Читать книгу The Majii: A Doc Savage Adventure - J. Allan Dunn - Страница 4

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“I am about to be killed,” the woman said.

The taxi driver whom she addressed had been half asleep behind the wheel of his parked cab, but the text of the woman’s speech was not conducive to further slumber. He sat up straight.

The woman asked, “Have you ever heard of Doc Savage?”

“Who ain’t?” growled the driver. “Say, what kind of a gag——”

“You will take us to Doc Savage,” directed the woman. “And hurry.”

The driver looked beyond the woman, after which his mouth fell open and his cigarette dropped off his lip and began to burn his coat front. The woman was veiled, but it was not that which shocked the hackman and scared him.

It was the four men behind the woman. They were four very tall men who had heads like cocoanuts in color, and who wore four of the most resplendent uniforms that the taxi driver had ever seen. Each of the four carried a modern automatic military rifle which was not much less than a portable machine gun.

“Well,” snapped the woman. “Have you a tongue?”

“Sure.” The driver swallowed twice. “I’ll take you to Doc Savage.” Then, under his breath, “Ain’t this a crackpot world!”

The woman spoke one ripping sentence which was absolutely unintelligible to the driver, but seemed to mean much to the four, men with the uniforms and the rifles.

They all got in. The woman received much deference. She had bundled herself in a voluminous, shapeless cloak, but she had a nice ankle.

The cigarette burned through the hackman’s trousers, scorched him and he jumped violently—then all but fainted, for, with a speed born of much practice, one of the brown men snapped up his rifle.

The woman cried out. Wildness, haste in her voice told the taximan the brown one was about to shoot. But she was in time. The automatic rifle lowered.

The driver found himself some blocks away, going in the wrong direction, before he got over his fright. He corrected his direction. The woman spoke to him.

“Is Doc Savage in New York?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” the driver said hoarsely. “He goes all over the world.”

The cab was headed for a nest of buildings in the center of Manhattan, out of which towered one of the tallest skyscrapers in the metropolis.

“What,” asked the woman, “does New York think of Doc Savage?”

“He’s quite a guy,” said the driver. “He helps people out of trouble. Does it for the excitement.”

“Then he should be interested in saving my life, as well as others, including, very possibly, his own,” the woman said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said the driver. He had already decided that the woman was some kind of nut.

The woman said no more, and the driver gave attention to his piloting, reflecting at the same time that the woman, while she spoke distinct and understandable English, had a pronounced foreign accent, but of what nation, the driver could not tell, he being no linguist.

They were down in the garment sector now, and the streets were comparatively deserted at this hour.

“Stop!” the woman commanded suddenly.

Her voice was shrill, tense. The driver swerved his machine in to the curb, then stared at his cargo as they unloaded hurriedly and scampered into a subway entrance. They disappeared.

The hackman had not been paid, but he only stared, for the truth was that he felt a relief at getting rid of his fares, for they were potential trouble, he felt.

But a low, coarse voice rumbled in the driver’s ear in a manner to halt his feeling of relief.

“Where’d she go, buddy?” the voice demanded.

The driver’s head jerked around, and he saw that there was another taxi in the street behind him, with at least three men inside. The cab must have been following.

The man who had asked the question had a thick body and a hard manner—the manner of a man accustomed to treating other people as they do not want to be treated.

“Where’d they go?” the man growled. “Where were you takin’ ’em?”

He twisted back his coat lapel to show something that the driver did not see distinctly but which he took to be a detective’s badge.

“Doc Savage’s office,” gulped the driver, who had no love for trouble.

The thick-bodied man looked as if he had indigestion at the information, and he grimaced, seeming on the point of saying several things, none of them pleasant. Then he looked up and down the street furtively.

He dipped a hand in his pocket, brought it out palm down, but with a dollar bill held between the extended fingers. He passed the bill in to the driver, but when the latter reached for it, the hand slashed suddenly for the fellow’s throat.

Awful horror came on the driver’s face, and he threshed about, making gargling sounds, while a red flood bubbled and cascaded down his chest.

The thick-bodied man ran back to his waiting taxi, carefully wiping and pocketing the queer razor-blade affair with which he had cut the throat. He got into his machine.

“South,” he said. “Give it all you got.”

The driver was obviously no regular hackman. He looked as tough as the three in the rear.

“Well?” he said over his shoulder.

“The Ranee is heading for Doc Savage,” said the thick-bodied man who had killed the taxi driver.

