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

by J. Allan Dunn

  Manning grappled with his antagonist. They swayed about the room, they stumbled over the writhing body of the man he had struck across his throat. They tripped over the corpse of Ferguson.

  Was this what the Crime Master meant by a demonstration of what might happen to Manning if he interfered too closely? Manning thought not. His opponent fought desperately but he seemed to have no weapon. He clutched Manning’s wrist above the hand that gripped the cane, for a while he matched him. They reeled through the open door, on to the dark well of the spiral staircase.

  It was a grim wrestling match. Manning strove to free his hand, to launch a blow with his cane. They were in blackness. Both were hard pressed, but he could feel the other yielding, slowly, with dynamic bursts of energy that lessened as they floundered in the dark. At any moment the other man might come back into it.

  Then he heard, above their panting, punctuated by the steady ticking of the clock, the sound of motors, striving up the hill. His men were coming. His opponent seemed to hear it, too. He put out a gust of strength, he bent Manning backward.

  Manning set his crooked knee back of the other’s leg. He thrust forward. He got one arm free at last, his left, and struck fiercely. Knuckles to bone. The man’s clutch gave way. He fell, vanished, and Manning heard him falling, striking, tumbling down the stairs, himself on the verge of them, clinging to the bannisters.

  The squad came in. Their torches sprayed through the gloom. Two of them stooped over a prostrate form. Two charged up stairs. The library was vacant of anyone save Ferguson’s body. The man with the candle had revived and gone.

  Nor could he be found. A rear door was wide open. There were some marks of footprints, faint in the torch light, indeterminate.

  “That chap at the foot of the stairs, his neck is broken,” said one of the detectives.

  Manning looked at him, at his shell. A gaunt man with gray hair. A man who had mistrusted, at the last, the Griffin’s promise of protection, had, perhaps, exceeded his instructions, perhaps tried to win higher reward by killing the man who had so unexpectedly interfered.

  It might have been done for the sake of his family, might have been in desperation. The Griffin might not have told him his private duel with Manning. It was a secret locked behind his lips, silent for ever. His neck was awry, his head limp on that broken stem.

  And Ferguson was dead. Manning gave his orders. They ransacked the house, found extra fuses, restored the lights. Manning, with an idea of what had happened, after his inspection of the ruined radio-set, the remembrance of the Griffin’s suggestion of automatic death, went to the roof.

  The telephone wires had been shifted. They ran close to the aërials. A supercharge over them would leap to the latter. Their insulation was scorched.

  Once more the Crime Master had eluded him. One of his tools lay broken, silent forever. Another had escaped.

  He went down to his car, his clothes torn in the struggle with Number Nine. The four took charge of the rest. There was little to do. Ferguson was dead. Once more the Griffin had triumphed. The loss of a pawn was nothing to him.

  Defeated, Manning took seat in his roadster. He started the engine and went coasting down the hill. As he turned into the highway, powerful lights enveloped him and he kept to his side of the road. A machine surged by him. He held sight, for an instant, of a face that looked out at him, the face of a devil, surely. He caught the sound of a laugh, the indetermined syllables of a voice that was familiar.

  Furiously, he turned his car, swept in pursuit. But he could not gain on that crimson rear light, fast as he drove. It seemed to jeer at him. It seemed, to his exasperated fancy, to look like the seal on the Griffin’s letters, the seal he had seen set on the forehead of Ferguson. His car reeled, swayed as he held the bucking wheel. Then they came to a place where three roads met. There highways, all cemented, holding no trace of cars. Two of them curved. He tried one and, coming to a straight stretch, saw no red light. He had lost again.

  VI

  THE Renalia docked at ten. Manning paced up and down the wharf. He was bruised and shaken, physically and mentally, by his experience of the night before, but more stubbornly resolved than ever upon the elimination of the Griffin. His night had been racked with recurrent glimpses of that indeterminate face in the rear of the car that had outraced his own, memories of the mocking laugh, of the twisted face of Ferguson, of the red blotch of the Crime Master’s seal on his forehead.

