The Fourth Plague (10 page)

“Do you remember how we sent the man from Florence to kill him? We never saw that man again,” the big man's voice shook a little, for the man from Florence had been his brother. “Tillizini sent me his hand—that is all—by parcel post! Just the hand of the man from Rome, with the rings of the brotherhood still upon his finger. No name to identify the sender, and the postmark ‘Paris.'

“It cannot be done, I tell you,” he said, “the man is not human.”

Festini was listening with an amused smile.

“He is sufficiently human, my friend,” he said, softly, “only he is more clever than the men who have been pitted against him. Now I propose, myself, to arrange matters with Signor Tillizini. I have tried every one of our agents, and they have all failed. I must take up my share of the work. Here is a dangerous enemy, who may spoil our plans. To-night, whilst our friends are reconnoitring the ground at Burboro', I myself will work independently.”

“Shall I come with you?” asked the other, eagerly. “Signor, I would give my life for you.”

He spoke with sincerity. There was no questioning the honesty of the dog-like faithfulness of this big man.

Again Festini smiled.

“I will work alone, my good friend,” he said, and tapped the other on the shoulder with his white hand, approvingly. “These things must be done with subtlety if they are to succeed.”

He rested his head upon his hands for a few minutes, deep in thought. The other waited patiently, his deep-set eyes filled with love and admiration for the master whose house he had served all his life.

“There is a man,” said Festini, suddenly, “who is a sort of agent of this Tillizini. Now, you shall go to him and kill him.”

He spoke as though it were a very ordinary transaction which he had asked the other to undertake.

Il Bue nodded.

“It will be simple,” he said. “I can do it to-night.”

Festini was still thinking.

“No,” he said, after a while, “do not kill him. Take him away to the house by the river. You know where I mean?”

The other nodded.

“When you have got him safe, send a letter to Tillizini saying that you have him, and demanding a ransom—say of 500, and leave the rest to me.”

The big man rose.

“I will see about this at once, Signor,” he said. “God prosper you.”

With which commendation he left the restaurant.

X. —A WAY OF TILLIZINI'S

TILLIZINI WAS SITTING IN his room, examining a number of photographs that he had received that morning from Florence, when the note came to him.

He opened and read it.

It was brief and to the point.

“We have taken your spy. You will give us five hundred English pounds, and he shall be released. By Order of The Red Hand.”

He folded it carefully.

“Is the messenger still waiting?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said the servant, “it was a boy who handed it in.”

Tillizini examined the note again, and smiled. He rose from the table and went to the telephone which stood on a small bracket near the wall. He gave a Treasury number which is not in the telephone book, it is only to be found in the small volume issued to Cabinet Ministers and to public officials, and in a few seconds he was connected with Inspector Crocks.

“They have taken my man,” he said; “at least they say they have, and I suppose they are speaking the truth. They demand £500 for his immediate release.”

“What are you going to do?” asked the inspector's voice.

“I'm going to release him,” said the other, “though I have my doubts as to whether they really want the money.”

In a few minutes they were driving to Smith's lodgings. The landlady gave him all the information he required, and another hour's search revealed the place where his man had been captured. As he thought, it was on the wharf from whence he usually set his make-believe flash-signals. There were signs of a little struggle. Some children, playing in the dark street from which the wharf was gained, had seen four men, very drunk as they thought, staggering to a waiting motor-car.

There is a little club in Soho where men, with certain political views, may be found between the hours of eleven at night and five in the morning.

At a quarter to twelve the stout man Pietro, who had formed the third at the Deptford conference, entered the club and, after a fruitless inspection of its members, came out again.

He walked through Soho, crossed Oxford Street, and entered one of the slummy thoroughfares which abound in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road.

He let himself into a gloomy house with a key, and closed the door behind him.

His room was on the ground floor. He unlocked the door, went in, and again closed and locked it before he struck a match.

His hands were fumbling with a match-box when there was a quick, blinding flash, and he found himself standing in a circle of light thrown by an electric light.

“Don't move,” said a voice, “or I will kill you.”

The intruder spoke in Italian.

“You may light the gas,” said the unknown.

The circle of light followed the alarmed man, as he moved to the centre of the room, reached up and ignited an incandescent burner.

“Tillizini!” he gasped.

“It is I,” said the other easily. “Your doors are shut—yes. Your windows are shuttered, of course. Sit down.”

Shaking in every limb, the man obeyed. The revolver in the professor's hand was an excellent excuse for obedience.

“Where have you been to-night?”

“That is no business of yours,” growled the other. “You have no right to come into my room. What have you stolen?”

