Chapter 6

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.”

“Hello, Kronski!” came over the detectaphone. “This is Janeff. How are things going?”

Wachtmann’s chauffeur must have answered that everything was all right.

“You knew that they had discovered the poisoned wall-paper?” asked Janeff.

A long parley followed. Finally, Janeff repeated what apparently had been his instructions. “Now, let me see,” he said. “You want me to stay here until the last minute so that I can overhear whether any alarm is given for her? All right. You’re sure it is the nine-o’clock train she is due on? Very well. I shall meet you at the ferry across the Hudson. I’ll start from here as soon as I hear the train come in. We’ll get the girl this time. That will bring Brixton to terms sure. You’re right. Even if we fail this time, we’ll succeed later. Don’t fail me. I’ll be at the ferry as soon as I can get past the guards and join you. There isn’t a chance of an alarm from the house. I’ll cut all the wires the last thing before I leave. Good-bye.”

All at once it dawned on me what they were planning—the kidnapping of Brixton’s only daughter, to hold her, perhaps, as a hostage until he did the bidding of the gang. Wachtmann’s chauffeur was doing it and using Wachtmann’s car, too. Was Wachtmann a party to it?

What was to be done? I looked at my watch. It was already only a couple of minutes of nine, when the train would be due.

“If we could seize that fellow in the closet and start for the station immediately we might save Yvonne,” cried Brixton, starting for the door.

“And if they escape you make them more eager than ever to strike a blow at you and yours,” put in Craig coolly. “No, let us get this thing straight. I didn’t think it was as serious as this, but I’m prepared to meet any emergency.”

“But, man,” shouted Brixton, “you don’t suppose anything in the world counts beside her, do you?”

“Exactly the point,” urged Craig. “Save her and capture them—both at once.”

“How can you?” fumed Brixton. “If you attempt to telephone from here, that fellow Janeff will overhear and give a warning.”

Regardless of whether Janeff was listening or not, Kennedy was eagerly telephoning to the Woodrock central down in the village. He was using the transmitter and receiver that were connected with the iron tube which he had connected to the two regular house lines.

“Have the ferry held at any cost,” he was ordering. “Don’t let the next boat go out until Mr. Brixton gets there, under any circumstances. Now put that to them straight, central. You know Mr. Brixton has just a little bit of influence around here, and somebody’s head will drop if they let that boat go out before he gets there.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Brixton. “Much good that will do. Why, I suppose our friend Janeff down in the storeroom knows it all now. Come on, let’s grab him.”

Nevertheless there was no sound from the detectaphone which would indicate that he had overheard and was spreading the alarm. He was there yet, for we could hear him clear his throat once or twice.

“No,” replied Kennedy calmly, “he knows nothing about it. I didn’t use any ordinary means to prepare against the experts who have brought this situation about. That message you heard me send went out over what we call the ‘phantom circuit.’”

“The phantom circuit?” repeated Brixton, chafing at the delay.

“Yes, it seems fantastic at first, I suppose,” pursued Kennedy calmly; “but, after all, it is in accordance with the laws of electricity. It’s no use fretting and fuming, Mr. Brixton. If Janeff can wait, we’ll have to do so, too. Suppose we should start and this Kronski should change his plans at the last minute? How would we find it out? By telepathy? Believe me, sir, it is better to wait here a minute and trust to the phantom circuit than to mere chance.”

“But suppose he should cut the line,” I put in.

Kennedy smiled. “I have provided for that, Walter, in the way I installed the thing. I took good care that we could not be cut off that way. We can hear everything ourselves, but we cannot be overheard. He knows nothing. You see, I took advantage of the fact that additional telephones or so-called phantom lines can be superposed on existing physical lines. It is possible to obtain a third circuit from two similar metallic circuits by using for each side of this third circuit the two wires of each of the other circuits in multiple. All three circuits are independent, too.

“The third telephone current enters the wires of the first circuit, as it were, and returns along the wires of the second circuit. There are several ways of doing it. One is to use retardation or choke-coils bridged across the two metallic circuits at both ends, with taps taken from the middle points of each. But the more desirable method is the one you saw me install this afternoon. I introduced repeating-coils into the circuits at both ends. Technically, the third circuit is then taken off from the mid-points of the secondaries or line windings of these repeating coils.

