Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (25 page)

“He should be put to death,” said the distinguished jurist, Bernard Carruthers. “There is no virtue in his living. He is of no use, save as an examination of his brain may teach scientists something. He should be put out of the way, painlessly and peacefully—perhaps without any preparation, anaesthetized out of existence, as one would chloroform a mad dog. Jurisprudence and science have yet to unite in a thoroughly modern code. Meantime we must uphold the present statutes. So long as he lives that man is a menace.”

Carruthers had not spoken publicly, but Manning wondered what he thought now, with the Griffin out. Manning resumed the letter.

I find by horology and hepatoscopy that the propitious moment in which he will be eliminated is close at hand. His hour has struck.

In ancient lore, as doubtless you are aware, but may have forgotten, griffins were consecrated to the Sun. They not only were held to have drawn the chariots of Helios and Jupiter, but also the car of Nemesis. You will see the allusion.

There is a man to whom I am directly indebted for long weeks of suffering, a man who poses as an upright judge, one who tempers justice with mercy, who clamors for the establishment of new prisons which shall be humane, sanitary, and upbuilding….

The bold writing had now covered three pages. Manning turned the fourth. The “allusion” was very clear. He knew the name he would read.

Carruthers!

Therefore this man, who so ruthlessly and arrogantly sentenced me, Bernard Carruthers, is now sentenced in turn. He shall shuffle off this mortal coil between dawn on Friday, the seventeenth, and dawn on Saturday, the eighteenth. He shall no more see the sun, nor the light of day.

Not even your vigilance and ingenuity, Manning, may avert this reprisal. It will be amusing to watch your efforts. In the meantime you should be glad to know that my scattered organization is being reassembled. I shall again prove a scourge to the unworthy. I, the Appointed One!

In place of a signature there was an
affiche
of thick scarlet paper in the shape of an oval, embossed by the signet of the Griffin. Thus:

The big studio on the top floor of the building was silent and dark. Some light filtered in through the great north-light and dimly revealed its furnishings. Carved chests and chairs, a big refectory table. A yawning fireplace. A deep lounge, many cushioned. Faint glitter of arms on the walls, a suit of armor, vessels of polished bronze and copper. Rugs and draperies and screens. The typical studio of a successful artist.

The whole building above the ground floor was given over to artists; few of them successful, most of them commercial. It was an old edifice, but it stood in the commercial heart of the city on the corner of a main avenue and a one-way side street. That gave it two entrances. There was one elevator, but it did not run after ten o’clock at night. Nobody actually lived there except the new tenant on the top floor.

The original tenant, one of the family that owned the building, had been killed in a car accident in Europe. The studio had been left vacant, untouched. Depression came, the artist’s relatives lost their funds. They were glad to let the place to the Mr. Silbi who took a lease, paid a good price for the furnishings and moved in promptly.

He was not often seen. Sometimes the janitor would see him gliding down the stairs after the elevator ceased running, a somber figure in a long cape with its collar well turned up and almost meeting the rim of a black slouch hat. His shadow looked like that of some great bird of prey, swooping on.

A beaked nose, dark, piercing eyes, a mustache and vandyke beard with hair untrimmed. The typical artist, eccentric, inclined to be theatrical, but generous with rent and a regular tip to the janitor, to whom he explained that an old servant of his would clean his studio.

Sometimes there were men—always men—who hurried up the stairs and knocked at the studio door; emerging late in the night. The janitor listened now and then, a little fearfully, but there was a heavy drape inside the door and he heard nothing except murmurs, faint sounds of music.

The door opened now, with the key in the hand of the tenant, Mr. Silbi. He entered, closing the door carefully behind him, sliding additional bolts he had installed. He turned a switch and lights came on in oriental lanterns of brass filigree that hung in chains from the high ceiling, their glow ruby and amber through the glass insets. The stars winked out above the big skylight, it became only a blank of blackness.

Silbi touched a button and music sounded, softly—curious, exotic strains. They suggested barbarian encampments, music and marches, dirges and triumphal chants. He touched off the kindling beneath the cannel coal in a large brazier in the fireplace and held his hands to the gathering flames for a moment as if he were cold, though it was only late summer.

