The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (4 page)

The man was seated behind a huge desk, but even seated he gave an impression of vast physical power and unbelievable quickness. And this was odd because he had a very average-sized body—no more than five feet eight in height and weighing about a hundred and sixty-five pounds.

His face was handsome, but that didn’t impress you as much as the strength of character portrayed in his features. Features that told at a glance that here sat a natural leader of men. And from this face burned basilisk eyes so colorless that they seemed to be mere holes into which you could peer endlessly at a world of fog and gray ice.

But even as they looked at him, these men who had come to seek his aid knew that Dick Benson, regardless of the stories they had heard of his genius, his experience in most any given field, his adventures in every corner of the earth, was a very young man. A man who was already a figure beyond the equal of any other, at an age when most men are looking vaguely about for a foothold in life.

“Mr. Benson?” said Wardwear.

The head, topped by the virile shock of coal-black hair, nodded.

“We are—”

“You are Thomas Wardwear, Abel Quill, Michael Moribunce and Anthony Hillyard,” said The Avenger, his face expressionless in its usual calmness. “I have been expecting some such visit, gentlemen.”

“Then you know about the second factory catastrophe?”

In the far corner of the room was the latest in teletypes, and over this flashed all the world’s news. Thus, Dick Benson knew of the death of an obscure laborer almost as soon as it happened, let alone news of such importance as the halting of a great factory.

But he did not explain; he only nodded again.

“With the trouble at my plant,” said Wardwear, “we all might have thought that some distressing but perfectly natural accident had occurred, and would have set about trying to correct it by natural means. But when, in only a few hours, a similar thing happened to another similar plant, and similarly wrecked its output for an indefinite number of days, we all began to think—”

He stopped, and Hillyard took it up with the one dread word:

“Sabotage!”

Quill nodded.

“Wardwear’s factory stopped by tragedy in the crude department, which is enough to keep all wheels from turning. My own whole factory affected—”

“Your whole plant?” Dick asked quickly.

“That’s right.”

“And in your case, Mr. Wardwear,” said The Avenger, “just one department was affected?”

“Yes,” said Wardwear rather impatiently. “But I don’t see what difference it makes how much of a factory is affected when the result is the stopping of the entire plant.”

“Possibly none,” murmured Benson. He looked at the fifth man, the ailing workman from Wardwear’s factory. In his colorless, dreadful eyes was a little less iciness. There was a trace of impersonal kindness and sympathy.

“This is Robert Maschek, from my crude-rubber department,” said Wardwear. “He saw the whole mysterious business. I thought you might be interested—”

“I would be very interested,” Dick cut him off, “to hear all about it. Will you tell me, Mr. Maschek?”

The man took a slow step nearer the desk. His dully suffering eyes rested on Dick’s face. And he began to talk, with a pause between each word, since his tongue and larynx seemed as subject to the queer slow-motion disease as his other muscles.

He told of the odd slow-up, of machines jamming and racing emptily when human hands no longer kept up with them. He told of his own slow surprise and that of the other men, at the jamming, because none had realized that he was moving more slowly than usual.

And as he talked, he shivered like a dog after an ice-water bath, and there were green-gray tints in his chalky face.

He told of the murder of the factory cop by the man with the hidden face at the doorway.

As he talked, Nellie Gray stared with almost tearful sympathy at him. The giant Smitty and the Scot, Mac, stared with equal sympathy, but with perplexity in their eyes, too. Because this shivering wreck of a man reminded them of something that for the moment they could not place.

At the end of his account, The Avenger turned back to the four magnates. What was in his mind could not have been read in his calm face nor in his icy, colorless eyes.

“I’ll do what I can to solve this, gentlemen,” he said. And the four sighed with relief. They could not know that this man would have done what he could anyhow, whether or not they had come to see him and ask for help.

Rubber goods, particularly tires, are part of the sinews of war. With war all over the world, and even talk of the inevitability of America’s own entrance, anything affecting the rubber output is a sinister thing to be instantly investigated.

The five went out. And Benson rose from the chair behind his desk.

With the move, you saw at once just how fast and how strong that average-sized body was. He seemed to flow, rather than move, so swift and smooth were his movements.

He stepped to one of the front windows and stared out and down. In his right hand were several small glass capsules, small enough to be dropped between the nickel-steel, bullet-proof slats which were set in the masonry to imitate ordinary Venetian blinds.

In those capsules was a gas of MacMurdie’s invention that could instantly induce unconsciousness in anyone near whom they broke.

The Avenger did not think it probable that men like these four would be attacked in broad daylight on his own street. But he was taking no chances. If anybody were lurking around the entrance, Dick meant to put them out of the running.

He saw the four go out the door. And there was no one nearby. The men got into the town car, with the workman getting in beside the chauffeur.

The pale eyes saw the chauffeur slam the doors, reach for the gear-shift lever, and then, after a little pause, saw the car start to turn smoothly around to go back out the street.

“Smitty! Mac!” Dick Benson’s voice positively crackled. “After that car! Nellie! To the elevator with me. You and I will follow in a car while Mac and Smitty go on foot!”

Mac and Smitty were already thundering down the stairs. They had not stopped to ask what their leader had seen, and they had obeyed commands instantly.

What The Avenger had seen had been a very small thing, indeed.

