The Fourth Plague

by Edgar Wallace

  “But from whom?” asked Sir Ralph.

  “That we shall know some day,” replied the other, evasively.

  Sir Ralph went down to the railway station to meet Tillizini and to see him off. He was consumed with curiosity as to the result of the interview which he had granted the detective.

  Whether he had the right of instructing the warders of the local gaol to admit Tillizini was a moot point; but since the Italian had such extraordinarily wide powers deputed to him by the Home Office, it was probable that the interview would have taken place even without Sir Ralph’s permission.

  The Chairman had hinted that it would be graceful, if not decent, for Tillizini to see the prisoner in his presence, but the Italian had artistically overlooked the suggestion.

  It was five minutes before the train left that Tillizini sprang out of the fly which brought him to the station entrance. He was smoking a long, thin cigar, and was, as Sir Ralph judged, tremendously pleased with himself, for between his clenched teeth he hummed a little tune as he strode through the booking-hall on to the platform.

  “Well?” asked the Chairman, curiously, “what had our friend to say for himself?”

  “Nothing that you do not know,” replied the other, brightly. “He merely repeated the story that he told in the dock about my mysterious fellow-countryman. He gave me one or two details, which were more interesting to me than they would be to you.”

  “Such as?” suggested Sir Ralph.

  “Well,” Tillizini hesitated. “He told me that his instructor had informed him that the packet would be small enough to put in his waistcoat pocket.”

  Sir Ralph smiled sarcastically.

  “There are a dozen objects in my collection which might be carried in a man’s waistcoat pocket. No!” he corrected himself, “there are at least fifty. By the way,” he said suddenly, “you’ve never asked to see my collection.”

  Tillizini shook his head vigorously, amusement in his eyes.

  “That would be unnecessary,” he said. “I know every article you have, Sir Ralph, its size, its origin, almost the price you paid for it.”

  Sir Ralph turned to him in surprise.

  “But how?” he asked wonderingly. “I have only my private catalogue, and no copy exists outside my house.”

  “Very good,” said Tillizini. “Let me enumerate them.”

  He told them off on his hands, finger by finger.

  “Number 1, an Egyptian locket from the Calliciti collection—gold, studded with uncut rubies—value, £420. Number 2, a plaque of Tanagra ware, rather an unusual specimen in a frame of soft gold, inscribed with Syrian mottoes. Number 3, a crystal medallion, taken by Napoleon from Naples, on the inverse side a bust of Beatrice D’Este, on the reverse side Il Moro, the Duke of Milan, value—by the way, I didn’t give you the previous value because I don’t know it—£600. Number 4, a Venetian charm in the shape of a harp—”

  “But,” gasped Sir Ralph, “these facts, regarding my collection are only known to me.”

  “They are also known to me,” said the other.

  The train had come in as they were speaking. Tillizini walked towards an empty carriage, and entered it. He closed the door behind him, and leant out of the window.

  “There are many things to be learnt, and this is not the least of them,” he said. “Between the man with the secret, and the man who knows that secret, there are intermediaries who have surprised the first and informed the second.”

  Sir Ralph was puzzling this out when the train drew out of the station, and its tail lights vanished through the tunnel which penetrates Burboro’ Hill.

  Left to himself, Tillizini locked both doors and pulled down all the blinds of his carriage. He had no doubt as to the sinister intentions of the man or men who had dogged his footsteps so persistently since he had left London. If he was to be killed, he decided that it should not be by a shot fired by a man from the footboard.

  It was a fast train from Burboro’ to London, and the first stop would be at London Bridge. He took the central seat of the carriage, put his feet up upon the opposite cushions, laid his Browning pistol on the seat beside him, and composed himself to read. He had half a dozen London papers in the satchel which was his inseparable companion.

  One of these he had systematically exhausted on the journey down; he now turned his attention to another. His scrutiny was concentrated upon the advertisement columns. He did not bother with the agonies, because he knew that no up-to-date criminal would employ such method of communication.

  One by one he examined the prosaic announcements under the heading “Domestic Servants Wanted.” He reached the end without discovering anything exciting. He laid the paper down and took up another.

  Half-way down the “Domestic Wants” column his eye was arrested by a notice. To the ordinary reader it was the commonplace requirement of an average housewife. It ran:—

  “Cook-General; Italian cooking preferred. Four in family. Fridays; not Thursdays as previously announced. State amount willing to give.”

  The address was an advertising agency in the City. He read it again; took a little penknife from his waistcoat pocket, and carefully cut it from the paper.

  There were many peculiarities about that announcement. There was a certain egotism in the “Fridays, not Thursdays as previously announced,” which was unusual in this type of advertisement. Who cared whether it was Thursday or Friday that had been previously given, presumably, as the evening “out”?

  But the glaring error in the advertisement lay in the last paragraph. The average advertiser would be more anxious to know what wages the newcomer would require, and would most certainly never suggest that the “Cook-General” whose services were sought, should contribute, in addition to her labour, anything in the nature of payment for the privilege.”

