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

by J. Allan Dunn

  A swift and sudden certainty of something wrong, of danger close at hand, surged over Manning. Something, he fancied later, to do with the haste of the man to leave, an echo of the manner in which he had wished Pollard many happy returns of the day. At the risk of spoiling Pollard’s drive for nothing he rose to his feet, starting forward.

  “No pawns at hand,” the Crime Master had said. What if one had just left? He barely grasped what the diabolical genius had planned. It was intuition, working like lightning, developing—but too late.

  Pollard’s club had gone up slowly, came down in perfect rhythm, his wrists doing their work at the last moment. Then—

  A blast of pale flame, an acrid odor, fierce fulmination, an explosion that swept Manning backward, over the bench, with the violent impact that shook the ground, the trees, tore a hole in the turf of the tee.

  Pollard was down, hideously wounded, unconscious, his broken body moving slightly, terribly stained, his clothes saturated with gushing blood.

  Men came running up as Manning regained his feet. Players, the professional, caddie master and caddies, staring horror-stricken while Manning’s own men vaulted the wall, others hurrying up. He turned to them.

  “Get after that car that just passed. Stay where you are, boy,” he shouted to Pollard’s caddie. “Don’t move. Take Mr. Pollard in. Send for a doctor.”

  He knew no surgeon could avail. Pollard was starting on his last adventure, exploring the unknown.

  Manning ran to the caddie, took Pollard’s bag. There was slight danger, he imagined. Those balls had been so constructed that the pent-up and supremely powerful explosive needed a hard blow to release it. A man might have putted with them. They were evidence, though he feared they might not furnish any clew beyond the cause of death. There were nine more in Pollard’s locker—should be. Spheres of death if mishandled.

  They carried Pollard in and laid him on two tables in the locker room. His clothing had been almost stripped from him. Manning had seen other terribly mutilated bodies after high explosive had struck close by, in the war; men flung into trees, left there, dismembered, naked. There had been but a small amount in the golf ball, but it had been compressed in the hollow core. Pollard’s driver had utterly vanished.

  The man’s immense vitality still lingered. Some one came running with a car robe, spread it over him. The stains of blood came through.

  “Where is his locker?” Manning demanded of the professional, whose Scotch stolidity had given place to an exhibition of rage and grief. “Quick, man,” he said, “there may be life and death in it. Those other balls!”

  He was determined to get hold of them. A doctor had been summoned. McKenzie stared at Manning as if he thought he were demented, but led the way down the room, between files of steel lockers, pointing out Pollard’s.

  “It was open, sir,” he said. “I closed it when I put the balls there. It was one o’ them? Guid God!”

  “Get a pass key,” Manning commanded. The professional vanished, while Manning waited. There was nothing he could do for Pollard now but see the body taken back, notify the authorities. He had failed—failed. He fancied he could hear the mocking laughter of the Griffin. He wondered if the Crime Master was close at hand. If he was, if he could get to grips with him. He held faint hope that the other car would be overtaken. It was too powerful.

  Once he had chased the Crime Master in his own fast roadster and lost him.

  There was a murmur of voices. McKenzie came back.

  “There’s a doctor here now, sir,” he said. “A guest of the club. He’s lookin’ at him, but he’s dead, lang syne.”

  Manning took the box, set back the two balls from the bag. He saw now why they had been nested, like eggs, though the risk was comparatively slight, unless the car had met with accident. Slight chance of that. The Griffin’s emissary had gone swiftly, but he had probably driven up carefully enough.

  The doctor had gone. The robe was again covering the dreadful sight. But one of Pollard’s arms had been displaced. It hung down from the edge of the narrow table. There was something on the dangling wrist like a clot of blood.

  Manning looked at it.

  It was the sinister scarlet seal of the Griffin!

  V

  “WHERE did that doctor go—what did he look like?” he barked at the bystanders, already stupefied by the tragedy, bewildered still more by Manning’s demand, the set fury of his face.

  “Out, down to the cars. He said he could do nothing. Felt his pulse. A man with a pointed beard. In brown golf clothes.”

