The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  Cube did not give his quarry a chance to struggle. Versed to some degree in the arts of wrestling and ju-jutsu, he quickly overpowered the surprised Oriental. The man was heavy, but flabby of physique, and put up a desperate though useless struggle. In twenty seconds Cube was astride his chest, and holding out the doughy arm flat to the floor. In the meantime Krahn had discovered a spool of copper wire on one of the tables. With this crude but efficient agent they bound the wrists and ankles of the captive.

  “Now you have a lot to explain,” commented Cube savagely, addressing his prisoner. “Where is Sherrod Guest? Where is Irene Jeffries? And Kohler Andrews? How did you kill Noah Lacey?”

  The Chinaman, evidently recognizing the hopelessness of his predicament, gazed about stolidly at first. Lester Krahn pushed forward. “McKenzie can answer that last question for you, I believe,” he stated. “You’re probably more interested in the rest right now however. If there is any way in which we can help—”

  Cube scowled menacingly. “I’ll get the truth out of him!” he muttered. “Don’t worry about that.” His hand dropped suggestively to the butt of his automatic.

  “Violence will not be necessary!” broke in the Chinese unexpectedly. “For me the end has come. I it was who killed your esteemed uncle. My associates now hold the detective whom you are seeking. There is only one way in which you ever will see him alive. Deliver to us the manuals stolen from the T’ao tong by your uncle!”

  “Manuals? What do you mean?” demanded Cube blankly.

  The tong agent’s face wreathed in a cynical, disbelieving smile. “Explanations are unnecessary!” he snapped, and then as if suddenly invoking the spirits of his ancestors, the man broke into guttural Chinese.

  While the three Americans gazed at him in perplexity, he leaned forward suddenly, gnawing at something on the breast of his blouse. Too late Cube guessed the reason. Half of a black button had been chewed away. The Oriental quickly swallowed this, a convulsive shudder almost immediately attacking his frame. In a few seconds he fell back limply, stone dead.

  Krahn leaned forward, gingerly holding the chewed button to his nostrils. “Potassium cyanide!” he commented wryly. “Looks like he half expected to be caught at something. Prepared to cash in his own checks rather than take a chance with execution—or torture.”

  Chapter X

  “How did you come upon him?” demanded Cube, somewhat ashamed and angry with himself for allowing the Oriental’s suicide. The man might have been made to divulge all of the secrets now tormenting Lacey; but the method of carrying a load of poison disguised as a common button had been novel to the detective.

  “He came upon us, rather,” responded McKenzie. “We weren’t looking for visitors at all, but a squeak like a rusty hinge sounded behind. We turned, and saw a whole piece of the wall swinging open over there.” He gestured at a blank stretch upon which Cube could discern no hint of door. “Knowing it couldn’t be you, Krahn and I dodged behind two of these pillars. A Chinaman came in, but only glanced about casually. Probably he didn’t know we were in the house at all. He turned and did something in the wall, pressed a button or something, I suppose, and those stairs swung down. He climbed up the stairs and out of sight. Where do they lead?”

  Lacey considered the ceiling. “To my uncle’s rooms, I believe,” he answered. “But this door of which you spoke, let’s find it, and discover where it leads. Miss Jeffries knows of the passage, but she is not here at present. I’d rather not have a helpless girl along, anyway, if there proves to be trouble. We might locate a dozen more Chinese.”

  McKenzie grimaced, glancing down at the dead Celestial. It was plain he had little relish for active adventure of so serious a type. Cube caught the expression. It fitted in with his plans exactly. “If you’ll do something, Mr. McKenzie,” he added quickly, “I believe Krahn and I can handle affairs down here. Will you go up and inform the officers of what has happened. Tell them that inspector Harris ought to be notified. We’re likely to need help before this is over.”

  The botanist obeyed with alacrity, slamming the door of the elevator hastily when he glimpsed Cube hand one of his automatics to Krahn. “Know how to use it?” asked Lacey.

