The Avenger 15 - House of Death (10 page)

The big man opened the stout oak door of the enclosure, threw the bundled waterproof cloth in, and quickly closed the door again. That was so the things in the enclosure couldn’t get out. They might raise hell if they did, killing even the great dogs.

They were pigs, giants of their kind, three years old and more. But they were not as fat as swine usually are. They were kept a little starved, for just such emergencies as this. Just pigs. But any farmer would rather face a mad bull than a dozen huge hogs in savage semi-starvation.

“You can take care of what is left later,” said the master of this house of terror.

“Yes, sir,” whispered Morgan, licking pale lips. In a little while he would have to fish over the enclosure wall for a few bones and then bury them.

The two went into the house.

“Anything else, M-Master Goram?” asked the servant.

The grim fat man shook his head.

“No! Good night.”

Morgan went to his room, to wait till he should go back out to the enclosure. But his master did not go upstairs.

He waddled downstairs to the moldering basement of the house, instead.

The cellar of this deathly place was almost as elaborate as the upstairs. There were wine cellars with vaulted roofs, with only a few bottles in them, now. There were crypts behind heavy metal doors, in which valuables had once been stored, but which now were empty.

The place was almost like a catacomb. As the fat man waddled, eyes unblinking, with a slow movement like that of a tank, his footsteps rang emptily from vault to vault of the dank and cobwebbed labyrinth.

Yes, like a catacomb, a place of death. So much like it, in fact, that it was only with a sense of horror, and with scarcely any surprise at all, that an observer would have followed the fat man to—an occupied coffin!

It was on ebony trestles in the farthest crypt from the stairs. It was quite an elaborate thing, of polished grayish metal with bronze, or gold, handles. At each end burned a taper nearly six feet tall and six inches through—the kind designed to burn uninterrupted for many months.

In this low but steady light could be seen, through the glass lid, the occupant of the thing.

It was an elderly man, small, delicate, with a skin even more wax-white than dead skin usually is. The eyes were closed and sunken deep; but otherwise, so perfect a preserving job had been done that the body looked more like that of a sleeping man than a dead one.

The heavy owner of the house waddled deliberately to the side of the coffin and stood staring down.

“Hello, father,” he said.

There was a faint, far echo: “. . . lo f . . .”

It was almost as if the stony lips in the casket, four years dead, had really replied. And with callous humor the grim fat man played up to the fantasy.

“I trust you are well this evening?”

The far echo whispered, “. . . well . . . eve . . .”

“That’s fine. Did you know we had another visitor?” The elephantine humorist waited an instant as if the corpse had spoken. Then he went on: “Well, we did. A fellow managed the swim from the mainland again. I guess you weren’t as smart as you thought, when you bought this island. It would have been better to get one twenty or thirty miles out, instead of six, in spite of the difficulty of getting monthly supplies.”

He paused again, quite as if carrying on a conversation with the corpse.

“I know,” he nodded gravely. “You thought you were acting for the best. But you weren’t. If you had been, you’d have left something better than those damned medallions. A fine heritage they are.”

He hesitated, then shrugged.

“Oh, you think they are a good heritage! You would, revered father. But then, you quite evidently had a screw loose. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have insisted on being put here in the vault in an open coffin instead of being decently cremated or buried. Did you think you’d come to life again, with about six quarts of embalming fluid in you?”

The gross figure laughed, then turned and waddled back toward the stairs, unblinking, phlegmatic, moving like a tank rather than a human being. He left behind him the unburied corpse of Wendell Haygar, once the greatest of them all, builder of this house, father of what, it would seem, was a most irreverent son.

The second Shan Haygar, who had had the first clubbed and stabbed to death under The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes, was not at all a fool. Before binding Benson, he had had a man search him.

The man, gingerly going over the average-sized body that had proved so amazingly strong, had come across Mike and Ike.

The two little weapons, so deadly in Benson’s slim, steely hands, did not look like much by themselves.

“Nothing but a funny little gun,” said the searcher, sliding Mike back into the slim leg holster, “and a small knife with a peculiar handle.” He slid Ike back, too. “Want me to—”

“Leave them in place,” said the tall leader indifferently. “We might as well throw them overboard on him as by themselves.”

For, after all, what could a man with his hands bound behind his back do with any amount of queer small weapons?

Probably no other man could have done much. But the moment Dick hit the water and was dragged under, he bent his strong body backward like a spring.

He could touch the back of his head with the soles of his feet, like a contortionist. But he didn’t bend that far. He arched his spine till his bound hands could touch Ike, below his left knee.

All this time he was being dragged swiftly down by the section of iron rail. There was already a drumming at his ears and a tight feeling like a band around his head.

Thirty-five or forty feet, he judged it, from an adventurous past in which, for a time, he had been a pearl diver. He sawed at the tough rope from ankles to iron.

At sixty feet, there was a sensation of colored lights bursting behind his eyeballs, and his body ached. Even he could not take much more . . .

The rope parted, the iron went on down, and Benson began slowly to rise. He was not yet in distress for oxygen; he could hold his breath a little over three minutes, if it were imperative.

He did not try to accelerate his rise to the top, just went up at the slow pace, natural to a sunken body with air in it. And meanwhile he worked at the rope around his wrists.

He held life literally by a hair in his fingers in the shape of the little throwing knife. If he ever dropped Ike from his awkward clasp, it was the end!

He didn’t try to saw through the cords. He maneuvered the knife till he got the point and then the edge up under the bonds and between his wrists. After that he just pressed, and was thankful for the hair-splitting edge on the fine steel blade.

