The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (2 page)

It was the concierge who called the gendarmes.

The man had been waiting for Wencilau to take his late-night walk for a bit of fresh air. He had intended to follow him again, for he was very curious, indeed, and he expected, one of these nights, to trail the man to whatever it was that made him act so queerly.

When Wencilau didn’t appear, he finally opened the door with his passkey.

The French gendarmerie is one of the best police organizations in the world. An inspector looked at the body convulsed on the floor and said instantly, “Poison!”

Then the laboratories went to work.

They analyzed the stomach contents. They analyzed the bottled water and crumbs from the man’s dinner plate. They analyzed a sample of the room’s air. They inspected the water in the tap.

Since the bird was also dead along with its owner, they even repeated the same drawn out performance with the canary.

And they came to one absolute conclusion.

There was no trace of poison.

Monsieur Wencilau had died as if in the agonies of deadly poisoning, but there had been no poison in anything he ate, breathed or drank.

Next morning, an excerpt from a Paris newspaper read:

—Well-known Polish scientist, Monsieur Wencilau, died of an attack later diagnosed as acute indigestion—

Two days dater, in Montreal, Canada, a man paced the living room floor of a hotel suite and chewed feverishly on a long, black cigar.

The man was big, florid-faced, heavy-set. He had graying, shaggy eyebrows and looked like a swashbuckling fellow who feared neither man nor devil.

That is, normally he might have exhibited some such fearlessness. Right now he apparently suffered from hell’s own terror. His florid face was pale. The cigar bobbled and jerked between trembling jaws. He clenched and unclenched his hands as he paced. A big, burly man not even remotely like the dead Wencilau in appearance.

But he was like him in one respect. He, too, was from Poland.

And he acted similarly to Wencilau: he, too, was quite obviously hag-ridden by the terrible fear of death. In his movements could be read the whole thing. He knew he was going to die; yet he couldn’t quite accept the fact as truth and spent all his hours trying to shove the fatal moment further into the future.

There was a discreet tap at the door. The big man stopped his pacing as if he had been shot. He stood rigid, eyes flaming.

The tap was repeated, a little louder. He moistened his lips.

“Well?” he called, in a foreigner’s English.

“Package for you, Mr. Veck,” came the voice of the night man.

“Leave it at the door, please,” Veck said.

He stood there rigid, sweat streaming down his full, heavy face. He heard steps go down the hall, heard the clang of an elevator door. So he went to his own door—but not to open it.

He took from his pocket a little device like a stethoscope. This he applied to the panels. With it, he could have heard any sound in the hall—even one so faint as a person’s repressed breathing. He heard no such sound. The clerk had gone to the elevator and down, as his steps had indicated.

Veck relit his cigar. Then he opened the door, whisked the package in and shut the door again as swiftly as possible. He drew a long breath as he shot the bolt.

The package was bottle shaped. When he opened it, he saw a bottle of fine rye. There was a card in the wrappings.

“From a friend,” the card said simply. There was no name signed to it.

Veck laughed harshly. Of all the stupid moves! Did the person who had sent this package to a man in fear of his life actually expect the whiskey to be drunk?

He went with it to the bathroom, broke the bottle over the tub and watched the liquor drain away. He would take no such perilous chances as drinking from a bottle left at his door!

The liquor odor, however, suggested a drink of safer stuff to him. He went toward his bureau for the Scotch he kept in the top drawer.

For days Veck had literally lived on whiskey, trying to drink himself out of that awful fear and finding that the alcohol had no more effect than water on his over-stimulated brain.

He poured out half a tumbler of the stuff and gulped it. Then he clamped the cigar in his mouth again.

The time of Wencilau’s death was two days from that of Veck’s. The places were thousands of miles apart. The men were physically as different as two men can be.

But their invitation to the tomb was identical!

Veck stood stone-still for about thirty seconds after drinking the whiskey. His eyes widened with utter horror.

Then, as if suddenly hinged in the middle, he bent slowly over and fell to the floor. But there was more here than had occurred in the shabby little Paris hotel room.

