The Avenger 15 - House of Death (2 page)

It was gold.

It was a thing about as big as a quarter, though perhaps a shade thicker. It had the figures 29 32 at the top and the letters H H at the bottom. In between was a thing like a castle.

No, it was obviously only part of a castle. The up and down edges of the represented structure were rough, while top and bottom were smooth and finished.

The medallion, or coin, was the same on both sides. Letters, numbers, and part of a building or wall.

Resignedly, Milky Morley wended his way toward the abode of Simon the Grind.

Simon the Grind was a fence. He had a pet shop on Eighth Avenue; but the cats and canaries, dogs and rabbits he sold during the day were only a blind to cover the things he bought at night.

In the evenings, from about eleven o’clock on, an odd parade of objects came into his possession. Diamonds and emeralds and rubies, banknotes too large to have been easily and immediately passed without serial numbers being noted, bonds that would have to cool a while, antiques of the small and easily transportable kind which a certain type of dealer would later buy for a certain type of collector.

Milky had done a lot of business with Simon the Grind. Not that it made Milky love Simon very much. Simon was a person Milky could have seen ground under the wheels of a truck with perfect calmness—except that then he’d have to go to the trouble of hunting up another fence.

Milky scowled as he tapped at the door over the pet shop.

There was a massive sound of bolts being thudded back from sockets. Heavy bolts, thick sockets, with electrical controls. The bolts only moved when the right tap was given.

“Come in.”

Milky went in, and the heavy door, looking deceptively cracked and fragile on the outside, closed by itself behind him.

“Oh, it’s you, Milky.”

Simon the Grind looked smoothly at Milky. He was a smooth guy, anyway, though he didn’t look too prepossessing.

Simon had one gray eye and one green eye. The green one had a disconcerting trick of wandering off out of line of the gray eye. The gray one would drill you like a cold gray stone while the green one stared pensively up at the ceiling, down at the desk top, or off at the wall. He wore glasses of the half-oval type, so that when he wanted to examine something he stared down through the glass, and when he was observing people he did so over the flat tops.

Simon smiled as he looked at Milky. But then, Simon was always smiling. A smile was permanently set on his thin lips like the meaningless painting of a bad theatrical backdrop.

“What can I do for you, Milky?”

“Got some dough,” said Milky, tossing the thick wallet on the desk. “It ain’t American, but it’s worth a lot.”

Simon the Grind didn’t even pick the wallet up. A corner of one bill was protruding a little, and he looked at that corner. He smiled, neither more nor less widely than the usual.

“It not only isn’t American, it isn’t worth a lot,” he contradicted.

“Huh?” said Milky, all surprise on the outside while inwardly his heart descended the scale of emotions.

“Czechoslovakian,” said Simon the Grind.

Even Milky had a vague idea of what that meant. He didn’t read a newspaper once a month, but that was enough. Czechoslovakian! Well, there wasn’t any such country any more. The government that had issued those bills was now in the vest pocket of a larger and hungrier government.

“It would have some value to a collector, though, huh?” he said hopefully.

Simon, in answer, nudged the wallet back toward him. Milky took it, and then drew out the gold coin, or medal.

“This’ll be worth something, though.”

Simon took the medallion. He wasn’t very enthusiastic about it. He stared down at it through the bottom of his half glasses. His body and hands still held in different lines, and his eyes were so languidly heavy-lidded that they nearly closed. It looked as if he were going to sleep right under Milky’s gaze.

“Gold, I guess,” he said, ringing it. “What’s this stuff on it?”

“I don’t know,” confessed Milky. “Numbers and letters and part of a building. Maybe it’s a life-saving medal or something. What’ll you give me on it, Simon?”

“Ten bucks, I guess,” shrugged Simon.

“Nuts to you,” grated Milky. He picked it up and started toward the door. Simon waited till his hand was on the knob.

“Make it fifteen,” he said indifferently. “I guess I can get twenty by weight for it.”

Milky, a disappointed and frustrated man, came back and tossed the coin on the desk. Fifteen dollars, plus two one-dollar bills! It was hardly a beginning on a new kit. If he ever got hold of that crook on the subway . . .

Simon handed over a five and a ten-dollar bill, and lit half a cigar, carefully laid in an ashtray on the desk.

“So long, Milky.”

As Milky went out, he carelessly raked the gold coin into the top drawer of his desk and went back to a newspaper he had been reading when Milky entered.

It was the best, and the hardest, acting Simon had ever done. As soon as the door had closed, he dropped the paper. His hands began trembling, and his eyes began to glitter feverishly.

He jerked the top drawer open and picked up the gold medallion with eager fingers. Then he snatched at his phone with his right hand, while his left began riffling the pages of a small secret book of addresses and numbers that never left his person.

For a man who had never harmed anyone—except, of course, that one who had had the bad taste to resist being robbed and the cop who had insisted upon chasing him—Milky Morley had had very bad luck.

It was due to pursue him, though he did not know that at the moment. In fact, it was due to hand him the worst pill bad luck can hand a man.

Which, it is generally conceded, is death!

Milky lived in an odorous first-floor room in a boardinghouse about a mile from where he had slugged the seedy-looking young fellow with the battered hat.

There was a handy back entrance down a short hall, in case the cops came. And he could leave through the window in front if he wished to depart in that direction in a hurry.

Because he might want to use that out, Milky did not have any window catches or other contraptions to keep people out. After all, burglars don’t get burgled—much.

He went into this room, shoved a dirty shirt off a rickety chair, and sat down. He stared bitterly at the wad of foreign money, then cursed and threw down the wallet. His eyes went from the wallet to a pair of feet that had appeared soundlessly near the window, where no feet should be, and through which they had just come.

