0,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
The Scientific Detectives – 3 Classic Mystery Novels is an intriguing anthology that blends the allure of mystery with the meticulous nature of scientific deduction. This collection captures the essence of a pivotal era in detective fiction, where ingenuity and scientific reasoning took center stage. The works span a range of styles from thrilling suspense to cerebral unraveling of intricate puzzles, showcasing the unique interplay between mystery and science. The anthology's standout pieces illuminate the evolving narrative techniques of their time, engaging readers with complex plots wrapped in layers of empirical investigation. Contributing authors Charles Reade, Fred M. White, and Arthur B. Reeve bring together a wealth of literary experience and cultural insight. These notable figures emerged during a time when scientific advancements were influencing all facets of life, including literature. Their stories resonate with the burgeoning interest in empirical inquiry and rational thought, capturing the zeitgeist of a society on the cusp of modernity. The authors' collective works offer a rich tapestry of narratives that reflect larger historical and literary movements, providing a glimpse into the world of early 20th-century detective fiction. Readers are invited to explore the depths of The Scientific Detectives for a captivating journey into the realm of logic and deduction. This anthology provides a unique opportunity to experience a comprehensive range of investigative styles and thematic exploration in one volume. Ideal for both casual readers and literary scholars, the collection not only entertains but also fosters an appreciation for the intricate dialogue between scientific advancement and the mysteries of human behavior. Embrace the educational value, diverse perspectives, and the timeless allure of methodical deduction in this well-curated compilation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
Ähnliche
The Scientific Detectives – 3 Classic Mystery Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Scientific Detectives – 3 Classic Mystery Novels unites Arthur B. Reeve’s The Stolen War-Secret, Fred M. White’s Blackmail!, and Charles Reade’s A Perilous Secret through a common fascination with hidden knowledge and the means by which concealed truths shape human affairs. Each title centers secrecy not as a mere decorative device but as the pressure that drives inquiry, suspicion, and revelation. Whether the concealed matter concerns public danger, private coercion, or unnamed risk, these works gather around the same essential drama: information withheld, pursued, manipulated, and finally brought into the light through acts of intelligence, observation, and moral testing.
Taken together, the three novels suggest a broad map of mystery in which detection is inseparable from the social world. The Stolen War-Secret points toward stakes extending beyond the individual, joining suspense to matters of strategy, vulnerability, and collective security. Blackmail! invokes a more intimate form of menace, where secrecy becomes a lever of domination and personal exposure can be weaponized. A Perilous Secret, by its very title, places danger and concealment in close relation, indicating how private knowledge may radiate outward into wider consequence. In each case, mystery emerges not in isolation but in relation to institutions, reputations, and the fragile bonds of trust.
A recurring motif across these works is the unstable boundary between surface appearance and underlying fact. Secrets depend upon masks, omissions, misread signs, and the strategic management of what others are allowed to know. This gives the collection a coherent intellectual texture: it is concerned with the interpretation of evidence, the uncertainty of motives, and the possibility that ordinary settings may conceal extraordinary pressures. The idea of the detective, whether explicit or implicit, therefore becomes larger than a profession or role. It names a disciplined habit of mind, one committed to reading the world critically when language, conduct, and circumstance cannot be accepted at face value.
The conversation among the novels is also sharpened by contrast. Reeve’s title carries the hard edge of national urgency, suggesting a mystery energized by modern conflict and organized power. White’s Blackmail! implies a darker proximity to social scandal, emotional vulnerability, and the economies of fear that flourish wherever reputation matters. Reade’s A Perilous Secret sounds at once more intimate and more broadly ominous, as if hidden knowledge could imperil both inner life and external standing. These tonal differences widen the collection’s range, allowing suspense to move between public crisis and private pressure while retaining a shared allegiance to unraveling what has been obscured.
This interplay of scales gives the volume much of its richness. One work appears to frame secrecy as a threat to larger systems, another as an instrument used against individuals, and another as a dangerous burden whose mere existence alters relationships and choices. Read together, they show that mystery fiction thrives when it recognizes that facts are never neutral once they are hidden. A secret may be guarded for protection, stolen for advantage, or exploited for control, yet in every case it generates moral dilemmas about loyalty, responsibility, and the costs of disclosure. The resulting dialogue is not repetitive but cumulative, each title illuminating the others’ concerns.
The contemporary resonance of this grouping is clear in its enduring preoccupation with contested information. Modern culture remains absorbed by questions of who possesses knowledge, who withholds it, and who suffers when truth is converted into leverage. These novels speak to that continuing condition in distinct but compatible ways, linking suspense to problems of privacy, security, and social pressure. Their appeal is therefore not limited to historical curiosity. They dramatize habits of concealment and investigation that still shape public imagination, from stories of institutional vulnerability to narratives of coercion and exposed identity, revealing why mystery remains one of the most adaptable forms of serious popular art.
As a collection, these three works affirm that the classic mystery novel is not only a mechanism of plot but also a study of power exercised through uncertainty. Charles Reade, Fred M. White, and Arthur B. Reeve approach secrecy from different angles, yet their titles indicate a shared commitment to the drama of hidden causes and consequential discoveries. Their works belong together because each treats knowledge as something fought over, feared, and ethically charged. In that shared terrain, suspense becomes a way of thinking about modern life itself, where danger often begins in what is concealed and understanding must be earned through patience, inference, and resolve.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Arthur B. Reeve’s The Stolen War-Secret belongs to an era when state power, military preparedness, and industrial secrecy increasingly overlapped. Written in the shadow of early twentieth-century rivalry among great powers, it reflects anxieties about espionage before and during the period when modern intelligence work was becoming a public fascination. The novel’s emphasis on stolen technical knowledge mirrors debates about national vulnerability in a world tied together by telegraphy, rail, and mass-circulation news. Political authority appears both necessary and imperfect, relying on private expertise to protect strategic information that governments and manufacturers alike were struggling to secure.
