The Fourth Plague (6 page)

V. —THE STORY OF THE “RED HAND”

PROFESSOR ANTONIO TILLIZINI IS a name around which has centred the fiercest controversy. No scientist is ever likely to forget his extraordinary paper read before the Royal Society at Sheffield. It was entitled prosaically, “Some Reflections upon the Inadequacy of the Criminal Code,” and was chiefly remarkable from the layman's point of view in that the professor in the course of his address calmly admitted that he had found it necessary to kill ten criminals at various stages of his career. He was sufficiently discreet to offer no further information on the subject, and, though his enemies endeavoured, on the clue he had offered them, to bring at least one crime home to the Italian, they were unsuccessful.

More significant of the trend of public opinion, Tillizini was not deprived of his chair of Anthropology at the Florence University, nor did London society bar its doors to the foreigner who was a self-confessed slayer of men.

More than this, it is known that in preparing their Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 19—, the Government sought the advice of this extraordinary man.

But it was in connexion with the remarkable outburst of crime of a peculiar character that the young man who spent six months of the year in England and six months in his beloved Italy, and of whom the epigram had been perpetrated, that he thought in English and acted in Italian, that he first came largely into the public eye.

It was said of him that all the secrets of the Borgias were known to him; there were dark hints amongst the superstitious of necromancy, and this reputation, generally held among the Italian colony in London, served him in good stead when the days came for him to tackle the “Red Hand.”

The organization known as the “Red Hand” had been driven from America by the heroism and resourcefulness of Teum, the famous Cincinnati detective. Laws, drastic to the point of brutality, had been instituted; the system of inquiry known as the “Third Degree” had been elaborated so that it only stopped short of the more extreme methods of the Spanish Inquisition, to cope with the increase in blackmail and murder in which the “Red Hand” specialized.

There was a lull in this type of crime after the electrocution of the Seven Men of Pittsburg, but the silence of the “Red Hand” was broken at last.

It was in December, 19—, that Carlo Gattini, a wealthy Italian living in Cromwell Square Gardens, received a curt type-written request that he should place a thousand pounds in banknotes under a certain seat in Hyde Park. The hour and the date were mentioned, and the letter was signed by a small red hand, evidently impressed by a rubber stamp.

Mr. Gattini smiled and handed the letter to the police.

At their suggestion he replied through the agony columns of The Times, agreeing to the request; a package was made up and placed beneath the seat described, and four Scotland Yard men waited through the whole of one dismal evening for the “Red Hand” messenger. He did not come. He either suspected or knew; so there the matter should have ended by the severe and unromantic police code.

But on the following morning another letter came to the Italian. It was brief:—

“We give you another chance. Go to the police again and you are a dead man. Place £2,000 in notes in an envelope and leave it under the first bush in your garden.”

In alarm, Gattini went to the police. They pooh-poohed any suggestion of danger. Plain-clothes men were concealed in the house and in the garden; other secret service men were stationed in the house opposite, but again the messenger did not come, nor did the Italian receive any further communication.

On Christmas Eve Mr. Gattini returned from the City after a busy day. He was a widower, and lived alone, save for four servants—an elderly woman who acted as cook, a housemaid, and two menservants.

At 7.30 his valet went to his room to announce dinner. Gattini's door was locked.

The man knocked, but received no answer. He knocked again, without result.

He returned to the servants' hall and announced his failure, and he and the chauffeur went to the front of the house and looked up at the window of Mr. Gattini's room.

It was in darkness.

It happened providentially that a Scotland Yard man had called in at that moment in connexion with the threatening letters, and the servants confided their apprehensions.

The three men went to the door of Gattini's room and knocked loudly. There was no reply, and, putting their shoulders to the door, they burst it open.

One of them switched on a light.

At first they saw nothing; the room was apparently empty…then they saw.

The unfortunate man had been struck down as he sat at his dressing-table. The knife that had cut short his life was missing, but it was evident that he had died without a cry.

