The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (19 page)

“I suppose you concentrated on the detonating cables?” said Addington.

“Yes,” said The Avenger, “I found them all.”

“In that undersea darkness?” said Addington incredulously. “You found three cables—not daring to use a light of any kind—and rendered all three useless?”

“I did,” said The Avenger, voice as expressionless as his mask of a face.

“Oh, boy!” said Smitty.

Mac boomed. “So, ye skurlies—” Then he stopped. Because Addington wasn’t looking as downcast as he should.

In fact, Addington was beginning to laugh. He rocked with laughter.

“I said you’d met a force you couldn’t beat,” he exulted finally. “There were four cables, my friend. We are methodical, my men and I. To be absolutely sure there could be no slip, we strung four cables. Each one of them capable of detonating the explosive.”

Mac struggled suddenly, against his bonds. He saw that Cole and Smitty were doing the same, with sweat standing out on their foreheads. Mac saw The Avenger keep looking among the men as if for a certain face he hadn’t yet seen.

“Four cables,” repeated Addington. “Each led halfway across the river, to a sealed case in which is a contact clock. At 3:45 exactly, the clock hand makes an electrical contact—and that is that. It is now,” he said, looking at his watch, “3:41.”

“O.K.,” said one of the others. “We know now that everything is all right. Let’s knock ’em off.”

Addington shook his head. “This Avenger is tricky. We’ll wait till the actual explosion, to be sure everything is all right. When that comes—and it will shake this building clear across the river mouth—we’ll let them have it. None of them must live, of course.”

Benson spoke, voice unholy in its calm.

“The cable extends on from your clock device to this building?”

“Of course,” said Addington. “The power comes from here.”

“Then you could stop the explosion by throwing a switch here?”

“I could,” said Addington, laughing.

“Then I would advise you to do so,” said The Avenger.

For an instant there was such silence that you could hear the creak of Smitty’s bonds as the giant threw all his vast strength against them.

“If you have investigated me at all,” Benson went on, “you will know my methods. I avoid taking lives. I give the criminals I’m fighting a chance to save their own lives by surrendering. If they don’t surrender, they destroy themselves.”

The eerie silence continued while all stared at the icy-eyed man who seemed utterly helpless.

“I give you this same chance to surrender,” Dick said. “If you don’t, you similarly will destroy yourselves.”

One of Addington’s men said suddenly: “I don’t like the way he says that. Gives me the creeps. Do you suppose—”

“Nonsense!” said Addington easily. “What could this beaten fool possibly do to us now?”

“You have a little more than a minute left,” said The Avenger. “I urge you—throw that switch. Cut off the power from the explosive.”

“You bluff magnificently,” said Addington, bowing in mockery.

“Once more—throw that switch!”

Once more, Addington laughed. And then another member of his small army came in from the stair door, bolting it tightly after him.

This man was monstrously fat; he must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. His heavy jowls were blue-black, with a growth of beard that would require shaving two or three times daily. He had mean little black eyes that looked at everything as if wondering how much profit could be squeezed out of that.

Smitty and Nellie exclaimed aloud as they stared at him. For they felt that now there was no doubt. They had seen the remains of this man after he had fallen forty-four stories onto concrete sidewalk.

Yet, here he stood!

“Got ’em all, huh?” the fat man said.

“All, Teebo,” said Addington. He stood with his watch in his hand now. “And in twenty seconds—”

“Hey!” said another man suddenly. “The guy with the pale eyes! His voice! I remember where I heard that before. He was the guy in the mausoleum at Grayson Cemetery that said something about the mark of Cain being on Teebo’s forehead—”

“Shut up!” snarled Addington with appalling ferocity that seemed without reason. “Five seconds—”

That five seconds seemed ten years long. And then it came. The explosion.

Shake the building? It did more than that. It seemed to pick it up and rock it as if lifted by a giant’s hand. Mac groaned at the thought of its power at the source, if they could feel it thus at such a distance.

A sort of concerted sigh went up from all the big underground room. Addington put the watch away.

“All right,” he said, a new tone in his voice. “It’s finished. We’ve done it. Kill The Avenger and his friends—”

“Wait a minute!”

That was the fat man, Teebo. And his voice had a snap in it that startled Addington. The dark leader turned and found himself looking at the muzzle of Teebo’s gun.

“What’s the matter with you, man?” Addington blustered. “Why are you—” His voice died. The rest of the gang looked in bewilderment at the two of them.

“I’d like to know more about this mark of Cain supposed to be on my forehead.” Teebo’s voice was almost silky in its smoothness but sounded as sinister as a snake’s hiss.

“Why, there’s nothing to that,” said Addington. “Mark of Cain! I don’t know what—”

“Cain,” said the fat man, “killed his brother. And I have a brother. Or had one.”

“Perhaps Addington would like me to explain,” Benson said. Behind him, his deft hands were working at his bonds. “Your brother headed the gang of picture thieves. You are in this gang. You brothers were the link between gangs, though your brother apparently didn’t know that. He started to sell me ‘The Dock,” and Addington killed him at the Pink Room of the Coyle Hotel.”

A strangled sound came from the fat man’s throat. His finger whitened on the trigger till Addington screamed: “Wait! Let me—”

“You said he wasn’t dead,” droned Teebo. “I kept asking you and you kept telling me. You said it was another guy went out that window, and that my brother was safe and hiding out.”

