The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (9 page)

Conroy was dead! The room in which he lay, at the rear of the hall cutting through the apartment like a main artery, was a library. There were many books, several tables, leather chairs, a leather divan. The beams showed in here too in imitation of an ancient feudal castle. Around the walls were the heads of animals, a zebra, two lions, a tiger and an elk. Benson recalled that his investigations of the four directors had revealed that Conroy had been quite a big game hunter up till a few years ago.

Conroy lay on the divan. He seemed only asleep, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes peacefully closed. But there is something about death that proclaims itself from afar, to those accustomed to it, as were the little group aiding The Avenger in his crime battles.

“Well,” said Smitty, towering in the room,
“he
isn’t to blame for any of our recent troubles. Wonder what killed him?” It took a lot of searching to find that out.

The Avenger took out a small bit of what seemed to be dark violet paper. But the paper was coated with a special methyl stain of MacMurdie’s concoction to detect gunfire. Hours after a gun had been fired in a room, this stain would pick up the faint remaining fumes and turn to bluish-green. The paper retained its color, showing that no gun had been fired in this room, at least not for a long time.

Conroy’s body, on examination, seemed to be completely unmarked. You’d have thought the man had simply lain down on the divan and peacefully died of a heart attack. Or perhaps he had committed suicide in some subtle way, since it was apparent that his servants had been sent away from the place.

Then The Avenger’s sensitive, steel-strong fingers found something. They had been searching Conroy’s scalp, through the thick, reddish hair. There was a tiny projection above the left ear, not quite as far from the ear as from a point at the exact top of the skull. Benson stared closer. Something like the end of a needle was just barely seen in the scalp—with the other end far down in the brain beneath.

Into the stainless steel chips of eyes came the diamond glitter that meant The Avenger had suddenly discovered a great deal. He straightened up and stared at the curiously staring giant and the equally curious Scot. “From the mists of the past,” said Benson, pale lips scarcely moving in his paralyzed face, “the ruthless ancients teach the modern crook. But not, it would seem, too well.”

“Huh?” said Smitty.

The colorless, terrible eyes turned on him; and the giant experienced a funny feeling at the pit of his stomach, as even friends did when those pale-agate orbs rested on them. Benson’s lips barely moved in his paralyzed face. “I told you about the sample manuscript, the ancient bundle of hides, Lini Waller brought to New York as an example of the archaeological wonders of those caves,” he said. “I told you that the ancient record they chanced to pick at random was a volume dealing with the medicinal and surgical skill of that lost race. Well, among other things, it is told in the record how they made slaves by a brain operation that robbed the victim of conscious will, turned him into a robot that moved and talked as its master commanded. But it was hardly complicated enough to be called an operation. It consisted of very simply, and diabolically, driving a slim metal wedge into the brain at precisely the right area to paralyze the seat of will. Whoever we are after, has learned this trick from a study of the manuscript.”

The pale, clear eyes narrowed. “I think this was done to Lini Waller. It would explain the way she is apparently working against her own interests. She’s an automation docilely working toward her own destruction. And that would explain why I was unable to hypnotize her. There was no conscious will there to hypnotize.”

Smitty jabbed a colossal thumb in the direction of the divan. “But Conroy wasn’t turned into a robot. Conroy was turned into a corpse.”

The Avenger nodded. “By accident,” his calm, cold voice came in reply. “I have said the ancients seem to have taught the modern crook the robot trick—but not too well. This is a delicate operation, simple as the actual penetration of the brain appears to be. The metal must go into the exact segment of the brain. If it strays to right or left, even a fraction of an inch, the victim dies—as Conroy did. It would appear that someone wanted Conroy to become an automation obeying crooked orders, perhaps wanted him to be a scapegoat in case trouble developed. But the needle didn’t go exactly where it should have gone; so Conroy died!”

Mac was staring at the bizarre picture presented by the dead man and his immediate surroundings. The divan on which the corpse lay was covered with dark-red leather, so that it looked like a sacrificial slab coated with crusted, long-dried blood. And right over the body, like the head of some sort of vile god, was the mounted head of a North Woods moose. “Sacrifice to the beast,” muttered Mac. “Only beasts don’t come as rotten as the man who did this.”

Smitty had an objection to one of Benson’s points. It was so seldom that he could see even a small hole in the reasoning of the ice-eyed man that he felt sneakingly proud of the fact. “You said this may have been done to Lini Waller,” he said. “But if that were true, how could the girl give away the place where she’d been held prisoner? You remember her babble to you of ice caves was what let us find that cold-room at the refrigerating warehouse. If she were a robot, doing someone else’s bidding, how is it she would let that slip out?”

Benson had the answer, as Smitty should have known he would. “She was operated on in that room,” The Avenger said, voice absent as he stared at Conroy. “The hairs on the bench indicate that. The bench was a crude operating table. But just before the needle was driven into her brain, she was still herself, and observed the appearance of the room. Later, that memory, lingering in her subconscious mind, came out as she was talking to me. Only her sense of timing was wrong. She said she was held in the ice cave last night; but, actually, it must have been the night before last.”

Mac nodded. “And even a very intelligent mon,” he added, “as intelligent as our head skurlie in this affair must be, would hardly foresee a trap like that. If he had told the girl to say nothing of where she had been held, she wouldn’t have done so.”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

“I don’t know that our discovery of the cold-room did any good,” said Smitty gloomily. “Where’d it get us, I’d like to know?”

“Now who’s croakin’ disaster?” demanded Mac, at whom the giant was always jeering as being a Scotch raven croaking of failure.

