Kennedy?” he inquired, adding quickly without waiting for an answer: “I
am glad to see you. I suppose you have noticed the precautions we are
taking against intruders? Yet it seems to be all of no avail. I can not
be alone even here. If a telephone message comes to me over my private
wire, if I talk with my own office in the city, it seems that it is
known. I don’t know what to make of it. It is terrible. I don’t know
what to expect next.”
Brixton had been standing beside a huge mahogany desk as we entered. I
had seen him before at a distance as a somewhat pompous speaker at
banquets and the cynosure of the financial district. But there was
something different about his looks now. He seemed to have aged, to
have grown yellower. Even the whites of his eyes were yellow.
I thought at first that perhaps it might be the effect of the light in
the centre of the room, a huge affair set in the ceiling in a sort of
inverted hemisphere of glass, concealing and softening the rays of a
powerful incandescent bulb which it enclosed. It was not the light that
gave him the altered appearance, as I concluded from catching a casual
confirmatory glance of perplexity from Kennedy himself.
“My personal physician says I am suffering from jaundice,” explained
Brixton. Rather than seeming to be offended at our notice of his
condition he seemed to take it as a good evidence of Kennedy’s keenness
that he had at once hit on one of the things that were weighing on
Brixton’s own mind. “I feel pretty badly, too. Curse it,” he added
bitterly, “coming at a time when it is absolutely necessary that I
should have all my strength to carry through a negotiation that is only
a beginning, important not so much for myself as for the whole world.
It is one of the first times New York bankers have had a chance to
engage in big dealings in that part of the world. I suppose Yvonne has
shown you one of the letters I am receiving?”
He rustled a sheaf of them which he drew from a drawer of his desk, and
continued, not waiting for Kennedy even to nod:
“Here are a dozen or more of them. I get one or two every day, either
here or at my town house or at the office.”
Kennedy had moved forward to see them.
“One moment more,” Brixton interrupted, still holding them. “I shall
come back to the letters. That is not the worst. I’ve had threatening
letters before. Have you noticed this room?”
We had both seen and been impressed by it.
“Let me tell you more about it,” he went on. “It was designed
especially to be, among other things, absolutely soundproof.”
We gazed curiously about the strong room. It was beautifully decorated
and furnished. On the walls was a sort of heavy, velvety green
wall-paper. Exquisite hangings were draped about, and on the floor were
thick rugs. In all I noticed that the prevailing tint was green.
“I had experiments carried out,” he explained languidly, “with the
object of discovering methods and means for rendering walls and
ceilings capable of effective resistance to sound transmission. One of
the methods devised involved the use under the ceiling or parallel to
the wall, as the case might be, of a network of wire stretched tightly
by means of pulleys in the adjacent walls and not touching at any point
the surface to be protected against sound. Upon the wire network is
plastered a composition formed of strong glue, plaster of Paris, and
granulated cork, so as to make a flat slab, between which and the wall
or ceiling is a cushion of confined air. The method is good in two
respects: the absence of contact between the protective and protected
surfaces and the colloid nature of the composition used. I have gone
into the thing at length because it will make all the more remarkable
what I am about to tell you.”
Kennedy had been listening attentively. As Brixton proceeded I had
noticed Kennedy’s nostrils dilating almost as if he were a hound and
had scented his quarry. I sniffed, too. Yes, there was a faint odour,
almost as if of garlic in the room. It was unmistakable. Craig was
looking about curiously, as if to discover a window by which the odour
might have entered. Brixton, with his eyes following keenly every move,
noticed him.
“More than that” he added quickly, “I have had the most perfect system
of modern ventilation installed in this room, absolutely independent
from that in the house.”
Kennedy said nothing.
“A moment ago, Mr. Kennedy, I saw you and Mr. Jameson glancing up at
the ceiling. Sound-proof as this room is, or as I believe it to be,
I—I hear voices, voices from—not through, you understand, but
from—that very ceiling. I do not hear them now. It is only at certain
times when I am alone. They repeat the words in some of these
letters—‘You must not take up those bonds. You must not endanger the
peace of the world. You will never live to get the interest.’ Over and
over I have heard such sentences spoken in this very room. I have
rushed out and up the corridor. There has been no one there. I have
locked the steel door. Still I have heard the voices. And it is
absolutely impossible that a human being could get close enough to say
them without my knowing and finding out where he is.”
Kennedy betrayed by not so much as the motion of a muscle even a shade
of a doubt of Brixton’s incredible story. Whether because he believed
it or because he was diplomatic, Craig took the thing at its face
value. He moved a blotter so that he could stand on the top of
Brixton’s desk in the centre of the room. Then he unfastened and took
down the glass hemisphere over the light.
“It is an Osram lamp of about a hundred candlepower, I should judge,”
he observed.
Apparently he had satisfied himself that there was nothing concealed in
the light itself. Laboriously, with such assistance as the memory of
Mr. Brixton could give, he began tracing out the course of both the
electric light and telephone wires that led down into the den.
Next came a close examination of the ceiling and side walls, the floor,
the hangings, the pictures, the rugs, everything. Kennedy was tapping
here and there all over the wall, as if to discover whether there was
any such hollow sound as a cavity might make. There was none.
A low exclamation from him attracted my attention, though it escaped
Brixton. His tapping had raised the dust from the velvety wall-paper
wherever he had tried it. Hastily, from a corner where it would not be
noticed, he pulled off a piece of the paper and stuffed it into his
pocket. Then followed a hasty examination of the intake of the
ventilating apparatus.
Apparently satisfied with his examination of things in the den, Craig
now prepared to trace out the course of the telephone and light wires
in the house. Brixton excused himself, asking us to join him in the
library up-stairs after Craig had completed his investigation.
Nothing was discovered by tracing the lines back, as best we could,
from the den. Kennedy therefore began at the other end, and having
found the points in the huge cellar of the house where the main trunk
and feed wires entered, he began a systematic search in that direction.
A separate line led, apparently, to the den, and where this line
feeding the Osram lamp passed near a dark storeroom in a corner Craig
examined more closely than ever. Seemingly his search was rewarded, for
he dived into the dark storeroom and commenced lighting matches
furiously to discover what was there.
“Look, Walter,” he exclaimed, holding a match so that I could see what
he had unearthed. There, in a corner concealed by an old chest of
drawers, stood a battery of five storage-cells connected with an
instrument that looked very much like a telephone transmitter, a
rheostat, and a small transformer coil.
“I suppose this is a direct-current lighting circuit,” he remarked,
thoughtfully regarding his find. “I think I know what this is, all
right. Any amateur could do it, with a little knowledge of electricity
and a source of direct current. The thing is easily constructed, the
materials are common, and a wonderfully complicated result can be
obtained. What’s this?”
He had continued to poke about in the darkness as he was speaking. In
another corner he had discovered two ordinary telephone receivers.
“Connected up with something, too, by George!” he ejaculated.
Evidently some one had tapped the regular telephone wires running into
the house, had run extensions into the little storeroom, and was
prepared to overhear everything that was said either to or by those in
the house.
Further examination disclosed that there were two separate telephone
systems running into Brixton’s house. One, with its many extensions,
was used by the household and by the housekeeper; the other was the
private wire which led, ultimately, down into Brixton’s den. No sooner
had he discovered it than Kennedy became intensely interested. For the
moment he seemed entirely to forget the electric-light wires and became
absorbed in tracing out the course of the telephone trunk-line and its
extensions. Continued search rewarded him with the discovery that both
the household line and the private line were connected by hastily
improvised extensions with the two receivers he had discovered in the
out-of-the-way corner of a little dark storeroom.
“Don’t disturb a thing,” remarked Kennedy, cautiously picking up even
the burnt matches he had dropped in his hasty search. “We must devise
some means of catching the eavesdropper red handed. It has all the
marks of being an inside job.”
We had completed our investigation of the basement without attracting
any attention, and Craig was careful to make it seem that in entering
the library we came from the den, not from the cellar. As we waited in
the big leather chairs Kennedy was sketching roughly on a sheet of
paper the plan of the house, drawing in the location of the various
wires.
The door opened. We had expected John Brixton. Instead, a tall, spare
foreigner with a close-cropped moustache entered. I knew at once that
it must be Count Wachtmann, although I had never seen him.
“Ah, I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed in English which betrayed that he
had been under good teachers in London. “I thought Miss Brixton was
here.”
“Count Wachtmann?” interrogated Kennedy, rising.
“The same,” he replied easily, with a glance of inquiry at us.
“My friend and I are from the Star” said Kennedy.
“Ah! Gentlemen of the press?” He elevated his eyebrows the fraction of
an inch. It was so politely contemptuous that I could almost have
throttled him.
“We are waiting to see Mr. Brixton,” explained Kennedy.
“What is the latest from the Near East?” Wachtmann asked, with the air
of a man expecting to hear what he could have told you yesterday if he
had chosen.
There was a movement of the portieres, and a woman entered. She stopped
a moment. I knew it was Miss Brixton. She had recognised Kennedy, but
her part was evidently to treat him as a total stranger.
“Who are these men, Conrad?” she asked, turning to Wachtmann.
“Gentlemen of the press, I believe, to see your father, Yvonne,”
replied the count.
It was evident that it had not been mere newspaper talk about this
latest rumored international engagement.
“How did you enjoy it?” he asked, noticing the title of a history which
she had come to replace in the library.
“Very well—all but the assassinations and the intrigues,” she replied
with a little shudder.
He shot a quick, searching look at her face. “They are a violent
people—some of them,” he commented quickly.
“You are going into town to-morrow?” I heard him ask Miss Brixton, as
they walked slowly down the wide hall to the conservatory a few moments
later.
“What do you think of him?” I whispered to Kennedy.
I suppose my native distrust of his kind showed through, for Craig
merely shrugged his shoulders. Before he could reply Mr. Brixton joined
us.
“There’s another one—just came,” he ejaculated, throwing a letter down
on the library table. It was only a few lines this time:
“The bonds will not be subject to a tax by the government, they say.
No—because if there is a war there won’t be any government to tax
them!”
The note did not appear to interest Kennedy as much as what he had
discovered. “One thing is self-evident, Mr. Brixton,” he remarked.
“Some one inside this house is spying, is in constant communication
with a person or persons outside. All the watchmen and Great Danes on
the estate are of no avail against the subtle, underground connection
that I believe exists. It is still early in the afternoon. I shall make
a hasty trip to New York and return after dinner. I should like to
watch with you in the den this evening.”
“Very well,” agreed Brixton. “I shall arrange to have you met at the
station and brought here as secretly as I can.”
He sighed, as if admitting that he was no longer master of even his own
house.
Kennedy was silent during most of our return trip to New York. As for
myself, I was deeply mired in an attempt to fathom Wachtmann. He
baffled me. However, I felt that if there was indeed some subtle,
underground connection between some one inside and someone outside
Brixton’s house, Craig would prepare an equally subtle method of
meeting it on his own account. Very little was said by either of us on
the journey up to the laboratory, or on the return to Woodrock. I
realised that there was very little excuse for a commuter not to be
well informed. I, at least, had plenty of time to exhaust the
newspapers I had bought.
Whether or not we returned without being observed, I did not know, but
at least we did find that the basement and dark storeroom were
deserted, as we cautiously made our way again it to the corner where
Craig had made his enigmatical discoveries of the afternoon.
While I held a pocket flashlight Craig was busy concealing another
instrument of his own in the little storeroom. It seemed to be a little
black disk about as big as a watch, with a number of perforated holes
in one face. Carelessly he tossed it into the top drawer of the chest
under some old rubbish, shut the drawer tight and ran a flexible wire
out of the back of the chest. It was a simple matter to lay the wire
through some bins next the storeroom and then around to the passageway
down to the subterranean den of Brixton. There Craig deposited a little
black box about the size of an ordinary kodak.
For an hour or so we sat with Brixton. Neither of us said anything, and
Brixton was uncommunicatively engaged in reading a railroad report.
Suddenly a sort of muttering, singing noise seemed to fill the room.
“There it is!” cried Brixton, clapping the book shut and looking
eagerly at Kennedy.
Gradually the sound increased in pitch. It seemed to come from the
ceiling, not from any particular part of the room, but merely from
somewhere overhead. There was no hallucination about it. We all heard.
As the vibrations increased it was evident that they were shaping
themselves into words.
