Читать книгу The Freckled Shark: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTHE MISSING MAN
About an hour later, Rhoda Haven stood on the sidewalk in front of one of New York’s highest buildings. By tilting her head back and straining her eyes, she could just discern the topmost—the eighty-sixth floor—windows, partially enveloped in a low-hanging cloud. Quite a number of people, she imagined, knew that behind those windows was Doc Savage’s headquarters. She, herself, had known the fact for some months.
She knew that Doc Savage was an unusual man whose occupation was righting wrongs and punishing evildoers, frequently traveling to the world’s far places to do so. She had heard that Doc Savage, sometimes called the “Man of Bronze,” had been trained scientifically from childhood for his career, trained so successfully that he was an almost superhuman combination of inventive genius, mental wizard and physical giant.
Personally, Rhoda Haven doubted a great many things she had heard about Doc Savage. He seemed too perfect, too much of a superman. She suspected a good deal of that was hokum.
It was also reported that Doc Savage took no pay for punishing the evildoers and righting the wrongs, and Rhoda Haven doubted that, too. It did not seem sensible. It was all right for men named Galahad and Lancelot to ride around in medieval literature doing such things, because they possibly never did actually exist. In real life, people expected to get paid for what they did.
Rhoda Haven compressed her lips.
“Still,” she remarked, “where there is smoke, you generally find a fire.”
By smoke, she meant the reputation of this Doc Savage, a reputation that gave nightmares to crooks, international or otherwise, whenever the name of the Man of Bronze was mentioned. She knew that mention of Doc Savage really scared certain kinds of people. She had seen it happen.
Rhoda Haven entered the skyscraper lobby, which was as vast as the interior of some cathedrals, and took an elevator that traveled upward so swiftly that she had to swallow wildly to equalize the pressure against her eardrums. She found herself standing in a corridor which had one door, an unobtrusive, bronze-colored panel lettered simply:
CLARK SAVAGE, Jr.
“At least,” Rhoda Haven said with some approval, “he doesn’t put on much of a show.”
As a matter of fact, she had heard that Doc Savage dodged newspaper publicity so assiduously that it was almost impossible for a reporter to get an interview with him.
“I wonder,” she added, “if he believes female lies?”
She knocked on the door.
The door was opened by a man who bore a striking likeness to an extremely long skeleton coated with some sunburned hide.
“Consociative accolades,” he remarked.
“I hope,” Rhoda Haven said, “that you’re not Doc Savage!”
“An apocryphal hermeneutic,” said the long string of bones.
“Eh?”
“A corrigendum.”
Rhoda Haven narrowed one eye.
“I must have got off on the wrong floor,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for a walking dictionary.”
With some evidence of reluctance, the string of bones lapsed into ordinary words.
“I am trying to explain that you have made a mistake,” he said. “I am not Doc Savage. I am William Harper Littlejohn.”
“And what else,” Rhoda Haven inquired, “might you be?”
“One of Doc Savage’s associates, or assistants, or whatever you would call the five of us who work with the bronze man.”
William Harper Littlejohn stood back politely for the young woman to enter, and she did so. The room into which she came was equipped with a large inlaid table, a very big safe, and a scattering of comfortable leather-upholstered furniture. It appeared to be a reception room.
The room was not as interesting as the man who had opened the door. Rhoda Haven stared at him.
“Revelatory peroration is ultrapropitious,” he stated.
Rhoda Haven blinked.
“When they made you,” she said, “they must not have had any materials left but bones and big words.”
“A deleterious—”
“Whoa!” said Rhoda Haven. “What do I do to persuade you to use little words?”
“You just explain who you are,” William Harper Littlejohn said, again reluctantly using small words, “and state your business.”
“My name is Mary Morse,” said Rhoda Haven.
“And—”
“I came here to see Doc Savage.”
“Why?”
“That,” the girl said, “is something I will only tell to Doc Savage.”
“I see. Well, good-by.”
“What do you mean—good-by?”
“Doc Savage isn’t available. He is missing. He frequently becomes missing, and none of us know where he is. It happens often enough that we do not get alarmed. Furthermore, when he isn’t here, he just isn’t here; and we have no way of getting in touch with him.”
Having ridded himself of this explanation with an air of injury at having to use such small words, William Harper Littlejohn turned to the inlaid table and picked up a massive book titled, “Influence of Lepidoptera on Ancient Decorative Design,” which he appeared to have been reading.
Rhoda Haven said, “I need help.”
“Eh?”
“My life is in danger.”
William Harper Littlejohn put down the large book.
“Why didn’t you,” he said, “say so in the first place?” He took the girl’s arm, led her to a chair. It was a very massive chair, and apparently extremely heavy. At least, it would not budge when the girl hitched at the chair to move it. She let the chair remain where it was.
“What is the trouble?” asked William Harper Littlejohn.
“Some men are trying to kill me and my father,” Rhoda Haven said.
“Why?”
“We don’t know.”
“Who are the men who want you dead?”
“We don’t have any idea,” Rhoda Haven said, and looked as if she were telling the truth.
William Harper Littlejohn wore, attached to his coat lapel by a dark ribbon, a monocle. He never put this in his eye, and a second glance would disclose that the monocle was really a strong magnifying glass. Now he absent-mindedly whirled the monocle around by its ribbon.