He had seen that when the chauffeur reached for the gear-shift to start to turn, he had fumbled to the right for a gear-shift lever—and there was no such lever! The car had its shift lever on the steering column, in the new style.

That small move instantly told that the man was unfamiliar with the car he was supposed to drive for his living, which was very odd. And The Avenger’s quick brain had as instantly sensed peril.

It had sensed it truly!

There was normally no traffic on Bleek Street. Inasmuch as only Justice, Inc., was on it, only people wanting to see The Avenger entered. Usually! But there was traffic on it, now.

Smitty and Mac burst out of the street door, looked to the right and saw three cars beside the town car, halfway between the entrance and the end of the block.

The phony chauffeur was stopping the town car even as The Avenger’s two aides began to race toward the tangle. And the three sedans began to pour out men.

The sedans had been crowded to capacity. About twenty men were milling around when the cars had emptied.

They were milling around that town car!

Smitty and Mac, getting close, saw the chauffeur tugging to get the rear door open; they saw the four princes of the rubber industry inside frantically hanging on and trying to keep them closed till they could throw the locks.

Evidently, they snapped the locks because the chauffeur suddenly stopped trying to yank the doors and took a heavy wrench from his pocket instead. He smashed the glass.

Meanwhile, the score of men from the sedans were acting rather strangely. There was not one sound from any of them. No word, no yell, nothing. Instead, two of them pointed at the man in the front seat beside the driver’s seat, and some more of them nodded. Then three of them aimed guns and shot that man. They then joined the chauffeur at the rear door.

Mac and Smitty went berserk!

Murdering a sick man, seated and defenseless, in cold blood! They wanted nothing more than to get to close quarters with these deaf-mutes, or whatever they were that acted so silently by making sign language to one another.

But Mac wasn’t so wild as to have lost all his wits. As the two charged into a group just becoming aware of their approach for the first time, Mac’s right arm made throwing motions. And from his right hand shot a half dozen of the little glass capsules containing the gas.

One of the men in the gang suddenly bent far down, as if trying to roll a pea with his nose for an election bet. But he kept on bending down till finally he fell on his face, with his nose plowing along the sidewalk.

Three more of the men sagged, and half a dozen reeled as they moved away from that spot.

They got to the other side of the car and began shooting. But they had not been fast enough with their guns.

Mac raced around the car toward the rear. Smitty didn’t race anywhere. He just jumped!

The gigantic form, which you’d think would have been muscle-bound but which was actually as lithe as a boy’s, went over the hood of the town car like a track man over a hurdle. Two men shot over backward like tenpins, as the giant’s smashing feet began the battle before even he had hit the street.

They couldn’t shoot, then, without drilling each other. For, at once, the big fellow was the center of a pulling mob, like a brawny half-back wading down a football field with a dozen men on him!

Smitty’s vast fists pistoned in and out like something propelling huge flywheels in a power plant. And with each blow, a man folded up. And it was possible that a few would never unfold again, for men like Smitty—what few of them there are—can kill with their bare fists.

Clubbing at the colossus with their guns, the deaf-and-dumb crew started to get him down; then Mac got around the car and waded in from the rear!

His fists, at the end of his long, wiry arms, were like ivory mallets. Cartilage and flesh gave before them. More men went down. But it was still five or six to two, and the outcome of the battle would have been problematical, save that at that moment The Avenger’s car shot up the ramp from the basement garage, over the sidewalk to the street, and charged toward the struggling knot like a runaway locomotive.

Dick had taken the sedan in case the town car got out of the street before Mac and Smitty could get it afoot. He used it now like a tank.

The gang scrapping with Mac and Smitty heard the roar of the motor and hopped nimbly to right and left. But they were not to be run down.

The Avenger’s steely, slim hand pressed something that looked like a horn button but was not a horn button, and from the grilled radiator shield came a blinding white cloud. It was an anaesthetic. It enveloped the town car and the struggling men. Most of them fell, including Mac and Smitty. But a few reached the three waiting sedans.

The cars roared off, leaving a dozen men behind.

There was the distant scream of police sirens. The cops were coming; the four rubber barons were safe. And that was all Smitty and Mac knew as they sank into the deep sleep induced by the white mist The Avenger had ejected from the front of his car.

At Mac’s drugstore, hours later, they were feeling fine again, save for some lumps raised by the deaf-and-dumb crew. Feeling fine—and very thoughtful.

Both were thinking the same thing, as both remembered the way that workman had looked in the Bleek Street headquarters. The unfortunate fellow who had been shot by the gang.

“Shiverin’,” mused Mac aloud. “The mon was tremblin’ all the time. And verra weak. That colorin’, and the draggy way he moved—”

“Seems to me I’ve seen somebody like that before,” said Smitty.

It was obvious from Mac’s look that he’d gotten precisely the same thought at precisely the same time. The men stared at each other, bleak blue eyes into china-blue eyes.

“That old tramp!” breathed Smitty.

Mac nodded emphatically.

“The same colorin’. The same shiverin’, though not quite as noticeable a slow motion. Smitty, we may have something here. Do we call the chief?”

Smitty thought a minute, then shook his head.

“It’s a pretty thin hunch, Mac,” he said. “Why in the world would there be any connection between an old bum in New York and a couple of rubber factories in Akron, Ohio? Let’s just nose around a little on our own hook. We’ll almost surely find nothing at all—but it’s an idea.”