Fred M. White’s Blackmail! reflects a society preoccupied with reputation, class discipline, and the porous boundary between private conduct and public scandal. In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, legal and journalistic cultures made exposure a potent social weapon, especially where inheritance, marriage, and respectability governed access to power. White’s treatment of coercion through secret knowledge belongs to a broader climate of concern about urban anonymity, financial speculation, and criminal opportunism. Authority in such fiction is rarely confined to official institutions; instead, social hierarchies themselves enforce order, while blackmail exposes how fragile that order becomes when hidden behavior can be turned into leverage.
Charles Reade’s A Perilous Secret emerges from mid-Victorian debates about domestic authority, property, and the moral responsibilities attached to social rank. Reade often wrote in a culture shaped by reform controversies, where law, family governance, and gendered expectations were under active negotiation. The novel’s secrets and pressures are rooted less in parliamentary conflict than in the everyday politics of household control and social surveillance. Its world assumes that class position confers obligations as well as privileges, yet it also shows how private power can be exercised coercively. In that respect, the novel reflects Victorian unease about whether moral legitimacy truly accompanies social authority.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Across these three works, the most visible intellectual shift is the movement from sensation and melodrama toward analytically organized mystery. Reade writes within a mid-nineteenth-century culture that prized moral intensity, emotional trial, and intricate plotting, while White develops a brisker fin-de-siècle pace shaped by popular journalism and serial publication. Reeve pushes further by centering forms of reasoning associated with laboratory method, technical evidence, and professional specialization. Yet all three retain older narrative pleasures: concealed motives, delayed revelations, and sharply managed suspense. Their anthology pairing therefore traces how mystery fiction absorbed changing ideas about knowledge, proof, and the means by which truth becomes legible.
The Stolen War-Secret is especially marked by the prestige of science in public culture. Reeve wrote when criminology, chemistry, photography, and other applied sciences were increasingly imagined as tools capable of disciplining uncertainty. His fiction participates in the same imaginative field that celebrated inventors, engineers, and the promise of modern apparatus, even as it acknowledged fears that technical progress empowered new forms of crime. The detective becomes a mediator between specialist knowledge and a mass readership eager for both instruction and excitement. Scientific detection in this setting is not merely a plot device; it is an aesthetic claim that modern reality can be interpreted through disciplined observation.
Blackmail! bears the imprint of sensation fiction’s afterlife and the commercial aesthetics of periodical culture. White’s storytelling depends on compression, cliff-edge momentum, and the rapid circulation of suspicion, all features suited to readers accustomed to newspapers and serialized tales. Thematically, the novel explores how identity can be staged, masked, and manipulated, a concern shared with wider fin-de-siècle interest in duplicity and the unstable surfaces of modern social life. Its dramatic economy also reflects an entertainment market in which fiction competed by producing immediate emotional stakes. As a result, secrecy becomes both a moral problem and a formal engine for sustained narrative tension.
A Perilous Secret reflects Victorian realism’s alliance with melodramatic structure. Reade was attentive to social institutions and recognizable moral pressures, yet he also valued theatrical turns, extreme predicaments, and the strategic revelation of hidden facts. That combination was central to an age when readers expected fiction to instruct, move, and entertain simultaneously. The novel’s emphasis on conscience, duty, and the consequences of concealment aligns with a broader belief that character is tested under pressure and disclosed through action. Even when its situations intensify toward melodrama, the governing assumption remains ethical rather than purely sensational: secrets matter because they deform ordinary human relations.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Later readers have often treated Reeve as a crucial intermediary between the sensational detective tale and the fully technologized crime story. The Stolen War-Secret has accordingly been reassessed less as a simple thriller than as evidence of how early twentieth-century fiction imagined expert knowledge entering everyday life. Scholars interested in surveillance, media history, and prewar security culture have found in Reeve’s work a compact record of changing beliefs about evidence and national risk. At the same time, some modern criticism notes that confidence in scientific method can appear overstated or theatrically convenient. That tension has kept the novel relevant to histories of both detective fiction and popular science.
White and Reade have undergone a different kind of afterlife, shaped by shifting literary prestige. Blackmail! has often been revisited through studies of sensation, print culture, and the social mechanics of scandal, rather than as an isolated canonical detective text. A Perilous Secret, meanwhile, has benefited from renewed attention to Victorian popular fiction that crosses realism, melodrama, and proto-mystery. Together, the novels invite reassessment of literary history’s sharper divisions between serious and popular writing. Modern scholarship increasingly values them for revealing how secrecy, evidence, and social performance evolved across decades, preparing the ground on which later mystery fiction would more self-consciously define itself.
The Scientific Detectives – 3 Classic Mystery Novels
Science and Forensic Reasoning
Crime, Secrecy and Social Stakes
Arthur B. Reeve
The Stolen War-Secret
I. The Mystery of the Spy
CHAPTER I
THE MYSTERY OF THE SPY
IT WAS during the dark days at the beginning of our recent unpleasantness with Mexico that Craig Kennedy and I dropped in one evening at the new Vanderveer Hotel to glance at the ticker to see how affairs were going.
We were bending over the tape, oblivious to everything else about us, when we felt a hand on each of our shoulders.
“We’ve just had a most remarkable tragedy right here in the hotel,” a voice whispered. “Are you busy tonight, Kennedy?”
Craig and I turned simultaneously and found Michael McBride, the house-detective of the hotel, an old friend of ours some years before in the city detective-bureau.
McBride was evidently making a great effort to appear calm, but it was very apparent that something had completely upset him.
“How’s that?” asked Kennedy shaking hands.
McBride gave a hasty glance about and edged us over into a quiet corner away from the ticker.
“Why,” he replied in an undertone, “we’ve just discovered one of our guests—a Madame Valcour—in her room—dead!”
“Dead?” repeated Kennedy in amazement.
“Yes—the most incomprehensible thing you can imagine. Come upstairs with me, before the coroner gets here,” he urged. “I’d like you to see the case, Kennedy, before he musses things up.”
We followed the house-detective to the tenth floor. As we left the elevator he nodded to the young woman floor-clerk who led the way down the thickly carpeted hall. She stopped at a door, and through the transom overhead we could see that the room was dimly lighted. She opened the door and we caught a glimpse of a sumptuously furnished suite.