Milky didn’t even start to reach for his gun.

He figured that anyone getting in that furtively and standing there staring down at him would be in too strong a strategic position to pull a gun on.

He was right, as he found when his eyes went a little farther up.

Feet, legs in shabby blue serge, then a face with narrow, determined-looking eyes under a shapeless hat brim.

What was more to the point, in a poised right hand there was the shiniest, sharpest-looking knife Milky had ever seen. It appeared positively to yearn for Milky’s throat.

Milky was so impersonal a robber that for a moment he didn’t recognize the fellow. Then he did. It was the shabby-looking owner of the Czech money and the gold medallion.

“You will turn around,” said the man evenly. There was a foreign inflection to his words and hesitations between them which indicated that his English vocabulary was not large.

Milky turned around. He knew shivs and shiv-bearers. The hand holding that murderous blade would be practiced in throwing it.

The man came up behind Milky. Hands went over his frame. Milky cursed as his gun was taken from him, howled when strong fingers ripped a pocket out of his clothes—taking some skin with it—and then shut up as a voice growled, “Silence!”

The man had his knife back in its sheath when Milky next saw him. In its place, he held the gun. Milky’s gun.

“Where is the gold coin?” the man demanded, voice calm but eyes hot.

Milky rather idiotically tried to lie.

“I don’t know nothing about a gold—”

“The one you took from me, you swine! Where is it?”

Milky moistened dry lips.

“I want that coin back. The rest,” the man waved his left hand, “that matters little. But the coin!”

“I ain’t got it any more,” quavered Milky.

The man glared at him.

“Then that other must have it. The one you visited.”

“How’d you know—”

“I got my senses back two, three minutes after you hit me. I was getting up. I look the other way from the one you had been going. At the corner, I see you again.”

Milky was beyond curses. In his chase from the cops, he had eventually doubled back around the block. So this monkey had seen him when he’d completed the circuit!

“I follow you to a place where animals are kept for sale. I could not get in there, so I wait and follow you again, back here to where you live. And you say you have not the coin?”

“I swear it,” said Milky eagerly. “The other guy—I sold it to him.”

“Turn around,” said the man.

Milky turned, reluctantly, hoping for the best. If he had seen the change in weapons the man made behind his back, he’d have gambled everything on a leap. But he did not see it.

The man put the gun in his pocket and took out the knife again. Knives are excellent for one prime reason. They make no noise to speak of.

“What you goin’ to—” began Morley.

That was all he ever said. After the interrupted words, he grunted.

That was when the knife went into his back! It slipped in as if into butter, testifying to its infernal sharpness as well as to the man’s expertness. And Morley sagged. He was as motionless as any man is with a blade squarely through his heart.

Milky would never need a kit of burglar’s implements again.

The man wiped the knife on Milky’s coat and went over his frame once more, this time in an even more thorough search. There was no gold coin.

Snarling under his breath, in a perfect frenzy, he ripped the room apart in a search. Rugs up, bedding off, mattress cut to pieces—all on the chance that Milky had managed to hide the coin in the short time between his entrance through the door and the man’s entrance through the window.

There was no coin anywhere around.

With his face a mask of hate, the man in the battered hat slid out of the window again and into the night.

The man standing before Simon the Grind’s desk was old. But he was one of these tough old men whose gray hair and lined face inspire no respect for age.

He was thin and stooped and wiry, with overlong arms and legs and a small round belly that stuck out of his thinness in a most unexpected way. He looked like a spider.

His features were no more prepossessing than his body.

His eyes were watery blue. His nose had an eagle jut to it, over a mouth that didn’t seem to exist at all till the old man spoke; then words split the invisible lips apart, temporarily, just about enough to wedge a knife blade between them.

“You came fast,” nodded Simon the Grind. His nod was contented. Such speed, he thought, meant a degree of interest that would permit him to charge a high price for the object that had called it forth.

“The medallion,” snapped the old man, lips a sixteenth of an inch apart to get out the words. “You phoned you had it. Where is it?”

Simon the Grind took his time. He had observed that keeping folks waiting sometimes added dollars to an article’s value.

“Where do you come in on this, anyhow? And how did you know a guy like me might some day have it pass into his hands?”

“I made that medallion years ago,” said the spidery old man. “That’s how I happen to know about it. I’m a jeweler and engraver. I knew it might be stolen some day because I know about the history of the medallion.”

“What is the history?” Simon the Grind invited.

“None of your business, my friend,” said the tough elderly man. “If you really have it, name your price.”

“Did you leave your phone number with a lot of other guys?” inquired Simon.

“I left it with about every fence in New York. If such a coin got to them, they were to phone me and get a good reward for it.”

“Fence?” complained Simon the Grind. “I’m a buyer and seller of valuable goods. I’m no—”

“All right, you’re a fine, upstanding, respectable pillar of society. Where’s that medallion?”

Simon the Grind decided there was nothing to be gained by whetting the spidery man’s appetite any more. He dipped into his desk drawer and produced the coin.

The old man practically pounced on it. His eyes were gem-bright as his clawlike fingers turned it over.

He bit it. He rang it gently on the desk. He looked at it through a jeweler’s lens.

“You don’t think I’d try to ring in a phony on you, do you?” said Simon the Grind, in a hurt voice.

“All right, what do you want for it?” said the old man, ignoring the plaintive tone.

“Ten thousand,” said Simon, on a wild guess.

The old man laughed. “You have queer ideas. I want this, yes. But it has no such value as that. I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”