Chapter 7

Spencer, with a glance at his watch, excused himself, nodding to Dr. Lith to show us about, and with a good night to Miss White which was noticeable for its sympathy with her fears, said, “I shall be at the house for another half-hour at least, in case anything really important develops.”

A few minutes later Miss White left for the night, with apparent reluctance, and yet, I thought, with just a little shudder as she looked back up the staircase that led to the art-gallery.

Dr. Lith led us into a large vaulted marble hall and up a broad flight of steps, past beautiful carvings and frescoes that I should have liked to stop and admire.

The art-gallery was a long room in the interior and at the top of the building, windowless but lighted by a huge double skylight each half of which must have been some eight or ten feet across. The light falling through this skylight passed through plate glass of marvellous transparency. One looked up at the sky as if through the air itself.

Kennedy ignored the gallery’s profusion of priceless art for the time and went directly to the mummy-case of the priestess Ka.

“It has a weird history,” remarked Dr. Lith. “No less than seven deaths, as well as many accidents, have been attributed to the malign influence of that greenish yellow coffin. You know the ancient Egyptians used to chant as they buried their sacred dead: ‘Woe to him who injures the tomb. The dead shall point out the evildoer to the Devourer of the Underworld. Soul and body shall be destroyed.’”

It was indeed an awesome thing. It represented a woman in the robes of an Egyptian priestess, a woman of medium height, with an inscrutable face. The slanting Egyptian eyes did, as Miss White had said, almost literally stare through you. I am sure that any one possessing a nature at all affected by such things might after a few minutes gazing at them in self-hypnotism really convince himself that the eyes moved and were real. Even as I turned and looked the other way I felt that those penetrating eyes were still looking at me, never asleep, always keen and searching.

There was no awe about Kennedy. He carefully pushed aside the lid and peered inside. I almost expected to see some one in there. A moment later he pulled out his magnifying-glass and carefully examined the interior. At last he was apparently satisfied with his search. He had narrowed his attention down to a few marks on the stone, partly in the thin layer of dust that had collected on the bottom.

“This was a very modern and material reincarnation,” he remarked, as he rose. “If I am not mistaken, the apparition wore shoes, shoes with nails in the heels, and nails that are not like those in American shoes. I shall have to compare the marks I have found with marks I have copied from shoe-nails in the wonderful collection of M. Bertillon. Offhand, I should say that the shoes were of French make.”

The library having been gone over next without anything attracting Kennedy’s attention particularly, he asked about the basement or cellar. Dr. Lith lighted the way, and we descended.

Down there were innumerable huge packing-cases which had just arrived from abroad, full of the latest consignment of art treasures which Spencer had purchased. Apparently Dr. Lith and Miss White had been so engrossed in discovering what damage had been done to the art treasures above that they had not had time to examine the new ones in the basement.

Kennedy’s first move was to make a thorough search of all the little grated windows and a door which led out into a sort of little areaway for the removal of ashes and refuse. The door showed no evidence of having been tampered with, nor did any of the windows at first sight. A low exclamation from Kennedy brought us to his side. He had opened one of the windows and thrust his hand out against the grating, which had fallen on the outside pavement with a clang. The bars had been completely and laboriously sawed through, and the whole thing had been wedged back into place so that nothing would be detected at a cursory glance. He was regarding the lock on the window. Apparently it was all right; actually it had been sprung so that it was useless.

“Most persons,” he remarked, “don’t know enough about jimmies. Against them an ordinary door-lock or window-catch is no protection. With a jimmy eighteen inches long even an anaemic burglar can exert a pressure sufficient to lift two tons. Not one window in a thousand can stand that strain. The only use of locks is to keep out sneak-thieves and compel the modern scientific educated burglar to make a noise. But making a noise isn’t enough here, at night. This place with all its fabulous treasures must be guarded constantly, now, every hour, as if the front door were wide open.”

The bars replaced and the window apparently locked as before, Craig devoted his efforts to examining the packing cases in the basement. As yet apparently nothing down there had been disturbed. But while rummaging about, from an angle formed behind one of the cases he drew forth a cane, to all appearances an ordinary Malacca walking-stick. He balanced it in his hand a moment, then shook his head.

“Too heavy for a Malacca,” he ruminated. Then an idea seemed to occur to him. He gave the handle a twist. Sure enough, it came off, and as it did so a bright little light flashed up.

“Well, what do you think of that?” he exclaimed. “For a scientific dark-lantern that is the neatest thing I have ever seen. An electric light cane, with a little incandescent lamp and a battery hidden in it. This grows interesting. We must at last have found the cache of a real gentleman burglar such as Bertillon says exists only in books. I wonder if he has anything else hidden back here.”

He reached down and pulled out a peculiar little instrument—a single blue steel cylinder. He fitted a hard rubber cap snugly into the palm of his hand, and with the first and middle fingers encircled the cylinder over a steel ring near the other end.