On the snowy white bed, in all her cold, stony beauty, lay the beautiful Madame Valcour, fully dressed in the latest of Parisian creations, perfect from her hat which breathed of the Rue de la Paix to her dainty tango-slippers peeping from a loosely draped skirt which accentuated rather than concealed her exquisite form.
She was a striking woman, dark of hair and skin. In life she must have been sensuously attractive. But now her face was drawn and contorted with a ghastly look.
There she lay, alone, in an elegantly appointed room of an exclusive hotel. Only a few feet away were hundreds of gay guests chatting and laughing, with no idea of the terrible tragedy so near them.
In the comer of the room I could see her maid sobbing hysterically.
“Oh—niña—niña,” cried the maid, whose name I learned afterward was Juanita. “She was muy simpatica—muy simpatica.”
“‘Niña,’” remarked Kennedy to us in an undertone, “means ‘little girl,’ the familiar term for mistress. As for ‘muy simpatica,’ it means, literally, ‘very sympathetic,’ but really can not be done justice to in English. It is that charming characteristic of personal attractiveness, the result of a sweet disposition.”
He looked down keenly at the woman before us.
“I can well imagine that she had it, that she was muy simpatica."
While Craig was taking in the situation, I turned to McBride and asked—
“Who was Madame Valcour—where did she come from?”
“You haven’t heard of her?” he repeated. "Well—I’m not surprised after all. Really I can’t say I know much about her myself—except that she was a beauty and attracted everybody’s attention here at the hotel. Among other things, she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair, I believe. You know him, don’t you—the retired army-engineer— interested in Mexican mines and railroads, and a whole lot of things? Oh, you’ve seen his name in the newspapers often enough. Lately, you know, he has been experimenting with air-ships for the army—has a big estate out on Long Island.”
Kennedy nodded.
“Rather a remarkable chap, I’ve heard.”
“I don’t know whether you know it or not,” continued McBride, “but we seem to have quite a colony of Mexican refugees here at the Vanderveer. She seemed to be one of them—at least she seemed to know them all. I think she was a Frenchwoman. At least, you know how all the Latin-Americans seem naturally to gravitate to Paris and how friendly the French are toward them.”
“How did you come to discover her?” asked Kennedy, bending over her again. “She couldn’t have been dead very long.”
“Well—she came into the hotel during the dinner-hour. As nearly as I can find out, the elevator boy, who seems to have been the only person who observed her closely, says that she acted as if she were dazed.
“They tell me her maid was out at the time. But about half an hour after Madame came in, there was a call for her over the telephone. The operator got no answer from her room, although the boy had seen her go up and the young lady who is floor-clerk on the tenth floor said she had not gone out.”
“Did the person on the telephone leave any message—give any name?” asked Craig.
“Yes. It was a man who seemed to be very much excited—said that it was Señor Morelos—just Senor Morelos—she would know.”
“What then?”
“Why, when he found he couldn’t get her, he rang off. A few minutes later her maid Juanita came in. The moment she opened the door with her key, she gave a scream and fainted.”
“Suicide?” I ventured under my breath to Kennedy, as McBride paused.
Craig said nothing. He was making a careful examination of both the room and of the body on the bed.
A moment later he looked up quickly, then bent down farther.
On her arm he had discovered a peculiar little red mark!
Gently, as if he would not hurt such an exquisite creature even in death, he squeezed a tiny drop of blood from the little puncture and caught it on a sterilized glass slide of a microscope, which he carried in a small compact emergency-case in his pocket.
He continued to rummage the room.
Thrown carelessly into a top drawer of the dressing-table was a chatelaine. He opened it. There seemed to be nothing there except several articles of feminine vanity. In the bottom, however, was a little silver box which he opened. There lay a number of queer little fuzzy buttons—at least they looked like buttons. He took one, examined it closely, found it rather soft, tasted it—made a wry face and dropped the whole thing into his pocket.
A HEAVY tap sounded on the door. McBride opened it. It was our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the coroner.
“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole situation, and hardly more surprised seeing us than at the strangeness of the handsome figure on the bed. “Well—what is all this?”
McBride shook his head gravely and repeated substantially what he had already told us.
There is no need to go into the lengthy investigation that the coroner conducted. He questioned one servant and employee after another, without eliciting any more real information than we had already obtained.
The maid was quite evidently a Mexican and spoke very little and very poor English. She seemed to be in great distress, and as far as we could determine it was genuine. Through her broken English and our own fragmentary knowledge of Spanish, we managed to extract her story, about as McBride had told it.
Madame Valcour had engaged her in Paris, where she had been taken and later had been thrown on her own resources by a family which had been ruined in the revolution in Mexico. As for a Monsieur Valcour, she had never seen him. She thought that Madame was a widow.
As the questioning continued, I read between the lines, however, that Madame Valcour was in all probability an adventuress of a high order, one of those female soldiers of fortune who, in Paris, London, New York, and all large cities, seem to have a way of bobbing up at the most unexpected moments, in some way connected, through masculine frailty, with great national and international events.
The questioning over, the coroner ordered that the body be sent down to one of the city hospitals where an autopsy could be performed, and we rode down in the elevator together.
“Extraordinary—most extraordinary,” repeated Dr. Leslie as we paused for a moment in an angle of the lobby to discuss the conclusion of his preliminary investigation. “There is just one big point, though, that we shall have to clear up before we can go ahead with anything else. What was the cause of death? There was no gas in the room. It couldn’t have been illuminating gas, then. It must have been a poison of some kind.”
“You assume then that it was suicide?” asked Kennedy keenly.
“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole “I assume nothing—yet,” replied the coroner, quickly backing water, and affecting the air of one who could say much if he chose but was stopped by professional and official etiquette.
“You’ll keep me informed as to what you do discover?” asked Kennedy with a deference that could not fail to be ingratiating.
“Indeed I will,” answered the coroner, cordially taking the flattery. “Now I must be off—let me see—an accident case. Yes indeed, Kennedy, I shall be only too glad to keep you informed and to have your co-operation on the case.”
“Poison of some kind,” repeated Kennedy as Dr. Leslie disappeared. “Sounds very simple when you put it that way. I wish I could handle the whole thing for him. However, I suspect he’ll come around in a day or two—begging me to help him save his precious reputation and find out what it really is.”
