But—why should he have such supreme control over men whose mental capacity seemed so superior?
Because he had something on them. There were plenty of chemists, doctors, scientists, men high in engineering and all the professions who had fallen, been expunged from the society of their fellows and the practice of their callings by some lapse, some error that had, in all likelihood, branded them as felons.
They would have records.
He handed on his deduction to the commissioner of police, recommending finger-prints to be taken, the Identification Bureau put to work, requests broadcast for reports.
The prints were sent out by radio-print, but the answers were found at Centre Street.
They had their names, their records, up to the time that they had disappeared below the surface. One a chemist, one an ex-surgeon and general practitioner, the other a well-known consulting engineer. No need now to publish them. They threw light on the Griffin’s methods, explained something of his seemingly infernal genius. The man was not omniscient. He had the cunning brain of one inflicted with grandiose dementia, he could plan evil, and these castaways of civilizations worked out his problems. Now their lips—and the lips of headquarters, were sealed by their death.
“There might have been some sort of minor mutiny,” Manning said to the commissioner. “They may have rebelled against something that the Griffin contemplated as too horrible to even barter their lives against. So he made examples of them, had them conveyed unconscious to the Driveway. I wouldn’t give out anything to the press about the Griffin.”
The commissioner shook his head.
“The less the public hear of that scoundrel the better,” he said. “Sends a wave of hysteria out that is like the circles from a rock in a millpond, extending to the outer edges of the community. It even affects the stock market. And, above all, it pleases the Griffin. Notoriety is his favorite nutriment. I shall not even give out the identity of the poor devils who have paid their penalties. No sense in making their families suffer. The Griffin is like a ghost, Manning. We seem to clutch him and our fingers close on thin air.”
“I’ll grip him yet,” said Manning slowly. “And, when I do, I’m not going to let go—alive or dead.”
II
THE telephone in Manning’s suite of offices, on the outer door of which he was announced as a consulting attorney, rang with that peculiar vibration he had grown to know so well and, not so much to dread as to listen to with nerves suddenly taut, his spirit arming itself for sinister adventure.
It never rang in that fashion but when he was in his private room. He knew that the Griffin had means of watching his ordinary comings and goings—no especially difficult matter. It never rang, so far, but what it presaged death and disaster. It took a sturdy man with a strong will to not lose heart in these encounters, always fatal to some worthy and notable person.
The audacity of the Griffin had grown to the point where he deliberately announced to Gordon Manning, as his adversary, the name of his next victim and the day on which he would surely die, despite all of Manning’s precautions, backed by the police force of New York. The methods of these tragedies, that left millions of people aghast as they read of them, were subtle and unique.
It was a challenge that the Griffin sought to liken to a game of chess. He would play it in this way, announcing his first moves to Manning, so long as it amused him, he announced. If Gordon Manning pressed him too far, too close, he threatened to eliminate him, to wreak his anger on the woman Manning loved, but had foresworn while engaged on the perilous mission he had accepted.
So long as the Griffin lived, love was out of the question for Manning. The girl had once been within those swift and far flung coils of the Griffin, like the tentacles of an octopus. Now she was free, yet she was threatened. Manning stood between love and duty, and relinquished the former for the girl’s own sake, even though he might lose her to another.
He took up the telephone unhesitatingly and immediately the deep tones of the Griffin came to him. And, as always, there was an undertone of music, mysterious, exotic.
“Ah, there you are, Manning. A busy day for you. It was clever of you to imagine that those three disobedient fools might be men of mine, I did not set the scarlet seal on their foreheads, for that is reserved for those I choose to annihilate for other reasons than that they refuse to carry out my own wishes. These three were squeamish. Now they are dead. One, it seems, babbled a bit, but what he could tell was negligible. And the drug I gave him instantly destroys full coördination of brain as well as body.
“A useful drug, very. It comes from the Caribbean. They use it in voodoo. An active alkaloid, not unlike scopolamine, but virulent in its breakdown of the tissues and leucocytes. Most interesting.
“You continue to amuse me, Manning. I trust you have sense of humor enough to appreciate that. My next selection for elimination is….”
Manning’s eyes narrowed during the deliberate pause. He refused to be annoyed at the Griffin’s derision of himself, but here was another victim marked down. It was his own special mission to prevent the crime—and to capture the Griffin.
“Edward Brooks, that meddler in international affairs,” went on the sonorous voice, “that self-advertising politician who has ambitions that will never be realized! That would-be diplomat! He would have been wiser to have kept to the manufacture of washing machines that made his fortune. He is a colossal egoist who shall be destroyed, inevitably, despite all your efforts, Manning, some time between midnight of the ninth of the month and midnight of the tenth. Now go to work, perfect your arrangements—and find yourself once more checkmated on the board. I shall be close by when it happens, Manning, depend on that. And it will furnish front page news.”
The voice ceased with a rumble of mocking laughter, the strains of mystic melody.
In that last sentence Manning read, as he had read before, much that was the key to the Griffin’s character. He was a dangerous madman. His own supreme conceit would be fed by those front page stories, while he charged the man he meant to kill with his own disease.
