The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (18 page)

Meanwhile, Smitty was pacing around the office, restless with confinement, like a caged gorilla. He stared at the books along the walls.

“Bet old Groman hasn’t read any of these. He’s been too busy—”

His eyes lit on the books that had formerly attracted Benson’s pale, concentrated glare. The four books on paralysis. Smitty voiced the logical conclusion.

“Hello! Looks as if the old boy’s doctor warned him that a stroke or two was coming. Groman probably bought these books on the subject to try and figure out, as a layman, just what his fate was going to be.”

“Yes,” said Benson, tone far off. Then his gray steel figure straightened a little, and his pale and terrible eyes fastened on the giant’s face.

“What did you say?” he snapped, voice vibrant and crystal-hard.

Smitty moistened dry lips. That pale and glacial gaze of The Avenger’s was difficult to face even when you knew it was not directed at you.

“I just said,” he fumbled, “that the old boy had warning of what was going to happen to him and wanted to find out just what to expect.”

“Yes,” whispered The Avenger, through set teeth. “Yes! Of course! That’s the last link! All that’s needed!”

Swiftly Benson dialed a number. It was the phone number of the Ashton City collector of internal revenue. The name, Richard Henry Benson, worked its usual miracles with high officials. He was told things no other man could have demanded, to know. He set the phone down with tense, steel-white hands clenching.

He had just gotten some tax information that he had thought very valuable.

The head of the Civic League, Arthur Willis, in casting around for a means to prosecute the criminal elements of Ashton City, had called the Department of Justice to see if any of the racketeers or suspected crime leaders could be hauled to justice via the income-tax-evasion route.

And it seemed that none could be.

Checks on Wilson, Sisco, Singell, and all the rest of the vaguely suspected leaders had shown that they had paid on every dollar of income that banks, investment companies and bond houses could report. And the income had been much smaller than thought. Very much smaller!

“Smitty,” said Benson, voice crackling like an electric arc, “get the rest in here.”

Josh and Rosabel, Nellie and Mac and the giant, faced their chief at the desk. The dead, white face and the cold, colorless eyes were a picture of vengeance and steely triumph.

“Nellie,” said Benson, “what do the words, devil’s horns, mean to you?”

The diminutive blond bombshell thought a moment, small, straight nose wrinkled up. Finally she shook her head.

“Nothing at all,” she admitted.

Mac and Smitty gave the same answer. But Josh Newton had a variant.

“Down where Rosabel and I come from,” he said slowly, “superstitious people make what they call devil’s horns with their fingers to ward off the evil eye. They do it whenever they see anybody coming toward them who has the reputation of being a witch or a voodoo doctor. They do it like this:”

He held out his right hand, doubled into a fist, knuckles up. Then he extended his forefinger and little finger, straight out from the fist, parallel, making two little horns.

Rosabel nodded agreement.

“I have seen folks, especially elderly people, make that sign often,” she said.

The Avenger seemed to exude force, and surety. He repeated, in a low, vibrant tone, the words of the little note taken from the silver buffalo head.

“Third drawer on the left, full of the moon, the devil’s horns.”

And as he said the cabalistic words, eyes like ice in a polar sea, he made the little horns with his steely fingers.

“The full of the moon,” he said, “occurs day after tomorrow, December 26th. It rises”—he gazed around, orientating the room with the compass—“there. After it clears the top of the three-story building across the street, it will shine into that end window through the upper left-hand corner—”

There was a bronze ruler on the desk. Benson picked this up and carefully sighted along it, as along a gun, at the window corner indicated.

He pulled out the third drawer of Groman’s teak desk. All the way out. Then he followed the imaginary line of the beam of the rising full moon as it would first slant in the window.

The line touched the desk. Furthermore, it touched, about three inches back, the wall of the compartment in which the drawer had been.

“Flashlight,” said The Avenger.

Smitty handed over his. Very carefully, taking at least five minutes to the task, Benson adjusted the light so that it would duplicate the first beam of the full moon, and shine just where that beam would shine.

There was a hard line where the edge of the desk obtruded, but light shone into the recess where the drawer had been, just as Benson had estimated. And the line of light came within a fraction of an inch of where he had thought.

“Got it!” he said. “Now we know the—”

The door of Groman’s bedroom opened, and the nurse came out. It was the night nurse. She had come on duty early by arrangement with the day nurse, who had early plans in mind.

She had the thermos pitcher in her hand, for fresh water. She looked with raised eyebrows at the flashlight, and the drawer lying on the floor instead of being in the desk, but she said nothing.

She went out—and returned in a moment. She reentered Groman’s bedroom, closing the door behind her.

Benson went as softly as a gray fox to the door. There was a key in the lock. He turned it, without sound, and slid it into his pocket. Then he started back to the desk.

