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

by J. Allan Dunn

  There were watchers under the arches and in the quadrangle, watchers supplementing the regular employees of the place. These latter evaded their bitter duties, but the others, who had been changed twice since midnight, challenged the storm. They were heavily clothed and heavily armed. The fury of the gale that, at times, rushed about the quadrangle like a whirlwind, flinging the snow like foam, called for special alertness. The windows were caked and frosted and crystaled so that the lights shone dimly out.

  Within, Ezra Farnett and Gordon Manning sat in the studio that was both library and music room. Manning had taken every possible precaution. He had examined the apartment, gone over the grand piano lest the Griffin might have managed to place there some infernal machine that would explode when certain chords were inevitably struck. That would be characteristic of the fiend, sure that Farnett would play some time during the twenty-four hours the Griffin had set as his life-limit.

  But Manning found nothing. Farnett’s two menservants were Flemish, devoted, incorruptible. Eighteen of the twenty-four hours had passed. Six now remained. There had been no poison in the food, no attack from some hidden assassin.

  But it was a night of nights for murder.

  The studio was on the second floor, the windows were fastened, as well as rendered opaque by the snow; there was no way to reach them, and there were four trusted men without. Equally, the doors were barred, those that led outside and those that communicated with the rest of the building.

  It was a man’s dwelling, well but not too luxuriously furnished. There were many books and a few good paintings. One carven frame contained a curious inclosure. It was a small oblong of metal, like a mirror of steel. It covered a grating through which entered certain wires, behind which was a contrivance whose intricacies were too much for Manning, though he knew its use.

  It was a television transmitter that also carried sound. Farnett had not displayed its use to his guest and protector. The static was unfavorable. During the afternoon Farnett had rested. He had slept also between one and five in the morning, slumber induced by an opiate, largely at Manning’s request. He was no longer a young or even a middle-aged man, though still intellectually vigorous.

  He knew, as did all New York, of the Griffin’s diabolical deeds, and somewhat to Manning’s surprise, took his warning philosophically.

  “I am infinitely obliged to you,” Farnett said. “But I wonder if I would not be almost as much obliged to some one who would painlessly, quickly dispose of me? I have accomplished some things and I have paved the way to what others must inevitably finish. Your Griffin does not know how spent I am. He confers on me the compliment of imagining me his enemy because, in his perverted brain, he resents all rivals, hates genuine progress.

  “My brain can still conceive, and does, but my body is tired out. I am close to seventy. One cannot renew human cylinders and furnish spare parts. I get tired—too tired even to play. I must limit myself to an hour a day at the piano. I shall play for you to-night, during our vigil. I hope, for your sake, that you may circumvent the Griffin, or even, through my departure, capture him. The man is not responsible. He is evidently a lunatic, suffering from the sins of his forbears, probably, with tissues that cannot stand the strain of his faculty of imagination. A mentality run amok.

  “He takes long to strike. Maybe the storm has disrupted his plans and thus your idea that failure will result in his own disintegration will be proved. Selah! So be it. It is all on the knees of the gods—and there are no gods. Divinity lives within ourselves alone.”

  A clock chimed. It was seven o’clock. The old year was passing fast. Dim murmurs of the fury of the storm manifested themselves when even the thick plateglass, set in steel frames, rattled. A fine film of frost had formed, or drifted in, between the junction of the window panes. Dinner was served. Oysters, a soup of real turtle spiced with sherry, a curried fowl and a bottle of red Beaune, artichokes, no sweets, but Cheddar cheese and Napoleon brandy with the coffee. A man’s dinner, in a man’s house.

  Farnett ate little. Manning did not do much better. He did not mistrust the meal, but he was convinced that the Griffin was not frustrated by the weather, that already he had planted somewhere his instrument of death, that all was devised, prepared, and that even now the Griffin was waiting, in full content, for the fulfillment of his scheme.

  He glanced at the television plate and it seemed to him that something flickered over it, vague and uncertain, as if a projection sought to register itself against outside resistance.