  Tillizini looked up at the roof of the carriage in thought. To-day was Monday. Something had been arranged for Thursday. It had been postponed till the following day. For that something a price was to be paid, possibly an advance on the original price agreed upon was demanded. The advertiser would hardly undertake to perform the service without some previous agreement as to price.

  He did not in any way associate the announcement with the recent events at Highlawn; they were but part of the big game which was being played. The emissaries of that terrible society whose machinations he had set himself to frustrate were no doubt travelling by the same train. He was so used to this espionage that he ignored it, without despising it. He was ever prepared for the move, inevitable as it seemed to him, which would be made against his life and against his security.

  It was too much to expect that the “Red Hand” would forgive him the work he had accomplished in America. He had cleared the United States from the greatest scourge of modern times.

  It was no fault of his that they had taken advantage of the lax emigration laws of England to settle in the Metropolis.

  He replaced the papers in his satchel, and just before the train ran into London Bridge he let up the spring blinds of the compartment. It was dark, and wet, and miserable. He made no attempt to alight at the station. It was not a safe place, as he knew by experience, for a threatened man to end his journey.

  There were dark tunnels which led to the main entrance of the station—tunnels in which a man might be done to death, if by chance he were the only passenger negotiating the exit; and no one would be any the wiser for five minutes or so, sufficient time, that, to allow these professional murderers to escape.

  Outside Waterloo he pulled the blinds down again. He did these things automatically, without any fear. He took the same precaution as the everyday citizen takes in crossing the road. He looked from left to right before crossing this dangerous highway of his.

  Flush with the railway bridge which crosses the river to Charing Cross station is a footpath, Old Hungerford footbridge.
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br />   Three men were waiting there at intervals that wet and blusterous night to watch the Burboro’ train come in. They saw it from a position which enabled them, had the opportunity presented, of shooting into the carriage.

  Tillizini did not know this, but he could guess it. It was not an unlikely contingency.

  On the crowded station of Charing Cross he was safe enough. Moreover, there were two men, who had spent the afternoon unostentatiously wandering about the station, who picked him up as he came through the barrier.

  He gave one of them a little nod, which none but the keenest observer would have noticed.

  The two Scotland Yard men, whose duty it was to shadow him in London, walked closely behind him, and remained upon the pavement outside until he had entered the waiting electric brougham.

  V. —THE STORY OF THE “RED HAND”

  PROFESSOR ANTONIO TILLIZINI IS a name around which has centred the fiercest controversy. No scientist is ever likely to forget his extraordinary paper read before the Royal Society at Sheffield. It was entitled prosaically, “Some Reflections upon the Inadequacy of the Criminal Code,” and was chiefly remarkable from the layman’s point of view in that the professor in the course of his address calmly admitted that he had found it necessary to kill ten criminals at various stages of his career. He was sufficiently discreet to offer no further information on the subject, and, though his enemies endeavoured, on the clue he had offered them, to bring at least one crime home to the Italian, they were unsuccessful.

  More significant of the trend of public opinion, Tillizini was not deprived of his chair of Anthropology at the Florence University, nor did London society bar its doors to the foreigner who was a self-confessed slayer of men.

  More than this, it is known that in preparing their Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 19—, the Government sought the advice of this extraordinary man.

  But it was in connexion with the remarkable outburst of crime of a peculiar character that the young man who spent six months of the year in England and six months in his beloved Italy, and of whom the epigram had been perpetrated, that he thought in English and acted in Italian, that he first came largely into the public eye.

  It was said of him that all the secrets of the Borgias were known to him; there were dark hints amongst the superstitious of necromancy, and this reputation, generally held among the Italian colony in London, served him in good stead when the days came for him to tackle the “Red Hand.”

  The organization known as the “Red Hand” had been driven from America by the heroism and resourcefulness of Teum, the famous Cincinnati detective. Laws, drastic to the point of brutality, had been instituted; the system of inquiry known as the “Third Degree” had been elaborated so that it only stopped short of the more extreme methods of the Spanish Inquisition, to cope with the increase in blackmail and murder in which the “Red Hand” specialized.

  There was a lull in this type of crime after the electrocution of the Seven Men of Pittsburg, but the silence of the “Red Hand” was broken at last.

  It was in December, 19—, that Carlo Gattini, a wealthy Italian living in Cromwell Square Gardens, received a curt type-written request that he should place a thousand pounds in banknotes under a certain seat in Hyde Park. The hour and the date were mentioned, and the letter was signed by a small red hand, evidently impressed by a rubber stamp.

  Mr. Gattini smiled and handed the letter to the police.

  At their suggestion he replied through the agony columns of The Times, agreeing to the request; a package was made up and placed beneath the seat described, and four Scotland Yard men waited through the whole of one dismal evening for the “Red Hand” messenger. He did not come. He either suspected or knew; so there the matter should have ended by the severe and unromantic police code.

  But on the following morning another letter came to the Italian. It was brief:—

  “We give you another chance. Go to the police again and you are a dead man. Place £2,000 in notes in an envelope and leave it under the first bush in your garden.”

