Читать книгу Fortress of Solitude: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 8

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Not everybody in the world had heard of Doc Savage.

But too many had. Doc Savage—Clark Savage, Jr.—had of late been trying to evade further publicity, and he had an understanding, finally, with the newspaper press associations, with some of the larger newspapers, and with most of the fact-story magazines extant. They weren’t to print anything about him. They were to leave his name out of their headlines.

Now, if anyone heard of Doc Savage, it would be by word-of-mouth only. “Haven’t you heard—Doc Savage has invented a cure for cancer, they say.” The surgical and medical skill of Doc Savage was probably his greatest ability. “I hear that new wrestler from Czechoslovakia is a human Hercules, built something along the lines of Doc Savage.”

The physical build of Doc Savage got attention wherever he appeared, for he was a giant, although so well proportioned that, seen from a distance, he resembled a man of ordinary proportions.

Talk, talk—there was always plenty of talk about Doc Savage.

“I hear the Man of Bronze has invented an atom motor that could drive the Queen Mary across the Atlantic with a spoonful of coal.” They called him the “Man of Bronze” because of the unusually deep-tan hue which tropical suns had given his skin. They—their talk—attributed fantastic inventions to him. Conversation made him a superman, a mental colossus.

Really, Doc Savage was a normal fellow who had been taken over by scientists as a child and trained until early manhood, so that he was rather unusual but still human enough. He had missed the play-life of normal children, and so he was probably more subdued, conscious that he hadn’t gotten everything out of life.

Talk, talk—it attributed all kinds of fantastic doings and powers to Doc Savage.

But it was only talk. Nobody, for instance, listening to it, could find out exactly where Doc Savage was at a given time. No enemy could listen to the gossip and get enough real information to lay a plan to kill the Man of Bronze.

His enemies were many. They had to be. Because his life work was an unusual one. That was why he had been scientifically trained; he had been prepared from childhood, in every possible way, to follow a career of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers, even in the far corners of the earth.

A strange career—his father’s idea. His father who was no longer living. His father had located a fabulous source of gold in the Central American mountains, realized such a wealth should do good, and had trained his son, Clark Savage, Jr.—Doc Savage—to use the wealth to do good. Also to use it to right wrongs.

This was the real Doc Savage, who found it safer not to be too well-known.

Doc read the newspaper account of what had happened to Serge Mafnoff. The bronze man often spotted unusual wrongs that could stand righting, from reading the newspapers.

Doc Savage did not know, as yet, about the man waiting in the lobby downstairs, or the other men looking at books in a near-by bookstall.

Doc Savage was impressed by the Mafnoff thing.

He was so impressed that he did something which he only did in moments of great mental or physical stress; he made a strange, exotic trilling sound, a note that was created somehow in the throat, and which had a low quality of ventriloquism that made its vibrations seem to suffuse the entire surrounding atmosphere. The sound was often described as being as eerie as the song of some rare bird in a tropical jungle, or like the noise of a wind through an arctic ice wilderness.

There was nothing spooky or supernatural about this sound. Doc had acquired it as a habit in the Orient, where the Oriental wise men sometimes make such a sound deep in the throat—for the same reason, approximately, that the rest of us say, “Oh-h-h, I see. I see, I see-e-e,” when understanding dawns.

Doc Savage had been seated at a great inlaid table in his reception room. He stood up quickly. Through the windows—this was the eighty-sixth floor of one of the city’s tallest buildings—an inspiring view of Manhattan was visible.

Doc passed through a huge library crammed with scientific tomes, and entered a laboratory so advanced that scientists frequently came from abroad to study it. The bronze man picked up a microphone.

“In case you wish to get in touch with me,” he said into the mike, “it is my intention to investigate the Serge Mafnoff story which is on the front pages of the newspapers this morning.”

What he said was automatically recorded, could be played back at will. It also went out on the short-wave radio transmitter.

Doc Savage had five assistants in his strange work. Each of the assistants kept a short-wave radio tuned in on Doc’s transmitter wave-length as much as possible.

The bronze man then rode his private speed elevator to the lobby.

He was instantly noticeable when he stepped out in the lobby. Not only because of his size. There was something compelling about his carriage, and also about his unusual flake gold eyes—calm eyes, fascinating, like pools of flake gold being continuously stirred.

The man waiting in the lobby noticed Doc instantly. The man had been loitering there for hours. He was a short man, blond, with a face that looked somehow starved. His story was that he was a process server lying in ambush for one of the skyscraper tenants. When he told that, he spoke with a pronounced Russian accent.

The instant he saw Doc Savage, this man stepped outside, hurried a dozen paces to the door of a small bookstore, entered—and walked right out again.

Several men who had been pretending to browse over books in the store, followed him. These men began getting in taxicabs.

