JUST AS THE PERFECT MURDERER is someone who commits the crime without being suspected, perhaps even having the death seem accidental or natural, the Infallible Godahl has never even been suspected of a crime, much less been caught or convicted. He may well be the greatest criminal in the history of mystery fiction. Unlike such better-known thieves as A. J. Raffles, Arsène Lupin, and Simon Templar (the Saint), who rely on their wit, charm, intuition, and good luck to pull off a caper, Godahl has a purely scientific approach to jobs. His computer-like mind assesses every possibility in terms of logic and probabilities; his successes are triumphs of pure reason—the inevitable victory of superior intellect. His uninterrupted series of successes has made him wealthy enough to join the Pegasus Club, which has a membership restricted to fifty millionaires.
The New York Police Department is endlessly frustrated by the perfect crimes committed by Godahl, whose activities are known only to Oliver Armiston, a writer who has recorded some of his exploits. Godahl’s only fear is of those afflicted with blindness or deafness, as he believes that the loss of any sense heightens the sensitivity of those that remain.
The exploits of Godahl are the product of one of America’s most underrated mystery writers, Frederick Irving Anderson (1877–1947), who also created the only slightly better-known jewel thief Sophie Lang. Born in Aurora, Illinois, Anderson moved east and became a star reporter for the New York World from 1898 to 1908 and then became a successful and highly paid fiction writer for the top American and English magazines, notably The Saturday Evening Post, in which most of his mystery stories, and all six of his Godahl stories, were first published.
Anderson’s stories are written in a slow, circuitous style that may discourage the impatient reader but have a subtle richness that rewards the careful one who will appreciate the events that transpire between the lines.
“The Infallible Godahl” was first published in the February 15, 1913, issue of The Saturday Evening Post; it was first collected in The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1914).
OLIVER ARMISTON never was much of a sportsman with a rod or gun—though he could do fancy work with a pistol in a shooting gallery. He had, however, one game from which he derived the utmost satisfaction. Whenever he went traveling, which was often, he invariably caught his trains by the tip of the tail, so to speak, and hung on till he could climb aboard. In other words, he believed in close connections. He had a theory that more valuable dollars-and-cents time and good animal heat are wasted warming seats in stations waiting for trains than by missing them. The sum of joy to his methodical mind was to halt the slamming gates at the last fraction of the last second with majestic upraised hand, and to stroll aboard his parlor-car with studied deliberation, while the train crew were gnashing their teeth in rage and swearing to get even with the gateman for letting him through.
Yet Mr. Armiston never missed a train. A good many of them tried to miss him, but none ever succeeded. He reckoned time and distance so nicely that it really seemed as if his trains had nothing else half so important as waiting until Mr. Oliver Armiston got aboard.
On this particular June day he was due in New Haven at two. If he failed to get there at two o’clock he could very easily arrive at three. But an hour is sixty minutes, and a minute is sixty seconds; and, further, Mr. Armiston, having passed his word that he would be there at two o’clock, surely would be.
On this particular day, by the time Armiston finally got to the Grand Central the train looked like an odds-on favorite. In the first place, he was still in his bed at an hour when another and less experienced traveler would have been watching the clock in the station waiting-room. In the second place, after kissing his wife in that absent-minded manner characteristic of true love, he became tangled in a Broadway traffic rush at the first corner. Scarcely was he extricated from this when he ran into a Socialist mass-meeting at Union Square. It was due only to the wits of his chauffeur that the taxicab was extricated with very little damage to the surrounding human scenery. But our man of method did not fret. Instead, he buried himself in his book, a treatise on Cause and Effect, which at that moment was lulling him with this soothing sentiment:
“There is no such thing as accident. The so-called accidents of every-day life are due to the preordained action of correlated causes, which is inevitable and over which man has no control.”
This was comforting, but not much to the point, when Oliver Armiston looked up and discovered he had reached Twenty-third Street and had come to a halt. A sixty-foot truck, with an underslung burden consisting of a sixty-ton steel girder, had at this point suddenly developed weakness in its off hindwheel and settled down on the pavement across the right of way like a tired elephant. This, of course, was not an accident. It was due to a weakness in the construction of that wheel—a weakness that had from the beginning been destined to block street-cars and taxicabs at this particular spot at this particular hour.
Mr. Armiston dismounted and walked a block. Here he hailed a second taxicab and soon was spinning north again at a fair speed, albeit the extensive building operations in Fourth Avenue had made the street well-nigh impassable.
The roughness of the pavement merely shook up his digestive apparatus and gave it zest for the fine luncheon he was promising himself the minute he stepped aboard his train. His new chauffeur got lost three times in the maze of traffic about the Grand Central Station. This, however, was only human, seeing that the railroad company changed the map of Forty-second Street every twenty-four hours during the course of the building of its new terminal.
Mr. Armiston at length stepped from his taxicab, gave his grip to a porter and paid the driver from a huge roll of bills. This same roll was no sooner transferred back to his pocket than a nimble-fingered pickpocket removed it. This, again, was not an accident. That pickpocket had been waiting there for the last hour for that roll of bills. It was preordained, inevitable. And Oliver Armiston had just thirty seconds to catch his train by the tail and climb aboard. He smiled contentedly to himself.
It was not until he called for his ticket that he discovered his loss. For a full precious second he gazed at the hand that came away empty from his money pocket, and then:
“I find I left my purse at home,” he said, with a grand air he knew how to assume on occasion. “My name is Mister Oliver Armiston.”
Now Oliver Armiston was a name to conjure with.
“I don’t doubt it,” said the ticket agent dryly. “Mister Andrew Carnegie was here yesterday begging carfare to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and Mister John D. Rockefeller quite frequently drops in and leaves his dollar watch in hock. Next!”
And the ticket-agent glared at the man blocking the impatient line and told him to move on.
Armiston flushed crimson. He glanced at the clock. For once in his life he was about to experience that awful feeling of missing his train. For once in his life he was about to be robbed of that delicious sensation of hypnotizing the gatekeeper and walking majestically down that train platform that extends northward under the train-shed a considerable part of the distance toward Yonkers. Twenty seconds! Armiston turned round, still holding his ground, and glared concentrated malice at the man next in line. That man was in a hurry. In his hand he held a bundle of bills. For a second the thief-instinct that is latent in us all suggested itself to Armiston. There within reach of his hand was the money, the precious paltry dollar bills that stood between him and his train. It scared him to discover that he, an upright and honored citizen, was almost in the act of grabbing them like a common pickpocket.
Then a truly remarkable thing happened. The man thrust his handful of bills at Armiston.
“The only way I can raise this blockade is to bribe you,” he said, returning Armiston’s glare. “Here—take what you want—and give the rest of us a chance.”
With the alacrity of a blind beggar miraculously cured by the sight of much money Armiston grabbed the handful, extracted what he needed for his ticket, and thrust the rest back into the waiting hand of his unknown benefactor. He caught the gate by a hair. So did his unknown friend. Together they walked down the platform, each matching the other’s leisurely pace with his own. They might have been two potentates, so deliberately did they catch this train. Armiston would have liked very much to thank this person, but the other presented so forbidding an exterior that it was hard to find a point of attack. By force of habit Armiston boarded the parlor car, quite forgetting he did not have money for a seat. So did the other. The unknown thrust a bill at the porter. “Get me two chairs,” he said. “One is for this gentleman.”
