The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (2 page)

The laboratory was a curious room. All the apparatus in it, normally in use for a dozen experiments, had been shoved aside out of the way of a great table and several benches on which only one experiment was taking the limelight.

On the table and workbenches were many flat, shallow pans, with glass lids carefully fitted over them. In the pans were snow.

At least it looked like snow—fine, white snow.

On the big table, among the pans, lay a small, dead piglet. The little porker had been shaved, as if in preparation for a barbecue. Every part of its hide had been shaved clean. And it wore pants. A small pair of trousers, made from a thick towel, swathed porcine waist and hams.

Targill stared at the pig in pants with eyes literally glazed with terror, as if the dead piglet were some frightful monster about to spring at him.

“I tell you, we’ve got to phone headquarters about what happened!” he croaked. “Are you a human being, that you can ignore a thing like that? There are seven and a half million helpless souls in this vicinity—”

“I’m human enough,” snapped Veshnir. “Human enough to want my share of the biggest thing that’s ever happened under this roof. You’ll get a huge share, too.”

“I don’t want a share at such a price. I’ve done a lot of things that weren’t quite straight. I’d do them again. I’m no saint. But this—oh, no!”

Targill started toward the phone with his fists clenched. Veshnir grabbed up a small lead case in which was a radium needle.

“Stand aside, Veshnir!”

Veshnir stood where he was, teeth showing between parted lips.

“My friend,” he said softly, “it is better to be a live—and rich—man of discretion, than a dead hero.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” whispered Targill.

Veshnir continued to smile, teeth naked and ugly, like the fangs of an animal.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Targill repeated.

And he leaped for the older man.

On the table, the dead pig in its grotesque pants, seemed to stare as if with grim approval.

There were lights on the top floor of the Sangaman-Veshnir Building other than those in the laboratory. There were lights in Thomas Sangaman’s big private office, too.

Sangaman was the elder partner. He was over sixty, and he didn’t look well. There were lines in his thin, sensitive face. His gray hair was thinning at the forehead. His hands trembled a little at their task.

The task was the examination of the company books for the last six months. The books told a very disquieting story.

The Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp. was a big one. It was a twenty-million-dollar outfit. It had branches all over the country and a few in Europe. But its size wasn’t doing much for it at the moment.

The company was in a very bad way, financially.

From time to time Sangaman turned a page of neat figures, frowning at their import. From time to time he absently poured and drank black coffee out of a thermos bottle on his desk. It was well after midnight, but he hadn’t a thought of going home, yet. He had to finish his examination of the books and learn the whole story of disaster.

What it amounted to was that the corporation was bankrupt, right this minute. It would be public news inside of a week.

Most of the trouble was Veshnir. Sangaman had always known that; but he hadn’t realized till now just how
much
of it was Veshnir’s doing.

The complete story of failure lay in the fact that Veshnir just naturally seemed to be a born chiseler. The man couldn’t do things in an open, aboveboard fashion. He seemed to prefer to make a dollar in a deal that was slightly shady rather than twenty dollars in a decent business transaction.

Sangaman had known of his partner’s tendency to chisel since the early days. He had found it out in a few months after their partnership had been formed. But he had put up with it. The business was growing rapidly in spite of Veshnir. The public had accepted them as a pair, and Sangaman hated to break it up. Besides, Veshnir had ability as a sales executive, and once or twice by his close dealing had pulled the firm out of a bad hole.

So Sangaman went along with him, and played his tendencies down, and kept him as straight as he could. Sangaman’s own reputation was so honorable that it kept Veshnir’s whitewashed. In addition to which, Veshnir’s look of being a benevolent deacon helped get him by.

But in the last year, the books showed, something seemed to have happened to Veshnir. He had become worse. There were transactions in which the corporation had taken terrific losses because Veshnir tried to shave the law too fine. There was a deal or two creating the suspicion that money had been made—but had gone into Veshnir’s private account instead of into the firm’s treasury.

The office door opened and Veshnir came in. Sangaman looked at him inscrutably, not yet quite ready to confront his partner with his suspicions and, at last, have it out. Veshnir, he thought, looked a little pale and agitated.

“About through?” Veshnir asked Sangaman, sitting on Sangaman’s desk with his back to the coffee thermos.

“Oh, no,” said Sangaman evenly. “I’ll be here for another hour, anyway.”

“I should think you’d leave the books to an accountant instead of going over them yourself,” said Veshnir, taking a cigar from his vest. He fumbled for a match, did not find one, and reached behind him for a lighter—which was near the thermos.

“It looks to me,” said Sangaman, watching him light the cigar, “as if it would be best to keep the books away from accountants, right now.”

“Is that so?”

“I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

“I guess things aren’t too good,” Veshnir said vaguely.

“That’s a mild way to put it!”

“Oh, well,” said Veshnir, getting up. “We can probably get old August Taylor to come through with some more capital. What’s he a silent partner for, if not to put up money when we need it?”

He went back to the door.

“More laboratory work?” Sangaman said.

Veshnir nodded.

“What in the world are you and Targill doing in there evey night?”

“Working on an experiment.”

