The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (12 page)

He hung up, grinning. Louie grinned, too.

“That’ll bring him,” he said. “Everybody thinks he’s so damned smart— What do you want?”

One of his gang had come in, a bulky man with reddish hair and a sullen face.

“There’s one of the bank guys at the door,” the man said.

“What?”

“One of the bank guys. He wants to come in.”

Louie Fiume swore in exasperation, and went downstairs. He looked into the choleric face of Frederick Birch.

“What are you doing here?” Fiume snapped. “Don’t you know there’s fireworks about to start in this place? Why can’t you keep out of business that’s none of your concern?”

“But it is my concern,” said Birch apologetically.

“It isn’t! You guys hired me to do a job. I’ll do it, if you don’t mess around.”

“I came to see if it wasn’t possible just to hold these people prisoners for a while,” bleated Birch. His face was very pale and his hands moved agitatedly. “After all, a mass murder—”

“It ain’t mass murder,” snarled Fiume. “It’s slaughter! So what are you going to do about it?”

“If you could just hold them prisoner—”

“No dice! They’d talk later, wouldn’t they? You’d never get away with whatever it is you’re trying to do. No, they got to die. Particularly the white-haired guy. And he’ll be along here any minute. So, with everything set, you have to come around and whine about mass murder! Beat it!”

“What are you going to do?” chattered Birch.

So Fiume told exactly what they were going to do. He took a malicious pleasure in it.

“We’ve got thermite bombs all over this old shack. See? The minute Benson steps through that door, he steps into a trap that chutes him right down to the basement. Then the bombs go off. Ever try to put out a thermite fire? You can’t. This old firetrap will be a furnace. And in the center of it will be this Benson guy and everybody working for him.”

“Fire! Burning them to death!” Birch swayed. “My heavens, you can’t—”

A man jumped into the hall from a vacant front room almost at their elbow. The room had a window on the street, and the man had been posted at that window.

“Guy coming,” he said swiftly. “Holds his head down so that his hat’ll cover his face. He’s coming for this door.”

Louie glared murder at the white-faced bank director.

“So now there isn’t time for you to get out of here!” he raved. “All right. You’ll stay and see it, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll get a belly full before we’re done.”

“Let me out—” began Birch wildly.

“And tip off Benson, coming up to the door? Hardly! Take him, Pike. Stick close to him. When it’s all set, you drag out with him and pile into one of the getaway cars.”

The man called Pike dragged Birch with him down the hall. The dim candle in the hall was extinguished, plunging everything into complete darkness.

There was a light tap at the door.

“Got crust,” admitted Louie grudgingly. “Coming right up and knocking.”

The man at the door turned the key, then leaped far back. The door was opened by the man outside.

The man came in, looked around inquiringly. At least it seemed as if he were doing that; it was so dark they could only see a vague movement of his head. Then he took a forward step, yelled, and fell fifteen feet to the basement floor.

“Got him!” shouted Fiume, with an unholy triumph in his voice. “Set ’em off, you guys!”

Five men raced to five parts of the building where thermite bombs waited to make an inferno of the condemned tenement building. In about ten minutes blazing walls, roof, floors would smash down on the helpless man in the basement, and his bound aides.

“Fire ’em!” yelled Louie again.

There seemed to be an echo to his words. But the echo did not repeat the syllables.

“Don’t do it,” said the echo.

But the echo was in the cold, terrible voice of The Avenger.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Fiume laughed. It was a diabolical laugh, full of murderous amusement.

“Don’t do it, huh?” he said. “You down there. The guy that has the nerve to call himself The Avenger. Why shouldn’t we do it?”

The only answer was a repetition, words clear and cold, calm and steady.

“Don’t do it!”

Louie yelled to the scattered members of his gang:

“You heard me. Set ’em off. Wait till the fire’s going good, to be sure that guy don’t get up out of the basement. Then hightail it out the front door.”

There were soft flares of whitish light as the thermite was started at its deadly task.

That wooden building, never any good even when new, had been drying and rotting for a long time. It started to blaze like tinder.

In the room where the candle glittered on the box, Mac and Nellie and Smitty and Josh saw flickering red tongues show under the crack of the closed door. They stared at each other, instantly getting the whole thing.

Fire! And they were bound in here—helpless as rats in a burning ship—

Swiftly the building caught. In four minutes the heat was beginning to be felt even in the hall, where no bombs had been placed. The man in the basement was screaming incoherently. His fingers appeared at the edge of the hole through which he had been chuted. The fingers looked like pale asparagus stalks in the firelight.

Louie laughed, and stamped on them. Quiveringly they lost their hold, and their owner crashed again to the basement.

“O.K.,” Louie yelled. “Out!”

But, now, something very queer was happening to the door they were to flee through.

It sprang into living flame.

Door and jamb were suddenly a fierce red glow. It was as if that whole section were a great match which had been struck and had spontaneously ignited.

Yells of astonishment, and then of growing fear, came from Louie Fiume’s gang. Now that they were all together near the front door, it could be seen that over a dozen were here.

Several sprang for the door, blazing though it was. They clawed at it to get it open, fell back squalling with burned hands.

