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 its Criminal Law
Amendment Bill of 19--, the government sought the advice of this
extraordinary man.
But it was in connection 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 Teurn, 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 typewritten request that
he should place a thousand pounds in bank-notes 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. Plainclothes 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 connection 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 than 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 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 grayness; 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 coziness 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 mantel-shelf.
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 subconsciousness 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 toward 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 connection 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 break-neck 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 gray; 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 mild 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 inspector 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 dryly; “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 or 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 gray-streaked hair with a characteristic gesture, then sank into
the padded chair by the desk.
“Well,” he said briskly, “what have you discovered?”
The inspector 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 inspector’s hand went to his pocket. He drew forth a bundle of
papers enclosed in an elastic band. From this he extracted a letter.
“This has been addressed to the San Remo Ambassador,” he said. “I won’t
trouble to read it to you; it is the usual sort of thing. Only this
time it is a child who is threatened.”
“A child!”
Tillizini’s black brows met in an ugly frown.
“That is their principal card,” he said slowly. “I wondered how long
they would keep their hands off the children. What does he threaten,
our unknown?”
“Abduction first--murder afterwards, if the abduction fails.”
Tillizini took the letter from the other’s hand and read it carefully.
He held the paper to the light.
“This is the American gang--I thought we’d wiped them out, but it was
evidently a bigger organization than I credited.”
The musical little bell rang overhead. Tillizini raised his eyes,
listening. After the shortest interval the bell rang again.
The professor nodded. A big black box stood at one corner of the
table--he unlocked it, the detective watching him curiously. With the
turning of the key and the lifting of the lid, the front fell away,
revealing three sedate rows of crystal phials.
Tillizini took one from the front, slipped it in his pocket, then bent
down and pressed the bell in the table.
The door opened to admit a servant, followed by a fresh-coloured
young man evidently of the working class. Crocks looked at him,
saw he was an Englishman, and wondered in what way the two men had
become acquainted. The young man accepted a seat at the invitation of
Tillizini.
“Well, my friend,” said the professor pleasantly, “you are willing to
go on with this matter?”
“Yes, sir,” said the other firmly.
Tillizini nodded.
“I got your message,” he said. He turned to the inspector.
“This man’s name is Carter,” he said briefly; “he is an out-of-work
plumber, unmarried, without family, and prepared to take risks. You
have been in the army, I think?” he said.
The newcomer nodded. He sat uneasily on the edge of his chair as though
unused to good society, and with obvious embarrassment.
“I advertised,” Tillizini went on, “for a man who was willing to risk
his life; I’m paying him two hundred pounds, and he is earning it.”
Crocks was mystified.
“Exactly what does he do?” he asked.
“That,” said Tillizini, with a slow smile, “is exactly what he does not
know.”
He turned to the other man, who grinned sheepishly.
“I carry out instructions,” he said, “and I’ve had a hundred pounds.”
“Lucid enough, Mr. Crocks; he does nothing except live in a lodging
in Soho, make his way to a wharf over there”--he pointed out of the
window--“every evening at about this hour, signal to me a fairly
unintelligible message, and afterwards walk slowly across Westminster
Bridge, along the Embankment, up Villiers Street, and so to my house.”
He paced the room with long, swinging strides.
“He has taken his life in his hands, and he knows it,” he said. “I have
told him that he will probably be assassinated, but that does not deter
him.”
“In these hard times,” said the ex-soldier, “a little thing like that
doesn’t worry you; it is better to be assassinated than to be starved
to death, and I have been out-of-work for twelve months until Mr.
Tillizini gave me this job.”
“He receives two hundred pounds,” Tillizini went on, “by contract. I
have paid him one hundred. I shall pay him another hundred to-night and
his expenses. Probably,” he said, with a little smile, “he may escape
with minor injuries, in which case I shall congratulate him heartily.”
He turned briskly to the man.
“Now let me have all the papers you have got in that pocket. Put them
on the table.”
The man dived into his various pockets and produced scraps of paper,
memoranda, pocket-books--all the literary paraphernalia of his class.
From his pocket Tillizini took the phial he had removed from the
medicine chest. He unstoppered it, and a pungent, sickly odour filled
the room. With the moist tip of the stopper he touched each article the
man had laid on the table.
“You will get used to the smell,” he said, with a smile; “you won’t
notice it after a while.”
“What is it?” asked Crocks curiously.
“You will be surprised when I tell you,” said the other. “It is double
distilled attar of roses, the vilest smell in the world in its present
stage, and this bottle I have in my hand is worth, commercially,
twenty-five pounds.”
At a nod from Tillizini, Carter gathered up his papers and replaced
them in his pockets.
“You have a revolver?” asked the professor.
“Yes, sir,” replied the man. “I went down to Wembley the other day and
had some practice.”
“I hope that no occasion will arise for you to have practice nearer at
hand,” said Tillizini dryly.
He rang the bell, and the servant came.
“Get Mr. Carter some supper,” he ordered. He nodded to the man as he
left.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked Crocks.
“That you shall see,” said the other.
“But I don’t understand,” said the bewildered detective. “Why should
you give this man so large a sum to do nothing more than send electric
signals to you every evening?”
Tillizini sat down at his desk.
“Mr. Crocks,” he said, “it would be false modesty on my part if I
pretended that my movements escape the notice of the Red Hand. I am
perfectly satisfied in my own mind that I do not go in or out of this
house without the organization being aware of the fact. Every step I
take is watched; every action of mine is considered in the light of a
possible menace to the society.
“This society knows that every evening I am engaged in the exchange of
messages with a man south of the Thames. The very mysteriousness will
naturally appeal to the Latin temperament, and its significance will be
magnified. On the second night you may be sure that Carter was located.
You may also be sure that he was watched from the wharf and followed
to this house.”
