The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (5 page)

They went on foot to the place where Smitty had taken the aged hobo a couple of days ago, because it was only a few blocks from the store. It was getting dark as they reached the mouth of the dismal, narrow alley. They stared down at the front of the shabby, leaning rear-house.

“Poor old guy,” said Smitty. “Pretty bad to have to live in a joint like that.”

He gnawed at his lip. “And yet,” he went on, “there must be something worth while looking after in that place, or else somebody’s crazy.”

“Huh?” said Mac.

“The locks,” said Smitty, pointing to the door on the left of the old man’s door. “Those great big, heavy new locks on that door. They weren’t put on there for nothing.”

Mac shrugged, and the two went to the aged tramp’s door.

Smitty knocked. The frail door rattled back and forth as if just the giant’s tap would break it in. But there was no answer. Smitty tried the door and found it locked, though the lock on this door was not at all like the complicated devices on the other alley door.

“Not at home,” said Mac. “So now what?”

“We might wait for him a few minutes,” rumbled the giant.

On each side of the miserable shack was the back end of a large, cheap apartment building, running from street in front to alley in the rear. But on each side, between rear-house and apartment house, was a very narrow runway.

Mac and Smitty waited in the left one, and then they suddenly heard steps from behind them.

They turned. A woman was coming toward them. It was necessary for the two to go out into the alley so the woman could get down the narrow runway.

They saw her for a moment as she came out. An elderly woman, heavy-set, squat, large-footed, dressed in clothes that must have been worn for a long, long time, and yet were reasonably clean. Thousands of her kind patiently clean the city’s many office buildings, trailing scrub brushes and pails full of gray water behind them.

She glanced heavily, incuriously, at them and went down the alley to the street. Mac and Smitty stepped back into the narrow passageway.

They waited quite a little while.

“We might as well come back again tomorrow,” growled Smitty, “or just leave and stay left. This is a crazy idea anyhow. There can’t possibly be any connection—”

Steps sounded in the alley. It was as if someone had left the old man’s door, or the door next to it, and the two hadn’t heard the door opening. Both popped into the alley.

A man was coming from the narrow runway on the other side of the rear-house.

“They duck in and out like rabbits in a maze,” complained Mac. “There must be a couple of stairways and doors in the back of this joint, too, to feed the top-floor rooms.”

Smitty only said, “Let’s get this guy and ask a few questions.”

It was easy to catch up to this second person to leave the rear-house, for the man had a twisted leg and walked quite slowly.

He turned in surprise and a little fear as he heard the two behind him. But the fear left when he saw the amiable look on gigantic Smitty’s moonface.

“Hello,” said Smitty. “You live in that house?”

“Yes,” said the man. “Top floor, left-hand side. My name is Mason,” he added.

“We wanted to see the old fellow on the ground floor,” Mac said. “Do you know if he is in?”

“No, I don’t,” said Mason. “He’s a quiet old chap. I never know whether he’s in or out. Are you friends of his?”

“We were afraid he was sick,” evaded Smitty.

“Come to think of it,” said the man, “Old Mitch has looked badly for several days.”

“Old Mitch?”

“That’s all the name I know,” said the man with the twisted leg, apologetically. “Everybody just calls him Old Mitch. For Mitchell, I suppose.”

“Say,” blurted Smitty impulsively, “you seem a cut above a joint like that rear-house. How is it you live in there?”

The man smiled. And the smile took years off his face. He had looked about fifty before. Now he seemed no more than in his thirties. He looked meek and beaten and humble—but not old.

“I have lived in better places,” he said. “But I have to have extra money, right now, and a bookkeeper doesn’t make much. There is a Mrs. Mason. I think she can come home from Arizona pretty soon, with cured lungs. But in the meantime”—he waved his hand—“I live here so she can stay in a sanitarium there.”

There were no heroics in his tone, just a statement of fact. Mac and Smitty thanked him for his courtesy, and he went on.

“Now?” said Mac disgustedly.

But it was Smitty’s turn to be stubborn.

“Make it just fifteen minutes more. Then we’ll blow.”

Thirteen of the fifteen minutes passed, and they saw the object of their visit.

At the alley entrance toiled a bent, aged figure with a ragged bundle in its arms. From the end of the bundle trailed a few bits of string and also protruded the jagged ends of broken wood for fuel.

“Here we go,” said Smitty starting toward the old man. But Mac caught his arm.

Another figure appeared at the alley entrance. This one was that of a younger and well-dressed man.

“What in the world would he want with that old bum?” snapped Smitty suspiciously.

What the young, well-dressed fellow wanted was nothing good, apparently.

He said something in a loud, angry tone to the old man, and the old fellow cowered back.

Then the man the bookkeeper had called Old Mitch said something in a low, placating tone. But it didn’t placate.

“Why, you old fool—” Mac heard the young fellow snarl. Then there was the sound of a blow and the old man sprawled piteously in the alley.

With one impulse, Mac and Smitty raced for the young bully. But they didn’t get him. There was the sound of a motor, and a cheap but new roadster flashed away as they got to the street. The young fellow was driving it.

They helped the old fellow up—and they got the same snarling, querulous ingratitude they’d received before.

