The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (3 page)

The number 87-89 was on a dilapidated-looking building next to a garage on East Eighty-ninth Street. Across the front of the building was the faded sign:

NASH USED-TYPEWRITER CORP.

“I think this is it,” said Nellie tensely. “Teebo said it didn’t look like an art gallery. This certainly doesn’t. How do we get in?”

“How do we usually get in places?” said Smitty.

But the usual way proved all right in this case, as they found when they’d reached the door of the two-story brick building.

Smitty’s way was simple.

He put one vast hand on a doorknob and turned it clockwise with about the power of a steam winch. Then he inserted a foot-long piece of pointed steel rod in between the door and the jamb and pried.

This time it wasn’t even necessary to use the jimmy. When he turned the knob, there was a thin shriek of breaking metal, a sound like a small bag of gravel being run over; then the lock bar went back and the door opened.

Smitty closed the door carefully and looked out the small, dirty glass panel.

“You must have been wrong about someone’s following us,” he said after a minute. “No car is stopping anywhere near here. Or else we shook them with our doubling around.”

“Do you think anyone trailing us would stop right in front of the building?” sniffed Nellie. “However, I could have been mistaken.”

“First time I ever heard you admit it,” grinned Smitty.

Nellie’s red lips parted for a stinging rejoinder, but she didn’t make it.

“Let’s see if we can find the painting that seems to have led to Teebo’s death,” she said.

They found it on the second floor.

The entire first floor of the building was empty. It had an unused look, too; and Smitty was prepared to bet that if he inquired he’d find the place was for rent—but that no amount of money would actually rent it.

The second floor had an equally desolate look, till they got to the back. There was a small room partitioned off there, and in this they located a loose floor board. When the board was pried up they saw a roll of canvas.

Gently, Nellie got it out and unrolled it. In the light of Smitty’s small flash, they looked at it.

Gauguin’s “Dock” is one of the major paintings. It shows a wharf, two small sailing vessels with highly colored sails and several men just getting aboard them. In the foreground, a small boy, wearing pants too big for him and a cap too big for him, is looking wistfully at the sea, longing for the time when he’ll be old enough to go, too.

The boy’s face is deeply tanned and his neck and nose are sun reddened.

“Hasn’t he got a red little nose, though?” Nellie exclaimed.

He certainly did have. Gauguin customarily used raw, strong colors. Here he had outdone himself. The boy’s nose was like a little raw tomato from the seaside sun.

Smitty grinned. “That’s a trademark, all right. I remember, now. I saw this in Paris once, and I still remember the boy’s nose—”

He snapped the flash out. There was no need for Nellie to ask why, because she had heard it, too.

A faint sound of something moving outside the partitioned off space in which they crouched.

Smitty stood up, with Nellie behind him. She glared at him for the care he was taking.

“Don’t be a dope,” he whispered, lips close to her ear. “We were dancing. Neither of us has on his bulletproof panties and scanties.”

Suddenly, there was no attempt at concealment of noise outside.

“They were here, all right,” same a cultured voice. “The broken lock proved that. But they must have gone.”

“Unless they’re in that room,” came a voice not so cultured. “We ain’t looked in there, yet.”

“If so, they’ll never snoop around again. There are six of us. And we can use our guns as much as we please. This place means nothing to us.”

“O.K., guys. Fan out.”

“We must get at the picture,” came the cultured voice. “I shall take care of that myself—”

There was a stabbing beam of light from a flash bigger than Smitty’s. And then the room was full of men. Smitty and Nellie were flattened against the wall next to the door.

Smitty’s idea was simple. They’d steal out while the men were facing forward and while the flashlight rayed that way and left the space in back of it in blackness. And for a minute it looked as if the two would be able to escape like that.

Then the man in the lead exclaimed sharply.

“The floor board. Look! It’s been pried up!”

At the same time there came a yell from Smitty’s right.

“They’re here! Get ’em!”

That started it.

Six men piled onto the big fellow and the small girl. The men, naturally, split in what seemed a proper ratio—five to handle the giant, one to take the easy job of subduing the girl.

It was an uncomfortable mistake for the one. He didn’t know Nellie.

The little blonde looked as if a hard wind would blow her away. She looked as if she’d scream if she saw a mouse. She looked as if one careless slap would knock her unconscious for a week. The fact of the matter was that she was a past mistress of jujitsu, could wrestle and box like a little champion, and was as hard to hold as a basketful of snakes.

The one man tackling her found that out in about a third of a second. He aimed a blow at her face, being not quite all a gentleman should be, and found his fist caught in two small white hands. Then he found himself being propelled forward, half by his own momentum, half by the direction of the amazing little blonde.

After that, he found himself doing a pinwheel through the air which ended with his sliding on chest and chin till the wall brought him up with a bang.

“Hah!” said Nellie. And she turned to the rest.

Smitty’s methods were less subtle. When he saw a face, he struck at it. He didn’t care if there was a scientific guard blocking the blow or not. If there were, he simply knocked the man out with his own guard, driving the protecting fist back against the jaw behind it with such force that nothing could block the blow. If there wasn’t a guard—

There was no guard in the first case. The man was bending to get Smitty around the legs and bring him down. So the big fellow hammered straight down on the top of the fellow’s head with a fist like a sledge hammer. He heard a kind of crack and didn’t know if it was a neck vertebra or a collar bone. He didn’t care much, either.

A clubbed gun glanced from the side of his head. That annoyed him. He whirled, lashing out with a gigantic fist as he did so and caught the clubber on the shoulder. It was a blow that ordinarily wouldn’t have amounted to much, but it was Smitty’s virtue that he hit so incredibly hard that it didn’t matter where his fists landed.

