Free The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) by J. Allan Dunn

glow and settled back to smoke, musing as the rose water in the container bubbled, cooling the smoke that passed through it. The music rose and fell, exotic, modern, yet infinitely primitive. Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. It was seductive, sexual; but, to the Griffin, there was another interpretation. He had nothing to do with women.
    Presently he touched a button.
    A section of the curving wall slid noiselessly aside. Out of the opening appeared a strange creature, more like ape than man, an ape with the mange. The figure was naked save for a loin-kilt of red cloth, a high turban of the same. His skin was black as ebony and black hair grew on his chest, and on his misshapen shoulders. The lower part of his arms was so long that his hands reached below his knees. They too were hairy. But his face, distorted, set in a leering grimace, was without whiskers. The low brow was furrowed, deep lines ran from nostril to mouth on either side; the eyes were small, like jet, monkey’s eyes, shallow, shifting perpetually.
    Between his shoulders there rose a great hump. He was a dwarf, a kobold, sub-intelligent but shrewd; voodoo-bound, brought from Haiti, worshipping the Griffin, his dog. He fawned like a dog. He looked like a page in Hades, sent from the infernal regions to become the familiar of the Griffin.
    The face of the Griffin was now covered with a mask that gleamed like goldbeaters’ skin, plastic, molded to his features but changing them. Through it gleamed his pitiless eyes.
    The dwarf bowed until his turban touched the ground, remained so, crouching. The Griffin took a lump of translucent Turkish sweetmeat from a cloisonné casket and tossed it to him, as he might have tossed a scrap of meat to a favorite hound. The hunchback retrieved it, sucked it greedily, squatting, his beady eyes fixed on his master.
    “Quantro,” said the Griffin, speaking the Creole of Haiti, “Who is God, the Supreme? The Lord of Life and of Death?”
    “You, O my worshipful Master.”
    “You would die for me?”
    “Willingly.”
    “You are prepared, always, to protect me?”
    The misshapen being gobbled the last of the sweetmeat, stood up. The glow in the room, that seemed like daylight but could not be, heightened the plum-black of his skin. From his kilt there flashed a curving blade out of a scabbard of sharkskin. He held it aloft. Its shining steel showed dark along the edge, rimmed with deadly venom that also stained the point.
    “Those who would harm you kill me first,” he cried.
    The Griffin gave him a nod and a grim smile. The greeting and its answer was a formula but he knew the value of its repetition. The dwarf was his, body and what soul he possessed, but his mind was shallow, his memory deficient.
    “Quantro, the stars proclaim the time for another vengeance. Let us verify it. You have a white cock ready? Then you shall guard me later while I speak with others whom I do not trust as well as I do you.”
    The dwarf’s eyes glowed like polished obsidian reflecting fire. He chuckled horribly, gibbering.
    “Ready, O Mighty One.”
    To the pressure of another button, a new section of the wall responded. Master and man stepped into an automatic elevator that bore them swiftly down a steel shaft, landed them in a cellar hewn out of the rock foundations, squared, laid with cement. In the middle of the chamber there was a block of stone, dark-veined with red in the purple matrix. Light glowed from some invisible source.
    The dwarf disappeared through a vaulted exit. The Griffin took the only seat. The divination did not touch him, save that he was sadist enough to like to see the flow of fresh blood, the struggles of the victim. It was an ancient rite—Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, almost universal, one of the occult “mysteries.”
    The Griffin realized that some day he might well need the devotion of a bodyguard like this. Quantro was as strong and active as a chimpanzee, for all his hump. His loyalty was fanatic. He