The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (19 page)

Josh was flabbergasted. After all The Avenger had said about the old bum, now he was untying him! And saying no word of warning to Nellie and Smitty!

But Josh didn’t utter any words of surprise. He knew Dick always had a reason for anything he did. He must have one here, even if it wasn’t at all apparent to the bewildered Josh.

“Thanks,” said Old Mitch in surly tones. He sat up, with an effort, and rubbed his ankles and wrists. With no consideration for Nellie, he proceeded to curse the men at the far end of the basement room. They only stared stolidly.

There was still that air of waiting for something.

Suddenly, there was a sound above them. They all looked up.

A hole was appearing in the ceiling. It was a very large hole. The trapdoor that had covered it took up nearly half the floor of the room above. They could see solid bars, that still remained over the hole when the trapdoor was swung wide. And beyond, they caught glimpses of glass laboratory apparatus.

“The room of Johnny the Dip,” said Benson calmly.

Nellie stared. “Then we are under the rear-house! But the police ripped up floor boards and found only bare earth—”

Benson pointed. Nellie saw that the trapdoor, now held straight up on edge, was about a foot thick and that it had packed earth between the top layer, which was the rickety floor of the rear-house, and the bottom layer, which was of cement. The cops had taken up a floor board, had seen that bare earth and assumed it went right on down, solidly.

The little band saw somebody up there looking down between the bars over the hole, but they couldn’t see who it was. And then the thing that had been awaited happened.

There was a creak, and the door in the end wall, the one through which Josh and Benson had just been thrust, opened again. Now, two more were pushed in. And Smitty groaned when he saw them.

Mac and Rosabel. This gang had broken into Bleek Street and rounded them up.

The Avenger and all his crew were in here, now.

Mac came toward them, moving slowly, dazed and ill. Rosabel helped him. She was disheveled, testifying to the fight she must have put up before being caught.

“Mac,” said Smitty, “didn’t you have sense enough to—”

“I had sense enough to wait till I was taken,” snapped Mac bleakly. “I didn’t just come here under my own power, anyhow. I wasn’t as obligin’ as ye were.”

While the door was open, the gang in there handled their guns less indolently. All of them covered their prisoners, so there could be no dash for the door.

At the same time, two of them warily approached the group.

They got Old Mitch, one on each arm, and started toward the door with him.

The Avenger’s whipcord body quivered with the urge to prevent that move. But if he had twitched a muscle in rebellion, a dozen guns would have gone off at point-blank range.

“There goes our hostage,” said Josh, watching Old Mitch go through the door and understanding the situation at once. “As long as we had Old Mitch with us, we might have been safe. Now—”

“Now it will come any minute,” said Dick quietly.

“Old Mitch? Hostage?” mumbled Mac. “What do ye mean?”

So they told Mac and Nellie and Smitty what they meant, and their savage amazement was almost funny.

“Old Mitch himself!” rumbled Smitty. “Right under our noses from the start!”

Nellie exclaimed, and snatched from her purse the coin she had found in Old Mitch’s room. On it was scratched, in tiny letters:

August 2nd, Wardwear Plant 3.

“We were certainly slow,” said Nellie. “Here is a slow-motion disease, supposedly incurable; yet Old Mitch caught it twice ‘by accident’ and recovered. He got it from his own poison brew and knew enough to cure it. Yet, we didn’t catch on! At least I didn’t.”

The gang in the basement room, still covering The Avenger and his crew, began backing toward the door in the wall.

“They’re clearing the room for action against us,” said Smitty. “This is it, all right!”

“Yes,” said Benson, voice as calm as his unalterable face. He took a bottle from his pocket. “Each of you take a swallow of this. We’ll divide it as well as we can measure it by eye and each take a sixth.”

But now something was happening to the gang of killers that drew their eyes. They saw the one nearest the door press the spot that should have opened the solid portal, and they saw that it did not open. The men looked stupidly bewildered, then vaguely afraid.

The man in the lead jammed his thumb on that spot again, and still the thing didn’t open. A Babel of outlandish exclamations sounded out, in obscure languages no one of which was intelligible to any but the speaker.

“For Heaven’s sake!” faltered Nellie.

“It looks,” said The Avenger calmly, “as if the leaders in this affair have decided this is a good chance to get rid of any of their own men who might know too much. Start on the bottle, Nellie. You first.”

