Читать книгу Resurrection Day: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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It just happened that General Ino was the first man who saw a truckload of policemen stop in front of the skyscraper which housed Doc Savage’s New York headquarters. The general would have read about it in his newspaper, along with the rest of the world, a bit later, no doubt. But by seeing the truckload of policemen arrive, he got in on the ground floor, in a manner of speaking.

The general stopped to watch. He was interested in what the policemen had on their truck. Heavy lumber posts, barbed-wire, and a keg of staples.

The general had a vocational interest in policemen, anyway, having spent many of his waking hours, as well as many hours taken from his sleeping time, in figuring out ways of keeping out of their clutches.

The policemen began unloading their posts, timbers and barbed-wire. The officer in charge gestured and called orders. General Ino’s jaw dropped in astonishment. The cops were going to build a barbed-wire barricade across one of the busiest streets in New York City!

General Ino crowded around with some other curious people who had stopped. The general was not afraid of cops. Not for nothing had he stayed awake nights, for he could walk New York streets undisguised and—practically—unafraid.

There was a commotion at the other end of the block, and another truckload of policemen and the makings of a barbed-wire barricade came to a stop near the giant skyscrapers.

It was true that General Ino had thus far operated in Egypt, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. Places far from New York, but places where they have rich men. Particularly rich are the new merchant princes of Japan. One of them had paid a quarter of a million yen ransom for his son, his only man-child.

More trucks were arriving. It seemed that the entire block was going to be barricaded. That meant the building, really. The building was a block square and taller than the length of the longest ocean liner in the world.

General Ino had killed the Japanese merchant prince’s man-child, but the merchant prince didn’t know that before the ransom was paid. Didn’t know it yet, in fact. Years later, the general had thought he might work off some phony brat as the man-child. He had kept the baby clothes of the man-child and the bit of jewelry it had worn.

There was quite a hullabaloo now, with the policemen stopping traffic and beginning to build their barbed-wire fences across the most teeming streets in a city noted for its traffic.

General Ino had played the races. That took money. He had practically kept himself a harem. That took more money. Moreover, he had kept his old organization of crooks and killers intact. That took the most money of all. In that organization he believed he had some of the coldest, slickest crooks alive.

The general had once added up the rewards hanging over the heads of his organization members. The total had stunned him. But it was an asset which he hadn’t yet been able to think out a method of cashing in on.

For General Ino was about broke. All ripe for one of the fabulously big, cleverly planned, cunningly executed hauls which was the only kind he touched.

General Ino walked over to the nearest policeman.

“M’sieu’ Gendarme,” he said, “could you tell me why all thees ees happen?”

The general could fake almost any accent. He loved to.

The cop had come from a long line of brick-throwing ancestors, and his grin was big.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Frenchy.” The officer jerked a thumb upward. “The powers that be say fence in the streets around here; so fence ’em in we will.”

“But, m’sieu’, some reason you ’ave give thees people why you not let zem pas’, no?”

“This is the only reason we have to give ’em.” The cop tapped his badge.

“Velly stlange,” said the general, singsonging. “Velly stlange.”

The cop watched him walk off, then scratched his head.

“Dang me,” he grunted. “First he’s a frog, then he’s a laundryman!”

The general was at that moment also much the master of evil—and profitable—schemes. He went directly to the offices of Proudman Shaster.

Proudman Shaster gave his visitor a dry smile and a dried-up hand, then went back behind his huge desk and sat down. The result was that Proudman Shaster about disappeared. Only his bulging melon of a head showed over the formidable desk.

Proudman Shaster’s head was all that counted, anyway. It was full of brains, and all the ideas they hatched were bad.

“It’s really a wonderful day,” he said. “Really wonderful.”

Proudman Shaster was a well-known attorney, and everything was usually “really wonderful” with him. It was a small habit of speech he had.

“Si, si, señor,” said the general, imitating a Spaniard. “Look, I have an idea. A mucho bueno idea! I want it looked into.”

Proudman Shaster folded his dry hands and looked as if he hadn’t heard a word of it.

“I want all of my men assembled here in New York at once,” said General Ino. “All of my hombres, understand!”

“Can do,” Proudman Shaster admitted, lighting a cigarette.

He should have been able to do it. He was Ino’s mouth, his eyes, his ears, even a wee bit of his brains, when the occasion demanded. He had furnished the acid that had disposed of the last bit of epidermis of the Japanese merchant prince’s man-child.

General Ino shook hands with himself, Chinese fashion, and murmured, “This humble one is most proud of such a worthy servant.”

Proudman Shaster looked at his finger nails, found grime under one and began to clean it with a small, sharp tooth.

“Who are we going to take to the cleaners now?” he asked.

“Doc Savage,” General Ino said.

Proudman Shaster gave a violent leap, closed his eyes, and seemed to stop breathing. He dropped his cigarette.

General Ino was plainly quite amused by the actions of his lieutenant—not his most valuable one, incidentally. Ino smiled, picked up the cigarette stub and extinguished it in a bronze tray.

“Oh, don’t worry, I knew you’d be quite surprised,” he said.

Proudman Shaster went through some convulsive facial expressions.

“Water!” he gasped faintly. “And one of the pills out of the box on the water cooler!”

General Ino seemed about to laugh, as if it were a good bit of acting; then he peered closely at his follower. He ran to the cooler, got the water and pill, then administered both to Proudman Shaster.

“Don’t you know I have a weak heart?” were Shaster’s first words.

“I never expected merely mentioning a name would kill you off,” Ino told him.