“I know what he’ll do,” asserted McBride with a scowl. “He’ll take this chance to rub it in on the Vanderveer. We’ve had a couple of suicides since we opened. It isn’t our fault if such things happen. But somehow or other it seems to appeal to the city official to blame some private agency for anything like this. I tell you, Kennedy, we’ve got to protect the reputation of the hotel against such things. Now, if you’ll take the case, I’ll see that you don’t lose anything by it.”
“Gladly,” replied Kennedy, to whom a mystery was as the breath of life. Then he added with a smile, “I had tacitly assumed as much after you spoke to me.”
“I meant that you should,” agreed McBride, “and I thank you. Only it is just as well that we understand each other clearly at the outset.”
“Exactly. Has anything in Madame Valcour’s actions about the hotel offered a clue—ever so slight?” asked Craig, plunging into the case eagerly.
“Perhaps,” hesitated McBride as if trying to separate something that might be trivial from that which might be really important. “When she came here about a week ago, she left word at the telephone-desk that if a Señor Morelos should call, she was at home.”
“Morelos?” repeated Kennedy. “That is the name of the man who called up to night. Did he call?”
“Not as far as I can find out.”
“But she must have had other callers,” pursued Craig, evidently thinking of the attractiveness of the woman.
“Yes indeed,” answered McBride, “plenty of them. In fact, she seemed never to be able to stir about downstairs without having some one looking at her and ogling.”
“Which is no crime,” put in Craig.
“No,” agreed McBride, “and to be perfectly fair to her, she never gave any of them any encouragement, as far as I could see.”
“You mentioned that she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair’s,” prompted Kennedy.
“Oh yes,” recollected McBride. “He called on her—once, I think. Then for a couple of days she was away—out on Long Island, I believe she left word. It seems that there is a sort of Summer settlement of Mexicans and Latin-Americans generally out there, at a place called Seaville. It was only today that she returned from her visit.”
“Seaville,” repeated Kennedy. “That is out somewhere near Westport, the home of Sinclair, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is,” remarked McBride.
He was chewing his unlighted cigar thoughtfully, as we tried to piece together the fragmentary bits of the story.
Suddenly he removed the cigar contemplatively.
“I have been wondering,” he said slowly, “just what she was here for anyway. I can’t say that there is anything that throws much light on the subject. But she was so secretive, she threw such an air of mystery about herself, never told any one much about her goings-out or comings-in, and in fact seemed to be so careful—well, I’ve just been wondering whether she wasn’t mixed up in some plot or other, wasn’t playing a deeper game than we suspect with these precious friends of hers.”
I looked at McBride attentively. Was he merely mystified by having had to deal with a foreigner who naturally was not as easy to understand as a native, or was the general impression he sought to convey really founded on that instinct which no true detective can afford to be without?
“In other words,” McBride pursued, uninterrupted by Kennedy who was only too glad to glean any impression the house-man might have received, “I was never quite able to fathom her. You see, yourself, that she could not even have made much of a confidant of her maid. She was just the type I should pick out as—as the agent of somebody.”
“You mean that she was playing a game?” I interjected.
“Yes,” he acquiesced. “You know as well as I do that if any one wants to accomplish anything, get information that it is hard to get, the first thing necessary is to employ a woman of the world. Why men will tell their inmost secrets to a clever woman, if she knows how to play the game right. I can’t persuade myself that—that it was all perfectly straight. She must have had a purpose in being here. I don’t know what it could be. But—well—this tragedy shows that there must be something hidden under the surface. She—she might have been a spy.”
Kennedy was watching McBride’s face encouragingly, but without a word so far.
He was evidently thinking of Colonel Sinclair. Sinclair, I knew, was a very wealthy mine-owner down in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico. I recalled having seen him once or twice—a tall, wiry, muscular man on whose face the deep tan showed that he had lived for years in the neighborhood of the tropical sun. Could Colonel Sinclair know anything of the mysterious death of Madame Valcour?
“A spy,” pondered Kennedy at length. “What other people have you seen her with—or have reason to think she was with?”
“Why,” replied McBride contemplatively, “I understand that she used to go around a good deal to a place which they call the Mexican-American Tea-Room—just around the corner from here.”
“The Mexican-American Tea-Room. Do you know anything of the place?”
“Not much—only that it seems to be frequented largely by people in the city who want to discuss affairs down in Mexico to the accompaniment of dishes that are hot with peppers and chillies. It’s a peculiar place. They have a cabaret upstairs in the evening. I believe it is—well—pretty swift.”
Kennedy seemed at last to have received some hint that indicated a possible line of action.
“I think I’ll drop in there before Leslie gives this thing out to the papers,” he decided. “Walter—come on—this is the life!”
II. The Mexican Cabaret
CHAPTER II
THE MEXICAN CABARET
WE EASILY found the Mexican-American cabaret and tea-room which McBride had mentioned. McBride himself refused to accompany us because it was likely that some of Valcour’s visitors, if they happened to be there, might recognize him. Kennedy was better pleased to have it that way also, for McBride, whatever his other merits, had detective stamped over him from his hat on the back of his head down to his square-toed shoes.
The house was an old-fashioned, high-stooped structure, just around the corner from the Vanderveer, in the neighborhood where business was rapidly replacing residences.
Apparently the entrance was through what had once been a basement, but which had been remodeled.
We entered the low door. There did not seem to be anybody dining downstairs. But now and then sounds indicated that up stairs there were many people, and that they were thoroughly enjoying the entertainment the cabaret afforded.
Passing by a dark-skinned individual who seemed to serve as both waiter and look-out for the room downstairs, we mounted the steps, and on the parlor-floor found a full-fledged cabaret in operation.
With a hasty, all-inclusive glance about, Craig selected a seat down near a little platform where there were several performers and a small dancing-floor fringed with little tables and chairs.
Fortunately it was such a place as New Yorkers in search of the picturesque often drop in upon, especially with friends from out of town, and our entrance did not, therefore, excite any comment whatever.
A waiter promptly appeared beside us, and Kennedy leisurely scanned a bill of fare which enumerated all sorts of tortillas, chilli con carnes, tamals and frijoles. We ordered and began to look about us.
