The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (8 page)

The man got up, sidled around the giant, yelled—and leaped to one side as Smitty’s hand raised. He fairly ran to where Benson stood by the cage. Benson opened the barred door.

“Get in!”

“Hey! Me get in
there?
I won’t—”

The almost colorless eyes—eyes of a deadly marksman—stared calmly at him. His words broke in the same squeak that had sounded when Smitty’s hand encircled his throat.

“What are you gonna do to me? Who are you guys, anyhow? Why’re you sticking your bills in this—”

“Get in, please.”

The man stumbled into the six-by-six cage, looking more dead than alive.

“What are you gonna
do
to me? You turn me over to the cops! You hear? If you don’t—”

“You can shout as loudly as you like,” said Benson. “The place is thoroughly soundproofed. But I’d advise you not to.”

He went back to the others, with the caged man’s awed and panic-glazed eyes following his lithe body and smooth tiger tread.

Benson drew out the list he had gotten from Doolen.

“Here,” he said, “are the men who accompanied Professor Gray on his last trip. Some one of them—perhaps more than one—must know what this is all about.”

He read the list aloud:

“Michael Bower, retired manufacturer; Basil Doolen, importer; Olin Chandler, engineer; Rex Orto, Jr., no occupation; Harry Armitage, sales manager; John Sanderson, manufacturer; Cole Tega, advertising artist; Alec Knight, student; Mortimer Barker, physician.”

Benson glanced at Nellie Gray.

“You needn’t answer if you don’t want to, Miss Gray. We can go ahead without any help. But you might tell me if this list is complete or if any have been left out.”

Nellie stared a long time into the gray eyes, like pale ice in a polar dawn. You could fairly see her thinking it out:

This is a world of greed. No one does anything unless he’s going to get something out of it. Therefore, Benson must be mixing in because he expects a reward. His claim that he is only doing it to help the cause of justice is, by all logic, silly.

And yet—she was beginning to think, foolish as it sounded, that he was really on the level.

“The list is complete,” she said, in a low, troubled tone.

Benson nodded.

“Three of these,” he said, “have little check marks after them, meaning that on the expedition they were the particular intimates of Professor Gray. The three are Dr. Barker, Olin Chandler, and Alec Knight. Right, Miss Gray?”

The girl nodded, uncertain, still not knowing how much trust to place here.

“Dr. Barker has been our personal physician for years. Olin Chandler has worked with Columbia, and with dad, on Aztec stuff, and was on an expedition with dad two years before, in Yucatan. Al Knight is a brilliant student working his way through Columbia now. They were the three father knew best. Two were with him when he discovered—”

She stopped abruptly.

“When he discovered what?” said Benson. “The bricks?”

She would not answer. She had gone as far as she dared go, at the moment.

What was her secret, that it was so gigantic she dared not, even yet, lift a corner of the veil of mystery for Benson to gaze at?

The pale-gray flames of eyes turned from her face to the faces of MacMurdie and Smitty.

“Mac, call on Rex Orto and Harry Armitage. Smitty, visit John Sanderson and Cole Tega. Learn from them what you can. I’ll take Professor Gray’s three intimates—Olin Chandler, Dr. Barker, and Alec Knight. Then we’ll all get together and see what we’ve turned up.”

A sound, methodical plan. But even the plans of Dick Benson, The Avenger, could fail if the proper factors—beyond any human influence—appeared.

One such factor being death—

Dr. Mortimer Barker had cut and run.

Bower was so frightened for his personal safety after the murder of Professor Gray that he had fainted when Dick Benson dwelt on the subject. Doolen was frightened, but composed. Barker, it appeared, was frightened and discreet.

He had gone to Europe for a month, his assistant said, when Benson called to talk to the man.

Two phone calls—one to the American consulate in New York and one to the steamship company—verified the statement that Barker was on a ship and fleeing from danger at the moment. So Benson discarded the worthy physician as a possible source of information and went to see Olin Chandler.

Chandler was in an office listed: “Chandler & Co., Zoning and City Planning Engineers.” There was an outer office with half a dozen clerks at work, an anteroom where a smart-looking girl answered phone calls and talked to visitors, and then the inner office of Chandler himself.

Benson was directed in. He saw a big desk in the five-o’clock sun, with a smallish, middle-aged man seated at it. The man had intelligent brown eyes and an alert manner. He looked hard at Benson as the pale-gray man walked with his tiger tread from door to visitor’s chair beside the desk.

Then Chandler withdrew his hand from the partly open desk drawer. In that drawer was a flat automatic.

“So you want to know about the Mexican expedition, too,” he said, folding well-kept hands across his flat and well-kept middle and leaning back in his chair.

“Too?” repeated Benson. His pale eyes were rapidly evaluating Chandler. A man as composed as Doolen, and perhaps even more resolute. A younger man than Doolen, perhaps more of a fighter.

“You’re the third to approach me with questions,” said Chandler. “The police were one. In connection with poor Gray’s death. The second was a man who skulked into my apartment when I was out, waited till I’d got home, and then talked to me from behind where I sat. He said he had a gun and would shoot if I tried to turn and see who he was. I took his word for it and didn’t turn. I didn’t tell him anything either. Rather, I told him a lot of stuff that I made up as I went along. But I’ll talk to you, Mr. Richard Henry Benson.”

“Why?” said Benson.”