A loud report followed, and a vase, just unpacked, at the opposite end of the basement was shattered as if by an explosion.

“Phew!” exclaimed Kennedy. “I didn’t mean to do that. I knew the thing was loaded, but I had no idea the hair-spring ring at the end was so delicate as to shoot it off at a touch. It’s one of those aristocratic little Apache pistols that one can carry in his vest pocket and hide in his hand. Say, but that stung! And back here is a little box of cartridges, too.”

We looked at each other in amazement at the chance find. Apparently the vandal had planned a series of visits.

“Now, let me see,” resumed Kennedy. “I suppose our very human but none the less mysterious intruder expected to use these again. Well, let him try. I’ll put them back here for the present. I want to watch in the art-gallery to-night.”

I could not help wondering whether, after all, it might not be an inside job and the fixing of the window merely a blind. Or was the vandal fascinated by the subtle influence of mysticism that so often seems to emanate from objects that have come down from the remote ages of the world? I could not help asking myself whether the story that Miss White had told was absolutely true. Had there been anything more than superstition in the girl’s evident fright? She had seen something, I felt sure, for it was certain she was very much disturbed. But what was it she had really seen? So far all that Kennedy had found had proved that the reincarnation of the priestess Ka had been very material. Perhaps the “reincarnation” had got in in the daytime and had spent the hours until night in the mummy-case. It might well have been chosen as the safest and least suspicious hiding-place.

Kennedy evidently had some ideas and plans, for no sooner had he completed arrangements with Dr. Lith so that we could get into the museum that night to watch, than he excused himself. Scarcely around the corner on the next business street he hurried into a telephone booth.

“I called up First Deputy O’Connor,” he explained as he left the booth a quarter of an hour later. “You know it is the duty of two of O’Connor’s men to visit all the pawn-shops of the city at least once a week, looking over recent pledges and comparing them with descriptions of stolen articles. I gave him a list from that catalogue of Dr. Lith’s and I think that if any of the emeralds, for instance, have been pawned his men will be on the alert and will find it out.”

We had a leisurely dinner at a near-by hotel, during most of which time Kennedy gazed vacantly at his food. Only once did he mention the case, and that was almost as if he were thinking aloud.

“Nowadays,” he remarked, “criminals are exceptionally well informed. They used to steal only money and jewels; to-day it is famous pictures and antiques also. They know something about the value of antique bronze and marble. In fact, the spread of a taste for art has taught the enterprising burglar that such things are worth money, and he, in turn, has educated up the receivers of stolen goods to pay a reasonable percentage of the value of his artistic plunder. The success of the European art thief is enlightening the American thief. That’s why I think we’ll find some of this stuff in the hands of the professional fences.”

It was still early in the evening when we returned to the museum and let ourselves in with the key that Dr. Lith had loaned Kennedy. He had been anxious to join us in the watch, but Craig had diplomatically declined, a circumstance that puzzled me and set me thinking that perhaps he suspected the curator himself.

We posted ourselves in an angle where we could not possibly be seen even if the full force of the electrolier were switched on. Hour after hour we waited. But nothing happened. There were strange and weird noises in plenty, not calculated to reassure one, but Craig was always ready with an explanation.

It was in the forenoon of the day after our long and unfruitful vigil in the art-gallery that Dr. Lith himself appeared at our apartment in a great state of perturbation.

“Miss White has disappeared,” he gasped, in answer to Craig’s hurried question. “When I opened the museum, she was not there as she is usually. Instead, I found this note.”

He laid the following hastily written message on the table:

Do not try to follow me. It is the green curse that has pursued me from Paris. I cannot escape it, but I may prevent it from affecting others.

LUCILLE WHITE.

That was all. We looked at each other at a loss to understand the enigmatic wording—“the green curse.”

“I rather expected something of the sort,” observed Kennedy. “By the way, the shoenails were French, as I surmised. They show the marks of French heels. It was Miss White herself who hid in the mummy-case.”

“Impossible,” exclaimed Dr. Lith incredulously. As for myself, I had learned that it was of no use being incredulous with Kennedy.

A moment later the door opened, and one of O’Connor’s men came in bursting with news. Some of the emeralds had been discovered in a Third Avenue pawn-shop. O’Connor, mindful of the historic fate of the Mexican Madonna and the stolen statue of the Egyptian goddess Neith, had instituted a thorough search with the result that at least part of the pilfered jewels had been located. There was only one clue to the thief, but it looked promising. The pawnbroker described him as “a crazy Frenchman of an artist,” tall, with a pointed black beard. In pawning the jewels he had given the name of Edouard Delaverde, and the city detectives were making a canvass of the better known studios in hope of tracing him.