“Lemme alone. I’m all right. Lemme be, I tell you! I can take care of myself.”

The old fellow was shaken from the blow but otherwise he looked all right. Mac took special care to see that, without letting Old Mitch know that he was being given the once-over.

He wasn’t shivering any more. His color was not good, but at least it was no longer that bean-green shade. And he didn’t move any more slowly than any other man.

“Lemme go, dang it!” Old Mitch snarled.

So Smitty let him go. But he looked after the cheap new roadster with hard eyes.

“I got the license number,” he said. “I’ll phone it in to the police and let them give him a going over. I’ll teach that guy to hit an old, defenseless man!”

“No!” snapped Old Mitch instantly. “No! I . . . you can’t do that!”

“Why not?” demanded Smitty curiously.

“Because . . . you . . . I don’t want you to. I can take care of myself, I tell you. I’ll fight my own battles!”

“Good for you,” approved Smitty. “But just the same, I’ll give that young fellow something to remember me by.”

“I won’t let you look him up!” raved Old Mitch, seeming ready to literally froth at the mouth. “If you haul him in, I’ll swear he never touched me! See?”

“That sounds,” said Smitty quietly, “as if you knew him.”

“I do,” said Old Mitch.

His shoulders drooped and showed the full weight, and more, of his years and feebleness.

“He is my son!” he said, with a volume of unspoken grief in the tone of voice. “I . . . I don’t want to be a burden on him; so he goes his way and I go mine.”

“Except for once in a while,” said Mac hotly, “when he drops around to get pennies or something from you—and knocks you down!”

“He is my son,” said the old man wearily. “I would never permit charges to be lodged against him.”

He turned and went laboriously down the alley, bundle of discarded wood scraps and other bits of junk tightly held under his ragged old arm.

In Akron, Ohio, two rubber factories had been paralyzed by the mysterious business of their workers abruptly turning into slow-motion automatons.

The factories stayed paralyzed. No workman would enter the crude-rubber department of Wardwear’s plant, or any part at all of the Quill factory. They were afraid they would get the same queer malady that had afflicted the other workmen.

The fear was justified. That malady was deadly!

Several dozen of the workmen had already died. Of the rest, a score or more were at death’s door. And the balance were very sick men and getting worse.

Some kind of anaemia, the doctors said vaguely. And it was an anaemia that grew worse instead of better. It looked as if every man affected, and there had been hundreds, was going to die sooner or later.

In the two plants, watchmen hired for their almost crazy courage were on guard to keep the vacant shops from being looted. Nothing happened to the watchmen, which would seem to argue that it was safe to go back, now.

But just the same, no workman could be induced to enter the places and start the machines again. So two plants were out of the running.

And a third blow, had anyone known it, was in the process of paralyzing another plant.

This time it was in New York.

Down near the Hudson River, a light closed truck left a clattering machine shop that specialized in machine tools and dies. The truck had a load of jigs and dies for the Manhattan Rubber Gasket Company.

This company was small—its plants employed only a hundred and four men all told—but it was highly important. It made only one thing—various rubber gaskets. It was made immensely important by one type of gasket now being turned out in quantity lots.

This gasket was made from a secret formula and by a secret process for the tubing of ships, notably warships and coast-guard cutters. Just one small part of the labyrinth of machinery in a ship. But it is impossible to overrate the importance of that one part.

The little plant was working night and day to turn out an order of those gaskets for war use.

The truck went east on Canal Street, north on one of the avenues, east again. There is a lot of trucking on the crosstown streets; so the truck went slowly.

There was a man at the wheel, and a man with a gun sat beside him. The man with the gun was smoking idly. He pointed suddenly ahead and to the right.

“Fight,” he said.

“Looks like it,” said the driver.

Three men were on the sidewalk. They said no word to each other, but two were glaring at the third. And as the men in the truck watched, one of the two reached out with his hand, planted it in the third man’s face and pushed.

The third man came back swinging and knocked one of the other two backward off the sidewalk, directly in front of the truck.

The driver stopped with a screeching of brakes, and the purpose of the fight was immediately apparent. It was just to stop the truck.

At once, the two men left on the walk leaped for the right-hand side of the truck! The man with the gun, thoroughly alarmed, snapped it up—and was felled by a blackjack. The driver started to swing a hunk of metal rod which he kept in the cab for self-defense. But he was clubbed down by the third man, who had slipped up to the other side.

That was all there was to it.

The three heaved the two slack bodies into the truck, then climbed in themselves. The one who took the wheel was a young fellow, excellently dressed, with narrowed eyes and a thin gash of a mouth.

There was some yelling and commotion around, by then; and the young fellow, looking as if only faintly annoyed, drove off fast. The truck went down a street on which was a large old building, just vacated for a wrecking crew to tear down a little later.

When the truck emerged down this street, some minutes later, there were two men in the front again, dressed in the clothes of the two who had originally been there. And this time the young fellow was not driving. He sat beside the man who had been knocked in front of the truck to stop it and directed him where to turn.

He did it by signals, as if the driver were a deaf-mute.

The truck drew up before heavy gates in front of a small yard, almost completely filled by the neat building of the Manhattan Gasket Company.