Читать книгу The Avenger - Justice, Inc. - Paul Barth Ernst - Страница 6

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His name was Fergus MacMurdie. He was over six feet, and had coarse red hair and bitter blue eyes and hands that doubled into fists like bone clubs. His feet were the biggest Benson had ever seen, and they made the bony legs above them look even bonier.

The man from the airport had come, and stood now before him with his hat in his raw, red left hand. In the last few days Benson had become accustomed to the sight of men viewing his white and terrible face with a trace of fear in their eyes. But this man did not. He didn’t look as if he’d ever be afraid of anything. With the deep lines of his freckle-splotched face, and the grim, stony look of his intensely blue eyes, he gave the impression of a man who had had all fear burned from him in some travail of the soul.

“MacMurdie,” Benson said, “you saw me get aboard the plane with my wife and little girl?”

“Of course, mon,” said MacMurdie.

“They stayed aboard with me? They didn’t get off before we left?”

“Sure, they stayed aboard with ye.”

Benson looked at the Scot’s mallet-like right hand. There was skin missing from the knuckles. At the edge of the Scotchman’s sandy hair line the blue of a bruise showed.

“What happened?” said Benson.

MacMurdie’s bitter blue eyes narrowed.

“Some at the airfield guessed I’d said something to ye, I’m thinkin’. Anyhow, outside, two men jumped me. I left ’em there.”

Benson’s set, white face remained as still as a thing in death. But his eyes were puzzled.

“Power behind this,” he said, lips barely moving. “Money. Many men. People bribed, the forces of the law overcome—just to prove to the world that I got on the plane alone—that I never had a wife and daughter. You know that’s what they tell me, don’t you, MacMurdie?”

“I know,” said the dour Scot.

The pale-gray eyes played coldly over his face.

“Why didn’t you turn your two attackers over to the police, MacMurdie?”

“I’ve done wi’ the police,” the Scot said grimly.

“You mean—a jail sentence in your past?”

“No. ’Tis not because of that. The police are all right, as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. At least, they didn’t wi’ me.”

The pale-gray eyes expressed the question that the rest of the face could not.

“You see me a field attendant,” said MacMurdie, spreading his bony red hands. “Not much more than a laborer. But I wasn’t, once. I owned four drugstores. I’m a licensed pharmacist. I attended three years medical school, but I was too poor to finish.”

The bitter blue eyes matched the cold gray ones, flame for flame.

“I had a wife, too. I had a boy. And men came round and said to me, ‘MacMurdie,’ they said, ‘your stores are likely to be bombed some night if you don’t take out a membership in our protective association, which costs two hundred dollars a month for four fine stores like yours.’ So I told ’em where they could go, and I told ’em twice. And then—”

The knobby, huge hands clenched and quivered.

“My biggest store was bombed. It was at six at night. Mrs. MacMurdie was there and so was my boy.”

The look in Benson’s ice-gray eyes was gentler than it had been since the terrible plane ride.

“The police did what they could,” MacMurdie went on. “I’ll say that for ’em. But nobody seemed to do anything. No one but the undertaker. I let the stores slide. Since then I’ve drifted. When I get the chance, I smash the crooked skurlies like the two that jumped me outside the airport. But call in the police? What for? It’d do me no good now, or ever again.”

Benson stared into the stony-blue eyes for a long time. He was a judge of men, and he could see no deceit in this man’s dim-freckled face.

“It seems we’ve both lost all a man has to lose, MacMurdie. And it seems we’re both beyond the power even of the police to help. But maybe we can help each other. Will you help me in this?”

“Gladly, if I can,” said the Scot.

“Then tell me, have you any idea what’s behind this? Why were my wife and little girl spirited away? What plan did I interrupt when I got aboard that plane? Who hired the men who attacked you, and three more who also attacked me a while before that?”

MacMurdie shook his sandy-red head.

“I’d tell ye, mon, if I could. But I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.”

“Then you know nothing at all?”

“Whoosh! I wasn’t sayin’ that. I know a few things that I’ve thought about more than once. One is that about that same crowd has booked the Buffalo-Montreal plane solid four times in the last three weeks. Another is that always every seat is bought—but two or three are always empty when the plane goes up. A third is that always there’s a trunk goes aboard, though ’tis seldom folks travel in planes wi’ trunks. What is it, mon?”

Benson had gotten up from his chair with one tigerish surge of muscle. He was glaring at the Scot, with his eyes like gray holes in his white, dead face.

“A trunk! I saw one in the tail when I searched for my wife! She—they—could have been hidden and taken off at Montreal in that—”

Then, slowly, he sat down again. He had remembered something more.

He had seen that trunk, and it had been open, with the lid thrown back—and empty. This hope, at least, of sometimes seeing Alicia and little Alice again, was futile.

“Maybe they’re dead,” he whispered. “I’m afraid they are dead. If not—I’ll find them. If they are—I’ll make that gang of crooks, whoever they are, wish they’d never been born!”

“And how are ye fixin’ to do that?” said MacMurdie. “You, one man alone, against a whole gang, and them with big money and big power behind them?”

“I’ll do it!” said Benson.