Smitty’s voice sounded.

“Chief! Here’s a funny one! Your radio. There’s something coming through. But that can’t be possible! The only message that can come over that receiver is one sent by one of us, reporting at a distance. And we’re all here.”

The Avenger got to where Smitty stood so fast that you could hardly see him move.

When he’d first made his headquarters in that room, next to the paralytic, Benson had stripped the binding from a large book, inserted his radio set in the cover, and put it back into the bookcase. He stood before it now.

“But how can a message come through?” Smitty repeated bewilderedly, incredulously. “All of us are—”

“When I went to the warehouse to help Josh,” Benson said, turning up the volume just a little, “I took an extra set with me. I managed to leave it, concealed, under the stairs in the basement where Josh was held. The sounds coming now, must be made in that basement. Listen!”

You could barely hear the words, because of the size of the gang’s rendezvous and the necessity of hiding the marvelous little set in a spot where it would be least apt to be found. Benson turned the volume up some more.

“Hell of a time to meet to knock someone off,” a man was saying.

Another man’s voice came in reply.

“Don’t matter when it happens to be—the big boys have to get busy. See? Why, the ground’ll fall out from under
all
of us if this kind of baloney keeps on. That’s why the biggies are meetin’ here tonight. We got to burn the white-headed guy and those with him, before they burn us. See? So the heads meet tonight with masks over their faces and cook up a way out.
If
they can.”

“What time?”

“I dunno. About ten, I guess. That’s the time they usually get around the table together when there’s something to talk over—”

That was all that could be heard.

The Avenger turned away from the dead radio, eyes gleaming like drawn steel blades.

“So the masked five—rather, four, since Vautry had his unfortunate accident—meet at the warehouse tonight. That is very interesting. I think we’ll look in on that meeting.”

It was too bad The Avenger and his little crew couldn’t look in on the warehouse at that moment. They’d have seen a big fellow with black hair—Sisco’s particular pal—with the two men who had just been talking.

“Sure you were near enough to the radio to be heard?” the black-haired man was saying.

“Sure I’m sure,” nodded one of the two men.

“You said there’d be a meeting at ten? You stalled and made it sound natural?”

“Sure!”

The black-haired killer grinned.

“There’ll be a meeting, all right. But it won’t be just to talk over plans. It’ll be to watch Benson and his smart assistants die, slow and hard! Boy, if they knew we’d found that trick little radio of theirs and talked into it just to lead ’em on—”

The Avenger moved to the door of Groman’s bedroom and bath compartment. The door was still locked, had not been stealthily unbarred from within. He came back to the desk, moving as lithely and soundlessly as the gray fox he was.

“Turn out the light.”

Nellie was nearest the switch. She clicked it off, plunging the office into darkness. The darkness was split a moment later when Benson snapped on the flashlight that Smitty had handed him.

The beam from the light shone along the exact path the first beam of the full moon would travel, two nights from now. It struck the edge of the big teak desk, and angled partly into the cavern made by withdrawing the third drawer on the left.

Benson’s deft white hand went into that cavern, with first and little fingers extended in the devil’s horns. The two fingertips touched in a line along the line of light formed by the edge of the desk.

Nothing happened.

Methodically, Benson moved his fingers, up, down, making the spread wider or narrower, between fingertips.

“It has to be very precisely done, evidently”—his musing voice sounded—“to the slightest fraction of an inch. That’s why Ted Groman was measuring the spread between his father’s first fingers— Ah!”

Through hand and wrist The Avenger had felt a little tingling shock. Those two fingers had bridged a low-power electric arc, making of his hand a flesh-and-blood contact switch.

Nellie’s hand swiftly went to her lips to cut off the cry of surprise and alarm that had risen. For with the closed contact formed by The Avenger’s fingertips, an amazing thing happened.

The big teak desk, the swivel chair behind it, and a six-foot-square of seeming solid floor, began to sink.

Without a sound, worked by noiseless electric motors whose switches had no doubt been thrown by a radio-amplified impulse resulting from Benson’s finger-touch, that section was descending, carrying The Avenger with it.

The section stopped on the concrete floor of the basement beneath. But not in any part of the basement the outer world could see. The section into which desk and chair and Benson had descended was a sort of well, hardly larger than the square of false flooring, with a solid, thick wall between it and the regular basement.

“Down here,” The Avenger said, voice as crystal-hard as his flaming, colorless eyes.

They all lowered themselves into the pit.

In the solid concrete on the side opposite to the regular basement side, was set a big, stainless-steel dial. It was like the dial of a monster safe; only there were letters on it instead of numbers. This was of the type to be worked by a key word, or words, instead of figures.

“The reason,” Benson said, pointing, “why the income-tax officials have nothing against Groman’s old gang.”