And behind the gang, the hall suddenly became an inferno, too.

They were trapped between a portal too fiery to flee out of, and a roaring flame in the center of the hall that leaped higher even as they watched.

Fiume’s gang was normally disciplined. But it lost all that, now. It was every man for himself.

Some burned their hands again trying to get near the front door and open it. Some raced to the front room and yanked at iron bars placed there long ago to render the first floor burglar-proof. Only about half the crew had sense enough to take the one possible way out:

Over the roofs.

These jammed the staircase in the dark, looking like figures out of hell with the reflected red light of fire licking at them.

They scrambled up those stairs to the roof.

“Lam! Everybody! The fire department’ll be here in a second, and the cops, too—”

That was Fiume’s voice. Seven of his men were going to be charred sticks in the ashes of that fire. But the leader, himself, at least, had gotten clear.

The scattered members of the gang streaked to the left, down the pitch of the roof to the flat one next door.

But a compact group also moved more methodically to the right, to the opposite roof. The group took a fire escape to the ground, three buildings down the line.

The Avenger’s car was at the curb. They all piled into it. Nellie and Mac, Josh and Smitty—and a man who appeared to be the bank director, Frederick Birch.

But “Birch” reached to his face and took thin glass eyecups from blazing, colorless eyes. Those eyecups had pupils painted on them resembling in color the pupils of Birch’s eyes. And the face, with flesh as dead and pliant as any plastic, had been shaped to resemble Birch’s face.

The Avenger became himself, again, with all but Smitty staring at him in a kind of awe. Smitty was driving, fast, to get away from the scene of the fire and couldn’t stare at anything but the traffic.

“One of that gang fired at me from the warehouse roof in Bleek Street,” Benson said, voice and eyes as cold and emotionless as if he were merely remarking on what a nice, starry night it was. “I trailed him to the tenement. Then”—he raised his voice so that the giant at the wheel could hear—“your latest invention came in handy, Smitty.”

Smitty listened. That latest invention was something the utility companies would have paid a fabulous sum for. It was a radio-telephonic hookup. The Avenger’s phone was wired to a radio transmitter on a constant wavelength. When the phone rang, his radio buzzed. With a power signal activating an induction coil near the phone, he shorted the instrument, in a sense, and listened to the phone message, and could answer the speaker, over his own radio transmitter, even though he was miles away.

“I trailed the men to the tenement and then I saw Birch coming down the street,” said the Avenger quietly. “I don’t know what he was coming for. We’ll never know. I slugged him, and made up to resemble him. Then I took his watch and wallet and let him lay. I figured he’d think he had been attacked by a common thief, when he regained consciousness, and go on with whatever business he had in mind. Which he did.”

Mac’s bleak blue eyes were very somber.

“Then the man who fell into the basement—”

“Was Birch,” nodded Benson, pale eyes flaming. “One of the bank men, at least, has paid for his crimes. I came first, was mistaken for him, and managed to get you all free and the lot of us out of there. The man crushed in the basement was the real Birch.”

“But the blazing door that kept the skurlies from gettin’ away,” said Mac.

“You should know how that was done, Mac. One of your brain children accomplished it. You know the chemical you evolved which is so volatile that it leaps into flames with the mere warmth of a candle twenty feet away? I dashed a vial of that against the door when I came in. The heat of the building fire very soon set it off. I warned the gang not to fire the building. They did—and about half of them have given their lives in consequence.”

A sound came from Smitty that was like a croak, but was really a gasp of awe.

This man with the dead face and the pale eyes and the virile hair! He would be a perpetual marvel to his aides. The Avenger did not take life. Instead he maneuvered enemies into positions where, if they tried murderously to destroy him or anyone connected with him, they destroyed themselves instead.

Once more the master chess player called The Avenger had moved living pawns into such a position. And half the pawns had been swept from the board.

The colorless, infallible eyes of The Avenger had a glitter in them like that of gray-fogged glass. Things were rushing to a time limit.

Because of the deliberate rumors about Town Bank, there had been many withdrawals. And the directors couldn’t bolster up the bank’s liquid assets with their own money because Benson had driven their personal securities down to a point where it would be ruinous to sell them.

Town Bank and its unscrupulous executives were in a desperate position. But it looked as if, with ingenuity, it could last for another twenty-four hours before closing its doors.

And in another day the stockholders of Ballandale Glass Corp. had their meeting. At that meeting, the Town Bank directors, with Crimm’s big block of stock to give them a majority, could vote in a policy that would swiftly ruin the corporation.

Then, at once, they could sell that stock, as secretly and circuitously as it had been bought, and get the cash they needed to save the bank. After that, they would follow their original plan to wait till the corporation had smashed, buy the pieces for five cents on the dollar, and make millions by building the concern up again.

In twenty-four hours the stockholders’ meeting—

Then safety for the ruthless bank crew.

So The Avenger had to wind their clocks for them before that time had passed. And a day is not very long when you are confronted with an involved criminal mess.

Benson had a dozen plans in his flaming, cold brain. But with time pressing urgently, with a thousand things to be done, there had to be a bad break.

It was furnished by Tom Crimm.