“The current on a long-distance line is alternating in character, and it passes readily through a repeating-coil. The only effect it has on the transmission is slightly reducing the volume. The current passes into the repeating-coil, then divides and passes through the two line wires. At the other end the halves balance, so to speak. Thus, currents passing over a phantom circuit don’t set up currents in the terminal apparatus of the side circuits. Consequently, a conversation carried on over the phantom circuit will not be heard in either side circuit, nor does a conversation on one side circuit affect the phantom. We could all talk at once without interfering with each other.”

“At any other time I should be more than interested,” remarked Brixton grimly, curbing his impatience to be doing something.

“I appreciate that, sir,” rejoined Kennedy. “Ah, here it is. I have the central down in the village. Yes? They will hold the boat for us? Good. Thank you. The nine-o’clock train is five minutes late? Yes—what? Count Wachtmann’s car is there? Oh, yes, the train is just pulling in. I see. Miss Brixton has entered his car alone. What’s that? His chauffeur has started the car without waiting for the Count, who is coming down the platform?”

Instantly Kennedy was on his feet. He was dashing up the corridor and the stairs from the den and down into the basement to the little storeroom.

We burst into the place. It was empty. Janeff had cut the wires and fled. There was not a moment to lose. Craig hastily made sure that he had not discovered or injured the phantom circuit.

“Call the fastest car you have in your garage, Mr. Brixton,” ordered Kennedy. “Hello, hello, central! Get the lodge at the Brixton estate. Tell them if they see the engineer Janeff going out to stop him. Alarm the watchman and have the dogs ready. Catch him at any cost, dead, or alive.”

A moment later Brixton’s car raced around, and we piled in and were off like a whirlwind. Already we could see lights moving about and hear the baying of dogs. Personally, I wouldn’t have given much for Janeff’s chances of escape.

As we turned the bend in the road just before we reached the ferry, we almost ran into two cars standing before the ferry house. It looked as though one had run squarely in front of the other and blocked it off. In the slip the ferry boat was still steaming and waiting.

Beside the wrecked car a man was lying on the ground groaning, while another man was quieting a girl whom he was leading to the waiting-room of the ferry.

Brixton, weak though he was from his illness, leaped out of our car almost before we stopped and caught the girl in his arms.

“Father!” she exclaimed, clinging to him.

“What’s this?” he demanded sternly, eying the man. It was Wachtmann himself.

“Conrad saved me from that chauffeur of his,” explained Miss Brixton. “I met him on the train, and we were going to ride up to the house together. But before Conrad could get into the car this fellow, who had the engine running, started it. Conrad jumped into another car that was waiting at the station. He overlook us and dodged in front so as to cut the chauffeur off from the ferry.”

“Curse that villain of a chauffeur,” muttered Wachtmann, looking down at the wounded man.

“Do you know who he is?” asked Craig with a searching glance at Wachtmann’s face.

“I ought to. His name is Kronski, and a blacker devil an employment bureau never furnished.”

“Kronski? No,” corrected Kennedy. “It is Professor Kumanova, whom you perhaps have heard of as a leader of the Red Brotherhood, one of the cleverest scientific criminals who ever lived. I think you’ll have no more trouble negotiating your loan or your love affair, Count,” added Craig, turning on his heel.

He was in no mood to receive the congratulations of the supercilious Wachtmann. As far as Craig was concerned, the case was finished, although I fancied from a flicker of his eye as he made some passing reference to the outcome that when he came to send in a bill to Brixton for his services he would not forget the high eyebrowed Count.

I followed in silence as Craig climbed into the Brixton car and explained to the banker that it was imperative that he should get back to the city immediately. Nothing would do but that the car must take us all the way back, while Brixton summoned another from the house for himself.

The ride was accomplished swiftly in record time. Kennedy said little. Apparently the exhilaration of the on-rush of cool air was quite in keeping with his mood, though for my part, I should have preferred something a little more relaxing of the nervous tension.

“We’ve been at it five days, now,” I remarked wearily as I dropped into an easy chair in our own quarters. “Are you going to keep up this debauch?”

Kennedy laughed.

“No,” he said with a twinkle of scientific mischief, “no, I’m going to sleep it off.”

