The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  He gazed at me a moment, then: “I do not lance an abscess till conditions warrant it,” he answered. “Neither do we vent our efforts, fruitlessly in this case. Mademoiselle Alice is the focal point of all these vile activities. Where she is, there are the leaders of the Satanists, and—where they are, there is she.

  “From what Mademoiselle Abigail told us, we may assume there will be other celebrations of the Mass of Wickedness—when we find one of these and raid it, our chances of finding Alice are most excellent. Costello’s men are on the lookout, they will inform us when the signs are out; until that time we jeopardize our chances of success by any move we make. I feel—I know—the enemy is concentrated here, but if we go to search for him he will decamp, and instead of the city which we know so well, we shall have to look for him only God knows where. Alors, our best activity is inactivity.”

  “But,” I persisted, “what makes you think they’re still in the city? Common sense would have warned them to get out before this, you’d think, and—”

  “Non: You mistake,” he told me bluntly. “The safest hiding-place is here. Here they logically should not be, hence this is the last place in which we should be thought to look for them. Again, temporarily at least, this is their headquarters in America. To carry out such schemes as they plan requires money, and much money can be had from converts to their cult. Wealthy men, who might fear to follow nothing but the dictates of their unconscionable consciences, will be attracted by the freedom which their creed permits, and will join them willingly—and willingly contribute to their treasury. It is in hope of further converts that they linger here, as well as to await the blowing over of the search for Alice. When the hue and cry has somewhat abated, when some later outrage claims the public interest, they can slip out all unnoticed. Until that time they are far safer in the shadows of police headquarters than if they took to hasty flight, and—”

  BR-r-r-ring! The telephone’s sharp warning shut him off.

  “Costello? Yes, just a moment,” I answered, passing the instrument to the sergeant.

  “Yeah, sure—eh? Glory be to God!” Costello said, responding to the message from across the wire. To us: “Come on, gentlemen; it’s time to get our feet against the pavement,” he admonished. “Two hours ago some murderin’ hoodlums beat up a nursemaid wheelin’ a baby home from a visit wid its grandmother, an’ run off wid it. An’ the boys have found th’ chalk-marks on th’ sidewalks. It looks—”

  “Non d’un chou-fleur, it looks like action!” de Grandin cried exultantly. “Come, Friend Trowbridge; come, my Renouard, let us go at once, right away, immediately!”

  Renouard and he hurried up the stairs while I went to the garage for the car. Two minutes later they joined us, each with a pair of pistols belted to his waist. In addition to the firearms, de Grandin wore a long curve-bladed Gurkha knife, a wicked, razor-bladed weapon capable of lopping off a hand as easily as a carving-knife takes off the wing of a roast fowl.

  Costello was fuming with impatience. “Shtep on it, Doctor Trowbridge, sor,’ he ordered. “Th’ first pitcher wuz at Twenty-Eighth an’ Hopkins Streets; if ye’ll take us there we’ll be after follyin’ th’ trail I’ve tellyphoned to have a raidin’ party meet us there in fifteen minutes.”

  “But it is grand, it is immense; it is magnificent, my friend!” de Grandin told Renouard as we slipped through the darkened streets.

  “It is superb!” Renouard assured de Grandin.

  “Bedad, here’s where Ireland declares war on Kur-r-distan!” Costello told them both.

  13. Inside the Lines

  A LARGE, BLACK AND VERY shiny limousine was parked at the curb near the intersection of Twenty-Eighth and Hopkins Streets, and toward it Costello led the way when we halted at the corner. The vehicle had all the earmarks of hailing from some high-class mortician’s garage, and this impression was heightened by a bronze plate displayed behind the windshield with the legend Funeral Car in neat block letters. But there was nothing funereal—except perhaps potentially—about the eight passengers occupying the tonneau. I recognized Officers Hornsby, Gilligan and Schultz, each with a canvas web-belt decorated with a service revolver and nightstick buckled outside his blouse, and with a vicious-looking sub-machine gun resting across his knees. Five others, similarly belted, but equipped with fire axes, boat-hooks and slings of tear-bombs, huddled out of sight of casual passers-by on the seats of the car. “Camouflage,” Costello told us with a grin, pointing to the funeral sign; then: “All set, Hornsby? Got ever’thing, axes, hooks, tear-bombs, an—”

  “All jake, sir. Got th’ works,” the other interrupted. “Where’s th’ party?”

