The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (16 page)

“Yes. I think I do,” said The Avenger slowly, after looking at Singer for a long time. The financier was greatly relieved when the pale, infallible eyes swung away from his face.

“Your arrival was appreciated, Smitty,” Benson said to the giant. “But how is it you’re here?”

“That girl!” said Smitty. “The black-eyed one. She’s responsible. She got the man you call Rann away from me. Left me stranded in a one-way street and drove off. But she didn’t notice a delivery boy’s bicycle at the curb. I followed on that to a loft building. She and Rann went in. After a while, Rann came out alone. I trailed him, instead of picking him up, to a tough cafe on Third Avenue. Right after he went in, a bunch of hoods came boiling out with blood in their eyes; so, on a hunch, I followed them here.”

“Your hunch,” nodded Benson, “was pure gold—”

He stopped, and his fingers went to his belt—to the tiny radio there.

“Nellie, chief,” he heard Nellie Gray’s delicate voice when he answered. “Warsaw, Poland, wants to talk to you. Something pretty important, I guess.”

At Bleek Street, the call from Warsaw was put through to The Avenger, on his return, with a swiftness that no ordinary person could ever experience. They dropped everything else on the big board when Benson had a long distance call.

The caller was an American newspaper correspondent in Warsaw. Benson had saved his life once in Albania. He had been only too glad to volunteer to help when Benson called some time before and asked his aid. He had a report now.

“On Shewski, Wencilau, Veck and Sodolow,” the man’s voice came across the Atlantic. “They were four screwballs—but excellent chemists. It is known around here that they discovered something very important, but no one knows what. People around their little plant knew how they kept their secret, though—even from each other.

“They had a four-story building. Each put together a part of the finished product on one floor. Then they shot it down a floor to the next associate, who added his ingredient. When Sodolow, on the fourth floor, poured his work down a pipe to the third, it blended with what Shewski had mixed up and went down to the second floor where Wencilau had his own stew worked out. Then the product of the three went on down the pipe to the first floor and mixed with what Veck had produced. The final result was their product—whatever that could be. Crazy, huh?”

“Cautious, to say the least,” said Benson. “So the blending of the work of the four made the finished article. Is their little plant occupied now?”

“No. It stands empty. There are a row of drums on the first floor, where they’d been put to receive more of whatever stuff it was that they concocted. Everything just as they left it when they went to America nearly a year ago.”

“The drums are empty?” said The Avenger. His voice was as even and quiet as usual, but his aides could tell that the question had grave importance.

“That’s a queer thing,” said the man in Warsaw. “They aren’t empty. Not quiet. I tilted one, to see if there was a label of any kind on the back, and I heard a swishing sound. I opened the drum. There was about a half an inch of some dark liquid just covering the bottom. It was the same with all the drums. I don’t know if it means anything.”

“That was very thorough and very clever work, my friend,” said Benson. “If there’s any way I can show my thanks—”

“You just have,” said the man in Warsaw. “It means a great deal to be called
your
friend. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

The Avenger hung up, and Nellie Gray signaled him to a front window.

The fragile looking blonde who could toss men around like Indian clubs, had been staring out for several minutes. When Benson joined her, he saw why.

Bleek Street normally had no one on its walk at all. Now, it was relatively crowded. There were twelve or fifteen men standing unobstrusively around in plain sight. Anyone standing in Bleek Street would have to be in plain sight, no matter how little they cared for it; there weren’t any doorways to loiter in, save the one under the Justice, Inc. sign itself.

“The warehouse gang,” said Benson, nodding, pale eyes like ice in a winter moon.

He had recognized the man who looked like a black snake, the dull-eyed fellow who had taken Mike and Ike from him, and half a dozen of the others.

“Apparently,” said The Avenger, “Singer’s gratitude for having his life saved lasted only till he could get his crew of thugs together again. There are over a dozen, aren’t there?”

“Fourteen,” said Nellie. “I counted while you finished phoning.”

