Читать книгу Death in Silver: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 8

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Doc Savage heard the ugly sounds of the blows upon Monk’s head, for there had been no time for the homely chemist to replace the telephone receiver, and telephones are sensitive.

Doc listened closely. The noise had been distinct enough to tell what had happened. Over the wire came scuffling sounds, grunts, which meant that Monk’s bulk was being hauled from the booth. Then the telephone receiver in the booth must have been replaced; there was a click, with silence afterward.

Doc Savage had been bending over an expensively inlaid table as he conversed with Monk. He straightened, and his tremendous physical build was apparent to its fullest. The telephone, the massive table, seemed to shrink beside him; yet it was only in comparison to these objects that his full proportions were evident.

So symmetrically was his giant frame developed that, seen at a distance and away from objects to which his size might be compared, he appeared no larger than other men.

But he would never be mistaken for another, this Herculean figure. His bronze motif prevented that—his skin, remarkably fine of texture, had been turned a rich bronze hue by countless tropical suns, and his hair, straight and fitting like a metallic skull cap, was of a bronze color only slightly darker.

His face was regular, the lineaments having an unusual quality of handsomeness, but in no sense possessing the somewhat effeminate prettiness often found in very handsome men.

The most striking feature, however, was his eyes. They were slightly weird, like pools of flake-gold stirred continually by tiny whirlwinds. They held an almost hypnotic quality, a compelling power.

The room where this amazing bronze man stood was the outer office of his headquarters, and held only comfortable chairs and a massive safe. Adjacent was the library with its thousands of scientific volumes and the laboratory with an array of equipment nearly without equal.

Doc whipped into the corridor, his movements apparently unhurried, but his speed great. A special elevator, a fast lift installed for his own use, lowered him eighty-six floors to the skyscraper basement. There, he kept several automobiles, all of special construction, in a garage the existence of which was unknown to all but a few.

The bronze man’s skyscraper establishment had cost a small fortune, yet its expense was scarcely a drop from his reservoir of wealth. Doc possessed an almost unlimited source of funds, a treasure trove as unusual as the bronze man himself.

Scarcely three minutes after disaster befell Monk, Doc Savage was on the street in an expensive but unostensible roadster. He touched a dash button. Under the hood a siren began wailing. Traffic police heard and opened a way for him.

Doc went down Broadway, and for a long time the speedometer needle swayed above seventy miles an hour. He drove with an uncanny skill.

The roadster was fitted with short-wave radio receiving-and-transmitting apparatus. Ordinarily, Doc Savage would have used this to get in touch with the other three members of his group of five assistants.

But three of his aides were not at present in New York. William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn, the expert on archæology and geology, was in London, filling a special lecture engagement at a famous university.

Major Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, electrical wizard extraordinary, was in Europe, collaborating in experiments with another electrical expert on a device which was Long Tom’s pet dream—an apparatus which, when perfected, could be used to kill insects with ultra-short sonic or electric waves. This would be an inestimable boon to farmers.

Colonel John “Renny” Renwick, famous engineer, was in South Africa, halfway around the world, overseeing construction of a particularly difficult hydro-electric plant, a project in which the engineer had a financial interest.

For the first time in many months, Doc Savage would have to go into action without the aid of three of his remarkable group of five men, each of whom was a master in some profession.

Several blocks from the scene of the strange explosion in the office building, Doc switched off the siren. A crowd milled in front of the building itself. There were signs of excitement.

Doc parked at the end of the block and hurried forward, intent on learning what had befallen Monk and Ham. He caught snatches of conversation from the crowd.

“They came in an armored truck!” gasped a man.

A woman was telling a friend, “Did you notice how they were dressed? Silver-colored suits!”

“Those silver masks on their faces!” gasped the friend. “Ugh! Hideous!”

Doc went on and heard a fat colored fellow in a bus boy’s uniform exclaim, “Dem silver lads done lit out of heah in the same truck dat dey came in!”

“Boy, did yoah see dem two men they was draggin’ when they up an’ left?” asked a brother bus boy.

“Yassuh,” agreed the first. “Dem two was daid, if yoah asks me.”

Doc Savage’s remarkable bronze features did not change expression. That did not mean he was unconcerned, for he schooled himself until he possessed an uncanny control over his own emotions.

A lieutenant of police—the same individual to whom Monk and Ham had been talking—answered the question. Doc encountered the officer in front of the building. The cop saluted briskly.

“It was the Silver Death’s-Heads,” the policeman explained before Doc could put a query. “They drove right through the crowd in an armored car. Ran down two spectators. They rushed in, clubbed down the guard at the door, and seized Monk and Ham. It happened so quickly that we could do nothing, although I did manage to fire one shot.”