  “Never fired one in my life, but I’m glad to get hold of it!” replied the chemist pluckily. “This little dew-dad is the safety catch, isn’t it? Do you have to pull the trigger for every shot, or does merely keeping it down make the darned thing work?”

  Cube explained and demonstrated, and then the two approached the section of wall in which the door to the secret passage was located. Lacey realized that perhaps his greatest danger now would come from the weapon in his companion’s hands, yet between himself and Krahn lay an unexpressed kinship of liking for unusual adventure which possesses an etiquette of silence all its own. Men will risk serious injury or even death itself for it, rather than take the obvious and commonsense course of obviating risk to which they have committed themselves.

  Without fore-knowledge of the fact that a door actually existed, neither of the men could have discovered it. Even Krahn, long-trained in impressing photographic detail upon sensitive negative of brain, could not trace with any surety the irregular line. He indicated a one-foot space, however, in which he swore the door edge existed, and though Cube, after hasty examination looked at his companion doubtfully, Krahn found it himself. The aperture had been fitted so closely that only the breadth of a thin penknife could be inserted. Prying open was obviously impossible, but Cube accidentally solved the new riddle. Knocking each tile beside the length of the door, with his knuckles, he discovered a small mosaic which rattled in its place. Quick experimentation with this showed that it slid forward and back; pulling forward released a catch, allowing the door to swing open the distance of three inches. Cube caught it and flung it wide, propping it open with a heavy mould. “Might want to come back in a hurry,” he explained succinctly.

  One glance had shown the men that instead of the narrow passage both of them expected, the door opened upon a chamber extending at right angles to the line of house wall. Outside of faint illumination from laboratory lights it was pitch black, but Cube, after exposing himself in the doorway for a fraction of a second, boldly flashed his hand torch. He saw that the chamber stretched outward from the house wall a distance of twenty-five or thirty feet, and that on the far side a black opening indicated a continuation of the passage. This was not surprising, in view of the fact that electrical connections for the six-foot zone with burglar-alarm connections in the dooryard necessarily must have some means by which electrical contacts could be installed or repaired. The chamber lay directly below the strip.

  This feature was not what caused Lacey to stop as if petrified. On the floor fifteen feet distant, and strutting about like a drum major leading dress parade, was the parrot!

  “Hold up!” cried Lacey, thrusting back his eager companion. “I want to catch him!”

  Krahn, not understanding, obeyed nevertheless. Lacey walked cautiously forward, groping for a notion of what the parrot likely would do in this low-ceiled room. “Pretty Polly!” he exclaimed cajolingly.

  The bird lifted one leg and scratched his head. “Well, I’ll be switched!” he squawked.

  In that second the detective dove, crushing the green plumage in his arms just as Sun Yat decided that the vicinity of floor he had chosen had become dangerous. “Got you now!” Lacey gasped, the breath knocked from his lungs by his sudden header to the brick floor, He clasped the bird’s head expertly between two fingers, seeing to it that the fiendish beak got no chance at his flesh.

  “Aw hell!” remarked Sun Yat disgustedly. “We got a lady now. A lady! Haw!”

  “A lady?” cried Cube, horrified that the bird might be repeating real information he had heard somewhere. Then he tried in vain to get it to repeat his message—if such it was—but nothing was forthcoming save a stream of invective. Taking the parrot back into the laboratory, Cube imprisoned him under an inverted bushel basket, wedged beneat
h a bench in such manner that the bird’s struggles would be as ineffectual as his language. Then Cube and Krahn returned to the underground chamber.

  Luckily, the corridor beyond proved to be empty. It ran straight for a distance of sixty feet, then angled to the right to end in another door of masonry. The latter was equipped with a heavy iron handle on the inside, which manipulated the lock. Turning this cautiously, Cube discovered that the door opened inward. Peering through, he saw the reason. Boxes and barrels were piled against it, making a climb necessary.

  The two men listened intently, but only dull noises from some distance overhead reached their ears. They were in the basement of an apartment building, not far from the huge boiler of the steam plant, for the air was hot and sultry. Cautiously they emerged, but no one was in sight. The way lay open to the street outside via a tunnel-like passage between two wings of the building.

