Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Action and Adventure
He chuckled as he made his final selection, ticked a mark with a crimson crayon against the name. He rolled up the chart, the list of names about it, tore off the leaf of calculations and set fire to the fragments in a bowl of bronze, putting away the roll in a deep drawer.
He renewed the tobacco in the bowl of the hookah, lit it, drew it to a glow and settled back to smoke, musing as the rose water in the container bubbled, cooling the smoke that passed through it. The music rose and fell, exotic, modern, yet infinitely primitive. Debussy’s
L’Après-midi d’un faune.
It was seductive, sexual; but, to the Griffin, there was another interpretation. He had nothing to do with women.
Presently he touched a button.
A section of the curving wall slid noiselessly aside. Out of the opening appeared a strange creature, more like ape than man, an ape with the mange. The figure was naked save for a loin-kilt of red cloth, a high turban of the same. His skin was black as ebony and black hair grew on his chest, and on his misshapen shoulders. The lower part of his arms was so long that his hands reached below his knees. They too were hairy. But his face, distorted, set in a leering grimace, was without whiskers. The low brow was furrowed, deep lines ran from nostril to mouth on either side; the eyes were small, like jet, monkey’s eyes, shallow, shifting perpetually.
Between his shoulders there rose a great hump. He was a dwarf, a kobold, sub-intelligent but shrewd; voodoo-bound, brought from Haiti, worshipping the Griffin, his dog. He fawned like a dog. He looked like a page in Hades, sent from the infernal regions to become the familiar of the Griffin.
The face of the Griffin was now covered with a mask that gleamed like goldbeaters’ skin, plastic, molded to his features but changing them. Through it gleamed his pitiless eyes.
The dwarf bowed until his turban touched the ground, remained so, crouching. The Griffin took a lump of translucent Turkish sweetmeat from a cloisonné casket and tossed it to him, as he might have tossed a scrap of meat to a favorite hound. The hunchback retrieved it, sucked it greedily, squatting, his beady eyes fixed on his master.
“Quantro,” said the Griffin, speaking the Creole of Haiti, “Who is God, the Supreme? The Lord of Life and of Death?”
“You, O my worshipful Master.”
“You would die for me?”
“Willingly.”
“You are prepared, always, to protect me?”
The misshapen being gobbled the last of the sweetmeat, stood up. The glow in the room, that seemed like daylight but could not be, heightened the plum-black of his skin. From his kilt there flashed a curving blade out of a scabbard of sharkskin. He held it aloft. Its shining steel showed dark along the edge, rimmed with deadly venom that also stained the point.
“Those who would harm you kill me first,” he cried.
The Griffin gave him a nod and a grim smile. The greeting and its answer was a formula but he knew the value of its repetition. The dwarf was his, body and what soul he possessed, but his mind was shallow, his memory deficient.
“Quantro, the stars proclaim the time for another vengeance. Let us verify it. You have a white cock ready? Then you shall guard me later while I speak with others whom I do not trust as well as I do you.”
The dwarf’s eyes glowed like polished obsidian reflecting fire. He chuckled horribly, gibbering.
“Ready, O Mighty One.”
To the pressure of another button, a new section of the wall responded. Master and man stepped into an automatic elevator that bore them swiftly down a steel shaft, landed them in a cellar hewn out of the rock foundations, squared, laid with cement. In the middle of the chamber there was a block of stone, dark-veined with red in the purple matrix. Light glowed from some invisible source.
The dwarf disappeared through a vaulted exit. The Griffin took the only seat. The divination did not touch him, save that he was sadist enough to like to see the flow of fresh blood, the struggles of the victim. It was an ancient rite—Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, almost universal, one of the occult “mysteries.”
The Griffin realized that some day he might well need the devotion of a bodyguard like this. Quantro was as strong and active as a chimpanzee, for all his hump. His loyalty was fanatic. He returned bearing by its legs a white cock, squawking abortively, sensing its fate.