  And he was more resolved than ever to shut out Eleanor Severn from his life until he had run to his last covert this supreme criminal. It meant nothing that one gaunt body lay in the Morgue. It had not been identified. Yet it might be, might hold some clew.

  He doubted it. Someone might claim that relic of a man but who could tie it up with the Crime Master!

  The papers carried the news of the latest achievement of the Griffin. He had done his best. But had the Griffin done his worst? What did he hold in hand? What ghastly deeds?

  The liner came proudly in. Manning forced himself to the moment. He saw Eleanor Severn waving to him. He waved back, goading himself to the immediate occasion.

  Presently she came down the gangway. There were others to meet her from whom he had kept aloof, but now mingled. He felt the grasp of her hand, saw her astonished gaze.

  “Are you ill, Gordon?”

  “No. But I have been very busy. You look wonderful. Let me help you with your baggage.”

  Her relations acknowledged his methods. The customs man chalked her trunks, unexamined, after a word from Manning, a glimpse of a badge he wore.

  “You’ll come up to the hotel?” she asked him.

  A messenger pushed through before he had time to answer.

  “Miss Severn?”

  He proffered a florist’s box. The girl took it while Manning tipped the boy.

  “Did you send these?” she asked, her eyes aglow.

  Manning shook his head. He should have thought of it—but he had not.

  There was a great spray of orchids, elaborate, expensive. Eleanor Severn sought for the envelope, opened it.

  “Why, how funny!” she said. “I wonder who could have sent them?”

  The envelope contained a card, blank of writing but with a scarlet seal affixed, a seal that bore a griffin’s head. Manning knew.

  The Unknown Hazard

  “Number Fourteen,” Under Torture’s Stress, Aids the Griffin in a Terrible Plan

  THE ball rebounded at eye-dazzling speed, glancing again at sharply varying angles, went hurtling back again. The skin of the two players was varnished with the sweat of their lean, athletic bodies; they seemed like a pair of wing-heeled Mercuries as they bounded about the court, evenly matched.

  The decisive point was scored and Gordon Manning, breathing hard but unwinded, shook hands smilingly with the man who had defeated him—for the first time. They went off to the showers together and the old trainer, owner of the down town gymnasium, who had been watching the game from the balcony, shook his head slightly.

  “Manning seemed off his game. A bit stale perhaps,” hazarded the man beside him; a successful stockbroker who believed in keeping himself fit, he was one of the veteran’s clients.

  “He’s not stale, and his game was all right,” said the trainer. “But it wasn’t Manning playing, just his body. When he’s right he outguesses ’em right along. Something on his mind lately, I imagine. Mebbe it’s some tough business deal.”

  “Maybe,” said the other. He knew that Manning was an advisory counsel who made good fees, never appeared in court, had a fine reputation as consulting attorney. Then he dismissed the subject.

  Manning left the gymnasium, walking swiftly to his office. His body swung along with his elastic strides, but there was a frown on his brow, a look of care in his eyes that had not been there three months ago.

  Youngest major in the A.E.F., brilliantly distinguished in the Secret Service during the war, he had volunteered as special agent under the police commissioner to
track down and destroy the fiend known as the Griffin, also, to use the criminal’s own braggart term, written personally to Manning, as the Crime Master.

  For months the Griffin had mocked at authority, at all social and civic order. The list of his mysterious crimes was appalling. His resources and information seemed inexhaustible. Without doubt he had added to his funds by the coups he had brought off. He was plunderer as well as murderer.

  It was generally granted that the Griffin was insane, not a maniac, but a man whose brain had become tainted.

  Upon each crime he set the scarlet seal of his identity, red as blood, an oval of heavy paper on which was embossed his crime crest, the rampant head of a griffin. Manning had worked under cover, but the Griffin had forced him into the open, had deliberately challenged him, had given him advance information concerning his latest atrocities with such carefully calculated margin that Manning always arrived too late for anything but the solution of the ingenious methods of murder, the arrest in two cases of tools of the Griffin, just pawns in the game. They had refused to divulge any information concerning their criminal.

  On the third attempt Manning had come closer. He had actually glimpsed the Griffin. And he had killed, in a struggle, one of the Griffin’s servants. But the Crime Master was still at large, his whereabouts unknown, ready to strike again, as he unquestionably would.

  And now another element had entered into Manning’s crusade. It was the girl he loved, Eleanor Severn. Sternly he had resolved to avoid her until the Griffin was eliminated, partly because of his own constant jeopardy, principally because he feared she might be included in that danger.

  Fear did not enter into Manning’s composition, but one might be afraid for another. And the feeling he held for the Griffin admitted the possibility, lurking always in the background, that he might not be able to circumvent the diabolic intrigues of so fantastic and ruthless a creature. Not a day passed he did not dread to hear the subtly jeering voice of the Crime Master, and to receive from him a missive in his characteristic writing, bold and unusual, sealed with the scarlet mark.

  He was not given to hunches, but he admitted that, anxiously keyed-up as he was, he had times of anxiety that were usually justified. Manning had traveled in many lands; he had seen strange things; he did not dispute that mental waves might vibrate through to receptive brains.

  Such a mood was on him now. He was not surprised to see the heavy envelope of gray paper in his waiting mail. The address in violet ink, the flap fastened with red wax—the imprint of the griffin’s head, waiting for him to break.

  Instead he slit the envelope, read the contents with narrowed eyes.

  Dear Manning:

  I am changing my tactics slightly. We were almost in contact on the last occasion. That proximity provided me with a genuine thrill that I trust you shared. I have often thought that the hunted and the hunter might sometimes have something in common. The lure and tingle of the chase.

  Again you got rid of a pawn of mine. I am afraid he was not much use to you. Dead men tell no tales, but he would not have told you much if he had been alive and willing. As a matter of fact, I am rather obliged to you for ridding me of him. He was an overscrupulous fellow.

  Next time there will be no pawns on hand for you to grapple with. To compensate for this I propose to give you the name of the next man selected from my list, as soon as that is decided. Also the date of his death. Then, my dear Manning, you will have a chance to prove yourself. You may prove a protective agent, even if you are not too successful as a detective one.

  But do not overlook the fact that, as the ratio of your success increases, so does your own risk. Perhaps not only yours. I acknowledge my faults. I am a poor loser.

  Antagonistically yours,

  The Crime Master.

  Beneath the signature was the drawing, cleverly enough done, of a griffin’s head, its hackles rampant, its tongue protruding from its open beak in derision.

  The conceit, the colossal, mad conceit of it, was staggering. To announce the name of his proposed victim, the date of his contemplated death. It was sheer lunacy! Yet it was through that supreme impudence, that evidence of grandiose dementia, that Manning hoped eventually to trip his man, to get him in the toils. That happening, when it occurred, would be fraught with vital hazard to himself, he did not doubt. Nor care. He longed to come to grips with this modern Frankenstein.

  And he believed that the Crime Master would make good his boast. And soon.

  II

  THE strange sanctum of the Griffin was vacant. It was a room with curving walls, without visible doors, without windows. The appointments might have belonged to any century. There was a gazing globe, suspended disks of bronze—an inkstand with a carved head of a griffin, in gold. Light came from invisible sources, the air was sweet, perfumed with amber. Music sounded faintly, muted music that was primitive.

  Actually, the chamber itself was intensely modern. Back of the wall tapestries there was chilled steel, the floor was steel beneath the priceless Oriental weaves. Modern science and ingenuity had many devices connecting with that room.

  A section of the wall opened. A bizarre figure stepped out of an elevator, black of skin, wearing a loin-kilt and turban of scarlet; deformed, long-armed as an ape. It squatted like a toad. The Crime Master sat back of his carved desk in a thronelike chair. The Griffin’s strange eyes gleamed from a mask of plastic material like goldbeater’s skin. Eyes of topaz, snake’s eyes, tiger’s eyes, cruel, pitiless. Now they glittered with anticipated satisfaction as he spoke to the hunchback dwarf in the latter’s native Haitian.

  “I do not think I shall need you again to-night, Quantro,” he said. “I am only waiting for a report from the laboratory. You may—”

  Suddenly the hidden music faltered, the bronze disks gave out an ominous note. The whole room seemed slightly shaken as if an earthquake had rumbled, save that the sound was sharper. It seemed to come from far below, where the Griffin, with the aid of expert employees, conducted certain malevolent experiments, deep in the rocky foundations of his house. He spoke sharply, his eyes flaming.

  The dwarf rose, went through the opening that reappeared as the Griffin pressed a foot button. The lift shot down the steel tube. The Crime Master waited, immobile, as if carved. The close-fitting mask aided the illusion of his having turned to a statue, the folds of his brocaded robe were still.

  The lift ascended again, the dwarf stepped out once more, behind him a man in mechanic’s overalls, a plate round his arm bearing the numeral “12,” a mask over his face, above which his partly bald head, like a monk’s tonsure, seemed incongruous.

  The Griffin came to life, nodded him to a chair. Quantro took place behind the man he deemed his god, his beady eyes avid. He fingered a long, curving knife in a shagreen scabbard, thrust through the band that sustained his loin cloth. He scented trouble; his nose was like that of a snuffing beast of prey.

  The Griffin listened coldly to the explanations of Number Twelve. When he spoke, the syllables were like pellets of hail.

  “It was, you say, the fault of Number Fourteen?—but for his carelessness the experiment was a success?”

  “He paid for that carelessness. My God, I saw him die. It was terrible, horrible!” Number Twelve shuddered. The Griffin’s mouth accentuated its ever present sneer, turned it to a devilish smile, licked his lips.

  “I shall look at him presently,” he said. Now his even tones held a gloating note, a hideous anticipation.”  There is no doubt that what I asked for is practical?”

  Number Twelve shuddered.

  “It is. I have not yet done all you asked. It can be done. But—I ask you to get some one else to complete the job.”

  “Why?” The word was icy, imperative.

  “It is not human, to—”

  “Have you a substitute? Am I to be disobeyed? Who are you to judge my actions, my motives? Yours, I think, have been challenged.”

  “There are limits. You goad me too far. I�
�”

  “Exactly—there are limits.”

  Number Twelve had started up in his chair, his hands on its enfolding arms. And Quantro, the dwarf, had come forward, his knife half out. It was not needed. Number Twelve sank back, writhing, twisted, powerless under the current that, suddenly, galvanically gripped him.

  “Those limits are yours,” said the Crime Master. “I have none. I need you, so I spare you, for the present. Do you know where you are, who I am?”

  “No.” The current had diminished. The racked man could speak. “You brought me here drugged.”

  “From a place to which you can be readily returned—with all the consequences—in the same manner. Will you complete this task I have set you—or—”

  Once more the galvanic current raced through the poor wretch’s tissues, filled his veins with scalding fire. His head fell forward in abject assent.

  Again the opening appeared. Number Twelve staggered toward it, his momentary mutiny quelled. A little later the Griffin descended, with the dwarf. At the bottom of the shaft he walked through stone chambers where strange lights flickered, where the hum of a dynamo prevailed, through to where the pawn who had been known as Number Fourteen lay. It was a ghastly sight, but the Griffin seemed to revel in it. The dwarf Quantro, voodoo worshiper, steeped in bloody ritual, looked on, rubbing his clawlike hands and, for the moment, there was little to choose between the two.

  III

  WITH the first tinkle of the telephone Manning knew who was calling. He was on edge. He had been for days, with the horror of experience, the hope of this time grappling with the Griffin himself. There were to be no pawns. If that was true, the Crime Master would not be far off to witness the success or failure of his coup. If Manning could cope with him it might be failure. Surely this time the Griffin would overreach himself.

  He knew it was hopeless to trace the phone call. There was some principle of induction involved by which the Griffin got through to the circuit he wanted without himself using a commercial instrument. Manning’s pulses beat high as he lifted the receiver in his own study, at Pelham Manor.