He claimed to give Manning every advantage in proclaiming his opening moves, but Manning knew that each crime was long thought out, perfected after an intimate study of the prospective victim’s habits.
There was a kink to the Griffin’s mind that may have been aggravated by the contemplation of some real or fancied injury that had set him against law and order, progress and enlightenment, made him a pseudo-iconoclast of all that was decent and honorable, a foe to justice and religion. Jealousy perhaps entered into it.
Here was Edward Brooks, millionaire manufacturer, it was true, and a man of sound sense and judgment, who had forged ahead by sheer merit. He had been ambassador abroad and served with distinction in various crises. He had aided materially the peace commissions and arms reduction boards. He was prominent in the Russian problem and the recognition question of the Soviet, the problems of Poland and the Balkans. He was the dark horse of one party for the presidency.
And the Griffin consigned him to oblivion as carelessly as a man might plan to remove some noxious vermin.
Manning sat staring out of his window, hardly seeing the towers of Manhattan, the bridges, the busy shipping of the great city he loved, infested by this monster. His face was lined and looked old in its leanness. He was in the prime of life and physical condition, but the strain of fighting the Griffin, or tracking him to his lair, of destroying this dragon against whom he was a modern St. George, had told upon him.
Always spare, he was worn to the quick in body and spirit. The burning resolve to rid the world of this perverted but powerful wretch burned high, like a consuming fever, devoured his sleep. His eyes shone with the light that also illumined the working of his brain. His hands were clenched until the knuckles showed white, little knots of muscles tossed along the lines of his jaw, veins stood out. The will of the man, defeated and enduring, gave a curious transparency and radiance to his well cut, deter
mined features.
Manning did not meddle in politics, but he used them on occasion. Through the police commissioner he got in touch with a man powerful enough to secure for him a practically immediate interview with Brooks.
“He is laying a corner stone for the new Memorial Hospital in the Bronx,” said the man. “I’ll get in touch with him. If you can go directly you will be in time to see him before the ceremonies are over and you will find him ready to talk. I understand that this matter is imperative, Mr. Manning?”
“It is.” Manning took no public credit for his work against the Griffin. His failure and his ultimate success—of which he was steadfastly assured—reflected on the police commissioner. The man to whom he was speaking did not suspect the gravity of the occasion, and Manning did not enlighten him. Such matters were not to be talked of over the telephone.
He went down, got his powerful roadster from the garage and started north. He had plates, a card, a badge, and other matters that secured him right of way if he wanted them, and he used them to get through the heart of New York, to make sure of finding his man.
III
BROOKS was a big man in more ways than one. An astute one. He knew of Manning, he guessed on what errand he might have come, but he showed no tremor in his greeting, in his conducting of the ceremony.
“We will go back together to my hotel, Manning,” he suggested with cordiality. “I suppose there is nothing likely to interfere with that?”
His words showed Manning that Brooks knew. He admired the high courage of the man. It could hardly stiffen his resolve to save him, but it did enhance the diabolical nature of the Griffin’s plot. Here was the highest type of truly patriotic American, imperiled by the fantasy of a lunatic.
Brooks lived in Westchester County, but he reserved a suite of rooms high up in the tower of one of New York’s newest and most select hostelries, the last word in convenience and luxury—and expense.
He invited Manning to dinner, dismissing other engagements for the evening on Manning’s estimate that their talk would be lengthy. The investigator wanted to acquire at least an equal knowledge with the Griffin of Brooks’s mode of living. Appraising his man, he made no restriction as to the gravity of the situation.
Brooks entered into it gravely, listened to Manning’s brief recital or recapitulation of the Griffin’s crimes, more particularly since he had been working on them.
“You wish, I assume,” he said, “to afford me protection, to be with me yourself during the threatened period. You state that the Griffin, who is undoubtedly insane, may be depended upon, if one may use that word in such a grisly business, to make his attempt during that stated time. Not to, would, I imagine, be a blow at his own conceit.”
Manning nodded.
“Without prejudice, it would seem my predecessors in his plots have been unfortunate.” Brooks went on, “through no fault of yours or the police department. This Griffin is a resourceful villain with a brain inflamed to weird and bizarre ideas that, so far, have baffled protection. However, this time I think the Griffin will be foiled.”
Manning listened attentively.
He had heard almost precisely such statements of assurance on each occasion of his conferences with the men the Griffin had marked for death. All had been men of brains, some of great resources, yet this confidence, backed by his own efforts, had failed.
“It happens,” Brooks went on, “and this is a matter known only to the President, certain members of the Cabinet and the head of the Secret Service, that I am about to depart on a strictly secret mission. You are the only other person to know this. I may not tell even you what this mission is, save that it is important to world progress.
“The point is that I sail on the France at midnight on the eighth. My incognito may be discovered after we sail, hardly before. The suite has been retained in the name of the man, a high official at Washington, who, ostensibly, I shall be seeing off. I should have done so in any case. He will take another suite reserved in still another name. I shall simply not go ashore with the rest when the steamer sails. You know the confusion of those midnight sailings. It is impossible to tell who leaves. I shall go into the suite quite naturally. I shall have my own man along, who is absolutely to be trusted. Moreover, as I have the misfortune to be a very bad sailor I shall certainly keep to the suite for two or three days in any event, beyond the limit set by the Griffin.”