It was as strange and interesting a gathering as one could have found anywhere in the city. As nearly as I could make out there were refugees from Mexico, of every class and condition and nationality, who seemed to be in the habit of meeting there nightly. There were soldiers of fortune preparing to go down there if they got the chance. Here was a man who had fled from Vera Cruz on a transport, there was another aching to get away and break into the country as soon as there were any signs of the lifting of the embargo.
There were Mexicans, Americans, English, French, Germans—all who were interested in the unhappy republic south of us, all talking in animated tones, except now and then when a mutual confidence was exchanged between some of them, all seeming to know each other, if not to be on friendly terms with one another. What was seething under the surface an outsider could not judge. But of one thing I felt certain. If Valcour had been of this group, certainly none of them showed any knowledge of the tragedy, or if they did they were consummate actors and actresses.
THE music, furnished by a piano, mandolins and guitars on the platform, started up.
Across from us was a party of men and women talking to a woman, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, the type of Spanish dancing-girl. As the music started the girl rose.
“Who is that?” asked Craig of the waiter who had brought us our order.
“Señora Ruiz,” he replied briefly, “one of our best dancers.”
We watched her intently. There was something fascinating about the woman. From the snap of her black eyes to the vibrating grace of her shapely ankle there was something that stamped her as unique. She seemed to realize the power nature had given her over the passions of men, to have the keen wit to play them off, and the joy of living to appreciate the dramas which were enacted.
She began with the danza de sombrero. A sombrero was placed on the floor and she danced about it, in and out, now drawing near and now gliding away without touching it. There was something fascinating, not so much about the dance as about the dancer, for the dance itself was interminable, monotonous.
Several times I saw that Kennedy had caught her eye, and when at last the dance ended she contrived to finish close to our table, so close that it was but a turn, an exchange of looks, a word or two, and, as cabaret dancers will, she was sitting at our table a moment later and Kennedy was ordering something.
The Señora spoke very good English and French, and the conversation glided along like a dance from one subject to another, for she had danced her way into almost every quarter of the gay world of America and Europe.
It was not long before Kennedy and she were discussing Mexican dances and some how or other those of the south of Mexico were mentioned. The orchestra, meanwhile, had burst forth into a tango, followed by a maxixe, and many of the habitues of the cabaret were now themselves dancing.
“The Zapotecs,” remarked Kennedy, “have a number of strange dances. There is one called the Devil Dance that I have often wished to see.”
“The Devil Dance?” she repeated. “That usually takes place on feast-days of the saints. I have seen it often. On those occasions some of the dancers have their bodies painted to represent skeletons, and they also wear strange, feathered head-dresses.”
The waiter responded with our order.
“The Zapotec ballroom,” she continued reminiscently, “is an open space near a village, and there the dance goes on by the light of a blazing fire. The dancers, men and women, are dressed in all kinds of fantastic costumes.”
So from dancing the conversation drifted along to one topic after another, Kennedy showing a marvelous knowledge of things Mexican, mostly, I suspected, second-hand, for he had a sort of skill in such a situation of confining the subjects, if he chose, to those on which he was already somewhat acquainted.
“Señora,” called a voice from the other table at which she had been sitting.
She turned with a gay smile. Evidently the party of friends were eager to have her back.
Some words passed, and in a few moments we found ourselves at the other table with the rest of Señora Ruiz’s friends. No one seemed to think it strange in this Bohemian atmosphere that two newcomers should be added to the party. In fact, I rather suspected that they welcomed us as possibly lightening the load of paying the checks which the waiters brought for various things ordered, none of which were exactly reasonable in price.
AMONG others whom we met was an American, a Western mining-woman whom all seemed to know as Hattie Hawley. She was of the breezy type that the West has produced, interested in Mexican affairs through having purchased an interest in some mines in the southern part of the country, and seemed to be thoroughly acquainted with the methods of Wall Street in exploiting mines.
It was a rapid-fire conversation that they carried on, and I kept silent for the most part, fearing that I might say the wrong thing, and following Kennedy’s lead as much as possible.
Mrs. Hawley happened to be sitting next to Kennedy, and as the talk turned on the situation in the country in which all seemed to be interested in some way, Kennedy ventured to her—
“Do you know Colonel Sinclair?”
“I should say I do,” she replied frankly. “Why, it was only a few days ago that he came in here and we were all sitting at this very table discussing the situation down in Oaxaca. You know, I’m interested in some mines near Colonel Sinclair’s, and in the same railroad through the region which he controls.”
“He isn’t here tonight, then?” pursued Kennedy.
“No,” she answered. “I suppose he is out on Long Island at his place at Westport. A fine boy, the Colonel. We all like him.”
There was no mistaking the tone in which she made the remark. Even if it sounded a little unconventional, it was merely her way of testifying that she had a high regard for the gentleman.
“I have known the Colonel fairly well for a number of years,” prevaricated Kennedy, and the conversation drifted on to other topics.
Kennedy managed to lead it about again so that in a perfectly inconsequential way, after the mention of Sinclair’s name, he could say—
“I have heard him mention the name of a Madame Val—” he hesitated, as if the name were not familiar, “a Madame Valoour, I think it is. Is she here? Does she come around to the cabaret?”
“Oh yes,” replied Hattie Hawley. “She comes around here quite often. I haven’t seen her tonight though. She has been away for a few days—down on Long Island, I believe. Perhaps she is there yet.”
I caught her looking significantly at Kennedy, and wondered what was coming next.
She leaned over and whispered—
“Between you and me, I think the Colonel is stuck on her, only I wouldn’t say that aloud here.”
She flashed a glance at one of the men who had been sitting in the shadow, talking with Señora Ruiz.
“He could tell you more about her than I could,” she remarked under her breath. “I never saw any one so crazy over a woman as he is over Valcour.”
“And does she care for him?” asked Kennedy.
Hattie Hawley considered for a moment.
“I don’t believe she cares for anybody,” she answered.
At least there was no hint that the tragedy was known yet here.
I glanced more closely at the man who was talking to Ruiz. He was dark-faced, tall, military in bearing, straight as an arrow, with a little black imperial and a distinguished shock of bushy dark hair.