Once inside and settled, Armiston renewed his efforts to thank this strange person. That person took a card from his pocket and handed it to Armiston.
“Don’t run away with the foolish idea,” he said tartly, “that I have done you a service willingly. You were making me miss my train, and I took this means of bribing you to get you out of my way. That is all, sir. At your leisure you may send me your check for the trifle.”
“A most extraordinary person!” said Armiston to himself. “Let me give you my card,” he said to the other. “As to the service rendered, you are welcome to your own ideas on that. For my part I am very grateful.”
The unknown took the proffered card and thrust it in his waistcoat pocket without glancing at it. He swung his chair round and opened a magazine, displaying a pair of broad unneighborly shoulders. This was rather disconcerting to Armiston, who was accustomed to have his card act as an open sesame.
“Damn his impudence!” he said to himself. “He takes me for a mendicant. I’ll make copy of him!”
This was the popular author’s way of getting even with those who offended his tender sensibilities.
Two things worried Armiston: One was his luncheon—or rather the absence of it; and the other was his neighbor. This neighbor, now that Armiston had a chance to study him, was a young man, well set up. He had a fine bronzed face that was not half so surly as his manner. He was now buried up to his ears in a magazine, oblivious of everything about him, even the dining-car porter, who strode down the aisle and announced the first call to lunch in the dining-car.
“I wonder what the fellow is reading,” said Armiston to himself. He peeped over the man’s shoulder and was interested at once, for the stranger was reading a copy of a magazine called by the vulgar The Whited Sepulcher. It was the pride of this magazine that no man on earth could read it without the aid of a dictionary. Yet this person seemed to be enthralled. And what was more to the point, and vastly pleasing to Armiston, the man was at that moment engrossed in one of Armiston’s own effusions. It was one of his crime stories that had won him praise and lucre. It concerned the Infallible Godahl.
These stories were pure reason incarnate in the person of a scientific thief. The plot was invariably so logical that it seemed more like the output of some machine than of a human mind. Of course the plots were impossible, because the fiction thief had to be an incredible genius to carry out the details. But nevertheless they were highly entertaining, fascinating, and dramatic at one and the same time.
And this individual read the story through without winking an eyelash—as though the mental effort cost him nothing—and then, to Armiston’s delight, turned back to the beginning and read it again. The author threw out his chest and shot his cuffs. It was not often that such unconscious tribute fell to his lot. He took the card of his unknown benefactor. It read:
MR. J. BORDEN BENSON
THE TOWERS NEW YORK CITY
“Humph!” snorted Armiston. “An aristocrat—and a snob too!”
At this moment the aristocrat turned in his chair and handed the magazine to his companion. All his bad humor was gone.
“Are you familiar,” he asked, “with this man Armiston’s work? I mean these scientific thief stories that are running now.”
“Ye—yes. Oh, yes,” sputtered Armiston, hastily putting the other’s card away. “I—in fact, you know—I take them every morning before breakfast.”
In a way this was the truth, for Armiston always began his day’s writing before breakfasting.
Mr. Benson smiled—a very fine smile at once boyish and sophisticated.
“Rather a heavy diet early in the morning, I should say,” he replied. “Have you read this last one then?”
“Oh, yes,” said the delighted author.
“What do you think of it?” asked Benson.
The author puckered his lips.
“It is on a par with the others,” he said.
“Yes,” said Benson thoughtfully. “I should say the same thing. And when we have said that there is nothing left to say. They are truly a remarkable product. Quite unique, you know. And yet,” he said, frowning at Armiston, “I believe that this man Armiston is to be ranked as the most dangerous man in the world to-day.”
“Oh, I say——” began Armiston. But he checked himself, chuckling. He was very glad Mr. Benson had not looked at his card.
“I mean it,” said the other decidedly. “And you think so yourself, I fully believe. No thinking man could do otherwise.”
“In just what way? I must confess I have never thought of his work as anything but pure invention.”
It was truly delicious. Armiston would certainly make copy of this person.
“I will grant,” said Benson, “that there is not a thief in the world to-day clever enough—brainy enough—to take advantage of the suggestions put forth in these stories. But some day there will arise a man to whom they will be as simple as an ordinary blueprint, and he will profit accordingly. This magazine, by printing these stories, is merely furnishing him with his tools, showing him how to work. And the worst of it is——”
“Just a minute,” said the author. “Agreeing for the moment that these stories will be the tools of Armiston’s hero in real life some day, how about the popular magazines? They print ten such stories to one of these by Armiston.”
“Ah, my friend,” said Benson, “you forget one thing: The popular magazines deal with real life—the possible, the usual. And in that very thing they protect the public against sharpers, by exposing the methods of those same sharpers. But with Armiston—no. Much as I enjoy him as an intellectual treat, I am afraid——”
He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he fell to shaking his head, as though in amazement at the devilish ingenuity of the author under discussion.
“I am certainly delighted,” thought that author, “that my disagreeable benefactor did not have the good grace to look at my card. This is really most entertaining.” And then aloud, and treading on thin ice: “I should be very glad to tell Oliver what you say and see what he has to say about it.”
Benson’s face broke into a wreath of wrinkles:
“Do you know him? Well, I declare! That is a privilege. I heartily wish you would tell him.”
“Would you like to meet him? I am under obligations to you. I can arrange a little dinner for a few of us.”
“No,” said Benson, shaking his head; “I would rather go on reading him without knowing him. Authors are so disappointing in real life. He may be some puny, anemic little half-portion, with dirty fingernails and all the rest that goes with genius. No offense to your friend! Besides, I am afraid I might quarrel with him.”
“Last call for lunch in the dinin’ cy—yah—aa,” sang the porter. Armiston was looking at his fingernails as the porter passed. They were manicured once a day.
“Come lunch with me,” said Benson heartily. “I should be pleased to have you as my guest. I apologize for being rude to you at the ticket window, but I did want to catch this train mighty bad.”
Armiston laughed. “Well, you have paid my carfare,” he said, “and I won’t deny I am hungry enough to eat a hundred-and-ten-pound rail. I will let you buy me a meal, being penniless.”
Benson arose, and as he drew out his handkerchief the card Armiston had given him fluttered into that worthy’s lap. Armiston closed his hand over it, chuckling again. Fate had given him the chance of preserving his incognito with this person as long as he wished. It would be a rare treat to get him ranting again about the author Armiston.
But Armiston’s host did not rant against his favorite author. In fact he was so enthusiastic over that man’s genius that the same qualities which he decried as a danger to society in his opinion only added luster to the work. Benson asked his guest innumerable questions as to the personal qualities of his ideal, and Armiston shamelessly constructed a truly remarkable person. The other listened entranced.
“No, I don’t want to know him,” he said. “In the first place I haven’t the time, and in the second I’d be sure to start a row. And then there is another thing: If he is half the man I take him to be from what you say, he wouldn’t stand for people fawning on him and telling him what a wonder he is. That’s about what I should be doing, I am afraid.”
“Oh,” said Armiston, “he isn’t so bad as that. He is a—well, a sensible chap, with clean fingernails and all that, you know, and he gets a haircut once every three weeks, the same as the rest of us.”
“I am glad to hear you say so, Mister—er——”
Benson fell to chuckling.
“By gad,” he said, “here we have been talking with each other for an hour, and I haven’t so much as taken a squint at your card to see who you are!”
