Chapter 16

It was toward the close of the afternoon that Carton called up hurriedly. As Kennedy hung up the receiver, I read on his face that something had gone wrong.

“Haddon has disappeared,” he announced, “mysteriously and suddenly, without leaving so much as a clue. It seems that he found in his office a package exactly like that which was sent to Carton earlier in the day. He didn’t wait to say anything about it, but left. Carton is bringing it over here.”

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, Carton himself deposited the package on the laboratory table with an air of relief. We looked eagerly. It was addressed to Haddon at the Mayfair in the same disguised handwriting and was done up in precisely the same fashion.

“Lots of bombs are just scare bombs,” observed Craig. “But you never can tell.”

Again Kennedy had started to dissect.

“Ah,” he went on, “this is the real thing, though, only a little different from the other. A dry battery gives a spark when the lid is slipped back. See, the explosive is in a steel pipe. Sliding the lid off is supposed to explode it. Why, there is enough explosive in this to have silenced a dozen Haddons.”

“Do you think he could have been kidnapped or murdered?” I asked. “What is this, anyhow—gang-war?”

“Or perhaps bribed?” suggested Carton.

“I can’t say,” ruminated Kennedy. “But I can say this: that there is at large in this city a man of great mechanical skill and practical knowledge of electricity and explosives. He is trying to make sure of hiding something from exposure. We must find him.”

“And especially Haddon,” Carton added quickly. “He is the missing link. His testimony is absolutely essential to the case I am building up.”

“I think I shall want to observe Loraine Keith without being observed,” planned Kennedy, with a hasty glance at his watch. “I think I’ll drop around at this Mayfair I have heard so much about. Will you come?”

“I’d better not,” refused Carton. “You know they all know me, and everything quits wherever I go. I’ll see you soon.”

As we drove in a cab over to the Mayfair, Kennedy said nothing. I wondered how and where Haddon had disappeared. Had the powers of evil in the city learned that he was weakening and hurried him out of the way at the last moment? Just what had Loraine Keith to do with it? Was she in any way responsible? I felt that there were, indeed, no bounds to what a jealous woman might dare.

Beside the ornate grilled doorway of the carriage entrance of the Mayfair stood a gilt-and-black easel with the words, “Tango Tea at Four.” Although it was considerably after that time, there was a line of taxi-cabs before the place and, inside, a brave array of late-afternoon and early-evening revellers. The public dancing had ceased, and a cabaret had taken its place.

We entered and sat down at one of the more inconspicuous of the little round tables. On a stage, at one side, a girl was singing one of the latest syncopated airs.

“We’ll just stick around a while, Walter,” whispered Craig. “Perhaps this Loraine Keith will come in.”

Behind us, protected both by the music and the rustle of people coming and going, a couple talked in low tones. Now and then a word floated over to me in a language which was English, sure enough, but not of a kind that I could understand.

“Dropped by a flatty,” I caught once, then something about a “mouthpiece,” and the “bulls,” and “making a plant.”

“A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them,” translated Kennedy. “One of their number has evidently been picked up by a detective and he looks to them for a good lawyer, or mouth-piece.”

Besides these two there were innumerable other interesting glimpses into the life of this meeting-place for the half-and underworlds. A motion in the audience attracted me, as if some favourite performer were about to appear, and I heard the “gun-moll” whisper, “Loraine Keith.”

There she was, a petite, dark-haired, snappy-eyed girl, chic, well groomed, and gowned so daringly that every woman in the audience envied and every man craned his neck to see her better. Loraine wore a tight-fitting black dress, slashed to the knee. In fact, everything was calculated to set her off at best advantage, and on the stage, at least, there was something recherche about her. Yet, there was also something gross about her, too.

Accompanying her was a nervous-looking fellow whose washed-out face was particularly unattractive. It seemed as if the bone in his nose was going, due to the shrinkage of the blood-vessels. Once, just before the dance began, I saw him rub something on the back of his hand, raise it to his nose, and sniff. Then he took a sip of a liqueur.

The dance began, wild from the first step, and as it developed, Kennedy leaned over and whispered, “The danse des Apaches.”

