Читать книгу The Avenger - Justice, Inc. - Paul Barth Ernst - Страница 3

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Under the May sun, the Buffalo airport looked as peaceful as a pond in a calm. Like a pond it had its water bugs—planes, some standing, one coming onto the runway, several wheeling into position for a take-off.

Calm and peaceful in the late May sun. Looking back on it, Richard Benson found it almost impossible to realize that in that peace and orderliness had begun the fantastic thing of horror that was to change the whole course of his life.

Such things couldn’t grow from a germ of terror nesting in that peaceful spot. Such things couldn’t happen anyway! Not to Benson, who was known by all his friends as the luckiest man they knew.

But the seed of tragedy did sprout from that field. And the thing did happen to him.

A ten-passenger Douglas was one of the two planes with props idling for a getaway. It squatted on the runway receiving the last luggage of passengers into its maw. And Benson saw it from the window.

Benson was talking to the agent.

“I’ve got to get to Montreal at once! You understand? I’ve got to!”

The agent was listening respectfully. People always listened respectfully to Benson. His jet-black hair, framing a lean, square face, his pale-gray eyes, flaming with vitality and will, his erect, whipcord body and swift, sure movements, inspired respect on sight.

But just the same the agent shook his head.

“The Montreal plane leaving now is booked solid. Didn’t they tell you at the downtown office?”

Benson’s eyes were like pale-gray fire.

“They told me. But there has to be a place for the three of us. My wife’s mother is dying in Montreal.”

He put his hand—the kind of slim-fingered, long hand that is made up of steel wire and leather sinew—on the arm of Mrs. Benson, who added mute appeal to his out of soft brown eyes.

She was beautiful, Benson’s wife. Tall and lovely and slim, with soft gold hair and dark-brown eyes. She looked like a gold-crested gray dove in her tweed traveling suit. Benson’s face softened as he looked at her. It always did. And the hard flame in his gray eyes always softened when they rested on the dainty little figure beside Alicia Benson—his little daughter, as brown-eyed and gold-haired as her mother. A wife and girl to be proud of, those two!

The agent was shaking his head, looking sympathetically at the three.

“It simply can’t be done. There’s a plane at midnight—”

“Can’t wait that long,” snapped Benson. His face was a lean square of inflexible purpose. There was on it the look that had come there in his varied and adventurous past, when some problem unsolvable to ordinary men came up—and was solved by him.

“I’ll charter a plane. I don’t care how big—”

“We haven’t a plane on the field to be chartered,” said the agent. “I’m afraid you simply won’t be able—”

It was then that Benson looked out the airport office window and saw the Douglas wheeling to the runway.

Without a word to the agent he hurried to the door, with Alicia and little Alice coming after him.

“What are you going to do, darling?” Alicia Benson asked. Her voice was as lovely as the rest of her. In it was implicit trust in this gray flame of a man.

“I’m going to get us to Montreal at once if I have to—”

The banging door shut off his sentence. He hurried to the airliner.

At rest Benson compelled respect. In motion he roused something like awe. Only about once in a decade do you see a man move with the flow of easy power, the perfect co-ordination and the rhythm of intense vitality owned by Richard Benson. Yet he didn’t look particularly big. He was no more than five feet eight, weight about a hundred and sixty.

He and Alicia and little Alice got nearly to the plane. The double metal door was still open, the stairs still in place. An attendant came around the plane and stood in front of them.

“You the three who have the vacant seats on this plane?” the attendant asked.

He was tall and bony, with knobs of hands and with red, coarse skin. Sandy eyebrows were like sand ropes over his frosty blue eyes.

Benson stared at the man, eyes pale blazes of triumph.

“So there are three seats on that plane! Everybody said there was no chance to board her. Perfect conspiracy to keep us from getting aboard! But we’ll show ’em.”

“If you haven’t the tickets—” the attendant began, with a heavy Scotch burr.

“We’ll pay at the other end. Fix up the irregularity any way you please. Come on, sweethearts.”

Up the steps and into the plane. A roar of the props, slam of the metal door, which was locked into place, and then motion. And Benson looked around. He was doomed right then, though he didn’t know it.

There were six men and a woman in the plane besides the Bensons. The woman was young, pretty, but with a hard line around her mouth. One of the men was big and flabby with surplus flesh; another was big, but not flabby, and had pads of black hair on his hands; a third was short and stout, and chewed an unlit black cigar. The other three were just average, to be lost in a crowd.

“Comfortable, honey?”

Benson leaned forward in the seat and laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder. A perfect union was advertised in every movement of these two.

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” smiled Alicia Benson. And little Alice piped up, “I’m fine, too, daddy.”

Benson relaxed, body moving easily to the slight motion of the plane. Off to the west, at their tail, the late sun dipped under the horizon and purple dusk capped the landscape.

They were on a visit to a deathbed; but Alicia’s mother was old, and death comes gently to the aged. In spite of their errand, Benson could not help but feel almost happy as he dwelt on the great good fortune that was his.