  Eight o’clock. Four hours more. Manning had not slept. He felt no fatigue. He was girded against the onslaught of the Griffin that might manifest itself at any moment, must do so within two hundred and forty minutes, or fail.

  Farnett finished his coffee in which he had placed the century old brandy, burned in sugar.

  “I shall play for you,” he said. “Then I shall lie on the couch here until midnight, with you, my friendly guardian, watching me. After that you can rouse me and we will congratulate each other. I shall live on and the Griffin, perhaps,” he added whimsically, “will be like the little leprechaun who huffed and puffed, and huffed and puffed until he blew up with mortification.”

  Under the magic fingers of Farnett the piano became, to Manning, a hundred instruments. He heard the devil-drums of barbaric lands, the shaken sistra of ancient Egypt, the cithara of medieval music, lutes and flutes and Andalusian guitars. Panpipes and deep-toned trumpets, calling to battle, challenging. Rattling gourds and bawling conches as wild hordes swept on to rapine and loot. Music of love, pagan and divine. High inspiration, the paeans of the dead dynasties of gods and demigods, the shrill pipe of sybils, the rolling rhythm of martial strains.

  He knew now what Farnett meant when he declared music an inspiration, a vibrational urge to those attuned to cadence. The piano, like a horizontal harp, sang to him of his own ambitions, of his longings for love, for achievement. It evoked anew the desire to open the world, like an oyster, with his sword. It spoke of combat and of peace. It ended in soft, lingering chords.

  Farnett sat on the piano bench, exhausted but elated.

  “So it finishes,” he said. “ ‘So fleet the works of men back to the earth again; ancient and holy things fade—like a dream.’ How it storms. To dream and not to waken, only to dream once more the vision is accomplished. Good night, Manning. I’m tired. I’m glad to have known you. I have heard of you before, of course, in war as well as in what we call peace, the period between wars when men rest and sharpen their weapons for the next encounter. And still, some of them, too many of them, keep on killing. Like our friend the Griffin. I don’t want to see another war. Man. Homo sapiens he calls himself. The wise one of the genus who devotes his brains to the art of destroying his kind. With the wild ape still in him. Well, there is no end to wars and the making of wars. The Four Horsemen are grooming their wild steeds, saddling up. Good night.”

  V

  THE house phone rang. Farnett answered it.

  “Something wrong with the steam,” he said. “They want us to shut off the radiators for half an hour until they trace the leak. The engineer seems to think it’s in this section of the building. He says, and truly, that this is no weather for steam valves to misbehave. He’s coming up.”

  Manning nodded. It all seemed natural enough. But he knew the Griffin. This was no night for outsiders to appear, however plausibly. His hand slid to where his automatic nested in its shoulder clip.

  A knock sounded and Manning answered it. There was a grizzled, elderly man in overalls, carrying a box of tools. He had a red scar on his right cheek that looked like a scald. He touched the peak of the cap he wore.

  “Evening, Mr. Farnett. Sorry to disturb you. But it’s a nasty night and we don’t want the heat to go wrong. There’s a blockade somewhere. Air in the valves, I reckon. It won’t take a minute or two.”

  Manning had taken his seat again. He seemed to look at the blank oblong of steel in its metal frame, Farnet
t’s television producer.

  The engineer fiddled with the valves, turned them off.

  “Your rooms are warm,” he said. “They’ll keep you comfortable till we fix things. Can I go into the bathrooms?”

  Farnett yawned, nodded. The man knew where to go. As he disappeared Manning leaned forward.

  “You recognize him?” he asked.

  Farnett smothered another yawn.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “It’s Sissons.”

  “Excuse me,” said Manning.

  He strolled to the bathroom. Sissons straightened from where he had been testing the register.

  “It’s not here,” he said. “I’ll just take a look at Mr. Farnett’s bathroom upstairs. But I think the trouble’s in the next apartment. It’s vacant. They’re gone South for the winter.”

  He disappeared, carrying his tools. Manning kicked off his shoes and followed him. He entered Farnett’s bedroom, on the upper floor of the duplex, halted. The engineer was in the bathroom. Manning gave him a minute, and then glided to the open door.