“So I gathered,” Sangaman said dryly. Then: “I don’t like Targill.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s too—ruthless. It isn’t right for a man, with as much power to harm as an expert chemist has, to be as shifty as Targill.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Veshnir, biting down on his cigar, “how kindly Targill can be. Well, duck in and say good night when you leave.”

Sangaman nodded; then he turned back to the books when Veshnir left.

It was on the next to the last page that he saw something that riveted his attention even more than the rest. It was an item concerning a foreign country; one that is in a constant state of military preparedness amounting almost to actual warfare.

There was no story to be drawn from the item. It wasn’t complete enough, and it did not occur again. The product listed was simple enough: crude drugs.

The only trouble being that the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp. did not sell crude drugs to that particular country.

Sangaman gulped black coffee and thought hard.

There was a mystery here that needed solving. And that brought to his mind, like a light in a dark place, one name—that of a man who made mystery his business.

Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger.

Sangaman reached for the phone.

Sangaman dialed a number, and a mile or so away, a telephone rang.

It rang in a curious place, on Bleek Street. Bleek Street is only a short block long. On one side is the back end of a concrete storage warehouse, taking up a whole block. The building shuts off that side like a great wall. On the other side are several stores and, in the center, three old brick buildings.

The three buildings, owned by Benson, were thrown together into one and used as his headquarters. The other places were rented by him on long lease. In effect, he owned the block.

The telephone, dialed by Sangaman, rang in a tremendous room taking up the whole top of the three buildings. He heard a girl’s voice answer, then said:

“I would like to speak to Mr. Benson, please.”

The voice, low and sweet, replied politely: “I am sorry. Mr. Benson has just left. Is there a message?”

Sangaman thought a moment, then said, disappointedly: “No— I’ll call later.”

He hung up. And in the Bleek Street room a lovely small blonde traced the call as a matter of routine, determining that it came from one of the private lines of the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp.

In his office, Sangaman got up and started toward the door. He meant to ask Veshnir about that one obscure item concerning the warlike foreign power. But he didn’t reach the door. Something seemed to hit him on the head, and he sagged to his knees.

He looked dazedly around. There was no one in the office but himself: so it could not have been a physical blow. He tried hazily to get up, and saw the floor seeming to rush upward to hit him.

Richard Henry Benson, The Avenger, had just stepped out, as the pretty blond girl had said. He had gone out because just before Sangaman called for help, the police had called for the same reason. The police had learned what The Avenger could do; so every once in a while, now, they paged The Avenger and asked for assistance.

The help they wanted, this time, concerned a little-known worker in the Laddex Rubber Co. named John Braun.

Braun had gotten home about ten minutes after the queer glass capsule burst at his feet. He had felt a little funny on entering his apartment. It was a peculiar sensation. It seemed as if he were breaking out all over in a rash that itched badly. But he couldn’t see anything on his skin.

The itching subsided a little, so he undressed quickly and went to bed. The apartment seemed dreary and empty with his wife and sister away on a visit. He was glad to fall asleep as quickly as a tired man, after a hard eight hours’ work, does.

He woke up in what seemed a few minutes. And now there was no doubt at all about there being something wrong with him. It was dark; so he couldn’t see himself. And that was just as well for had he looked at his body, he might have lost his reason.

John Braun could hardly breathe. He felt as if he were choking to death. And so he was, if he had only known it. Besides, there was an indescribable, blanketed feeling to all his body. When he’d been a kid, the small school he’d attended had given a play. A foolish teacher had gilded the upper half of his body for the part he had to play. There had been a lot of trouble till the local doctor could get the stuff off so that his skin could breathe again.

He felt now, all over his body, as he had felt then, from the waist up.

The phone was on a stand beside his bed. He reached for it, in darkness. He didn’t know if he would be able to get up and walk to the light.

He called a doctor and gasped out his plea for help. He was too weak, by then, to hang up the receiver. The phone dropped from his lax hand, as he sagged back in bed.

The doctor came in a hurry. And after one look, he called the police in even more of a hurry.

It was the investigating detective who, glancing at the unconscious man in bed, had gotten in touch with The Avenger.

John Braun, lying naked on the bed with the covers turned back for medical examination, looked as if someone had sifted powdered sugar all over him. The stuff was dust-fine, and glittered softly with an almost crystalline appearance.

“Gosh!” whispered the detective. “The guy looks like a snow man!”

The comparison was apt. Braun lay in the bed like a figure of fine, dazzling white snow. Only he didn’t melt as a snow man would have in the warm room.

The fact that Braun’s bedroom was so small and dark and bare brought out the terror of the thing all the more sharply.

Braun’s body seemed to concentrate the dim light from the simple bulb within itself, and to glow as if with an inner fire. It was like a snow figure with a small searchlight on it. You felt dazzled when you looked at it.

The doctor was feeling around with a puzzled hand. He scraped some of the whitish, powdery stuff from a bit of Braun’s dead arm. The skin was exposed for only a few seconds. Then it filmed over again. The skin seemed to cloud, as a mirror does when you breathe on it; then it soon presented that powdered-sugar look again.