The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (14 page)

“Who are you?” panted the man with the odd ears. “By what right—”

“Give him that address,” snapped Smitty, turning on the pressure again a very little.

The man hastened to obey. The cab was redirected after a shrug of the driver’s shoulders.

“What’s on Second Avenue near Thirty-fourth?” said the little man, looking so perplexed that Smitty’s heart sank.

Had The Avenger’s apparent stab into thin air about this man having something to do with the warehouse gang been a wrong one? Was the fellow merely some innocent bystander who could do Benson no more good than any other casual taxi fare in the big city?

True, the man had a gun and had drawn it. But lots of people having nothing to do with gangs carry guns; and any one of them would draw if a stranger forced a way into his cab. Even the fact that the man had been trailing somebody, might mean nothing; he could be a private detective on some job having nothing to do with Benson’s deadly dilemma.

“What’s on Second Avenue?” the man repeated.

“A storage warehouse,” said Smitty. “In it there’s a bunch of guys I don’t like. You’re to tell them to go home or to Coney Island or any other place a long way off.”

“You must be crazy,” said the little man. “I don’t know any men in a warehouse at that address. What kind of men?”

“Very competent killers or I miss my guess,” said the giant.

The little man’s mouth twisted.

“Oh! But look here! If I go in and try to tell such men what to do, they may . . . they may shoot me!”

“They may,” said Smitty. “Step on it, driver.”

“But my dear sir! You’re exposing me to death! You’re the same as murdering me.”

The cab raced down Second Avenue into the Thirties. Smitty’s eyes roamed over the cluster of buildings, looking for the storage warehouse with the white stone front. He spotted the wholesale paper office—and the warehouse next to it.

“Stop here, driver,” said the giant.

The cab stopped before the storage building. Smitty took a gun from his pocket. He seldom used a gun; his fists were preferable. But he had to act unsuspicious in the sight of the many people around. He held the gun well concealed.

“Walk ahead of me to the door,” he said. “When you get to it, just walk in. Order the first man you see to collect the others and leave. If you don’t—” He jabbed the gun hard.

“If I die it’ll be your fault,” wailed the man with the pointed ears.

But he went to the door and tried it. It wasn’t locked. Evidently the men inside were only too anxious for it to open hospitably to an intruder. The little man went in. His heel snapped against the door in a fast effort to slam it in Smitty’s face.

The effort did not succeed. Smitty’s foot was a lot larger. The giant shut it himself, softly.

There was a door leading into a darkened little office with grimy windows on the street. Smitty ducked in there.

“Stand right there,” he whispered, “in this doorway. Call to one of the men. If you don’t and if you try to leap out of range, I’ll make a sieve out of you.”

The little man was sweating. But there was raw murder in his eyes now—no longer any trace of perplexity.

However, the big fellow had him, and he knew it.

“Jake!” he called.

There were steps. Smitty crouched back farther in the shadows of the office. He saw a man who looked uncannily like a snake come up to the little fellow. Furthermore, he came up to him as if he knew him. Smitty drew a deep breath of relief. Once more The Avenger had been right in a assumption whose foundations were a complete mystery to everyone else.

“Jake,” said the little man, voice almost natural, “get the others and take them out of here for about half an hour. I want to be alone.”

“Take them out? You want to be—” exclaimed the snake-like individual. “Hey, that ain’t what I thought was to happen—”

“Take them all out! Don’t come back for half an hour. That’s an order!” said the little man crisply. He started to turn his head a bit, longingly, as if contemplating an attempt to glance at the giant concealed behind him and thus tip the gangster to his presence. But he didn’t complete the move.

“O.K., if you want it like that,” said the snaky one dubiously. “Though it looks damn funny to me.”

He went back toward the big receiving room, calling as he went. In a few minutes men began to file past the little man. And past, if they had guessed it, a giant with a gun in his hand who was the real commander behind this maneuver.

Smitty gave the gang three minutes. Then he picked the little man up by the scruff of the neck, as he’d have picked up a kitten, and carried him at arm’s length into the receiving room.

He opened the tank. Benson walked calmly, emotionlessly out. The big fellow drew a great breath and dropped his squirming burden.

“Chief—”

The little man deemed it a good time to run. He made a mistake.

He had taken three long, running steps, when a gray streak seemed to blur beside him. The Avenger’s fist went out with delicate exactness and power. It got the little man under the ear, and he went down. And out!

The little man with the odd ears was propped against the wall of the dim receiving room. Propped next to him was a most peculiar case.

It looked like an overnight bag; but its contents were such as no overnight bag ever held.

In the top tray were dozens of fragile, tissue-thin semispheres with different colored pupils painted on them. They were tiny cups which The Avenger could slip over his eyeballs to change their flaring colorlessness when wanted.

Under the top tray were all the known make-up aids, plus a few of Benson’s own designing, which could be utilized to change the man’s gray steel appearance.

The case was laid so that a small mirror was on a level with the little man’s face, and right next to it, Benson was seated before the two, looking into the mirror one second and at the man’s face the next.

When the face of Richard Benson had been paralyzed by the terrific nerve shock that also whitened his thick, virile hair, something had happened to the facial muscles that even the doctors couldn’t explain.

The facial flesh had not only gone dead, from the standpoint of no longer responding to nerve impulses, but it had also lost all natural elasticity. It was like dead wax. Where it was put, it stayed, till it was put carefully back again into place.

