Robert Wallace: The Dancing Doll Murders

The white-and-gold central cabin of the big yacht held a glamorous group of social lights. Young men in tails, tuxedos, and yachting regalia. Girls dressed in the smartest low-cut evening gowns from ultra-fashionable shops along Fifth Avenue.

Courteous, well trained English stewards moved about bearing trays of liquor; small, appetizing cocktail sausages; and diamond-shaped sandwiches of Russian caviar, Schweitzerkäse, and Rocquefort. A string ensemble played a special transcription of Auf Wiedersehen.

It was a farewell to those who must go ashore presently, while their lucky friends set sail for balmy Southern waters.

A tall young man in a trim blue yachting jacket struck a theatrical pose and softly crooned the plaintive German melody along with the orchestra in a voice that would have done credit to a Metropolitan Opera singer.

“Dick, you sing divinely,” gushed a pretty debutante. “It makes quivers run up my back. I’m glad I’m going on this cruise with you.” She turned a smiling face to him.

The young man bowed at the compliment, a slightly mocking look in his dark eyes. “Singing isn’t all I do well, my dear. Wait till we get under that much publicized tropic moon!”

The debutante blushed in confusion, while laughter rose around her. The man she’d addressed as “Dick” was Richard Curtis Van Loan, society idler, bon vivant, and gaily sardonic spender of the millions his father had grubbed to accumulate.

He was one of the most sought after bachelors in the city, a man whom mothers with marriageable daughters watched constantly with hopeful, appraising eyes. A man who was envied by his friends, but never taken too seriously, because he didn’t appear to have a serious thought in the world nor any useful function. He had been invited on the cruise to add life to the party. He had accepted gaily with the half bored, half gallant air he always assumed in his social relations.

Only one person in the world knew that Richard Curtis Van Loan, son of wealth and supposedly flippant wastrel, was the internationally famous Phantom – the mysterious detective genius who had faced death stoically scores of times along the black alleys of the underworld. Wrongdoers feared him as a force for justice, unknown, unseen, unpredictable. The police of a dozen countries, including Scotland Yard, the Paris Sureté, and the celebrated Bureau of Criminal Intelligence in Budapest, respected him.

Yet only one man, Frank Havens of the Clarion, knew his true identity; knew that Richard Van Loan’s adventurous, daring spirit had rebelled against a life of routine business, and that he had deliberately taken up and schooled himself in all the intricacies of one of the most dangerous vocations on earth. For the Phantom had a talent for disguise that seemed to give him a thousand different faces. He was elusive as a shadow, as hard to hold as the night wind.

After accepting the invitation to go cruising, Van had told Frank Havens jokingly that nothing short of the most startling crime on the police calendar could interrupt his holiday. And Havens had taken him at his word.

“Don’t worry, Van, I won’t bother you. The police can handle their own dirty work.”

But now Van noticed a sudden crimson sheen out on the oily surface of the harbor. It came and went as he glanced idly out the cabin windows, as if some mysterious devil’s fire were playing over the sea tonight.

Van’s nostrils flared for a brief instant. Balancing his cocktail, he crossed the yacht’s cabin and eased himself out on the chilly deck. He looked back over the harbor toward the city. There in the sky was a winking, blood-red light. In and out, it blinked, like the eye of a satanic being beckoning, hinting of some high carnival in Hell, telling Van that the Phantom could not rest.

For in all the city’s teeming millions Van knew that that red light was meant for him. It was high up in the Clarion tower; the light used to broadcast election returns, and now broadcasting to him that Havens wanted to see him; that the bloody hand of crime had struck the city; that the Phantom was called to his self-appointed job.

Dick Van Loan turned and went back into the cabin. His eyes were grave, though his lips were still smiling. He tossed off his cocktail, went to his host, and spoke casually.

“Sorry, old man, I’ve just thought of something – a deal I’d forgotten. I’ve got to excuse myself from this trip, much as I’d like to go with you.”

“Look here, Dick, you can’t run out on a fellow like that! I’ve made all arrangements – reservations at Havana – and, besides, we want you -”

“Mighty swell of you, Wally. I’m sorry as hell – but this deal won’t wait. I’ll grab my luggage. You won’t mind if I skip back in the yacht’s tender?”

There was something in Dick Van Loan’s eyes when he made up his mind that didn’t encourage argument. His host sensed it, shrugged despairingly.

Van didn’t wait to say good-by to everyone. That red light was still winking. Already Van had stopped thinking of the delights of the cruise. His heart was beating faster than it had for weeks. The thrill of excitement, of the chase, was upon him.

The yacht’s tender carried him back across the harbor. Van docked near the Battery, took a cab uptown. An inner voice urged him to hurry. Havens wouldn’t have called him back from the cruise if hell wasn’t popping. Whatever had happened, Van wanted to get started while the trail was still fresh.

Yet there were certain things that had to be done. He couldn’t go in his yachting jacket; and, as the Phantom, he made it a point never to appear with his own true features.

He got the cab driver to let him out at an apartment house uptown. But he didn’t enter. When the cab had rolled away Dick Van Loan walked a full block away from the dwelling, abruptly turned a corner, and disappeared in the inky darkness down a dark, narrow alley.

Five minutes later, walking by sense of direction alone, he approached a small building that stood all by itself. He thrust a queer-shaped key into a special multiple lock. He entered, closed the door after him, and his finger found a familiar light switch. The Phantom was in the secret laboratory-workshop he had built.

Here were many of the things that made it possible for him to retain his position as one of the world’s foremost crime fighters. In dimensions the place was modest. But its equipment was up-to-date to the last degree.

Its optical apparatus included tiny, lightning-fast reflex cameras with telephoto and wide-angle lenses, and one of the uncanny ultra-violet cameras used to detect forgeries. There were bullet microscopes and comparison microscopes; the famous Greenough microscope for the scientific detection of clues.

A crime library numbered more than a thousand volumes and was written in five different languages. There was an outfit for the investigation of all toxic substances, with chemicals which the Phantom had imported from Germany, Switzerland, and France. Complete equipment for analyzing bloodstains, with benzidine and hydrogen for the hemoglobin test, serum for the method suggested by Bayles of Paris, and a spectroscope to be used in connection with blood colloids, after the manner advocated by the eminent Dr. Wilhelm Zangemeister of Konigsberg.

In a concealed closet was a small arsenal of the world’s most deadly explosive weapons: Lugers, Webleys, Colts, and strange guns from many different nations. There was a rack of knives also, varying from the thinnest Sicilian stiletto to a broad-bladed, serpentine Malay kris. There was an electric stove, a small electric smelting furnace, a miniature lathe with diamond-set tools, numerous bank keys, mercury vapor lights, three-way mirrors, and an elaborate dressing table with all the material for the Phantom’s most ingenious impersonations.