Читать книгу The King of Terror: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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They killed Doc Savage on Saturday.

It was chilly that afternoon, with a little snow falling, and the snow as hard as salt particles. The wind had a hissing strength; it pounced on pedestrians and shook their overcoats and flapped their hat brims. Soldiers on the streets, and sailors in their winter-issue peajackets, blew steam on their fingers.

The man with the red hat and the blue armband with the yellow cross was not used to the cold, or to the bite that winter has in New York, close to the sea. He cursed the weather fluently, with the slightly accented voice of a man who can speak several languages.

His red hat and blue-yellow-cross armband, incidentally, was his own idea of a disguise. Dress in a bizarre outfit, he believed, and people wouldn’t be able to recognize you when you dressed in ordinary clothes.

He crossed Fifth Avenue and went into a restaurant, one of those white-enamel-and-chrome quick-eat places.

“Mug one and save the cow,” he told the waiter.

He grinned a little when he said that, for he liked to show his acquaintance with the local vernacular, in any part of the world where he happened to be.

Soon after he got his coffee black another man came in. This fellow looked very much a gentleman. He could have been a clerk in one of the insurance offices in the neighborhood, or a floorwalker in one of the big department stores, or anything else genteel.

“Hello, Francis,” he said. He slid onto a stool beside the other. “Really, Francis, you look a holy horror in that red hat and with that idiotic armband.”

Francis sugared his coffee. “Percy,” he said, “I have argued psychology with you before, so I will not do so now. I will just ask you one question: Do you think you could tell a peacock from a chicken if they both had no feathers?”

Percy sneered. “Give me a glass of milk,” he told the waiter, “with just a touch of chocolate in it.” His sneer was polite. Everything he did was polite. He had a floorwalker’s manner without ever having been a floorwalker.

“It is a bitter day,” Francis said. “I thoroughly detest a climate like this.”

“Yes, it is very unpleasant,” Percy agreed.

The waiter went to the other end of the counter.

Francis said, “The new guns are in a car I rented, at the end of this block.”

“Have you tested them, Francis?”

“Oh, naturally. They are very good weapons. Better, even, I think, than the Thompson submachine gun. They are of the same caliber as the Thompson, but I believe their reliability is greater since the mechanism is simpler. It follows that it would be, don’t you think?”

“True,” Percy said. He consulted his wrist watch. He showed Francis the time. “I believe we should be going, don’t you?” he asked.

“By all means,” Francis agreed.

They shot Doc Savage to pieces in the long narrow lobby hall of a midtown skyscraper.

The building was one of the tallest in the city, in the world in fact, and the decorative motif of its lobby was subdued modernistic. The main lobby was a great vaulted room where chandeliers hung and where dozens, actually dozens, of elevators operated for the benefit of the tenants.

But Doc Savage’s private elevator was apart from the others. Once it had been in the same bank with the other elevators, but lately it had been changed, being now placed at the end of a small corridor that was a narrow thumb off the main lobby.

Percy and Francis took up a position at the mouth of this small blind hall, and there they waited.

“I do hope our calculations are sufficiently accurate that this will not be embarrassing,” Francis remarked.

“Yes, indeed,” Percy agreed. “It would be such a bother.”

They stood there, two fine, kind, polite, suave-looking gentlemen who wouldn’t be thought to have an idea more violent than what kind of a present to take the baby at home this evening, or, maybe, when was the army going to get around to needing them.

“Oh my, I feel conspicuous,” Francis declared. “Suppose we seem to conduct a bit of a business transaction, by way of making ourselves less obvious.”

So they acted like two gentlemen with a transaction. They made it good, actually, with Francis selling Percy an automobile which had three good tires, but one that unfortunately wasn’t so good. They had a good deal of give-and-take over the condition of the fourth tire, and what brand it was, how many miles were in it, and then Doc Savage came out of the elevator.

It was very skillful the way neither Percy nor Francis seemed aware that Doc Savage was stepping out of the private elevator.

“Ah, the time is one thirty,” said Francis.

“Mr. Savage’s lunch hour,” Percy agreed.

“With the Scientific Club?”