He searched for the card Armiston had given him.
“Call it Brown,” said Armiston, lying gorgeously and with a feeling of utmost righteousness. “Martin Brown, single, read-and-write, color white, laced shoes and derby hat, as the police say.”
“All right, Mr. Brown; glad to know you. We will have some cigars. You have no idea how much you interest me, Mr. Brown. How much does Armiston get for his stories?”
“Every word he writes brings him the price of a good cigar. I should say he makes forty thousand a year.”
“Humph! That is better than Godahl, his star creation, could bag as a thief, I imagine, let alone the danger of getting snipped with a pistol ball on a venture.”
Armiston puffed up his chest and shot his cuffs again.
“How does he get his plots?”
Armiston knitted his ponderous brows. “There’s the rub,” he said. “You can talk about so-and-so much a word until you are deaf, dumb, and blind. But, after all, it isn’t the number of words or how they are strung together that makes a story. It is the ideas. And ideas are scarce.”
“I have an idea that I have always wanted to have Armiston get hold of, just to see what he could do with it. If you will pardon me, to my way of thinking the really important thing isn’t the ideas, but how to work out the details.”
“What’s your idea?” asked Armiston hastily. He was not averse to appropriating anything he encountered in real life and dressing it up to suit his taste. “I’ll pass it on to Armiston, if you say so.”
“Will you? That’s capital. To begin with,” Mr. Benson said as he twirled his brandy glass with long, lean, silky fingers—a hand Armiston thought he would not like to have handle him in a rage—“To begin with, Godahl, this thief, is not an ordinary thief, he is a highbrow. He has made some big hauls. He must be a very rich man now—eh? You see that he is quite real to me. By this time, I should say, Godahl has acquired such a fortune that thieving for mere money is no longer an object. What does he do? Sit down and live on his income? Not much. He is a person of refined tastes with an eye for the esthetic. He desires art objects, rare porcelains, a gem of rare cut or color set by Benvenuto Cellini, a Leonardo da Vinci—did Godahl steal the Mona Lisa, by the way? He is the most likely person I can think of—or perhaps a Gutenberg Bible. Treasures, things of exquisite beauty to look at, to enjoy in secret, not to show to other people. That is the natural development of this man Godahl, eh?”
“Splendid!” exclaimed Armiston, his enthusiasm getting the better of him.
“Have you ever heard of Mrs. Billy Wentworth?” asked Benson.
“Indeed, I know her well,” said Armiston, his guard down.
“Then you must surely have seen her white ruby?”
“White ruby! I never heard of such a thing. A white ruby?”
“Exactly. That’s just the point. Neither have I. But if Godahl heard of a white ruby the chances are he would possess it—especially if it were the only one of its kind in the world.”
“Gad! I do believe he would, from what I know of him.”
“And especially,” went on Benson, “under the circumstances. You know the Wentworths have been round a good deal. They haven’t been overscrupulous in getting things they wanted. Now Mrs. Wentworth—but before I go on with this weird tale I want you to understand me. It is pure fiction—an idea for Armiston and his wonderful Godahl. I am merely suggesting the Wentworths as fictitious characters.”
“I understand,” said Armiston.
“Mrs. Wentworth might very well possess this white ruby. Let us say she stole it from some potentate’s household in the Straits Settlements. She gained admittance by means of the official position of her husband. They can’t accuse her of theft. All they can do is to steal the gem back from her. It is a sacred stone of course. They always are in fiction stories. And the usual tribe of jugglers, rug-peddlers, and so on—all disguised, you understand—have followed her to America, seeking a chance, not on her life, not to commit violence of any kind, but to steal that stone.
“She can’t wear it,” went on Benson. “All she can do is to hide it away in some safe place. What is a safe place? Not a bank. Godahl could crack a bank with his little finger. So might those East Indian fellows laboring under the call of religion. Not in a safe. That would be folly.”
“How then?” put in Armiston eagerly.
“Ah, there you are! That’s for Godahl to find out. He knows, let us say, that these foreigners in one way or another have turned Mrs. Wentworth’s apartments upside down. They haven’t found anything. He knows that she keeps that white ruby in that house. Where is it? Ask Godahl. Do you see the point? Has Godahl ever cracked a nut like that? No. Here he must be the cleverest detective in the world and the cleverest thief at the same time. Before he can begin thieving he must make his blueprints.
“When I read Armiston,” continued Benson, “that is the kind of problem that springs up in my mind. I am always trying to think of some knot this wonderful thief would have to employ his best powers to unravel. I think of some weird situation like this one. I say to myself: ‘Good! I will write that. I will be as famous as Armiston. I will create another Godahl.’ But,” he said with a wave of his hands, “what is the result? I tie the knot, but I can’t untie it. The trouble is, I am not a Godahl. And this man Armiston, as I read him, is Godahl. He must be, or else Godahl could not be made to do the wonderful things he does. Hello! New Haven already? Mighty sorry to have you go, old chap. Great pleasure. When you get to town let me know. Maybe I will consent to meet Armiston.”
Armiston’s first care on returning to New York was to remember the providential loan by which he had been able to keep clean his record of never missing a train. He counted out the sum in bills, wrote a polite note, signed it “Martin Brown,” and dispatched it by messenger boy to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. The Towers, the address Mr. Benson’s card bore, is an ultra-fashionable apartment hotel in lower Fifth Avenue. It maintains all the pomp and solemnity of an English ducal castle. Armiston remembered having on a remote occasion taken dinner there with a friend, and the recollection always gave him a chill. It was like dining among ghosts of kings, so grand and funereal was the air that pervaded everything.
Armiston, who could not forbear curiosity as to his queer benefactor, took occasion to look him up in the Blue Book and the Club Directory, and found that J. Borden Benson was quite some personage, several lines being devoted to him. This was extremely pleasing. Armiston had been thinking of that white-ruby yarn. It appealed to his sense of the dramatic. He would work it up in his best style, and on publication have a fine laugh on Benson by sending him an autographed copy and thus waking that gentleman up to the fact that it really had been the great Armiston in person he had befriended and entertained. What a joke it would be on Benson, thought the author; not without an intermixture of personal vanity, for even a genius such as he was not blind to flattery properly applied, and Benson unknowingly had laid it on thick.
“And, by gad!” thought the author, “I will use the Wentworths as the main characters, as the victims of Godahl. They are just the people to fit into such a romance. Benson put money in my pocket, though he didn’t suspect it. Lucky he didn’t know what shifts we popular authors are put to for plots.”
Suiting the action to the words, Armiston and his wife accepted the next invitation they received from the Wentworths.
Mrs. Wentworth, be it understood, was a lion hunter. She was forever trying to gather about her such celebrities as Armiston the author, Brackens the painter, Johanssen the explorer, and others. Armiston had always withstood her wiles. He always had some excuse to keep him away from her gorgeous table, where she exhibited her lions to her simpering friends.
There were many undesirables sitting at the table, idle-rich youths, girls of the fast hunting set, and so on, and they all gravely shook the great author by the hand and told him what a wonderful man he was. As for Mrs. Wentworth, she was too highly elated at her success in roping him for sane speech, and she fluttered about him like a hysterical bridesmaid. But, Armiston noted with relief, one of his pals was there—Johanssen. Over cigars and cognac he managed to buttonhole the explorer.