“It’s evident that she is an ardent admirer of him,” remarked Kennedy following my eye, “whatever he may think of her.” Then, louder, he asked of Mrs. Hawley, “What is his name? I don’t believe I caught it when we were introduced—that is, if we were, in this very informal meeting.”
She laughed. Evidently she liked it.
“His name is Sanchez,” she replied.
A snatch of conversation from a side table floated over to us.
“Whoever can learn how to get at the key and decipher those hieroglyphics will not only add a chapter to archeology, but he’ll be rich—in my opinion—enormously rich. Why, my dear sir, there is more treasure in Mexico today that has never——”
The voice was drowned in the din of the orchestra starting up a new dance.
Kennedy turned. At another table were two men talking earnestly. One was the very type of the German savant, including the whiskers and the near-sighted glasses. The other looked very much as if he were an American college professor.
The savant, at least, seemed to be at home in the Bohemian atmosphere, but the other man looked for all the world as if he momentarily expected to be discovered by some of his students and have his reputation ruined forever.
“Who is that?” asked Kennedy of Mrs. Hawley. “Do you know them?”
“At the next table?” she answered looking around. “Why, that is Professor Neumeyer, Freidrich Neumeyer, the German archeologist. He has been all over Mexico—Yucatan, Mitla, the pyramids, wherever there are ruins. I never cared much about ruins—guess I’m too modern. But Colonel Sinclair does. He goes in for all that sort of thing—has collections of his own, and all that.
“I believe he and Neumeyer are great friends. I don’t know the other man, but he looks like one of the professors from the University.”
Kennedy continued to divide his attention between the party at our table and the archeologist. His companion, as I myself had observed, seemed entirely out of place outside a classroom or archeological museum, and I soon dismissed him from my thoughts.
But Neumeyer was different. There was a fascination about him, and in fact I felt that I would really like to know the old fellow well enough to have him tell me the tales of adventure combined with scholarship, with which I felt intuitively he must be bursting.
AS THE hour grew later more people arrived, and the groups were continually splitting up and new ones being formed. Thus it came about that Kennedy and myself, having been set down I suppose as mere sightseers, found ourselves at last alone at the table, while Señora Ruiz and another gay party were chatting in animated tones farther down the room.
I looked at Craig inquiringly, but he 6hook his head and said in a whisper:
“I hardly think we are well acquainted enough yet to do much circulating about the room. It would look too much like ‘butting in.’ If any one speaks to us we can play them along, but we had better not do much speaking ourselves—yet.”
It was a novel experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I did every new phase of life in cosmopolitan New York.
The hour was growing late, however, and I began to wonder whether anything else was going to happen, when I saw a waiter go down quietly and speak to Señora Ruiz. A moment later the party of which she was a member rose and one by one disappeared up what had been the stairs of the house when it was formerly a residence. Others rose and followed, perhaps ten or a dozen, all of whom I recognized as intimate friends.
It had no effect on the crowd below, further than to reduce it slightly and put an end to the dancing of Ruiz.
“Private dining-rooms upstairs?” inquired Kennedy nonchalantly of the waiter as he came around again for orders.
“Yes,” he replied. “There’s a little party on up there in one of them tonight.”
Our friend Neumeyer and his guest had left some time before, and now there seemed to be little reason why we should stay.
“We have gained an entrée, anyhow,” observed Kennedy, moving as if he were going.
He rose, walked over to the door and out into the hall. Down the staircase we could hear floating snatches of conversation from above. In fact it seemed as if in several of the dining-rooms there were parties of friends. One was particularly gay, and it was easy to conjecture that that was the party of which Señora Ruiz was the life.
Craig rejoined me at the table quickly, having looked about at practically all the private dining-rooms without exciting suspicion.
“It’s all very interesting,” he observed to me. “But although it has added to our list of acquaintances considerably, I can’t say this visit has given us much real information. Still you never can tell, and until I am ready to come out in what I call my ‘open investigation,’ these are acquaintances worth cultivating. I have no doubt that Valcour and Sinclair would have been welcomed by that Ruiz party, and certainly from their actions it can not be that it is generally known yet that Valcour is dead.”
“No,” I agreed.
I had been going over in my mind the names of those we had met and the names I had heard mentioned. Not once had any one said the name of Morelos.
“There has been no one of the name of Morelos here,” I suggested to Craig.
“No,” he answered with a covert glance around. “And I did not make any inquiries. You may have noticed that all these people here seem to be supporters of the Government. I was about to inquire about him once when it suddenly occurred to me that he might be connected with the rebels, the Constitutionalists. I thought it would be discretion to refrain from even mentioning his name before these Federals.”
“Then perhaps Sinclair is playing the game with both factions,” I conjectured hastily, adding, “and Valcour was doing the same—is that what you mean?”
“The dancing has begun again,” he hinted to me, changing the subject to one less dangerous.
I took the hint and for a few moments we watched the people in the sensuous mazes of some of the new steps. Intently as I looked, I could see not the slightest evidence that any one in the cabaret knew of the terrible tragedy that had overtaken one of the habitués.
As I watched I wondered whether there might have been a love triangle of some kind. It had all been very unconventional. Had the Bohemian Valcour come between some of these fiery lovers? I could not help thinking of the modern dances, especially as Valcour must have danced them. I could almost imagine the flash of those tango-slippers and her beautiful ankle, the swaying of her lithe body. What might she not do in arousing passions?
Speculate as I might, however, I always came back to the one question, “Who was the mysterious Señor Morelos?”
I could think of no answer and was glad when Kennedy suggested that perhaps we had seen enough for one night.
III. The Secret Service
CHAPTER III
THE SECRET SERVICE
WE HAD scarcely turned down the street when I noticed that a man in a slouch-hat, pulled down over his eyes, was walking toward us.
As he passed I thought he peered out at us suspiciously from under the shelter of the hat.
He turned and followed us a step or two.
“Kennedy!” he exclaimed.
If a fourteen-inch gun had been fired off directly behind us, I could not have been more startled. Here, in spite of all our haste and secrecy, we were followed, watched—even known.
Craig had wheeled about suddenly, prepared for anything.
For an instant we looked at the man, wondering what to expect next from him.