“Yes, with the Scientific Club,” said Percy quietly. “The Scientific Club members are going to be disappointed, aren’t they?”

Percy and Francis were dropping the innocent brown wrapping-paper sheaths off a pair of submachine guns.

“Probably they’ll be disappointed,” Francis agreed. “Am I right in believing Mr. Savage is president of the Scientific Club?”

They were ready now.

“You shoot high.”

“Right. You shoot low,” Percy said.

The roar of the guns in the small hall, in the great lobby of the building, was thunder a thousandfold.

First burst of the weapons seemed to take Doc Savage in the upper chest. His coat front and shirt and necktie got ragged, and his chest lost shape. The little machine guns could turn out seven or eight hundred bullets a minute. They fired at Doc Savage in bursts for fully half a minute. Maybe two hundred bullets from each gun. Four hundred in all. And not more than twenty-five or so missed his body.

Percy and Francis saw the bullets do to Doc Savage’s body what that many .45-caliber bullets would do to a body. Any single .45-caliber slug would kill a man, which was why as far back as 1909 the army adopted the caliber as its official side arm.

They saw Doc Savage’s arms and legs get joints where there were no joints, even before he had folded to the floor. And after he was on the floor they saw the body kick and twitch as long as their guns roared.

It was a hideous transformation from life to death. Doc Savage, when he had stepped out of the elevator, had been before them as a fine physical specimen, a giant of a man bronzed by tropical suns, with strange eyes that were like pools of always-stirred flake gold, and hair that was a bronze only a little darker than his skin. Now he was something torn in a crimson puddle on the floor.

Francis and Percy stopped shooting.

They tossed their guns on the floor.

They noticed what seemed to be smoke around them. Percy fanned at this vapor.

“Bit of a fog,” he complained.

“Smoke, I imagine,” Francis agreed. “I don’t recall smokeless powder making a smoke like that before. However, the job seems to have been done well enough.”

They turned and walked out of the building. Both of them had produced handkerchiefs, and were fastidiously wiping their hands.

The mangled figure of Doc Savage disappeared as soon as Francis and Percy were out of sight.

Literally and actually, the body disappeared.

A panel opened in the side of the hall; a panel which no casual observer would have noticed as a door, and Doc Savage came out. Doc Savage was personally unharmed.

“Monk, Ham, you clean up this mess,” he said. “And be ready for a call.”

Monk and Ham came out of the opening that had been concealed by the ingenious panel.

“We better go along,” Monk said. He sounded hopeful.

Doc said, “No, stay here.”

Monk nodded, but not with enthusiasm. Monk liked excitement, and standing around here after the excitement was over didn’t appeal to him.

Monk’s life was probably dedicated more to excitement than to any other one thing. Certainly he liked trouble more than his profession, which was chemistry. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, which was Monk’s full name and title, was rated one of the great industrial chemists of the era. He didn’t look it. He was a short man, very wide, as wide as tall almost, as hairy as a baboon with rusty red hair that resembled finishing nails, and with a face that would stop a clock if any face would.

Ham Brooks—who was, like Monk, one of a group of five men who worked closely with Doc Savage—also had a title. He was Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks. He had fame in two lines—law and clothes. In law, he was good enough that Harvard Law School was always pointing him out as one of its better examples. And as for clothes, tailors who loved their work often followed him down the street just to watch clothes being worn as they should be worn.

Doc was gone now. Presumably he was on the trail of Percy and Francis.

“Who were those two fellows?” Monk asked.

“The two with the machine guns?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I never saw them before in my life,” Ham declared.

“Then you wouldn’t know what they wanted?”

“To anyone but you,” Ham said, “it would be fairly obvious what they wanted. But since it’s you, I’ll explain. They wanted to kill Doc.”

“Thank you,” Monk said sourly. “I wouldn’t have dreamed, of course, that they wanted to kill Doc. I’m deaf, dumb, blind, and with my head cut off, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Somebody must have given you that perfect description of yourself,” Ham remarked. “You surely didn’t make that up all alone.”

Monk grinned at the lawyer. “Someday I’m going to show you what the words ‘sudden destruction’ mean.”

