The Avenger 15 - House of Death (5 page)

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac aloud, after putting a drop of the unfinished anesthetic on the tail of an experimental rat and watching the tail shrivel. “‘Tis a fine substitute for sulphuric I’ve got—but no anesthetic. The devil take it!”

He started to work on a beaker of the stuff, then turned with a scowl. The big cabinet in the rear of the room was buzzing.

That cabinet, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was the last word in television sets, better than any the big corporations had yet produced. The buzz told that somebody wanted to talk to him on it.

Mac switched it on. In a big screen over the front of it a face formed. A full-moon face with wide, naïve eyes.

“Smitty!” snapped Mac. “Ye mountain of meat. D’ye know it’s after two in the mornin’? What d’ye mean by—?”

“Better get over to headquarters, Mac,” said Smitty, from the screen. “Looks like something’s breaking. The chief is out, but I’ve a hunch he’ll be back soon.”

“That’s different, mon,” said Mac. “I’ll be over at once.”

He reached there as Benson was rolling his car down the ramp to the basement garage.

Up in the big top-floor room, he looked at the girl, and at the Slavic-looking gangster snaked by the thin line from the middle of the gunfight.

The girl was moving under her own power, now, but the man was not. It seemed that Dick had struck a little harder than he intended, in the necessity for quick action back there off the parkway.

“Concussion,” judged MacMurdie.

Benson, an unparalleled physician himself, nodded.

“I’d judge so, too. I’m glad you’re here, Mac. I want you to work on him.”

“I’d rather work on the girrrl,” burred Mac, with a twinkle in his eyes that brought an answering wan smile to the lips of the dark-haired beauty.

“The man swallowed something,” said Benson. “Get a stomach pump and see what it was.”

“I can tell you that, I think,” said the girl. “It was a gold medallion.” She pointed to the coronetlike roll of her black hair, disarranged over the right ear. “I had it in my hair. While I was being driven in the car I felt a hand take it.”

“Gold medallion?” said Benson, turning his pale, agate-bright eyes on her.

“I—yes.” She stopped. “It was for the medallion that I was kidnapped, I think. It’s death! I had death in my hair.” She finished with the dramatic sense of her Latin ancestry.

“Why would the gold medallion be so important?”

The girl bit her lip.

“Will you think it terrible? I do not want to tell you. Not even you, Mr. Benson. Oh, I thank you so much for the quickness that let you trace me, and the cleverness that enabled you to rescue me.”

“You don’t care to tell me about the gold medallion?”

“Please. No. I tried to telephone you to ask you to hide me from death for forty-eight hours. Only that. Then I am to meet other members of my family, and I shall be safe.”

“Your family?”

The girl’s dark head went up and back.

“Very, very pretty,” whispered Smitty to Nellie.

The fragile-looking little blonde shot the girl a nasty glance and the giant a venomous one.

“Hm-m-m!” was all she said.

“I am from Spain. My name is Carmella Haygar,” the dark beauty said.

“Haygar?” repeated The Avenger, his eyes like chips of stainless steel in his calm face. “Of the international business-and-banking family of that name?”

“Yes.” There was regal bearing to Carmella’s head.

“A shining clan,” said The Avenger softly.

Some of the proud lift went from the dark head.

“It was a shining clan. Cut now—broken. Ruined! My branch of the family, the one that has lived in Spain for two hundred years, is typical. My father and brother were killed in the revolution there. Our fortune and lands were expropriated. I am the only one of the great Spanish Haygars left. I escaped to this country barely with my life and with a few meaningless keepsakes, such as the gold medallion I spoke of.”

“So meaningless,” snapped Nellie Gray in an aside to Smitty, “that men kill each other like flies to get it.”

The Avenger did not dwell on that fact.

“You are to meet others of the Haygar family in two days, you say?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

MacMurdie came in.

“Mon, even unconscious, he was reluctant to give it up,” he said. “But here it is.”

With an eager cry, Carmella took possession of the disk in Mac’s hand. The little gold medallion.

“May I see it?” said Dick, voice calm but compelling.

“Yes.” Carmella handed it to him. “Just a keepsake, as I said. But it is very valuable to me for . . . for sentimental reasons.”