It was acrobatic. The man expressed brutish passion and jealousy; the woman, affection and fear. It seemed to tell a story—the struggle of love, the love of the woman against the brutal instincts of the thug, her lover. She was terrified as well as fascinated by him in his mad temper and tremendous superhuman strength. I wondered if the dance portrayed the fact.

The music was a popular air with many rapid changes, but through all there was a constant rhythm which accorded well with the abandon of the swaying dance. Indeed, I could think of nothing so much as of Bill Sykes and Nancy as I watched these two.

It was the fight of two frenzied young animals. He would approach stealthily, seize her, and whirl her about, lifting her to his shoulder. She was agile, docile, and fearful. He untied a scarf and passed it about her; she leaned against it, and they whirled giddily about. Suddenly, it seemed that he became jealous. She would run; he follow and catch her. She would try to pacify him; he would become more enraged. The dance became faster and more furious. His violent efforts seemed to be to throw her to the floor, and her streaming hair now made it seem more like a fight than a dance. The audience hung breathless. It ended with her dropping exhausted, a proper finale to this lowest and most brutal dance.

Panting, flushed, with an unnatural light in their eyes, they descended to the audience and, scorning the roar of applause to repeat the performance, sat at a little table.

I saw a couple of girls come over toward the man.

“Give us a deck, Coke,” said one, in a harsh voice.

He nodded. A silver quarter gleamed momentarily from hand to hand, and he passed to one girl stealthily a small white-paper packet. Others came to him, both men and women. It seemed to be an established thing.

“Who is that?” asked Kennedy, in a low tone, of the pickpocket back of us.

“Coke Brodie,” was the laconic reply.

“A cocaine fiend?”

“Yes, and a lobbygow for the grapevine system of selling the dope under this new law.”

“Where does he get the supply to sell?” asked Kennedy, casually.

The pickpocket shrugged his shoulders.

“No one knows, I suppose,” Kennedy commented to me. “But he gets it in spite of the added restrictions and peddles it in little packets, adulterated, and at a fabulous price for such cheap stuff. The habit is spreading like wildfire. It is a fertile means of recruiting the inmates in the vice-trust hotels. A veritable epidemic it is, too. Cocaine is one of the most harmful of all habit-forming drugs. It used to be a habit of the underworld, but now it is creeping up, and gradually and surely reaching the higher strata of society. One thing that causes its spread is the ease with which it can be taken. It requires no smoking-dens, no syringe, no paraphernalia—only the drug itself.”

Another singer had taken the place of the dancers. Kennedy leaned over and whispered to the dip.

“Say, do you and your gun-moll want to pick up a piece of change to get that mouthpiece I heard you talking about?”

The pickpocket looked at Craig suspiciously.

“Oh, don’t worry; I’m all right,” laughed Craig. “You see that fellow, Coke Brodie? I want to get something on him. If you will frame that sucker to get away with a whole front, there’s a fifty in it.”

The dip looked, rather than spoke, his amazement. Apparently Kennedy satisfied his suspicions.

“I’m on,” he said quickly. “When he goes, I’ll follow him. You keep behind us, and we’ll deliver the goods.”

“What’s it all about?” I whispered.

“Why,” he answered, “I want to get Brodie, only I don’t want to figure in the thing so that he will know me or suspect anything but a plain hold-up. They will get him; take everything he has. There must be something on that man that will help us.”

Several performers had done their turns, and the supply of the drug seemed to have been exhausted. Brodie rose and, with a nod to Loraine, went out, unsteadily, now that the effect of the cocaine had worn off. One wondered how this shuffling person could ever have carried through the wild dance. It was not Brodie who danced. It was the drug.

The dip slipped out after him, followed by the woman. We rose and followed also. Across the city Brodie slouched his way, with an evident purpose, it seemed, of replenishing his supply and continuing his round of peddling the stuff.

He stopped under the brow of a thickly populated tenement row on the upper East Side, as though this was his destination. There he stood at the gate that led down to a cellar, looking up and down as if wondering whether he was observed. We had slunk into a doorway.

A woman coming down the street, swinging a chatelaine, walked close to him, spoke, and for a moment they talked.

“It’s the gun-moll,” remarked Kennedy. “She’s getting Brodie off his guard. This must be the root of that grapevine system, as they call it.”

Suddenly from the shadow of the next house a stealthy figure sprang out 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.