Smitty grimaced, then grinned sheepishly. But The Avenger seemed not even to hear the byplay. He was staring at the corpse, but obviously not seeing it. His pale eyes were like twin swirling pits of fog as, in the brain behind them, cold facts began to marshal themselves into an orderly arrangement.

The Avenger and his aides were all in the great room on the top floor of their Bleek Street headquarters. Smitty was tinkering with Josh’s little radio. These tiny radios were rather marvelous things. Run on tiny but powerful batteries, they were encased in small metal containers curved to fit the waist and hardly larger than cigar cases. They would transmit as well as receive and had a range up to forty miles. Benson and each of his helpers always wore one strapped to his belt; and they had saved the little crew a lot of grief.

Since the radios were Smitty’s own invention, he found the bug in Josh’s pretty quickly and fixed it. “There, Josh. Bet you ate so many maple-nut sundaes that you bulged in the meal case and loosened the connection,” said Smitty, handing back the tiny radio.

Josh grinned. The lanky Negro’s consuming passion was sticky maple-nut sundaes. He had been known to eat six of them at a sitting; and four or five were nothing at all.

“Ye’ll be breakin’ me up in business, Josh,” said Mac solemnly, “if ye keep on lappin’ up the sundaes in my drugstore during yer spare time.”

The drugstore had been bought by Benson and turned over to MacMurdie. It was an ordinary drugstore in front; but in the rear it was highly extraordinary. Back there, Smitty had a long bench at which he worked on his electrical inventions, and Mac had an equally long table where he concocted drugs that so often turned out to be revolutionary in the world of medicine—and of crime fighting.

The Avenger sat at a teak desk near a rear window, with late sun slanting in on his white, thick hair through what seemed ordinary Venetian blinds. Only instead of being wood, the slats of the blinds were made of nickel-steel, set in the masonry at a forty-five degree angle to admit light but deflect bullets.

Nellie Gray looked at the chief, as they all called him. Benson was staring at the desk top with eyes as cold and still as his face. Nellie knew that look. He was driving through mystery and evasions on a path half of chill logic and half of an almost feminine intuition. He stared suddenly at the group. “Mac. Josh.”

The Scot with the big ears and feet and the sleepy looking Negro went to the desk. “I think we’d better locate the caves where Lini Waller and her brother found the ancient relics,” Benson said calmly to Mac. “You and Josh had better hop out there and look around. There has been no word from her brother since that last message we caught on their wave length about his having had ‘a little trouble’ but that ‘everything is all right now.’ ”

Mac gasped. “D’ye think we can find the cave, Muster Benson? The girrrl has made it her chief business to keep the secret of that location, ever since coming to New York. She didn’t tell even the men who are to give her two and a half million dollars for the stuff in the caves.”

“I think we can reason out about where the caves are,” Benson repeated. “The nature of the sample she brought to New York is about enough. A bundle of hides which, after all, is quite a perishable thing. Now how could thin hides last for forty or fifty thousand years? Only in one way—preserved by intense cold. You could find such cold only in polar regions, or in glacial ice. Since it is unlikely that the girl went on a polar expedition with her brother, the glacial idea is indicated. This would be borne out too by her talk of being held in an ice cave here in New York.”

Benson took out the map on which Smitty had ruled the line laid out by the radio direction-finder when the words came from Brent Waller in the far away cave. “There are no glaciers inland anywhere near this line,” he said. “But there are two within a hundred and ten miles of it; one is almost on the line, along the Pacific coast. You two take the fast plane out there and try to locate that glacier from which the stuff came. Look for one which has recently cracked so that it might expose an object heretofore hidden. You might be able to find whatever Indians guided the Wallers recently, and get an even closer line on the location. Radio back the minute you have something to report.”

Josh and Mac went out. The Avenger had half a dozen planes, small and large, built variously for speed or to transport heavy loads. They’d be in one of the fastest in about half an hour, winging their way toward the virgin fir forests of northern British Columbia.

Neither had said a word to the command. They were all prepared for such instant trips to far corners of the continent. They occurred frequently in the strenuous fights against crime for which the indomitable little crew existed.

Nellie Gray turned her lovely face toward Benson. “What do I do?” she asked. “You haven’t given me a thing to do so far.”

“There will probably be plenty for you to do before this is over,” said Benson. “But for the moment there is nothing.” He got up, moving, as always, so smoothly that he seemed slow, but getting to the door in about half the time you’d expect. “It’s nearly seven o’clock,” he said. “Well after standard office hours. I’m going to have a quick look at the offices of Werner and Mallory and Wittwar. I’ll be back soon.”

He left; and Nellie, sighing for action, picked up the late afternoon paper. There was a lot in it about the strange death of Conroy. Nothing was said of murder. Benson had told of the inconspicuous needle when he reported to the police; but for their own reasons they were soft-pedaling the murder angle. They thought they’d have less reporters interfering in a murder chase, possibly. Nellie smiled a little. There was only one man alive who could solve that murder, she reflected loyally. That was the scourge of the underworld—The Avenger.

The Wittwar Packing Co. had its own five-story office building in lower Manhattan. The building was deserted when Benson reached it; too late for late workers, too early for scrubwomen. Which was precisely what Benson wanted.

It was night now. No trick for the gray steel bar of a man to slide like a shadow up the fire escape of the next building, walk a narrow ledge and get into the building absolutely unseen through a third-story window. Wittwar’s big office was on the top floor. It was unlocked; there was nothing furtive about it.

The Avenger went in. The powerful little flashlight played around on a big vault, two desks and several chairs. He went to the vault first. The combination of the vault was good, but not as elaborate as that of a safe in which money and other valuables might be kept. Benson, with sensitive fingertips, felt out the numbers worn by constant use and swung open the door. There was nothing in the vault that didn’t refer to the meat business.