Chapter XXVI.The Final SurpriseIt seemed to me that I was struggling up through miles of deep blue water that gradually turned to lighter emerald. Huge sea monsters swam lazily about me, staring with curious, lackluster eyes. I fought on, in a panic to rise above them, and broke surface at last with a splash. But when I opened my eyes I was lying in a narrow white bed in a hospital room. An old man with a long beard bent over me, and beside him stood a nurse clad in white.I stared at the old fellow curiously and he nodded at me.“Feeling better, eh?” he asked.I tried to fill my lungs with air, but desisted hurriedly at the stab of pain that shot through me. “What’s the matter with me?” I demanded.The doctor laughed. “Nothing much. You’ve got five broken ribs and a broken breastbone. You’ve got a bullet wound in the shoulder that you neglected shamefully and another in the scalp. Otherwise you’re as healthy as possible.” He shook his head. “You’ve had the narrowest kind of a narrow escape, young man. You’ll pull through now if you take care. But no jumping about and no hasty movements until those ribs grow together again. We put you straight on the operating table and that’s all done with.” He turned to the nurse. “He’ll do now, nurse.”The girl drew him aside and whispered a moment, and presently the doctor returned to my side.“There are about nineteen people outside waiting to see you. If I let one or two of them in, will you keep quiet and be careful?”“I sure will,” I told him.He turned away and spoke to the nurse again. “Not more than two,” I heard him say. Then they both went out.I lay waiting in a fever of impatience. But in a moment the door opened again and I was able to feast my eyes on the two prettiest girls in New York, even if I dared not hug them.There were a few preliminary remarks on both sides which need not be repeated here. And then I put a question.“Peggy, dear, did they treat you pretty well? Are you all right again?”“Oh, yes, Jack.” Margaret nodded brightly. “They frightened me a good deal, and once they beat me, as I told you, but that was all. They didn’t mistreat us much because they said that we had to keep our looks.”I groaned, and in spite of myself my eyes sought Natalie’s face. She met my glance frankly. “I’m all right too, Jack,” she answered, and with that answer a great content settled over my heart. They had been through a terrible experience. But they would both forget!When the first excitement of our meeting had worn off a little, which it speedily did under the watchful and reproving eye of the nurse, I begged the two of them to sit down and tell me some of the news that I wanted to hear.So they drew up chairs, possessed themselves of one of my hands apiece and prepared to be interrogated.“First of all, I want to know how they captured you in the first place, Margaret?”My little sister made a face, wrinkling up her little nose until she looked entirely adorable. “Why, I went into that store, you know, to buy you a present. I had only been there a minute when that Mr. Vining came up to me and said that Mrs. Furneau had sent him for me. He said that Mrs. Furneau had had to move her car away from the front of the store and that she would have trouble with the police unless she went away very soon. He had been passing and she had sent him in, after describing me to him.“Of course I didn’t suspect anything, and when he led me out the side door into a side street, I looked around for Mrs. Furneau’s car. But he was talking all the time and he led me up to the door of a car before I ever looked. Then before I could turn back or ask any questions, he pushed me into the car, another man grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth and the car started. They kept me bound and gagged and blindfolded all the time until finally they untied me in that terrible house. Ever since then I’ve been dancing for them at their parties. But they treated me pretty well, except for that one night. And I knew you’d come for me sooner or later.”I turned to Natalie. “Will you ever forgive me for sending you off in that taxi?” I asked her.Her smile was answer enough. “Poor Larry,” she answered. “He did his best that night. But the taxi stopped in the Park and two men yanked open the doors before I even knew what was going on. Your man got his revolver out and fired at one of them a couple of times, but the man on the other side knocked it out of his hand and they climbed into the taxi and dragged him out. I tried to get out and run away, but another man caught me, picked me up and bundled me into another car. Then they tied me up and gagged me and took me to that awful place. I saw your sister almost at once, but of course I did not know shewasyour sister until afterwards. Oh, Jack——”But at this point the nurse came up and kindly but firmly informed them that they must go. Margaret stooped over and kissed me, and, in spite of a stifled giggle from Margaret, Natalie did the same. A moment later they were gone.I was not allowed to see any one the rest of that day, nor the next, owing to a rise in temperature, induced, according to the doctor, by my first visitors.But on the third day I was much better, and the doctor informed me that arrangements had been made to move me to my own apartment, where I was to be put in charge of a trained nurse. Mrs. Furneau took charge of the moving, accompanied by Natalie, Margaret and Moore, but I had no chance to talk to them till later, as I was pretty tired after the trip.The day after the move, however, Moore came in to see me and we shook hands with expressions of mutual esteem. I guess we were pretty glad to see each other again.After the first few remarks, Moore plunged into an account of his adventures after he had been captured that day. It seemed that he, too, was taken straight to the house on Long Island and put through a sort of Third Degree in the room of the voices. It must have been pretty bad, for he did not want to talk about it much. But I found out that the Emperor would ask him a question, and when Moore refused to answer, they turned on some other sort of gas and put him to sleep, waking him up, violently sick, and questioning him again.When they realized at last that they could get nothing out of him, they told Moore, who was pretty well all in by that time, that the next time the gas was turned on he would not wake up at all. But just before they turned it on, and while Moore was bracing himself for the end, his tormentors asked him casually whether he knew anything about mechanics and electricity.Grasping at a straw, Moore admitted that he was an electrical engineer. Whereupon he was put to sleep by the kind of gas used on me, but woke up again to find himself in a cell in the same building in which they had locked me up. Later, they let him see part of the apparatus which worked the cylinder, although he was never allowed to study the thing sufficiently