  Manning brushed by them, through the door that led by an outside stair to the club’s parking space, between club and caddy house.

  “No pawn on hand!” But the Crime Master himself, in person, masquerading as a guest, as a doctor, with a forged card, perhaps a false beard.

  He raced to his car. One of his men came at his beckon, answered him.

  A man with a beard, in brown golf clothes, had just left in a big car, gone down hill, in the same direction taken by the messenger who had brought the fatal balls.

  “Get in with me,” ordered Manning. “You’ve got your gun? Here, hold these in your lap. They won’t explode if you’re careful. If anything goes wrong, get rid of them.”

  The man took seat beside him, his face pale, but steadfast, holding the box gingerly. They might get a flat. They might?

  Manning switched on, let in the clutch, was in the road, in high, a master at the wheel.

  Cold Brook Country Club was in the hills. The road curved. To its right there ran Cold Brook, between high banks. The fallen leaves from the trees gave Manning a glimpse of a cloud of dust, a car rolling rapidly about a curve.

  He went hurtling down the grade in headlong pursuit. The car might have the speed of his, but he would make that up by more reckless driving. Reckless, with less consummate a driver. This road had taken its toll of others not so skillful. It was marked with danger signs, with boards indicating snake curves.

  The man beside him sat with feet braced. Temporarily Manning had forgotten about the loaded balls, intent only upon overtaking his man. There were two figures in that car ahead, one driving, hunched over the wheel. Now it was out of sight, and Manning pressed down his accelerator. The roadster fairly leaped ahead. It was a heavy car with low clearance and should hold the road. Dust rose back of them like vapor.

  His tires were new. The speedometer crept up, trembled at eighty, as they skidded round a curve, another, perilously close to the brink of the deep gulch where Cold Brook brawled along. They touched the protection fence, tore off a sliver of white painted wood.

  The other car was in sight again. Manning had gained. He saw one figure turn in its seat. The so-called Death Curve was at the bottom of the hill, a twist in the highway beyond it, going up, steep.

  There was sweat of fear on the face of the operative beside Manning. He had come over that road. He believed they would never make that curve, nor the car they were pursuing, unless it slowed up. It had margin enough for that. He glanced about him, resolved to toss the box into Cold Brook at any moment, stiffened at sight of Manning, driving like a demon.

  The operative’s gun was out, tucked under his thigh. He meant to shoot at the first chance, tires, men. He was a chosen man, one of eight on the job, a crack marksman. But he had faint hope of getting a shot.

  Manning was past hopes, centered on sending the car at top speed, better than top. Time after time they veered round the curves and his strong wrists brought it under control.

  On the short straights he pressed it up to ninety, changing no gears, using no brakes. Brakes at their speed meant disaster. And he was cutting down that lead.

  Round a bend, on two wheels, rocking back to base, lunging on. The Griffin’s car disappeared about a curve. Death Curve close now. Very close. The wind whistled over the top of the glass shield behind which Manning bent over the bucking control.

  A side road on the left. A light truck coming out of it, the
driver with a face of chalk, tugging at emergency brakes.

  This time they crashed a protection post, they went out beyond the solid edge. The nigh wheels still held traction, clawing at the road. The operative started to hurl the box away and they were back, with a crumpled fender, a broken running board, swaying, but safe, the truck driver, a local farmer, gaping at them, too terrified to find voice.

  Death Curve!

  Muscles stood out along the lines of Manning’s jaws. His wrists were wrenched, but his sinews were of steel, handball-hardened. The roadster was exceeding its limit. It was in danger of freezing, for all its plentiful oil supply, its daily overhauling. But it was a magnificent climber. It might yet catch the Crime Master’s car on the hill.

  They shot round the last curve, almost out of control, actually out at moments, the rear tires spurning the ground to regain it. They had made it. Here Cold Brook swung off in a rocky defile.

  “Throw it!”

  Manning’s yell was not needed. His aide sent the box spinning out into the gorge. The lid opened, the balls scattering, falling in a shower.