The eyes of The Avenger expressed nothing as he examined the gold disk. They were as blank as bits of glacier ice, and as cold.

The building was on a shabby street just off Eleventh Avenue. On one side was a rope-and-cord factory, on the other a cheap candy company whose odors were guaranteed to make the passers-by decide never again to eat anything sweet.

The two-room space on the second floor in the rear of the building got the noise of the rope shop and the smells of the candy factory all day and most of the night. Now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, both were at their peak.

The name under the bell of the two rear rooms—a bell that had not been in working condition for at least ten years—was Harlik Haygar.

The occupant of the rooms was inside. He was dragging two chairs from the cubicle used as a bedroom and extending a broken-down studio couch to accommodate more people. He was preparing for company.

It was the man who had been slugged, about a half-mile from this spot. He didn’t have on the battered hat, but the frayed blue suit and his decisive but secretively narrowed eyes branded him.

The man who had been slugged, it seemed, was this Harlik Haygar.

About the time he had finished fixing the cot, there was a tap at the door, after a fruitless pressure on the bell button had disclosed the fact that it didn’t ring anything.

The man opened the door.

On the threshold was a heavy-set fellow of forty-five who took off a stiff-brimmed felt hat to disclose stiff, close-cropped gray hair. The man’s head had practically no back to it. He stood ramrod straight, and wore silver-rimmed spectacles with lenses so thick that it made his eyes seem enormous.

“Harlik Haygar?” this man said gutturally.

“Yes.”

The man with the Prussian head extended a hand with a jerky, precise gesture.

“Cousin!”

Harlik Haygar was not impressed.

“You are?”

“Von Bolen Haygar, Essen, Germany.”

“Ah, yes. You can prove that?”

The Prussian smiled stiffly.

“Yes. By this.”

He produced a small gold disk, about the size of a quarter but a bit thicker. On it were the letters v B H.

Only then did Harlik Haygar relax a little.

“Cousin,” he nodded, “come in.”

Von Bolen Haygar entered the room, set his stiff hat precisely on a table, and seated himself precisely in a chair next to it.

“My German is poor,” said Harlik. “My English is not much more better, but I would suggest that we speak in that tongue.”

The other man nodded. Then he looked long at his host.

“From Czechoslovakia,” he mused. “You are the last.”

“Yes,” said Harlik, with not much emotion on his face, “I am the last to have been dispossessed. But your turn was almost as recent, I believe.”

Von Bolen nodded.

“In September of 1939 the German government confiscated the Haygar estates. Our assets had long been listed, but we had hoped to be immune, since the German branch of the family was most influential in helping Der Fuehrer in his rise to power. But there was to be no immunity after all. And the government was to be in war in a month. So all the Haygar wealth was seized.”

Harlik nodded.

“Our branch, near the Skoda works, fared the same. When Munich gave part of the country to Germany, we feared for the worst. Two months ago it came. I am the sole Haygar left from Czechoslovakia, and all our assets have been taken over—”

There was another tap at the door.

This time the man who came over the threshold was slim and dapper, though elderly, with a small, neat mustache and a tiny spike of a goatee. He looked like a doctor.

“Harlik Haygar?” he said, voice high and reedy. “I am Sharnoff Haygar of Moscow. But this, perhaps, will speak more loudly than words.”

He extended a gold medallion, but kept it carefully in his own hand while Harlik examined it.

“Cousin,” said Harlik, pointing out a chair. The man already seated, von Bolen Haygar, introduced himself.

“You have been an expatriate for some time, have you not, Cousin Sharnoff?” von Bolen asked.

“For seven years,” replied the Haygar from Russia. “In Paris, Basle, and Alexandria. Then here. It was in 1933 that the Bolsheviks took the last of our estates from us.”

The three men stared uncertainly at each other for a moment. All of the same family—but the beginning of that family dipped back in the centuries, so that still they were utter strangers to each other.

There was another tap. The man who entered this time did not look Caucasian at. all. He wore ordinary clothes—pretty shabby ones, too—but you could fairly see a turban on his head and a voluminous robe on his strong body. He was almost as dark as a Negro, with dark eyes, squinted and surrounded by lines from peering into the desert.