There was utter silence while the cab lunged along the gloomy streets, and inside it there was all of the cheer of a hearse interior.

“It ain’t too late to get out of this thing,” said one of the men. “We can grab a plane or a boat or something.”

“Lingh may be able to handle Doc Savage,” snapped the thick man.

“Yeah,” grunted the other. “But let Lingh do it. I don’t want none of this Doc Savage.”

The thick man laughed, but not joyfully. “Get wise to yourself. Lingh probably has us covered.”

They seemed to think that over, and, judging from the expression on their features, it was not pleasant thinking.

“Why’d you fix the hack driver?” one asked finally.

“He knew they were headed for Doc Savage,” said the thick-bodied man. “He might have identified their bodies, and told what he knew, and that would have got to Doc Savage.”

The cab took a corner, tires sizzling.

“Where to now?” asked the driver.

“Times Square subway station,” said the thick-bodied man. “We’re gonna head off the Ranee and her four boys with rifles.”

The Times Square subway station is possibly the busiest in the metropolis, but even it has quiet moments, of which the present happened to be one.

Cars of the train, as it rumbled and hissed to a stop in the station, were full of bright light and had only a few passengers.

The thick-bodied man and his companions were separated the length of the two-block long platform, and they got on the train without excitement, two at one end, three at the other, after which they walked through the train, looking carefully into each coach before they entered it.

Thus it was that they converged at the ends of one certain car which held their quarry.

The leader said to the two with him, “Lingh wants the Ranee alive. Remember that.”

“Wonder why?” countered one of the pair.

“Don’t know,” said the man. “Doubt if Lingh knows. Think his orders come from some one else.”

“Let’s go,” the other grunted.

They walked down the aisle, hands in bulging coat pockets.

Ranged side by side on the cane-bottomed seat running lengthwise of the subway coach, the veiled woman and her gaudy, dark riflemen escort were very quiet, watchful. They seemed a little confused, too, by the roar and shudder of the underground train.

They stood up suddenly before the thick man and his companions were near. The uniformed escort held the rifles across their chests, soldier fashion, alert.

“Easy does it,” snapped the thick man.

He put a hand on the veiled woman’s arm. That started it. Her escort clapped rifle stocks to shoulders.

The thick man yelled, “All but the Ranee, guys!”

Pockets split open to let out flame and noise. The thick man’s aides were using sawed-off, hammerless revolvers which would not jam in cloth, and they shot as rapidly as fingers could work triggers, calmly, confidently.

It was plain they expected to blast down the uniformed opposition with the first volley. That did not happen. The tall, cocoanut-headed guards staggered, but did not fall.

“Watch it!” screamed the thick man. “They’re wearing some kind of an armor!”

After that, there was screaming and noise and death in the moaning subway. Two of the tall men with the gaudy uniforms and the heads remindful of cocoanuts crumpled where they sat. The two others got in front of the veiled woman, shielding her, firing, screeching in their strange, foreign tongue.

Five men, altogether, were on the floor, badly wounded, when some one who knew a bit about the mechanics of the car managed to yank an emergency lever and the train ground to a stop, half inside of a lighted station.

The two uniformed men with the veiled woman got out on the platform and ran. The thick man tried to follow, with his single companion who had survived, but was shot at and, frightened, ducked back.

The wounded and dying screamed and groveled on the car floor, and that seemed to remind the thick man of something, for he turned deliberately, saw that one of the uniformed foreigners alone had a chance of living, and shot the man in the head. Then he ran, with his companion, out of the subway.

The veiled woman and her two escorts had vanished.

The episode of the subway was newspaper headlines before the night was over, and it was a very mystifying matter to the police, who admitted they failed to make heads or tails of it, beyond the fact that they had identified three of the dead as local police characters known for their viciousness.

The desk clerk of the Hotel Vincent, a small but rather ornate hostelry which charged exorbitant rates and got the patronage of show-offs and people of importance, was reading the newspaper accounts of the subway slaughter. The hour was near midnight.

The clerk came out of the paper to an awareness of impatient fingers drumming the desk. It chanced that he noticed the finger nails on the drumming hand at first. It was a woman’s hand and the nails were enameled blue. The clerk glanced up.

The woman before him was an unknown quantity inside the folds of a black veil and a voluminous cloak. When she spoke, it was in an accent distinctly foreign.