“Johanssen,” he said, “you have been everywhere.”
“You are mistaken there,” said Johanssen. “I have never before tonight been north of Fifty-ninth Street in New York.”
“Yes, but you have been in Java and Ceylon and the Settlements. Tell me, have you ever heard of such a thing as a white ruby?”
The explorer narrowed his eyes to a slit and looked queerly at his questioner. “That’s a queer question,” he said in a low voice, “to ask in this house.”
Armiston felt his pulse quicken. “Why?” he asked, assuming an air of surprised innocence.
“If you don’t know,” said the explorer shortly, “I certainly will not enlighten you.”
“All right; as you please. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Have you ever heard of a white ruby?”
“I don’t mind telling you that I have heard of such a thing—that is, I have heard there is a ruby in existence that is called the white ruby. It isn’t really white, you know; it has a purplish tinge. But the old heathen who rightly owns it likes to call it white, just as he likes to call his blue and gray elephants white.”
“Who owns it?” asked Armiston, trying his best to make his voice sound natural. To find in this manner that there was some parallel for the mystical white ruby of which Benson had told him appealed strongly to his super-developed dramatic sense. He was now as keen on the scent as a hound.
Johanssen took to drumming on the tablecloth. He smiled to himself and his eyes glowed. Then he turned and looked sharply at his questioner.
“I suppose,” he said, “that all things are grist to a man of your trade. If you are thinking of building a story round a white ruby I can think of nothing more fascinating. But, Armiston,” he said, suddenly altering his tone and almost whispering, “if you are on the track of the white ruby let me advise you now to call off your dogs and keep your throat whole. I think I am a brave man. I have shot tigers at ten paces—held my fire purposely to see how charmed a life I really did bear. I have been charged by mad rhinos and by wounded buffaloes. I have walked across a clearing where the air was being punctured with bullets as thick as holes in a mosquito screen. But,” he said, laying his hand on Armiston’s arm, “I have never had the nerve to hunt the white ruby.”
“Capital!” exclaimed the author.
“Capital, yes, for a man who earns his bread and gets his excitement by sitting at a typewriter and dreaming about these things. But take my word for it, it isn’t capital for a man who gets his excitement by doing this thing. Hands off, my friend!”
“It really does exist then?”
Johanssen puckered his lips. “So they say,” he said.
“What’s it worth?”
“Worth? What do you mean by worth? Dollars and cents? What is your child worth to you? A million, a billion—how much? Tell me. No, you can’t. Well, that’s just what this miserable stone is worth to the man who rightfully owns it. Now let’s quit talking nonsense. There’s Billy Wentworth shooing the men into the drawing-room. I suppose we shall be entertained this evening by some of the hundred-dollar-a-minute songbirds, as usual. It’s amazing what these people will spend for mere vulgar display when there are hundreds of families starving within a mile of this spot!”
Two famous singers sang that night. Armi–ston did not have much opportunity to look over the house. He was now fully determined to lay the scene of his story in this very house. At leave-taking the sugar-sweet Mrs. Billy Wentworth drew Armiston aside and said:
“It’s rather hard on you to ask you to sit through an evening with these people. I will make amends by asking you to come to me some night when we can be by ourselves. Are you interested in rare curios? Yes, we all are. I have some really wonderful things I want you to see. Let us make it next Tuesday, with a little informal dinner, just for ourselves.”
Armiston then and there made the lion hunter radiantly happy by accepting her invitation to sit at her board as a family friend instead of as a lion.
As he put his wife into their automobile he turned and looked at the house. It stood opposite Central Park. It was a copy of some French château in gray sandstone, with a barbican, and overhanging towers, and all the rest of it. The windows of the street floor peeped out through deep embrasures and were heavily guarded with iron latticework.
“Godahl will have the very devil of a time breaking in there,” he chuckled to himself. Late that night his wife awakened him to find out why he was tossing about so.
“That white ruby has got on my nerves,” he said cryptically, and she, thinking he was dreaming, persuaded him to try to sleep again.
Great authors must really live in the flesh, at times at least, the lives of their great characters. Otherwise these great characters would not be so real as they are. Here was Armiston, who had created a superman in the person of Godahl the thief. For ten years he had written nothing else. He had laid the life of Godahl out in squares, thought for him, dreamed about him, set him to new tasks, gone through all sorts of queer adventures with him. And this same Godahl had amply repaid him. He had raised the author from the ranks of struggling amateurs to a position among the most highly paid fiction writers in the United States. He had brought him ease and luxury. Armiston did not need the money any more. The serial rights telling of the exploits of this Godahl had paid him handsomely. The books of Godahl’s adventures had paid him even better, and had furnished him yearly with a never-failing income, like government bonds, but at a much higher rate of interest. Even though the crimes this Godahl had committed were all on paper and almost impossible, nevertheless Godahl was a living being to his creator. More—he was Armiston, and Armiston was Godahl.
It was not surprising, then, that when Tuesday came Armiston awaited the hour with feverish impatience. Here, as his strange friend had so thoughtlessly and casually told him was an opportunity for the great Godahl to outdo even himself. Here was an opportunity for Godahl to be the greatest detective in the world, in the first place, before he could carry out one of his sensational thefts.
So it was Godahl, not Armiston, who helped his wife out of their automobile that evening and mounted the splendid steps of the Wentworth mansion. He cast his eye aloft, took in every inch of the façade.
“No,” he said, “Godahl cannot break in from the street. I must have a look at the back of the house.”
He cast his eyes on the ironwork that guarded the deep windows giving on the street.
It was not iron after all, but chilled steel sunk into armored concrete. The outposts of this house were as safely guarded as the vault of the United States mint.
“It’s got to be from the inside,” he said, making mental note of this fact.
The butler was stone-deaf. This was rather singular. Why should a family of the standing of the Wentworths employ a man as head of their city establishment who was stone-deaf? Armiston looked at the man with curiosity. He was still in middle age. Surely, then, he was not retained because of years of service. No, there was something more than charity behind this. He addressed a casual word to the man as he handed him his hat and cane. His back was turned and the man did not reply. Armiston turned and repeated the sentence in the same tone. The man watched his lips in the bright light of the hall.
“A lip-reader, and a dandy,” thought Armiston, for the butler seemed to catch every word he said.
“Fact number two!” said the creator of Godahl the thief.
He felt no compunction at thus noting the most intimate details of the Wentworth establishment. An accident had put him on the track of a rare good story, and it was all copy. Besides, he told himself, when he came to write the story he would disguise it in such a way that no one reading it would know it was about the Wentworths. If their establishment happened to possess the requisite setting for a great story, surely there was no reason why he should not take advantage of that fact.
The great thief—he made no bones of the fact to himself that he had come here to help Godahl—accepted the flattering greeting of his hostess with the grand air that so well fitted him. Armiston was tall and thin, with slender fingers and a touch of gray in his wavy hair, for all his youthful years, and he knew how to wear his clothes. Mrs. Wentworth was proud of him as a social ornament, even aside from his glittering fame as an author. And Mrs. Armiston was well born, so there was no jar in their being received in the best house of the town.
The dinner was truly delightful. Here Armiston saw, or thought he saw, one of the reasons for the deaf butler. The hostess had him so trained that she was able to catch her servant’s eye and instruct him in this or that trifle by merely moving her lips. It was almost uncanny, thought the author, this silent conversation the deaf man and his mistress were able to carry on unnoticed by the others.
