the fantasy of a lunatic.
Brooks lived in Westchester County, but he reserved a suite of rooms high up in the tower of one of New York’s newest and most select hostelries, the last word in convenience and luxury—and expense.
He invited Manning to dinner, dismissing other engagements for the evening on Manning’s estimate that their talk would be lengthy. The investigator wanted to acquire at least an equal knowledge with the Griffin of Brooks’s mode of living. Appraising his man, he made no restriction as to the gravity of the situation.