“I desire to see Rama Tura,” she said.

The clerk lifted his brows, then made a show of sifting through the guest cards.

“Very sorry,” he said. “We have no one by——”

The folds of the woman’s cloak shook a little, and the clerk’s eyes grew round, for she had exposed the business end of an automatic pistol.

“You will take me to Rama Tura’s quarters,” suggested the woman. “I know he directs you to say he is not here.”

Two tall men wearing topcoats came in from where they had been waiting outside. They had heads which made the clerk think of cocoanuts.

The clerk sized up the situation, and since he was neither a hero nor a fool, he came from behind the desk, and the veiled woman and her two companions followed him into the elevator.

They rode to the sixteenth floor, where the clerk served as guide down a deeply carpeted Moorish hall to a door that was strapped with ornamental iron.

The clerk was on the point of knocking when one of the tall, dark men reached out and knocked him back of the ear with a revolver butt. The other dark man caught the clerk, and they held him while they knocked on the iron-strapped door.

“What is it?” queried a sleepy foreign voice from behind the panel.

“Cablegram,” said the veiled woman, making her voice low and hoarse, so that it sounded remarkably like a boy’s.

The man who opened the door certainly belonged to the same race as the veiled woman’s two companions. His head had the identical hard round lines, the same fibrous brown hair.

He uttered the beginning of a cry when he saw his visitors. The sound did not get far, being stopped by a gun barrel which glanced off his head. He, too, was caught before he fell.

“Harm him not!” snapped the woman. “He is only a servant!”

She spoke in English, probably due to excitement, but was not too rattled to translate it into the tongue which the pair with her understood.

Three doors opened out of the room. The woman had not been there before, because she opened two and found closets, then tried the third, and discovered it led into what seemed to be the bedroom of a suite.

She went in with her small automatic pistol in hand, squinting in the luminance that came from a shaded bedside lamp.

The man who lay in the bed seemed, at first glance, to be dead.

He was lean, this man in the bed, so lean that the coverlets seemed little more than wrinkled where they lay over his body. His head, however, was huge, a big and round brown globe that resembled something made out of mahogany and waxed over with shiny skin. His eyes were closed. He did not move. There was something unearthly about him.

The woman stood and stared at him through her veil.

Her two companions, having lowered the unconscious hotel clerk and the senseless man who had answered the door, and having locked the door, now came in. They stared at the man on the bed, and their eyes were as if they looked upon a deity.

Both got down on hands and knees and touched foreheads to the floor.

“Fools!” shrilled the woman.

“This man is Rama Tura, chosen disciple of the Majii,” murmured one of the kowtowing pair in his native tongue.

“He is an old fakir,” snapped the veiled woman.

The two guards seemed inclined to argue the point, but respectfully.

“He has the power of dying and returning to life when he so desires,” one stated. “You can see now that he is dead. And was he not brought from our native land to this one in a coffin?”

The woman’s cloak shook slightly, as if she had shuddered. She stepped forward and touched the weird form on the bed.

“You find him cold,” said one of the guards. “He is a corpse. It is not good that we broke in here.”

The woman’s eyes became bright and distinct as seen through her veil.

“Is it that you no longer serve me?” she demanded.

The two got up off their hands and knees.

“Our lives, our bodies, are yours, Ranee,” one said gloomily. “Our thoughts are birds that fly free. Is it your wish that we cage them?”

“You might clip their wings that they may walk on solid ground,” said the Ranee. “You may also take your knives and cut off Rama Tura’s big ears. It is my guess that he will revive, from the dead in time to save them.”

The men nodded, produced long shiny knives with black handles, and advanced upon the recumbent Rama Tura. Towering over him, they hesitated.

“He is chosen disciple of the Majii,” gulped one. “Even the great American scientists have not been able to prove otherwise. For does he not take worthless glass and make it, by the touch of his power, into jewels for which men pay fortunes?”

“He is a fakir,” repeated the woman. “He is a troublemaker. For years, he has been a nuisance. He is a common, ordinary beggar who for years made his living by performing street-corner tricks for tourists.”

“He has powers no man understands,” insisted the other stubbornly. “Out of worthless pebbles, he makes great jewels.”

“Cut his ears off and see if he is magician enough to make them grow back again,” the woman directed. “It is about those jewels that I wish him to explain.”

The grotesque thing of bones on the bed opened its eyes.

“I am the dead who lives at will,” he said. “What do you want?”