The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (9 page)

Benson pressed the bell under his name, got no answer, and jabbed the button again.

Benson went to the top floor of the four-story walk-up building, and found Knight’s door. He knocked. When there was still no answer, he took out a small pocket knife and opened a blade that looked a bit like an old-fashioned buttonhook, except that it was smaller.

It was not a buttonhook. He inserted the thin, flexible end in the lock, turned experimentally twice, and the door opened. He stepped in—and then shut the door quickly and softly behind him. Shut it on death.

His call on Alec Knight, brilliant student putting himself through Columbia, was too late.

Knight, a sturdy, tanned youngster of twenty-one or so, lay next to the shabby day bed, which was the largest piece of furniture in the room. The top of his head was mashed in, as the top of Gray’s head had been. And the room had been searched by someone so thoroughly that it looked as if a tornado had come to call.

Benson stepped with his tiger tread to the door on the side wall. Opening it, he saw another room, with the big folding doors of a pullman kitchenette at its end. This had been designed as a dining room, perhaps. Now it held a work table cluttered with Indian relics of the more common variety and textbooks.

Here the room was not so disarranged, and the gray steel man nodded, his face, as ever, expressionless. The fact that blood was still trickling from Knight’s head showed that he had been very recently killed. And the fact that this second room was only a little disarranged hinted that the killer hadn’t had time for a complete search before he’d been frightened off. Probably by Benson’s ring at the bell downstairs.

With pale eyes full of sympathy at the youth of the dead man, but with a white, still face as dead as the man himself, Benson finished the searching of the second room. No need to go over the part that had already been rifled; anything of importance there would already have been taken.

Benson found many things relative to Aztec Indians—but no clay brick. Only one thing came to light—in a battered leather portfolio—that caught the notice of the pale, infallible eyes.

That was a sealed envelope addressed to Professor Archer Gray. It was unstamped.

Benson opened it. The piece of paper within had just three marks on it—three of the ancient Indian ideographs. That was all.

Benson put it in his pocket and went back to examine the murdered man. His pockets had been turned out, his shirt had been half removed to make sure he had no secret hiding place next to his skin for anything, like a money belt.

The position of the body indicated that the youth had been slugged while he lay resting on the day bed. Asleep, probably. The poor devil hadn’t had a chance, had never known what hit him.

With a reflection of the terrible, cold fury in his pale eyes that had leaped there at the callous act of the man in the brown cap, Benson left the pitiful place of death.

He went to the Metropolitan Museum.

As Chandler had noted, Dick Benson knew countless people in many unusual positions. One of his host of friends was old Dr. Brunniger, on the staff of the Metropolitan. Brunniger was an outstanding authority on ancient Mexico.

“Dick,” said the old man, as Benson found him munching a cold dinner and studying the latest shipment of primitives, “it’s a treat to see you again.”

Brunniger’s eyes went to Benson’s still, white face and his snow-white hair.

“You’re . . . different than when I saw you last, Richard. I heard about your loss. I’m . . . sorrier than I can say.”

A terrible light flared in the deadly, pale eyes. That light came when anything reminded The Avenger of the reason for his present mode of life. But he moved his hand as if brushing the thought aside.

“I came for a little information on your specialty, doctor,” he said. He opened the paper Chandler had given him.

“Can you read this?”

Brunniger smiled. “Indian ideographs! Why do you come to me? You, with your surprising knowledge of all things under the sun, can read hieroglyphs yourself.”

“My knowledge,” said Benson, “isn’t as deep as yours. At any rate, this seems to be beyond me.”

Brunniger studied the paper.

“Mayan, I think—no, Aztec. They borrowed from the Mayans, who preceded them, as you know—”

The old expert blinked, shook his head a little, then studied the paper again. He stared up at Benson with a humorous quirk to his lips.

“Why, it doesn’t mean anything! I thought so at first, but couldn’t be sure. Is this some brilliant joker’s idea of humor?”

“I don’t think,” said Benson, “that’s a joke. But it seemed to me, too, to have no significance. That’s why I brought it to you. To make sure. You’ll swear to that—that the ideographs have no meaning?”

“Of course. It’s as though a child with a knowledge of hieroglyphs had scrawled several lines of characters having no relation to each other—and no meaning whatever.”

Benson stared at the paper with icily flaming eyes. The copy of the hieroglyphs on Chandler’s brick. Murder had been done for bricks similar to that. Seemingly, the bricks themselves had no real value. So it had been probable that the murder had been done to get and read whatever message had been on the bricks.

And now it was proved that the message on Chandler’s brick, at least, had no meaning at all.

Benson took out the paper with the three ideographs on it that Alec Knight had addressed to Professor Gray.

“What do these tell you, doctor?”

The old man studied the three symbols, and nodded after a moment.

“The first of these,” he said, “is the symbol for death. The last has to do with building construction. Stones—or bricks.”

“I read those two,” said Benson. “But the center one I couldn’t be sure of.”

“That’s natural,” said Brunniger. “It’s a very rare symbol. It means artificial rain, irrigation. The Aztecs raised crops by irrigation, you know.”

“Thanks,” said Benson.

Brunniger’s whimsical smile appeared.

“Thanks for what, Richard? Is it possible that those three symbols spell a message to you? Death—irrigation—bricks! Can you read a meaning there?”

“I think I can,” said Benson.

And the gray steel figure with the dead, paralyzed face and the snow-white hair turned and went out.

Back to Alec Knight’s dingy little apartment.

Benson found it under the tub. Under the linoleum, and then under a loose board in the floor of the bathroom.

That was the way he’d figured Knight’s cryptic message to Professor Gray. Symbol for death, symbol for running water, symbol for brick. “In the event of death, you will find the brick under the bathtub.”

