Death out of Thin Air (2 page)

As he removed the dark stain from his lean but firmly modeled face, the expected Latin countenance did not appear. It was, instead, a puzzling face, handsome, and mysteriously engaging. It was American rather than Latin but there was something more there — an illusive something that was difficult to name.

Don Diavolo had taken the name along with the scarlet evening clothes and the neat red mask which put the final flash on his smoothly bewildering routine of prestidigitation. Offstage, though they called him Don a few close friends knew he had another name — Nicolas Alexander Houdin. But some of them suspected that this too was assumed, once they had noticed that it was a combination of the names of some very famous old-time conjurers.

No one knew whether this strange reticence was due to his ever-present love of mystery, or if there was some deeper, perhaps darker, reason.

Diavolo's age was also something to guess at — he was young, but that was as much as anyone would say. He had, due perhaps to the rigid training which his remarkable straitjacket and underwater escapes necessitated, the lithe, muscled figure of an athlete and the iron-willed endurance of six men.

His constant devil-may-care flirting with sudden death, made necessary in upholding his challenge that no man could invent a method of restraint that would hold him, had given him nerves of steel and the habit of lightning thought and action in the presence of danger.

It was doubtlessly this death-defying attitude along with his smooth sleek appearance that caused the fluttering in so many feminine hearts. The backstage door of the Manhattan Music Hall was almost constantly besieged by a ravenous horde of women with autograph books outstretched. One heartstruck but golddigging damsel had made eyes at the doorkeeper and insinuated her way past him to Diavolo's dressing room where she created a scene that had nearly resulted in a breach of promise suit.

Don had then instructed Chan that, on no account, must he ever again let anything in skirts get past that threshold — except, of course, Pat and Mickey Collins, Don's two girl assistants.

But today this rule was shattered. Diavolo, in his dressing-gown, was just making up for the remainder of his act when Chan went to answer a knock at the door.

A young woman in a silver-fox cape and with a high perky Lily Daché creation on her velvet-black hair, stood outside. Her dark mascared eyes cast a frightened glance back over her shoulder, and she started in as the door opened, fearfully.

Chan stood in her way. “Don Diavolo is dressing,” he said politely but firmly. “You cannot come in.”

That was when Chan noticed the blunt, blue-steel muzzle of the small automatic she held in her gloved hand. It was pointing directly at him.

She stepped through the door. Chan retreated. He knew only too well that a loaded gun in a frightened woman's hand is a most unpredictable thing.

“I must see Don Diavolo immediately,” she said. Her words were urging, insistent, shaky.

Chan gauged the distance to the gun with a glance and decided that her grip on it was too uncertain. He bowed politely, turned and left her.

He reported to the magician that the visitor had forced her way in demanding to see him at once.

Diavolo, who was pulling on the trousers of his scarlet stage costume replied calmly, “No, she doesn't. Not until I'm dressed. And we won't hurry too much. Perhaps she'll cool off a bit.”

“I am sorry that the lowly Chan was taken unaware,” Chan said, snapping gold cuff-links into a dress shirt. “I did not expect that the young lady would be armed. In India—”

“Forget it, Chan,” Diavolo grinned. “Think what a nice story it will make for Woody's column. Female admirer gets magician's autograph at the point of a gun. Don Diavolo is considering the purchase of an armor-plated Hispano-Suiza. His servant, the Honorable Chan Chandara Manchu, has laid in a winter's supply of hand grenades and—”

Diavolo stopped short.

There was a small curious disturbance just outside the dressing room door. It was an odd, scratching, flapping noise as if some winged creature was fluttering and beating against the door.

Chan, puzzled, pushed the door half open. The dark shape of a foot-long, brown-furred bat, swooped in. It darted with an irregular, uncertain motion across the room near the ceiling and came to rest, hanging upside down from a coat hanger in the open wardrobe.

Diavolo looked at Chan. “That's funny,” he said. “I thought those things only came out at night.”

Chan started. “In India—”

But Diavolo had gone. He wondered why the woman in the other room had not cried out at the sight of the animal.

He came to a sliding stop just beyond the door, the expression on his face as astounded as the audience had been who had just witnessed his remarkable vanish of The Princess and The Elephant.

The woman seemed to have disappeared, impossibly.

The door to the corridor was one that Diavolo's technical assistant, Karl Hartz, had installed. It locked automatically whenever it closed; it had no keyhole whatever and the trick of opening it was known only to three people, Diavolo, Chan and Karl.

The window that had been closed was now open wide. But it was five sheer stories above 51st Street. Then Diavolo saw the arm lying on the floor and protruding from behind the divan. He moved swiftly toward it.

The girl lay there, her hands clenched, her body arching in a rigid, spasmodic convulsion; her breath came rapidly in great gasps. But, even as Diavolo knelt at her side, the breathing slowed and the dilated stare of her pupils began to lose the quality of life.

Her scarlet lips moved slightly and he barely caught the words that issued on her last breath.

“The bat's! … aviary….?”

On her throat, Diavolo saw two red marks from each of which a single drop of blood oozed slowly. The razor-sharp teeth of a bat would have left just such marks as these.