He was beginning to want air, so he kicked his bound feet to speed his ascent a little before cutting the rope from his ankles. He sheathed Ike, saw dim pink as the surface was almost reached, then saw it blotted out, and felt his head strike something firm but yielding.

His pale eyes probed the water. It was a body. A blue and mottled face peered at him with sightless orbs, and he recognized the features of Shan Haygar—or at least the man who had called himself that before being killed by another who insisted that he was Shan Haygar.

The Avenger caught the body by the shoulders and eased it slowly up till his own head was hidden by its bulk. He could feel as well as hear the throb of the boat’s propeller and knew it was not too far off.

He waited there in the growing dawn till he couldn’t hear it any more, then looked over the sodden bulk of the dead man.

The boat was a speck far off. Benson swam toward shore, towing the dead man with him.

He came out at Governor’s Island. He searched the dead man. The other fellow had left little in his pockets. The only thing that seemed to have any significance was part of a newspaper page, with a faint mark at an ad.

He left the body to be found by the regular police. A night watchman at a nearby dock greeted him sympathetically when he said he had fallen off a boat and had to swim to shore. There was a little stove in the watchman’s shack. The Avenger dried his clothes, took a ferry back to Manhattan, and examined the bit of newspaper again.

It was from an Arabic paper. The ad marked was that of an enterprising boat concern that rented cruisers of all types for special trips.

He phoned it, as soon as the morning was advanced enough for places of business to begin opening.

“Yes,” said whoever answered the phone at the boat firm, “a fellow such as you describe rented a boat yesterday. A Turk, from his looks and name. We get a good many customers from our ads in foreign-language newspapers—”

“Did the man say where he wanted to go?” Benson interrupted the flow.

“Who did you say you were?” said the voice cautiously.

“Police calling,” said Benson. That was true enough. He held a special badge. Probably, with this murder charge hanging over him, it had been recalled. But there was no need to go into that here.

“I got an idea that the man was going to some island off the coast of Maine,” the voice replied. “He kept mentioning the Maine coast and looking at a chart we have. But he didn’t say which one. So that is only a guess.”

The Avenger thanked his informant and hung up, pale eyes glinting as they stared at the scrap of paper with the strange Arabic characters printed on it. An answer in Arabic? It might very well turn out to be.

That early morning light found the giant, Smitty, and the diminutive blond bombshell, Nellie Gray, trailing a taxi out through Newark toward, apparently, the airport.

Neither of them had had breakfast, and they were a bit snappish about it. Smitty usually ordered breakfast eggs by the dozen; and Nellie, for all her dainty smallness of size, could do a fine, thorough job on a rasher of bacon and a pile of toast.

They hadn’t had breakfast because, in turns, they had been watching an entrance way all night—one dozing beside the wheel while the other, ready for instant motion, glued his eyes on the door.

It was the door of a second-rate building in which resided a person named von Bolen Haygar.

The Avenger had come in direct contact with persons calling themselves Shan Haygar, Carmella Haygar, and Harlik Haygar. As the woods seemed to be so full of Haygars, he had decided to look around and see if there were still more.

Benson had a private espionage system that was unparalleled for efficiency. Clerks in rental agencies, men in stores, boys at newsstands, subway workers—a host of people, following occupations that exposed them to the public, did occasional searching for The Avenger. He had thrown this machine into gear and had come up with some additional facts.

There were more Haygars.

There was a Sharnoff Haygar, described by a delicatessen-store owner in lower Manhattan as a customer. There was a von Bolen Haygar.

Also, from an old
Who’s Who
came the information that there had been a Wendell Haygar; and following that lead had been unearthed the story of old Wendell’s death, the return of an estranged son, and his residence on a Maine island.

Benson had shelved that for the moment and set Nellie and Smitty on von Bolen’s trail and Mac and Josh on the trail of Sharnoff.

Von Bolen was now on his way somewhere with a suitcase in a taxicab, with Smitty and Nellie faithfully behind.

“You know,” said Smitty sourly, “this is one of the goofiest affairs yet. It didn’t look like much of anything when it started. A girl comes and says somebody is out to kill her and asks us to guard her for forty-eight hours. She has a gold metal for which, it seems, she was kidnapped, and there are a couple of other unexplained murders. Then
zing!
We’re in it up to our necks. And we still know nothing at all about it.”

“We know there are other medals besides the one Carmella had,” said Nellie. “I believe the chief is working on the theory that another one of the things was the motive for the murder of Milky Morley and Simon the Grind.”

Smitty thought hungrily of about eighteen fried eggs reposing on half a dozen pieces of ham. Large pieces.

“We wouldn’t be in this at all,” he grumbled, “if that nitwit Carmella hadn’t sneaked away from Bleek Street. Now the chief is afraid she’s in danger.”

“We’d be in it without Carmella,” contradicted Nellie. “The chief wants to know the secret of those golden disks. It’s something pretty big, and pretty dangerous, which is exactly the kind of thing he takes on.”

“I wonder what is the secret? What do the gold medallions mean?”

“They’re just keepsakes,” mimicked Nellie. “They mean nothing; have little value. We Haygars treasure them because they have sentimental value. Bah! If—”

The taxi ahead of them turned into Newark Airport, as they’d had an idea it would.

Smitty stopped their car at the gate, and he and Nellie walked in. Ahead of them, they could see von Bolen legging it for one of the small hangars at the east end of the field. Apparently he had made all arrangements in advance for a plane.

They hurried a little, and then it commenced—an apparent attempt in broad daylight, on a field swarming with attendants, at either murder or kidnapping.