The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) (29 page)

He had no business doing anything like that.

The next second the man saw Manning. He dropped the tube and started to whirl as Manning leaped.

Manning saw his hand slide down. The overalls were not intended for the quick handling of a gun. Manning did not use his. He jumped and got a wrestling grip. The engineer’s apparent age shed itself as he strained against the hold, but Manning was too quick and expert for him. Manning got him in a hammer lock and threw him. The man’s head connected with the tiled flooring of the bathroom and he relaxed, unconscious.

Manning gave him a swift inspection before he turned to the basin. In it was a tube of well known toothpaste, partly squeezed. Another on a shelf inlaid in the tiled wall. They were duplicates, or would have been when the fake engineer had finished squeezing his to seem the same as the other.

Here was a deadly device—of the Griffin. Frustrated this time.

Manning held no doubt that analysis would prove the tube the fake Sissons meant to substitute was filled with deadly, swift-acting poison.

He put it away safely in his pocket, the cap replaced, then stooped and with a moistened towel wiped off the artificial scald on the man’s face. He lifted the gray wig, and his face grew grim and earnest.

He had one of the Griffin’s tools, unhurt save for perhaps a slight concussion of the brain. The tiled floor was hard. The man breathed stertorously. Manning felt his pulse. Then he looked in the cabinet. It was a deep one and well stocked. There were two unbroken packages of medical bandages.

Deftly Manning used them to securely tie up his prize. It did not take long to truss the killer’s tool.

Manning left him there. He could keep. This time they would hold the man, give him a real inquisition, an improvement on any police third degree. They would wrest from him all he knew of the Griffin’s actions and whereabouts. Manning was in no mood, nor would he be, to show any mercy in his mode of questioning. Too many valuable citizens had been killed, too often had he been frustrated by the necessary slaying of an emissary. But now he had one at last, alive. Others had refused to talk, this one should not.

Manning had traveled in many lands. He knew strange, savage ways to torture, to break men down. He felt exultant.

He found Farnett divested of his outer clothing, lying down on a lounge beneath the television tablet.

“What happened?” he asked feebly. “I heard some sort of a commotion. Tell me, Manning.”

Manning told him briefly. He was worried about Farnett. The man did not look too well. His eyes were dull and his cheeks were sunken.

“Haven’t you got some tablets to take?” he asked. “I think the main danger is over. Take it easy.”

“I’m cold,” said Farnett, drawing his dressing gown closer. “It was just a fake about the steam. Turn it on again. I’m cold. There are some strychnine tablets upstairs, in the medicine cabinet, but I don’t need them now. I took some digitalis I keep handy.”

Manning turned on the valves. The steam came readily enough. He fixed the cushions under Farnett, who now seemed responsive to the drug he had taken.

Halfway up the stairs Manning felt a curious sense of dizziness. He had not been himself of late, with the strain of his warfare with the Griffin, and he fought it off. His fight with the pseudo-engineer had been short but severe.

He wanted to search the man before he called up headquarters. He found it hard to breathe, his heart was pounding, but he mounted the stairs and found his man, still seemingly out, on the bathroom floor.

Manning started to search him. He found a gun and then a small cardboard box. He opened it, with a hunch as to what was inside. His hunch was justified.

Seals! Heavy crimson paper, gummed on the inside, bearing the symbol of the Griffin. The killer had been instructed to fasten one of them on his victim. And Manning might find them useful later.

As he looked at the seals, the room seemed suddenly to revolve about him. He lifted himself from his knees and then felt the strength go out of him. He could not get air into his lungs. Something entered them, but it was not oxygen. He fought to rise, but could not. The last thing he heard was the hissing steam.

VI

MANNING came to, panting. He thought he was back in the war. Some alarm was ringing. Gas! Gas!

Where was his mask? He was strangling. But not going to quit. A light glowed faintly overhead. Electric? What….

Nothing short of the invincible purpose with which he had pursued the Griffin, his absolute determination to annihilate this fiend, could have got him to his feet.