to get a clear understanding of the nature of the fierce rays.However, he was able to make certain adjustments that were needed, and he was retained as the house electrician after that. A few days later he was allowed, under supervision, to make the electrical preparations for a Japanese fête. He was loose in the building with his guard the night we attacked. His guard was killed at the start and Moore lay low until things quieted down. Then he came out to try to find me, saw us start for the room of the cylinder and ran after us to warn us, for he had discovered the electrical arrangement for blowing up the little stone house in case of an attack. It had been a bar from one of the windows of that house that had crushed in my ribs.But, Moore said, no one had been able to find any trace of the man Clark, who had disappeared early in the search, of the young man about town who had given Moore his first clew that night on Riverside Drive, nor, finally, of Pride. Nor has anything ever been learned of these three.The loss of Pride was a bitter blow to all of us. The man gave up his life, I believe, to trace me that night, probably putting up a fight after his car smashed up and getting killed in the process. None of us will ever forget him. Whatever death he died, I know and we all know that it was a good death. All honor to him and may he sleep soundly. The Chief and Moore and I have lost a friend that we can never replace.Later, when the earlier report of my death had been contradicted, I had other visitors, and I began to learn more about what had happened after the big drug raid, as the papers called it.The whole country rang with the affair for a while, as every one will remember. But owing to the importance of the people who were at the house that night, or who were found to be connected with the gang, and the position of many of the girls who were rescued, very few of the details got into the papers. The little book I took from Vining’s flat was found among the Emperor’s papers. The names in it, mostly of persons in high social positions, referred to people whom the Emperor had got into his toils, through drugs, and to whom he had been supplying drugs regularly, to keep them under his thumb. The numbers after their names referred to supplies of these drugs.The girls in the gardens, of whom there were some ten or twelve, were young Russian girls, smuggled into this country, and were mostly peasants. I never heard what became of them.As for Mrs. Fawcette, she was taken to her town house and quietly buried from there. Nothing more was ever said about the manner of her death, although the others know now.The girl who was my dinner companion that first night in the Emperor’s house came to visit me too. And since then she has become a close friend of Margaret’s and mine, as have some of the others whom Margaret saw at that house.The Secret Service alone knew of the extent of the organization which that strange man, the Emperor, had built up about him. After the smash, the mortality, through suicide, among men and women prominent both socially and politically, was simply appalling. But the Department of Justice kept its own counsel and no one else ever knew how many of these people were connected with the Emperor’s organization, and how many were simply his victims who had become drug addicts and had committed suicide when the supply was cut off. And of course some of such deaths may have been coincidences. I am not intending to imply that any one who died suddenly at that time was necessarily involved. But it is certain that many such people were.There were many other details, however, which we were all curious to know. And after some difficulty, Moore at length succeeded in persuading the Chief to come to a little dinner at my apartment. This was after I was well enough to sit up.When the night finally came, there were quite a lot of us gathered around my table. Of course Natalie, Margaret, Moore and Larry were there and the Chief. But in addition we had invited Natalie’s aunt and Mrs. Furneau. I had long since explained to the former the reason for my rudeness over the telephone.Natalie had given me permission to announce our engagement that night at the dinner. I had done so, and relaxed nerves and the lifting of the cloud of the last few months had made them all pretty noisy and inconsequential over their congratulations to me. But after Larry had set the coffee on the table and had at last consented to take a chair between Margaret and me, for he worshiped my little sister and positively became her slave, we settled back in our seats and waited for the Chief’s story. I started him off with a question.“Chief,” I said, “we’re all pretty anxious to get at the truth of this queer thing we’ve been up against. But what I want to know more particularly is what idea the man had, why he called himself an Emperor, why he dabbled in drugs, and why he stole the girls and ran that place at all. It seems to me that he was running his neck into a noose for nothing.”The Chief laughed.“Well, I’ll tell you most of the details that we have learned about the man and his gang, and you can draw your own conclusions.“In the first place, he was a Russian aristocrat who turned renegade to his class under the Bolshevik régime, and was given command of a big commune somewhere in Eastern Russia after the defeat of Kolchak. We have traced him back that far, through one of his men whom we captured. The fellow would not talk at all until we assured him that this Emperor of his was dead. And even then we had to drag the details out of him. The Emperor, as he called himself, seems to have had a tremendous personality. My own view is that he was mad.”“Was the whole thing the dream of a madman then?” asked Natalie.“Perhaps so, Miss Van Cleef,” answered the Chief. “But there was a lot of method in his madness, I’ll say that for him.“It seems that he was a traitor to every one but himself. He was a man of immense wealth before the Revolution. He saw the Revolution coming and salted a good deal of his wealth away in the form of valuable drugs, jewels and minerals. It seems that he had extensive connections in Siberia before and after the Revolution, and he had built up a considerable trade in opium smuggled into China. He had also refined the manufacture of synthetic drugs to an extent that had never been equaled, importing them from Germany and refining them. Besides all that, he was a mechanical and electrical engineer of no mean order.“When the Revolution came, he retained his liberty by joining the Bolsheviki, even, apparently, gaining a high place in their councils. Later he came to America, either with affiliations with the Bolsheviks or actually as their accredited agent, for the purpose of bringing about a Bolshevik Revolution in this country.”