  He saw the man standing over the toilet bowl, the hot water running. There was a cabinet back of it, with a mirrored front. In the mirror Manning saw the man squeezing out something into the bowl—a metal tube, labeled.

  He had no business doing anything like that.

  The next second the man saw Manning. He dropped the tube and started to whirl as Manning leaped.

  Manning saw his hand slide down. The overalls were not intended for the quick handling of a gun. Manning did not use his. He jumped and got a wrestling grip. The engineer’s apparent age shed itself as he strained against the hold, but Manning was too quick and expert for him. Manning got him in a hammer lock and threw him. The man’s head connected with the tiled flooring of the bathroom and he relaxed, unconscious.

  Manning gave him a swift inspection before he turned to the basin. In it was a tube of well known toothpaste, partly squeezed. Another on a shelf inlaid in the tiled wall. They were duplicates, or would have been when the fake engineer had finished squeezing his to seem the same as the other.

  Here was a deadly device—of the Griffin. Frustrated this time.

  Manning held no doubt that analysis would prove the tube the fake Sissons meant to substitute was filled with deadly, swift-acting poison.

  He put it away safely in his pocket, the cap replaced, then stooped and with a moistened towel wiped off the artificial scald on the man’s face. He lifted the gray wig, and his face grew grim and earnest.

  He had one of the Griffin’s tools, unhurt save for perhaps a slight concussion of the brain. The tiled floor was hard. The man breathed stertorously. Manning felt his pulse. Then he looked in the cabinet. It was a deep one and well stocked. There were two unbroken packages of medical bandages.

  Deftly Manning used them to securely tie up his prize. It did not take long to truss the killer’s tool.

  Manning left him there. He could keep. This time they would hold the man, give him a real inquisition, an improvement on any police third degree. They would wrest from him all he knew of the Griffin’s actions and whereabouts. Manning was in no mood, nor would he be, to show any mercy in his mode of questioning. Too many valuable citizens had been killed, too often had he been frustrated by the necessary slaying of an emissary. But now he had one at last, alive. Others had refused to talk, this one should not.

  Manning had traveled in many lands. He knew strange, savage ways to torture, to break men down. He felt exultant.

  He found Farnett divested of his outer clothing, lying down on a lounge beneath the television tablet.

  “What happened?” he asked feebly. “I heard some sort of a commotion. Tell me, Manning.”

  Manning told him briefly. He was worried about Farnett. The man did not look too well. His eyes were dull and his cheeks were sunken.

  “Haven’t you got some tablets to take?” he asked. “I think the main danger is over. Take it easy.”

  “I’m cold,” said Farnett, drawing his dressing gown closer. “It was just a fake about the steam. Turn it on again. I’m cold. There are some strychnine tablets upstairs, in the medicine cabinet, but I don’t need them now. I took some digitalis I keep handy.”

  Manning turned on the valves. The steam came readily enough. He fixed the cushions under Farnett, who now seemed responsive to the drug he had taken.

  Halfway up the stairs Manning felt a curious sense of dizziness. He had not been himself of late, with the strain of his warfare with the Griffin, and he fought it off. His fight with the pseudo-engineer had been short but severe.

  He wanted to search the man before he called up headquarters. He found it hard to breathe, his heart was pounding, but he mounted the stairs and found his man, still seemingly out, on the bathroom floor.

  Manning started to search him. He found a gun and then a small cardboard box. He opened it, with a hunch as to what was inside. His hunch was justified.

  Seals! Heavy crimson paper, gummed on the inside, bearing the symbol of the Griffin. The killer had been instructed to fasten one of them on his victim. And Manning might find them useful later.

  As he looked at the seals, the room seemed suddenly to revolve about him. He lifted himself from his knees and then felt the strength go out of him. He could not get air into his lungs. Something entered them, but it was not oxygen. He fought to rise, but could not. The last thing he heard was the hissing steam.

  VI

  MANNING came to, panting. He thought he was back in the war. Some alarm was ringing. Gas! Gas!

  Where was his mask? He was strangling. But not going to quit. A light glowed faintly overhead. Electric? What….