“Fourteen,” mused The Avenger, pale eyes glittering. “And there were eight in the gang that nearly did in Singer and me—I’m going out, Nellie.”

Nellie only nodded, exhibiting no concern at all. That was because the guarding of the Bleek Street place was apt to be a complete joke, from the standpoint of those within. There were exits out of that place that only a crystal-gazer could have found.

Benson took one of them now.

Elevator to the basement garage. Basement passage all along the block to the vacant warehouse he secretly owned at the corner. Then a tunnel under the street, crowded with electric cables, through which Benson could move because of his modest size, and an exit half a block deep in the next square.

But The Avenger didn’t use the electric company’s tunnel under the next street at once. Instead, he peered between the boards over the warehouse door into Bleek Street for an instant.

As he had remembered, one of the men was lounging against the building wall within a yard of this boarded-up door. Benson softly opened the portal.

Nail heads, boarding, everything else moved on oiled hinges without a sound. The gray steel figure of The Avenger stood for an instant behind the back of the man.

Then the man felt something like a metal bar hook under his throat from behind and felt himself drawn back into a door he had thought so nailed up that it would take dynamite to open it. None of his pals down the street saw the flashing move; and none could hear because the man could not utter a sound with that throttling arm around his neck.

Benson’s fist licked out, precisely, accurately. The man sagged. The Avenger went through his pockets.

His memory had, as always, served him faithfully. This was the man who had searched him at the warehouse. And the fellow had the results of the search still in his pockets.

Mike and Ike, the ingenious little throwing knife and the special little .22.

Benson holstered the weapons at the calves of his legs, opened the “boarded-up” door, and rolled the man out onto the sidewalk while the eyes of the other men still kept glued to the Justice, Inc., doorway, in the other direction.

The Avenger went on to the loft building Smitty had spoken of.

A glance told Benson which of the five floors was unused for regular loft-building purposes: the one with the cleanest windows; since the smoke of industry stains windows swiftly, and one seldom bothers to wash the windows of a small factory.

The top floor was his goal, he decided. He went up to it, to the door marked: Krakow Distillate Co.

The door was fastened with the largest, most modern of locks. But to The Avenger, locks were only something that took a little time—not a real hindrance. This one might have taken fifteen minutes to pick, and he didn’t care to spend that much time on it; so he took out the little object like an atomizer with which he had burned a way into the Salt Lake City garage.

He torched the lock out in about three minutes; toward the end, it would not have been noticed. A sound from within would have drowned it.

That sound was a muffled screaming. A girl’s screaming.

Benson opened the door and stepped, as soundlessly as a gray shadow, into the big room. Two figures were at the far end, struggling. One was the girl with the black eyes and ink-dark hair. The other was the man with the sharp ears—Rann.

Rann, smirking, half angry and half entertained, had his left hand over the girl’s lips to muffle her cries and was drawing her close to him with a rough right arm. Benson stooped. Mike and Ike seemed to leap into his hands of their own volition.

“Rann,” Benson said.

The man with the pointed ears sprang from the girl as if she had burned him. Springing, he drew a gun. With the swiftness of long practice, he leveled it at The Avenger.

But the practiced swiftness was a slow thing compared to Benson’s move. His left hand had lashed out—and from it, like a tiny arrow from a bow, had lanced Ike.

The little knife sliced across Rann’s knuckles, and, with a gasp, he dropped the gun. Raging, he stooped to pick it up again, and a slug whispered from Mike’s silenced little muzzle.

Rann went down and stayed down. Blood came from his head.

The girl’s reaction to the downing of the man who had recently been her captor, was strange. She turned, raging like a tigress, toward Benson.

“You’ve killed him!” she panted. “How dare you kill him! All I’ve done—everything—done for nothing—”

She cracked, and began to laugh and cry in hysteria. Benson had a quick method for that. His hands seized her slim shoulders with a force that shocked her out of the attack. His eyes, like pools of ice water, seemed to drown her like a glacial flood. She shuddered a little and relaxed.