Veck’s breathing did not stop for a moment or two after his fall.

And Veck breathed—fire!

From the man’s mouth and nostrils came pure, white flame in streamers a yard long. The flame seared the nap of the carpet, scorched the leg of a nearby chair. It came and went, as Veck’s breath came and went. It was like the legendary exhalations of a dragon.

The flame, gruesome, ghastly, streamed a last time and died. It made an audible hissing as it licked at the remnants of moisture on the man’s splitting lips. But it stopped when Veck’s breathing stopped.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, had come this flame of death; and Veck had breathed it and died!

It was probably the strangest drugstore in existence. It was the drugstore at Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, in New York City, run by Fergus MacMurdie.

The store itself was small and looked like any other drugstore. It was the rear that made it unusual. The rear was twice as big as the front and was locked off from the store part by a heavy iron door.

In this big back room was a double laboratory. Along one side ran all the paraphernalia used by an expert chemist, which modestly described Fergus MacMurdie’s abilities. Along the other, was all the equipment needed by a first-rank electrical engineer. And this was used by Smitty.

In the front of the store was one customer, seated at the soda fountain, consuming his fifth maple-nut sundae.

The customer was a gangling, sleepy-looking Negro. He looked as if he didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain—or to refrain from killing himself with maple-nut sundaes. Actually, Josh Newton was smart enough to be counted as one of the best aides of the odd, grim character called The Avenger.

In the dual laboratory, Smitty was working on his side. He was trying to perfect a television radio set that could be carried in a case the size of a small cigar box which, as any radio engineer could tell you, can’t be done. But the six-foot-nine giant thought he’d be doing it very soon now.

Smitty—to call him by his true name, Algernon Heathcote Smith, was to court annihilation—looked slow-witted but he, too, along with Josh Newton and the store proprietor, Fergus MacMurdie, was another of The Avenger’s aides.

The Scot wasn’t working on his side of the fence. He was looking through the evening paper. He had just finished concocting a little pellet which, when crumbled between thumb and forefinger, would form a dust that would blot up an incredible amount of poison gas, leaving the air fit to breathe again. The pellet would be useful in counterattacks.

Smitty laid down a miniature photoelectric cell and swore fervently. Mac stared at him out of bleak blue eyes.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided mildly. “Such language, mon. Ye’re reddenin’ my poor old ears.”

“They couldn’t be any redder than they naturally are,” snapped Smitty.

“I judge ye’re havin’ difficulties with yon silly work,” Mac said.

“Silly, is it?” howled the gigantic Smitty.

“Of course,” burred the Scot. “Ye’ve already perfected little receiving and transmitting sets over which we can talk to each other and to the chief. Now ye want us to see each other while we’re talkin’. And all in the size of a coffee cup. ’Tis totally unnecessary to gild the lily like that.”

“Yeah?” said the giant morosely. “Sometimes a set gets into the wrong hands, and we think it’s one of us talking and get in a jam. If we could see the talker, as well as hear . . . But I’m not coming along so fast on the thing.”

“ ’Tis to your credit that ye keep at your toys so persistently,” said Mac tolerantly folding his newspaper and beginning to peruse the second page. “I admire ye, Heathcote.”

Smitty purpled. There were very few people alive who could call him Heathcote. There were even fewer who could call the results of his brilliant work in radio, toys. But a look at the Scot’s face stopped any wrathful words Smitty might have hurled at him.

“What’s up, Mac?” he said.

“A friend of mine died last night in Montreal,” the Scot said soberly. “A mon named Veck. We were classmates at college. I remember he could hardly speak English when he first came to this country from Poland. And marvelous he was in chemistry, too. I rrremember.”

“How’d he die?” said the giant, looking at the tiny photoelectric cell.

“Acute indigestion, the paper says. But there’s a curious hint—”

Mac stopped, and stared at the paper without really seeing it. He was silent so long that Smitty turned from his bench to stare at him again.

“Verra odd business, Smitty,” Mac said softly. “What would ye think if a mon was hinted to have died of poison; but there was no poison to be traced anywhere? And what would ye think if living flame had apparently come from the mon’s mouth and nose before he died?”