With incredible swiftness and dexterity Quantro slit the fowl’s throat, cut the sinews of the flopping wings and split the struggling body with his keen blade. The sign was favorable.
“It is well,” the Griffin said. “Wait here for me.”
He disappeared through a second arch, down a passage where the murmur of a dynamo sounded, where green lights flickered and there was the sound of hammering on metal.
II
GORDON MANNING flexed and reflexed his lean, strong body under the tingling spurt of needle shower in the down town gymnasium where he kept himself fit with handball, once a day. His body glowed, his eyes sparkled with health as he went mechanically through his rubdown and the donning of his clothes. His mind was occupied with an ever-present problem, the capture or destruction of the Griffin. It was open war between them.
Manning had been the youngest major in the A.E.F. Ostensibly a brass-hat of the staff, he had actually been in the secret service. Now he had volunteered as a special agent of the New York Police Force, with secret appointment from the Chief Commissioner, baffled and worried with the failure of the department to get rid of the man who, for months, had committed a series of terrible, far-reaching crimes.
Manning’s ostensible profession was that of advisory attorney. It brought him sufficient income without use of more than half of his time or energy. The balance he devoted to coping with the Griffin. Twice he had partly thwarted him, not in time to save life, but to capture the tools of the Crime Master. Nor could any confession be extracted from these men to implicate the Griffin, to give a hint of his whereabouts.
To Manning, the Griffin had issued open challenge. Though Manning’s appointment was supposedly secret the Griffin had learned of it, greeted the other in congratulatory terms that were tinged with sardonic scorn, styling him a worthy adversary while he warned Manning that he was handicapped, since the Griffin would always make the first move in the game they played, alluding to that contest in chess terms.
His comparative failures, the knowledge that the Crime Master, as he had first named himself in his letter to Manning, was plotting other diabolical coups, undermining society, commercial industry, mocking the law, was beginning to wear on the special agent. At any hour the mail might deliver a letter in the characteristic writing of the arch-criminal, the telephone ring and his mocking voice come over it to announce his latest deed, timed so that Manning could take up the scent while it was fresh, but after the act had been accomplished.
There were times when he questioned his own capacity, but he knew that, like a highbred hound, he would pursue to the bitter end; he believed that some day he would come to grips with this inhuman monster.
Always the Griffin’s coups were marked, as his letters were sealed, by the presence in some conspicuous place of a cartouche of scarlet, an oval of heavy paper embossed with a griffin’s head. Red, the color of blood, was the symbol of the Crime Master, grim and significant.
What next, when, where would the strike come, out of the unknown? At moments Manning could have believed that the Griffin was as fabulous as the mythical creature whose head he used for crest; save for the warnings, the evident fact that none of the men he had captured, the first ever caught in connection with the Griffin’s crimes, could have plotted such coups. The voice of the Griffin, as he had heard it, educated, refined but infinitely and subtly evil, was always in his ears. Some day he would come face to face with the owner of that voice. That he was assured of, even, in his most despondent moments.
The Griffin had promised him that, if he sufficiently interfered with the Griffin’s affairs. He could force him out of cover at last, if he annoyed him enough. Meantime, the Crime Master was free to go ahead with his diabolical schemes of what he called reprisal against a rotten condition of social and civic affairs.
Manning walked to his office, swinging his cane of leather rings shrunk on a rod of steel, a weapon he had often used to prime advantage. He was a good fencer. With a turn of his wrist he could cripple a man, and had.
Arrived, he attended to the matters prepared for him, then swung his chair toward the window, gazing out on the tall buildings, hearing vaguely the busy noise of street and river. It was the very foundation of all this that the Crime Master threatened.
Already the conservative papers had reached the point where they could not ignore the matter in their editorials, counseling against panic. The tabloids and the sensational press made the most of the tragedies while they clamored for the capture of the Griffin.
