The Complete Simon Iff (22 page)

At the autopsy of Miss Wakefield one of the physicians had stated that he had never seen so complete and sudden a destruction of the tissues of the lungs. There was no trace of tuberculosis or any other known destructive agent, and the woman's health had always been perfect. On the other hand, no other possibility suggested itself. She had been in the service of the Society since its formation two years previously; she had no relatives or other enemies, and no love affairs. She enjoyed the full confidence of her employers in their very simple and very noble work, which, the writer continued, for he was hard put to it to fill his allotted space, was a perfume peculiarly grateful in the nostrils of the Great American Ideal. Its directing body was a living proof of the assimilation of diverse elements, and of their harmonious cooperation in helping to realize the Great Thought of America, the Home of the Homeless. Rakowsky, the famous Banker, was its President, a man who had landed penniless in New York twenty years before, and was now reported to be worth his two hundred millions; Broglio, the labour leader, who by tact and insight had done so much to foster friendly relations between employer and employed, and enjoyed the confidence of the working men more than any of his colleagues; and, perhaps above all, the Reverend Joshua Henderson, the emminent revivalist who stood in his own person as the symbol of the solution of the Problem of the South.

"Incongruous," mused Simon Iff; "but America is the land of incongruities."

He found further evidence to this effect on arrival at Atlanta. The friend whom he proposed to visit, a Colonel Boughey, greeted him with a stately courtesy equal to Iff's own. But his idea of after-dinner entertainment was of a kind rarely visible in those European circles where similar manners obtain. "You've run right into it," he said to his guest; "One of those damned buck niggers has been at it again, and they caught him this afternoon. To-night we'll show you how we fix things south of Mason and Dixon's line."

It was a starry night, cloudless, with a warm breeze from the south-west. Boughey, who drove his own car, pulled up on the outskirts of a village some twenty miles from Atlanta.

The scene will never fade from Simple Simon's mind. By the roadside stood a live oak, under which a bonfire was blazing. Children were gathering sticks and throwing them into the blaze. Several women were standing around, and the noise of their chatter was deafening. Masked men on horseback guarded every approach; they welcomed Boughey with sighs of delight manifest in every hearty boyish greeting. "Just in time, Colonel," cried one; "we were just getting down to business."

Simon Iff noticed of a sudden that from a bough of the great oak a naked negro was swinging by his thumbs, his feet a bare yard from the ground.

"Southern Justice, I gather?" he queried politely.

"Yes, sir, the real thing," replied Boughey.

"I am fortunate," smiled Iff; "we see none of this in Europe - or even in India."

"No, sir. I reckon this scene may be kind of painful for you," he added with strangely harmonious intuition, "but we've got to do it. I was a little squeamish myself when I first came South, forty years ago."

At this moment Iff perceived that the bonfire was full if iron bars, heated to whiteness.

"Stand back!" said a cool determined voice. "The man's my prisoner."

The speaker was a sturdy man, armed with two revolvers. With his left hand he turned back his coat, and a sheriff's badge gleamed in the light of the fire. One of the masked men approached him. "You're not sheriff in this county, are you?" he said, with equal formality.

"I protest," said the Sheriff.

"Overruled," replied the other. "Seize him, boys!"

Two other men came into the light, and laid hands on the sheriff, who drew his revolvers and emptied them into the air.

"Just a little necessary formality," explained Colonel Boughey. "He resisted desperately, see, but missed his assailants owing to the darkness, and he don't know 'em from Adam."

"Get busy!" ordered a stern voice, from somewhere in the dark. "Now, Mrs. Grant!"

A hag of fifty, bowed and wrinkled to seem eighty, leapt toward the fire. Her face was a picture of all the passions of the damned.

"The wronged woman," explained Boughey.

"Thank you," murmured Iff.

"See her avenge the honour of the Southern Woman!"

"Ah, yes. I've read about it, don't you know?"

Mrs. Grant deliberately plucked an iron bar from the furnace, and came dancing up to the tree. From her wried mouth poured a torrent of the filthiest abuse. The negro never moved or moaned. But for the light in his eyes one might have thought him already dead.

