The older of the women gasped in broken English: “You must come. There is a man dying at Grove Street.”
Young Dr. Scanlon wasn’t sure whether he was dreaming or whether he had not simply stepped into the pages of an old-fashioned melodrama. However, he dressed quickly, snatched up his bag and followed the two women through the dim streets.
As they approached Grove Street, Dr. Scanlon was further baffled by the behavior of the younger woman. Abruptly she turned back and disappeared. The other woman expressed no surprise and Dr. Scanlon kept his bafflement to himself.
The address was No. 59 Grove Street. The ground floor was in complete blackness. A light glimmered in the topmost room. The woman, now panting heavily, led the way up a narrow, broken-down staircase. The doctor could barely see a foot ahead of him and twice stumbled. But at last they reached the top floor. The woman pointed to a room facing the landing and Dr. Scanlon went in.
A man lay on the bed. Between his tight-clinched teeth, gasps of agony escaped. Sweat beaded his stubbled, sallow face. Dr. Scanlon approached the bedside, deposited his bag and asked gently: “What’s the matter?”
The man groaned again, answered: “I was shot in the back by a friend. It was an accident. You must do something, doctor, the pain is unbearable.”
Dr. Scanlon was beyond mere surprise. There was no longer any doubt of it. He had walked straight into blood-and-thunder melodrama! The man was fully dressed even to his shoes.
The young doctor probed for the bullet. It had entered the man’s left side and inflicted dangerous injury. Both the stomach and lungs had been pierced and the man was vomiting blood. He dressed the wound as best he could, but saw that hospital equipment was required to extract the bullet.
“What is your name?” he asked the agonizing man.
“My name? Gardstein — George Gardstein.”
The woman made a sudden gesture with her extended hand as though she would stop Gardstein’s mouth, but in his pain he was beyond reasoning and caution.
“This man,” Dr. Scanlon told the woman, “is dangerously ill. He must be taken to the hospital.”
The woman’s eyes blazed. “No, never. Never will he go to the hospital.”
And the man, raising himself painfully on one elbow, echoed the woman’s words. “No, she is right. I will not — I cannot go to a hospital.”
Dr. Scanlon saw it was useless to argue with them. He remained with the wounded man an hour. Then he left, promising to return in the morning. The woman accompanied him so that he might give her some drugs to see Gardstein through the night.
It was unfortunate that Inspector Wensley’s discovery as to the identity of the lessee of No. 10 Exchange Buildings had not yet been made. Dr. Scanlon had never heard the name Gardstein before and it did not occur to him to report the matter to the police.
He returned to Grove Street the following morning, Sunday, at eleven. An even more startling set of events confronted him. For a long time, no one answered the door. When finally it did open, two scowling, unshaven men glowered at him.
“How is the man upstairs?” Dr. Scanlon asked.
The two men exchanged puzzled glances. “Man? What man? We know of no one.”
“Why, George Gardstein.”
Dr. Scanlon thought he detected a fleeting shadow of alarm in their faces, but they only shrugged. Impatiently he brushed them aside and dashed up the stairs. He tore open the door of Gardstein’s room, half expecting to find the man gone. But he was gone only in the spiritual sense. His body was still on the bed, cold, stiff. He had died sometime during the night.
When Dr. Scanlon descended to the lower floor, his mind racing with the mysterious events of the past twelve hours, the house was deserted. It was as empty and silent as a tomb. Alone was Dr. Scanlon with the stiffening corpse of George Gardstein.
This time, he wasted no instant reporting the strange death to the coroner. The coroner in turn reported to the police and it was then, and then only, that Detective John Stark and his assistants received the vital news of Gardstein’s hide-out. Had that news reached them six hours earlier, the ghastly blood-letting yet to come would have been avoided.
As it was, Inspector Wensley, accompanied by a squad of plain-clothes men, rushed to 59 Grove Street. They were admitted by an obese Russian woman, who either could not or would not understand a word they said. Wensley found that she had been destroying some papers in a back room and she was promptly arrested. She gave her name as Mrs. Rosa Trassjohnski.
Upstairs, in the squalid, stained bedroom, where Gardstein’s body still lay, there was evidence of a wild search having been made. Hidden in various parts of the room were daggers, rounds of ammunition. Under the dead man’s pillow was a black automatic. Wensley reasoned that it had been left by Gardstein’s colleagues to give him a chance to make a fight for it when the police came.
Wensley stepped into an adjoining bedroom and there saw a second woman, the young woman described by Dr. Scanlon, standing near the blazing fireplace, a sheaf of photographs in her hand. Wensley sprang forward, gripped her wrist, but too late to prevent her dropping the photographs into the flames. They were consumed in an instant. Like fat Rosa Trassjohnski, the girl feigned to be unable to understand Wensley’s questions. Nevertheless, the famous sleuth felt that he was measurably nearer the identity of the men who had butchered his colleagues. That Gardstein was one of them he had no doubt.
The Inspector was not far wrong. Arrested and taken back to the Yard, the two women were persuaded by gentle, but effective methods of third degree to talk in their native Russian to an interpreter.
From their statements the first important leads on what was ultimately found to be a giant ring of anarchist-gangsters developed. After days of questioning, searching, employing police “informers,” publishing Gardstein’s photograph and offering rewards, the police were able to piece together a story surpassing in fantasy the wildest concoctions of Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim.
The dead man had been known variously as Gardstein, Morin, Morountzeff and a great number of other aliases. Russian police informed the Yard that a year previously this man had fled from Moscow, a fugitive from the law. He made straight for London.
There was at this time in the British capital a secret society calling itself the Anarchist Club. It was composed of a desperate, sinister brood of foreigners, misfits in their own country, homeless wanderers, ready for any deed of violence. Gardstein joined this society and by force of his dominating personality became the ringleader of ten particularly bloody-minded ruffians.
The Yard’s toughest task was determining the identities of these ten men. Ordinary detective work was unavailing here. Mere questioning among the Russian element in the East End met only with a wall of silence, of thinly veiled hostility. Subtler methods were required. Stool pigeons became invaluable allies.
Eventually another name came to the Yard’s attention, Fritz Svaars, another Russian criminal who, like Gardstein, had left Russia a step ahead of the police. From a description given by Dr. Scanlon of the two men he saw at 59 Grove Street the morning following Gardstein’s death, it was clear that one of these was Svaars, the other an odd character, an artist, Peter Piatkoff, known as “Peter the Painter.” Then there was Fritz’s girl, Luba Milstein. She was the one whom Wensley had caught destroying photographs. Were these the three who with Gardstein had escaped from the goldsmith’s shop, scattering lead death as they went?
Other names entered the investigation. It appeared that a meeting had been held in Fritz’s rooms at 59 Grove Street on the very afternoon of the crime. Those who were seen to enter the house were Gardstein, Svaars, Peter the Painter, and Russians named Joseph, Zourka Duboff. John Rosen, Jacob Peters, Ossip Federoff, the brothers Max and Karl Hoffman, the two women, Rosa Trassjohnski and Luba Milstein. The meeting of these men so close to the hour of the crime was too strong a juxtaposition to pass as mere coincidence. Wensley was hot on the trail.