The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (8 page)

“Senator Burnside!” the little man chirped, rubbing his hands together. The hands looked like bird claws. “You surely weren’t trying to go out the window, were you? Or were you? That wouldn’t be a reasonable thing to do when there are doors to use.”

“Of course I wasn’t trying to go out the window,” said Burnside stiffly. “I merely wanted a little fresh air in the room and was raising the window to get it. Who are you, sir?”

“My name is Sherman,” said the little man. “Dr. Sherman, of the Washington Board of Psychiatrists. We—the board, that is—want to have a little talk with you. So I came in the car, which the board has at its disposal, to get you. If you will just get your hat and coat—”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Burnside thickly. When you’ve dreamed of something like this for days, and then it happens, the fact tends to clog your throat a little and make it hard to talk.

“We merely want to talk to you a bit,” soothed the birdlike little man who called himself Dr. Sherman. His jolly smile beamed out. “We understand you have been having a little trouble lately with—your eyes. You see things. So if you will just come along with us—”

Burnside lost all reason, then. He forgot about trying to act pompous and authoritative.

Fram, he thought wildly, had betrayed him. He had gone to Fram with a story of a “friend of his” seeing the little red man with the green dog. Fram, after saying that anyone seeing such things could not be sane, had deduced that Burnside was talking about himself and not any mythical third party. Then Fram had gone to the Washington Board of Psychiatrists about him.

Probably Burnside wouldn’t have gone so completely to pieces if he hadn’t entertained such grave doubts in the last two weeks as to his own sanity. He didn’t need anyone to insinuate that perhaps he didn’t have all his buttons; he was increasingly afraid of it himself.

And now—an asylum wagon, an attendant, and a horribly smiling little psychiatrist!

Burnside screamed and leaped for the dining-room door in spite of the steps he had heard there a moment ago. He was confronted by his butler, who stepped into view when Burnside charged.

Burnside was hopelessly aware that his servants had been looking askance at him for days—realizing that he was acting very queerly indeed. The butler had never, for example, swallowed that story about Burnside’s gun going off in the dead of night because he had been “cleaning” it.

The servants thought he was crazy, too. So the butler promptly closed with Burnside and kept him from getting out of the living room into the dining-room.

The Senator lashed out wildly with his fists. The servant went down. But by then the white-coated man had him. He got the Senator down and held him by sitting on his head, as one would hold an unruly horse.

“I’m not crazy!” screamed Burnside. If he wasn’t, it was exactly the wrong thing to yell. “I swear I’m sane!”

“There, there,” soothed the little doctor, never losing his smile or his professional composure for a moment. “Of course you’re sane. Of course you’re not crazy. But we just want to ask you a few questions— Oh, you would, would you!”

Burnside had tried to grab Sherman’s legs. So the little birdlike doctor nodded to the big man sitting on Burnside’s head, and the man smacked the Senator in the jaw.

Burnside wasn’t out, but he was unable to move when they hoisted him out the door and into the dreadful vehicle with the grated windows. He heard the little man say: “My, but it’s fortunate this was discovered! Think of having the nation’s affairs handled by a crazy man! A United States Senator, gone mad in office!”

“Sometimes I think they’re all a little nuts,” observed the big man, dumping Burnside into the wagon.

Burnside was stirring again; but it did him no good, then, because the door at the end had clanged shut on him. It sounded to the anguished Senator like the big iron asylum gates which would also presently clang shut on him. Unless he could beat this—somehow.

“Just make yourself comfortable, Senator,” chirped birdlike Dr. Sherman. He had climbed into the rear of the ambulance with Burnside. So had the big man in white, who now glowered at him, plainly ready to sock him again if he tried any tricks.

Burnside couldn’t see the driver. There was a little window in the front wall of the padded truck, but the man at the wheel was sitting to the left of it, out of his range of vision. All he knew was that there was a driver, because the car was moving.

“Look, here,” the Senator said to Sherman. “This is all pretty ridiculous. I don’t care what Fram told you, it isn’t true.”

“Of course, it isn’t,” said the little psychiatrist, beaming.

“The things I told Fram were about a friend of mine,” said Burnside.

“Of course. About a friend of yours.”

The ambulance slowed, then stopped.

The little doctor hopped to the small front window, opened it a crack, and said to the driver: “What’s up? Why are you stopping?”

“Dr. Fram is out here. He wants to go with us, I guess,” Burnside heard the driver reply.

Then the car sagged a little as a man got on. Burnside saw the back of someone’s back, beside the driver. The car started on—

Afterward, Burnside never knew exactly what had happened. For that matter, neither did the husky man in white, nor little Dr. Sherman.

The driver of the car with the grated windows had stopped for the man with the trim goatee and the mustache that looked waxed but wasn’t. Dr. Fram nodded pleasantly to him and climbed up beside him.

Fram had touched his goatee gently with his middle finger. Then, after the car had rolled several blocks along Massachusetts Avenue, things happened in that front seat too swiftly for the driver to keep pace.

Dr. Fram’s left hand shot out and clamped over the driver’s neck—from the rear, instead of the front. That was because the hand was not concerned with throttling the driver, but with finding certain nerve cables there.

That the questing fingers found the right place, the driver could have testified, because in a second things began to go black before his eyes.

Dr. Fram’s right hand caught the wheel after the car had wobbled once, and kept it on a straight path. The driver slumped behind the wheel.

There was a deft exchange, in which the man with the neat goatee pulled the driver’s unconscious form out from behind the wheel and onto the floor, and then slid over himself.

But behind, the three men in the body of the ambulance did not know these things.

They had felt it when the car swerved, and merely thought that the driver was wheeling to avoid hitting something in the street. After that they felt nothing—except a sudden, overpowering sleepiness.