Mrs. Grant went up to him and spat upon him; then with her blazing bar she performed an unutterable mutilation.

The negro writhed. A shriek utterly ghastly and horrible burst from his throat.

Mrs. Grant, foaming at the mouth, fell upon the ground in a fit suggesting epilepsy.

"Poor woman!" said Boughey. "What she must have suffered!"

Several men ran to her aid, and carried her, now screaming and kicking, from the tree.

"Now, boys!" said the same voice as before. "First come, first serve!"

It was a scene wholly demoniacal. Even the children aped their elders, striking the negro with their fiery bars. In the lulls of the shouting one could hear the sizzling flesh. The breeze bore its reek into the nostrils of Simon Iff. For an hour the revel raged.

Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the night.

"Beat it, boys!" cried the leader, and, emptying his Colt into the bowels of the negro, jumped into his car, and led the flight.

Boughey and his guest were a mile away from the scene when they encountered the posse sent, at a carefully calculated time, to prevent any violation of the law.

"If Josh Henderson had his way, all this would be stopped," said Boughey.

"Strange, indeed! Is the man right in his mind?"

"Well, he's a queer guy. Son of old Doc Henderson, of Memphis, Tennessee. Mother was a durned good-looking yellow girl; clever and educated and all that. Gosh! She had some pull with the doc! We had to rescue him; he was plumb crazy about her. And when Josh was born, he talked of going to Canada, and tying up to her. So, by Gosh, there was only one way out. We got her and the kid one night, and ran them over to a brothel in New Orleans. The old man went right off the handle; but when he tracked her, six months later, to a shack with 'Fanny. Come in boys' on the door, he came sane again."

"This is the Joshua Henderson who is so anxious to reconcile the negroes with their masters?"

"No masters here in America!" Boughey rebuked his guest with democratic earnestness. "The negro is a free man, sir, in these States."

"I understand," said Simon Iff, thoughtfully.

The next morning he was "Obliged to go on to St. Louis to see another friend, on his way to San Francisco;" but at the first station he changed trains, and went back to New York. He had wired Commissioner Teake to make a certain inquiry, and to meet him at the Chiliad Club for dinner, without fail, on the night of his arrival.

III

Commissioner Teake drank his cocktail. He then drew a slip of paper from his pocket, and pushed it over to Simon Iff. It read

B. 3,500,000.00

H. 2,500,000.00

"This morning," said Teake.

Iff burnt the paper in the ashtray by his chair.

"I'm utterly at a loss," remarked the Commissioner. "What do you know of these men, and why should you suspect any such transaction?"

"I have arranged for a special train to Washington," returned Iff. "We have not a moment to lose. Shall we drive down to the Pennsylvania Station? We can talk on the train."

Teake agreed; he had become an automaton. He had no idea what was going on, but he trusted Iff that it was something gigantic.

Dinner was served in the car, and Simon talked only of indifferent matters; but the waiter having withdrawn, he changed his whole manner. He became earnest, eloquent, electric; and as he proceeded, the Commissioner grew pale as death.

"I want to tell you the whole course of my investigation," said Iff. "Let me begin with my views on prophecy!" A touch of his normal lightness infected his tone for a moment.

"When a man prophesies, it is either a guess or a calculation of probabilities. Yes? Now the rulers of the world don't act on guesses. And calculations of probabilities have their limits of accuracy. Take the weather! 'It will be cold in December' is all right; nothing in that; but 'There will be a blizzard on December first which will destroy the Woolworth Building' is a specific prediction which, as it happens, nobody is in a position to make.

"Now the rescript was in the nature of such a prediction; and the question is how its author came to make it. He must have had what he thought to be absolute foreknowledge of events. Now, if I say to you, 'I shall have dinner with so-and-so next week,' you rightly judge that the matter is already arranged. The person in power has declared his will, and the event will come to pass. Now the author of the rescript has no power to cause the events which he prophesies; he must therefore have been assured that they would take place by people who have that power. Who, then, are they?

"You will remember that the rescript declares that four things have taken place.

"An anarchist outbreak. Who could arrange for that? Some leader of labour.

"A revolt among the negroes? Who has power over them as a class?