  Here Cube, searching carefully as he proceeded, descried something white and rumpled lying on the cement. He picked it up, and a cry of dread apprehension and certainty was wrung from his lips. The bit of cloth and lace was a woman’s handkerchief; daintily embroidered in one corner was the monogram I.J. The parrot had been coached in the truth!

  Chapter XI

  Inspector Harris was inclined to scoff at first when Lacey’s message reached headquarters. The sight of the dead Chinaman sobered him, however, and when Cube insisted that Irene Jeffries, Sherrod Guest, and Kohler Andrews doubtless all were in the hands of the tong he had little to say. After viewing the parrot, however, he let slip one surprising item of information.

  “Those Chinks are apt to discover that they’ve got hold of a pair of Tartars!” he commented grimly. “That is, if your friend Guest is as much of a detective as Irene.”

  “A—a what?”

  “Sure, didn’t you know she was an operative? Well, she is. With Pinkertons. Old Lacey employed her right along, getting her to stay here at the house and pretend she was a ward of his. But let’s get busy. Maybe that Chink has something in his clothes which will give us a steer.”

  Search of the corpse revealed nothing of the sort, but from an inside pocket Harris drew forth a small rubber bellows. He was in the act of squeezing this when Krahn caught his hands.

  “Don’t,” cried the chemist sharply. “Here, drop that thing a minute. It’s deadly! Take a look at it, McKenzie. Don’t you think—?”

  The botanist nodded slowly, staring down at the bellows in fascination. “Probably so!” he agreed. “Mr. Lacey, did your uncle snore?”

  Cube looked blank. “Heavens, I don’t know,” he answered.

  “Sa-ay!” broke in Harris, frowning in exasperation. “What are you three trying to do; kid me? This is a blamed serious matter.”

  “Quite true,” agreed Krahn acidly. “It would have been still more serious if you had blown the stuff which is in that bellows around this room where we could breathe it. Tell him, Macs!”

  The latter was nothing loath. He launched into a technical description of the lower forms of plant life—bacteria and fungi. Harris, still suspicious, listened impatiently. “What all this has got to do with murder I don’t see,” he interrupted.

  “Well, in so many words,” answered McKenzie, “our tests of blood from Mr. Noah Lacey reveal the fact that his circulatory system was crammed with fungi! These had been feeding parasitically on his red blood corpuscles. Though he actually died from the blow on his forehead, these fungi caused the fainting spell. They’d have killed him in another day or two, anyway. The fungi, I believe, are a species new to scientists here. That green slime over there in the tank is almost a pure culture of the organisms. The dampness keeps them from being much of a menace, however. The murderer of Mr. Lacey took a quantity of the fungi, dried it out, and then blew some of the spores from this bellows—probably over Lacey’s bed while the victim lay asleep. The reason why I asked concerning the snoring was that, if these had been drawn through the nostrils, many of them never would have reached the lungs and the blood stream. Of course only a few spores actually had to be inhaled.”

  “Good night!” exclaimed Harris. “And this was the bird that turned the trick, then!”

  “Yes, he confessed it. Until I saw the bellows, though, I had been trying to imagine the means employed to get the spores into the air. They’d be mighty dangerous to handle in the dry state.”

  Harris shivered. “If it’s all right with you,” he said, “I’d like to wrap up that thing and let you carry it. I don’t fancy getting a load of green slime in my blood.”

  * * * *

  Harris employed ordinary police methods. The inspector was not brilliant, but he went forward in ordinary routine, bulldog manner, and had at his back all the necessary resources of his department. He began by questioning everyone, by calling in Chinese residents of different portions of the city in the attempt to identify the dead man—a possibility which did not materialize immediately in admitted recognition, though behind masks of disinterest worn by two merchants of Chinatown, Cube fancied he detected curious flickers of alarm. Harris was confident enough that sooner or later he would succeed in naming the suicide, for it was plain the man had been a member of the ranking classes, educated and well-to-do.