There was a vital spark within him, born of his will, that whipped his dying senses.

Gas! Gas without question. But this was not the trenches. A hospital, with the tiled walls and floor? No! They had no hospitals like that where he had fought.

He saw the lax form of the engineer in his overalls—not a uniform—and his sluggish memory was spurred.

There was a window to the room and he thrust it up, gulping at the cold air, the driving snow.

He had to stoop once more and he did it, as a diver does, holding his breath, shutting off the radiator valves through which the deadly gas might still be coming. The same in the bedroom, then downstairs. The wild wind blew the curtains out straight, the white flakes rushed in. It was freezing—far below freezing, but better that than death.

He was too late.

Farnett lay stretched out on the couch. His low vitality had succumbed. The Griffin had triumphed after all.

Had he?

Manning, assured that Farnett was beyond recovery, utterly collapsed under the deadly fumes, raced back to the bathroom.

There was clear air there now, plenty of oxygen, but the Griffin’s aide, like Farnett, had not been able to assimilate it. Unconscious from the flying mare, his lungs had not been able to help his beleaguered body. The man was dead.

Manning went slowly down the stairs, ready to call up headquarters, to report another failure for himself, another victory for the Griffin.

He paused as he entered the room. The television plaque was beginning to glow.

As Manning gazed, a vision materialized upon it. The picture of a man, masked with something that effectually disguised and yet half-mockingly revealed him.

He heard a voice. The voice of the Griffin, that he had heard so often—too often—and knew so well.

“I had two strings to my bow, Manning. I am not sure, at this moment, which one sped the fatal arrow. Perhaps the toothpaste, perhaps the cyanogen. But I time these matters. By now I am sure that Farnett has joined ‘the great majority.’ ”

For once Manning lost control, looking at the mocking vision on the plaque, regarding the stiffening form of Farnett. As if in a dream, he heard himself hurling invectives at the portrait that was now gradually fading.

“Here’s hoping, Manning,” sounded the voice of the Griffin faintly. “Some day we’ll get to grips. Meanwhile, your oaths are not too fitting. This
is.
”

Through the plaque, now only vacant metal, there seemed to come a strain of music. Wherever evolved, it was plain enough in that room of death.

Chopin’s Funeral March.
La Marche Funébre.

The Griffin’s Double Cross

In the Heart of a Fortified Laboratory, the Griffin’s Tool Threatens Manning with Death from a Jar of Germs

THE broadcasting stations had said good night through their suave-voiced announcers and the silver gongs had chimed. Hundreds of thousands of radio owners were prepared to tune off for the night when suddenly, unannounced, there came on the air the deep notes of a booming voice in words whose portent was so startling, so arresting and sinister, that the ears of half a nation strained to listen, thrilled with horror.

There were others who heard with hatred, with anger, with chagrin at their own past and present impotence to still that booming voice for ever. Men, many of them, who had tried in vain to capture the owner of the mysterious voice, the arch-fiend who had terrorized Manhattan, who had murdered more than a score of prominent, useful citizens, heard the words with a shudder.

A maniac, the speaker was, beyond a doubt, and one possessed of infinite resource and cunning, primed with the deviltry of Eblis. A magician who by some method, was sending his fateful, grandiloquent message abroad.

“This is the Griffin speaking.”

There was a short pause in which strange, exotic music could be faintly heard. Then a chuckle, diabolical and exultant, as if the sender was enjoying the shock he knew his five words had caused.

The assurance, the conceit of the man was astounding. It was not the first time he had sought publicity to satisfy his grandiose dementia, his colossal ego.

“I make no apology,” the deep, confident voice went on. “I would clear up a misunderstanding. I have been described as a menace—even as a monster. I am a philanthropist. There are those who seek to rid the world of me in return for my having eliminated others who, with their insane theories, their pretentious humbuggery, their false morality, have clogged the path of the world’s true progress.