“Thank heaven!” I muttered.

“Because,” he went on seriously, “that case interrupted a long series of tests I am making on the sensitiveness of selenium to light, and I want to finish them up soon. There’s no telling when I shall be called on to use the information.”

I swallowed hard. He really meant it. He was laying out more work for himself.

Next morning I fully expected to find that he had gone. Instead he was preparing for what he called a quiet day in the laboratory.

“Now for some REAL work,” he smiled. “Sometimes, Walter, I feel that I ought to give up this outside activity and devote myself entirely to research. It is so much more important.”

I could only stare at him and reflect on how often men wanted to do something other than the very thing that nature had evidently intended them to do, and on how fortunate it was that we were not always free agents.

He set out for the laboratory and I determined that as long as he would not stop working, neither would I. I tried to write. Somehow I was not in the mood. I wrote AT my story, but succeeded only in making it more unintelligible. I was in no fit condition for it.

It was late in the afternoon. I had made up my mind to use force, if necessary, to separate Kennedy from his study of selenium. My idea was that anything from the Metropolitan to the “movies” would do him good, and I had almost carried my point when a big, severely plain black foreign limousine pulled up with a rush at the laboratory door. A large man in a huge fur coat jumped out and the next moment strode into the room. He needed no introduction, for we recognised at once J. Perry Spencer, one of the foremost of American financiers and a trustee of the university.

With that characteristic directness which I have always thought accounted in large measure for his success, he wasted scarcely a word in coming straight to the object of his visit. “Professor Kennedy,” he began, chewing his cigar and gazing about with evident interest at the apparatus Craig had collected in his warfare of science with crime, “I have dropped in here as a matter of patriotism. I want you to preserve to America those masterpieces of art and literature which I have collected all over the world during many years. They are the objects of one of the most curious pieces of vandalism of which I have ever heard. Professor Kennedy,” he concluded earnestly, “could I ask you to call on Dr. Hugo Lith, the curator of my private museum, as soon as you can possibly find it convenient?”

“Most assuredly, Mr. Spencer,” replied Craig, with a whimsical side glance at me that told without words that this was better relaxation to him than either the Metropolitan or the “movies.” “I shall be glad to see Dr. Lith at any time—right now, if it is convenient to him.”

The millionaire connoisseur consulted his watch. “Lith will be at the museum until six, at least. Yes, we can catch him there. I have a dinner engagement at seven myself. I can give you half an hour of the time before then. If you’re ready, just jump into the car, both of you.”

The museum to which he referred was a handsome white marble building, in Renaissance, fronting on a side street just off Fifth Avenue and in the rear of the famous Spencer house, itself one of the show places of that wonderful thoroughfare. Spencer had built the museum at great cost simply to house those treasures which were too dear to him to entrust to a public institution. It was in the shape of a rectangle and planned with special care as to the lighting.

Dr. Lith, a rather stout, mild-eyed German savant, plunged directly into the middle of things as soon as we had been introduced. “It is a most remarkable affair, gentlemen,” he began, placing for us chairs that must have been hundreds of years old. “At first it was only those objects in the museum, that were green that were touched, like the collection of famous and historic French emeralds. But soon we found it was other things, too, that were missing—old Roman coins of gold, a collection of watches, and I know not what else until we have gone over the—”

“Where is Miss White?” interrupted Spencer, who had been listening somewhat impatiently.

“In the library, sir. Shall I call her?”

“No, I will go myself. I want her to tell her experience to Professor Kennedy exactly as she told it to me. Explain while I am gone how impossible it would be for a visitor to do one, to say nothing of all, of the acts of vandalism we have discovered.”

VII

THE GREEN CURSE

The American Medici disappeared into his main library, where Miss White was making a minute examination to determine what damage had been done in the realm over which she presided.

“Apparently every book with a green binding has been mutilated in some way,” resumed Dr. Lith, “but that was only the beginning. Others have suffered, too, and some are even gone. It is impossible that any visitor could have done it. Only a few personal friends of Mr. Spencer are ever admitted here, and they are never alone. No, it is weird, mysterious.”