“Did they harm Monk and Ham?” Doc demanded.

The lieutenant shivered slightly at the grim sound of the giant bronze man’s voice.

“Both were clubbed over the head,” he said thickly. “Ham was caught beside me. The silver devils came up behind us. Monk was in the telephone booth and did not get out in time.”

“How badly were they clubbed?” Doc questioned.

The officer moistened his lips. “Pretty hard. I don’t know—if they are alive. They were dragged away.”

“What about the armored truck?” Doc asked. “Armored trucks are not extremely common on New York streets.”

“This one was a steel pay-roll truck,” the policeman replied. “It was stolen, we learned, from a company which makes a business of delivering pay-rolls. It was taken only a few minutes before the raid here.”

“You assemble information very quickly,” Doc told the officer. “Good work. Was the truck followed?”

The policeman grimaced. “I’m sorry to say that it got away completely. Of course, every radio patrol car in the city is now looking for it. We expect a report at any minute. It cannot escape.”

Doc Savage did not rush off on any wild chase of his own in search of the armored truck. He knew the efficiency of the metropolitan police; he had, in fact, served in a consulting capacity when the present radio car system was inaugurated. A vehicle as prominent as the armored truck would not get far before it was discovered.

The bronze man’s first move was to examine the semimolten silver mass which Monk and Ham had found in the basement fire box. A small bag was brought from Doc’s roadster. With chemicals taken from the bag, Doc tested the silver.

“Coin silver,” he announced.

“Eh?” The police lieutenant was puzzled.

“The cloth is interwoven with fine wire made from molten silver dollars,” Doc explained.

“Does that prove anything?” the officer queried.

“Only that the criminals must be making the garments themselves, which indicates that some of them are highly skilled metalsmiths,” said the bronze man. “If the disguises had been purchased, it is almost certain that a different grade of silver would have been used.”

The policeman nodded, not greatly surprised, for he knew the amazing detective ability possessed by Doc Savage. He was slightly abashed, however, when Doc went upstairs to the explosion scene and almost at once turned up the cause of the blast.

Doc did not expend much time on the wreckage itself, except to apply chemical tests to some of the powder stains.

“The work of trinitrotoluene,” he stated.

“Huh?” asked the officer.

“T.N.T.,” Doc elaborated. “The famous World War explosive.”

“Oh!”

The bronze man dug into the office walls, probing pits made by bits of wreckage, and brought out, after some work, several bits of steel. He assembled these, studied them.

“We found some of that metal and sent it to a specialist for an opinion,” said the officer. “We hoped it would tell us what caused the blast—whether it was a bomb or not.”

“It was a high-explosive three-inch shell,” Doc said.

“Good night!” the lieutenant exploded. “You don’t mean a cannon ball?”

“You might call it that,” Doc assured him. “Except that this was a very modern demolition shell from a three-inch artillery piece.”

“But where was it fired from?” yelled the officer.

There was an interruption while a sergeant came in with a report that the armored truck had been found. A radio car had come upon the truck, abandoned on the water front of the East River.

No trace of the sinister men in silver garments had been found in the vicinity of the truck. Nor were there finger prints. No one could be found who had seen the truck being abandoned.

“Finding it doesn’t help us a bit,” the police lieutenant groaned.

“I would not say that,” Doc told him.

“Yes?” the other queried. “But how is this going to help?”

“According to the newspapers, the men in silver robbed another armored truck earlier in the day and took a quarter of a million dollars in cash,” Doc pointed out.

“Of course.”

“Police followed them,” Doc reminded.

“Yes, and lost them——” The officer did not finish, but swore and snapped his fingers violently.

“Exactly,” Doc said. “The police lost trace of them around the water front of the East River—in the same vicinity in which this armored truck was found, to be exact.”

The lieutenant shouted, “I’ll have every square inch of that area combed!”

“Do it unobtrusively,” Doc requested.

“Of course,” the officer agreed. “We will use plain-clothes officers, and put a flock of stool pigeons to work. We’ve got a swell lot of stool pigeons. They’re in nearly every crook hangout in the city. You’d be surprised what they can turn up.”

“Do you wager?” Doc asked.

“Bet? Sure—on sure things.”

“Want to bet me that your stool pigeons won’t turn up a thing?” the bronze man asked.

“What makes you think they won’t?” the cop demanded.

“These are not ordinary crooks,” Doc told him. “And I doubt very much if robberies, such as the armored truck holdup this afternoon, are the real motive behind the organization of men who use the silver disguises.”