“Shan Haygar, Turkey,” said this man, showing his gold medallion.

Again there was a silence, as each looked at the other. It was the dapper little Sharnoff who broke it. He was more urbane and courteous than the others.

“A unique occasion, gentlemen,” he said. His voice had almost a purring quality. “We represent, here, a family that has probably never been surpassed in its influence over the affairs of the globe. Perhaps it has been equaled by the famous Rothschilds, but certainly not surpassed. And now-—we are the poorest of the poor. Unless Shan Haygar—”

He peered questioningly at the latest arrival.

The man who was a Turk in spite of English clothes smiled wryly and shook his dark head.

“Year by year,” he said, “the regime of Kemal Pasha in Turkey has drained the resources of the family there. Now they are entirely gone. Entirely! I came to America in the steerage class of an Italian boat so filthy that none of you would have spat upon it.”

Again they were silent, these survivors of a once-great house. Branch by branch, they had set up shop in various countries. They had intermarried with the natives there, becoming German, Russian, Turkish—yet still Haygar.

“There should be a fifth,” said von Bolen Haygar at length. “All our clan is not yet represented.”

Sharnoff nodded.

“Francisco Haygar of Spain. Where is he?”

“Surely you gentlemen know,” shrugged Shan. “Francisco Haygar and his son were murdered in Valencia. Only the daughter, Carmella, is alive. But she is in the city, I understood. Why is she not here, now?”

“She is to meet us later,” said Harlik smoothly. “She it is who was responsible for having this meeting held today instead of several days ago.”

“Perhaps she has gone directly to the island in Maine,” murmured Sharnoff, with a sudden tightening of bland eyes in his neat, small face.

“If she has—” exclaimed von Bolen gutturally, his fists clenching.

“But, no,” said Shan. “It would do her no good to meet alone with him. We are all to meet, which is why we all came here. We judged it wise to go there in a group—”

There was another tap on the door.

In the room a surprised silence held the four. Then von Bolen whispered, “It is this Carmella, perhaps. Yes?”

Harlik shook his head, looking worried.

“She was not to be here so soon. We should be prepared, I think.”

They all understood that.

Von Bolen took out a Luger-type automatic, which he held with the easy assurance of a military man. Sharnoff produced a small derringer, as neat and miniature as himself. Shan drew a revolver.

Harlik Haygar took out the knife with the infernal glint of razor-sharpness on its edge. And then he opened the door.

A spidery old man stood there, regarding them out of watery blue eyes. He had an eagle beak of a nose over a mouth that didn’t seem to exist at all until he spoke, when knife-thin lips parted a fraction of an inch.

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself. I am Harlik Haygar!”

It was a bombshell. The three with guns leaped to their feet with faces going either pale or red according to their blood-reactions to shock. They stared at the spidery old man with death in their eyes.

“You can prove that, perhaps?” said Shan softly.

“Certainly! By this.”

The spidery old man took out a gold medallion.

“This is all a lie!” panted the Harlik Haygar who had been playing host. “This man is an imposter! I swear it! I am Harlik Haygar!”

Von Bolen, gun steady in his right hand, reached for the medallion with his left. He looked at it, stepped with it to the table where his hat reposed, and dropped the coin on the hardwood surface. Its clear ring sounded.

“That is my medallion,” panted the man in whose rooms they stood. “It was stolen from me. That is the truth. On the street I was robbed. I got the man who robbed me and the man to whom he sold the medallion. But I could not recover the gold coin itself. But that is mine—”

His voice died as he stared from face to face of the four men.

In Shan’s eyes was almost a dreamy look as his dark finger tightened a little on the revolver’s trigger. Sharnoff’s eyes were like small stones as his derringer shoved forward a little like the head of a snake about to strike. Von Bolen’s eyes held no emotion at all, but the gun in the Prussian’s hand settled back a fraction of an inch.

“This man is the imposter,” pleaded the younger Harlik, pointing with a shaking finger at the spidery old fellow. “He holds a medallion stolen from me. Believe me! Say something!”

The four were closing in on him. The latest comer, coin still in his hand, had a gun out, too, now. He was grinning just a little, knife-edge lips showing a thin glint of yellowed, snaggly teeth.