In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (13 page)

It was long since he had slept, but he was in no mood for sleep. Absently, he turned on the radio. There came a rhumba, then a song. Then all blurred out. The instrument seemed dead as he moved the dials. Suddenly, it came to life.

There was the sound of strange music, barbaric and exciting. Manning was very sure he heard the voice of the Griffin, deep, and grating.

“This time
you
win, Manning. Next time you
lose.
”

The Griffin Runs Amuck

A Crazy Laugh, a Scream of Terror, and Crumpled Bodies Strewn in the Night—the Griffin Had Struck Again!

Manning came out of the private gymnasium down town, where he helped to keep himself fit with handball, and saw the panhandler. He had noticed him for the past three or four days hanging outside a liquor store close to the corner, where he could cadge the customers as they came out. It was a crafty idea, choosing such a pitch. Many men felt like a skunk refusing a poor devil the “price of a cup of corfee, mister,” when they had just paid four bucks for a quart of whisky.

Manning had scant sympathy with such beggars. He knew that the experts among them could pick up three or four dollars in as many hours, and considered all contributors suckers. He was on his way to his office where the signs proclaimed him as “Consulting Attorney.”

His private business had suffered severely since he had accepted the special City and State Commission to run down the Griffin, but there were clients who could not be denied, and the Griffin had been quiet since his last defeat. Manning wanted to get rid of certain important matters before that inhuman monster and murderer gave out once more his usual, boastful warning concerning his intended victim.

So far, the panhandler had not tackled Manning. But this afternoon he edged out from the doorway of the liquor store and sidled up.

He was a short man, shabby, shuffling in worn shoes, but he seemed, to Manning, spry on his feet. He was naturally swarthy, with dark eyes that seemed all pupils, so bright, though opaque, they looked as if they were varnished. His color was unhealthy, the end of his long nose twitched as he approached.

He held his right hand almost closed, the fingers uppermost; curled about something concealed in the palm. This was an old trick. Manning was striding by, wondering at the cadger’s picking him as a prospect, when he caught a glimpse of something crimson through the incurled, clawlike, dirty fingers.

“Something to show you, mister,” whined the man, glancing up and down the street. Manning half-poised in his stride, cane in hand, a stick presented to him years before by a convict in a Western penitentiary. It looked like a supple, tapering, cloudy-malacca palm-rib, but it was made of a steel rod covered with rings of leather, shrunken close. Not a plaything, but a weapon. A terrible one, for defense or attack.

In the grimy palm there lay an oval of thick paper, about an inch and a half long. It was scarlet as a blob of fresh-spilled blood. The insignum of the Griffin. A small, crimson cartouche embossed with the design of a demi-griffin, rampant—eagle’s beak and wing, and lion’s outspread claws.

Manning barely glanced at it. His perfectly conditioned body acted in instant coördination with brain and nerves. At that, he was almost too late. This was the trick of the true faker, the tiny instant of distraction to cover the real move.

The knife came upward, curved and keen, from the false side-pocket of the assassin’s trousers, slashing at Manning’s unprotected belly like a flash of light.

Manning felt the prick of it on the bone of his hip. But he had struck too, and faster; as the strike of a mongoose beats that of a cobra. The cane did not travel far, but it lashed hard and swift. The ferrule was merely the end of the steel rod. It smote the would-be killer’s shin midway between knee and ankle; it plowed through the bone of the tibia; and the agony of that shock severed all nerve-connection, brought a yelp to the man’s lips.

The blow worked exactly as the reflex tap of a surgeon. Involuntarily the other doubled up, standing on one leg, the knife falling from his unnerved fingers to the sidewalk.

Manning’s cane rose up and down. It descended like a blunt saber stroke just where the other’s skull rocked atop his spine, and sent him sprawling at Manning’s feet.

A crowd began to gather, fascinated, hypnotized, looking at Manning, calm and unruffled, at the prostrate panhandler, the curved knife that had skidded into the gutter.

There was a whistle from Broadway. A man pushed authoritatively through the onlookers. Morrell, of the down town deadline squad. He knew Manning at instant sight.