This was the first murder—there were others to follow.

The request for money came to Sir Christoforo Angeli, a rich banker, and a naturalized Britisher. He treated the threat as lightly as Gattini had done…he was shot dead as he stood at his window one Spring afternoon, and no man but he saw the murderer.

Again there came a lull, but it was evident to the police, ransacking Europe for a clue, that the apparent inactivity was less significant of a cessation on the part of the gang, as it was of their successes. Men in terror of their lives were paying and keeping information away from the police. A reign of terror was in progress, when, exhausting the wealthier members of the Italian colony, the gang turned its attention to other sources of income.

Henry S. Grein, a wealthy Chicago broker, and known throughout Europe for his art collections, received the stereotyped demand. He 'phoned the police, and Scotland Yard sent its best man to interview the millionaire at the Fitz Hotel, where he was staying.

“I pay nothing,” said the millionaire. He was tall and hard-faced, with a mouth like a rat trap, and the secret service man knew that here the “Red Hand” had come up against a tough proposition. “It is your business to see that I do not get killed; you may make what arrangements you like, but I am going to offer a reward of $20,000 for the arrest of the gang, or the leader.”

Then began that extraordinary feud which first opened the eyes of the public to the condition of affairs which existed.

The history of Grein's fight with his assassins on the roof of the Fitz Hotel, his shooting down of the man Antonio Ferrino who had gained admission to his bedroom, the abortive attempt to blow up the Fitz Hotel by dynamite; all these facts are so much history. It was on the morning that Henry S. Grein's body was found floating on the Thames off Cleopatra's Needle that the Government turned to Tillizini.

On the evening of his return from Burboro' Tillizini sat at his broad desk working out a side issue of the problem. The red glow from the shaded lamp by his side gave his face a sinister appearance which ordinarily it did not possess. It was a thin and deeply-lined face, a little sallow and a shade bluish about the jaw and upper lip; the nose was long and pinched, the eyebrows black and arched; but whatever unpleasant impression the somewhat Mephistophelean features may have produced, that impression was forgotten in the pleasant shock which came to the observer who saw Tillizini's eyes.

Italian as he was in every feature, his eyes were almost Irish in their soft greyness; big and clear and luminous, the long black lashes which shaded them gave them an added beauty.

With his left hand resting on his book to keep the stiff volume open at the page, he reached across the table to a gold cigarette box, took a long, thin cigarette, and lit it at the small electric lamp which stood at his elbow.

The room wherein he sat was lofty and spacious. The ceiling and the fireplace were as Adam's magic art had left them. The walls were half panelled in dark oak and, save for a small water-colour sketch of a woodland scene on the left of the fireplace, they were innocent of pictures.

Along one wall ran a bookshelf that stretched from the outer wall to a door near the window.

The windows were long and narrow and were hung with dull red curtains. There was cosiness in the big gilt screen by the fire, in the roomy club chair, the soft thick carpet and the tiny clock that ticked musically over the mantelshelf.

Tillizini read steadily, the smoke of his cigarette rising in blue coils to the ceiling.

Suddenly he closed the book with a snap and rose noiselessly.

He glanced at the clock: it was an idle glance, for he knew the time. He had an eerie sub-consciousness of the hour, be it day or night.

He walked to one of the three windows and looked out upon the Embankment.

He saw a crescent of cold lights that stretched towards Blackfriars and was intersected dimly by the bulk of Waterloo Bridge. Across the river was an illuminated sign imploring him to drink somebody's wine at his own expense; farther down a tall tower of reappearing and vanishing light urged him to the consumption of the only whisky worth while.

The professor watched without a smile.

Suddenly a bright splash of light started, and was as suddenly extinguished. Again it flamed—dazzling, white, palpitating light—and again vanished.