They examined the device, the gadget, by which Doc Savage had been able to make Percy and Francis think they had shot Doc into a pulp.

The trick was ingenious, but there was nothing particularly new about its conception. An experienced magician would have said, probably, that it was just so-so, good enough for its purpose. Good enough for its purpose was good enough, though.

It was a movie projector, color film. It was concealed well back in the corridor, in the ceiling, shooting from behind one of the light fixtures, so that it was hardly noticeable from direct inspection, and certainly not at all discoverable from where Percy and Francis had stood.

For a screen, a polished—brushed, rather—metal panel that was part of the decoration on either side of the elevator door. In fact the elevator door and the elevator interior were all the same material and would serve as a screen.

Monk and Ham examined the damage the bullets had done.

Monk asked, “Who figured this gimmick out, Ham? And don’t tell me you did.”

“It was Doc’s idea,” Ham said. “And he had Long Tom fix the thing up. Long Tom has become a home-movie fan recently, and spent a mint of money on equipment.”

Long Tom was Major Thomas J. Roberts, electrical wizard of the Doc Savage group of five associates.

Monk said, “Long Tom is in England, installing that new plane-detector system, isn’t he?”

Ham nodded. “He fixed this up before he left. Made the films for Doc, with Doc doing the acting, of course.”

Having squinted at the projector overhead, Monk pondered aloud, “I don’t see how Doc made it stick that way. That film he showed was a picture of him getting shot with a machine gun. Cut to pieces. I see how you could fake such a picture in taking it. That ain’t no trouble for a good movie photographer. But suppose those guys would’ve had rifles, and just shot him once apiece, and ran.”

Ham laughed. “There’s more than one movie projector up there, Monk. Each one has a different film. There’s one showing Doc getting shot once and falling dead. But you should see the one of him getting blown up with a bomb. That’s a daisy! This one of his getting shot with a machine gun was nothing compared to it. All Doc had to do was take a look down the hall through the televisor, guess what was up, and turn on the right film. When the gunmen saw Doc opening the elevator door they opened fire—at nothing more than the clever motion picture.”

Monk was satisfied.

The machine-gun bullets had done considerable damage to the metal trim at the end of the hall, and to the elevator-door jambs and even the elevator interior. An extended repair job would be necessary.

Then Monk stopped and clapped a hand to his forehead.

“That smoke!” he exclaimed. “What was it?”

“I’m surprised,” Ham said, “that you ever thought of the smoke.”

“It was something, then?”

“It was.”

Monk waited for Ham to give more information, but Ham remained silent. Monk scowled darkly. His association with Ham Brooks was almost a continuous quarrel. Not that he didn’t contribute his part to the fussing.

“All right, you overdressed shyster,” Monk said. “I know that no machine gun shooting bullets loaded with smokeless powder makes that much smoke.”

“It’s the cartridges that are loaded with powder, not bullets—”

“Don’t talk word technicality to me!” Monk yelled. “What made the smoke? If you know, tell me. If you don’t, shut up!”

Ham grinned. One of the things he enjoyed most was Monk in a rage.

“That smoke wasn’t smoke,” he said. “It was some vapor, a chemical, which Doc discharged from vents in the wall. He has different vents on separate controls, so he can squirt the stuff on anybody standing in any part of the hall.”

“How’s it work?”

“The vapor gets on the guys and enables Doc to trail them.”

“How?”

“I don’t know just how.”

Monk said, “I’m surprised you’d admit not knowing everything.” The homely chemist gazed about the corridor. “Doc sure went to a lot of trouble on this gadget.”

Ham nodded.

“I’d say it might be worth it,” he remarked. “Look how it pans out: Doc apparently dead. Whoever shot him will go away satisfied. They won’t be suspicious. And Doc is able to trail them. Makes a nice set-up when something like this happens.”

“And it happens,” Monk said, “a little too regular to suit me. Sometime, somebody is going to get Doc. But I wonder what kind of trouble has come looking for him this time?”

They pondered that mystery while they went hunting the head janitor in order to have a canvas screen erected, closing off the little private elevator hall, and getting repairs under way.