“Just a moment,” he said.
He passed through another door. This admitted him to the Doc Savage library, a large room crowded with cases that were in turn jammed with books, most of them scientific tomes.
William Harper Littlejohn made sure the girl was remaining behind. Then he went close to a large bookcase, which was really a panel that could be swung outward and reveal a niche in which a man might remain comfortably seated without his presence being suspected by anyone who might pass through the library.
“Doc?” said William Harper Littlejohn in a low voice.
The voice which answered from inside the hidden niche was deep, and although controlled down to a whisper, it gave an impression of remarkable power.
“Yes, Johnny,” it said.
Johnny used small words—he always used small ones when talking to Doc Savage, for some reason or other—and asked, “I had our visitor sit down in the chair that’s wired up with our new lie detector. Is the gadget working all right? You’re watching the various indicator dials in there, aren’t you?”
“It seems to be working,” replied the striking voice of the man inside the niche.
“Has the girl told the truth?”
“Only once,” Doc Savage said. “And that was when she said some men were trying to kill herself and her father.”
“Do you want to go in and talk to her, Doc?”
“No. You do that.”
“But—”
“And if she thinks she needs help, you might as well help her.”
Johnny asked, “Shall I call in Monk and Ham? They’re the only two members of our gang that are in town. Renny and Long Tom are in Czechoslovakia trying to build a dam and electrify it.”
“Monk and Ham would want you to call them.”
“I’ll say they would. But I hate to think about the way they’ll squabble. This girl is pretty. Every time she smiles at Monk, he’ll have to fight Ham, and vice versa.”
“Call them, anyway.”
“All right,” John said. “But what are you going to be doing?”
“I will try,” Doc Savage explained, “to think of something.”
William Harper Littlejohn rejoined Rhoda Haven in the reception room with a big smile and the request, “Call me Johnny. Everyone does.”
“I will,” the girl said, “if you promise to use small words.”
“Now just what has happened to make you think your life is in danger?”
“Some men,” Rhoda Haven explained, “attacked us in our rooms at the Tower Apartments. We escaped down the fire escape. There was a shooting affray in the garden where they tried to head us off, but we got away.”
“I’m superamalgamated if I—I mean, I don’t see why you didn’t go to the police.”
Rhoda Haven knotted and unknotted her handkerchief, and worked her mouth, looking very scared. For a girl who had behaved in her calm fashion during the gun fight, she looked very frightened indeed.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that one or more of our attackers were killed in the garden.”
“They were?”
“Yes. The police would put us in jail for it, we were afraid.”
“And you don’t deserve to go to jail?”
“Oh, no indeed.”
“In that case,” Johnny said, “I’ll have to help you.”
He got up—he had been in shirt sleeves—and put on his coat, which fit him with about the same effect as a flag draped about the top of a flagpole on a windless day. He looked almost completely like a scarecrow. Certainly he did not resemble one of the most eminent living authorities on the subjects of archæology and geology. He gave his monocle-magnifier a flourish, bowed low—pretty girls were not without their effect upon him—to Rhoda Haven, and escorted the young lady to the street.
“Primigenously, we colligate ancillary—”
“You promised,” Rhoda Haven said, “to stop using such words.”
Johnny nodded reluctantly.
“First,” he said, “we collect help in the shape of Monk and Ham.”
“I never heard of Monk and Ham.”
“Most people,” Johnny said, “have trouble keeping from hearing them.”
They got into a taxicab and drove off.
A man who had been standing on the sidewalk, taking candid-camera shots of pedestrians and passing out coupons which entitled the receiver to a picture providing the coupon and twenty-five cents were mailed in, came to sudden life. He was a short, swarthy man, rather well-dressed for an itinerant photographer.
He ran to a parked car which had another dark man at the wheel.
“Follow that cab!” he barked.
“The girl—”
“She went to Doc Savage. Horst must be a mind reader.”
The car—it was a rent-a-car sedan—snooped downtown after the cab, and the two swarthy occupants of the machine watched William Harper Littlejohn and Rhoda Haven enter a tall office building near the Wall Street district.
“Better call Horst,” one said.
The other man got out of the car, hurried to a telephone. He said, “Horst, what in the devil ever made you suspect the Haven girl would go to Doc Savage?”
Horst swore. “Did she?”
“Nothing else but.”
Horst swore some more, said, “I figured old Tex Haven was fox enough to try to sick somebody else’s dog onto us. And this Doc Savage was the logical dog. For a long time, we’ve been afraid someone would set him on us.”
“You mean this Doc Savage is tough?”
“Haven’t you heard of him, you fool?”
“I ... uh—”
“Where is the girl now?”
“She came out of the building with the longest and skinniest guy you ever saw—”
“That one is Johnny Littlejohn, who is famous for archæology, geology and big words.”
“And they went downtown and entered an office building—”
“What address?”
The man furnished Horst with the address.
Horst cursed a third time, said, “There is where Monk Mayfair, the chemist of Doc Savage’s organization, has his lab. They’ve gone to get Monk.”
“What do we do?”
“Get them. Take them prisoners. I don’t care how you do it, but get it done.”
“How,” the man asked, “will I know this Monk Mayfair?”
“Just look at him,” Horst snarled.
