He babbled away in a nightmarish delirium, while his companions looked on without compassion. A blaze flared in the Agent’s eyes. Karloff had the fixed expression of a hideous idol. He showed no sign of emotion. Here was an example of the tremendous power drugs could give a man like Karloff. He was a despot. An addict, deprived of his drug and shrieking for the powder that would end his suffering, would sell his life or take a life for “just one little shot.”
Serenti collapsed and clawed at the cement floor. The grinding of his teeth sounded like the rasp of a steel file against granite. He raised to his knees and cried like a lost child. Getting up, he staggered across the cell and pounded his fists against the wall.
“I’ve got to have it!” he blubbered. “Give me one little shot, Karloff. Just one little shot. Then I’ll go out and kill anyone you want. I’m being eaten — alive — eaten alive!”
“Serenti likes to talk,” said Karloff softly, his voice almost a purr. “He became very friendly with the cops last week. He even told where one of our hideouts was located. He’s been a week without his dope. But we mustn’t be too severe. Here, Serenti, here is your shot.”
Karloff spoke as gently as a mother to her sick child. Serenti uttered a hysterical cry and threw himself against the bars again. He reached out both hands for the white capsules which Karloff produced.
“You’re my friend, Karloff!” he screamed. “You’re my best pal, my only pal. I’ll do anything for you. Anything!”
Serenti got three little capsules from Karloff. The drug addict gulped them down like a famished dog swallowing a bit of meat. His nerves quieted. He relaxed and leaned against the bars, sighing contentedly. But Karloff was not as kind as his manner indicated.
Suddenly Serenti stiffened. His eyes all but popped from their sockets. His veins bulged and seemed to writhe like snakes. He choked and struggled in a terrible agony for breath. He howled like some wounded creature in the wilderness.
“Karloff! Karloff — you fiend! The — the green death!”
“Yes,” breathed Karloff, “the green death.”
IN amazement the Agent watched a startling transformation in the pigmentation of Serenti’s skin. The tortured man suddenly slumped to the floor. “X” knew he was dead. That was not astounding, considering the treachery of Karloff. But what opened the Agent’s eyes was that Serenti’s skin had turned green, a horrible, deathly, muddy green — the hue of some dread arsenical poison.
“Come, gentlemen,” said Karloff softly.
Not once had the leader scowled or smiled or sneered. Only his gentle voice had the tone of ugly insinuation. He moved away with the softness of a cat. In the big room, he handed “X” a small square of powdered narcotic wrapped in white paper. By this time the Agent was cleverly simulating frayed nerves, playing his part of Louie Corbeau. He grabbed the deck of dope, opened it with trembling fingers.
At least, he appeared to open the one Karloff had given him. But right before the sinister man’s searching, penetrating ferret eyes, “X” performed a brilliant trick of sleight-of-hand. He had palmed another square of power — a harmless powder. This one he opened, having palmed the one Karloff handed him. Quickly, dexterously he poured the powder on the back of his hand, and sniffed it. Immediately he straightened up, squared his shoulders and smiled.
Karloff was gone. He had drifted away again, his tread as soft as a cat’s. The Agent found himself alone with Gus Tansley. After a few minutes of idle conversation, “X” decided that he could learn something from Tansley by skillfully guiding the talk. He worked around to the subject of dope, and the trafficking of this drug.
“What I can’t understand, Tansley,” he said, “is why we risk our lives, why fellows like Serenti get the green death, all to transport and distribute dope that is given away!”
The Secret Agent’s eyes were brightly alert. He hoped he was close to a solution of the enigma that had puzzled him all along — the purpose behind the dope ring’s free distribution of the dread stuff. His questioning of Tansley was a shot in the dark, but it connected.
Tansley laughed wickedly.
“You’re a sappy guy, Corbeau. I figured you was wiser than that.”
The Agent waited tensely for Tansley to go on. For a moment it seemed that the mobster would say no more. Then, with the arrogance of one who feels himself in possession of superior wisdom he continued:
“You saw how Serenti was howling for the junk. You know yourself how shaky you was before Karloff handed you a deck. It takes a week to make a hoppy. How many ever get off the stuff?”
The Agent shrugged. He knew that the percentage was very small. The cure depended on the will of the addict, and most of them were weak-willed at the outset. The drug undermined what little moral strength they had, so most cases were hopeless.
“Not many, I guess,” answered “X.” “But I still can’t figure why we’re going in for this gift proposition.”
“Till America’s right in our fist, Corbeau! That’s why.”
“It don’t seem smart, Gus,” returned the Agent. “I know a little about dope. I know that a hundred tons of opium are enough to give the docs of the world all they need. Yet more than two thousand tons are being turned out — and a lot of that tonnage is coming to America. We get everybody twitching and jerking for a shot, and guys like this Martel will jump in and cop the business.”
TANSLEY smirked. “For a little while, yes,” he said. “But it costs a hell of a lot to smuggle dope into the country — and half the junk the peddlers handle is adulterated with about fifty percent sugar of milk. Lots of guys fork over two bucks for a deck, and get nothing but a pinch of salt. But we’ll sell the straight stuff — and underbid any dope ring in America. Even with all of this free junk we’ll make profits the first day we start selling. Now do you get the idea, sap?”
Agent “X” nodded. He got the idea all right. A chill seemed to pass slowly through his blood. The free samples constituted a hideous advertising campaign, a build-up for a tremendous sales onslaught that could not fail. In all his experience with vicious criminals he had never run into anything more appalling than this.
The menace of a foreign invasion had been abolished. But in its place was this monstrous, hydra-headed scheme that was just as terrible. And it was not only possible, but too imminently probable.
Agent “X” knew that statisticians claimed that one-fourth of China’s four hundred million were opium smokers. A hundred million drug addicts in Asia alone. And every twelfth person in India chewed or smoked opium. What if that fate visited America, a land of highly organized nervous systems, keyed up to the pitch of modern civilization? Would the filth, the squalor, the untold misery of the Far East become the Fate of America?
“X” was about to ask how this drug ring could possibly smuggle enough of the stuff in to underbid the other rings, when he noticed a slender thread of wire, colored the mahogany of the furniture, that ran down the leg of the table at which they sat. Quickly he reached his hand under the table and felt a small, hard-rubber disc. A dictograph.
“Yeah,” Gus Tansley was saying, “in another month we’ll all be on the gravy train. Hell, us that’ve got in the outfit early will be drawing in so much cash, we’ll have to hire bookkeepers to tally each day’s take. Gold mines and oil wells ain’t in it. They peter out. But a cokehead ain’t gonna stop sniffin’ till he croaks!”
“You’ve said enough,” spoke a soft voice behind Tansley.