“By gad, it’s wonderful! Godahl, my friend, underscore that note of yours referring to the deaf butler. Don’t miss it. It will take a trick.”
Armiston gave his undivided attention to his hostess as soon as he found Wentworth entertaining Mrs. Armiston and thus properly dividing the party. He persuaded her to talk by a cleverly pointed question here and there; and as she talked, he studied her.
“We are going to rob you of your precious white ruby, my friend,” he thought humorously to himself; “and while we are laying our wires there is nothing about you too small to be worthy of our attention.”
Did she really possess the white ruby? Did this man Benson know anything about the white ruby? And what was the meaning of the strange actions of his friend Johanssen when approached on the subject in this house? His hostess came to have a wonderful fascination for him. He pictured this beautiful creature so avid in her lust for rare gems that she actually did penetrate the establishment of some heathen potentate in the Straits simply for the purpose of stealing the mystic stone. “Have you ever, by any chance, been in the Straits?” he asked indifferently.
“Wait,” Mrs. Wentworth said with a laugh as she touched his hand lightly; “I have some curios from the Straits, and I will venture to say you have never seen their like.”
Half an hour later they were all seated over coffee and cigarettes in Mrs. Wentworth’s boudoir. It was indeed a strange place. There was scarcely a single corner of the world that had not contributed something to its furnishing. Carvings of teak and ivory; hangings of sweet-scented vegetable fibers; lamps of jade; queer little gods, all sitting like Buddha with their legs drawn up under them, carved out of jade or sardonyx; scarfs of baroque pearls; Darjeeling turquoises—Armiston had never before seen such a collection. And each item had its story. He began to look on this frail little woman with different eyes. She had been and seen and done, and the tale of her life, what she had actually lived, outshone even that of the glittering rascal Godahl, who was standing beside him now and directing his ceaseless questions. “Have you any rubies?” he asked.
Mrs. Wentworth bent before a safe in the wall. With swift fingers she whirled the combination. The keen eyes of Armiston followed the bright knob like a cat.
“Fact number three!” said the Godahl in him as he mentally made note of the numbers. “Five—eight—seven—four—six. That’s the combination.”
Mrs. Wentworth showed him six pigeon-blood rubies. “This one is pale,” he said carelessly, holding a particularly large stone up to the light. “Is it true that occasionally they are found white?”
His hostess looked at him before answering. He was intent on a deep-red stone he held in the palm of his hand. It seemed a thousand miles deep.
“What a fantastic idea!” she said. She glanced at her husband, who had reached out and taken her hand in a naturally affectionate manner.
“Fact number four!” mentally noted Armiston. “Are not you in mortal fear of robbery with all of this wealth?”
Mrs. Wentworth laughed lightly.
“That is why we live in a fortress,” she said.
“Have you never, then, been visited by thieves?” asked the author boldly.
“Never!” she said.
“A lie,” thought Armiston. “Fact number five! We are getting on swimmingly.”
“I do not believe that even your Godahl the Infallible could get in here,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Not even the servants enter this room. That door is not locked with a key; yet it locks. I am not much of a housekeeper,” she said lazily, “but such housekeeping as is done in this room is all done by these poor little hands of mine.”
“No! Most amazing! May I look at the door?”
“Yes, Mr. Godahl,” said this woman, who had lived more lives than Godahl himself.
Armiston examined the door, this strange device that locked without a key, apparently indeed without a lock, and came away disappointed.
“Well, Mr. Godahl?” his hostess said tauntingly. He shook his head in perplexity.
“Most ingenious,” he said; and then suddenly: “Yet I will venture that if I turned Godahl loose on this problem he would solve it.”
“What fun!” she cried clapping her hands.
“You challenge him?” asked Armiston.
“What nonsense is this!” cried Wentworth, coming forward.
“No nonsense at all,” said Mrs. Wentworth. “Mr. Armiston has just said that his Godahl could rob me. Let him try. If he can—if mortal man can gain the secret of ingress and egress of this room—I want to know it. I don’t believe mortal man can enter this room.”
Armiston noted a strange glitter in her eyes.
“Gad! She was born to the part! What a woman!” he thought. And then aloud:
“I will set him to work. I will lay the scene of his exploit in—say—Hungary, where this room might very well exist in some feudal castle. How many people have entered this room since it was made the storehouse of all this wealth?”
“Not six besides yourself,” replied Mrs. Wentworth.
“Then no one can recognize it if I describe it in a story—in fact, I will change the material details. We will say that it is not jewels Godahl is seeking. We will say that it is a——”
Mrs. Wentworth’s hand touched his own. The tips of her fingers were cold. “A white ruby,” she said.
“Gad! What a thoroughbred!” he exclaimed to himself—or to Godahl. And then aloud: “Capital! I will send you a copy of the story autographed.”
The next day he called at The Towers and sent up his card to Mr. Benson’s apartments. Surely a man of Benson’s standing could be trusted with such a secret. In fact it was evidently not a secret to Benson, who in all probability was one of the six Mrs. Wentworth said had entered that room. Armiston wanted to talk the matter over with Benson. He had given up his idea of having fun with him by sending him a marked copy of the magazine containing his tale. His story had taken complete possession of him, as always had been the case when he was at work dispatching Godahl on his adventures.
“If that ruby really exists,” Armiston said, “I don’t know whether I shall write the story or steal the ruby for myself. Benson is right. Godahl should not steal any more for mere money. He is after rare, unique things now. And I am Godahl. I feel the same way myself.”
A valet appeared, attired in a gorgeous livery. Armiston wondered why any self-respecting American would consent to don such raiment, even though it was the livery of the great Benson family.
“Mr. Armiston, sir,” said the valet, looking at the author’s card he held in his hand. “Mr. Benson sailed for Europe yesterday morning. He is spending the summer in Norway. I am to follow on the next steamer. Is there any message I can take to him, sir? I have heard him speak of you, sir.”
Armiston took the card and wrote on it in pencil:
“I called to apologize. I am Martin Brown. The chance was too good to miss. You will pardon me, won’t you?”
For the next two weeks Armiston gave himself over to his dissipation, which was accompanying Godahl on this adventure. It was a formidable task. The secret room he placed in a Hungarian castle, as he had promised. A beautiful countess was his heroine. She had seen the world, mostly in man’s attire, and her escapades had furnished vivacious reading for two continents. No one could possibly connect her with Mrs. Billy Wentworth. So far it was easy. But how was Godahl to get into this wonderful room where the countess had hidden this wonderful rare white ruby? The room was lined with chilled steel. Even the door—this he had noted when he was examining that peculiar portal—was lined with layers of steel. It could withstand any known tool.
However, Armiston was Armiston, and Godahl was Godahl. He got into that room. He got the white ruby!
The manuscript went to the printers, and the publishers said that Armiston had never done anything like it since he started Godahl on his astonishing career.
He banked the check for his tale, and as he did so he said: “Gad! I would a hundred times rather possess that white ruby. Confound the thing! I feel as if I had not heard the last of it.”
Armiston and his wife went to Maine for the summer without leaving their address. Along in the early fall he received by registered mail, forwarded by his trusted servant at the town house, a package containing the envelope he had addressed to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. Furthermore it contained the dollar bills he had dispatched to that individual, together with his note which he had signed “Martin Brown.” And across the note, in the most insulting manner, was written in coarse, greasy blue-pencil lines:
“Damnable impertinence. I’ll cane you the first time I see you.”
