Читать книгу The Dagger in the Sky: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6
ОглавлениеDARK DEATH
Later, Ham returned. His plane came slanting down, then long funnels of light jumped out of the wingtip floods, and he executed a skillful landing. All of Doc’s associates were experienced fliers.
“No dice,” Ham reported.
“The plane got away?”
“Yes, blast the luck. It flew north. Got into those clouds before I could force it down, and I lost it.”
Monk said, “A fine lot of help you are!”
Ham—he was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks on formal occasions—got out of the plane. He was a lean-waisted man with good shoulders, a rather handsome face (Monk always insisted Ham was fox-faced, but then Monk was biased) and the wide, mobile mouth of an orator, possibly developed by the amount of talking Ham had done in courtrooms. Ham’s clothing was sartorial perfection; it was a common saying that tailors frequently followed Ham down the street to see clothes being worn as they should be worn. He carried a black cane. He was one of the nation’s leading lawyers. His main interest in life was his clothes.
Ham eyed their long-faced prisoner.
“What’s his name?”
“Sid,” Monk said.
“That his full name?”
“Full or sober, his name would still be Sid, wouldn’t it?” Monk said.
Ham scowled. “Listen, you dopey missing link, this is no time for those remarks you think are gags.”
Doc Savage sketched briefly for Ham’s enlightenment what they had learned from Sid, Ham listening to the end of the recital without a word.
Then Ham said, “I don’t believe it any more than you do.”
“You saw that black dagger in the sky, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—well, blast it! Such stuff isn’t reasonable.”
They entered the plane, and Doc lashed Sid to one of the seats, so that he could not interfere with the operation of the controls should he attempt resistance. The bronze man himself rolled the plane across the meadow, lifted it off, and pointed its baying nose at the stars.
“New York?” Monk asked.
“Yes.”
The seven hundred and sixty thousand lights—latest estimate—of New York City came into view, and they were not particularly bright, for the blizzard had arrived. There were low angry clouds, traveling fast, and the Hudson was crawling with white-capped waves.
The plane bounced, pitched, all but turned handsprings as they landed. Hard particles of snow hissed against the windows when the motors were throttled. They held to their seats and taxied to the hangar, the doors of which could be opened by tapping out a combination on the short-wave radio in the plane, this door opener being a gadget similar to those long used in telegraph-relay offices.
The hangar was a huge cavern of dank warmth into which whirled the increasing outdoors cold, and a little snow.
Doc Savage drew Monk and Ham out of earshot of their captive.
The bronze man said, “You two take the flea run to headquarters, and be posted in the street outside the building.”
The “flea run” was Monk’s term for an underground tunnel in which a small car traveled, driven by pneumatic pressure, passing from the water-front hangar to the eighty-sixth-floor skyscraper headquarters in a few moments.
“In front of the building I will let this fellow Sid Morrison escape,” Doc added. “Monk, you and Ham trail him. We may learn something about this mystery by following him.”
Monk and Ham nodded, walked away. Monk, who was an enthusiastic liar at times, announced loudly, “O.K. Doc. We’ll stay here and guard the plane. We’ll meet you after daylight.”
Doc told Sid Morrison, “You will go with me,” and they left the warehouse hangar in the plain dark car in which Doc had driven to the place that afternoon.
It was dark, the streets were unusually deserted, and the swirling snow made the ball of light around every street lamp resemble a squirming white animal. The hard snow pelted the car; the cold wind flattened the clothing of pedestrians against their bodies.
“Bitter night,” Sid Morrison muttered.
Doc glanced at him. The man seemed genuinely afraid. But what he feared it was hard to say.
They reached the towering midtown building, the eighty-sixth floor of which Doc Savage occupied. The bronze man parked in front of the building, and they got out. Wind tore at their clothing, pellets of snow pecked at their skin. A newspaper, wind-tortured, went scudding past on the sidewalk like a gray ghost, and vanished in the darkness.
“Walk ahead of me,” Doc directed.
He pushed Sid Morrison into the revolving door, then followed. With casual deliberation, so that it seemed an accident, he let a hand drag behind him, where it was caught as the revolving door whirled, and imprisoned. It was not painful; the rubber wiper formed a cushion.
He went through the motions of being trapped and struggling.
“Don’t you run!” he yelled, making his voice so anxious that it was literally a command for flight.
Sid Morrison fled. There were several revolving doors in the bank. The man dashed for the handiest, his long face determined, whirled through it and was gone, feet pounding into the night.
Doc Savage waited an appropriate interval, then extricated himself and, registering proper vexation and alarm, sprang out onto the sidewalk. He ran up and down the street a sufficient number of times to make it look good, seeing nothing, hearing only the hissing of the blizzard snow that was like driven salt.
“He’s dead!” Monk gasped.
Doc Savage’s metallic features became somewhat blank.
“Dead?”
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
The elevator in which Monk had come up to the eighty-sixth floor was waiting. It sank with them, making a faint sighing sound.
Monk said, “We were trailing him. He ducked into a doorway down the street. We waited to see if he would come out, and he didn’t, so we went in. We found him.”
Doc Savage looked at Monk with steady curiosity. “You have seen dead men before. It never affected you this way.”