Manning nodded again. This bettered matters if the secret could be kept. It looked as if it could. It would not be difficult to have a special guard.
“The captain will have to be taken into our confidence,” he said. “There will be no danger there. I shall sail also, but that must not be known. I am tailed by the Griffin’s men, without question. If it was known I was sailing, the inference to the Griffin would be plain that you were going to be on the boat, all evidence to the contrary.
“It can be managed. You will have to endure me whether you are seasick or not for that twenty-four hours. It is my responsibility, it is the only way by which we can hope to thwart this maniac. I shall have to see the officials of the line, but I shall not explain to them that it is you I expect to protect. The captain will not know it until we are at sea. But I must have men aboard to form a cordon round your suite unostentatiously on the tenth. They will appear as deck and other stewards. You have relieved me immensely. This trip is something that the Griffin cannot have taken into consideration.”
It was Brooks’s turn to nod.
“Still, if they are tailing you—as you term it?…” he ventured.
“Their skill is not so great but that I can break it when I take the trouble. I shall go aboard in efficient disguise. Mr. Brooks, you give me heart, fresh courage. The burden has been a heavy one; will be until this monster is destroyed—and this has been the best chance to show him that his game—as he terms it—has its flaws. We can hardly hope to take him in the attempt, as it looks as if he will be left in the dark. Still, I shall omit no precautions. He has extraordinary resources. Without doubt you have been on his list for weeks, perhaps months. He casts horoscopes and selects his men as they seem to be most vulnerable according to his astral reckonings. But, if he fails, I am inclined to think that it will unnerve him, or even totally destroy the uncertain balance of his already deranged mentality.
“I am sorry that you put off your engagements for this evening. If I had known at the start you were sailing I could have told you the interview would not be long.”
“I am glad to have a free evening,” said Brooks. “Let us spend it together. I should like to hear something of your travels. That is something denied to me as my ambitions run and my duties seem to point. It is a very great happiness to me, Major Manning, that I have been able to serve this country, my country in my peculiar capacities.”
It was late when Manning left. He had not been the only talker. He bore with him the mental portrait of a fine American. A man the country needed, could not afford to lose.
The thought that a maniac like the Griffin should dare to even contemplate his destruction was infuriating, but Manning controlled himself in the hope that this time the tables would be turned.
He did not doubt that he was being shadowed, and he did not bother to verify it, to shake off the tailers. The Griffin would expect him to get in touch with Brooks. This merely verified it, and the long time they had spent together would suggest that they were planning elaborate defense against the machinations of the Griffin’s carefully thought out scheme.
He even grinned a little, and he had not been smiling much of late, when he found, attached to the horn button, an oval cartouche of heavy paper embossed with the griffin, the symbol of the man who used the name of that mythical, rapacious creature, half lion, half eagle, to represent him and his cruel, ruthless deeds.
The burden seemed lifting. He had been chosen after the police had utterly failed. He had not, he told himself, done much better, and the responsibilities of not having saved the lives he had trie
d to protect had at times weighed heavily upon him. To-night, for once, he got five hours of sound, refreshing sleep.
IV
THE liner was on her second day at sea, logging her twenty-five knots an hour. Everything was in full swing aboard that palatial steamship with its spacious salons, its elegant suites, its shops, its lounges, its big swimming pool and gymnasium.
Every one but those who, like Brooks—his presence unknown aboard—were confined to their cabins by seasickness, was making the most of the voyage, exhilarated by the sea air, enlivened by new acquaintanceships, the informality of shipboard.
It was fine weather. A good sea was running, but the liner sheared through the long, frothing hills of brine on a nearly level keel. It was the idea, rather than the fact, that made people suffer from mal-de-mar. Her wake was like a silver ribbon from the churning of her powerful propellers. Her graceful hull trembled ever so slightly as if with eagerness to beat the record. The sky was deep blue, mottled with shreds of white vapor to a semblance of marble. There was no haze, the horizon was sharply defined as if drawn by a firm hand and a fine brush dipped in deep purple.
This was the Atlantic, with the United States over eight hundred miles astern as seven bells struck in mid-morning, and the bibulous ones announced jocularly that the sun was over the yard arm and it was time to patronize the bar.
Brooks was wretched. Psychological or physical, as the source might be, he was a seasick man. He ate nothing. He lay like a bundle of wet rags and his face was the hue of verdigris.
His man waited on him absolutely, allowing no one else in the suite, save Manning, who did his best to cheer the patient and, every little while, quietly inspect the suite and see that the unostentatious guards kept their cordon. Seven hours were gone of the fatal twenty-four but he showed no exultation, felt none and would not until eight bells sounded at midnight. As for Brooks, he was too sick to bother much about anything. He was confident that the Griffin had been thrown off the track and that he was quite safe, aside from Manning and his men.
The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) Page 15