“This man’s lying,” said Addington, with sweat pouring down his cheeks.

“He shot your brother with a silenced gun,” said Benson inexorably. “The Pink Room orchestra was playing, and he must have made the report coincide with a drumbeat. Later, he was afraid the woman he was with either heard the silenced slap of the gun in spite of the drums or felt it strapped under his evening clothes; so he killed her, too.”

“He’s lying,” panted Addington. “Look, now, Teebo, you aren’t going to lose your head when we’ve just pulled off the biggest job in— Get him, somebody!”

The shot sounded as loud as another marine explosion, in the basement room. Addington stood for a moment with a hole in his head, and then sagged. Half a dozen guns leveled at the fat man—

A wild yell came from a man near the tunnel door.

“Hey, ain’t this basement below the river level? There’s water comin’ in here! And it’s comin’ fast!”

The lights went out.

The place turned into an inferno as water shorted the circuit somewhere and plunged the room into blackness. The men had no thought of killing anyone, now, and no triumph at what they’d achieved. They were solely concerned with their lives.

The tunnel door had burst open. And down its slant from the waterline dock where the sub rested, water was pouring at a terriffic rate.

Smitty broke the last of the rope binding him. “Nellie!” he yelled, splashing through water toward her.

Mac and Cole felt a needle-sharp point go between their wrists and then their ankles, then felt their bonds slash free. The Avenger was loose, too, and was using Mike, the throwing knife, on the tough cord.

“Follow me,” he said into Mac’s ear. “Repeat to the others.”

“Follow,” was the word from each to the next, lips to ear.

Benson went to the stair door through which Teebo had come. It was high time; one of the terrified, almost witless gang yelled, “The door upstairs—”

The Avenger’s fingers were as incredibly strong as little steel vises. He bent the bolt. No one would ever slide that back! He got away, others trailing him hand to wrist, just before the first of the maddened gang got there—and screamed in panic as he found the way barred.

Dick led them to a far corner. They stood in water up to their waists.

“Look,” said Nellie, with practically no quaver in her voice, “if we have to drown so as to drown these rats, too, why—that’s all right. But isn’t there some way—”

“We won’t drown,” came Dick’s calm voice in the dark. “The water will go little higher than this. Only the bottom third of the basement is below the river level.”

“Not that it matters much,” said Mac gloomily. “They did it. The
Carolina
and all those men—”

“Are perfectly safe,” said The Avenger quietly. “I said I had rendered three detonating cables useless. That was true. But I found all four. The fourth I trailed back with me, along with the drum of explosive to which it led, to the submarine. When I rode the sub back, the drum rode, too, with wire paying out behind. I dropped the drum just before the sub berthed. The explosion you heard was not under the
Carolina;
it was that drum practically under the Gas Products’ wharf, taking off the whole rear of the building and cracking the water-retaining basement wall.”

There was so much to be said that none of his aides could say anything.

The Avenger went on, in an almost conversational tone: “The explosion will draw the river police here in a drove. They will take care of these maniac killers. It was not they who won, after all.”

More than the harbor police came. They plugged the river end of the building, all right. But battering down the stair door came a dozen men from the F.B.I., trapping the gang in deadly pincers.

“So the lad was telling the truth,” a Federal man said to Benson when the gang was rounded up.

“Lad?” asked Dick.

“A boy came staggering into the office a few minutes ago, with a lump on his head as big as a hen’s egg. Said he had been knocked unconscious on his way and had just come to. He said to come here at once with a lot of men.”

Smitty and Nellie looked at each other with shining eyes.

“There’s a boy,” said Nellie softly, “who is going to get anything he asks for.”

But they felt silly, at that, about the Teebo affair.

“Are we dumb,” said Nellie. “All we could see was what we thought we saw. Brothers! There are a lot of little differences between the fat man who fell from the Pink Room window and the fat man in that gang they’re leading off to jail. The first one was a little younger, not quite so fat and had more hair. I don’t see how you could have made such a mistake, Smitty,” she finished illogically.

“Me make it!” gasped the giant. “How about you? You were as dopey as I was about it.”

They were still quarreling when they got to the amphibian for the trip back to New York and the Bleek Street headquarters. Then Smitty thought of a way to spike it.

“I’m in a hurry to get back,” he said smugly. “We have such a charming guest—Jessica Marsden. She’ll know a nice guy when she sees one. She’ll willingly dance with me at the Pink Room.”

“No one willingly dances with an elephant,” snapped Nellie. “But you’ll never have a chance to find out. If anyone is forced to suffer on a dance floor with you, it will be me—”

Her voice trailed away as she glanced at The Avenger. The rest were looking at him, too.

He was at the controls of the amphibian, pale eyes gazing straight ahead. He obviously hadn’t even heard the banter and obviously was not sharing their jubilation at a big job well done.

A strange, restless mystery, this Richard Benson. All that was in his mind, now, was more of the same kind of dangerous work. More and more. Moving against crooks wherever they showed their heads, a machine of cold vengeance as if one man could whip the entire underworld.

Well, maybe one man couldn’t. But he could fight till the underworld finally caught up to him with knife or bullet. And before that day came, they’d know it would have been easier to fight an army than the one man, the pale-eyed, calm-faced, steel-muscled Avenger.