Monk cleared his throat as if there was tightness in it.
“The others,” he said, “weren’t killed with a black dagger.”
The elevator doors opened with a choking noise, their heels clicked on the lobby tiles and they pushed out into the night, with the wind beating at them.
“Ham’s watching the body,” Monk said thickly.
The doorway was unlighted, and there was a Space For Rent sign on the windows to either side. Inside was a hallway, long and dark, high-ceilinged. Halfway down the hall, another corridor branched off like the leg of a T.
Ham stood at the junction, a flashlight in one hand, a supermachine pistol in the other. The weapon, one of Doc Savage’s inventions, had the size of an automatic and the bullet-emitting capacity of a Lewis machine gun.
“Anybody show?” Monk asked.
“Nobody,” Ham said. He looked at Doc. “This gets my goat. There’s a black dagger sticking in his chest.”
“It’s back here,” Monk explained, and led the way down the branching hallway.
There was a row of doors, all closed, on either side.
Monk said, “Here’s what stood our hair on end. You see this dust?”
The homely chemist cast a flashlight beam across the floor, fanned it slowly.
Dust lay thick, for obviously the hallway had been closed and unvisited for a long time. There were footprints. Doc studied the tracks intently.
“You see,” Monk said hollowly. “The only footprints are those made by Sid Morrison, and our own. There are no murderer’s tracks.”
Doc asked, “How about the doors?”
“No tracks. The man went down the middle of the hall, and hardly moved after he dropped. There were no other tracks. We looked.”
Doc Savage went forward, stood looking down at Sid Morrison. The bronze man’s face became tight and grim. He glanced at Monk and Ham. They were pale.
He stated an obvious fact.
“I don’t,” he said, “see any dagger.”
Whoever—or whatever—placed the dagger had known enough of anatomy to sink it in Sid Morrison’s heart. There was a single stab wound, and when they turned the body, it was evident the blade had gone all the way through. There had been very little red leakage.
Doc asked. “Between the time he came into the building and you found his body—how long?”
“Well—five minutes,” Ham hazarded.
“You saw a black dagger?”
“It wasn’t imagination,” Monk said stubbornly. “It was sticking out of his chest.”
“Who got it?”
Ham swore, something he rarely did.
“Nobody,” he insisted. “I stood right here at the head of the hall. Nobody came in. Nobody went out. I didn’t hear anything. And believe me, I was listening all the time.”
Doc Savage went over the hall floor again with a flashlight, giving it a minute scrutiny this time. When he had finished, the stubborn fact still confronted him—there were no alien footprints.
Doc Savage said finally, “We’ll do some telephoning.”
The bronze man occupied the entire eighty-sixth, the topmost floor of the skyscraper. The place was divided into three rooms, one of them being small and furnished with a huge inlaid table, an equally huge safe, and a number of comfortable chairs. Adjacent was the library, containing one of the most complete collections of scientific tomes extant, and beyond that the laboratory, a scientific wonder in itself.
Doc picked up a telephone.
“Long Distance operator ... I want to get hold of Juan Don MacNamara, son of the president of Cristobal, a South American republic. You might try Cristobal City, the capital.”
While he was waiting, the bronze man cut the telephone line in on an amplifier which made the other half of the telephone conversation audible to Monk and Ham. There had been other occasions when several of them had wished to hear both sides of a telephone call.
The operator said, “There may be some difficulty in routing your call. Cristobal is at war with the neighboring republic of Hispanola.”[B]
“It is important.”
“We will do our best,” the operator said.
Monk, whose newspaper reading rarely got beyond the comic strips, asked, “When did this war start? I thought all of the wars were in Europe and China.”
“This one began about a week ago,” Doc Savage explained. “There has been a boundary dispute between the two countries. Hispanola seems to be the aggressor, and suddenly sent troops into Cristobal, although President Gatun MacNamara of Cristobal had made a number of concessions in an effort to assure peace. There is violent fighting, I understand.”
Nearly an hour later, Doc’s call got through to Cristobal City, and a heavily accented voice said, “This is President Gatun MacNamara’s secretary speaking. I am sorry, but the President’s son, Juan Don MacNamara, is not available.”
“Where is he?” Doc asked.
“He left yesterday afternoon, flying his own plane, for New York City. No word has been received from him since.”
“Why was he coming to New York?”
“I believe the telephone operator said you are Doc Savage—is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Juan Don MacNamara announced publicly that he was flying to New York to see you.”
“You sure of that?”
“Yes. He made a public announcement.”
“Why was he coming to see me?” Doc Savage asked.
“He did not state his reasons.”
More to himself than anyone else, Doc mused, “That is queer.”
“We thought so too,” the distant voice remarked.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Sid Morrison?” Doc inquired.
There was a pause, evidently for memory-fishing, at the other end of the wire.
“Never.”
Doc, after hesitating, asked, “What about black daggers? Ever heard of them?”
The man at the other end of the thousands of miles of telephone wire did a rather baffling thing.
He made a strangled sound and hung up.
| [B] | Author’s note: As in the case of Cristobal, the name of Hispanola is also a fictitious one for reasons which later in this story become quite obvious. |