There was only one thing that held Manning in his offices. He had a premonition that the afternoon delivery of mail would bring him a communication from the Griffin. It was not nervousness, not apprehension, but the outlet of some sixth sense, or that of his subconscious brain, constantly digesting that vexing problem, tuned-in to the evil vibrations emanating from the Crime Master. Such things were fantastic to the precise scientist, but they had happened before.
In this very building the Griffin had struck, and notified Manning over his own telephone of the murder before the body was cold. It was uncanny because the man was uncanny, abnormal.
His secretary brought in the mail. Manning did not need the look on her face to tell him that his hunch was right. He knew it was there, had known it was on the way, that envelope of heavy paper, the bold writing in violet ink, the scarlet cartouche sealing it. The girl knew that seal. All of Manhattan knew it. Manning could trust her, trust all his employees, including the red-headed lad in the outer office. He knew they must fear for him, perhaps for themselves.
He held up the letter.
“This is extremely confidential, Miss Reynolds,” he said. “And entirely personal.”
“Very well, sir.
She was not a pretty girl, but she was very efficient, not to be stampeded. Manning respected her abilities. He had a heart affair of his own, not too forward but promising. The girl he hoped some day to marry had been abroad but was now on the way home, the ship due in a few days. He had been glad she was away. She would not, he thought, have understood his volunteered adventure, appreciated it from his standpoint. But, until he had gone through with it, until the duel between him and the Griffin came to the final issue, he must put all thoughts of that kind from him; he must try to make her understand that, without divulging his mission and his risks.
He slit open the envelope with his desk paper knife, took out the sheet enclosed. Despite himself, his hand trembled, slightly. It was the same eager tremor that a thoroughbred hunting dog shows in the blinds before the ducks come in; but Manning frowned. Then his pulses dropped to normal and he read:
Dear Manning:
It will be some time in the near future. I am concluding the necessary preliminaries and I shall advise you at the crucial moment.
You have somewhat annoyed me. You made away with my spoils, my legitimate loot, on the last occasion. And took another of my pawns. The hoard is reset. This time there are no spoils, only, to me, the satisfaction that the world is rid of a supreme charlatan.
Your discovery of my previous methods marks you as the man I hoped you were. This time the
modus operandi
will be purely automatic. The victim—I believe you call them victims—will coöperate. A semi-suicide. That is hint and stimulus enough for you. This time there will be no pawns for you to capture, but I know you will be interested in solving what you describe as crime, and I call a beneficent vengeance. For the man I have marked is a liar, a rogue, a cheat!
As an adversary, I salute you! You play a better game than I thought you would. But don’t prove too dangerous. I may call checkmate, in so many moves. I may even give you a hint of what you can expect in the near future.
I can tell you this much beforehand of what I have planned. The man whose demise, not untimely, is forecast lives not very far from you—or from me.
Antagonistically, but sincerely,
The Crime Master.
Manning put down the letter. It held the elements of madness, of illusion. He believed a part of it lies. How much he could not tell. It was the cunning of dementia. The Griffin was a supreme egomaniac. He seemed to consider himself pledged to remove men he had marked down under the plea of their villainy. And he had chosen upright, valuable citizens. It was another proof of his warped mentality.
Here was another doomed. And there was nothing to do but wait. To wait, and control himself. The communication was cunningly devised to undermine Manning’s resistance.
He did not believe the phrase about there being no more pawns in this game. The Griffin might have devised some devilish means of death that did not call for an actual assassin, but someone would be there. He knew that he would surely find that scarlet seal conspicuously affixed on the scene of crime, on the body of the victim probably, as he had himself seen it, had found the taunting symbol on the wheel of his car, on the lock of his house-door. The Griffin was not supernatural.
If he was given time he would have a cordon ready to surround the place.
If
he was given time. He acknowledged the cleverness of the man who styled himself Crime Master. To Manning there were two readings to that phrase. If he won
he
would be a Master of Crime. He meant to be so far as the Griffin was concerned.