“Great Scott,” I said, “was that what he was after?”The Chief laughed. “Wait. It seems that that was only part of it. From what we can learn from his papers and from the men he had under him, his dream was a greater dream than that.“He had no intention of acting as an agent of the Bolsheviks. He was a man who believed implicitly in the inherent wickedness of mankind—that every man and woman has his or her price—and he set himself, on that assumption, to obtain a power which should eventually rival that of Napoleon. And,” the Chief added, leaning forward in his seat, “he had gone quite a respectable way toward realizing his dream!”We stared at him in genuine amazement this time.“Yes,” the big man went on. “He had two methods, desire and intimidation. He came to this country originally with immense wealth in his possession or at his disposal. He brought a big stock of drugs with him, which we have found, by the way. And since then he had been importing synthetic drugs into this country from Germany in large quantities.”“I noticed an article on that subject inThe Timessome time in November,” I interrupted. “I noticed it because it told of the amount of synthetic drugs being smuggled to America from Germany.”“Yes,” the Chief nodded. “The Germans perfected the manufacture of synthetic drugs during the war and they keep our hands full. But this man did not use, nor intend to use, his drugs merely to gain wealth. He had a bigger motive. It was power he wanted, colossal power, and he was in a fair way toward getting it when we finally stopped him.“He bought that house out there on Long Island, refitted it with all kinds of luxuries and electrical devices, and prepared to sit back in his web and wait for his victims. His gang was already organized, and at least four of his principal lieutenants were men—or women—with a good socialentrée. These acted as decoys and brought the influential people, with whom the Emperor wanted to get in touch, to the man’s parties. Here they were given a wonderful time and were skillfully and thoroughly drugged. To give real parties of that kind he had, of course, to secure beautiful women—hence his method of kidnaping beautiful girls——” and the Chief bowed very handsomely to Natalie, who flushed and returned the courtesy prettily.“Just there is where the man’s personality came in. Sometimes he would talk to his victims about life as it is to-day, and his idea of what it should be and could be if a few resolute men made up their minds to make it so. And in this way he actually enlisted quite a number of persons, mostly women, in his scheme for establishing a modern Utopia in these United States, with every man making his own laws and a free-and-easy life, love and religion for every one.“Of course he had no such idea in his mind, except perhaps at first, with himself as head or Emperor. But he got these people eating out of his hand—Mrs. Fawcette was one of them—and they brought others. And among the others were often men of real power and influence whom the Emperor succeeded either in enlisting in his cause, blackmailing or drugging. If they were men in important political positions, he got secrets out of them and then blackmailed them. Or he threatened to destroy their public lives for them unless they did as he wanted.“But his safest and most effective method was to drug his victims so subtly and with such skillfully prepared drugs that they acquired the drug habit and the drug hunger before they were aware of it. Then, as he was the only source of supply, they would do anything he told them to, to get some more of the same.”“But surely,” Moore interrupted, “you don’t believe that he could have got away with anything like that for long, do you, sir?”The Chief shook his head, “I don’t know, Moore,” he answered. “Nobody would have dreamed that Napoleon could get away with what he did get away with. And immense wealth means immense power in the world of to-day, as the history of Hugo Stinnes in Germany shows. Without a doubt this Emperor was a little mad—perhaps more than a little. But who can say where genius ends and madness begins? And the man was an organizing genius, an electrical genius, an executive genius in his power over men, had a genius for making money and was an expert chemist. What is more, he had a big vision, such as it was. And that is everything.“From the rambling versions I have been able to get out of the few of his men who were left alive, he intended to make his power practically absolute in this country by the underground methods I have told you. Then, according to one man, he intended to make himself Emperor of the World. That was the little plan he had up his sleeve!”We all laughed. But when I glanced at the Chief’s face I was amazed to see that his smile was perfunctory. Evidently he did not take this Russian’s crazy ambition quite as lightly as we did. “He was about the most dangerous customer I’ve run up against in my career, anyway!” he added, a moment later.“Tell me, Chief,” I asked him, “how did he manage to run a place like that without somebody getting on to it? I’ve been wondering about that. I should think local people would have noticed all the activity involved in running such aménage. Think of the supplies and the power he used for that big house and that huge staff.”The Chief laughed. “That puzzled me for a while too. But he was too clever for that. All his supplies were brought in by lighter from New York and unloaded on the beach at night. You saw one party at it. He brought coal that way too. And he had a big dynamo brought from New York in the same way for his electric power. He sent a man to the village for a few small supplies every little while as a blind.”“How did he get his supplies, then, into the house?”“By another underground passage, up that little gully you saw his men disappearing into. We stopped that hole the night we made the raid. It was cleverly concealed with growing bushes and brush. But they aren’t yet through exploring the place, and we expect to find many other ‘earths’ before we get through. Acting as an agent for the Bolshevik Government gave him practically unlimited men to work for him, and there was little danger of their talking. These Russians are too good conspirators for that and so are the Chinese he had brought with him. They thought that that house was the headquarters of the future Bolshevik Government in the United States. The Emperor was a wonder at making people believe what he wanted them to believe.”“Funny there were no windows in the place.”The Chief smiled. “That was clever, too,” he answered, “He had had an inner shell put in the house, so that the windows showed from the outside but showed no lights. It gave the house a deserted appearance, which was just what he wanted.”