  The sergeant beckoned the patrolman loitering at the corner. “Where is it?” he demanded.

  “Right here, sir,” the man returned, pointing to a childish scrawl on the cement sidewalk.

  We examined it by the light of the street lamp. Unless warned of its sinister connotation, no one would have given the drawing a second glance, so obviously was it the mark of mischievous but not exceptionally talented children. A crudely sketched figure with pot-belly, triangular head and stiffly jointed limbs was outlined on the sidewalk in white chalk of the sort every schoolboy pilfers from the classroom. Only a pair of parentheses sprouting from the temples and a pointed beard and mustache indicated the faintest resemblance to the popular conception of the Devil, and the implement the creature held in its unskillfully drawn hand might have been anything from a fishing-pole to a pitchfork. Nevertheless, there was one fact which struck us all. Instead of brandishing the weapon overhead, the figure pointed it definitely toward Twenty-Ninth Street. De Grandin’s slender nostrils twitched like those of a hunting dog scenting the quarry as he bent above the drawing. “We have the trail before us,” he whispered. “Come, let us follow it. Allons!”

  “Come on, youse guys; folly us, but don’t come too close unless we signal.” Costello ordered the men waiting in the limousine.

  Down Hopkins Street, shabby, down-at-the-heel thoroughfare that it was, we walked with all the appearance of nonchalance we could master, paused at Twenty-Ninth Street and looked about. No second guiding figure met our eye.

  “Dame!” de Grandin swore. “C’est singulier. Can we have—ah, regardez-vous, mes amis!” The tiny fountain pen searchlight he had swung in an ever widening circle had picked out a second figure, scarcely four inches high, scribbled on the red-brick front of a vacant house. The trident in the demon’s hand directed us down Twenty-Ninth Street toward the river.

  A moment only we stopped to study it, and all of us were impressed at once with one outstanding fact; crudely drawn as it was, the second picture was a duplicate in miniature of the first, the same technique, if such a word could be applied to such a scrawl, was evident in every wavering line and faulty curve of the small picture. “Morbleu,” de Grandin murmured, “he was used to making these, the one who laid this trail. This is no first attempt.”

  “Mais non,” Renouard agreed.

  “Looks that way,” I acquiesced.

  “Sure,” said Costello. “Let’s get goin’.”

  Block after block we followed the little sprawling figures of the Devil scrawled on sidewalk, wall or fence, and always the pointing tridents led us toward the poorer, unkempt sections of the city. At length, when we had left all residential buildings and entered a neighborhood of run-down factories and storehouses, de Grandin raised his hand to indicate a halt.

  “We would better wait our reinforcements,” he cautioned; “there is too great an opportunity for an ambuscade in this deserted quarter, and—ah, par la barbe d’un poisson rouge!” he cried. “We are in time, I think. Observe him, if you please.”

  Fifty or a hundred yards beyond us a figure moved furtively. He was a shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement, though with surprising speed, through the little patch of luminance cast by a flickering gas street-lamp. Also he seemed supremely alert, perceptive and receptive with the sensitiveness of a wild
animal of the jungle stalking wary prey. The slightest movement of another in the semi-darkness near him would have needed to be more shadow-silent than his own to escape him.

  “This,” remarked Renouard, “will bear investigating. Let me do it, my Jules, I am accustomed to this sort of hunting.” With less noise than a swimmer dropping into a darkened stream he disappeared in the shadow of a black-walled warehouse, to emerge a moment later halfway down the block where a street lamp stained the darkness with its feeble light. Then he melted into the shadow once again.

  We followed, silently as possible, lessening the distance between Renouard and ourselves as quickly as we could, but making every effort at concealment.

  Renouard and the shadow-man came together at the dead-end of a cross-street where the off-stained waters of the river lapped the rotting piles.