"A collapse of the financial system. Here we must look for some great banker.

"A man who could cause a 'catastrophe' to the Government of the United States. Note the word 'catastrophe'. It implies more than a mere political upheaval. I thought that it meant death. Now who is a master of death?

"I answered the fourth question easily. There was already such a man within the field of our vision. Dr. Nagasaki is the first chemist and bacteriologist in Cerisia. But the others? Evidently people already in power, in their various lines, over here.

"I had no clue. I took the hardest case first - the question of the negroes. I went South to make inquiries.

"As it happened, I was reading that murder of Miss Wakefield in the paper..."

"Murder?" gasped Teake.

"Murder. Wait a moment. I noticed - or rather, I did not notice - the name of Joshua Henderson. I went to a lynching bee on the night of my arrival in Atlanta, and - who should come up to talk but this same Joshua? My mind flew back to the Wakefield case. My friend from Georgia told me Henderson's story. He and his mother had been most foully treated by the Southern Gentlemen. Who then was this revivalist, 'the man who had awakened a million hearts,' as the paper called him? Who but a man whose whole soul must naturally be eaten up by hatred of the white man?

"And with whom is he associated in this Indigent Relief Show? With the banker and the labour leader, the very men who could fill the blanks in my equation!

"Instantly my mind began to reconstruct the situation. Prince Brzoloff is let out - without the lining of his jacket, which would tell him that the game was up. He will immediately communicate with Nikko and Nagasaki. They will have but two courses - either to throw up the sponge or advance the date of their action. I see them - in my mind's eye - desperate men in hasty conference. Nagasaki has made good on his 'mastery of death'. Miss Wakefield was merely the 'corpus vile' on whom they tried the experiment. They decide to trust Brzoloff's verbal account of the rescript or he has a copy. They decide to act. This is certain, for Rakowsky distributes the funds according to the prearranged plan, and probably sets in motion the machinery that he had prepared for causing a financial panic."

Simon Iff paused.

"But all that will take time," said Teake, with confidence. "We can arrest these men, and stop the whole business."

"Certainly," said Iff. "But our hurry is in the other matter. The efforts of these men would be in vain, and they would not take the final step unless the Government were first put out of the way. Nagasaki is probably in Washington at this moment. He had evidently some plan for wholesale murder in his mind. The date appointed proves that. Possibly the President and Cabinet dine together on July 4 or some such date. But if he can't get them together, he'll try to do it piecemeal. Remember, it's a 'new disease' - no suspicion attached to the murderer."

"Good God!"

"I know Nagasaki's work fairly well. He did some wonderful research on leprosy. And on helium..." He suddenly rose and clapped his hand to his brow. "By Jupiter," he shouted, "I wonder if that could be it!"

He paced the car for five minutes; then returned, and sat down abruptly. "I believe I have it," he said shortly. "We must get Nagasaki without a moment's delay. But oh! if we could only catch him in the act! Can you think of an excuse to see him at once - without alarming him, you know, in case the shot misses?"

"Oh, I guess so," replied Teake after a moment's thought. "I can tell any third party that my wife's dying of beri-beri - she was in Japan, as a matter of fact, last year - and in view of his great reputation, and all that ... will that do?"

"I should think so," said Iff. "But we'll hope for the best of the luck. Heaven knows it's been with us so far! Better touch wood, I suppose."

In fact, Teake did not have to resort to any subterfuge. The servant at Captain Nikko's house, where they enquired first of all, informed them quite simply that his master had gone out with Dr. Nagasaki, only an hour before, to Mrs. Blebeney Bland's ball.

They hurried thither. A word from Teake to the hostess, whom he knew well, was enough. She led him and Iff to a curtained alcove, where, at a small occasional table, sat Nikko and Nagasaki with three ladies and the Secretary of the Navy.

Simon Iff motioned his friends back. Unperceived, he peeped through the screen.

"I am sure you do not take snuff, my Dear Mr. Secretary," Nagasaki was saying, as he held out a small jewelled box tentatively, "but no doubt you and these charming ladies will permit an old fossil his indulgence." He leaned back in his chair, and inhaled a pinch of light brown powder from between delicate finger and thumb.