  In alarm, Gattini went to the police. They pooh-poohed any suggestion of danger. Plain-clothes men were concealed in the house and in the garden; other secret service men were stationed in the house opposite, but again the messenger did not come, nor did the Italian receive any further communication.

  On Christmas Eve Mr. Gattini returned from the City after a busy day. He was a widower, and lived alone, save for four servants—an elderly woman who acted as cook, a housemaid, and two menservants.

  At 7.30 his valet went to his room to announce dinner. Gattini’s door was locked.

  The man knocked, but received no answer. He knocked again, without result.

  He returned to the servants’ hall and announced his failure, and he and the chauffeur went to the front of the house and looked up at the window of Mr. Gattini’s room.

  It was in darkness.

  It happened providentially that a Scotland Yard man had called in at that moment in connexion with the threatening letters, and the servants confided their apprehensions.

  The three men went to the door of Gattini’s room and knocked loudly. There was no reply, and, putting their shoulders to the door, they burst it open.

  One of them switched on a light.

  At first they saw nothing; the room was apparently empty…then they saw.

  The unfortunate man had been struck down as he sat at his dressing-table. The knife that had cut short his life was missing, but it was evident that he had died without a cry.

  This was the first murder—there were others to follow.

  The request for money came to Sir Christoforo Angeli, a rich banker, and a naturalized Britisher. He treated the threat as lightly as Gattini had done…he was shot dead as he stood at his window one Spring afternoon, and no man but he saw the murderer.

  Again there came a lull, but it was evident to the police, ransacking Europe for a clue, that the apparent inactivity was less significant of a cessation on the part of the gang, as it was of their successes. Men in terror of their lives were paying and keeping information away from the police. A reign of terror was in progress, when, exhausting the wealthier members of the Italian colony, the gang turned its attention to other sources of income.

  Henry S. Grein, a wealthy Chicago broker, and known throughout Europe for his art collections, received the stereotyped demand. He ’phoned the police, and Scotland Yard sent its best man to interview the millionaire at the Fitz Hotel, where he was staying.

  “I pay nothing,” said the millionaire. He was tall and hard-faced, with a mouth like a rat trap, and the secret service man knew that here the “Red Hand” had come up against a tough proposition. “It is your business to see that I do not get killed; you may make what arrangements you like, but I am going to offer a reward of $20,000 for the arrest of the gang, or the leader.”

  Then began that extraordinary feud which first opened the eyes of the public to the condition of affairs which existed.

  The history of Grein’s fight with his assassins on the roof of the Fitz Hotel, his shooting down of the man Antonio Ferrino who had gained admission to his bedroom, the abortive attempt to blow up the Fitz Hotel by dynamite; all these facts are so much history. It was on the morning that Henry S. Grein’s body was found floating on the Thames off Cleopatra’s Needle that the Government turned to Tillizini.

  On the evening of his return from Burboro’ Tillizini sat at his broad desk working out a side issue of the problem. The red glow from the shaded lamp by his side gave his face a sinister appearance which ordinarily it did not possess. It was a thin and deeply-lined face, a little sallow and a shade bluish about the jaw and upper lip; the nose was long and pinched, the eyebrows black and arched; but whatever unpleasant impression the somewhat Mephistophelean features may have produced, that impression was forgotten in the pleasant shock which came to the observe
r who saw Tillizini’s eyes.

  Italian as he was in every feature, his eyes were almost Irish in their soft greyness; big and clear and luminous, the long black lashes which shaded them gave them an added beauty.

  With his left hand resting on his book to keep the stiff volume open at the page, he reached across the table to a gold cigarette box, took a long, thin cigarette, and lit it at the small electric lamp which stood at his elbow.

  The room wherein he sat was lofty and spacious. The ceiling and the fireplace were as Adam’s magic art had left them. The walls were half panelled in dark oak and, save for a small water-colour sketch of a woodland scene on the left of the fireplace, they were innocent of pictures.

  Along one wall ran a bookshelf that stretched from the outer wall to a door near the window.

  The windows were long and narrow and were hung with dull red curtains. There was cosiness in the big gilt screen by the fire, in the roomy club chair, the soft thick carpet and the tiny clock that ticked musically over the mantelshelf.

  Tillizini read steadily, the smoke of his cigarette rising in blue coils to the ceiling.

  Suddenly he closed the book with a snap and rose noiselessly.

  He glanced at the clock: it was an idle glance, for he knew the time. He had an eerie sub-consciousness of the hour, be it day or night.

  He walked to one of the three windows and looked out upon the Embankment.

  He saw a crescent of cold lights that stretched towards Blackfriars and was intersected dimly by the bulk of Waterloo Bridge. Across the river was an illuminated sign imploring him to drink somebody’s wine at his own expense; farther down a tall tower of reappearing and vanishing light urged him to the consumption of the only whisky worth while.

  The professor watched without a smile.

  Suddenly a bright splash of light started, and was as suddenly extinguished. Again it flamed—dazzling, white, palpitating light—and again vanished.