“Don't be foolish,” said Tillizini, calmly. “Stand up again, put your hands above your head. Thank you, Signor.”

His deft fingers searched the other, removed a revolver from the hip-pocket and a knife from inside the waistband of his trousers. These he laid on the table, first jerking open the chamber of the revolver scientifically. There was a little clatter of cartridges as they fell on the floor.

“Now I want your hand,” he said. “Hold it out.”

Hesitatingly, the other man obeyed, his fearful eyes fixed upon the calm face of the other.

Tillizini leant over and raised the hand to his face. His sensitive nostrils dilated. He had no difficulty in detecting the scent of the attar of roses with which his spy's papers had been impregnated.

“Yes,” he said, “you are the man I want.”

The fear deepened in the stout man's eyes.

“What do you mean?” he gasped.

He had a superstitious dread of this undefeatable man. With the ignorance of his kind he had endowed him with powers which were almost supernatural.

“I want the man you helped to kidnap to-night, or if you did not help to kidnap, assisted in searching,” said the Italian, pleasantly.

“It's a lie,” said the other. “I know nothing about a kidnapped man.”

“The man you searched to-night,” continued Tillizini, unemotionally, “whose pockets you ransacked, whose papers you examined. Where is he?”

The look of fear in the man's face was ludicrous.

“How do you know?” he gasped.

“I know,” said Tillizini. “That is sufficient.”

He waited for the stout man to speak, but in whatever fear he stood of the detective, his terror of reprisal from his comrades was a greater factor.

“I can tell you nothing—nothing,” he said, sullenly.

“Then you shall come a little journey with me,” said Tillizini. “We will leave the light, if you don't mind. Get up.”

He went to the door and, standing with his back against it, unlocked it.

“You will go first,” he said.

Outside the street was deserted, save for a number of children who were playing noisily in the roadway.

“To the right,” said Tillizini, curtly.

The man obeyed.

Drawn up by the opposite side of the pavement a little way along was a pair-horse brougham. Opposite this Pietro waited till Tillizini's voice stopped him.

“Get in.”

Again the man obeyed and Tillizini followed. He closed the door, and the prisoner noted that he gave no instructions as to where the man was to drive. Evidently that had already been arranged. His wonder was dissipated when he found the carriage driving along the Thames Embankment. He was going to Tillizini's house. He pulled himself together. He was half losing his nerve. After all, Tillizini could not torture him here, in the heart of London, and he a Government official.

It was to Adelphi Terrace that the carriage drove and pulled up before the detective's house.

“Get out.”

The map followed his instructions. Tillizini's ring was instantly answered by a servant. The two men stepped into the hall.

“Has anybody been?” asked the detective, in English.

“No, sir, except a man called with a parcel for you.”

“A parcel?” He looked thoughtful. “A large parcel?” he asked, idly.

“No, sir, a smallish parcel,” replied the man. “He would not leave it until I signed for it.”

“I see,” said the detective, “and so you left him at the hall door whilst you went down to get a pencil?”

The man smiled.

“Oh, no, sir, I took the parcel from him—there it is on the hall table. I wouldn't leave the door.”

Tillizini's lips twitched. In the most tragic moments of his life he could find sources of amusement. He scarcely gave the parcel more than a passing glance. Instead, his eyes rapidly surveyed the floor. He opened the door, and looked at the lock. It was a patent lock with a small catch. From the slot into which the bevelled snap caught he extracted two little threads. He examined them briefly and kept them between the finger and thumb of his left hand. All the time he kept his hold upon his revolver, though the servant did not observe it.

“Very good, Thomas,” he said, as he closed the door again, “you may go.
Marchez, mon ami
.”

This last was to his prisoner. Pietro obeyed. He mounted the broad staircase to the dark landing above, and Tillizini stepped close to his prisoner.

“Go through that door,” he said.

Pietro did so.

He flung the door open, hesitated a moment, then stepped in. When the Italian's hand was on the knob of the door, Tillizini spoke. He was addressing apparently a person below.

“All right, Thomas,” he said loudly, “you may bring up that parcel now.”

Then he pushed Pietro into the room. It was in complete darkness, as he expected. The captive stood hesitating in the doorway for a fraction of a second, Tillizini behind him, waiting. He had only to wait for an infinitesimal space of time. From the darkness in the room four shots rang out in rapid succession and Pietro pitched forward on his face, a dying man.

Tillizini had moved swiftly under cover of the doorway. He offered no view of himself to his hidden enemy. He heard the quick steps of Thomas. In the hall below were governing switches by which any room in the house could be illuminated. A quick order from Tillizini, and the lights blazed up in his room.