“By the way,” I asked, “what became of that other car that started out with us?”Both the Chief and Moore laughed outright at this. “Well,” said the former, “there’s been a little feeling about that. It seems that they had only gone a block or two when they were overtaken by a motor-cycle cop. He told them that I had sent him with instructions that they were to proceed at once to Coney Island, as the meeting place had been changed. What’s more, they went. They waited awhile, and by the time they suspected that something was wrong and came back, you and I had gone on. We never caught the cop either.”“I never heard what happened to the other fellows outside that night,” said Moore.“Oh, they had a pretty warm time. Those fellows that tried to blow us up on the way down came back and reported their failure, and the Emperor stationed them outside the house to wait for us. But of course he thought there were only the three of us. When our men came in touch with them there was a battle-royal, the end of which we saw from the big hall. It’s a good thing that they drove those fellows in, or our men might have been a much longer time getting in to us.”“What became of Vining?” I asked him presently. “Is he going up for trial soon?”The Chief stared at me and shook his head slowly. “He’s gone up for trial already,” he said gravely. “One of the fool cops out there in —— told him that we had rounded up the gang and that the head of it was dead. And the next morning they found Vining hanging by his own belt from the bars of his window. We had enough evidence to send him to the chair ten times over anyway. He took the easier way.”The rest of the general conversation that night was of a more personal nature. The Chief had to leave early and we all trooped out to the elevator to wish him God-speed. He is a great man, and somehow I feel that I am destined, perhaps, to work with him again, before I die, although the thing seems improbable enough. Perhaps what Moore told me that night just before he left may have something to do with my feeling.I had left the others in the sitting-room, intending to take Natalie and her aunt home later on. I had walked out to the elevator to say good-night to Moore there. But before he rang the bell he turned and faced me, smiling a little.“Clayton,” he said, “I’ve got a confession to make to you. I knew Margaret quite a while before I knew you!”“What!—where?” I demanded.“In town,” he answered. “I met her several times at the house of a school friend of hers with whom she was staying. And, old man, I made up my mind that she was the only girl in the world for me!”I could only stare at him with my mouth open and he hurried on.“You see, when she disappeared I had been out of the army for some time and I was looking around for a job. I have independent means and I was taking my time, but when I heard about Margaret I hurried down to Washington and began pulling wires. You see I was in the Intelligence Department in the Service. And finally I got the Chief to take me on. I knew that you were doing all you could to find her outside, and I thought I’d try to find her that way, for I knew that the Department was up in the air about the number of girls that had disappeared.“I did not say anything about it to you then, because I could not bear to talk about her and I saw no need. But later, when I realized the danger you were in, I got the Chief to agree to offer to take you on. The rest you know.” He hesitated. “But I wanted you to know, because——”I held out my hand to him. “It’s up to her of course, but I don’t know any one I’d rather have for a brother-in-law,” I told him.The grip Moore gave my hand caused me to open and shut it two or three times to see whether anything was broken. But a moment later he turned to me with a wry grin.“Old man,” he said, “I’ve got some other news for you that may explain the fact that the Chief did not laugh much to-night when we were discussing the Emperor’s chances. It’s mean news too.”I stared at him. “Mean news?”He nodded. “You remember that night in the little stone house, just before it was blown up? I was just behind you when that fellow jumped into the blazing cylinder, do you remember?”“Yes, I remember,” I told him.“Well, you fellows turned away. But I didn’t. And I saw something that you didn’t—something that I have told to nobody except the Chief as yet. But I think—and he thinks—that you are entitled to know it too. And I have his permission to tell you. The man who jumped into the cylinder turned an agonized face in my direction for a moment just before he disappeared. And, Clayton, it was not the Emperor!”“What!” I shouted.Moore shook his head. “I saw the Emperor—twice. It was the Emperor you talked to, for the Chief has described him to me. But the man who died in the cylinder was not he. It was his body servant. The Emperor made up all that rigmarole about leaving the earth, or whatever it was. And he hypnotized his servant into going to his death for him, to put us off the track. I’ve seen the servant too, and I recognized him.”“But then—where is he?”Moore shook his head again. “Got away somehow. Nobody knows how. But he’s free. His gang is broken up for some time to come, but the man himself is still at large. The Chief is scouring the place for him, but so far without success. That’s why he looked grave to-night. And—I don’t blame him.”“We’ve failed after all then.”Moore smiled and nodded toward the room we had left. “Hardly that,” he said. “But—the man who calls himself Emperor has probably taken an unaccountable dislike to both of us. And—I wanted you to know. That’s all.”“Thanks,” I told him simply. And with that Moore took his departure. He was leaving for Washington the next day.There are just a few words to add.Natalie and I were married the following spring. And in the autumn Margaret came to live with us, having spent her summer with old friends. Of course Larry, who had simply refused to listen to suggestions as to finding a better job for him, had been placed in practical command of our household as soon as Natalie and I settled down.Moore gave up his work with the Secret Service about the time of my marriage, got himself a position with a firm of consulting engineers in New York, and took to running in to see us two or three times a week. Of course I am only a brother and these things are hidden from me. But although Margaret goes out a good deal and has many friends, she always seems to be at home when Moore calls. I hope I’m right!Of the Emperor, whom Moore and I often discuss, we have heard nothing more. He was never captured, so far as we know. But he has never been heard from since that night.Possibly he’s gone back to Russia, or some place equally distant. I hope so!The End
It seemed to me that I was struggling up through miles of deep blue water that gradually turned to lighter emerald. Huge sea monsters swam lazily about me, staring with curious, lackluster eyes. I fought on, in a panic to rise above them, and broke surface at last with a splash. But when I opened my eyes I was lying in a narrow white bed in a hospital room. An old man with a long beard bent over me, and beside him stood a nurse clad in white.