“I’d think the first was improbable and the second absolutely impossible,” said the giant. “What gives you that brainstorm?”

“The poison is hinted all through the newspaper item, Smitty, though they call it acute indigestion. And the fire? My friend was found lyin’ on his side, very soon after a mon in the room below heard him fall. From Veck’s mouth and nostrils, for a yard along the carpet, the nap was seared as if by fire. The leg of a chair at the end of the seared streak was scorched. And Veck’s flesh was blackened, as if the mon breathed out flame before he died.”

Smitty shrugged.

“Nobody can breathe flame; so it couldn’t be what it seems. Now if you’ll give me a lift here—”

“I’ll give ye no lift,” said the Scot. “Not till I have contacted the chief on that funny lookin’ black box of yours.”

The box in question was the main television set communicating from the store to the headquarters of Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger.

Smitty had already perfected television far beyond the accomplishments of the big commercial studios. It was condensing it in tiny form that was bothering him at the moment.

Mac stepped to the big set and twisted dials.

A curious sort of screen took up most of the front of the big cabinet. As the magnificent set warmed, a clouded appearance mottled the screen. Then the clouded look faded out, and a face appeared.

It was a face to make any man gasp, then turn to look again with a shiver compounded of awe and fear.

The countenance was as dead as the face of the moon, and as white and still. Over the face was a shock of snow-white hair; but its thickness and virility showed that the owner was still a very young man. In the face were set eyes that seemed to have no color at all. They were deadly, pale holes in the white flesh. Yet they flamed like ice under a polar dawn.

As though carved from white metal, with diamond drills for eyes, the face peered at the two men from the screen. And even these two, close friends and aides of The Avenger, felt a chill shock at the impact of the colorless eyes.

“Chief,” said Mac, “I contacted ye because I’ve just read a very odd thing. It’s about the death of a man in Montreal last night who . . .”

Words came from the awesome white countenance, though the dead flesh of the lips scarcely moved.

“The Polish scientist, Veck. Dead of poisoning, obviously, though the statement was otherwise. Apparently exhaled flame as he died.”

Mac had long since stopped being surprised when Benson seemed to know everything.

“That’s the mon,” said Mac. “Veck was a friend of mine, Muster Benson. We were classmates. I’d like ye to let me go to Montreal and investigate a little. He was a grrrand person, and I—”

“We’ll do better than that, Mac,” said the still, barely moving lips. “We will take this on officially. I suspect there is a task for Justice, Inc. here.”

“We will?” said the Scot, as surprised as he was pleased. “Splendid, Muster Benson. We’ll report to ye, at once. Smitty’s beside me, and Josh is out front—at his eterrrnal maple-nut sundaes.”

The sinister, dead face of The Avenger faded from the screen. And a mile or so from the drugstore Benson turned from his duplicate television transmitter-receiver.

The man whose white, emotionless countenance was the nightmare of every crook from Maine to California, was only of average size. But every move he made shouted the fact that he possessed, in that average-sized frame, a power such as is seldom seen in mortals.

“Flame, breathed from Veck’s mouth and nostrils,” The Avenger whispered to himself. His pale, infallible eyes were like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face. “And flame, according to the servant, from the lips of the man in Berlin. Yes, it’s a case for Justice, Inc.”

Richard Benson’s life was devoted to the eradication of crime. Forced by his own personal tragedy—a criminal plot that had irreparably seared his soul—he had become The Avenger, the terrible enemy of the underworld.

Some of his battles were begun at the request of harassed individuals faced by dangers too great or subtle for the police to cope with. Some were begun as this one was—by the flaming genius of the man with the colorless eyes in picking significant bits from the news of the day.

A man had died in Berlin apparently breathing flame.

A man had died in Montreal apparently breathing flame.

The coincidence clicked over again and again in the mind behind the pale, deadly eyes. Benson walked, with his smooth stride hinting at great power, to the window and looked down at Bleek Street. There was nothing there for his unseeing gaze to rest on.