  “Hands up, my friend!” Renouard commanded, emerging from the darkness behind his quarry with the suddenness of a magic-lantern view thrown on a screen. “I have you under cover; if you move, your prayers had best be said!” He advanced a pace, pressing the muzzle of his heavy pistol almost into the other’s neck, and reached forward with his free hand to feel, with a trained policeman’s skill, for hidden weapons.

  The result was surprising, though not especially pleasing. Like an inflated ball bounced against the floor, Renouard rose in the air, flew over the other’s shoulder and landed with a groan of suddenly expelled breath against the cobblestones, flat upon his back. More, the man whose skill at jujitsu accomplished his defeat straightened like a coiled steel spring suddenly released, drew an impressively large automatic pistol and aimed it at the supine Frenchman. “Say your prayers, if you know any, you”—he began, but Costello intervened.

  Lithe and agile as a tiger, for all his ponderous bulk, the Irishman cleared the space between them with a single leap and swung his club in a devastating arc. The man sagged at the knees and sank face forward to the street, his pistol sliding from his unnerved hand and lying harmless in the dust beside him.

  “That’s that,” remarked the sergeant. “Now, let’s have a look at this felly.”

  He was a big man, more lightly built, but quite as tall as the doughty Costello, and as the latter turned him over, we saw that though his hair was iron-gray, his face was young, and deeply tanned. A tiny, dark mustache of the kind made popular by Charlie Chaplin and British subalterns during the war adorned his upper lip. His clothes were well cut and of good material, his boots neatly polished, and his hands, one of which was ungloved, well cared for—obviously a person with substantial claims to gentility, though probably one lacking in the virtue of good citizenship, I thought.

  Costello bent to loose the buttons of the man’s dark overcoat, but de Grandin interposed a quick objection. “Mais non, mon sergent,” he reproved, “our time is short. Place manacles upon his hands and give him into custody. We can attend to him at leisure; at present we have more important pots upon the fire.”

  “Right ye are, sor,” the Irishman agreed with a grin, locking a pair of handcuffs on the stunned man’s wrists. He raised his hand in signal, and as the limousine slid noiselessly alongside: “Keep an eye on this bur-r-d, Hornsby,” he ordered. “We’ll be wantin’ to give ’im th’ wor-rks at headquarters—afther we git through wid this job, y’ understand.”

  Officer Hornsby nodded assent, and we returned to our queer game of hare and hounds.

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN a half-hour later when we came to our goal. It was a mean building in a mean street. The upper floors were obviously designed for manufacturing, for half a dozen signs proclaimed that desirable lofts might be rented from as many agents. “ALTERATIONS MADE TO SUIT TENANT FOR A TERM OF YEARS.” The ground floor had once been occupied by an emporium dispensing spirituous, malt and vinous liquors, and that the late management had regarded the law of the land with more optimism than respect was evident from the impressive padlock on the door and the bold announcement that the place was “CLOSED BY ORDER OF U.S. DISTRICT COURT.”

  Beside the door of what had been the family entrance in days gone by was a sketch of Satan, his trident pointing upward—the first of the long series of guiding sketches to hold the spear in such position. Undoubtedly the meeting place was somewhere in the upper portion of the empty seeming building, but when we sought an entrance every door was closed and firmly barred. All, indeed, were furnished with stout locks on the outside. The evidence of vacancy was plain and not to be disputed, whatever the Satanic scrawl might otherwise imply.

  “Looks like we’re up agin a blank wall, sor,” Costello told de Grandin. “This place is empty as a bass drum—probably ain’t had a tenant since th’ prohibition men got sore ’cause someone cut off their protection money an’ slapped a padlock on th’ joint.”

  De Grandin shook his head in positive negation. “The more it seems deserted the more I am convinced we are arrived at the right place,” he answered. “These locks, do they look old?”

  “H’m,” the sergeant played his searchlight on the nearest lock and scratched his head reflectively. “No, sor, I can’t say they do,” he admitted. “If they’d been here for a year—an’ th’ joint’s been shut almost that long—they ought to show more weather-stain, but what’s that got to do wid—”

  “Ah, bah,” de Grandin interrupted, “to be slow of perception is the policeman’s prerogative, but you abuse the privilege, my friend! What better means of camouflage than this could they desire? The old locks are removed and new ones substituted. Each person who is bidden to the rendezvous is furnished with a key; he follows where the pointing spears of Satan lead, opens the lock and enters. Voilà tout!”