I stared at the old fellow curiously and he nodded at me.
“Feeling better, eh?” he asked.
I tried to fill my lungs with air, but desisted hurriedly at the stab of pain that shot through me. “What’s the matter with me?” I demanded.
The doctor laughed. “Nothing much. You’ve got five broken ribs and a broken breastbone. You’ve got a bullet wound in the shoulder that you neglected shamefully and another in the scalp. Otherwise you’re as healthy as possible.” He shook his head. “You’ve had the narrowest kind of a narrow escape, young man. You’ll pull through now if you take care. But no jumping about and no hasty movements until those ribs grow together again. We put you straight on the operating table and that’s all done with.” He turned to the nurse. “He’ll do now, nurse.”
The girl drew him aside and whispered a moment, and presently the doctor returned to my side.
“There are about nineteen people outside waiting to see you. If I let one or two of them in, will you keep quiet and be careful?”
“I sure will,” I told him.
He turned away and spoke to the nurse again. “Not more than two,” I heard him say. Then they both went out.
I lay waiting in a fever of impatience. But in a moment the door opened again and I was able to feast my eyes on the two prettiest girls in New York, even if I dared not hug them.
There were a few preliminary remarks on both sides which need not be repeated here. And then I put a question.
“Peggy, dear, did they treat you pretty well? Are you all right again?”
“Oh, yes, Jack.” Margaret nodded brightly. “They frightened me a good deal, and once they beat me, as I told you, but that was all. They didn’t mistreat us much because they said that we had to keep our looks.”
I groaned, and in spite of myself my eyes sought Natalie’s face. She met my glance frankly. “I’m all right too, Jack,” she answered, and with that answer a great content settled over my heart. They had been through a terrible experience. But they would both forget!
When the first excitement of our meeting had worn off a little, which it speedily did under the watchful and reproving eye of the nurse, I begged the two of them to sit down and tell me some of the news that I wanted to hear.
So they drew up chairs, possessed themselves of one of my hands apiece and prepared to be interrogated.
“First of all, I want to know how they captured you in the first place, Margaret?”
My little sister made a face, wrinkling up her little nose until she looked entirely adorable. “Why, I went into that store, you know, to buy you a present. I had only been there a minute when that Mr. Vining came up to me and said that Mrs. Furneau had sent him for me. He said that Mrs. Furneau had had to move her car away from the front of the store and that she would have trouble with the police unless she went away very soon. He had been passing and she had sent him in, after describing me to him.
“Of course I didn’t suspect anything, and when he led me out the side door into a side street, I looked around for Mrs. Furneau’s car. But he was talking all the time and he led me up to the door of a car before I ever looked. Then before I could turn back or ask any questions, he pushed me into the car, another man grabbed me and put his hand over my mouth and the car started. They kept me bound and gagged and blindfolded all the time until finally they untied me in that terrible house. Ever since then I’ve been dancing for them at their parties. But they treated me pretty well, except for that one night. And I knew you’d come for me sooner or later.”
I turned to Natalie. “Will you ever forgive me for sending you off in that taxi?” I asked her.
Her smile was answer enough. “Poor Larry,” she answered. “He did his best that night. But the taxi stopped in the Park and two men yanked open the doors before I even knew what was going on. Your man got his revolver out and fired at one of them a couple of times, but the man on the other side knocked it out of his hand and they climbed into the taxi and dragged him out. I tried to get out and run away, but another man caught me, picked me up and bundled me into another car. Then they tied me up and gagged me and took me to that awful place. I saw your sister almost at once, but of course I did not know shewasyour sister until afterwards. Oh, Jack——”
But at this point the nurse came up and kindly but firmly informed them that they must go. Margaret stooped over and kissed me, and, in spite of a stifled giggle from Margaret, Natalie did the same. A moment later they were gone.
I was not allowed to see any one the rest of that day, nor the next, owing to a rise in temperature, induced, according to the doctor, by my first visitors.
But on the third day I was much better, and the doctor informed me that arrangements had been made to move me to my own apartment, where I was to be put in charge of a trained nurse. Mrs. Furneau took charge of the moving, accompanied by Natalie, Margaret and Moore, but I had no chance to talk to them till later, as I was pretty tired after the trip.
The day after the move, however, Moore came in to see me and we shook hands with expressions of mutual esteem. I guess we were pretty glad to see each other again.
After the first few remarks, Moore plunged into an account of his adventures after he had been captured that day. It seemed that he, too, was taken straight to the house on Long Island and put through a sort of Third Degree in the room of the voices. It must have been pretty bad, for he did not want to talk about it much. But I found out that the Emperor would ask him a question, and when Moore refused to answer, they turned on some other sort of gas and put him to sleep, waking him up, violently sick, and questioning him again.
When they realized at last that they could get nothing out of him, they told Moore, who was pretty well all in by that time, that the next time the gas was turned on he would not wake up at all. But just before they turned it on, and while Moore was bracing himself for the end, his tormentors asked him casually whether he knew anything about mechanics and electricity.