“By Jove! Walter!” exclaimed Kennedy, almost before I had time to take in the situation. “It’s Burke of the Secret Service!”
“The same,” greeted a now familiar voice. “How are you?” he asked joining us and walking slowly down the street.
“Working on a case,” replied Kennedy colorlessly, meantime searching Burke’s face to discover whether it might be to our advantage to take him in on the secret.
“How did you come here?”
We had turned the corner and were standing in the deserted street near an electric light. Burke unfolded a newspaper which he had rolled up and was carrying in his hand.
“These newspaper fellows don’t let much get past them,” he said with a nod and a twinkle of his eye toward me. “I suppose you have seen this?”
He handed us a “war” extra.
We had not seen it, for our prolonged stay in the Mexican cabaret had, for the time being at least, superseded the interest which had taken us into the Vanderveer in the first place to look at the ticker. In the meantime an enterprising newspaper had rushed out its late edition with an extra.
Across the top of the page in big red-ink letters sprawled the headline:
WAR SECRETS STOLEN
The news account, in a little box at the bottom of the page where it had evidently been dropped in at the last moment, was also in red. It was meager, but exciting:
Plans which represent the greatest war secret of the Government have been stolen, it was learned today semi-officially in Washington.
The entire machinery of the Secret Service has been put into operation to recover the stolen documents.
Just what the loss is could not be learned by our correspondent from any one in authority, but the general activity of both the Secret Service and the War College seems to confirm the rumors current in the capital tonight.
As nearly as can be ascertained, it is believed that the information, if it has fallen into the hands of the Mexican Government, may prove particularly dangerous, and, while official Washington is either denying or minimizing the loss, it is reported indirectly that if the truth were known it would arouse great public concern.
That was all. Only pressure of time and the limited space of the box in which the news appeared had prevented its elaboration into a column or two of conjecture.
“What were the plans?” both Craig and I asked almost together as we read the extra. “Is that what brings you to New York?”
Burke leaned over to us excitedly and though there was no possibility of being overheard whispered hoarsely—
“I couldn’t have met any one I’d rather see just at this very moment.”
He regarded us frankly a few seconds, then queried—
“You remember that case we had where the anarchist used wireless?”
“Yes,” replied Kennedy, “telautomatics—exploding bombs at long range by Hertzian wave impulses.”
“Exactly. Well—this case goes far beyond even that,” pursued Burke with another glance around. “I need not ask you fellows if I can trust you. We understand each other.” He lowered his voice even more. “The secret that has been stolen is the wireless control of aeroplanes and aerial torpedoes. They use a gyroscope in it—and—oh—I don’t know anything much about mechanics,” he added floundering hopelessly, “but I do know about crime and criminals, and there is some big criminal at work here. That’s in my line, even if I don’t know much about science.”
“Where were the plans stolen?” asked Kennedy. “Surely not from the Government itself in Washington?”
“No,” answered Burke. “They were stolen out on Long Island, at Westport. Colonel Sinclair, the retired army engineer, had a model——”
“Colonel Sinclair?” broke in Kennedy, in turn surprised.
“Yes. You know him?”
Burke looked at Craig for a moment as if he were positively uncanny, and perhaps knew all about what the Secret Service man was about to say, even before he had said it.
Kennedy smiled.
“Not personally,” he replied. “But I have run across him in connection with a case which I am interested in. I understood that he was a friend of a Madame Valcour who has just been discovered dead up at the Vanderveer. It is a most mysterious case. She——”
“Madame Valcour?” interrupted Burke, now in turn himself surprised. “What sort of looking woman was she?”
Kennedy described her briefly, and ran over as much of the case as he felt it prudent to talk about at present.
“She’s one of the very persons I’m trying to get a line on!” ejaculated Burke. “There’s a sort of colony of Latin-Americans out there, across the bay from Sinclair’s. Sinclair knew her—had been automobiling and motor-boating with her. And she’s dead, you say?”
Kennedy nodded.
“Only my old friend the coroner, Dr. Leslie, stands in the way of saying how and by what,” he confirmed impatiently. “What do you know about her?”
Burke had fallen into a study.
“I suspected some of those people out there at Seaville,” he resumed slowly. “I found out that when they are in the city they usually drop in at that Mexican cabaret down the street.”
“We have just come from it,” interjected Kennedy.
“There seemed to be hardly any of them left out at Seaville,” went on Burke. “If any of them has pulled off anything, they have all come to New York for cover. My people at Washington hurried me up to Westport first, and after I looked over the ground I saw nothing to do but come back to New York to watch these Mexicans. I am told they make a sort of rendezvous out of this cabaret.”
“That’s strange,” considered Kennedy thoughtfully.
“Whom did you meet in the cabaret?” asked Burke.
“We just went in, like any other sightseers,” replied Craig. “There was a Señora Ruiz, dancing there——”
“Yes,” put in Burke. “She lives out there at Seaville. Has a cottage on the hill back of the hotel which she had leased for the season. Any one else?”
“There was a man named Sanchez.”
“Another one,” added Burke excitedly. “He stayed at the hotel—jealous as the the deuce of Valcour, too, they say. She was stopping at the hotel. You can imagine that Sanchez and Sinclair are not—well—just exactly pals,” finished Burke. “Any one else?”
“Oh, several others,” said Kennedy. “We were introduced and sat next to a Mrs. Hawley.”
“She’s a peculiar woman, as nearly as I can learn,” remarked Burke. “I don’t think she liked Valcour much. I haven’t been able to make out yet whether it was just because her interests were similar to those of Sinclair or whether there was something more to it, but if the Colonel would only say the word, I guess she wouldn’t stop long in saying ‘Yes.’ You see, I’ve only started on the case—just got into New York and haven’t had a chance to see any of these people yet. I’m giving you only the impressions I got out there from the people I talked to. Sinclair, as nearly as I can make out, ‘loves the ladies,’ to quote the cabaret song to that effect, but I don’t think there is any particular lady.”
“It’s a peculiar situation,” chimed in Craig. “Señora Ruiz, it seemed to me, thinks that Sanchez is just about right. And he is a rather striking-looking fellow, too. There’s one person, though, Burke, that I didn’t see or hear about, who interests me. Did you hear anything about a chap named Morelos?”