  “Wallah me eye,” the Irishman objected. “Who’s goin’ to lock up afther ’im? If—”

  A sudden scuffle in the dark, a half-uttered, half-suppressed cry, and the sound of flesh, colliding violently with flesh cut him off.

  “Here’s a bird I found layin’ low acrost th’ street, sir,” Officer Hornsby reported, emerging from the darkness which surrounded us, forcing an undersized individual before him. One of his hands was firmly twisted in the prisoner’s collar, the other was clamped across his mouth, preventing outcry.

  “I left th’ gang in th’ car up by th’ entrance to th’ alley,” he continued, “an’ come gum-shoein’ down to see if I wuz needed, an’ this gink must ’a’ seen me buttons, for he made a pass at me an’ missed, then started to let out a squawk, but I choked ’im off. Looks like he wuz planted as a lookout for th’ gang, an—”

  “Ah?” de Grandin interrupted. “I think the answer to your question is here, my sergeant.” To Hornsby: “You say that he attempted an assault?”

  “I’ll tell th’ cock-eyed world,” the officer replied. “Here’s what he tried to ease into me.” From beneath his blouse he drew a short, curve-bladed dagger, some eight inches in length, its wicked keen-edged blade terminating in a vicious vulture’s-beak hook. “I’d ’a’ made a handsome-lookin’ corpse wid that between me ribs,” he added grimly.

  De Grandin gazed upon the weapon, then the captive. “The dagger is from Kurdistan,” he declared. “This one”—he turned his back contemptuously on the prisoner—“I think that he is Russian, a renegade Hebrew from the Black Sea country. I know his kind, willing to sell his ancient, honorable birthright and the god of his fathers for political preferment. What further did he do, if anything?”

  “Well, sir, he kind of overreached his self when he drove at me wid th’ knife—I reckon I must ’a’ seen it comin’, or felt it, kind of. Anyhow, he missed me, an’ I cracked ’im on the wrist wid me nightstick, an’ he dropped his sticker an’ started to yell. Not on account o’ the pain, sir—it warn’t that sort o’ yell—but more as if he wuz tryin’ to give th’ tip-off to ’is pals. Then I claps me hand acrost ’is trap an’ lets ’im have me knuckles. He flings sumpin—looked like a bunch o’ keys, as near as I could make out—away an’—well, here we are, sir.

  “What’ll I do wid ’im, Sergeant?” H
e turned inquiringly to Costello.

  “Put th’ joolry on ’im an’ slap ’im in th’ wagon wid the other guy,” the sergeant answered.

  “I got you,” Hornsby replied, saluting and twisting his hand more tightly in the prisoner’s collar. “Come on, bozo,” he shook the captive by way of emphasis, “you an’ me’s goin’ bye-bye.”

  “And now, my sergeant, for the strategy,” de Grandin announced. “Renouard, Friend Trowbridge and I shall go ahead. Too many entering at once would surely advertise our coming. The doors are locked and that one threw away the keys. He had been well instructed. To search for them would take up too much time, and time is what we cannot well afford to waste. Therefore you will await us here, and when I blow my whistle you will raid the place. And oh, my friend, do not delay your coming when, I signal! Upon your speed may rest a little life. You understand?”

  “Perfectly, sor,” Costello answered. “But how’re ye goin’ to crack th’ crib—git in th’ joint, I mean?”

  De Grandin grinned his elfish grin. “Is it not beautiful?” he asked, drawing something from the inside pocket of his sheepskin reefer. It was a long instrument of tempered steel, flattened at one end to a thin but exceedingly tough blade.

  The Irishman took it in his hand and swung it to and fro, testing its weight and balance. “Bedad, Doctor de Grandin, sor,” he said admiringly, “what an elegant burglar was spoilt when you decided to go straight!”

  De Grandin motioned to Renouard and me, and crept along the base of the house wall. Arrived at a soiled window, he inserted the thin edge of his burglar tool between the upper and lower casings and probed and twisted it experimentally. The window had been latched, but a little play had been left between the sashes. Still, it took us but a moment to determine that the casings, though loose, were securely fastened.