  Nothing short of the invincible purpose with which he had pursued the Griffin, his absolute determination to annihilate this fiend, could have got him to his feet.

  There was a vital spark within him, born of his will, that whipped his dying senses.

  Gas! Gas without question. But this was not the trenches. A hospital, with the tiled walls and floor? No! They had no hospitals like that where he had fought.

  He saw the lax form of the engineer in his overalls—not a uniform—and his sluggish memory was spurred.

  There was a window to the room and he thrust it up, gulping at the cold air, the driving snow.

  He had to stoop once more and he did it, as a diver does, holding his breath, shutting off the radiator valves through which the deadly gas might still be coming. The same in the bedroom, then downstairs. The wild wind blew the curtains out straight, the white flakes rushed in. It was freezing—far below freezing, but better that than death.

  He was too late.

  Farnett lay stretched out on the couch. His low vitality had succumbed. The Griffin had triumphed after all.

  Had he?

  Manning, assured that Farnett was beyond recovery, utterly collapsed under the deadly fumes, raced back to the bathroom.

  There was clear air there now, plenty of oxygen, but the Griffin’s aide, like Farnett, had not been able to assimilate it. Unconscious from the flying mare, his lungs had not been able to help his beleaguered body. The man was dead.

  Manning went slowly down the stairs, ready to call up headquarters, to report another failure for himself, another victory for the Griffin.

  He paused as he entered the room. The television plaque was beginning to glow.

  As Manning gazed, a vision materialized upon it. The picture of a man, masked with something that effectually disguised and yet half-mockingly revealed him.

  He heard a voice. The voice of the Griffin, that he had heard so often—too often—and knew so well.

  “I had two strings to my bow, Manning. I am not sure, at this moment, which one sped the fatal arrow. Perhaps the toothpaste, perhaps the cyanogen. But I time these matters. By now I am sure that Farnett has joined ‘the great majority.’ ”

  For once Manning lost control, looking at the mocking vision on the plaque, regarding the stiffening form of Farnett. As if in a
dream, he heard himself hurling invectives at the portrait that was now gradually fading.

  “Here’s hoping, Manning,” sounded the voice of the Griffin faintly. “Some day we’ll get to grips. Meanwhile, your oaths are not too fitting. This is.”

  Through the plaque, now only vacant metal, there seemed to come a strain of music. Wherever evolved, it was plain enough in that room of death.

  Chopin’s Funeral March. La Marche Funébre.

  The Griffin’s Double Cross

  In the Heart of a Fortified Laboratory, the Griffin’s Tool Threatens Manning with Death from a Jar of Germs

  THE broadcasting stations had said good night through their suave-voiced announcers and the silver gongs had chimed. Hundreds of thousands of radio owners were prepared to tune off for the night when suddenly, unannounced, there came on the air the deep notes of a booming voice in words whose portent was so startling, so arresting and sinister, that the ears of half a nation strained to listen, thrilled with horror.

  There were others who heard with hatred, with anger, with chagrin at their own past and present impotence to still that booming voice for ever. Men, many of them, who had tried in vain to capture the owner of the mysterious voice, the arch-fiend who had terrorized Manhattan, who had murdered more than a score of prominent, useful citizens, heard the words with a shudder.

  A maniac, the speaker was, beyond a doubt, and one possessed of infinite resource and cunning, primed with the deviltry of Eblis. A magician who by some method, was sending his fateful, grandiloquent message abroad.

  “This is the Griffin speaking.”

  There was a short pause in which strange, exotic music could be faintly heard. Then a chuckle, diabolical and exultant, as if the sender was enjoying the shock he knew his five words had caused.

  The assurance, the conceit of the man was astounding. It was not the first time he had sought publicity to satisfy his grandiose dementia, his colossal ego.

  “I make no apology,” the deep, confident voice went on. “I would clear up a misunderstanding. I have been described as a menace—even as a monster. I am a philanthropist. There are those who seek to rid the world of me in return for my having eliminated others who, with their insane theories, their pretentious humbuggery, their false morality, have clogged the path of the world’s true progress.