MacMurdie’s bitter blue eyes traveled over Benson. Of only average height and weight, not looking exceptionally powerful. Only the deadly pale eyes in the dead white face compelled attention.

MacMurdie was a practical man.

“What have ye got to fight with, Muster Benson?”

“I have a great deal of money, though few except the income-tax department know it.”

“Ye’ll have to have more than that.”

“I made the money,” said Benson, “in wild countries, and with men who make city gangsters look meek. I’ve located mines in the arctic. I’ve taken emeralds from Brazil. I brought a forty-thousand-dollar cargo of animals to the Cleveland Zoo from the Malay jungles. I held a crew in mutiny across the Pacific for twenty-three days. I don’t talk of these things much, but you asked me what I had to fight with.”

“You’re not so big,” said MacMurdie doubtfully.

Benson got up and went to him.

“Hit me,” he said.

“Whoosh! I’m twice as big as ye!”

“Hit me. As hard as you can.”

The Scot could use his hands. He feinted cleverly with his left for Benson’s abdomen, then sizzled a right to Benson’s jaw that would have knocked him out.

And Benson swayed two inches, caught the flying knobby fist and bore down. The Scot turned almost a complete somersault and banged to the floor.

“Ye’ll do,” he said, getting up and blinking bewilderedly at the man with the set, still face.

“I have still another little weapon,” said Benson. “I seem to have acquired it with the shock of this thing.”

He turned from the Scot. There was a mirror over the dresser near the window. Benson looked into that, moving his hands over his face. Then he turned.

MacMurdie visibly started, then slowly whistled.

When Benson had turned from him his face was his own, well-cast and regular-featured though, of course, devoid of all expression. When he turned back, the transformation was startling. High cheekbones gave Benson a Chinese expression. The corners of the immobile mouth were turned down in a sinister fashion. The ears set forward a little. Even the forehead was altered, pressed into a narrower line with deep wrinkles where the smooth skin had been.

It was the face of another man.

“I wouldn’t know ye,” said MacMurdie, voice awed, “if it weren’t for the white hair.”

“I can wear a hat to cover that,” said Benson. “With a few outside aids, I think I can disguise more quickly and perfectly than any other man in the world today. And that won’t hurt any in our war on these murderers.”

He rearranged his face into its normal lines, flesh staying plastically in whatever outline his deft fingers prodded it.

“We’ve got to get a starting point for our investigations, MacMurdie.”

The Scot nodded slowly. “Yes, an’ I think we may have one, Muster Benson. ’Tis one more thing I thought of, and was going to tell ye when ye shocked me out of a year’s sleep by changing your face like that. Ye say your wife and little girl simply vanished from that plane?”

“Yes,” said Benson. His pale eyes were stricken at the mention of Alicia and little Alice, but his face was a mask. “They ... just vanished. Though that’s impossible. The regular door can scarcely be opened on a plane in flight. There’s no other way for them to have gotten out. But ... they disappeared!”

“Well, here’s somethin’ that may help ye,” MacMurdie said. “The Great Lakes Airline, owners of the plane ye took to Montreal, have bought some of their crates secondhand. One of ’em they picked up from the United States Coast Survey. It was a plane they used to make maps with.”

Instantly the flashing brain behind the pale-gray eyes got it. Comprehension glittered in their gray-ice depths.

“That same plane,” MacMurdie went on, “was used last year. ’Twas in all the papers. The airline sent it up to Hudson Bay with their best pilot—and they dropped food and supplies to a bunch of starving miners blizzard-bound two hundred miles from civilization.”

Once more Benson was on his feet, rising in the single surge of lithe, tigerish power.

“A trapdoor!” he snapped. “By all that’s holy—of course! A trapdoor!”

“An’ there,” nodded MacMurdie, “may be our startin’ point. Though a startin’ point to nothing but a slug in the pump for each of us, I’m thinkin’. We can’t win in a game like this. We’re bound to be flattened out.”

Later, Benson was to learn that the dour Scot was always a predicter of disaster. Nothing could possibly succeed; nothing gave the man any hope—until he was actually into battle. Then, and then only, did a sort of hard grin appear on his somber lips. Then, and then only, did he predict sure success where any other man on earth would have been convinced of failure.

“Then we’ll be flattened out,” said Benson shortly. “But we’ll flatten a few others first. What was the number of the plane I rode in, MacMurdie?”

“The S404. That’s the one with the door in its belly.”

“I’ll have a look at it,” said Benson. He began to write on a sheet of hotel stationery. “But on my way to the airport, I’ll make a few stops. Meanwhile, you take this note to an old, old friend of mine. On reading it, the friend will give you two things—something I thought I’d never have to use again, something I meant to keep out of my life since I retired with a fortune from adventurous money-making. You bring them back here. I’ll probably be back as soon as you are.”

“Right,” nodded MacMurdie. Then he looked curiously at the dead, white face that, no matter what the situation or emotional strain, could never express a sentiment.

“What stops do ye make on your way to the airport, Muster Benson?”

“I’m stopping at the best tailoring establishment in town. Also at a theatrical costumer’s. Also at a rubbergoods novelty shop. Be careful with those two things you get from my old friend, MacMurdie. It would be very hard to duplicate either of them.”