And no more. That was enough of course—quite sufficient.
In the same mail came a note from Armiston’s publishers, saying that his story, “The White Ruby,” was scheduled for publication in the October number, out September twenty-fifth. This cheered him up. He was anxious to see it in print. Late in September they started back to town.
“Aha!” he said as he sat reading his paper in the parlor car—he had caught this train by the veriest tip of its tail and upset the running schedule in the act—“Ah! I see my genial friend, J. Borden Benson, is in town, contrary to custom at this time of year. Life must be a great bore to that snob.”
A few days after arriving in town he received a package of advance copies of the magazine containing his story, and he read the tale of “The White Ruby” as if he had never seen it before. On the cover of one copy, which he was to dispatch to his grumpy benefactor, J. Borden Benson, he wrote:
Charmed to be caned. Call any time. See contents.
Oliver Armiston.
On another he wrote:
Dear Mrs. Wentworth: See how simple it is to pierce your fancied security!
He dispatched these two magazines with a feeling of glee. No sooner had he done so, however, than he learned that the Wentworths had not yet returned from Newport. The magazine would be forwarded to them no doubt. The Wentworths’ absence made the tale all the better, in fact, for in his story Armiston had insisted on Godahl’s breaking into the castle and solving the mystery of the keyless door during the season when the château was closed and strung with a perfect network of burglar alarms connecting with the gendarmerie in the near-by village.
That was the twenty-fifth day of September. The magazine was put on sale that morning.
On the twenty-sixth day of September Armiston bought a late edition of an afternoon paper from a leather-lunged boy who was hawking “Extra!” in the street. Across the first page the headlines met his eye:
ROBBERY AND MURDER
IN THE WENTWORTH MANSION!Private watchmen, summoned by burglar alarm at ten o’clock this morning, find servant with skull crushed on floor of mysterious steel-doored room. Murdered man’s pockets filled with rare jewels. Police believe he was murdered by confederate who escaped.
The Wentworth Butler, Stone Deaf, Had Just Returned From Newport to Open House at Time of Murder.
It was ten o’clock that night when an automobile drew up at Armiston’s door and a tall man with a square jaw, square shoes, and a square mustache alighted. This was Deputy Police Commissioner Byrnes, a professional detective whom the new administration had drafted into the city’s service from the government secret service.
Byrnes was admitted, and as he advanced to the middle of the drawing-room, without so much as a nod to the ghostlike Armiston who stood shivering before him, he drew a package of papers from his pocket.
“I presume you have seen all the evening papers,” he said, spitting his words through his half-closed teeth with so much show of personal malice that Armiston—never a brave man in spite of his Godahl—cowered before him.
Armiston shook his head dumbly at first, but at length he managed to say: “Not all; no.”
The deputy commissioner with much deliberation drew out the latest extra and handed it to Armiston without a word.
It was the Evening News. The first page was divided down its entire length by a black line. On one side and occupying four columns, was a word-for-word reprint of Armiston’s story, “The White Ruby.”
On the other, the facts in deadly parallel, was a graphic account of the robbery and murder at the home of Billy Wentworth. The parallel was glaring in the intensity of its dumb accusation. On the one side was the theoretical Godahl, working his masterly way of crime, step by step; and on the other was the plagiarism of Armiston’s story, following the intricacies of the master mind with copybook accuracy.
The editor, who must have been a genius in his way, did not accuse. He simply placed the fiction and the fact side by side and let the reader judge for himself. It was masterly. If, as the law says, the mind that conceives, the intelligence that directs, a crime is more guilty than the very hand that acts, then Armiston here was both thief and murderer. Thief, because the white ruby had actually been stolen. Mrs. Billy Wentworth, rushed to the city by special train, attended by doctors and nurses, now confirmed the story of the theft of the ruby. Murderer, because in the story Godahl had for once in his career stooped to murder as the means, and had triumphed over the dead body of his confederate, scorning, in his joy at possessing the white ruby, the paltry diamonds, pearls, and red rubies with which his confederate had crammed his pockets.
Armiston seized the police official by his lapels.
“The butler!” he screamed. “The butler! Yes, the butler. Quick, or he will have flown.”
Byrnes gently disengaged the hands that had grasped him.
“Too late,” he said. “He has already flown. Sit down and quiet your nerves. We need your help. You are the only man in the world who can help us now.”
When Armiston was himself again he told the whole tale, beginning with his strange meeting with J. Borden Benson on the train, and ending with his accepting Mrs. Wentworth’s challenge to have Godahl break into the room and steal the white ruby. Byrnes nodded over the last part. He had already heard that from Mrs. Wentworth, and there was the autographed copy of the magazine to show for it.
“You say that J. Borden Benson told you of this white ruby in the first place.”
Armiston again told, in great detail, the circumstances, all the humor now turned into grim tragedy.
“That is strange,” said the ex-secret-service chief. “Did you leave your purse at home or was your pocket picked?”
“I thought at first that I had absent-mindedly left it at home. Then I remembered having paid the chauffeur out of the roll of bills, so my pocket must have been picked.”
“What kind of a looking man was this Benson?”
“You must know him,” said Armiston.
“Yes, I know him; but I want to know what he looked like to you. I want to find out how he happened to be so handy when you were in need of money.”
Armiston described the man minutely.
The deputy sprang to his feet. “Come with me,” he said; and they hurried into the automobile and soon drew up in front of The Towers.
Five minutes later they were ushered into the magnificent apartment of J. Borden Benson. That worthy was in his bath preparing to retire for the night.
“I don’t catch the name,” Armiston and the deputy heard him cry through the bathroom door to his valet.
“Mr. Oliver Armiston, sir.”
“Ah, he has come for his caning, I expect. I’ll be there directly.”
He did not wait to complete his toilet, so eager was he to see the author. He strode out in a brilliant bathrobe and in one hand he carried an alpenstock. His eyes glowed in anger. But the sight of Byrnes surprised as well as halted him.
“Do you mean to say this is J. Borden Benson?” cried Armiston to Byrnes, rising to his feet and pointing at the man.
“The same,” said the deputy; “I swear to it. I know him well! I take it he is not the gentleman who paid your carfare to New Haven.”
“Not by a hundred pounds!” exclaimed Armiston as he surveyed the huge bulk of the elephantine clubman.
The forced realization that the stranger he had hitherto regarded as a benefactor was not J. Borden Benson at all, but some one who had merely assumed that worthy’s name while he was playing the conceited author as an easy dupe, did more to quiet Armiston’s nerves than all the sedatives his doctor had given him. It was a badly dashed popular author who sat down with the deputy commissioner in his library an hour later. He would gladly have consigned Godahl to the bottom of the sea; but it was too late. Godahl had taken the trick.
“How do you figure it?” Armiston asked, turning to the deputy.
“The beginning is simple enough. It is the end that bothers me,” said the official. “Your bogus J. Borden Benson is, of course, the brains of the whole combination. Your infernal Godahl has told us just exactly how this crime was committed. Now your infernal Godahl must bring the guilty parties to justice.”
It was plain to be seen that the police official hated Godahl worse than poison, and feared him too.
“Why not look in the Rogues’ Gallery for this man who befriended me on the train?”
The chief laughed.