Then he tossed off his cloak and hat; he shed the mustache and beard and wig, all masterpieces of deceptive craft, and sank into a deep chair in front of the hearth.

It was the Griffin. He had found sanctuary here, a place in which to recoup lost prestige, to foster revenge, to plot evil machinations and arrange a fresh organization. His face showed the hollows, the emaciation of suffering, of physical and mental stress. But vigor still emanated from him. He was dynamic, capable of storing energy and discharging it. The memory of his misfortunes stimulated his inflamed brain, increased its phantasmagoria. His conceit was still colossal.

His face was far from pleasant as he warmed his hands once more. It might have been that of Iblis, Prince of Darkness, the fallen angel of the Moslems, smitten by the curse of God for refusing to prostrate himself before Adam. Iblis, smitted but defiant, brooding in hell while its flames cheered him. Nor was it all coincidence that Silbi, (spelled backwards) was Iblis. There was no name on the door or in the hall, but the Griffin had signed his lease with that title in one of his characteristic moods of subtle irony.

Presently he filled the bowl of a Turkish pipe with tobacco that was finely cut and contained a blend of hasheesh. He lit it and held the tube of the hubble-bubble in one hand as the smoke came through the rose-scented water, sweet and soothing.

With his other hand he picked up an object he had bought recently, the same radiator cap ornament that Manning had noticed. It appealed to the Griffin, but he frowned as he remembered the golden griffin that had once mounted an onyx base on the desk of his now destroyed aerie. The recollection of all came back, the circular steel chamber, the underground laboratories, the mute Haitian dwarf who had been his bodyguard, the serfs laboring to carry out his commands.

Manning had demolished all that. There would be a reckoning with him some day; meantime the Griffin would use him as the antagonist, without whom the game would lack interest.

He still possessed his hidden sources of tremendous, incalculable wealth. He had been free only a few weeks, but already he had exterminated one against whom he held a grudge—the man who might have freed him—or, so the Griffin had imagined in his grandiose dementia. He had already located some of his old slaves who had imagined themselves free men once again; brought them again under his thrall, forced to do his bidding because of the Griffin’s knowledge of their lapses against the law; men trying to go straight, but caught again in his infernal net. Through them he would get others.

In forty-eight hours the judge who had sentenced him would cease to live. His death would prove that the Griffin was again regnant. Thousands would cower, millions shudder at the news.

He chuckled suddenly, a deep, ghoulish chuckle. Michael, the Archangel, had flung Lucifer, Son of the Morning, into Hades, but Lucifer had risen, a mighty insurgent, a power for evil. So would he.

He touched another switch and a board became illumined. Tiny globes showed constellations. The signs of the zodiac glowed. An inset wheel spun, slowed down, clicking. Again the Griffin chuckled.

“It is so ordained,” he muttered. “The stars in their courses fight for me and against thee.”

There was a steel cage behind a screen, blanketed, set on a stand. The Griffin moved the covering, opened the door and a white monkey, little smaller than a chimpanzee, but infinitely more graceful and agile, sprang out, clung to his shoulder, chittering before it leaped to the floor and ran and crouched before the hearth, warming its paws, looking at the fire with eyes sad and curious, with gestures almost human.

“Alfar,” said the Griffin. “To-night I sacrifice you to the Cause. It will be a swift passing, if my genius has not forsaken me.”

The white monkey turned and gabbled something. The Griffin went into another room. Here was his kitchen and his laboratory. Off that, his bedroom and bathroom. He put on a long garment of black silk brocade weft with a design in gold. The pattern was that of chimaeras, the griffins of China, whose images were set to guard the tombs of kings.

Next he unlocked a tall, shelved steel cabinet. With a metal spatula he took yellowish crystals from a glass vessel and smeared them on the surface of a banana he peeled and tipped. The crystals instantly dissolved in the juice of the fruit.

The monkey cried for the banana, reaching eagerly. The Griffin watched as the quadruman took one bite and almost instantly collapsed, curled up with its topaz eyes glazing before the fire they no longer reflected. It shivered once and lay still.