  Harris began an examination of all Noah Lacey’s papers, emptying two bank lock-boxes. In all this mass of material, however, was not one word dealing directly with tong, or indeed, with any part of the past which seemed to have bearing upon the fact of his murder. An old will was uncovered, by the provisions of which all his wealth was bestowed upon an organized charity which had gone out of existence six years before. His lawyers, Barnes & Tegardine, came forward with a recent codicil, however, by which bequests of five thousand dollars each were named for Kohler and Mrs. Andrews, twenty-five thousand dollars for Irene Jeffries, and three or four other small amounts given to various organizations in which Noah Lacey had been interested. The residue of the estate—estimated conservatively at something over four million dollars—was willed to “my contrary-minded, but admirable nephew, Kuban Lacey!”

  The young man, however, was in no mood to realize or rejoice in his good fortune. The great fact that Irene Jeffries and Sherrod Guest were in the hands of the tong drove him frantic. He divorced himself as quickly as possible from Harris’s humdrum procedure, and wracked his brain to imagine a shortcut. Krahn stayed with him, deserting his laboratory for a day; the scientist set himself the job of supplementing Cube’s experimental logic. He seemed to believe that in the mysterious manuals spoken of by the dead Chinaman would lie a direct clue.

  “From what you’ve told me,” he said to Cube, glancing questioningly about the tiled walls of the laboratory, “I think your esteemed uncle must have had some sort of a repository here in this house. Certainly nothing like manuals of any description have been uncovered in his safety deposit boxes. Don’t you suppose really that those manuals had something to do with the art of ceramics?”

  Cube flashed a look of interest. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” he agreed. “Irene told me that he had learned how to reproduce ancient pieces of pottery and porcelain.”

  “Worth a great deal of money?”

  “Ye-es—although he never sold the reproductions.”

  Krahn waved this aside as unimportant. “Then,” he deduced with a hint of triumph, “if this tong’s name means the fictile arts; if they have committed murder and abduction to regain certain manuals stolen by your uncle; if after his visit to China he suddenly learned how to manufacture art objects which previously had lain beyond his skill, it appears to me that the stolen manuals must have made the difference—and that they must have been concealed down here in the laboratory where he could get at them constantly!”

  Cube nodded slowly, hope firing his eyes for the first time in hours. “I know a little about the way vases are made,” he said. “Do just what I say for a second, Krahn. You’re almost exactly my uncle’s height.”

  Obediently the chemist stood before the
“kick wheel”—that device for “throwing” pottery shapes by centrifugal force—raised his right arm toward the wall and watched while Cube marked out a circle of normal reach. Inside the circle, all the tile, brick and mosaic were too small to house a single receptacle, and anchored firmly by mortar. Cube, however, was not dismayed in the least. He had not expected to find anything here really, as manuals suggested a table or bench upon which they might be spread for consultation.

  Next in order came the bench upon which were placed the plaster slabs for mixing and working the pastes and clay. After marking out as before the entire space circled by the radius of Krahn’s reach, Cube went over it quickly with a small hammer, sounding each tile. Midway in the length of wall he stopped, uttering an excited exclamation. A large tile before him sounded more than ordinarily hollow, and shook in its socket of mosaics under impact! Quickly, fiercely, Cube battered at it, not waiting to attempt discovery of possible secret button.

  The tile cracked. A fragment came away. Ten seconds more and Cube thrust a hand through the aperture.

  “It’s here!” he cried exultantly, bringing forth two encased rolls, the covers of which seemed to be of waterproofed, silken fiber. Beside these—one of which Krahn immediately slit open—a single envelope lay back in the tile repository.

  “These are all in Chinese!” exclaimed Krahn in a disappointed tone, unwinding part of a beautiful fabric of watered silk upon which six columns of “running writing” were done in black and lavender. “Still, they’re the manuals, I’ll wager. Couldn’t really expect them to be translated for us. But what is that you have?”

  For a second Cube did not answer. He had broken open the letter, and was reading. “This is what we were looking for!” he said huskily. “Listen!” He read the terse paragraphs, which were addressed to himself. The date on the latter was recent—the identical day upon which Noah Lacey had met his death: