on Brodie. It was our dip, a dip no longer but a regular stick-up man,
with a gun jammed into the face of his victim and a broad hand over his
mouth. Skilfully the woman went through Brodie’s pockets, her nimble
fingers missing not a thing.
“Now—beat it,” we heard the dip whisper hoarsely, “and if you raise a
holler, we’ll get you right, next time.”
Brodie fled as fast as his weakened nerves would permit his shaky limbs
to move. As he disappeared, the dip sent something dark hurtling over
the roof of the house across the street and hurried toward us.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I think it was the pistol on the end of a stout cord. That is a
favourite trick of the gunmen after a job. It destroys at least a part
of the evidence. You can’t throw a gun very far alone, you know. But
with it at the end of a string you can lift it up over the roof of a
tenement. If Brodie squeals to a copper and these people are caught,
they can’t hold them under the pistol law, anyhow.”
The dip had caught sight of us, with his ferret eyes in the doorway.
Quickly Kennedy passed over the money in return for the motley array of
objects taken from Brodie. The dip and his gun-moll disappeared into
the darkness as quickly as they had emerged.
There was a curious assortment—the paraphernalia of a drug fiend, old
letters, a key, and several other useless articles. The pickpocket had
retained the money from the sale of the dope as his own particular
honorarium.
“Brodie has led us up to the source of his supply,” remarked Kennedy,
thoughtfully regarding the stuff. “And the dip has given us the key to
it. Are you game to go in?”
A glance up and down the street showed it still deserted. We wormed our
way in the shadow to the cellar before which Brodie had stood. The
outside door was open. We entered, and Craig stealthily struck a match,
shading it in his hands.
At one end we were confronted by a little door of mystery, barred with
iron and held by an innocent enough looking padlock. It was this lock,
evidently, to which the key fitted, opening the way into the
subterranean vault of brick and stone.
Kennedy opened it and pushed back the door. There was a little square
compartment, dark as pitch and delightfully cool and damp. He lighted a
match, then hastily blew it out and switched on an electric bulb which
it disclosed.
“Can’t afford risks like that here,” he exclaimed, carefully disposing
of the match, as our eyes became accustomed to the light.
On every side were pieces of gas-pipe, boxes, and paper, and on shelves
were jars of various materials. There was a work-table littered with
tools, pieces of wire, boxes, and scraps of metal.
“My word!” exclaimed Kennedy, as he surveyed the curious scene before
us, “this is a regular bomb factory—one of the most amazing exhibits
that the history of crime has ever produced.”
XVIII
THE “COKE” FIEND
I followed him in awe as he made a hasty inventory of what we had
discovered. There were as many as a dozen finished and partly finished
infernal machines of various sizes and kinds, some of tremendous
destructive capacity. Kennedy did not even attempt to study them. All
about were high explosives, chemicals, dynamite. There was gunpowder of
all varieties, antimony, blasting-powder, mercury cyanide, chloral
hydrate, chlorate of potash, samples of various kinds of shot, some of
the outlawed soft-nosed dumdum bullets, cartridges, shells, pieces of
metal purposely left with jagged edges, platinum, aluminum, iron,
steel—a conglomerate mass of stuff that would have gladdened an
anarchist.
Kennedy was examining a little quartz-lined electric furnace, which was
evidently used for heating soldering irons and other tools. Everything
had been done, it seemed, to prevent explosions. There were no open
lights and practically no chance for heat to be communicated far among
the explosives. Indeed, everything had been arranged to protect the
operator himself in his diabolical work.
Kennedy had switched on the electric furnace, and from the various
pieces of metal on the table selected several. These he was placing
together in a peculiar manner, and to them he attached some copper wire
which lay in a corner in a roll.
Under the work-table, beneath the furnace, one could feel the warmth of
the thing slightly. Quickly he took the curious affair, which he had
hastily shaped, and fastened it under the table at that point, then led
the wires out through a little barred window to an air-shaft, the only
means of ventilation of the place except the door.
While he was working I had been gingerly inspecting the rest of the
den. In a corner, just beside the door, I had found a set of shelves
and a cabinet. On both were innumerable packets done up in white paper.
I opened one and found it contained several pinches of a white,
crystalline substance.
“Little portions of cocaine,” commented Kennedy, when I showed him what
I had found. “In the slang of the fiends, ‘decks.’”
On the top of the cabinet he discovered a little enamelled box, much
like a snuff-box, in which were also some of the white flakes. Quickly
he emptied them out and replaced them with others from jars which had
not been made up into packets.
“Why, there must be hundreds of ounces of the stuff here, to say
nothing of the various things they adulterate it with,” remarked
Kennedy. “No wonder they are so careful when it is a felony even to
have it in your possession in such quantities. See how careful they are
about the adulteration, too. You could never tell except from the
effect whether it was the pure or only a few-per-cent.-pure article.”
Kennedy took a last look at the den, to make sure that nothing had been
disturbed that would arouse suspicion.
“We may as well go,” he remarked. “To-morrow, I want to be free to make
the connection outside with that wire in the shaft.”
Imagine our surprise, the next morning, when a tap at our door revealed
Loraine Keith herself.
“Is this Professor Kennedy?” she asked, gazing at us with a half-wild
expression which she was making a tremendous effort to control.
“Because if it is, I have something to tell him that may interest Mr.
Carton.”
We looked at her curiously. Without her make-up she was pallid and
yellow in spots, her hands trembling, cold, and sweaty, her eyes sunken
and glistening, with pupils dilated, her breathing short and hurried,
restless, irresolute, and careless of her personal appearance.
“Perhaps you wonder how I heard of you and why I have come to you,” she
went on. “It is because I have a confession to make. I saw Mr. Haddon
just before he was—kidnapped.”
She seemed to hesitate over the word.
“How did you know I was interested?” asked Kennedy keenly.
“I heard him mention your name with Mr. Carton’s.”
“Then he knew that I was more than a reporter for the Star,” remarked
Kennedy. “Kidnapped, you say? How?”
She shot a glance half of suspicion, half of frankness, at us.
“That’s what I must confess. Whoever did it must have used me as a
tool. Mr. Haddon and I used to be good friends—I would be yet.”
There was evident feeling in her tone which she did not have to assume.
“All I remember yesterday was that, after lunch, I was in the office of
the Mayfair when he came in. On his desk was a package. I don’t know
what has become of it. But he gave one look at it, seemed to turn pale,
then caught sight of me. ‘Loraine,’ he whispered, ‘we used to be good
friends. Forgive me for turning you down. But you don’t understand. Get
me away from here—come with me—call a cab.’
“Well, I got into the cab with him. We had a chauffeur whom we used to
have in the old days. We drove furiously, avoiding the traffic men. He
told the driver to take us to my apartment—and—and that is the last I
remember, except a scuffle in which I was dragged from the cab on one
side and he on the other.”
She had opened her handbag and taken from it a little snuff-box, like
that which we had seen in the den.
“I—I can’t go on,” she apologised, “without this stuff.”
“So you are a cocaine fiend, also?” remarked Kennedy.
“Yes, I can’t help it. There is an indescribable excitement to do
something great, to make a mark, that goes with it. It’s soon gone, but
while it lasts I can sing and dance, do anything until every part of my
body begins crying for it again. I was full of the stuff when this
happened yesterday; had taken too much, I guess.”
The change in her after she had snuffed some of the crystals was
magical. From a quivering wretch she had become now a self-confident
neurasthenic.
“You know where that stuff will land you, I presume?” questioned
Kennedy.
“I don’t care,” she laughed hollowly. “Yes, I know what you are going
to tell me. Soon I’ll be hunting for the cocaine bug, as they call it,
imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps
see them, see the little animals running around and biting me. Oh, you
don’t know. There are two souls to the cocainist. One is tortured by
the suffering which the stuff brings; the other laughs at the fears and
pains. But it brings such thoughts! It stimulates my mind, makes it
work without, against my will, gives me such visions—oh, I can not go
on. They would kill me if they knew I had come to you. Why have I? Has
not Haddon cast me off? What is he to me, now?”
It was evident that she was growing hysterical. I wondered whether,
after all, the story of the kidnapping of Haddon might not be a figment
of her brain, simply an hallucination due to the drug.
“They?” inquired Kennedy, observing her narrowly. “Who?”
“I can’t tell. I don’t know. Why did I come? Why did I come?”
She was reaching again for the snuff-box, but Kennedy restrained her.
“Miss Keith,” he remarked, “you are concealing something from me. There
is some one,” he paused a moment, “whom you are shielding.”
“No, no,” she cried. “He was taken. Brodie had nothing to do with it,
nothing. That is what you mean. I know. This stuff increases my
sensitiveness. Yet I hate Coke Brodie—oh—let me go. I am all
unstrung. Let me see a doctor. To-night, when I am better, I will tell
all.”
Loraine Keith had torn herself from him, had instantly taken a pinch of
the fatal crystals, with that same ominous change from fear to
self-confidence. What had been her purpose in coming at all? It had
seemed at first to implicate Brodie, but she had been quick to shield
him when she saw that danger. I wondered what the fascination might be
which the wretch exercised over her.
“To-night—I will see you to-night,” she cried, and a moment later she
was gone, as unexpectedly as she had come.
I looked at Kennedy blankly.
“What was the purpose of that outburst?” I asked.
“I can’t say,” he replied. “It was all so incoherent that, from what I
know of drug fiends, I am sure she had a deep-laid purpose in it all.
It does not change my plans.”
Two hours later we had paid a deposit on an empty flat in the
tenement-house in which the bomb-maker had his headquarters, and had
received a key to the apartment from the janitor. After considerable
difficulty, owing to the narrowness of the air-shaft, Kennedy managed
to pick up the loose ends of the wire which had been led out of the
little window at the base of the shaft, and had attached it to a couple
of curious arrangements which he had brought with him. One looked like
a large taximeter from a motor cab; the other was a diminutive
gas-metre, in looks at least. Attached to them were several bells and
lights.
He had scarcely completed installing the thing, whatever it was, when a
gentle tap at the door startled me. Kennedy nodded, and I opened it. It
was Carton.
“I have had my men watching the Mayfair,” he announced. “There seems to
be a general feeling of alarm there, now. They can’t even find Loraine
Keith. Brodie, apparently, has not shown up in his usual haunts since
the episode of last night.”
“I wonder if the long arm of this vice trust could have reached out and
gathered them in, too?” I asked.
“Quite likely,” replied Carton, absorbed in watching Kennedy. “What’s
this?”
A little bell had tinkled sharply, and a light had flashed up on the
attachments to the apparatus.
“Nothing. I was just testing it to see if it works. It does, although
the end which I installed down below was necessarily only a makeshift.
It is not this red light with the shrill bell that we are interested
in. It is the green light and the low-toned bell. This is a thermopile.”
“And what is a thermopile?” queried Carton.
“For the sake of one who has forgotten his physics,” smiled Kennedy, “I
may say this is only another illustration of how all science ultimately
finds practical application. You probably have forgotten that when two
half-rings of dissimilar metals are joined together and one is suddenly
heated or chilled, there is produced at the opposite connecting point a
feeble current which will flow until the junctures are both at the same
temperature. You might call this a thermo-electric thermometer, or a
telethermometer, or a microthermometer, or any of a dozen names.”
“Yes,” I agreed mechanically, only vaguely guessing at what he had in
mind.
“The accurate measurement of temperature is still a problem of
considerable difficulty,” he resumed, adjusting the thermometer. “A
heated mass can impart vibratory motion to the ether which fills space,
and the wave-motions of ether are able to reproduce in other bodies
motions similar to those by which they are caused. At this end of the
line I merely measure the electromotive force developed by the
difference in temperature of two similar thermo-electric junctions,
opposed. We call those junctions in a thermopile ‘couples,’ and by
getting the recording instruments sensitive enough, we can measure one
one-thousandth of a degree.
“Becquerel was the first, I believe, to use this property. But the
machine which you see here was one recently invented for registering
the temperature of sea water so as to detect the approach of an
iceberg. I saw no reason why it should not be used to measure heat as
well as cold.
“You see, down there I placed the couples of the thermopile beneath the
electric furnace on the table. Here I have the mechanism, operated by
the feeble current from the thermopile, opening and closing switches,
and actuating bells and lights. Then, too, I have the recording
instrument. The thing is fundamentally very simple and is based on
well-known phenomena. It is not uncertain and can be tested at any
time, just as I did then, when I showed a slight fall in temperature.
Of course it is not the slight changes I am after, not the gradual but
the sudden changes in temperature.”
“I see,” said Carton. “If there is a drop, the current goes one way and
we see the red light; a rise and it goes the other, and we see a green
light.”
“Exactly,” agreed Kennedy. “No one is going to approach that chamber
down-stairs as long as he thinks any one is watching, and we do not
know where they are watching. But the moment any sudden great change is
registered, such as turning on that electric furnace, we shall know it
here.”
It must have been an hour that we sat there discussing the merits of
the case and speculating on the strange actions of Loraine Keith.
Suddenly the red light flashed out brilliantly.
“What’s that?” asked Carton quickly.
“I can’t tell, yet,” remarked Kennedy. “Perhaps it is nothing at all.
Perhaps it is a draught of cold air from opening the door. We shall
have to wait and see.”
We bent over the little machine, straining our eyes and ears to catch
the visual and audible signals which it gave.
Gradually the light faded, as the thermopile adjusted itself to the
change in temperature.
Suddenly, without warning, a low-toned bell rang before us and a
bright-green light flashed up.
“That can have only one meaning,” cried Craig excitedly. “Some one is
down there in that inferno—perhaps the bomb-maker himself.”
The bell continued to ring and the light to glow, showing that whoever
was there had actually started the electric furnace. What was he
preparing to do? I felt that, even though we knew there was some one
there, it did us little good. I, for one, had no relish for the job of
bearding such a lion in his den.
We looked at Kennedy, wondering what he would do next. From the package
in which he had brought the two registering machines he quietly took
another package, wrapped up, about eighteen inches long and apparently
very heavy. As he did so he kept his attention fixed on the
telethermometer. Was he going to wait until the bomb-maker had finished
what he had come to accomplish?
It was perhaps fifteen minutes after our first alarm that the signals
began to weaken.
“Does that mean that he has gone—escaped?” inquired Carton anxiously.
“No. It means that his furnace is going at full power and that he has
forgotten it. It is what I am waiting for. Come on.”
Seizing the package as he hurried from the room, Kennedy dashed out on
the street and down the outside cellar stairs, followed by us.
He paused at the thick door and listened. Apparently there was not a
sound from the other side, except a whir of a motor and a roar which
might have been from the furnace. Softly he tried the door. It was
locked on the inside.
Was the bomb-maker there still? He must be. Suppose he heard us. Would
he hesitate a moment to send us all to perdition along with himself?
How were we to get past that door? Really, the deathlike stillness on
the other side was more mysterious than would have been the detonation
of some of the criminal’s explosive.
Kennedy had evidently satisfied himself on one point. If we were to get
into that chamber we must do it ourselves, and we must do it quickly.
From the package which he carried he pulled out a stubby little
cylinder, perhaps eighteen inches long, very heavy, with a short stump
of a lever projecting from one side. Between the stonework of a chimney
and the barred door he laid it horizontally, jamming in some pieces of
wood to wedge it tighter.
Then he began to pump on the handle vigorously. The almost impregnable
door seemed slowly to bulge. Still there was no sign of life from
within. Had the bomb-maker left before we arrived?
“This is my scientific sledge-hammer,” panted Kennedy, as he worked the
little lever backward and forward more quickly—“a hydraulic ram. There
is no swinging of axes or wielding of crowbars necessary in breaking
down an obstruction like this, nowadays. Such things are obsolete. This
little jimmy, if you want to call it that, has a power of ten tons.
That ought to be enough.”
It seemed as if the door were slowly being crushed in before the
irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.
Kennedy stopped. Evidently he did not dare to crush the door in
altogether. Quickly he released the ram and placed it vertically. Under
the now-yawning door jamb he inserted a powerful claw of the ram and
again he began to work the handle.
A moment later the powerful door buckled, and Kennedy deftly swung it
outward so that it fell with a crash on the cellar floor.
As the noise reverberated, there came a sound of a muttered curse from
the cavern. Some one was there.
We pressed forward.
On the floor, in the weird glare of the little furnace, lay a man and a
woman, the light playing over their ghastly, set features.
Kennedy knelt over the man, who was nearest the door.
“Call a doctor, quick,” he ordered, reaching over and feeling the pulse
of the woman, who had half fallen out of her chair. “They will, be all
right soon. They took what they thought was their usual adulterated
cocaine—see, here is the box in which it was. Instead, I filled the
box with the pure drug. They’ll come around. Besides, Carton needs both
of them in his fight.”
“Don’t take any more,” muttered the woman, half conscious. “There’s
something wrong with it, Haddon.”
I looked more closely at the face in the half-darkness.
It was Haddon himself.
“I knew he’d come back when the craving for the drug became intense
enough,” remarked Kennedy.
Carton looked at Kennedy in amazement. Haddon was the last person in
the world whom he had evidently expected to discover here.
“How—what do you mean?”
“The episode of the telephone booth gave me the first hint. That is the
favourite stunt of the drug fiend—a few minutes alone, and he thinks
no one is the wiser about his habit. Then, too, there was the story
about his speed mania. That is a frequent failing of the cocainist. The
drug, too, was killing his interest in Loraine Keith—that is the last
stage.
“Yet under its influence, just as with his lobbygow and lieutenant,
Brodie, he found power and inspiration. With him it took the form of
bombs to protect himself in his graft.”
“He can’t—escape this time—Loraine. We’ll leave it—at his house—you
know—Carton—”
We looked quickly at the work-table. On it was a gigantic bomb of
clockwork over which Haddon had been working. The cocaine which was to
have given him inspiration had, thanks to Kennedy, overcome him.
Beside Loraine Keith were a suit-case and a Gladstone. She had
evidently been stuffing the corners full of their favourite nepenthe,
for, as Kennedy reached down and turned over the closely packed woman’s
finery and the few articles belonging to Haddon, innumerable packets
from the cabinet dropped out.
“Hulloa—what’s this?” he exclaimed, as he came to a huge roll of bills
and a mass of silver and gold coin. “Trying to double-cross us all the
time. That was her clever game—to give him the hours he needed to
gather what money he could save and make a clean getaway. Even cocaine
doesn’t destroy the interest of men and women in that,” he concluded,
turning over to Carton the wealth which Haddon had amassed as one of
the meanest grafters of the city of graft.
Here was a case which I could not help letting the Star have
immediately. Notes or no notes, it was local news of the first order.
Besides, anything that concerned Carton was of the highest political
significance.
It kept me late at the office and I overslept. Consequently I did not
see much of Craig the next morning, especially as he told me he had
nothing special, having turned down a case of a robbery of a safe, on
the ground that the police were much better fitted to catch ordinary
yeggmen than he was. During the day, therefore, I helped in directing
the following up of the Haddon case for the Star.
Then, suddenly, a new front page story crowded this one of the main
headlines. With a sigh of relief, I glanced at the new thriller, found
it had something to do with the Navy Department, and that it came from
as far away as Washington. There was no reason now why others could not
carry on the graft story, and I left, not unwillingly. My special work
just now was keeping on the trail of Kennedy, and I was glad to go back
to the apartment and wait for him.
“I suppose you saw that despatch from Washington in this afternoon’s
papers?” he queried, as he came in, tossing a late edition of the
Record down on my desk.
Across the front page extended a huge black scare-head: “NAVY’S MOST
VITAL SECRET STOLEN.”
“Yes,” I shrugged, “but you can’t get me much excited by what the
rewrite men on the Record say.”
“Why?” he asked, going directly into his own room.
“Well,” I replied, glancing through the text of the story, “the actual
facts are practically the same as in the other papers. Take this, for
instance, ‘On the night of the celebration of the anniversary of the
battle of Manila there were stolen from the Navy Department plans which
the Record learns exclusively represent the greatest naval secret in
the world.’ So much for that paragraph—written in the office. Then it
goes on:
“The whole secret-service machinery of the Government has been put in
operation. No one has been able to extract from the authorities the
exact secret which was stolen, but it is believed to be an invention
which will revolutionise the structure and construction of the most
modern monster battleships. Such knowledge, it is said, in the hands of
experts might prove fatal in almost any fight in which our newer ships
met others of about equal fighting power, as with it marksmen might
direct a shot that would disable our ships.