Kennedy had grasped the black box the moment the sound began and was
holding two black rubber disks to his ears.
At last the sound from overhead became articulate It was weird,
uncanny. Suddenly a voice said distinctly: “Let American dollars
beware. They will not protect American daughters.”
Craig had dropped the two ear-pieces and was gazing intently at the
Osram lamp in the ceiling. Was he, too, crazy?
“Here, Mr. Brixton, take these two receivers of the detectaphone,” said
Kennedy. “Tell me whether you can recognise the voice.”
“Why, it’s familiar,” he remarked slowly. “I can’t place it, but I’ve
heard it before. Where is it? What is this thing, anyhow?”
“It is someone hidden in the storeroom in the basement,” answered
Craig. “He is talking into a very sensitive telephone transmitter and—”
“But the voice—here?” interrupted Brixton impatiently.
Kennedy pointed to the incandescent lamp in the ceiling. “The
incandescent lamp,” he said, “is not always the mute electrical
apparatus it is supposed to be. Under the right conditions it can be
made to speak exactly as the famous ‘speaking-arc,’ as it was called by
Professor Duddell, who investigated it. Both the arc-light and the
metal-filament lamp can be made to act as telephone receivers.”
It seemed unbelievable, but Kennedy was positive. “In the case of the
speaking-arc or ‘arcophone,’ as it might be called,” he continued, “the
fact that the electric arc is sensitive to such small variations in the
current over a wide range of frequency has suggested that a
direct-current arc might be used as a telephone receiver. All that is
necessary is to superimpose a microphone current on the main arc
current, and the arc reproduces sounds and speech distinctly, loud
enough to be heard several feet. Indeed, the arc could be used as a
transmitter, too, if a sensitive receiver replaced the transmitter at
the other end. The things needed are an arc-lamp, an impedance coil, or
small transformer-coil, a rheostat, and a source of energy. The
alternating current is not adapted to reproduce speech, but the
ordinary direct current is. Of course, the theory isn’t half as simple
as the apparatus I have described.”
He had unscrewed the Osram lamp. The talking ceased immediately.
“Two investigators named Ort and Ridger have used a lamp like this as a
receiver,” he continued. “They found that words spoken were reproduced
in the lamp. The telephonic current variations superposed on the
current passing through the lamp produce corresponding variations of
heat in the filament, which are radiated to the glass of the bulb,
causing it to expand and contract proportionately, and thus
transmitting vibrations to the exterior air. Of course, in sixteen-and
thirty-two-candle-power lamps the glass is too thick, and the heat
variations are too feeble.”
Who was it whose voice Brixton had recognised as familiar over
Kennedy’s hastily installed detectaphone? Certainly he must have been a
scientist of no mean attainment. That did not surprise me, for I
realised that from that part of Europe where this mystical Red
Brotherhood operated some of the most famous scientists of the world
had sprung.
A hasty excursion into the basement netted us nothing. The place was
deserted.
We could only wait. With parting instructions to Brixton in the use of
the detectaphone we said good night, were met by a watchman and
escorted as far as the lodge safely.
Only one remark did Kennedy make as we settled ourselves for the long
ride in the accommodation train to the city. “That warning means that
we have two people to protect—both Brixton and his daughter.”
Speculate as I might, I could find no answer to the mystery, nor to the
question, which was also unsolved, as to the queer malady of Brixton
himself, which his physician diagnosed as jaundice.
VI
THE DETECTAPHONE
Far after midnight though it had been when we had at last turned in at
our apartment, Kennedy was up even earlier than usual in the morning. I
found him engrossed in work at the laboratory.
“Just in time to see whether I’m right in my guess about the illness of
Brixton,” he remarked, scarcely looking up at me.
He had taken a flask with a rubber stopper. Through one hole in it was
fitted a long funnel; through another ran a glass tube, connecting with
a large U-shaped drying-tube filled with calcium chloride, which in
turn connected with a long open tube with an up-turned end.
Into the flask Craig dropped some pure granulated zinc coated with
platinum. Then he covered it with dilute sulphuric acid through the
funnel tube. “That forms hydrogen gas,” he explained, “which passes
through the drying-tube and the ignition-tube. Wait a moment until all
the air is expelled from the tubes.”
He lighted a match and touched it to the open upturned end. The
hydrogen, now escaping freely, was ignited with a pale-blue flame.
Next, he took the little piece of wall-paper I had seen him tear off in
the den, scraped off some powder from it, dissolved it, and poured it
into the funnel-tube.
Almost immediately the pale, bluish flame turned to bluish white, and
white fumes were formed. In the ignition-tube a sort of metallic
deposit appeared. Quickly he made one test after another. I sniffed.
There was an unmistakable smell of garlic in the air.
“Arseniureted hydrogen,” commented Craig. “This is the Marsh test for
arsenic. That wall-paper in Brixton’s den has been loaded down with
arsenic, probably Paris green or Schweinfurth green, which is
aceto-arsenite of copper. Every minute he is there he is breathing
arseniureted hydrogen. Some one has contrived to introduce free
hydrogen into the intake of his ventilator. That acts on the arsenic
compounds in the wall-paper and hangings and sets free the gas. I
thought I knew the smell the moment I got a whiff of it. Besides, I
could tell by the jaundiced look of his face that he was being
poisoned. His liver was out of order, and arsenic seems to accumulate
in the liver.”
“Slowly poisoned by minute quantities of gas,” I repeated in amazement.
“Some one in that Red Brotherhood is a diabolical genius. Think of
it—poisoned wall-paper!”
It was still early in the forenoon when Kennedy excused himself, and
leaving me to my own devices disappeared on one of his excursions into
the underworld of the foreign settlements on the East Side. About the
middle of the afternoon he reappeared. As far as I could learn all that
he had found out was that the famous, or rather infamous, Professor
Michael Kumanova, one of the leaders of the Red Brotherhood, was known
to be somewhere in this country.
We lost no time in returning again to Woodrock late that afternoon.
Craig hastened to warn Brixton of his peril from the contaminated
atmosphere of the den, and at once a servant was set to work with a
vacuum cleaner.
Carefully Craig reconnoitred the basement where the eavesdropping
storeroom was situated. Finding it deserted, he quickly set to work
connecting the two wires of the general household telephone with what
looked very much like a seamless iron tube, perhaps six inches long and
three inches in diameter. Then he connected the tube also with the
private wire of Brixton in a similar manner.
“This is a special repeating-coil of high efficiency,” he explained in
answer to my inquiry. “It is absolutely balanced as to resistance,
number of turns, and everything. I shall run this third line from the
coil into Brixton’s den, and then, if you like, you can accompany me on
a little excursion down to the village where I am going to install
another similar coil between the two lines at the local telephone
central station opposite the railroad.”
Brixton met us about eight o’clock that night in his now renovated den.
Apparently, even the little change from uncertainty to certainty so far
had had a tonic effect on him. I had, however, almost given up the
illusion that it was possible for us to be even in the den without
being watched by an unseen eye. It seemed to me that to one who could
conceive of talking through an incandescent lamp seeing, even through
steel and masonry, was not impossible.
Kennedy had brought with him a rectangular box of oak, in one of the
large faces of which were two square holes. As he replaced the black
camera-like box of the detectaphone with this oak box he remarked:
“This is an intercommunicating telephone arrangement of the
detectaphone. You see, it is more sensitive than anything of the sort
ever made before. The arrangement of these little square holes is such
as to make them act as horns or magnifiers of a double receiver. We can
all hear at once what is going on by using this machine.”
We had not been waiting long before a peculiar noise seemed to issue
from the detectaphone. It was as though a door had been opened and shut
hastily. Some one had evidently entered the storeroom. A voice called
up the railroad station and asked for Michael Kronski, Count
Wachtmann’s chauffeur.
“It is the voice I heard last night,” exclaimed Brixton. “By the Lord
Harry, do you know, it is Janeff the engineer who has charge of the
steam heating, the electric bells, and everything of the sort around
the place. My own engineer—I’ll land the fellow in jail before I’ll—”
Kennedy raised his hand. “Let us hear what he has to say,” remonstrated
Craig calmly. “I suppose you have wondered why I didn’t just go down
there last night and grab the fellow. Well, you see now. It is my
invariable rule to get the man highest up. This fellow is only one
tool. Arrest him, and as likely as not we should allow the big criminal
to escape.”