A light began to dawn upon the detective.
“Then Carter is a decoy?”
“A two-hundred-pound decoy,” said the other gravely. “He knows the
risk, I am paying him a big sum; fortunately, he is something of a
signaller, and so he is able to tell me through a code of our own
what is happening on the other side of the river. I freely admit,” he
smiled, “that so far nothing has happened worth recording.”
“They will kill him,” said Crocks.
“They will try,” said the other quietly; “he is a pretty resourceful
man, I think. I am hoping that nothing worse will happen than that they
will seek a gentler method of solving the mystery which surrounds him.
Hallo!”
The door was thrust open suddenly, and the servant flew in.
“I’m very sorry, sir----” he stammered.
“What’s the matter?” Tillizini was on his feet. “Is it Carter?”
“No, sir--he’s in the kitchen. I heard a ring at the bell, and the
girl”--he went on incoherently--“a girl sort of fell in. What am I to
do, sir?”
“Fell in?” Tillizini stepped quickly past him and went down the broad
stairs, two at a time, to the hall.
The man had had sufficient presence of mind to close the door after the
strange visitor’s appearance.
Lying on the carpeted floor of the hall was the form of a woman.
Tillizini, practised as he was in every subtle move of the gang,
stepped forward cautiously. She lay under an overhanging light, and he
was able to see her face. He lifted her and walked quickly back up the
stairs with his burden.
Crocks was standing in the doorway of the room.
“What is it?” he asked.
Tillizini made no reply. He carried the limp figure and laid it on the
settee by the wall.
“What happened?” he asked the man shortly.
“I heard the bell ring, sir,” said the agitated servant, “and I went to
the door thinking it was----”
“Never mind all that--be brief,” said Tillizini.
“Well, I opened the door, sir, and she must have fainted against it.
I’d just time to catch her and to drag her into the hall before she
went off.”
“Did you see anybody outside?”
“No, sir,” said the man.
“You closed the door behind you, I see,” said Tillizini approvingly.
“Really, I shall make something of you, Thomas.”
From his medicine case he took a slender phial, removed the stopper,
and wetted the tip of his finger with the contents. He brushed this
along the lips of the unconscious girl.
“She has only fainted,” he said, while with a quick, deft hand he felt
the pulse, and his sensitive fingers pressed the neck ever so slightly.
The drug he had given her had a marvellously rapid effect.
She opened her eyes almost immediately and looked round. Then she
caught sight of Tillizini’s face.
“Don’t try to speak,” he said gently. “Just wait. I will get you a
little wine, though I don’t think you will require it.”
She tried to sit up, but his firm hand restrained her.
“Lie quietly for a little while,” he said. “This gentleman is a
detective from Scotland Yard. You need have no fear.”
“Are you Dr. Tillizini?” she asked.
He nodded.
“My husband--you’ve seen him?” she whispered.
Tillizini nodded again.
“Yes, yes. He was the man who was sentenced at Burboro’.”
A look of pain passed across the white-faced girl.
“Yes, he was sentenced,” she said weakly. “He was innocent, but he was
sentenced.”
Tears welled into her eyes.
Tillizini had the narrow blue phial in the palm of his hand. Again he
tilted it, and again the tip of his little finger swept across the lips
of the girl. She knit her brows.
“What is that?” she said. “It is very sweet stuff.”
The professor smiled.
“Yes, it is very sweet, my child,” he said, “but it will do you a lot
of good.”
His prediction was verified, for in a few minutes she sat up--calm and
collected.
“I heard you had been to see my husband,” she said. “I wanted to talk
to you, but you had gone, and then I thought I would write to you, and
I was starting my letter when a gentleman came----”
“Which gentleman?” asked Tillizini.
“The Italian gentleman,” she replied--“the one my husband said had
asked him to go to Highlawn. Oh, I knew it wasn’t true that he burgled
Sir Ralph. Poor as we were, he would never have done such a thing.”
Tillizini nodded, and raised his hand with a reproving little smile.
“Yes, the Italian came, and what did he want?”
She was calm again.
“He gave me some money,” said the girl, “and told me that he would see
that my husband was released, and I was so grateful because I felt so
sure that he would go to Sir Ralph and tell him, and George would be
let out of prison.”
She was little more than a child, and the men who listened were too
full of pity to smile at her naïve conception of Sir Ralph’s power.
“And then,” she went on, “he asked me a dreadful thing.”
She shuddered at the thought.
“He asked me to do that for which my husband was convicted.”
“To go to the house?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“And to take a package?”
Again the girl nodded.
“And you were to do this on Friday night?” His eyes were blazing with
excitement.
“Yes,” she said. “How do you know?”
A little look of fear came into her face. She was out of her depth in
these plots and machinations, this simple country girl who had entered
into the responsibilities and trials of marriage at an age when most
girls were at school.
“I know,” said Tillizini.
He walked up and down the apartment, his hands thrust in his pockets,
his head bent.
“You won’t be able to do it now. They’ve watched you come up here; I
suppose that’s why you came to me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am so afraid of these men. We are quiet country
folk. We have never been mixed up in anything like this.”
Tillizini considered a moment; then he took down the telephone receiver
and gave a number. He had a brief conversation with somebody in Italian
and he spoke with an air of authority. He hung the receiver up again.
“I have telephoned for a lady to come here to take you to her house,”
he said. “I don’t think these people will bother you at all, because
you know nothing which can possibly affect them one way or the other. I
suppose,” he said, turning to Crocks, “that you can give me a couple
of men to look after this girl till she reaches the house where I am
sending her?”
Crocks nodded.
“I’ll take her myself,” he said jovially. “I am worth two men.”
Tillizini smiled.
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that you are worth three. The one you
are, the one you can be, and the one you never appear to be!”
Crocks chuckled.