“For the love of Heaven, Armiston, do you, who pretend to know all about scientific thievery, think for a moment that the man who took your measure so easily is of the class of crooks who get their pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery? Talk sense!”
“I can’t believe you when you say he picked my pocket.”
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not; he did, or one of his pals did. It all amounts to the same thing, don’t you see? First, he wanted to get acquainted with you. Now the best way to get into your good graces was to put you unsuspectingly under obligation to him. So he robs you of your money. From what I have seen of you in the last few hours it must have been like taking candy from a child. Then he gets next to you in line. He pretends that you are merely some troublesome toad in his path. He gives you money for your ticket, to get you out of his way so he won’t miss his train. His train! Of course his train is your train. He puts you in a position where you have to make advances to him. And then, grinning to himself all the time at your conceit and gullibility, he plays you through your pride, your Godahl. Think of the creator of the great Godahl falling for a trick like that!”
Byrnes’s last words were the acme of biting sarcasm.
“You admit yourself that he is too clever for you to put your hands on.”
“And then,” went on Byrnes, not heeding the interruption, “he invites you to lunch and tells you what he wants you to do for him. And you follow his lead like a sheep at the tail of the bellwether! Great Scott, Armiston! I would give a year’s salary for one hour’s conversation with that man.”
Armiston was beginning to see the part this queer character had played; but he was in a semi-hysterical state, and, like a woman in such a position, he wanted a calm mind to tell him the whole thing in words of one syllable, to verify his own dread.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t quite follow. You say he tells me what he wants me to do.”
Byrnes shrugged his shoulders in disgust; then, as if resigned to the task before him, he began his explanation:
“Here, man, I will draw a diagram for you. This gentleman friend of yours—we will call him John Smith for convenience—wants to get possession of this white ruby. He knows that it is in the keeping of Mrs. Billy Wentworth. He knows you know Mrs. Wentworth and have access to her house. He knows that she stole this bauble and is frightened to death all the time. Now John Smith is a pretty clever chap. He handled the great Armiston like hot putty. He had exhausted his resources. He is baffled and needs help. What does he do? He reads the stories about the great Godahl. Confidentially, Mr. Armiston, I will tell you that I think your great Godahl is mush. But that is neither here nor there. If you can sell him as a gold brick, all right. But Mr. John Smith is struck by the wonderful ingenuity of this Godahl. He says: ‘Ha! I will get Godahl to tell me how to get this gem!’
“So he gets hold of yourself, sir, and persuades you that you are playing a joke on him by getting him to rant and rave about the great Godahl. Then—and here the villain enters—he says: ‘Here is a thing the great Godahl cannot do. I dare him to do it.’ He tells you about the gem, whose very existence is quite fantastic enough to excite the imagination of the wonderful Armiston. And by clever suggestion he persuades you to lay the plot at the home of Mrs. Wentworth. And all the time you are chuckling to yourself, thinking what a rare joke you are going to have on J. Borden Benson when you send him an autographed copy and show him that he was talking to the distinguished genius all the time and didn’t know it. That’s the whole story, sir. Now wake up!”
Byrnes sat back in his chair and regarded Armiston with the smile a pedagogue bestows on a refractory boy whom he has just flogged soundly.
“I will explain further,” he continued. “You haven’t visited the house yet. You can’t. Mrs. Wentworth, for all she is in bed with four dozen hot-water bottles, would tear you limb from limb if you went there. And don’t you think for a minute she isn’t able to. That woman is a vixen.”
Armiston nodded gloomily. The very thought of her now sent him into a cold sweat.
“Mr. Godahl, the obliging,” continued the deputy, “notes one thing to begin with: The house cannot be entered from the outside. So it must be an inside job. How can this be accomplished? Well, there is the deaf butler. Why is he deaf? Godahl ponders. Ha! He has it! The Wentworths are so dependent on servants that they must have them round at all times. This butler is the one who is constantly about them. They are worried to death by their possession of this white ruby. Their house has been raided from the inside a dozen times. Nothing is taken, mind you. They suspect their servants. This thing haunts them, but the woman will not give up this foolish bauble. So she has as her major domo a man who cannot understand a word in any language unless he is looking at the speaker and is in a bright light. He can only understand the lips. Handy, isn’t it? In a dull light or with their backs turned they can talk about anything they want to. This is a jewel of a butler.
“But,” added Byrnes, “one day a man calls. He is a lawyer. He tells the butler he is heir to a fortune—fifty thousand dollars. He must go to Ireland to claim it. Your friend on the train—he is the man of course—sends your butler to Ireland. So this precious butler is lost. They must have another. Only a deaf one will do. And they find just the man they want—quite accidentally, you understand. Of course it is Godahl, with forged letters saying he has been in service in great houses. Presto! The great Godahl himself is now the butler. It is simple enough to play deaf. You say this is fiction. Let me tell you this: Six weeks ago the Wentworths actually changed butlers. That hasn’t come out in the papers yet.”
Armiston, who had listened to the deputy’s review of his story listlessly, now sat up with a start. He suddenly exclaimed gleefully:
“But my story didn’t come out till two days ago!”
“Ah, yes; but you forget that it has been in the hands of your publishers for three months. A man who was clever enough to dupe the great Armiston wouldn’t shirk the task of getting hold of a proof of that story.”
Armiston sank deeper into his chair.
“Once Godahl got inside the house the rest was simple. He corrupted one of the servants. He opened the steel-lined door with the flame of an oxyacetylene blast. As you say in your story that flame cuts steel like wax; he didn’t have to bother about the lock. He simply cut the door down. Then he put his confederate in good humor by telling him to fill his pockets with the diamonds and other junk in the safe, which he obligingly opens. One thing bothers me, Armiston. How did you find out about that infernal contraption that killed the confederate?”
Armiston buried his face in his hands. Byrnes rudely shook him.
“Come,” he said; “you murdered that man, though you are innocent. Tell me how.”
“Is this the third degree?” said Armiston.
“It looks like it,” said the deputy grimly as he gnawed at his stubby mustache. Armiston drew a long breath, like one who realizes how hopeless is his situation. He began to speak in a low tone. All the while the deputy glared at Godahl’s inventor with his accusing eye.
“When I was sitting in the treasure room with the Wentworths and my wife, playing auction bridge, I dismissed the puzzle of the door as easily solved by means of the brazing flame. The problem was not to get into the house or into this room, but to find the ruby. It was not in the safe.”
“No, of course not. I suppose your friend on the train was kind enough to tell you that. He had probably looked there himself.”
“Gad! He did tell me that, come to think of it. Well, I studied that room. I was sure the white ruby, if it really existed, was within ten feet of me. I examined the floor, the ceiling, the walls. No result. But,” he said, shivering as if in a draft of cold air, “there was a chest in that room made of Lombardy oak.” The harassed author buried his face in his hands. “Oh, this is terrible!” he moaned.
“Go on,” said the deputy in his colorless voice.
“I can’t. I tell it all in the story, Heaven help me!”
“I know you tell it all in the story,” came the rasping voice of Byrnes; “but I want you to tell it to me. I want to hear it from your own lips—as Armiston, you understand, whose deviltry has just killed a man; not as your damnable Godahl.”
“The chest was not solid oak,” went on Armiston. “It was solid steel covered with oak to disguise it.”
“How did you know that?”
“I had seen it before.”