Nellie shrank back from the bottle with dismay in her lovely blue eyes. The contents of the bottle did not look appetizing. It was the most poisonous-looking stuff she had ever seen, purplish green, looking a little like cylinder oil.

Then, gagging over it, she got down about a sixth of the little bottle’s contents. Mac and Smitty, Josh and Rosabel, and finally The Avenger swallowed their portions.

None of them, save Dick, knew why.

The strange Babel of all these killers from the central countries of Europe sounded louder. The men had forgotten all about holding their prisoners at gun point, now. They were all glaring up at the grating in the ceiling.

So The Avenger and the others looked, too.

Old Mitch was up there. And the man with the crooked eyebrow, his black-sheep son.

But Old Mitch had shed the straggly whiskers, and he looked many years younger. The man with the crooked eyebrow wasn’t lifting a hand against him now. They were all arms-around-the-neck, the best of pals. And both were grinning as if at the joke of the century, though there was nothing reassuring in those grins.

There was death in them!

“Benson,” called the man who had been Old Mitch, “you are supposed to be very clever. Can you guess what is to happen to you, now?”

Never had the face of The Avenger been more expressionless. Never had his voice been more calm than now.

“Of course,” he said to the two murderously grinning faces seen through the heavy grating. “You have a favorite method of wholesale murder. You will use it, now, on us, as you have already used it on hundreds of innocent rubber workers.”

“That’s right,” said the rejuvenated Old Mitch. “The slow-motion death. I’ve got enough in my hand to kill a hundred men. More even than the amount I gave my first lieutenant, in the yard of the Manhattan Gasket Company, after the stupid guards at the gate had searched him and passed him. In this small, closed space, no ventilating system is necessary. When this little paper sack breaks on the floor below, the almost impalpable powder it contains will fill the air of the room in less than a minute.”

The Babel of the gang, doomed to die as well as the prisoners, became a wild chorus as the men from Central Europe saw the little sack and realized what it meant.

“Cattle!” said the man who had posed as Old Mitch’s son. “Time to clean them all out and get new and ignorant ones.”

“This sabotage is going on, then?” said The Avenger.

His voice was so calm that the two up there almost lost their grins for a moment. Then the grins came back.

“It will continue,” snapped the man who had acted the part of ungrateful son, “till your entire rubber industry is demoralized. It will be applied to other industries, making goods for our enemies in Europe. When it is finished, your country will be paralyzed. But so will our enemies. We shall win, and then quite possibly come over here to pick up the pieces before you can recover.”

“That’s what you think!” began Smitty hotly.

They saw then why the two had talked. It was to get them off guard so that none would be quick enough to dart forward and catch the little sack so that it should not hit the floor, when dropped, and break.

And, now, drop it did!

It struck the cement with a soft, harmless-sounding little squoosh, and split wide open. From it came a whitish cloud! Dust, powder, so fine that when it began to disperse it became practically invisible.

But each man there knew that it was entering his lungs with every breath—and that it spelled death!

There was bedlam from the doomed gang, paying the inevitable penalty of working for men who killed with no more compunction than murder machines. But there was no sound from The Avenger’s little band, though their faces were pale and their eyes wide. They did not want to die. But in the face of death, they were entirely composed.

The two up above were grinning. Their faces started to withdraw from the open grating.

“You!” called Benson. “Old Mitch!”

“Count Franz Bord, to you,” jeered the younger man. Their faces were pressed to the open grating again. “The best chemist in Europe. Educated in this country, as I was. Holding citizenship papers, as I do, but with a few affiliations still left in our homeland. What is it that we can do for you, Mr. Richard Benson?”

“You might make your wills,” said Dick, almost mildly. “And if you have any last requests to be mailed to your home country, you might leave them with us.”

“Bah!” snarled the count who had lived as a tramp. “You talk big. Didn’t I tell you there was death for a hundred men in that room? You breathe death every time your lungs work.”

“So do you,” said Benson, more mildly still. “The dust of death is rising up through that open grating so that you are breathing it as we are. Just to be sure you get your full share, I called to you so that you’d put your heads down to the grating again—into that powdered murder of yours.”

A look of supreme contempt came into the man’s face.

And a wider grin than ever into the face of the younger man.

“You are naïve, my friend,” said the count. “Do you think I could work with the powder without an antidote? Carefully as it is handled, it must infect the handler. So before I used it at all, I worked out the antidote. I shall take it from my pocket in a moment, and we two shall be safe—”

“Will you?” said The Avenger, with pale death in his eyes.