Or it could have been kitchen sink, bathroom wash-stand—anything symbolized by running water. It had been under the tub, however, the first place Benson looked.

He stared at the old clay brick Gray had entrusted to Knight. There was writing on it, too. Hieroglyphs that Benson could make out. It was the same as the picture writing on Chandler’s brick; it spelled no message.

It had no meaning whatever—was just a brainless conglomerate of symbols such as might occur in our own language if a child shook a hatful of words together at random and then copied several lines of them as they fell.

The newspapers were full of it. With the death of Alec Knight, second to go on the recent expedition with Professor Gray, the lurid sheets were talking of a tomb curse. The expedition had rifled an ancient Aztec tomb. Therefore a curse would lay them all low.

Up in Benson’s headquarters, they weren’t paying much attention to the papers. Benson was examining that brick.

It was about eight inches long, five wide, and three thick. It was curiously heavy. Nellie Gray was watching his examination with veiled eyes.

Benson deliberately broke a corner off the brick. It crumbled easily. He weighed the dried clay fragment. He made rapid calculations on a sheet of paper. Then he looked at the girl.

“This brick weighs about one quarter more than it should for its size and density,” he said. “That is very curious.”

With a powerful wrench of his slim, steely fingers he broke the brick in two. Nellie gasped, and Smitty and Mac looked with intent eyes.

The inside of the brick did not seem as old as the outside. In fact, the dried clay looked quite fresh. And, protruding from the center of one of the halves was a thing that glittered with a dull yellow sheen.

Benson got it out with another twist of his hands.

Inside the clay brick had been placed an object that would have brought a yell of joy to any museum curator. It was a slightly curved plate of old gold, so pure that it could be scratched with your thumbnail. It was about seven inches long and three-and-a-half wide. It weighed nearly a pound. In the center was set an emerald.

“Look
at that emerald!” breathed the giant Smitty. “Twenty carats, at least! And you don’t see many emeralds that big that aren’t flawed.”

“There’s no flaw in that one,” said Mac.

There wasn’t. Ancient, crudely cut, it was a perfect stone. The plate, obviously part of a belt composed of several other such plates, was worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars as it stood—and worth an unguessable amount as a museum piece.

“I begin to see,” Benson said, staring at Nellie Gray again. “An ancient gold belt. There are five links like this, in all. Each was baked in a clay brick that was then treated to make it look old and marked with hieroglyphs that had no meaning, but that made it look official. Professor Gray camouflaged the links in that manner to get them across the border, because the Mexican government would not allow such articles to leave the country if they knew of it. Is that right?”

Nellie Gray drew a deep breath. Her voice, when she replied, had a different note in it than had been there at any time before in her visit here.

“Yes,” she said, “that is right.”

“Care to tell me any more, now?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I will. I think I’ve been silly to distrust you.”

“You’d have been stupid if you hadn’t.”

Nellie smiled at the dead, white face in which flamed the pale and burning eyes.

“As you know, my father went to Mexico the last time to investigate further a discovery he’d made trip before last and hadn’t had time or money to go into then. It was an entire lost city of the Aztecs, known, till then, to no one. The whole expedition dug around, and we found many new things. But dad didn’t seem very excited about any of the discoveries, and one night just before we returned home, I found out why.

“At the very first, he’d discovered what he sensed was a very important tomb. He led us to it late that night—well after midnight, when the rest of the camp was asleep.”

“Us?” echoed Benson.

“Alec Knight, Dr. Barker, and myself. He said if his discovery was half as important as he hoped, he didn’t want to trust a soul but us. He led us to the thing that had roused his curiosity. It was just a mound in the jungle. You couldn’t see a thing about it, till we got close. Then you could see a square corner of stone sticking out near the top of the tree-grown mound, at one side.

“We dug, and in less than an hour had the doorway of the tomb uncovered. It was a small, solid stone building on top of rows and rows of steps running up in a pyramid. We pried a rock slab away that must have weighed over a ton, and went in. It was in perfect condition. It was the first important tomb dad had ever found that hadn’t been looted.

“There was a sarcophagus almost like the Egyptian ones. In it was a mummy. There were dozens of little gold and copper ornaments. But the most important thing was a belt, around the middle of the mummy. A belt of five links, like the one you have there.

“Dad placed the man and the tomb from the picture writing on the walls. We had actually discovered the secret resting place of Montezuma the Second, killed when the Spaniards invaded Mexico and murdered the Aztec tribe in 1520. The belt was worth probably a hundred thousand dollars as gold and emeralds. But any big museum would have given a year’s appropriation for it. The Smithsonian would give half a million, if they could beg or steal it from someone to pay for it.

“We knew the Mexican government wouldn’t let it leave the country, so dad put the links in five bricks, as you guessed. We replaced the dirt over the tomb entrance in the night before we left, knowing that in a few months jungle growth would hide it again.”

Nellie’s eyes grew clouded, worried.

“We were replacing the dirt when we heard a branch crack, and looked around. From beyond the mound, for just an instant, we saw a man’s head silhouetted against the sky. We’d thought no one but us knew the secret of the mound. But
someone
from the camp had followed us. That person might have seen the whole business, including the belt as dad lifted it from the sarcophagus. We didn’t know. But as a precaution, dad kept two of the bricks, and gave one apiece to Dr. Barker, Alec Knight, and Olin Chandler, whom he knew almost as well as Knight and the doctor.”

Benson nodded.

“So the eavesdropper is now after the belt, getting it piece by piece, killing for it. He got two of the golden plates from your father, after murdering him. He got one from Chandler, without murder. He murdered Knight for the fourth—and didn’t find it. We can be sure of only one thing. There will be more deaths.”