With Rann motionless on the floor, she seemed to have lost the mainspring of all her resolution. She answered dully, lifelessly, when The Avenger asked her name.

“Diana Borne,” she said.

“Why are you in this affair?”

“Because that man killed my brother.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes,” said Diana. “By brother is—was—a newspaper reporter. He got wind of a speed test to be made on a salt flat near Salt Lake City. He went out to it—and never came back! His body was found that night in a ditch, and there was a gun in his hand that spelled suicide to the police. I went to that flat and waited. I went alone, because the police were all through with a ‘suicide.’ My object was to kill the man who had murdered my brother, if he should come back to the murder scene. But finally you and your friends came down in a plane, and then a lot of other men—”

“So, to ingratiate yourself with the gang, you tried to turn us over to them?” said Benson.

“Yes. And it worked. Even if you got away. I told them I was sent by their superior—not knowing who this superior of theirs might be. And it worked. They took me as one of them. Then my plans were changed. I knew if one of a gang like this had killed my brother, it was simply at the orders of a higher-up. I meant to get that higher-up. I came east with the gang, worked with them, all to the end of learning that this man”—she stared at Rann—“was the superior in question. I got him here to kill him, after taking him from your colossal friend in a cab. But he got my gun and held me prisoner. Just the same, I’d have gotten him, if you hadn’t killed—”

“He isn’t dead,” said The Avenger.

“Not— But you shot him! In the head!”

“I creased him,” said Benson. “A shot on the top of the skull, placed just right, will knock a man out with its glancing blow; but it will not kill him.”

“Then give me that gun—” stormed Diana, reaching for Mike.

She was stopped first by the icy glitter of refusal in Benson’s pale eyes, and second by the sound of steps.

The steps came from outside, on the stairs.

Like a gray flash, The Avenger was at the door. He peered out the hole made when the lock was burned out.

The man who made the sounds was one of those who had attacked Singer and himself at the abandoned factory after Singer’s men had left.

Softly, silently, Benson slid the inner bolt on the door. The man was knocking before he had finished the move. He tried the door, knocked again and finally left.

The girl drew a deep breath. She had looked through the hole over Benson’s shoulder.

“I’m glad he left,” she whispered. “That’s one of the crew working for the Henderlin crowd. They’re all killers.”

Benson had his tiny radio out, and was signaling Bleek Street.

“Smitty? You and Josh and Mac come here at once. The loft building, Smitty, where you trailed Rann. No,
don’t
take the secret exit. Come right out on the street. The armored sedan will keep the bullets of that gang outside from you. Come at once!”

He turned back to the girl.

“How do you know about the coal and oil crowd?”

“I trailed Rann to the Henderlin place several times, after I’d found out he was the man I wanted. I never could get quite near enough to use my gun. Or rather, my brother’s gun. I almost got him the day he killed the vice president, and the secretary. And
you
almost got me! I thought I might get him the night I drove the Henderlin detective to Bleek Street to lead your men to that house in New Jersey. Instead, some other man named Xisco showed up and killed the detective.”

“That was
your
car my men heard drive off, then.”

“I guess so.”

“After that?” said Benson, cold eyes like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face.

“I found Rann again. He was apparently playing both Lorens Singer and the Henderlin Corp. I just watched both places till I picked up his trail. But the gang was getting suspicious. To allay that suspicion, I lured you to the warehouse for them. You were just another person to me. I didn’t care much what happened to you if I could get the man who got my brother.”

Benson looked at the black hair and eyes.

“Indian blood?” he said.

“Yes,” was her proud reply. “I— Oh! Stop him!”

Rann had come to. Suddenly he was on his feet and racing for the door. But The Avenger had caught the slight difference in breathing a minute ago and was ready. He simply put his foot out. Rann smashed to the floor again, sat up rubbing his shoulder.

And at the door, a stealthy finger was poking like a small snake through the hole where the lock had been burned out. The finger felt inquiringly for the inside bolt The Avenger had slid.

But the man with the white hair and deadly, pale eyes had turned his back by then, so that the finger wasn’t in his range of vision!