Kennedy, Dr. Lith and myself walked around to the boarding-house where Miss White lived. There was nothing about it, from the landlady to the gossip, to distinguish it from scores of other places of the better sort. We had no trouble in finding out that Miss White had not returned home at all the night before. The landlady seemed to look on her as a woman of mystery, and confided to us that it was an open secret that she was not an American at all, but a French girl whose name, she believed, was really Lucille Leblanc—which, after all, was White. Kennedy made no comment, but I wavered between the conclusions that she had been the victim of foul play and that she might be the criminal herself, or at least a member of a band of criminals.

No trace of her could be found through the usual agencies for locating missing persons. It was the middle of the afternoon, however, when word came to us that one of the city detectives had apparently located the studio of Delaverde. It was coupled with the interesting information that the day before a woman roughly answering the description of Miss White had been seen there. Delaverde himself was gone.

The building to which the detective took us was down-town in a residence section which had remained as a sort of little eddy to one side of the current of business that had swept everything before it up-town. It was an old building and large, and was entirely given over to studios of artists.

Into one of the cheapest of the suites we were directed. It was almost bare of furniture and in a peculiarly shiftless state of disorder. A half-finished picture stood in the centre of the room, and several completed ones were leaning against the wall. They were of the wildest character imaginable. Even the conceptions of the futurists looked tame in comparison.

Kennedy at once began rummaging and exploring. In a corner of a cupboard near the door he disclosed a row of dark-colored bottles. One was filled halfway with an emerald-green liquid.

He held it up to the light and read the label, “Absinthe.”

“Ah,” he exclaimed with evident interest, looking first at the bottle and then at the wild, formless pictures. “Our crazy Frenchman was an absintheur. I thought the pictures were rather the product of a disordered mind than of genius.”

He replaced the bottle, adding: “It is only recently that our own government placed a ban on the importation of that stuff as a result of the decision of the Department of Agriculture that it was dangerous to health and conflicted with the pure food law. In France they call it the ‘scourge,’ the ‘plague,’ the ‘enemy,’ the ‘queen of poisons.’ Compared with other alcoholic beverages it has the greatest toxicity of all. There are laws against the stuff in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. It isn’t the alcohol alone, although there is from fifty to eighty per cent. in it, that makes it so deadly. It is the absinthe, the oil of wormwood, whose bitterness has passed into a proverb. The active principle absinthin is a narcotic poison. The stuff creates a habit most insidious and difficult to break, a longing more exacting than hunger. It is almost as fatal as cocaine in its blasting effects on mind and body.

“Wormwood,” he pursued, still rummaging about, “has a special affinity for the brain-cells and the nervous system in general. It produces a special affliction of the mind, which might be called absinthism. Loss of will follows its use, brutishness, softening of the brain. It gives rise to the wildest hallucinations. Perhaps that was why our absintheur chose first to destroy or steal all things green, as if there were some merit in the colour, when he might have made away with so many more valuable things. Absintheurs have been known to perform some of the most intricate manoeuvres, requiring great skill and the use of delicate tools. They are given to disappearing, and have no memory of their actions afterward.”

On an ink-spattered desk lay some books, including Lombroso’s “Degenerate Man” and “Criminal Woman.” Kennedy glanced at them, then at a crumpled manuscript that was stuck into a pigeonhole. It was written in a trembling, cramped, foreign hand, evidently part of a book, or an article.

“Oh, the wickedness of wealth!” it began. “While millions of the poor toilers slave and starve and shiver, the slave-drivers of to-day, like the slave-drivers of ancient Egypt, spend the money wrung from the blood of the people in useless and worthless toys of art while the people have no bread, in old books while the people have no homes, in jewels while the people have no clothes. Thousands are spent on dead artists, but a dollar is grudged to a living genius. Down with such art! I dedicate my life to righting the wrongs of the proletariat. Vive l’anarchism!”

The thing was becoming more serious. But by far the most serious discovery in the now deserted studio was a number of large glass tubes in a corner, some broken, others not yet used and standing in rows as if waiting to be filled. A bottle labelled “Sulphuric Acid” stood at one end of a shelf, while at the other was a huge jar full of black grains, next a bottle of chlorate of potash. Kennedy took a few of the black grains and placed them on a metal ash-tray. He lighted a match. There was a puff and a little cloud of smoke.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “black gunpowder. Our absintheur was a bomb-maker, an expert perhaps. Let me see. I imagine he was making an explosive bomb, ingeniously contrived of five glass tubes. The centre one, I venture, contained sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash separated by a close-packed wad of cotton wool. Then the two tubes on each side probably contained the powder, and perhaps the outside tubes were filled with spirits of turpentine. When it is placed in position, it is so arranged that the acid in the center tube is uppermost and will thus gradually soak through the cotton wool and cause great heat and an explosion by contact with the potash. That would ignite the powder in the next tubes, and that would scatter the blazing turpentine, causing a terrific explosion and a widespread fire. With an imperative idea of vengeance, such as that manuscript discloses, either for his own wrongs as an artist or for the fancied wrongs of the people, what may this absintheur not be planning now? He has disappeared, but perhaps he may be more dangerous if found than if lost.”