  Across the road was the car of the Crime Master, blocking the way.

  Empty!

  Up from the ravine there came the blast of terrific explosions. Trees rocked. Some, at least, of the explosives had hit rock hard enough to set off the fulminate, starting the rest, destroying evidence. Boughs sailed across the road. Twigs showered down.

  To the right were birches, thick-set. Manning saw their white ranks, their scanty leaves, yellow as gold pieces.

  He set the roadster to the left, charging up a cut bank. It plowed through the soft soil, tilting, passed the other car, lunged in sharp zigzag as he strove to hold it. It ripped into the trees.

  It could not have been long before other cars came, with due caution, down the dangerous hill. Manning’s scalp was slashed. A flap of flesh and an eyebrow obscured his sight as he came back to consciousness. The roadster was a wreck, the radiator smashed, one wheel gone. They had been flung over the windshield.

  His aide lay with his leg badly crumpled, broken, still unconscious from a fractured skull. Manning wiped blood from his eye, sat up, aided by a sympathetic arm.

  The Crime Master’s car was gone!

  The Point of Death

  “He Will Not Be Alive After the Thirteenth!”—It Was the Griffin’s Ugly Promise

  IT might well have been a scene in some medieval torture chamber. The place had been hewn out of the rocky foundations of the Crime Master’s house. From it an arched doorway led to other cavernous recesses. There was a steady hum, as of some infernal machine, which was actually the great dynamo that supplied the arch-criminal with power, light and heat. There men worked, nameless, masked, with brassards about their arms bearing their numbers as cogs in his infamous organization. Strange lights flashed in green and blue flares; there was the clank of metal.

  The Crime Master, as the man known as the Griffin had boastfully styled himself, a boast not yet broken down, was clad in an Oriental robe. His face was masked by a visor of thin, plastic substance that did not mar the perfection of his features, but yet effectually disguised him. Through this visor his eyes gleamed steadily, charged with an intense cruelty that took satisfaction from the torment of his victim, a satisfaction that was sadistic.

  His gaze never varied. It was the gaze of a serpent, sure of its victim, gloating. Only the mocking sneer that marred the finely shaped mouth deepened as he watched the writhings of the unfortunate man, bound to a chair. The man’s almost naked body was wet with the sweat of anguish. The Griffin listened to his cries, now wails of pain, now a babble of seeming gibberish.

  There were four in the room. One was in a gown with a hood. He barely moved and he was listening with more intensity than even the Griffin, catching every syllable. Now and then he raised a hand in assent to the Griffin’s question as to the progress of the inquisition.

  The fourth was a dwarf; an apelike creature, hideous of face, distorted of body. His hairy arms were almost as disproportionate as those of a chimpanzee. His skin was plum-black. Hair grew on his fingers to the nails, on his shoulders, matted his chest. Above his small eyes, his forehead, low and brutish, was corrugated; his cheek bones stood out like knuckled fists.

  He was the Griffin’s personal bodyguard. One affected by the weird scene might have said it was an evil spirit, a demon, under the control of the Crime Master, whom Quantro worshiped as supreme. A Haitian, steeped in voodoo, ineffably vicious and depraved.

  He wore a turban and a loin-kilt of scarlet. In the band that was wound about his loins was a curving blade, like a machete, in a sheath of sharkskin, razor-edged. Now and then he chuckled as the man he was torturing twisted in torment, straining against his bonds.

  He had been stubborn, with an endurance that was marvelous, this unfortunate. Some strong resistance of fealty, of principle, had sustained him, but his spirit had broken down at last beneath the devilish device used upon him.

  A fine cord had been tied about his forehead. In it a hardwood stick had been twirled to form a tourniquet. The cord was stained with sweat and blood. It ate into his flesh and affected his brain like a ring of fire. It seemed as if it must sever his skull pan. It compressed veins and arteries; there has never been a greater, more efficient torture discovered by man. Now the slightest touch of the dwarf’s fingers was supreme agony, yet so cunningly had he used it, the victim did not swoon, and could reveal the secrets they wrested from him.