Grasping at a straw, Moore admitted that he was an electrical engineer. Whereupon he was put to sleep by the kind of gas used on me, but woke up again to find himself in a cell in the same building in which they had locked me up. Later, they let him see part of the apparatus which worked the cylinder, although he was never allowed to study the thing sufficiently to get a clear understanding of the nature of the fierce rays.
However, he was able to make certain adjustments that were needed, and he was retained as the house electrician after that. A few days later he was allowed, under supervision, to make the electrical preparations for a Japanese fête. He was loose in the building with his guard the night we attacked. His guard was killed at the start and Moore lay low until things quieted down. Then he came out to try to find me, saw us start for the room of the cylinder and ran after us to warn us, for he had discovered the electrical arrangement for blowing up the little stone house in case of an attack. It had been a bar from one of the windows of that house that had crushed in my ribs.
But, Moore said, no one had been able to find any trace of the man Clark, who had disappeared early in the search, of the young man about town who had given Moore his first clew that night on Riverside Drive, nor, finally, of Pride. Nor has anything ever been learned of these three.
The loss of Pride was a bitter blow to all of us. The man gave up his life, I believe, to trace me that night, probably putting up a fight after his car smashed up and getting killed in the process. None of us will ever forget him. Whatever death he died, I know and we all know that it was a good death. All honor to him and may he sleep soundly. The Chief and Moore and I have lost a friend that we can never replace.
Later, when the earlier report of my death had been contradicted, I had other visitors, and I began to learn more about what had happened after the big drug raid, as the papers called it.
The whole country rang with the affair for a while, as every one will remember. But owing to the importance of the people who were at the house that night, or who were found to be connected with the gang, and the position of many of the girls who were rescued, very few of the details got into the papers. The little book I took from Vining’s flat was found among the Emperor’s papers. The names in it, mostly of persons in high social positions, referred to people whom the Emperor had got into his toils, through drugs, and to whom he had been supplying drugs regularly, to keep them under his thumb. The numbers after their names referred to supplies of these drugs.
The girls in the gardens, of whom there were some ten or twelve, were young Russian girls, smuggled into this country, and were mostly peasants. I never heard what became of them.
As for Mrs. Fawcette, she was taken to her town house and quietly buried from there. Nothing more was ever said about the manner of her death, although the others know now.
The girl who was my dinner companion that first night in the Emperor’s house came to visit me too. And since then she has become a close friend of Margaret’s and mine, as have some of the others whom Margaret saw at that house.
The Secret Service alone knew of the extent of the organization which that strange man, the Emperor, had built up about him. After the smash, the mortality, through suicide, among men and women prominent both socially and politically, was simply appalling. But the Department of Justice kept its own counsel and no one else ever knew how many of these people were connected with the Emperor’s organization, and how many were simply his victims who had become drug addicts and had committed suicide when the supply was cut off. And of course some of such deaths may have been coincidences. I am not intending to imply that any one who died suddenly at that time was necessarily involved. But it is certain that many such people were.
There were many other details, however, which we were all curious to know. And after some difficulty, Moore at length succeeded in persuading the Chief to come to a little dinner at my apartment. This was after I was well enough to sit up.
When the night finally came, there were quite a lot of us gathered around my table. Of course Natalie, Margaret, Moore and Larry were there and the Chief. But in addition we had invited Natalie’s aunt and Mrs. Furneau. I had long since explained to the former the reason for my rudeness over the telephone.
Natalie had given me permission to announce our engagement that night at the dinner. I had done so, and relaxed nerves and the lifting of the cloud of the last few months had made them all pretty noisy and inconsequential over their congratulations to me. But after Larry had set the coffee on the table and had at last consented to take a chair between Margaret and me, for he worshiped my little sister and positively became her slave, we settled back in our seats and waited for the Chief’s story. I started him off with a question.
“Chief,” I said, “we’re all pretty anxious to get at the truth of this queer thing we’ve been up against. But what I want to know more particularly is what idea the man had, why he called himself an Emperor, why he dabbled in drugs, and why he stole the girls and ran that place at all. It seems to me that he was running his neck into a noose for nothing.”
The Chief laughed.
“Well, I’ll tell you most of the details that we have learned about the man and his gang, and you can draw your own conclusions.
“In the first place, he was a Russian aristocrat who turned renegade to his class under the Bolshevik régime, and was given command of a big commune somewhere in Eastern Russia after the defeat of Kolchak. We have traced him back that far, through one of his men whom we captured. The fellow would not talk at all until we assured him that this Emperor of his was dead. And even then we had to drag the details out of him. The Emperor, as he called himself, seems to have had a tremendous personality. My own view is that he was mad.”
“Was the whole thing the dream of a madman then?” asked Natalie.
“Perhaps so, Miss Van Cleef,” answered the Chief. “But there was a lot of method in his madness, I’ll say that for him.
“It seems that he was a traitor to every one but himself. He was a man of immense wealth before the Revolution. He saw the Revolution coming and salted a good deal of his wealth away in the form of valuable drugs, jewels and minerals. It seems that he had extensive connections in Siberia before and after the Revolution, and he had built up a considerable trade in opium smuggled into China. He had also refined the manufacture of synthetic drugs to an extent that had never been equaled, importing them from Germany and refining them. Besides all that, he was a mechanical and electrical engineer of no mean order.
“When the Revolution came, he retained his liberty by joining the Bolsheviki, even, apparently, gaining a high place in their councils. Later he came to America, either with affiliations with the Bolsheviks or actually as their accredited agent, for the purpose of bringing about a Bolshevik Revolution in this country.”