He sprang in, leaping over the twitching form of the fallen man. The room was empty; it offered no cover to any person in hiding. There was no need to search beyond the open window. The man who had waited there had already prepared and carried into effect his escape.

Tillizini shut down the switch and the room was in darkness again. He flew to the window. A slender rope had been fastened to the leg of his heavy writing table. It extended across the room, through the open window, and now swung to and fro in the breeze below.

The street was empty. There was no profit in searching farther. He closed down the window and 'phoned the police.

The man on the floor was too far gone for help. He was dying when Tillizini reached his side. With the help of the servant and a hastily-summoned policeman he was laid on the settee, where a few nights before the helpless and innocent victim of the “Red Hand's” plotting had lain.

Tillizini's busy hands plucked phial after phial from his medicine chest…the man revived a little, but it was evident, long before the police surgeon came, that he had no chance. He looked up at Tillizini's emotionless face with a faint smile.

“Signor,” he said, in Italian, “I ought to have known better—it was thus you trapped others. I have certain monies at the bank”—he named the institution—“I wish that money to go to my sister, who is a widow at Sezzori.”

“That I will send, Pietro.”

“You know my name,” said the dying man.

“I know you very well,” said Tillizini.

The man looked at him bleakly.

“Some day,” he said, at last—his voice was growing fainter—“they will have you, our brave ‘Red Hand,' Signor, and there will be a great killing.”

He checked himself and looked round at the uncomprehending policeman, who could not understand the language, and at the servant, obviously English and agitated by the extraordinary character of the evening.

Then he half whispered.

“There is something I wish to tell you, Signor.”

His voice was now difficult to hear. Tillizini bent his head to catch the words, and in that moment the dying man mustered his last reserve of strength; by sheer effort of malignant will he called into play all the vital forces which were left alive within him. As Tillizini's head sank lower and lower, Pietro's hand crept to his side.

“Signor,” he whispered, “take that!” Quick as he was, Tillizini was quicker. As he whipped round, his vice-like grip held the other's wrist, and the gleaming knife fell with a clatter to the polished floor. Then with a quick jerk he flung the man's hand down on the settee and stood up, smiling.

“How like a rat, Pietro, how like a rat!” And the dying man, unrepentant of his many villainies, of the sorrow and the suffering he had brought to so many people, saw with the glaze of death filming his eyes, the lips of Tillizini part in an amused and contemptuous smile.

An hour later Tillizini sat in the private office of Inspector Crocks, of Scotland Yard.

“It was a narrow squeak for you,” said the inspector, admiringly.

“There were two,” said Tillizini, dryly. “Which one do you mean?”

“The first, I think, was the most serious,” said the Englishman.

“Now it's strange that you should say that,” said Tillizini. “I think the second was—the dagger was poisoned. I discovered that soon after.”

“Poisoned?”

“Yes, with a poison that is not a particularly pleasant one—tetanus,” he said.

“Good God!” said the inspector, genuinely shocked. “That's the germ of lock-jaw, isn't it?”

Tillizini nodded.

“That is it,” he said, cheerfully. “A pleasant end especially planned for me. I tell you these men are scientists in a crude way. I knew he was upstairs waiting, the first man. An old trick that, you've probably had it played on innocent suburban folk of this city hundreds of times.”

The inspector agreed with a gesture.

“When the amiable Thomas closed the door, our friend who delivered the parcel quickly put up a piece of canvas paper backed with a strong silk fabric. The door caught in the staple, but so did the strong silk. When he considered the coast was clear and he judged Thomas to be out of the way, he had but to pull the projecting end—”

“I know the trick,” said the inspector. “I've seen it done a score of times.”

“I suspected something of the sort,” said Tillizini, “but mostly I suspected a parcel. I thought, too, that the kidnapping of Smith was a ruse to get me out so that a warm welcome might be prepared for me when I came back.”

“Have you found the man?”

“He'll be found,” said Tillizini, “by to-morrow morning.”

“I've got men out now hunting for him,” said Crocks. “It's rather a difficult job, Tillizini, dealing with your people.”

Tillizini smiled.

“They are somewhat different to the average English criminal,” he said. “One of these days when you are in Florence, Inspector, you must come to my museum and I'll show you the skulls of typical criminals of all countries. I will explain then to you just why our Southern men are more dangerous to handle, and if you would be patient with me,” he favoured the policeman with his little bow, “I would then as briefly as possible give you the basis by which you may forejudge men's actions.”