Burnside and the man in white let their heads nod with nothing but a dull wonder in their eyes that they should become sleepy at such a time. But birdlike little Dr. Sherman fought wildly against the slumbrous feeling. With his medical training, it had penetrated instantly into his numbing brain that something was very wrong.

The startled knowledge didn’t save him. His figure joined the other two on the floor. And the car rolled smoothly over Washington streets with three in the back who slept so deeply they might have been dead.

Burnside opened his eyes some time later to find himself in a small room that looked much like a standard bedroom, save that it had no windows.

He lay in bed, dazed, staring around. The door opened and a man with a neat goatee and a super-neat small mustache came in.

That stirred the Senator. He sat up with the dull-red of rage in his cheeks. “Fram!” he rasped. “You damned, double-crossing—”

He stopped. “Fram” was taking something curious from his eyeballs. Two small, tissue-thin glass cups with pupils painted on them like the pupils of Fram’s eyes.

The eyes that were revealed were not the eyes of the psychiatrist. They were like stainless steel chips in the emotionless countenance so cleverly resembling Fram’s face. They were—the eyes of The Avenger, otherwise disguised as Dr. Fram.

Man of a Thousand Faces, Benson was called. And once again he had proved his right to the title.

“I heard Dr. Sherman talk to your butler yesterday,” Benson said calmly. “I tapped your telephone wire. I heard the butler tell all about the way your gun went off ‘accidentally’ the other night, and I suspected something like this was in the wind. So I prepared for it. A substitution of Fram’s features for my own, a bit of gas for the men in the ambulance, and here we are.”

“You saved my life,” mumbled Burnside, eyes profoundly grateful.

“Perhaps not,” said Benson. “Perhaps you were only to be thoroughly frightened. But I couldn’t take a chance. I didn’t know.”

Burnside clutched The Avenger’s arm as his first fear came back. It was a good deal like clutching a length of tapering steel cable.

“You don’t think I’m insane, do you?” he implored. “You haven’t taken me—just to shut me up in a private sanitarium?”

“I think you are quite sane,” Benson said.

“Where am I?” said Burnside, relaxing again.

“In the storage room of an office suite I keep rented here in Washington. No one knows it is mine. You will have this room, and two outside, to wander in. But I don’t want you to leave the suite.”

“But you just said you didn’t think I was crazy.”

“I don’t. But others may. It would be safest for you to lie low here for a time.”

“I’m a busy man,” protested Burnside.

“When matters come up in the Senate making your presence there imperative,” said The Avenger, “you can go there from here, doubling on your tracks so that you can’t be traced. You can return the same way. But this hide-out must be your temporary quarters. I have assigned my two servants to take care of your needs.”

He nodded and went out, with authority and power so dominant in his average-sized body that even a man like Senator Burnside was left incapable of questioning it.

Outside, he drew Josh Newton aside. “You and Rosabel will tend the Senator’s needs,” he said. “Burnside knows something that he doesn’t seem to want to tell. I want you two to try to find out what it is.”

Nellie Gray was an excellent judge of character. She had talked quite a little with Nan Stanton, her fellow prisoner in the basement of the garage, and was sure Nan could be trusted.

The two girls had told a little about themselves to each other. Nan kept dwelling on the phrase the bony man had used to describe her.

“ ‘Dope from the front office,’ huh!” she repeated for the dozenth time. “Well, they’re right. I certainly was a dope.” She stretched slim, shapely arms. “It begins to look as if Dr. Fram sent me up to the New York office for the sole purpose of getting me grabbed off by those men.”

“So Dr. Fram’s a phony,” mused Nellie Gray.

Nan shook her sleek dark head doubtfully. “He’s not a phony—at least in his profession. That’s what makes it puzzling. He’s a bona-fide psychiatrist with a fine reputation. And his reputation has been earned. He
is
good.”

“It certainly looks as if he’s mixed up in this, somewhere,” shrugged Nellie. “Why would he want you kidnapped, though? What do you know about his business?”

“Not a blamed thing,” said Nan. “But I suppose he, or somebody,
thinks
I know something. I suppose he kept an ignoramus like me in the anteroom because I was a good front, and then suddenly decided I knew too much.”

“But you just said he wasn’t a phony, which would indicate that he wasn’t mixed up in anything crooked,” argued Nellie.

“I don’t know what I think,” Nan admitted.

Nellie cast back over The Avenger’s phoned command to her. Find out anything she could about the visits of the senators to Fram.

“Tell me about this sanity test thing Fram’s in Washington about,” she said.

“It’s a pet subject with Dr. Fram,” replied Nan. She repeated words she had heard often in his office. “Do you know that about one and a half percent of the population in the United States is doomed to insanity? Well they are. And usually they can be spotted by examination of their lives and their family history. Now, if all young people with doubtful streaks in their heredity could be kept from marrying, gradually the insanity rate would dwindle down to nothing. There would be no children with weak minds brought into the world.”

“You know,” said Nellie, “if enough cranks could pass enough laws designed to better the human race, in about a hundred years there wouldn’t be any human race left to better.”

“It sounds logical to me.”

Nellie shrugged again. “Maybe it’s logical,” she murmured. “But to me it sounds like the ‘so-what’ department. I find it very strange that Senators Wade, Hornblow, Burnside, Collendar and Cutten should call so often on Dr. Fram on such an uninteresting political issue. But they did call often, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Nan. She spoke slowly, and very thoughtfully.

Nellie Gray noted the slowness, and said, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” responded Nan, “that more than once I thought I saw something in the eyes of those Senators that a sanity test bill shouldn’t have brought. That was—fear.”

“Fear?” said Nellie.