The police lieutenant considered, then said, “I’ll bet you fifty that the stool pigeons turn up something.”

“The winner to contribute the fifty to the police Death Benefit Fund,” Doc said.

“Sure.”

A police messenger ran into the room. He was animated, breathless.

“Gugillello Bellondi was just murdered by a guy in silver!” he yelled.

Doc Savage demanded, “Who is Gugillello Bellondi?”

“A fisherman who was in a boat in the river at the time of the explosion,” said the police lieutenant. “We thought he might have seen the plane flying overhead drop a bomb, and we sent a man over to talk to him.”

“And our man found him dead,” said the messenger. “A woman saw a fellow in a silver suit run out of Gugillello Bellondi’s room just before the cop got there.”

“The killer got away?” the lieutenant wailed.

“So far, he has,” the messenger admitted ruefully.

Doc Savage put in, “Any line on the plane?”

“Yes. I forgot to tell you.” The lieutenant pulled out his notebook. “The flier was Gilbert Stiles, who lives on Eighty-fifth Street in Jackson Heights.”

“What house number?” Doc asked.

The policeman furnished that information, started to ask a question, but did not—Doc Savage was already whipping for the door.

The bronze man reached his roadster. Once again traffic police opened a lane, and the trip north to Queensboro Bridge, thence along Northern Boulevard to Jackson Heights was made in astounding time.

Jackson Heights was an apartment residential suburb near the north shore of Long Island, not far out. There were grass plots around some of the apartments, a few trees in the parkways down the center of a street or two.

Doc did not stop directly in front of Gilbert Stiles’s home, but parked in an adjacent side street, under the lazy droop of a weeping willow. He swung along the sidewalk, reached the corner, made a move at turning, but instead of doing so, continued on with long steps—and stopped when he was sheltered behind a parked car.

Doc’s move was urged by discovery of a man standing beside a shiny blue sedan down the street, near where Gilbert Stiles lived. The man was scrawny, with traces of grease stain on his hands and face. His face was a sickly gray hue, resembling a white ball which had been mauled in unclean hands.

During the past, Doc Savage had visited Monk’s skyscraper chemical laboratory frequently, and in doing so had occasionally seen members of the janitorial force. The bronze man never forgot a face. The man down the street was one of the janitors of Monk’s skyscraper.

Doc had no way of knowing the individual was Bugs, murderer of Clarence Sparks.

After watching Bugs for a moment, unobserved, Doc concluded something was not resting easily on the fellow’s mind.

Bugs squirmed. He smoked innumerable cigarettes. He walked about, and he glanced frequently at a tall brick apartment building before which the blue sedan stood. He even got into the sedan, but remained only a moment and climbed out again.

Bugs stood scowling at the apartment house. Then his pasty face took on an expression of resolve, and he went inside.

Doc Savage whipped back to his roadster. The rumble seat jumped open at his touch upon a button, and he dipped in a hand, withdrew a small box to which stout spring clamps were secured; then he ran to the blue car.

Employing the spring clamps on the box, Doc clipped the container to the chassis of the car in a spot where it was not likely to be noticed. Then he followed Bugs into the apartment house.

There was a Spanish-type lobby, with ornate columns, fake iron balconies, and a rather threadbare carpet. Bugs was nowhere in sight. Nor was there a directory of the tenants to be seen.

The elevator was automatic. You got in and pushed a button marked with the floor to which you wished to be lifted. Doc listened. The lift was running.

These apartment buildings were all similar in construction. Doc leaped around a corner, found stairs which ran to the basement, descended them, and located the master electric fuse board. He could still hear the low whine of the elevator. The sound stopped.

Doc took out the fuse in the power circuit. The cage would remain where it was, now. The bronze man ran up flight after flight of stairs.

The elevator car was on the sixth floor, which happened to be the top story. A long hallway was lined with numbered doors. Doc stood perfectly still, listening.

The bronze man possessed remarkable hearing. He used a special scientific device giving forth sound waves above and below the usual audible ranges, to develop his aural organs.

This was a part of a daily two-hour routine of intensive exercise which he had not neglected since childhood. The exercises were responsible for his physical development, for there reposed in his great bronze frame a strength that to many seemed incredible.

Down the corridor, a doorknob rattled. Doc whipped back. A niche—it probably housed an incinerator door—offered concealment. He pressed into that.

He heard the door open. Feet scuffed. Doc counted at least six persons, all men. The clicking of women’s high heels are distinctive, and there were none of those. One man walked far in the lead of the others. An instant later, the fellow appeared.