“You evidently have a great many friends, some of them in out-of-the-way places. One of them is a Harry Rhodes, who is an importer in Guatemala. Right?”

“Correct,” said Benson quietly.

“Well, it happens I know Rhodes, and he has spoken of you. That’s good enough for me.”

“You’ve been in Guatemala much?” came Benson’s silken voice.

“I was there for two years,” nodded Chandler. “Most of the time between Professor Gray’s next-to-the-last expedition—on which I went along, also—and this final one.”

“You were there in your capacity of zoning engineer?”

“Yes,” said Chandler. “The title indicates my work, of course. I advise governments in laying out new towns, or remodeling old ones. Where to lay the streets, how to group the various business, manufacturing, and residence districts, that sort of thing. I was at work on the town of Chiquimula when the boys told me to pack up and leave because they weren’t going to have the money to spend that they’d thought they would have.”

“Guatemala—munitions,” said Benson.

“That’s right.” Chandler nodded ruefully. “The silly little country is so busy buying a silly little army and navy that they’re broke. They haven’t the money for such comparatively civilized jobs as city planning. So I came on home.”

“There are whispers,” said Benson, “of more munitions being rushed down there than the country itself could ever handle.”

“Right,” said Chandler, eyes narrowing. “There are also whispers that this big store of munitions has something to do with a move against Mexico, with perhaps a foreign power aiding under the surface. But has this anything to do with what you came to see me about?”

“I suppose not,” Benson said. “What I came to see you about was—Mexican bricks.”

The pale and deadly eyes probed Chandler’s brown ones in the pause that followed. And Chandler stared squarely, thoughtfully back. Then he nodded.

“You’ve hit on it,” he said. “The thing of great importance that Professor Gray found in Mexico. The thing he was murdered for, though the police simply can’t quite believe it. Five rough, ancient bricks of ordinary dried clay.”

“There were five, then? I wasn’t sure of the number.”

“There were five. And Gray thought them so important that he split them up when we came up across the border into Texas, past the customs men. He took two himself—the ones that were stolen when he was murdered. He gave one to Dr. Barker to handle for him, another to a young fellow named Knight, and the third—to me.”

“Now,” said Benson, “we’re getting somewhere. As a great favor—if you’re sure enough of me to trust me that far—I’d like you to let me see that brick.”

Chandler got up. He began to pace slowly back and forth across his office. Finally he stopped in front of Benson with a troubled look on his face.

“I’m sure enough of you, after all the things Rhodes has told me about you. But—I haven’t got the brick.”

“You haven’t got it? You gave it back to Gray?”

“No. Gray hadn’t asked me for it before he died. I was still keeping it, waiting to hear from him. I told you a man was waiting in my apartment for me last night, and questioned me? Well, that man got the brick. As soon as he had gone out a rear window behind me, I ran to the place where I’d hidden the brick. It wasn’t there.”

Benson drew a deep breath.

“I understand there was Aztec picture writing on the bricks. If I could have just a glimpse of one of them—”

“There,” said Chandler unexpectedly, “I can help you out.”

On his desk, acting as a paper weight, was a perfect little cannon. A miniature of a field piece as complete in all its parts as the clever model boats that many men build as a hobby. Chandler lifted the little toy and took the top envelope from a pile of several envelopes held down by it.

Benson saw the name Krupp on the little cannon.

The envelope had a transparent window on it, as do envelopes that contain bills. The printing on it showed that it was a firm manufacturing mechanical-drawing instruments.

But the way Chandler handled it indicated that there was something in the envelope far more important than a bill for mechanical-drawing tools. That was just a blind.

“I’m trusting you right down to the ground in showing you this,” Chandler said. “But I think I can.”

“You can,” said Benson quietly.

Chandler took out a sheet of paper. It was covered by lines of little ideographs, the picture writing of the Aztecs.

“This,” said Chandler, “is an exact copy of the hieroglyphs on that brick Gray had me keep for him. I copied them off just in case something should happen to the brick.”

“Can you read this?” said Benson, pale flames of eyes traveling over the cryptic lines.

“Hardly!” said Chandler, smiling a little. “I’m interested in the Aztecs—went on two expeditions to their ruins—because they were such marvelous old city planners. I got ideas for my own modern work. I’m not nearly advanced enough to know their writing! Not many men are.”

“May I copy this?” said Benson.

Chandler thought for a moment. Then he said slowly: “I think I’ll do better than that. I think I’ll let you take the list itself. Since the brick itself, with that writing on it, has fallen into the wrong hands, there is no longer such an urgent reason for keeping the whole thing secret. Although I didn’t show even the police that sheet of paper you hold in your hand.”

“It’s much appreciated,” said Benson.

He got up, only of average size but impressive, with his silver-white hair and white, dead face, as few men are impressive.

“I’ll return this shortly,” he said. “Meanwhile, take plenty of precautions about your safety. There seems to be a menace over all who went on that last expedition. As an intimate of Professor Gray, perhaps you are in danger even more than the others.”

Chandler’s smile went crooked and humorless.

“Good advice—but I don’t need it. My hide is very precious to me. I’ll guard it, all right!”

Benson went to the address of Alec Knight, the one young student taken with Professor Gray on that final archaeological expedition—and the third of the dead man’s intimates on the trip.

Knight was obviously in meager circumstances. The building he lived in was hardly more than a tenement on the East Side. But there were tiny apartments in the tenement, not just single rooms. He was getting along well enough to have more than a single chamber to live in.