“I expect no recognition, no meed of praise, no statues nor tablets to my memory. Rather, I may be execrated. I do not pose as a martyr, nor do I intend to meet the fate of one. I pit my wits against the pseudo-intelligence of others, and laugh at the efforts of a perverted police system. What I do, I do for my own satisfaction.

“My task is far from ended. The stars in their courses are with me in my enterprise. Them I consult before I strike. You will hear of me before long. I have a list of those who must be removed. Their fates are decided, the days are appointed. They will be warned. Let those who think they can circumvent me make their endeavors. The ancient, mythical creature whose symbol I have taken, half lion, half eagle, armed with beak and claws, able to fly and leap, was worshiped once, at Cnossos and elsewhere, as a deity. I make no claim to deity. But it would be easier to pluck the flaming star, Aldebaran, from the firmament, to halt the rhythm of the universe, than to thwart my high endeavor.

“This is the Griffin.
Good night.”

Silence, and then the malicious chuckle once again, as if to stress the mockery of his final greeting. Again the strain of music, slowly dying out, gone.

The air was void of sound. The violent crackle of static followed, ceased, as a late program from a night club came faintly in with the latest jazz. It had no listeners. Men and women looked at each other with pallid faces, dry-lipped, their eyes fixed as if on something unseen and infinitely malignant, a flying, invisible monster that soared on widespread wings with outcurved claws and open beak, seeking its human victim.

The Griffin was abroad.

II

IN his library, in his own house at Pelham Manor, Gordon Manning, special agent, ex-intelligence officer in the Great War, whose mission was the capture and destruction of the Griffin, turned off his radio. His face was haggard with responsibility, graved with lines of effort that, so far, had only met with failure.

The colossal insolence of the Griffin left him untouched. He knew the man to be crazed, possessed of the idea that he must avenge some injury he had suffered, perhaps unjustly. Even as the violent maniac is endowed with super-human strength and cunning, so the inflamed brain of the Griffin conceived plans beyond the scope of a sane person.

He had agents, linked to him by some mysterious bond, slaves who did his bidding, made his schemes possible. They were men skilled in science and mechanics. Manning had met with them. More than one he had killed. Others had committed suicide. From none of them had the slightest clew been gained that led to the Griffin or to his hidden aerie.

Slowly Manning refilled the pipe that had gone out. The Griffin would strike again. At any moment he might communicate with Manning in what the Griffin chose to call a game. Jeeringly he would give Manning the name of his next victim, set the very day of attack, defy Manning to prevent the crime.

Manning had traveled far, seen many strange things. He knew that magic was merely the phenomenon of the unknown. He had witnessed the weird rites of Tibetan priests, of mahatamas, shamans, and South Sea Tahungas. He did not believe in the supernatural. There was nothing that could not be explained.

Yet his subconsciousness, reacting to atavistic fears of the days when his forbears lived in caves or trees and shivered at the ways of wizards, was, for a brief moment, flooded with a sense of the unreal.

Automatically he quoted, half aloud, from Poe’s Raven.

Be thou gone, thou thing of evil,

Be thou beast, or be thou devil;

Take thy beak from out my heart

And thy form from off my door!

The sound of his own voice roused him. He gave a short laugh as he stood to his full, lean height and lit his pipe.

Quoth the Griffin: “Nevermore”

he paraphrased, as he stood in front of his fireplace, where logs smoldered.

“Some day we’ll clip your wings, my mysterious friend,” he said. “Trim your talons and prune your beak. Stuff your hide and place you on exhibition. Some day you’ll slip, and I’ll be there to watch for it. Some day, some time, perhaps the next.”

His clean cut features were grim as he stood there, the amber stem of his pipe close clipped between his teeth.

A Japanese servant entered, silent and deferential.

“There is nothing more to-night, Tomaki,” said Manning. “Thank you. You have locked up?”

Tomaki hissed with indrawn breath.

“Everything is lock,” he said. “I go to look, make sure. There is knock on door. I get Matsumi. We open, quick. There is no one there.”

Poe was still in Manning’s mind.