“Great Scott,” I said, “was that what he was after?”
The Chief laughed. “Wait. It seems that that was only part of it. From what we can learn from his papers and from the men he had under him, his dream was a greater dream than that.
“He had no intention of acting as an agent of the Bolsheviks. He was a man who believed implicitly in the inherent wickedness of mankind—that every man and woman has his or her price—and he set himself, on that assumption, to obtain a power which should eventually rival that of Napoleon. And,” the Chief added, leaning forward in his seat, “he had gone quite a respectable way toward realizing his dream!”
We stared at him in genuine amazement this time.
“Yes,” the big man went on. “He had two methods, desire and intimidation. He came to this country originally with immense wealth in his possession or at his disposal. He brought a big stock of drugs with him, which we have found, by the way. And since then he had been importing synthetic drugs into this country from Germany in large quantities.”
“I noticed an article on that subject inThe Timessome time in November,” I interrupted. “I noticed it because it told of the amount of synthetic drugs being smuggled to America from Germany.”
“Yes,” the Chief nodded. “The Germans perfected the manufacture of synthetic drugs during the war and they keep our hands full. But this man did not use, nor intend to use, his drugs merely to gain wealth. He had a bigger motive. It was power he wanted, colossal power, and he was in a fair way toward getting it when we finally stopped him.
“He bought that house out there on Long Island, refitted it with all kinds of luxuries and electrical devices, and prepared to sit back in his web and wait for his victims. His gang was already organized, and at least four of his principal lieutenants were men—or women—with a good socialentrée. These acted as decoys and brought the influential people, with whom the Emperor wanted to get in touch, to the man’s parties. Here they were given a wonderful time and were skillfully and thoroughly drugged. To give real parties of that kind he had, of course, to secure beautiful women—hence his method of kidnaping beautiful girls——” and the Chief bowed very handsomely to Natalie, who flushed and returned the courtesy prettily.
“Just there is where the man’s personality came in. Sometimes he would talk to his victims about life as it is to-day, and his idea of what it should be and could be if a few resolute men made up their minds to make it so. And in this way he actually enlisted quite a number of persons, mostly women, in his scheme for establishing a modern Utopia in these United States, with every man making his own laws and a free-and-easy life, love and religion for every one.
“Of course he had no such idea in his mind, except perhaps at first, with himself as head or Emperor. But he got these people eating out of his hand—Mrs. Fawcette was one of them—and they brought others. And among the others were often men of real power and influence whom the Emperor succeeded either in enlisting in his cause, blackmailing or drugging. If they were men in important political positions, he got secrets out of them and then blackmailed them. Or he threatened to destroy their public lives for them unless they did as he wanted.
“But his safest and most effective method was to drug his victims so subtly and with such skillfully prepared drugs that they acquired the drug habit and the drug hunger before they were aware of it. Then, as he was the only source of supply, they would do anything he told them to, to get some more of the same.”
“But surely,” Moore interrupted, “you don’t believe that he could have got away with anything like that for long, do you, sir?”
The Chief shook his head, “I don’t know, Moore,” he answered. “Nobody would have dreamed that Napoleon could get away with what he did get away with. And immense wealth means immense power in the world of to-day, as the history of Hugo Stinnes in Germany shows. Without a doubt this Emperor was a little mad—perhaps more than a little. But who can say where genius ends and madness begins? And the man was an organizing genius, an electrical genius, an executive genius in his power over men, had a genius for making money and was an expert chemist. What is more, he had a big vision, such as it was. And that is everything.
“From the rambling versions I have been able to get out of the few of his men who were left alive, he intended to make his power practically absolute in this country by the underground methods I have told you. Then, according to one man, he intended to make himself Emperor of the World. That was the little plan he had up his sleeve!”
We all laughed. But when I glanced at the Chief’s face I was amazed to see that his smile was perfunctory. Evidently he did not take this Russian’s crazy ambition quite as lightly as we did. “He was about the most dangerous customer I’ve run up against in my career, anyway!” he added, a moment later.
“Tell me, Chief,” I asked him, “how did he manage to run a place like that without somebody getting on to it? I’ve been wondering about that. I should think local people would have noticed all the activity involved in running such aménage. Think of the supplies and the power he used for that big house and that huge staff.”
The Chief laughed. “That puzzled me for a while too. But he was too clever for that. All his supplies were brought in by lighter from New York and unloaded on the beach at night. You saw one party at it. He brought coal that way too. And he had a big dynamo brought from New York in the same way for his electric power. He sent a man to the village for a few small supplies every little while as a blind.”
“How did he get his supplies, then, into the house?”
“By another underground passage, up that little gully you saw his men disappearing into. We stopped that hole the night we made the raid. It was cleverly concealed with growing bushes and brush. But they aren’t yet through exploring the place, and we expect to find many other ‘earths’ before we get through. Acting as an agent for the Bolshevik Government gave him practically unlimited men to work for him, and there was little danger of their talking. These Russians are too good conspirators for that and so are the Chinese he had brought with him. They thought that that house was the headquarters of the future Bolshevik Government in the United States. The Emperor was a wonder at making people believe what he wanted them to believe.”
“Funny there were no windows in the place.”
The Chief smiled. “That was clever, too,” he answered, “He had had an inner shell put in the house, so that the windows showed from the outside but showed no lights. It gave the house a deserted appearance, which was just what he wanted.”
“By the way,” I asked, “what became of that other car that started out with us?”