It was Bugs. He saw Doc Savage. He could not very well help it. His eyes flew wide; stark horror contorted his face.

“Savage!” he bawled. “Watch out!”

Then Bugs clawed at his clothing for a gun.

Doc moved with dazzling suddenness. Flashing out of the niche, he drove a fist. So that there would be no lasting damage, he struck lightly. But the blow slammed Bugs back against the wall, knocking him instantly unconscious. The gun he had tried to get into action skidded over the floor tiling.

Doc now faced down the corridor—faced weird, inhuman figures, forms garbed in grotesque silver garments. The footstep count had been good. There were five of them.

Bugs’s yell had warned them. Three had drawn guns. The weapons gushed flame and raised ear-splitting thunder in the corridor.

There was a touch of the unearthly in the speed with which Doc Savage got back into the niche. Only fabulous muscles, carefully conditioned, could manage such blinding motion. The bullets, missing him, gouged plaster off the walls and knocked glass from a window at the corridor end.

“Rush him!” a man in silver squawled.

“T’hell with that, Ull!” another growled.

Shots almost drowned the words, and it was doubtful if the man in charge realized his name had been called—Ull. But Doc caught it and filed it mentally for future investigation—should he escape.

He was in a tight spot. It was his policy never to carry a gun, and he had none now. But he did have some of the scientific devices which he used. One of these he employed now.

A hand dipped into a pocket and came out with what might have been mistaken for a glass marble. This was actually a thin-walled glass globe, and the liquid inside was a chemical concoction which vaporized instantly into an anæsthetic gas.

The gas was unique in that its effects were immediate, and it became ineffective within less than a minute, so that Doc, holding his breath, could escape the potent stuff, while the unwary, breathing it, were rendered senseless.

Doc threw the anæsthetic ball.

Rarely had these gas balls failed to catch foes by surprise. But this was an exception. Doc waited, holding his breath to escape the vapor. But his enemies gave no sign of succumbing. They did not, however, call out again, and the clatter of their feet retreated. A door slammed. They had fled ahead of the gas.

Doc knew from past experience just how quickly a man can shoot at an unexpected target, and knew he could get a fleeting glimpse of the corridor without great danger of being shot. He looked out.

The hallway was empty. The silver men had gone back into an apartment. Doc stepped out into the hall.

An instant later, he flashed backward into the niche, for a door had opened and a metal object slightly smaller than a baseball had sailed through. No doubt the silver man who hurled it intended for it to stop beside Doc. But the thing had too much momentum. It clattered past. Then it exploded.

The concussion almost disrupted the bronze man’s eardrums. Clouds of plaster gushed. The big apartment house trembled. The ceiling lifted, split, and came down with a thundering clamor. The floor collapsed for some distance.

Doc, secure in the niche, unhit, was enveloped in a cloud of smoke, plaster particles and splinters. The grenade had been powerful. Directly in front of him, the floor was gone, fallen down into the hall below. Bugs’s body had been blown back out of sight.

Toward the end of the uproar, the door down the hall opened again.

“Get him?” asked the voice which belonged to Ull—it was a shrill, querulously whanging tone. Ull was not the one looking into the corridor.

“It fixed ’im,” said another voice. “The whole damn corridor is blown to pieces!”

At that point, a loud, agonized groan sounded.

“Who’s that?” asked Ull.

“Bugs,” said the other. “He’s butchered up some.”

“Let me take care of that,” Ull suggested.

A moment later there was a single deliberate shot, and after that the groans no longer ground out.

“He’s taken care of,” said Ull.

“What next?” grunted the other.

“Down the fire escape—all of you,” ordered Ull. “We’ve got to beat the cops away from here.”

Doc Savage gave Ull and his sinister silver aides a few minutes to be on their way. The bronze man did not want any more of those grenades thrown. Women were screaming, children crying, in the apartment below, although it was unlikely that any had been hurt.

When he considered sufficient time had elapsed, Doc stepped out of the niche.

Bugs was a slack figure, torn a little by the blast and with a bullet hole drilling his head just above the ears. Ull had made a cold, accurate shot in ascertaining that his followers did not live to talk. Evidently Ull had not wanted a wounded man on his hands during the get-away.

Doc shoved open the door through which the grenade had been hurled. He stood just inside, strange flake-gold eyes resting on the deep leather chair in the center of the apartment living room.

There was a man in the chair, but not a living man, for his body was stiffly erect, probably held that way by the blade of the long knife which had gone through his chest and well into the chair back.

A book had fallen to the floor beside the dead man and was open at the fly leaf, so that the name written there could be deciphered.

“Gilbert Stiles,” the name read.