“Where?”
“In Italy fifteen years ago, in a decayed castle, back through the Soldini pass from Lugano. It was the possession of an old nobleman, a friend of a friend of mine.”
“Humph!” grunted the deputy. And then: “Well, how did you know it was the same one?”
“By the inscription carved on the front. It was—but I have told all this in print already. Why need I go over it all again?”
“I want to hear it again from your own lips. Maybe there are some points you did not tell in print. Go on!”
“The inscription was ‘Sanctus Dominus.’ ”
The deputy smiled grimly.
“Very fitting, I should say. Praise the Lord with the most diabolical engine of destruction I have ever seen.”
“And then,” said Armiston, “there was the owner’s name—‘Arno Petronii.’ Queer name that.”
“Yes,” said the deputy dryly. “How did you hit on this as the receptacle for the white ruby?”
“If it were the same one I saw in Lugano—and I felt sure it was—it was certain death to attempt to open it—that is, for one who did not know how. Such machines were common enough in the Middle Ages. There was an obvious way to open it. It was meant to be obvious. To open it that way was inevitable death. It released tremendous springs that crushed anything within a radius of five feet. You saw that?”
“I did,” said the deputy, and he shuddered as he spoke. Then, bringing his fierce face within an inch of the cowering Armiston, he said:
“You knew the secret spring by which that safe could be opened as simply as a shoebox, eh?”
Armiston nodded his head.
“But Godahl did not,” he said. “Having recognized this terrible chest,” went on the author, “I guessed it must be the hiding-place of the jewel—for two reasons: In the first place Mrs. Wentworth had avoided showing it to us. She passed it by as a mere bit of curious furniture. Second, it was too big to go through the door or any one of the windows. They must have gone to the trouble of taking down the wall to get that thing in there. Something of a task, too, considering it weighs about two tons.”
“You didn’t bring out that point in your story.”
“Didn’t I? I fully intended to.”
“Maybe,” said the deputy, watching his man sharply, “it so impressed your friend who paid your carfare to New Haven that he clipped it out of the manuscript when he borrowed it.”
“There is no humor in this affair, sir, if you will pardon me,” said Armiston.
“That is quite true. Go ahead.”
“The rest you know. Godahl, in my story—the thief in real life—had to sacrifice a life to open that chest. So he corrupted a small kitchen servant, filling his pockets with these other jewels, and told him to touch the spring.”
“You murdered that man in cold blood,” said the deputy, rising and pacing the floor. “The poor deluded devil, from the looks of what’s left of him, never let out a whimper, never knew what hit him. Here, take some more of this brandy. Your nerves are in a bad way.”
“What I can’t make out is this,” said Armiston after a time. “There was a million dollars’ worth of stuff in that room that could have been put into a quart measure. Why did not this thief, who was willing to go to all the trouble to get the white ruby, take some of the jewels? Nothing is missing besides the white ruby, as I understand it. Is there?”
“No,” said the deputy. “Not a thing. Here comes a messenger boy.”
“For Mr. Armiston? Yes,” he said to the entering maid. The boy handed him a package for which the deputy signed.
“This is for you,” he said, turning to Armiston as he closed the door. “Open it.”
When the package was opened the first object to greet their eyes was a roll of bills.
“This grows interesting,” said Byrnes. He counted the money. “Thirty-nine dollars. Your friend evidently is returning the money he stole from you at the station. What does he have to say for himself? I see there is a note.”
He reached over and took the paper out of Armiston’s hands. It was ordinary bond stationery, with no identifying marks of any consequence. The note was written in bronze ink, in a careful copperplate hand, very small and precise. It read:
“Most Excellency Sir: Herewith, most honored dollars I am dispatching complete. Regretful extremely of sad blood being not to be prevented. Accept trifle from true friend.”
That was all.
“There’s a jeweler’s box,” said Byrnes. “Open it.”
Inside the box was a lozenge-shaped diamond about the size of a little fingernail. It hung from a tiny bar of silver, highly polished and devoid of ornament. On the back under the clasp-pin were several microscopic characters.
There were several obvious clues to be followed—the messenger boy, the lawyers who induced the deaf butler to go to Ireland on what later proved to be a wild-goose chase, the employment agency through which the new butler had been secured, and so on. But all of these avenues proved too respectable to yield results. Deputy Byrnes had early arrived at his own conclusions, by virtue of the knowledge he had gained as government agent, yet to appease the popular indignation he kept up a desultory search for the criminal.
It was natural that Armiston should think of his friend Johanssen at this juncture. Johanssen possessed that wonderful oriental capacity of aloofness which we Westerners are so ready to term indifference or lack of curiosity.
“No, I thank you,” said Johanssen. “I’d rather not mix in.”
The pleadings of the author were in vain. His words fell on deaf ears.
“If you will not lift a hand because of your friendship for me,” said Armiston bitterly, “then think of the law. Surely there is something due justice, when both robbery and bloody murder have been committed!”
“Justice!” cried Johanssen in scorn. “Justice, you say! My friend, if you steal from me, and I reclaim by force that which is mine, is that injustice? If you cannot see the idea behind that, surely, then, I cannot explain it to you.”
“Answer one question,” said Armiston. “Have you any idea who the man was I met on the train?”
“For your own peace of mind—yes. As a clue leading to what you so glibly term justice—pshaw! Tonight’s sundown would be easier for you to catch than this man if I know him. Mind you, Armiston, I do not know. But I believe. Here is what I believe:
“In a dozen courts of kings and petty princelings that I know of in the East there are Westerners retained as advisers—fiscal agents they usually call them. Usually they are American or English, or occasionally German.
“Now I ask you a question. Say that you were in the hire of a heathen prince, and a grievous wrong were done that prince, say, by a thoughtless woman who had not the least conception of the beauty of an idea she had outraged. Merely for the possession of a bauble, valueless to her except to appease vanity, she ruthlessly rode down a superstition that was as holy to this prince as your own belief in Christ is to you. What would you do?”
Without waiting for Armiston to answer, Johanssen went on:
“I know a man——You say this man you met on the train had wonderful hands, did he not? Yes, I thought so. Armiston, I know a man who would not sit idly by and smile to himself over the ridiculous fuss occasioned by the loss of an imperfect stone—off color, badly cut, and everything else. Neither would he laugh at the superstition behind it. He would say to himself: ‘This superstition is older by several thousand years than I or my people.’ And this man, whom I know, is brave enough to right that wrong himself if his underlings failed.”
“I follow,” said Armiston dully.
“But,” said Johanssen, leaning forward and tapping the author on the knee—“but the task proves too big for him. What did he do? He asked the cleverest man in the world to help him. And Godahl helped him. That,” said Johanssen, interrupting Armiston with a raised finger, “is the story of the white ruby. ‘The Story of the White Ruby’ you see, is something infinitely finer than mere vulgar robbery and murder, as the author of the Infallible Godahl conceived it.”
Johanssen said a great deal more. In the end he took the lozenge-shaped diamond pendant and put the glass on the silver bar, that his friend might see the inscription on the back. He told him what the inscription signified—“Brother of a King,” and, furthermore, how few men alive possessed the capacity for brotherhood.
“I think,” said Armiston as he was about to take his leave, “that I will travel in the Straits this winter.”
“If you do,” said Johanssen, “I earnestly advise you to leave your Godahl and his decoration at home.”