Manning checked the dick’s half involuntary salute.

“Panhandler,” he said crisply. “Tried to knife me when I turned him down. Get him away. It’s important,”

“Okay. My partner’ll be here in a jiffy. We’ll handle him. Get back there, you!” Morrell addressed the crowd. A patrolman surged up, and Morrell snapped at him.

“Where was
you,
slugfoot? Turn in a call. We want the wagon. Turn it in.”

Instantly the machinery of the police went into motion. Radio cruisers in the Wall Street district slid through traffic to the spot. A lone reporter at Center Street caught the scent. The news grapevine went into action. Legmen, newsreel operators, were like buzzards in the blue, swooping for a “story.”

They got none. The unconscious panhandler went to Bellevue. Morrell pocketed the knife. Manning disappeared, after looking vainly for the scarlet cartouche. It had fallen from the pseudo-beggar’s palm, had been trampled on, likely enough carried off stuck to the sole of somebody’s shoe. He hoped it would be ground to dust before it was ever noticed. There was no need for him to see it again.

For the first time the Griffin had struck without warning. He had discarded all the rules of what he had called, satirically, his “game” with Manning, the agent specially appointed for his destruction.

“It was justa hophead, shot to the gills with coke, tryin’ to slash a guy who wouldn’t slip him an easy quarter,” Morrell told the newshounds. That was his story, and he stuck to it. They got no more at headquarters when some of the veterans scented something deeper.

Manning’s name was not merely a
sesame;
it could also close doors of information. The reporters were given an address supposed to be that of the man who had nearly been knifed, actually the street number of a vacant lot. That could be blamed upon the man, who was not seeking notoriety.

At Bellevue the panhandler was kept quiet, by approved medical tactics. He could be held for homicidal assault, probably as a narcotic case.

An inspector looked at the knife that Morrell turned in. It was curved and of odd, foreign design. A kukri blade, of the smaller type, as used by the Gurkhas of northern India. Its handle was bound about with silver wire, encrusted with small turquoises. It retained only the merest hints of finger-prints.

Its sheath had been sewn into the ragged pants pocket of the panhandler, the opening of the pocket a wide and slanting one, for easy access.

II

Manning was closeted with the police commissioner. The faces of both men were grim.

“I saw the seal of the Griffin in the man’s hand,” Manning said. “There is no doubt about it. He is an agent of that fiend—and that is the least of it, Commissioner. It means that the Griffin will no longer play the game. It was a sinister, maniacal sport, born of a madman’s brain; but at least he gave us some chance. That swollen, perverted ego of his made him notify his victim, name him to me, and also name the actual day when the Griffin would strike.”

The commissioner nodded gloomily. “He’s angry, of course, that you foiled his last effort. It has affronted his grandiose dementia. Doc Norbert told me that his paranoia would increase until it destroyed him, until his inflamed tissues rotted and ceased to function. Meantime, he would keep on destroying—unless we stopped him. Now….”

Manning nodded in turn. Norbert was the chief police surgeon, a man who had performed numberless autopsies on criminals’ diseased brains. Norbert agreed with other eminent psychiatrists and anatomists. The Griffin was abnormal, a man without a soul.

“He’s gone amuck,” said Manning. “In Malay, amok. But the amok Malay is like a mad dog, without intelligence. The Griffin is crafty. He will strike right and left, at all those he hates. Their name is legion. Any one who stands for achievement, for advancement of the public good, is quarry for the Griffin.”

“Not excluding yourself, Manning.”

Manning grinned. “Me first, perhaps. Commissioner….”

The police head broke in, his brow furrowed. “You said just now, Manning, that the Griffin has, hitherto, always named ‘him’ to you. He has never yet killed a woman, but….”

Manning’s shrug dismissed the question. If it were to become one of sex, that still lay in the lap of Time.

“About that man in Bellevue, Commissioner. With the Griffin striking in the dark, we must trace him to his lair. We did it once before….”

“You
did, Manning. And the courts called him mad and put him in Dannemora, until he escaped. You called him a mad dog, just now. He is. The thing to do with him is to shoot him on sight and
then
have his head examined to see what sort of rabies afflicted him.”