Taxicabs always waited in a long string before the skyscraper, because it was a good stand. The bookstore loiterers took the first four cabs, and these pulled away from the curb. This left the fifth cab in the line as the next one up.

The fifth cab was the one they wanted Doc Savage to take. Driving this machine was a vicious-looking, black ox of a man.

Doc Savage had walked out of the building by now.

Having accomplished the job to which they had been assigned, the bookstore browsers and the fellow who had claimed to be a process server strolled away.

Doc got in the planted cab.

“Drive to the Hudson River water front,” the bronze man directed quietly.

He had a voice which gave the impression of being infinitely controlled, a voice that could do some remarkable things if necessary.

The cab rolled among the high buildings, passed through the less presentable West Side tenement section, and neared the rumblingly busy street which ran along the Hudson. Here, it stopped for a traffic light.

The window between driver and passenger was open.

Doc Savage reached through this. He took the black oxlike man by the neck.

“That was an ambitious trick you tried to pull,” the bronze man said quietly.

He squeezed the neck, trained fingers finding the proper nerve centers. The black ox fellow kicked around violently just before he became senseless.

Doc Savage got behind the wheel, shoving the unconscious passenger over to make room. He kept a sharp lookout around about while doing this, but saw no sign of more trouble. No cars following. As an afterthought, he got out and examined the taxicab.

The bronze man’s powers of observation had been trained from childhood, and he still took almost two hours of complicated exercises each day, aimed at developing his faculties.

He had to notice little things—like a man wheeling suddenly and walking from a skyscraper lobby when the bronze man got out of an elevator—if he wanted to go on living.

He saw, under the cab floor, lashed to the chassis, a thick steel pipe which was closed at both ends.

Doc snatched the unconscious man out of the cab, carried him, and ran away from the machine. This was a one-way street. He kept in the middle, so as to stop any cars that might enter. But it was a little-used street, and no cars came.

He waited.

The explosion was terrific. Doc stood at a distance from the cab, but the blast jarred him off his feet anyway.

The cab came apart, flew up in the air, some of the parts going so high that they became small. A deep hole opened in the street itself. Fragments of pavement went bounding along the street. After the first slam of the concussion, there was a ringing of broken glass falling from windows all over the neighborhood.

Doc Savage went away from there in a hurry with his prisoner. He had a high honorary commission in the New York police force, but there was nothing in it that said he didn’t have to answer questions.

It was obvious, of course, that the bomb under the cab was attached to a time-firing device which was probably switched on when the driver took his weight off the cushions.

No doubt the idea had been for the driver to stop somewhere and go in a store to get something, leaving Doc in the cab to be blown up.

Doc Savage carried the captive around the block, north two blocks along the Hudson water front, and reached a warehouse. The sign on this warehouse said:

HIDALGO TRADING COMPANY

It was an enormous brick building which appeared not to have been used for years. It was Doc Savage’s Hudson River hangar and boathouse.

Doc carried the captive into the warehouse, closed the doors, put the man down on the floor and did things with his metallic fingers to the man’s spinal nerve centers. The pressure which was keeping the fellow helpless could be relieved by these chiropractic manipulations.

Doc went through the man’s clothing while he was reviving, found nothing except a flat automatic pistol. The dark ox of a fellow sat up. He batted lids over eyes that resembled peeled, hard-boiled pigeon eggs.

“Didn’t I come to the end of the chain with a bang?” he muttered.

That was the first warning. In the case of this man, it was either one of two things: He was too stupid to be scared; or he had a brain that could control his nerves and make him wisecrack under circumstances such as this.

“Who are you?” Doc Savage asked calmly.

The man did not answer at once. He stared at the bronze man steadily. When he did speak, it was not to answer the question.

“They say no one has ever fought you successfully,” he said slowly. “I begin to believe that—looking at you now.”

Doc noticed the man’s rather strong Russian accent.

“Atkooda vy pree-shlee?” Doc asked.

“Yes. I don’t doubt that you would like to know where I come from,” the man said. “But let’s speak English.”

He frowned at the giant bronze man, and could not keep a flicker of terror from his eyes. “You spoke that Russian with no accent at all,” he muttered. “They say you can talk any language in the world.”

Doc said, “We are not discussing what you have heard. The subject is—why did you try to kill me?”

The man shook his dark oxlike head. “We’re discussing,” he said, “whether I had better talk—or tough it out.”

“Talk,” Doc said.

“Threatening me?”

“No.” Doc said quietly. “It is becoming apparent that you are not the type of man who can be frightened readily.”

The remark—it was merely a statement of truth as far as Doc Savage was concerned—seemed to shock the prisoner. His big white teeth set in his lips, and unexpected horror jumped briefly into his eyes.

“You don’t know John Sunlight,” he croaked.

Doc watched him. “John Sunlight?”

The man swallowed several times and forced the terror out of his eyes.