VIII

THE MUMMY CASE

The horrible thought occurred to me that perhaps he was not alone. I had seen Spencer’s infatuation with his attractive librarian. The janitor of the studio-building was positive that a woman answering her description had been a visitor at the studio. Would she be used to get at the millionaire and his treasures? Was she herself part of the plot to victimise, perhaps kill, him? The woman had been much of an enigma to me at first. She was more so now. It was barely possible that she, too, was an absintheur, who had shaken off the curse for a time only to relapse into it again.

If there were any thoughts like these passing through Kennedy’s mind he did not show it, at least not in the shape of hesitating in the course he had evidently mapped out to follow. He said little, but hurried off from the studio in a cab up-town again to the laboratory. A few minutes later we were speeding down to the museum.

There was not much time for Craig to work if he hoped to be ready for anything that might happen that night. He began by winding coil after coil of copper wire about the storeroom in the basement of the museum. It was not a very difficult matter to conceal it, so crowded was the room, or to lead the ends out through a window at the opposite side from that where the window had been broken open.

Up-stairs in the art-gallery he next installed several boxes such as those which I had seen him experimenting with during his tests of selenium on the afternoon when Mr. Spencer had first called on us. They were camera-like boxes, about ten inches long, three inches or so wide, and four inches deep.

One end was open, or at least looked as though the end had been shoved several inches into the interior of the box. I looked into one of the boxes and saw a slit in the wall that had been shoved in. Kennedy was busy adjusting the apparatus, and paused only to remark that the boxes contained two sensitive selenium surfaces balanced against two carbon resistances. There was also in the box a clockwork mechanism which Craig wound up and set ticking ever so softly. Then he moved a rod that seemed to cover the slit, until the apparatus was adjusted to his satisfaction, a delicate operation, judging by the care he took. Several of these boxes were installed, and by that time it was quite late.

Wires from the apparatus in the art-gallery also led outside, and these as well as the wires from the coils down in the basement he led across the bit of garden back of the Spencer house and up to a room on the top floor. In the upper room he attached the wires from the storeroom to what looked like a piece of crystal and a telephone receiver. Those from the art-gallery terminated in something very much like the apparatus which a wireless operator wears over his head.

Among other things which Craig had brought down from the laboratory was a package which he had not yet unwrapped. He placed it near the window, still wrapped. It was quite large, and must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. That done, he produced a tape-measure and began, as if he were a surveyor, to measure various distances and apparently to calculate the angles and distances from the window-sill of the Spencer house to the skylight, which was the exact centre of the museum. The straight distance, if I recall correctly, was in the neighborhood of four hundred feet.

These preparations completed, there was nothing left to do but to wait for something to happen. Spencer had declined to get alarmed about our fears for his own safety, and only with difficulty had we been able to dissuade him from moving heaven and earth to find Miss White, a proceeding which must certainly have disarranged Kennedy’s carefully laid plans. So interested was he that he postponed one of the most important business conferences of the year, growing out of the anti-trust suits, in order to be present with Dr. Lith and ourselves in the little upper back room.

It was quite late when Kennedy completed his hasty arrangements, yet as the night advanced we grew more and more impatient for something to happen. Craig was apparently even more anxious than he had been the night before, when we watched in the art-gallery itself. Spencer was nervously smoking, lighting one cigar furiously from another until the air was almost blue.

Scarcely a word was spoken as hour after hour Craig sat with the receiver to his ear, connected with the coils down in the storeroom. “You might call this an electric detective,” he had explained to Spencer. “For example, if you suspected that anything out of the way was going on in a room anywhere this would report much to you even if you were miles away. It is the discovery of a student of Thorne Baker, the English electrical expert. He was experimenting with high-frequency electric currents, investigating the nature of the discharges used for electrifying certain things. Quite by accident he found that when the room on which he was experimenting was occupied by some person his measuring-instruments indicated that fact. He tested the degree of variation by passing the current first through the room and then through a sensitive crystal to a delicate telephone receiver. There was a distinct change in the buzzing sound heard through the telephone when the room was occupied or unoccupied. What I have done is to wind single loops of plain wire on each side of that room down there, as well as to wind around the room a few turns of concealed copper wire. These collectors are fitted to a crystal of carborundum and a telephone receiver.”

We had each tried the thing and could hear a distinct buzzing in the receiver.

“The presence of a man or woman in that room would be evident to a person listening miles away,” he went on. “A high-frequency current is constantly passing through that storeroom. That is what causes that normal buzzing.”