The Griffin chuckled again.

“I thank you, Alfar,” he said. “Who knows but what, in your next incarnation, you may be a man and thank me for your evolution.”

He tossed the rest of the fruit on the fire, put the carcass of the monkey temporarily back in its cage. Then he resumed his nargileh pipe and sat brooding while the flames cast lights and shadows upon his face, vulturish, like the features of some ancient High Priest of Egypt, the mystic power behind the throne of Pharaoh.

Manning had talked more than once with Judge Carruthers in the latter’s chambers during the trial of the Griffin when the Law, rather than the Judge, let him escape the death penalty because of insanity. He found no difficulty in securing a private interview and close attention when he disclosed the reason for his call.

The distinguished jurist was a man in his early sixties, florid, not unlike the portraits of Washington, save for the thinning gray hair on the nobly proportioned head. He was slightly portly, eminently dignified.

He had been recently proffered, and had accepted, the highest honor in the gift of the nation—a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. He had contributed much to the cause of moulding old Common Law to modern conditions and to create a universal Code for the Union rather than the wide differences now existing between the States. He was strong in his condemnation of the prevailing prison system, with its unsanitary cells, the hard labor given entering convicts, largely young, with a big percentage of them high school and college-bred. He declaimed the word “penitentiary” a ghastly sarcasm. Judge though he was, he tried to temper justice with mercy, he was a supreme and constructive humanitarian.

That such a man should be swept out of existence at the peak of his career, the prime of his achievement, was a suggestion so colossally iniquitous that only a madman could have conceived the idea.

“I have not been altogether unexpectant of some such threat,” said the judge, “ever since I learned of the Griffin’s escape and his first murder of revenge. My hands were tied. It was another instance of where the Law is blind. Some day, medical jurisprudence will be both ethical and logical.

“The Griffin is a biological failure. Abnormal. He should have been destroyed, as a surgeon cuts out a cyst. What do you want me to do? I hardly think, with ordinary precautions, that the Griffin can reach me here. The apartment house is well run, with night and day protection against annoyance. I have my own servants, who sleep out. I eat meals prepared by my own cook. Couple these facts with whatever bolstering you propose, Manning, and I see no cause to worry. I place myself in your hands.”

Manning made an examination of the premises, looked into the running of the Highland Apartments and the judge’s own private menage. He found little in the way of upsetting Car-ruthers’ idea of security. Little that was logical. But the Griffin was
not
logical. His schemes might be those of a maniac, but it was hard for a normal man to predict them, to fathom their infinite and fiendish cunning.

On the face of things the suite could be made a hundred per cent proof. The apartment house was modern in its appointments and service, but not so much so in its architecture. There were no stepbacks to its floors. The walls rose sheer. The judge’s suite was twelve stories from the ground, five down from the roof. It had neither balconies nor fire escapes. The building was fireproof.

“I want,” said Manning, “to stay here from midnight between the sixteenth and seventeenth until well after dawn on the eighteenth. Dawn comes about five at this time of year. I shall have the place surrounded, under cover, by detectives. They will be outside in the lobby, on this floor, on the roof. Your servants, when they leave for the night, will not be molested though they may be trailed.”

“They are good servants,” said Carruthers. “I should not like to have them annoyed….”

“I understand,” said Manning. “I shall be here myself on the inside. I am going to taste every mouthful before you do, meat or drink, merely as a matter of precaution. And I am going to be sure of the source of supply. That may seem superfluous to you, but not to me. No need to do it ostentatiously, of course.”

“I’m under your orders,” said Carruthers. “I wouldn’t mind being bait for the Griffin if I could be sure of his capture. Such a monster demoralizes the nation. They will take better care of him next time.”

“Next time,” said Manning. “If he gives us a chance to get to actual grips the only man who will have to take care of the Griffin is the keeper of the Morgue. That’s the way the whole Force feels about it. So do I, an unofficial member. As for your being the bait, you are the goat tied under the tree, if you’ll excuse the simile, judge; waiting for the tiger.”