“I agree with you,” replied Manning somberly. “If I get the chance my finger will not linger on the trigger. But this man is his agent. How closely he may have ever been in communication with the Griffin is doubtful. But it
is
a clew. We’ve got to make the most of it. So far, we’ve not been able to break down any of his agents. They have been more afraid of him than the methods of the law. This thing hasn’t broken yet in the press. It must not. It may be best to let this man go, to trail him….”

A buzzer sounded. The commissioner pressed a button and the operator’s voice came through, the phoning cabinet. “Bellevue talking, commissioner.”

“Put ’em on.” The commissioner glanced at Manning as the direct voice enunciated.

“The man they just brought in, charged with attempted homicide, is dead.”

“What killed him?” Again the commissioner looked at Manning, who shook his head. The blow from his cane on the inion process had stunned the man, but it would not kill him.

“We wouldn’t want to say, Commissioner, without autopsy. Man was an addict of some sort of drug. I’m inclined to
cannabis indica,
but….”

“I’ll put Norbert on it,” said the commissioner. He turned to Manning with a shrug. “There’s your clew.
Cannabis indica,
same as hasheesh. Ties up with that oriental knife. Man might have been a Hindu. It won’t get us far, I fear.”

The telephone buzzed again. When the commissioner responded it was not the operator who spoke. A voice asked if Gordon Manning were present? It was a voice that Manning knew well, though the commissioner had never heard it before. Even at his trial the Griffin had remained silent.

Long ago, the Griffin, or one of the men he kept as slaves, men of scientific and mechanical achievements, held by the Griffin’s knowledge of their secret crimes, had perfected a process of projection that dispensed with regulation methods of telephony. Long ago, Manning, attuned to evil through his intimacy with the Griffin and his works, had been able to know when a message from that fiend in human shape was coming through. He knew it now, before the first raucous syllable was audible, before there came faintly through the receiver the sound of eerie, exotic music.

It was the voice of an enraged madman, kept only in control by the force of a will that was erratic, but still functioning. The deep notes had lost the mocking tones, the arrogance, of other days.

“Ha! Manning! I know you are there. So, you escaped this time. But soon the stars will be set in their courses against you, and you will be cast off the board of Life as a useless and discarded pawn. From now on there are no rules, Manning; no rules but my own whim, Commissioner. You will get nothing from that fool who failed. I have taken care of that. And you will hear again from me before the planet Venus sets to-night. Ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The burst of malignant, sinister laughter died, fading into the strains of music.

“He is a crank about astrology,” growled the commissioner, enraged at the Griffin breaking through his private wire at Police Headquarters. “Damn his impudence! What do you suppose he meant with that crack about Venus?”

“I’m not sure,” said Manning seriously. “He used to cast a horoscope, and choose what he considered a favorable day to make his coup. An
unfavorable
day for his victims, too often. When he missed out, he would blame it on the stars, I suppose. Saves his face for not having killed me, by hinting he did not consult the stars. As for Venus, I don’t know, Commissioner, except that I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. It ties up in my mind with what you mentioned just now, that the Griffin had never killed a woman, so far. I’m afraid he will—and without warning. And it won’t be any one who’s obscure.”

“You mean that some time to-night that maniac is going to kill—or have killed—a woman, some notable woman? It’s inconceivable, man.”

“You can’t preconceive what the Griffin may or may not do. It’s my hunch, Commissioner. And we can’t do a thing about it until after it has happened. If then.”

III

The Commissioner groaned. Lines of worry that had been graven in his florid face since he took office, and the Griffin began to operate, deepened until they looked like old scars.

“What
can
we do, Manning?”

The face of Gordon Manning, ex-Military Intelligence, adventurer, explorer and discoverer, eminent legalist, became so grimly set that it seemed carved from brown granite or molded in copper. Against the bronze of his skin his eyes seemed like insets of agate, through which determination and intelligence blazed their mutual purpose.

When he spoke, slapping his right fist into his left palm, gesture and words like piston strokes, it seemed to the commissioner that a dynamic explosion was taking place.