“Morelos—Morelos,” repeated Burke. “The name is familiar. No—I didn’t hear anything about him, in this case. But—why, yes. He wouldn’t be with these people. He’s one of the Revolutionist junta, here in the city. These people are all Government supporters.”
“I thought as much,” agreed Kennedy. “But you know him?”
“I never had anything to do with him,” replied Burke. “But I believe the Government—our Government—has had a good deal of trouble with him about the embargo on arms, since it was reestablished. He has been shipping them down there when he gets a chance. I can find out all about him for you, though.”
“I wish you would,” said Craig, “but the plans—how did they happen to be in Westport? What connection did Sinclair have with them?”
“Well, you see, the thing was the invention of Colonel Sinclair,” explained Burke. “I saw him, and although I couldn’t get him to talk much about these people—I suppose he was afraid to, for fear of his interests in Mexico—he was ready enough to talk about his invention. He told me he had never patented it, that it was too valuable to patent. He has been working on it for years, and only recently perfected it. As soon as it seemed likely that there might eventually be hostilities, he took a trip to Washington and gave it outright to the Government.”
“Mighty patriotic,” I commented.
“Yes,” agreed Burke. “The Colonel is a big man all right. You see this was one of his hobbies. He has spent thousands of dollars of his own money on it. There were two sets of plans made—one which he took to Washington and one which he kept him self out on his estate on Long Island. His own plans out there are those that have been stolen, not the plans that he gave to the Government.”
“The Government had accepted them, then?” queried Craig.
“Yes, indeed. They sent experts up to look at his machine, went over the thing thoroughly. Oh, there is no doubt about it.”
“You certainly have made a good start,” commented Kennedy.
“I haven’t had much time, it’s true,” said Burke modestly. “Sinclair had Washington on long-distance as soon as he discovered the theft, and I was taken off a case and hustled up to Westport immediately, without much chance to find out what it was all about.”
“What did you find up there?” asked Kennedy.
Burke shook his head.
“As far as I can make out,” he answered, “it must have been a most remarkable theft. The plans were stolen from Sinclair’s safe, in his own library. And you can imagine that Sinclair is not the sort who would have an old-fashioned, antiquated safe, either. It was small, but one of the latest type.”
“What did they do—drill it or use soup?” cut in Craig.
“Neither, as far as I could see,” replied Burke. “That’s perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole thing. How the fellow got into the safe is more than I can figure out. There wasn’t a mark of violence on it. Yet it had been opened. Not a soul in the world knew the combination except Sinclair, and he says that if he should happen to forget it or to die the safe would have to be drilled open. But they got in, nevertheless, and they seemed to know just what to take and the value that might be attached to it.”
As Burke proceeded with the details of the amazing case, Kennedy became more and more interested. For the moment, he forgot all about Valcour, or at least concluded that we had unexpectedly crossed a trail that would aid in the solution of that case.
BURKE had drawn from his capacious pocket a small but rather heavy apparatus, and, as we gathered about, displayed it under the light of the electric lamp overhead.
“Sinclair found this thing in his study the next morning,” he explained. “The thieves, whoever they were, must have left it in their hurry to get away after they found the plans.”
I looked at it uncomprehendingly. It was a small box, flattened so that it could be easily carried in a coat-pocket.
Craig opened it. Inside was what seemed to be a little specially constructed dry battery, and in another compartment a most peculiar instrument, something like a diminutive flat telephone transmitter. It was connected by flexible silk-covered wires to ear-pieces that fitted over the head, after the manner of the headgear used by telephone operators or operators in wireless.
“I can make nothing out of it,” confessed Burke, as Kennedy turned the thing over and over, shook it, fitted it on his head, examined it again, and then replaced the whole thing in its neat, compact box.
“I suppose you have no objection to my keeping this for a day or so?” he asked.
“None—if you can tell me what it is,” agreed Burke.
“You are positive that the safe had been opened?” asked Kennedy a moment later.
“We have Sinclair’s word,” asserted Burke. “That is all I know, and I assume that he is telling the truth. There couldn’t be any object in giving the invention to the Government and then robbing himself. No, if you knew Sinclair you’d know that about a thing like this he is as straight as a string. I feel that I can say positively that the papers were in the safe when it was locked by him for the night. He told me he put them there himself. And when he opened the safe in the morning they were gone.
“And, mind you, Kennedy, there wasn’t a mark of any kind on the safe—not a mark. I went over it with a glass and couldn’t find a thing, not a scratch—not even a finger-print—nothing except this queer arrangement which Sinclair himself found.”
“Why,” I exclaimed, “it sounds incredible—supernatural.”
“It does indeed,” asserted Burke. “It’s beyond me.”
Kennedy closed the cover of the little case and slipped the thing into his pocket, still pondering.
“It grows more incredible, too,” pursued Burke, looking at us frankly. “And then, to top it all off, when I do get back to the city I happen to run across you fellows hot on the trail of the death of Valcour herself—whatever she may be or have to do with the case. There’s only one thing Sinclair will not talk about freely and that is women—and this precious crew of Mexican friends of his. I’m afraid we shall have to go it alone on that end of it, without any assistance from him. All I was able to get, besides a word or two from him, was the gossip out there.” He paused, then went on, “I wonder if we can’t pool our interests, Kennedy, and work together on these cases?”
“Burke,” exclaimed Craig, for the moment showing a glimpse of the excitement that was surging through his mind, “I had no idea when I took up this case of Valcour for McBride of the Vanderveer that I should be doing my country a service also. When are you going up to Westport again?”
Burke looked at his watch. He was evidently considering what Kennedy had told him about the Mexican cabaret. It was growing late and there was little chance of his getting anything there now, or in fact tomorrow, until night-time came again.
“I can go tomorrow,” he answered, evidently only too glad to have Kennedy’s co-operation. “I’ll go up there with you myself at any time you say.”
“I shall be ready and meet you at the earliest train,” replied Craig.
Burke extended a hand to each of us as we parted.
Kennedy shook it cordially.
“We must succeed in unraveling this affair now at any cost,” he said simply.