Just then Spencer returned with Miss White. She was an extremely attractive girl, slight of figure, but with an air about her that all the imported gowns in New York could not have conferred. They were engaged in animated conversation, so much in contrast with the bored air with which Spencer had listened to Dr. Lith that even I noticed that the connoisseur was completely obliterated in the man, whose love of beauty was by no means confined to the inanimate. I wondered if it was merely his interest in her story that impelled Spencer. The more I watched the girl the more I was convinced that she knew that she was interesting to the millionaire.

“For example,” Dr. Lith was saying, “the famous collection of emeralds which has disappeared has always been what you Americans call ‘hoodooed.’ They have always brought ill luck, and, like many things of the sort to which superstition attaches, they have been ‘banked,’ so to speak, by their successive owners in museums.”

“Are they salable; that is, could any one dispose of the emeralds or the other curios with reasonable safety and at a good price?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” hastened Dr. Lith, “not as collections, but separately. The emeralds alone cost fifty thousand dollars. I believe Mr. Spencer bought them for Mrs. Spencer some years before she died. She did not care to wear them, however, and had them placed here.”

I thought I noticed a shade of annoyance cross the face of the magnate. “Never mind that,” he interrupted. “Let me introduce Miss White. I think you will find her story one of the most uncanny you have ever heard.”

He had placed a chair for her and, still addressing us but looking at her, went on: “It seems that the morning the vandalism was first discovered she and Dr. Lith at once began a thorough search of the building to ascertain the extent of the depredations. The search lasted all day, and well into the night. I believe it was midnight before you finished?”

“It was almost twelve,” began the girl, in a musical voice that was too Parisian to harmonize with her plain Anglo-Saxon name, “when Dr. Lith was down here in his office checking off the objects in the catalogue which were either injured or missing. I had been working in the library. The noise of something like a shade flapping in the wind attracted my attention. I listened. It seemed to come from the art-gallery, a large room up-stairs where some of the greatest masterpieces in this country are hung. I hurried up there.

“Just as I reached the door a strange feeling seemed to come over me that I was not alone in that room. I fumbled for the electric light switch, but in my nervousness could not find it. There was just enough light in the room to make out objects indistinctly. I thought I heard a low, moaning sound from an old Flemish copper ewer near me. I had heard that it was supposed to groan at night.”

She paused and shuddered at her recollection, and looked about as if grateful for the flood of electric light that now illuminated everything. Spencer reached over and touched her arm to encourage her to go on. She did not seem to resent the touch.

“Opposite me, in the middle of the open floor,” she resumed, her eyes dilated and her breath coming and going rapidly, “stood the mummy-case of Ka, an Egyptian priestess of Thebes, I think. The case was empty, but on the lid was painted a picture of the priestess! Such wonderful eyes! They seem to pierce right through your very soul. Often in the daytime I have stolen off to look at them. But at night—remember the hour of night, too—oh, it was awful, terrible. The lid of the mummy-case moved, yes, really moved, and seemed to float to one side. I could see it. And back of that carved and painted face with the piercing eyes was another face, a real face, real eyes, and they looked out at me with such hatred from the place that I knew was empty—”

She had risen and was facing us with wild terror written on her face as if in appeal for protection against something she was powerless to name. Spencer, who had not taken his hand off her arm, gently pressed her back into the easy chair and finished the story.

“She screamed and fainted. Dr. Lith heard it and rushed up-stairs. There she lay on the floor. The lid of the sarcophagus had really been moved. He saw it. Not a thing else had been disturbed. He carried her down here and revived her, told her to rest for a day or two, but—”

“I cannot, I cannot,” she cried. “It is the fascination of the thing. It brings me back here. I dream of it. I thought I saw those eyes the other night. They haunt me. I fear them, and yet I would not avoid them, if it killed me to look. I must meet and defy the power. What is it? Is it a curse four thousand years old that has fallen on me?”

I had heard stories of mummies that rose from their sleep of centuries to tell the fate of some one when it was hanging in the balance, of mummies that groaned and gurgled and fought for breath, frantically beating with their swathed hands in the witching hours of the night. And I knew that the lure of these mummies was so strong for some people that they were drawn irresistibly to look upon and confer with them. Was this a case for the oculists, the spiritualists, the Egyptologists, or for a detective?

“I should like to examine the art gallery, in fact, go over the whole museum,” put in Kennedy in his most matter-of-fact tone.