Tillizini stepped back quickly. From a cupboard he took a strange-looking lamp and a coil of wire. He rapidly affixed the plugged end with a connexion in the wall, then he switched out all the lights of the room, and waited. Again the bright light flickered on the opposite bank.

The professor touched a key at the base of the lamp, and from its conical-shaped projector shot a swift beam of soft blue light.

Twice he did this, when the light on the other bank began to wink furiously and at a breakneck pace. Long wink, short wink, long, short; without a pause it raced onward with its urgent message.

As the lamp spoke Tillizini answered it shortly. He read the message as easily as though it were in a printed book, for he knew English as well as he knew his mother tongue, and, moreover, he was an expert in such matters.

The light on the other shore ceased talking, and Tillizini closed the window at which he had been standing, replaced his projector in his cupboard, and the little table on which it had stood against the wall. Then he drew down the blind and switched on the ceiling light.

He stood over his desk and wrote rapidly the purport of the message he had received. It was written in small cramped signs which might have been, and probably were, a shorthand which he alone understood. He had scarcely finished when the musical thrill of an electric bell arrested him. He pressed an electric push inserted in the leg of the table, hastily slipped his notebook into a drawer, and turned as the door opened.

The neatly-dressed manservant ushered in a visitor.

“Inspector Crocks,” he announced.

Crocks was short and stout and jovial. His head was as bald as a billiard ball, his peaked beard was shot with grey; he was a bourgeois of the bourgeois; yet, for all his unpromising appearance, Tillizini had no delusions where this smart policeman was concerned.

“Sit down, inspector”—he indicated a chair. “A cigarette?”

The inspector smiled.

“Too subtle for me,” he said, “I'm a pipe smoker.”

“Fill up,” said the professor, with a little smile.

He did not insult his visitor by offering him tobacco, for he knew that it was an attention which all pipe-smokers resent, calling into question as it does their own discrimination and judgment.

“Well?” he asked, as the other slowly filled his polished briar.

“Your countrymen—if you will pardon me—are not helpful, they are a little—er—”

“They are liars,” said the young professor calmly. “All men are liars when they are afraid, and I tell you these poor devils are afraid in a way you cannot understand. Not for themselves, but for their children, their wives and their old mothers and fathers.” He rose from the table and walked slowly up and down the room.

“These men you want are merciless—you don't know what I mean by merciless. It is a word which to you signifies a certain unjust harshness, cruelty, perhaps. But, my friend…cruelty!” He laughed, a bitter little laugh. “You don't know what cruelty is, not the type of cruelty which flourishes on the shores of the Adriatic. I won't tell you, it would spoil your night's sleep.”

The detective smiled.

“I know—a little,” he said quietly, puffing a cloud of smoke and watching it disperse with a thoughtful eye.

“Your idea,” the professor continued, “is to catch them—very good. And when you have caught them to secure evidence against them—very good again,” he said drily; “one is as easy as the other. Now my view is that they are vermin, society's rats, to be exterminated without trial and without remorse.”

He spoke quietly; there was no trace of emotion in his voice nor in his gesture. The hand that went searching for a cigarette in the gold box was steady; yet Crocks, no sentimentalist, shivered.

“I know that is your view,” he said, with a forced smile, “yet it is not the view which finds favour in this country; it is a view which would get you into serious trouble with the authorities and might even bring you to the Old Bailey on the capital charge.”

The professor laughed—a low, musical laugh. He ran his fingers through his grey-streaked hair with a characteristic gesture, then sank into the padded chair by the desk.

“Well!” he said briskly, “what have you discovered?”

The detective shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said, “that is, nothing worth while. The gang is unreachable—the people who can give information are dumb brutes; they are either afraid, or in league with the ‘Red Hand.' I've tried threatening them; I've tried bribing them; neither is of the least use.”

Tillizini laughed softly.

“And the ‘Red Hand'—have they made any further move?”

The detective's hand went to his pocket. He drew forth a bundle of papers enclosed in an elastic band. From this he extracted a letter.