Both the Chief and Moore laughed outright at this. “Well,” said the former, “there’s been a little feeling about that. It seems that they had only gone a block or two when they were overtaken by a motor-cycle cop. He told them that I had sent him with instructions that they were to proceed at once to Coney Island, as the meeting place had been changed. What’s more, they went. They waited awhile, and by the time they suspected that something was wrong and came back, you and I had gone on. We never caught the cop either.”
“I never heard what happened to the other fellows outside that night,” said Moore.
“Oh, they had a pretty warm time. Those fellows that tried to blow us up on the way down came back and reported their failure, and the Emperor stationed them outside the house to wait for us. But of course he thought there were only the three of us. When our men came in touch with them there was a battle-royal, the end of which we saw from the big hall. It’s a good thing that they drove those fellows in, or our men might have been a much longer time getting in to us.”
“What became of Vining?” I asked him presently. “Is he going up for trial soon?”
The Chief stared at me and shook his head slowly. “He’s gone up for trial already,” he said gravely. “One of the fool cops out there in —— told him that we had rounded up the gang and that the head of it was dead. And the next morning they found Vining hanging by his own belt from the bars of his window. We had enough evidence to send him to the chair ten times over anyway. He took the easier way.”
The rest of the general conversation that night was of a more personal nature. The Chief had to leave early and we all trooped out to the elevator to wish him God-speed. He is a great man, and somehow I feel that I am destined, perhaps, to work with him again, before I die, although the thing seems improbable enough. Perhaps what Moore told me that night just before he left may have something to do with my feeling.
I had left the others in the sitting-room, intending to take Natalie and her aunt home later on. I had walked out to the elevator to say good-night to Moore there. But before he rang the bell he turned and faced me, smiling a little.
“Clayton,” he said, “I’ve got a confession to make to you. I knew Margaret quite a while before I knew you!”
“What!—where?” I demanded.
“In town,” he answered. “I met her several times at the house of a school friend of hers with whom she was staying. And, old man, I made up my mind that she was the only girl in the world for me!”
I could only stare at him with my mouth open and he hurried on.
“You see, when she disappeared I had been out of the army for some time and I was looking around for a job. I have independent means and I was taking my time, but when I heard about Margaret I hurried down to Washington and began pulling wires. You see I was in the Intelligence Department in the Service. And finally I got the Chief to take me on. I knew that you were doing all you could to find her outside, and I thought I’d try to find her that way, for I knew that the Department was up in the air about the number of girls that had disappeared.
“I did not say anything about it to you then, because I could not bear to talk about her and I saw no need. But later, when I realized the danger you were in, I got the Chief to agree to offer to take you on. The rest you know.” He hesitated. “But I wanted you to know, because——”
I held out my hand to him. “It’s up to her of course, but I don’t know any one I’d rather have for a brother-in-law,” I told him.
The grip Moore gave my hand caused me to open and shut it two or three times to see whether anything was broken. But a moment later he turned to me with a wry grin.
“Old man,” he said, “I’ve got some other news for you that may explain the fact that the Chief did not laugh much to-night when we were discussing the Emperor’s chances. It’s mean news too.”
I stared at him. “Mean news?”
He nodded. “You remember that night in the little stone house, just before it was blown up? I was just behind you when that fellow jumped into the blazing cylinder, do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” I told him.
“Well, you fellows turned away. But I didn’t. And I saw something that you didn’t—something that I have told to nobody except the Chief as yet. But I think—and he thinks—that you are entitled to know it too. And I have his permission to tell you. The man who jumped into the cylinder turned an agonized face in my direction for a moment just before he disappeared. And, Clayton, it was not the Emperor!”
“What!” I shouted.
Moore shook his head. “I saw the Emperor—twice. It was the Emperor you talked to, for the Chief has described him to me. But the man who died in the cylinder was not he. It was his body servant. The Emperor made up all that rigmarole about leaving the earth, or whatever it was. And he hypnotized his servant into going to his death for him, to put us off the track. I’ve seen the servant too, and I recognized him.”
“But then—where is he?”
Moore shook his head again. “Got away somehow. Nobody knows how. But he’s free. His gang is broken up for some time to come, but the man himself is still at large. The Chief is scouring the place for him, but so far without success. That’s why he looked grave to-night. And—I don’t blame him.”
“We’ve failed after all then.”
Moore smiled and nodded toward the room we had left. “Hardly that,” he said. “But—the man who calls himself Emperor has probably taken an unaccountable dislike to both of us. And—I wanted you to know. That’s all.”
“Thanks,” I told him simply. And with that Moore took his departure. He was leaving for Washington the next day.
There are just a few words to add.
Natalie and I were married the following spring. And in the autumn Margaret came to live with us, having spent her summer with old friends. Of course Larry, who had simply refused to listen to suggestions as to finding a better job for him, had been placed in practical command of our household as soon as Natalie and I settled down.
Moore gave up his work with the Secret Service about the time of my marriage, got himself a position with a firm of consulting engineers in New York, and took to running in to see us two or three times a week. Of course I am only a brother and these things are hidden from me. But although Margaret goes out a good deal and has many friends, she always seems to be at home when Moore calls. I hope I’m right!
Of the Emperor, whom Moore and I often discuss, we have heard nothing more. He was never captured, so far as we know. But he has never been heard from since that night.
Possibly he’s gone back to Russia, or some place equally distant. I hope so!
The End