He had the world by the tail—or so it seemed as the grim purple dusk lowered. A perfect family, a large fortune to lavish on them, comparative youth, and health—

The plane roared east and north. Underneath, the ebon surface of Lake Ontario was a black steel sheet under a starless sky. The short, stout man chewed his dead cigar and stared expressionlessly at Benson and the softly beautiful woman and the little girl. The big man with the pads of black hair on the backs of his hands looked out the window, paying no attention to anyone.

The stewardess, a girl of twenty or so, slim and attractive in the airline uniform, bent over Mrs. Benson to ask if she and the little girl were all right. And Benson got up, rubbing his hands together. They felt sticky. He wanted to wash them.

He started forward to the tiny men’s lavatory.

Again, from his movements you could get a story of rare physical power compacted in an average-sized frame. This man was just old enough to have a veteran fighter’s experience; just young enough to have the fire and endurance of youth. He blended both into a fusion of strength and swiftness that is seldom witnessed.

Alicia Benson smiled at him, and he smiled back with his vital gray eyes as he opened the door. Little Alice waved a chubby, pink hand at him. He went in.

His hands were not particularly dirty; but one of the characteristics of Richard Benson was a mania for cleanliness. In jungle and arctic wilds, in city and plain, during the amassing of his adventurer’s millions, he had carried that craving, washing sometimes when a sip of water was a precious thing.

He laved his hands leisurely and thoroughly and came back into the belly of the plane.

Two seats besides his own were vacant.

The seats occupied by Alicia and little Alice.

Benson stared at the seats with a little prickle of fear at his scalp. But of course everything was all right The two were only in the rear, in the ladies’ lavatory.

The man with the unlit cigar stared at him, then turned stolidly to a window. The other five men and the woman didn’t look at him at all. The stewardess came toward him from the rear. Benson beckoned to her.

“Is my wife all right? She’s not back there sick, is she?”

“Your wife?” said the stewardess, frowning a little.

“Yes. She isn’t ill from the plane motion, is she? Or the little girl?”

“I don’t understand,” said the stewardess, beginning to look at him very oddly indeed.

Benson’s gray eyes flamed through her. The crawling feeling at the nape of his neck grew stronger.

“My wife and daughter,” he said distinctly. “The woman and the little girl who were sitting in those two seats in front of mine.”

“Those two seats were vacant,” said the stewardess.

A little glitter of moisture showed on Benson’s forehead. And a glitter like that of steel showed in his pale-gray eyes.

“I simply don’t know what you’re talking about,” the stewardess said. “You didn’t get aboard with anyone. You got on alone.”

“Are you mad?” snapped Benson. He whirled to the passenger nearest him, the big, flabby man.

“You saw the woman and girl, of course. Tell this pretty fool of a stewardess—”

The flabby man shook his head slowly.

“You’re the one who’s nuts, brother. You got on alone at Buffalo, like the girl said.”

Benson had trusted his life to his almost superhuman hearing in many a wilderness. But he couldn’t believe his hearing was correct now. He turned to the others.

“You—all of you! You saw my wife and daughter—”

On all faces he saw the same blank amazement, the same frowns of bewilderment and fear. They were looking at him as if he were crazy.

Benson leaped to the rear of the plane. He slammed open the ladies’ lavatory. The small cubicle was empty. He looked into the tail compartment. Only luggage was there, and mail sacks. He jumped to the front of the plane and wrenched open the door to the pilot’s compartment. The pilot and copilot stared around at him angrily, then perplexedly as they saw the mounting mania in his pale eyes.

Alicia Benson and little Alice were not aboard the plane.

Benson’s voice sounded like strong metal breaking. “Damn you all!” he cried. “What have you done? Where are they?”

He went to the door. It was still locked and anyway, with the air pressure outside it would have been practically impossible to open it in flight. He whirled again.

The big, flabby man and the stout fellow with the unlit cigar were moving toward him.

“He’s insane,” faltered the stewardess. “Get him—”

“No, you don’t!” Benson jerked out, in that voice that he himself could hardly recognize. “I’ll kill the first man who—”

They retreated a step or two. The other four men got up. Benson’s hand went to his hip. He always carried a gun.

“Please,” said the stewardess, as one might talk to a child. “You got on alone. You rode alone. There was no one with you. You are having delusions.”

“You think I don’t know whether or not my wife and daughter were with me?”

Benson went to Alicia’s seat.

“The cushion will still be warm. You’ll see—”

He put his hand to the cushion. It was cool, as if no one had ever sat in it.

His wife and child were not in the plane. There was no evidence that they ever had been. All the passengers and crew swore they hadn’t been. And there was no way for them to have gotten out or been put out.

The pilot’s door opened behind him. He had forgotten about that. It opened slowly and without sound the copilot hurled a fire extinguisher. It hit the head of the “madman” at whom all were staring in fear.

And Benson went down.