The blow sent this man against the wall so that he fell in a scramble over the man Nellie had sent flying.

And then the fight changed character.

Six to one. This crew must have thought it wasn’t necessary to use guns. But they had changed their minds, now, with two out of the fight and a third woozy with slapping the wall.

There was a deliberate shot, and Smitty felt air against his cheek. He roared and plunged. The flashlight went out as its holder crashed to the floor.

But the big fellow had decided it was time to get out of there. As he’d said, they didn’t have on their bulletproof underwear, made of the marvelous, steel-strong flexible stuff which The Avenger had invented and called celluglass.

“Get a shield,” he yelled to Nellie.

She already had one. Another man reaching for her—more cautiously than the first, but still not cautiously enough—had found his arm caught in a grip that made him yell with pain. Nellie’s pink and white fingers had found a great nerve center near the elbow where such agony was produced by pressure that the owner would do anything desired.

In this case, he was to back to the door with Nellie, shielding her from bullets.

Smitty had a struggling figure held in front of him. The shooting was continuing, bullet after bullet plowing out in darkness. The giant caught the meaning of it.

No one could see where to shoot. But if they kept pumping lead at the doorway, no one could go through it.

Smitty had just figured this out when the figure he held screamed and slumped. A slug had caught the man. There was a cessation of firing. The man with the gun must have thought he’d hit his prey instead of his own man.

In the lull, Smitty and Nellie got out the door. They ran for the stairs.

“After them!” yelled the leader.

Smitty and Nellie raced down the dark stairs, with the thundering feet behind them. But at the foot of the stairs, Nellie drew Smitty toward the back of the place instead of the front.

She had picked the gun from the nerveless fingers of her shield. She threw the gun at the front door. It hit with a bang, as if someone had gone out to the street and slammed the door shut after him.

The men yelled and went out the door, too. There were four still navigating.

“O.K.,” said Nellie calmly.

They went to the rear, broke open a window and climbed out to an areaway. But Smitty stopped suddenly.

“The picture!” he said. “We ought to get that. There’s so much commotion about it that we ought to take it to the chief. I’ll go back for—”

“Don’t bother,” said Nellie, very calmly indeed. “I have it.”

“When in thunder did you get time to pick it up?”

“As I was backing out the door, I felt it with my feet; so I just stooped for it. One hand was enough to control my shield with the nerve pressure.”

Smitty, for once, allowed his admiration to show in his china-blue eyes.

“You’re not too dumb at that, sometimes,” he said.

Bleek Street in New York is now famous because it has become known that The Avenger has his headquarters there. It wouldn’t be famous if it weren’t for The Avenger, however. It is only a block long. One side is taken up by the wall of a windowless warehouse. The other side consists of stores and smaller warehouses, all vacant, and a row of three narrow brick buildings in the center.

Dick Benson, The Avenger, has all that side under lease or ownership. In effect; he owns the block.

The three dingy buildings in the center were his headquarters. Behind their grimy facade, they have been thrown into one and are outfitted and furnished as few buildings ever have been.

The top floor was the meeting place for the band, which was known as Justice, Inc. It was there that Benson sat when Smitty and Nellie came in with the painting at a quarter of one in the morning.

Volumes have been written about The Avenger. They have all left the enigmatic soul of the man unknown and secret. All that can be described is his physical appearance.

That is unusual enough.

Dick Benson was not a big man, though the legends around his name would lead you to expect a giant even larger than Smitty. On the contrary, The Avenger was about average height and was built with deceptive slimness. But then a steel rod is also slim.

He had hair that was coal-black, close cut, and fitting his head almost like a virile cap. In contrast, his eyes were pale gray, almost colorless, and as cold as ice under a polar moon. His features were really handsome, but you never noticed that. You only noticed that they were so calm, so controlled, that they seemed like a mask.

Dick was alone in the huge top-floor room when Smitty and Nellie came in. They told him what had happened, then unrolled “The Dock.” Benson stared at it with ice-clear eyes.

In the daylight luminosity of the special bulbs illuminating the place, the raw colors of the painting fairly leaped at you. It looked as if it had been done with a knife instead of a brush. But it was beautiful.

“This Teebo said he tried to get in touch with me and couldn’t?” The Avenger said. His voice was quiet but carried such authority that one’s first instinct on hearing it was to jump to obey.

“That’s right,” replied Nellie.

“He started with you to the place where he kept it, and then disappeared out that window?”

“Yes,” said Nellie.

“And you were trailed when you went to the Eighty-ninth Street place?” continued Benson.

“Yes. And the trailers caught up with us there.” Nellie bit her lip thoughtfully. “They might have been part of the same gang, partners of Teebo.”

“I don’t think so,” said Smitty. “Remember when we were trying to hide from that gang? One of them—it sounded like the leader—said they could shoot as much as they pleased; that the place made no difference to them. As if it was the lair of some other gang.”

Benson was still staring at the picture.

“On the surface, then,” he said, “it looks as if there were two gangs. One, Teebo’s, had this picture, and maybe many more, to sell secretly for whatever it would bring. The other gang was trying to highjack the painting, or paintings. In the course of that, they saw Teebo approaching you with the object of selling ‘The Dock,’ and murdered him to prevent that before they could get their hands on the picture.”

“That’s the way it looks,” said Nellie.

“But looks are sometimes deceiving,” Dick mused, his eyes colder than ever as they rested on the painting. “And here is a good example of that. An excellent example. This painting is a fake!”