Shaster got up shakily, helped himself to more water and another pill, and topped it off with a drink from a brown bottle with a black label. He looked closely at his chief.

“Look here!” he said grimly. “Don’t you know about this Doc Savage?”

General Ino said, “It is not my habit to go into things half baked.”

“You’ll come out of this one with your goose cooked,” said Proudman Shaster. “Doc Savage is one of the most dangerous men in the world to meddle with.”

“A reputation,” murmured General Ino, “is like a snowball.”

“Doc Savage is a man who was taken by his parents at birth and trained intensively and scientifically to become a catcher of crooks and a righter of wrongs,” explained Shaster.

“The snowball,” continued General Ino, “starts off as a little ball, but grows until it becomes as big as hell.”

“Doc Savage is a scientific genius, a mental wizard, and as strong as the Bull of Bashan!” snapped Shaster.

“The snowball gets big because it rolls down the hill,” Ino reminded.

“Doc Savage is not entirely human. Everybody, almost, has heard about him. His business is righting wrongs, aiding the oppressed, and sort of putting the kibosh on crooked schemes.”

“Nature put the hill there,” General Ino pointed out.

“Every crook alive, when he hears about Doc Savage, crosses his fingers and hopes the Man of Bronze—they call Savage that sometimes—will not get on his trail.”

“A little shove starts the snowball. After that it grows by itself.”

“Doc Savage alone is bad enough,” groaned Proudman Shaster. “But he also has five assistants. One of them I have personally seen in action. He is a lawyer named Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, and those who are not afraid call him Ham. Not many people call him Ham.”

“As I have been saying,” said General Ino, “it does not take much to make a big snowball.”

“Ham almost got me disbarred once,” moaned Shaster. “He is the cleverest lawyer I ever saw. Doc Savage’s other aids are equally clever in their lines. One is said to be an engineer, another a chemist, a third an archæologist, and the fourth an electrical wizard.”

“Reputations are like snowballs,” declared Ino.

“Doc Savage is the master of any of his aids in his respective line, incredible as it seems, according to reports.”

“A big reputation can grow out of a little of nothing,” Ino reminded.

Shaster snapped, “I would rather commit suicide than tackle Doc Savage!”

General Ino calmly drew a revolver out of his coat pocket and laid it on the desk.

“Then you’d better shoot yourself,” he said. He pressed a small catch on one of his cuff links and it flew open; a whitish-looking powder fell out on the desk top. “Or touch your tongue to that. It’s potassium cyanide of a newer and more lethal type.”

Proudman Shaster gulped, “But I don’t understand!”

“Well, we are going to tackle Doc Savage,” General Ino told him. “Doc Savage is a man after my style. He goes after big things.”

“And little ones, too, I’ve heard,” Shaster put in. “They say he helps an infinitely greater number of people in small ways, but only his big deeds find their way into the newspapers——”

“Then we’ll wait for one of his big ones,” said General Ino.

“I still don’t understand what you’re driving at,” Shaster told him nervously.

“Did you ever see a seagull wait until a pelican had dived, gotten a fish and come up breathless, then the seagull would pounce in and grab the fish?”

“My acquaintance with seagulls is limited.”

“Well, we are going to play seagull.”

“One will get you five,” said Proudman Shaster, “that we all wind up inside looking out.”

General Ino chuckled. He spoke like an Irishman.

“Sure, an’ thot reminds me of what brought all this to me mind,” he said. “They’re buildin’ a barbed-wire fence around Doc Savage’s headquarters, no less!”

The afternoon newspapers had pictures of the barbed-wire fence. Fences, rather. They were four in number, one at each street corner, and they completely blocked off, for anything less than a tank, ingress or egress from the cloud-piercing giant of a building.

One headline said:

MYSTERY MAN MAKES

MYSTERY MOVE!

A second read:

POLICE PREPARE FOR

STARTLING EVENT!

Another:

MORE DOC SAVAGE

GRANDSTANDING!

The stories were about the same. The police were telling nothing. Passes were being issued to persons employed in the skyscraper which was being fenced off. Newspapermen and cameramen were not getting passes.

There was a lot of talk about it over dinner cocktails that evening. Some people went down to look at the barricade, and the cops had traffic-jam trouble.

A little more of it developed the next morning. The newspapers all had a paid advertisement, one full page. It was alike in every paper, and in such plain type that some readers passed over it until they heard about it; then they went back and read it.

Most of them got the feeling that something was coming, and that they’d better hold onto their hats.

The ad read:

PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

We wish to give the public some facts about Doc Savage, although the public may already know them.

Doc Savage is Clark Savage, Jr., a man who has been developed scientifically, exactly as a great scientific laboratory would develop a product. This scientific development has been carried on for many years, and the results are amazing.

We personally know Doc Savage to possess one of the most amazing scientific minds in existence. He is a wizard.

To-morrow, Doc Savage will print an announcement. It is an announcement that will stir the world.

We believe it will change the entire course of civilization.

(SIGNED)

Lieutenant Colonel

Andrew Blodgett Mayfair.

Brigadier General

Theodore Marley Brooks.

Major Thomas J. Roberts.

William Harper Littlejohn.

Colonel John Renwick.

Almost every one knew the identity of the five men who had signed the advertisement.

“They’re Doc Savage’s five aids,” those who didn’t know were informed.

Of course, it was now generally realized that something was coming, and that was why the barbed-wire barricade was being erected around Doc Savage’s skyscraper headquarters.

The police around the barricade had more traffic troubles.