  The listening man in the hooded gown professed himself satisfied.

  He told what he had learned, and the Griffin gave approval.

  “See you forget nothing,” he said. “Then your payment will be great. A slip might cause your death. You understand that I cannot protect you. You may go.”

  He pointed to a door and the man went out silently. Quantro turned to his master with the look of a hound that has brought down its quarry, and begs permission to kill. His red tongue showed its tip between teeth that had been filed to points.

  The Griffin folded his arms, nodded.

  “He must be destroyed,” he said briefly.

  When he later shot up the steel tube of the elevator shaft to his own strange, luxurious apartment, the man had been eliminated. Quantro had been dismissed, not from any revulsion at his butchery, but because the Crime Master wished to be alone. His mood had changed, none the less cruel, none the less charged with malice toward the rest of the world in the revenge that fermented always in his brain, tainted with madness; a determination for reprisal of wrongs, fancied or real, magnified through the lenses of insanity, of grandiose dementia.

  The Griffin’s atrocities might be fantastic in conception and execution, but they were horribly real. They shocked the world, they defied the police, they mocked the press and terrified the public.

  Now he sat at his carved desk and look from a drawer a list of names through several of which a line of scarlet crayon had been drawn. Against each of these a date had been set down. He now wrote one after a name that stood seventh on his long list, dipping his pen in the violet ink of a container whose top was the golden head of a griffin, the fabulous beast of Greek mythology, half eagle and half lion.

  Now music sounded faintly. The perfume of burning amber floated through the room, which was built with curving walls that showed no door, no window, only golden tapestries. Yet the air was sweet, light coming from hidden sources.

  The Crime Master took sheets of heavy gray paper and wrote in bold script with the violet ink, his sneer now a smile of derision. For signature he made a clever pen sketch of a griffin’s head, with its curving, rapacious beak, a fitting emblem for such a creature as the man who used it.

  He read the letter over, addressed an envelope, sealed the missive with a cartouche of scarlet, an oval embossed with the griffin’s head. He filled a Turkish hubble-bubble with tobacco, picked up the tube and smoked through the cooling rose water.

  “I am afraid,” he said softly, �
�that my friend Manning is achieving a little false confidence. It might be well to reduce that.”

  Once more he addressed an envelope, this time to a woman. He placed no scarlet seal on this, but in the center of the sheet it contained, unwritten upon, he affixed the sinister cartouche of heavy paper.

  “He may not have told her about this emblem,” said the Griffin, “but she will have read the papers since she returned from abroad. It may unsettle her, but it is more likely to disturb Manning when he hears of it, as I think he will.”

  Then he leaned back, smoking, the fumes of the tobacco mingling with the amber incense, his mask off. None could enter the room, with its walls and floor of steel, without his consent. His face was that of Lucifer, proud, beautiful, but subtly marred. With his serpent eyes veiled by half-closed lids, he listened to the music as the smoke bubbled through the cooling fluid.

  II

  GORDON MANNING late major of the A.E.F., youngest of his rank, brilliant member of the Army Secret Service Corps, sat in his offices where the outer door announced him as Advisory Councillor.

  He was a volunteer special agent to the police under appointment by the commissioner to grapple with the Griffin. Police methods had failed. For months the Crime Master had achieved his devilish ends, leaving always his emblem, the scarlet seal.

  Now, despite all attempts at secrecy, he had discovered Manning’s appointment, written to him congratulating him as a worthy adversary, challenging him, forcing Manning into the open.

  Manning had discovered the subtle methods of the crimes with which he had grappled. He had arrested or killed the Griffin’s tools—his pawns, the Crime Master called them. He had been almost in actual contact with the Griffin himself, but the latter had eluded him. The pawns were unwilling or unable, to tell anything about their principal. No efforts could make them reveal the slightest clew.

  More than that, the Crime Master’s colossal egoism had led him to the announcement of the name of his intended victim, the day of the death he was to meet. He mocked Manning’s efforts to prevent it.