“I am interested in your work,” said Manning gravely. “And you must let me help in the cooking. I am a fair hand at it.”
“Then let us start breakfast. I’ll prepare the grapefruit. It is so often clumsily done—not that I refer to you—but I like to do it neatly. You will have one, or share one, with me? Or do you prefer oranges? I have both.”
“I’ll take the oranges,” Manning replied. “Domestic grapefruits are excellent, but I have tried the wild shaddocks of the tropics. Their pith is unbelievably bitter, like quinine. They gave me a permanent distaste for the fruit. I’ll make the coffee and poach some eggs.”
“We must not forget the biscuits. They will not take long—to make or bake.”
Payson held up one of the golden globes of grapefruit, calling attention to the marketing and advertising brand stamped on the skin.
“There is a perfect product,” he said. “The Greek fruiterer and grocer at the corner selects them for me.”
He halved the fruit, meticulously cutting free the pulp in sections from the rest, lightly sugaring it, placing the halves on ice before he mixed his biscuits deftly and set them in the gas oven.
“This Griffin reminds me of those who were said to be possessed of devils in the old days,” said Payson. “It is sad we have no one to cast them out. Faith is sadly weak these days. Of course the devils were a form of speech used by the ignorant. His glands do not function. It is hard to minister to a mind diseased, but surely his body could be treated with modern surgery. He is sick, and should be cured.”
“He is a foul murderer,” said Manning sternly. “He should be put out of the way. Annihilated.”
Payson shook his head in deprecation. He did not seem to underestimate his danger, and Manning admired and envied the quality of his courage.
“His chief crime,” said Payson, “is in destroying Faith, the hope of a future life. Taking away the consolation of the hundreds of thousands whose lives are filled with toil and care and sorrow. And, if there were no punishment, equally with reward, no belief in the power of divinity, what would restrain any man from crime, from theft, from murder, the whole decalogue of sins? This Griffin would erase all unselfishness, all decency. It is incredible that his mind can be so warped, yet he is but a sick man.”
Manning said nothing. He had his own opinion of the Griffin and what his punishment should be. There was nothing adequate under the law for the horrors he had caused, the losses the community had sustained through his acts.
Here was Payson mildly qualifying his deviltries as sickness, ready enough to forgive him—and the Griffin was surely at work, unseen, unheard, mining through all protection as a mole tunnels, unseen and unheard, beneath the surface of the lawn it destroys.
Manning was sensitive, he was wrought up. Zero hour had started with daylight. It seemed to him that he was receiving evil vibrations, that the atmosphere of that quiet apartment was charged with them. He went once more all through it. He made a patrol of the house, saw all in order, all in place, and returned just as Payson was dishing up the biscuits. Still he could not shake off the sense of impending disaster. As surely as one feels the aërial symptoms of a gathering storm, he felt evil entering, feared that it had entered.
Payson set the table. Manning had his orange juice, Payson his grapefruit. A canary was singing in the sunny window. Flowers sent by friends were blooming. The setting was pleasant, but dread stood at Manning’s shoulder. He was tempted to tell Payson to eat nothing, and yet it was surely all innocuous.
“A perfect fruit,” Payson repeated, spooning free a section of juicy pulp. He swallowed it, gulped with suddenly staring eyes, fell forward on the little table—dead.
Manning knew it. The Griffin had struck. How, he could as yet only surmise. Struck truly and surely. There would be no reviving Payson. Some deadly poison had stilled his heart, paralyzed his veins, curdled his life blood. Already his flesh was changing color. First the pallid, putty hue of death, then an angry purple flush that crept over face and neck, that showed in hands swelling to shapelessness.
Manning whirled to call the doctor who stood ready by his telephone, to call his men. Yet he knew they had not let any one pass them.
V
A MAN stood in the doorway, silently closing it with one hand. A tall man in a black cloak, a curious mask over his face. It looked to Manning in that swift, nervous moment, as his hand shot to his shoulder-holstered gun like the skin of a shedding snake.
The Griffin. He had dared to appear. How, Manning did not care. He was close to his man at last.
“Stop! No bullets in this gun, Manning. Only certain waxen pellets that will be taken up with the poison in their tiny capsules, absorbed by your tissues. I think you remember them. Stop. Unless you want to die. No report. An air chamber. I shall leave as I came, despite your men. If you still want to lay me by my heels, Manning, keep still.”
Manning remembered when those pellets were last used. He kept his hands away from his gun. There was no sense in following Payson into the shades if he could avenge him.
He backed up, upsetting the telephone stand. The Griffin laughed.
“Resourceful, Manning, but useless. I have seen that it is out of order. I hardly expected to find you alive. It seems you prefer oranges to the grapefruit. And it is as well. I find you still amuse me. Sit down. We are not likely to be disturbed. All went off smoothly, silently. Not very spectacular, not like the exploding golf balls—you remember those, Manning? But efficient—and simple!
“The late Everett Payson, who is now discovering whether there is a heaven or not, to use a metaphor, since he is past discovering anything, was a methodical man. It was easy to find our about his grapefruit habit and its purchase. I had a box delivered here that was substituted for the actual one. Quite simple. It was even a Greek who brought it finally. I like attention to details.
“The fruit had been carefully punctured through one of the pores of the rind, where even your perceptive powers could not find it with a hypodermic needle—you may sit if you wish, Manning, and I will relieve you of that useless, clumsy gun.”
Manning perforce obeyed. The Griffin took his weapon, searched him for more, his own air pistol with its deadly pellets ever ready.
“As for the poison, I doubt if it can be analyzed. I have very carefully prepared it. There is an antidote, but, unfortunately, if used, it leaves the subject bereft of sense, an idiot. I tested it. For a while I was tempted to use it on Payson. It would have been a rare jest to see him drivelling, but I had promised myself—and you—to kill him. I could not disappoint you.”
“You are mad yourself,” said Manning. “That brain of yours is rotten. There are maggots in it that will some day corrupt your reason.”
Through the semitransparent material of the mask Manning could see an angry flush ebb and flow. The Griffin’s eyes blazed. Here was the weakness that he sometimes feared himself.
“You talk too much,” he said. “I do not find it amusing, Manning. Let us return to poisons. I have made a study of them. There is the venom of those insects that sting their victim, paralyze, deposit their eggs within the living body that will feed their young. I have worked with that, modified it, produced a toxin that numbs the body, finally the brain, for a certain period.
“That is it.”
With incredible swiftness, like the strike of a serpent, he darted out his hand. Manning felt a shallow prick and then the Griffin stepped back.
“A few seconds and you cannot move. A few minutes and you will be unconscious. Even now you will find you cannot speak. So I shall leave you. In the meantime I want you to hear how I arrived, how I shall depart. I never employ the same method twice. Each special problem has to be studied. And you make it harder for me, Manning. You tax my powers of enjoyment of your actions.”
The stuff was working. Its action, though far swifter, was like that of kawa, which leaves the brain clear and robs the body of all coördination. Manning found that he could not e
ven move his lips, much less his fingers. Yet he saw and heard perfectly.
“On the third floor I hired the front apartment in this house. It has stayed unused. On the third floor next door I took another. Both take in the whole front with hall bedrooms. That, from time to time I have visited, entertained others. Last night my experts went through the dividing wall between the houses. They worked well and fast and silently.
“To open the door into this house was simple. Simple for one of my men to skeletonize a key for the late Everett Payson’s apartment. I used it just now. Last night he was snoring. Now he sleeps more soundly. I return by the same means, Manning, avoiding observation. Later I shall leave the house next door. While you stay here until they find you with the man you meant to protect.”
Manning made a supreme effort. It seemed as if his will must break the force of the drug that held him. He could not even quiver, but his attempt must have showed in his eyes for the Griffin laughed quietly but mockingly.
“I must really let you live, Manning. After all, you are quite amusing. I shall communicate with you again. I have a rare idea. It will be quite spectacular this next time—quite spectacular. And now there is one more formality.”
He took from his vest pocket a little case of gold inlaid with lapis lazuli and opened it. There were seals inside, oblong cartouches of scarlet with a Griffin’s head embossed on them.
He moistened the gum and set one of them on Manning’s forehead.
He lifted Payson’s head, now hideously discolored, and pressed another in the same place.
“When you come to, Manning, you might as well have the rest of those grapefruit thrown away. I am not a wholesale killer. Ah, I see the drug is working.”
Manning strove to keep his lids apart. Drowsiness swept over him. The Griffin vanished from his sight and he was left there, unconscious, with Everett Parson, who had solved his controversy with the man who wrote over the nom de plume of Lucifer, so far as Payson was concerned.
The Griffin Flies
The Diabolical Genius of Crime Reaches Out to Snatch a Victim from the Broad Atlantic
THE three bodies lay limp on the grass in the Bronx Park Reservation. They were all dressed alike in brown, zip-closing overalls, stained and well worn. Many early drivers passed them and thought them sleepers after an alky festival. Others, imagining they might be the aftermath of some racket, of a highjacking raid, forbore to meddle, with the cynical wisdom of the New Yorker.
They lay there, prone and immobile, save for the almost imperceptible lift of their chests; like three dummies rather than men. One was bearded, another bald. All were well on in middle life, all showed signs of high intelligence. They appeared to be of a much higher type than their clothing indicated. The hands of two of them were stained with chemicals, of the third with grease, but they were all the hands of men of imagination, likely to be specialists, experts, rather than common workmen.
A cycle cop finally investigated, reported through the telephone.
“Three guys laid out here on the Driveway,” he said. “Dead to the world. They don’t smell of hooch, but they are sure out. I can’t wake ’em, can’t get a rise out of ’em. No—I tried that. Look and act like they had that sleeping sickness.”
An ambulance came, the callous interne looked them over.
“They ain’t drunk,” he said, then, turning up their eyelids, “and they don’t seem to be doped. But they ain’t got any more pulse between ’em than a sick humming bird. We’ll take ’em in.”
The tabloids made a brief of it. So did the afternoon editions. The proverbial noses for news on the part of their eager reporters were not working on that occasion. It was the morning papers that started the news, making crisp conservative comment over what the others would, and justly should, have hailed as a mystery.
Doctors on the Bellevue clinic gathered in consultation, baffled. Others came in curiosity and proved no wiser. There was absolutely nothing about any of the three to even suggest identification beyond an intimate description of their bodies. No one thought of finger-prints until later. All that was known was that they were in a stupor, that all of them were sinking, their vitality lowering hour by hour, respiration a light sigh, pulses a mere flutter. Injections, all attempts at arousing them failed. They were well nourished enough and enforced feeding was not necessary.
But second by second, minute by minute, as the hands went round the circles of the clock, their sands of life were trickling out. The physicians marked the characteristics of culture and education, the fine skull formations that did not go with the brown overalls, the coarse underwear and socks, the cheap shoes and the crude hair cutting. They noticed also that every face was lined with care, masked with a registration of dull despair.
It was a good story now. It was a better one after the commissioner of police had mentioned the matter to the special investigator he had appointed in the matter of the Griffin, the murderous madman who had terrified Manhattan and mocked at the police with his announced assassinations of the most famous and useful men of the community.
No one had been able to get any clew to the Griffin’s identity or locate his whereabouts. Manning had been close to grips with him, had glimpsed him, almost foiled him, and he was ever on the alert for something that would link up with the Griffin. He had meant to work under cover, but the morning after his appointment the Griffin had written to congratulate him, to challenge him in what he termed the “game.” Now Manning was in the open, so far at least as the Griffin and his emissaries were concerned. He fancied that this new, strange mystery, disconnected as it seemed on the surface, might furnish him a lead.
He entertained this idea because of the strange condition of the patients. The Griffin was ever experimenting with new drugs and poisons, or managing to gain information of them. Manning himself, once major in the Secret Service during the war, traveler in far-off places, particularly the Orient, knew of potions and infusions that could produce trances, slowly destroy life or rot the brain. These conditions resembled the deviltry of the Griffin. Therefore he investigated.
On his way to Bellevue to meet the commissioner he telephoned Von Reithmann, authority on pellagra, sleeping sickness and forms of narcotic depression.
“It looks like henbane-hyoscine,” pronounced the scientist. “Not the usual variety—Hyoscyamus niger—probably a tropical variety, more powerful, more deadly. Ordinary henbane is a powerful poison. These men are sinking into a death coma.”
He looked again at their eyes, more expertly than the interne had done, shook his head.
“Two of them are pretty far along,” he pronounced. “I doubt if we can get them back. All tissues attacked. Their eyes are gone. This one is younger, he seems more vital. We can try stimulants on him. We’ll start with adrenalin. It is possible he may talk,” he added. “His tongue and palate are in better condition than the others. Ah!”
He had been feeling the pulses of the two others simultaneously. Now he bent down, set his head against the chest of one, called for a stethoscope. To both they gave deep injections of adrenalin, but they were gone to the Land of Shadows. He worked with the doctors in attendance on the younger subject.
Manning, forewarned, hoping for some such thing to take place, had brought a microphonic attachment by which he could hear the merest whispers. A nurse volunteered to take down the notes he gave, just as they might come from the patient, to be interpreted later.
It was hard to piece together those vague and disconnected mutterings that followed the administration of the stimulants. The man’s will strove to make communication. His shattered nervous system failed to plug in on his cerebral connections, his glands could no longer supply the galvanic fluids, save weakly and spasmodically; but a gleam came into Manning’s eyes as he listened.
To the rest they sounded like ravings. Talk of a subterranean place where men worked as prisoners under the will of a fiend. Men who had no longer names, but only numbers, who were under the thrall of Him who
ordered their tasks. Talk of a circular room of steel, draped with golden tapestries, of mysterious music, of a Being who wore a strange mask over his hawklike features, who laughed mockingly as Satan.
The Griffin!
Manning had heard that jeering laughter, the mysterious music, over the telephone that transmitted the Griffin’s menacing messages, instruments synchronized by him so that they were, for the time, private lines. He would well imagine the underground laboratory, the men enslaved there, the circular chamber of steel. He had seen the man in the strange mask.
But he could not prompt the man, could not get questions through to his failing brain. The mutterings ceased. Von Reithmann and the rest tried to restore him, but it was useless. The narcotic had done its work too thoroughly. One of the Griffin’s men had been in their hands. Others, when captured, had refused to talk. This one had slipped through. They were no nearer the Griffin’s real name—if indeed the man had known it—or the place where he made his lair.
“An autopsy may determine the poison,” Von Reithmann was saying. Manning paid scant attention. Analysis would not mean anything to him. The stuff had not been bought where it could be traced. It had been infused perhaps by one of these men, one of the two who had chemical stains on their fingers, it might be the one who had babbled and then died.
Manning was thinking, following up the thought. For some reason these men had been deliberately discarded by the Griffin. In some way they had displeased him—failed him. Only one with a hidden well of vitality had to some extent survived his intentions. To leave them dying, but not dead, to mock at the efforts of doctors to restore them while they guessed at police headquarters as to motives; was the sort of jest that pleased the Griffin and tickled his grim sense of humor.
The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) Page 14