The Avenger, with about eight minutes to go before the gang should return to the building, finished shaping his dead face to match the face of the man with the queer ears. He pinched his own ears into points to correspond with the others, put on a brown wig over his white hair, slipped eye-cups with brownish pupils over his pale orbs, and stood up.

He wasn’t Benson any more. He was the other man, line for line.

He put on the other man’s clothes, compressing his shoulders to resemble the narrower shoulders of the other.

“Take him to Bleek Street,” Benson said to Smitty, nodding to the unconscious man.

The giant held the little man up with an arm under his shoulder as if he were drunk instead of unconscious and walked him toward the door. Benson followed him soon after and climbed into a cab.

He went again to Singer’s hotel suite.

When The Avenger made up as another person, he always, if possible, studied that person’s walk and mannerisms, too, because a man is known by his gestures as well as his face.

In this case, he’d had no chance to do that. He could only trust that the amazingly accurate facial imitation would be enough. It looked as if it were going to be.

The man guarding the lower elevator door nodded to him on sight. He didn’t say a word, just passed him to the elevator. It appeared that the little man whom Benson was replacing had the run of the place.

Benson went up to the top floor and was similarly passed by the foyer guard. He walked into the big room where Singer had his desk.

Singer was seated there. He looked up at Benson, at the brownish pupils, hair, and the rest of The Avenger’s disguise. The financier’s eyes were keen. Would he—

“Well, Rann,” Singer said to the man he saw entering.

And Benson knew it was all right. At least for a little while.

He went on to the desk. And Singer stared with coldly smoldering eyes and a face that was frightening in its wrath.

“I’m glad you came, Rann,” Singer said, voice too smooth to be comforting. “I’ve come to a nasty conclusion in the last few hours of thinking things over. The conclusion is—
that you’ve been double-crossing me!”

Benson shook his head in a bewildered, too-innocent manner.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“No?” snapped Singer. “I think you do. Your face gives you away. There was no surprise or any other emotion on it when I said that. I was watching. It only confirms what I’ve been thinking.”

“But—” faltered Benson.

“I’ve got the wrecking of my house all figured out,” said Singer. “The private detectives I hired have helped a little. I guessed the rest.

“You went to the Henderlin coal and oil people with that damned process of yours, after getting into my confidence. Highest bid to get it—and to the devil with me if I wouldn’t pay as much as they offered. You gave them a small sample, to prove you had the goods. They tested it, and it worked as miraculously as it had when I tested it. They believed you and gave you a figure. You did not accept—thought you could get more. They tried, of course, to analyze the sample. It defied analysis, as you knew it would. Meanwhile, they learned that I was tied in with you, after the run-out the four Poles took on me. So they tried to kill me by blowing up my house. You were directly responsible for that, and it’s only luck that I’m alive.”

“But Mr. Singer,” said Benson, “you’re letting a lot of guesswork condemn me in your mind as guilty of—”

“Even your voice is different,” snarled Singer. “Your guilt shows in everything you say and do.”

“Look at all I’ve done in the interests of the two of us,” said Benson, stabbing in the dark. “That should prove—”

“It proves nothing, Rann. What you’ve done was in my interest as well as yours—
only
if you did not freeze me out. Which is precisely what I believe you have in mind, right now.”

“If you’ll give me a little time, I think I can make you understand—”

“I’ll give you time, my friend,” said Singer. “I’ll give you plenty of time! I’m through with this fooling around.” He pressed a button on his desk. “You’ll be taken to a little factory that I own outside Newark. It’s abandoned at the moment. No one will interfere. There, you will give me every detail of that process. You might not do it in a day or a week. But eventually, after enough persuasion, you’ll come through. Then I won’t be dependent on you any more.”

“But, Mr. Singer—”

The door opened and two men came in. They were not of the type thought of as normal employees of a respectable businessman.

“Take him to the Newark flats,” said Singer, lighting a thin brown cigar.

“Please! Give me a chance!” Benson put all the acting he could into his voice, since, even now, he could not express anything with his face. It was fortunate that Singer was looking at his cigar instead of the man he called Rann, or he might have noticed that lack of expression in spite of his anger.

“Take him out,” Singer repeated.

One of the two men stepped up to Benson and his fist smashed out.

The fist got The Avenger just under the heart, in a blow that had knockout power behind it but still should not leave a mark where a casual observer could see it.

Benson slumped. The two calmly propelled him toward the elevator.

“Had a heart attack or somethin’,” one of them said cheerfully to the curiously staring operator. The operator, a direct employee of Singer’s, nodded indifferently.

The two got Benson through the lobby and into a big car. The car headed for Newark—for an abandoned building where The Avenger was to be tortured into giving up a secret he did not have, or, if discovered in his true identity, was to be slaughtered outright.

Smitty, in the cab that had recently left the warehouse bearing him and the unconscious little man with the pointed ears, suddenly went for his gun. He was too late!

The move that had caused the grab was so deftly performed that it was over before he realized it.

The driver of the taxi that had conveniently picked him up with his burden near the warehouse door, had swirled the cab into a one-way street going east and stopped. Just like that. Smitty had been thrown forward, which had delayed the gun-grabbing. And now he couldn’t draw because he was looking into a gun muzzle himself!

The gun was one that swung its yawning muzzle toward him before. A .45 looking like a battleship cannon. It was in a hand that had wielded it before—a small hand, but one that held the big gun very competently, indeed.

The driver was the girl with the coldly beautiful black eyes and the ink-black hair. The hair had been tucked cleverly into her driver’s cap; but Smitty felt like a fool, nevertheless. He should have spotted something funny the instant he looked at the figure at the wheel.