Don Diavolo stared at the menacing gun in Count Draco's hand

C
HAPTER
III

Letters in Scarlet

T
HE
rouge on the girl's cheeks was redder by contrast with the unnatural deathly pallor of her face. Diavolo placed his fingers on her wrist. There was no pulse.

Again the furry-winged bat came with its zigzag flying motion, casting on the floor below a shadow as large as a man. As it crossed above him Diavolo shouted, “Chan. Get that thing!”

But before Chan could move, one of the animal's erratic swoops had taken it through the open window. It circled a moment in the deepening dusk high above the street and then, suddenly, swept along in a gust of wind, vanished from sight as if it had never been. Chan, leaning out the window, stared after it.

Don Diavolo took one swift glance around the room and rose from beside the girl's body, alert and ready, though he knew there was no immediate danger. The room held no place where anyone or anything could hide. He turned and went quickly to the corridor door which he opened by the secret method. He stepped halfway out.

A call-boy stood there in the hall less than twenty feet from the door. He was reading a copy of
Racing Dope.

“Jerry,” Diavolo said. “You were where you are now when I came offstage and Chan met me at the elevators. Where've you gone since then?”

Jerry looked up. “No place at all. I've been right here trying to pick up a gee-gee in the fifth at Belmont. How's about squinting in that crystal ball of yours and picking a horse for me?”

Don made a quick, smooth motion with his empty right hand and a quarter appeared in it as if from nothing. He flipped it toward the boy. “Forget the horses for a minute. This is important. Who came in after we did?”

“There was a real hot looking dame with a funny hat. Thought for a minute it was Dorothy Lamour. I'll take either of 'em. She—”

“All right. Now forget the dames, too.” Diavolo scowled impatiently. “Who else came in?”

“Nobody.” The boy looked at him curiously, wondering at the rapid-fire seriousness of Diavolo's questions. “Why?”

“You're sure of that?” Don insisted. “Myself, Chan and the girl. No one else?”

“That's right. Nobody at all. I'll swear to that on a whole stack of—”

“I know —
Racing Dopes.
And who left after that?”

“Say, what is this?” Jerry asked, finally beginning to realize that something was up. “A new trick of yours? How
could
anybody else come out if you were the only ones that—”

By now, however, Jerry was talking to a closed door. He stopped, scratching his head. Then his eye fell on his dope sheet and he grinned. “That's it!” he said. “
Screwball
in the ninth!” He started for a phone, whistling.

There was no whistling inside the dressing room. Instead Diavolo frowned grimly, first at the girl's still body and then at Chan. He was thinking that getting out of this predicament promised to be even more difficult than the nerve-racking experience of his Great Underwater Bank-Safe escape.

As Chan had done, he strode across to the window and leaned out. The traffic, five stories below, moved slowly in the five o'clock jam. Lights in the buildings opposite were beginning to come on.

“With that locked door of mine,” he said, “and Jerry on guard outside, it leaves just one exit from this room. The window.”

Chan said, puzzled, “But isn't that just how the bat—”

“The bat?” Diavolo asked. He shook his head. “Vampire bats, Chan, suck the blood of their prey like leeches. But that's a slow death, not the quick one this girl got. She seemed all right when she came in, didn't she?”

Chan nodded.

“Then the bat didn't kill her,” Don went on. “Anyway, it would have to be much larger….” He stopped, scowling. Then slowly, as if talking to himself, he added, “Maybe
I'm
crazy. I thought this was New York City, not 17th century Middle Europe.”

He blinked and shook his head as if discarding some thought that he would rather not believe. But his glance was worried. “Chan,” he said then. “We've got work to do. The publicity this will get us is not the kind we want. Get Woody Haines on the phone. We'll call the police as soon as I've had a look around.”

Chan went to the phone and Diavolo flipped a handkerchief from his pocket. He wrapped it around his hand and stooped to the green suede purse that lay where it had fallen near the body. He unsnapped the catch and looked inside. He fished gingerly among the usual contents of a woman's bag and then brought out one thing that was distinctly unusual.

It was a slip of paper torn from a memo book and one side was covered with a fine feminine script.

Diavolo read it aloud. Even Chan's Oriental calm was faintly disturbed.

About 1732 a veritable epidemic of vampirism terrorized Hungary. It was reported that in many villages shadowy figures haunted the churchyards and even penetrated into houses, sucking the blood of their victims who were mysteriously thrown into a hypnotic sleep.

— Summers,
The Geography of Witchcraft
.

Don looked across at Chan, a strange expression on his bronzed face. Chan regarded him in turn, immobile now; but his coal-black slanted eyes glistened.

Diavolo looked at the paper again, and reread it.

Chan, at the phone was saying, “Thank you. Please have Mr. Haines call Don Diavolo at the Manhattan Music Hall as soon as he comes in.”

Don's fingers turned the sheet of paper over. His glance rested on the half dozen words that were written there just as a sharp rapping came from the corridor door.

A voice called, “Open Sesame! The majesty and power of the Press awaits without.”