“No, no—you misunderstood me,” he said. “I said: ‘You don’t know, so you lie.’ What I meant is that you are trying to kid me along, telling me I’m brave. It’s a build-up.”

Doc said, “Why did you——” and the man hit him. The fellow hit hard, and he was strong. But the bronze man got his shoulder up, and the fist hit that instead of his jaw. Then he fell on the man. They stormed around on the floor; the man began to scream in agony.

“Why did you try to kill me?” Doc repeated.

“My name is Civan,” the man began.

Civan sat up on the floor, inched back a few feet from Doc Savage, and felt over his bruises, wincing as his fingers touched the places that hurt. Two or three times he peered at the bronze man, as though puzzled and trying to fathom where such incredible strength came from.

“I was the strongest man in my part of Russia,” Civan said stupidly.

Doc said, “Why try to kill me?”

“The man with the long nose hired me to do it,” Civan said.

“Who?”

“Eli Camel was the name he gave me,” Civan said. “He was a tall man, bowlegged, as if he had ridden horses in his youth. He had a high forehead, a mouth with no lips. And there was his nose, of course. It was very long, and kind of loose on the end, like an anteater’s nose.”

Doc Savage had never heard of an Eli Camel who had a long nose. But then, he had never heard of many men who might want to kill him.

Voice unchanged, Doc said, “What did this Eli Camel want to kill me for?”

“He did not say,” Civan said. “He just gave me twenty thousand dollars, and I agreed to get rid of you. Then he sailed for South America yesterday.”

“What about those other men—the ones who saw to it that I took your taxicab?”

“I hired them.”

“Who are they?”

Civan shook his head. “I won’t tell you. They’re not important. They’re just men I hired to help me.”

Doc Savage did not pursue that point.

“Eli Camel of the long nose, sailed for South America, you say?” Doc asked.

“Yesterday.”

“What boat?”

“The Amazon Maid.”

“That is all you know?” Doc asked.

“That’s all.”

Doc Savage went to the telephone. He knew there was a steamer on the South American run named the Amazon Maid; he knew what line owned her. He called their offices. When he explained who he was, he got service without delay.

“Yes,” the steamship line official told him. “A man named Eli Camel sailed yesterday on the steamer Amazon Maid for South America.”

“Radio the captain of the Amazon Maid,” Doc Savage directed, “and learn if the sea is calm enough for me to land a seaplane alongside his vessel and be taken aboard.”

“We’ll do that.”

“I’ll call you for the information later,” Doc said.

Civan stared at the bronze man. “You’re going after Eli Camel?” Civan demanded.

“What does it sound like?” Doc asked quietly.

Doc Savage went next to a short-wave radio transmitter-receiver outfit—he had them scattered around at almost every convenient point, for himself and his associates used that means of communicating almost exclusively.

“Monk,” Doc said into the microphone.

The answer came in a squeaky voice that might have belonged to a child or a midget.

“Yeah, Doc,” it said.

Doc Savage spoke rapidly and in a calm voice, using remarkably few words to tell exactly what had happened, and to give Monk instructions.

“Hold on!” Monk squeaked. “Let me get this straight. You started out to investigate this Serge Mafnoff mystery?”

“Yes.”

“And this guy Civan tried to kill you, and you’ve caught him, and he’s in the warehouse hangar now, and you want me and Ham and Johnny to drop by and pick him up?”

“Exactly.”

“Doc, do you think there’s a connection between the Mafnoff thing and this attempt on your life?”

Doc Savage did not answer the question. That was one of the bronze man’s peculiar habits—when he did not want to reply directly to a query, he simply acted as though no question had been asked.

“Pick up this Civan,” Doc said, “then go on out and investigate the Mafnoff mystery.”

“Um-m-m,” Monk said. “Where’ll you be, Doc?”

At that point, the other telephone—there were several lines into the place—rang, and Doc said, “A moment, Monk,” and answered the other instrument, listened for a time, said an agreeable, “Thank you,” and hung up.

“Monk,” the bronze man said, “the line that owns the Amazon Maid just called and said the sea was calm enough for a plane to land alongside the steamer and be lifted aboard with a cargo boom.”

“Oh!” Monk said. “So that’s where you’re going—to get that Eli Camel who hired this Civan.”

Doc asked, “You will be here shortly, Monk?”

“Shorter than short,” Monk said.

This terminated the radio conversation.

Doc Savage tied Civan securely with rope and left him lying in the middle of the hangar floor, lashed to a ring embedded in the concrete.

The bronze man walked to a seaplane. A number of aircraft stood in the hangar, including a small dirigible, but the ship he selected now was small, sturdy, and designed for landing on bad water, rather than for speed or maneuverability in the air.

He started the plane motor, taxied out on the river, fed the cylinders gas. The craft got up on the step, lifted into the air and went droning away and lost itself in the haze over the Atlantic Ocean.

Civan lay on the hangar floor and swore long strings of very bad Russian words.