The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack: 12 Tales of the Masked Hero

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  The youth crossed to a window, pulled it up, and hurled the contrivance out. The crash of its landing came faintly up to him, at the end of a twenty-one story fall to hard concrete. There wouldn’t be enough left of the instrument to tell even a paleontologist what it had been. A last quick glance around to see if there were any other trace of his long vigil here, then the door opened and Odon was alone, sleeping stertorously on the bed where he had been placed. Peculiarly enough, when he woke in the morning he would find that the room had been registered in his name, the night’s rental paid. And, very wisely, he would slink away into the vagueness of the furtive land in which he moved, nursing a headache and the sourness of defeat…

  * * * *

  The stoop-shouldered man with a florid face bleared by bad liquor who shambled unsteadily up a slimy tenement stoop on Third Avenue resembled neither the dusty Ford Duane who kept a bookshop on Fourth, just behind, nor the red-haired, grinning bellhop of the Hotel St. Vincent. He had trouble in finding his key, this derelict, and a watchful cop had already started to walk over from across the cartracks before the unpainted door in the dark vestibule opened. Once in the dimly-lit hallway reeking with stale smell of yesterday’s corned beef and cabbage and the boiled fish of the week before, the man padded down creaking wooden steps silently, turned left between white-washed cellar walls to the shabby room that he rented from a hard-pressed janitor for a dollar a week. His hand closed on the knob of the skewed door. A voice said, “Hold it that way, you. Just that way.”

  The man froze. From the shadows beyond, two forms materialized. Rough fingers clutched his arms, digging in. “Chees, guys,” the bum whined, “yer shinnying the wrong pole. I ain’t got a jit, honest I ain’t.”

  A guttural chuckle sounded, then a second voice said, thickly, “You might so well not try that, Chohn O’Hara. Or maybe you like better that I call you Red Finger? Save your breath for a prayer, because your tricks are all through.”

  The Bowery accent dropped from the captive’s speech, and he slumped wearily, the hands holding him apparently his only support. “Oscar Thorn!” he groaned in defeat, “you—” His speech choked suddenly, and he exploded into action. One foot lifted behind, lashed out and plunked into a soft groin. And Duane’s left arm was free.

  His hand flashed to a armpit; a knife gleamed in the dimness. He whirled, and steely muscles ripped away from the other retaining clutch. His quick twist showed him a second blade sweeping down at him. He caught it on his own, parried it with consummate skill. His opponent, bulky, obese, grunted, dodged back, came in again with surprising agility. But the American’s muscles vibrated like tempered springs, he flashed in and out again—and the battle was over. A heavy form thudded to broken concrete.

  Ford Duane whipped to the other man squirming on the basement floor. A pencil ray shot from a thin torch in his hand, kicked a brutish face out of the darkness, blue-jowled. He studied that face for a fleeting instant, came to a quick decision. “You,” he snapped. “Do you know what this is all about?”

  The fellow groaned. “Cripes,” he blurted. “No! De guy asks me does I want ter make a sawbuck beatin’ a guy up an’ I says I’d work over me own gran’mudder fer dat. Den he brings me in here an’ we lays fer yuh. Gawd, if I’d knowed…”

  “All right,” Duane interrupted. “That’s all I want to know. You can make that ten yet, and another like it if you will do as I say, and keep your mouth shut.”

  “Gawd,” the other grunted, unbelievingly. “Ye’re an all right guy at that. What’ve I got ter do?”

  * * * *

  A half-hour later there was a new-made grave in the soft dirt of the tenement’s backyard. A bewildered gorilla was climbing a fence on the way to freedom. Duane watched his shadowy form disappear in the graying dawn, sighed, and turned wearily back into the basement.

  Once more he was at the door of the cellar room that had once been a coal-bin. That door thudded softly behind him, and his tired footsteps seemed recurring echoes of that thud in the windowless dark. A bedstead creaked, hinges grated softly. And there was no longer anyone in that other room.

  But—moments later—Ford Duane was in the concealed cubicle behind his bookshop. Deft fingers twitched off a wig, erased skillfully applied paint, removed collodion strips that had widened nostrils, broadened a thin mouth. A flicker of movement, and a pajamaed young man moved slowly about his meagre living quarters, donning the dusty habiliments of a dreaming, other-wordly bookseller.

  No one would wonder if he dozed off at his pamphlet-cluttered desk out there between the bookshelves. He always looked as if he were half-asleep anyway.

  DEATH RIDES THE SOUND

  THE shabby stores along lower Fourth Avenue are somehow furtive despite the apparent frankness of their decrepit outside-boxes of “Bargains in Used Books.” A film of gritty dust grimes these bedraggled offerings, smuts the unwashed window-fronts, seeps into the gloomy interiors of the shops and spreads gray haze over the absorbed browsers and somnolent attendants within. Those who frequent the vicinity know, or think they know, that its air of hangdog stealth cloaks neither sly criminality nor high intrigue, that it is rather the pitiable camouflage of outlived writings, and of men who have never known life.

  Nowhere, perhaps, is there a drowsier back-eddy of musty quiet and stagnant uneventfulness than this. Yet, over one of the drab shops in this sleepy row the scythe of Death is suspended by a spider-filament taut to the breaking point. The merest whisper of suspicion into the ear of one of a half-score thin-lipped, stony-faced men sitting behind the guarded doors of secret rooms in far-off capitals would map that thread. The slightest hint reaching one of a hundred others; ghostly wraiths waging unacknowledged war in the dim underways of a world ostensibly at peace; and eager fingers would reach thousands of miles to sever its tenuous fibre. For something more than the life of a man hangs by that easily parted strand. A Nation’s fate depends on its strength.

  Death, and the fear of death are silent, invisible sentinels at either side of the pamphlet-hung doorway in which Ford Duane folded his lanky limbs into a broken-backed swivel chair. Beneath their drooping lids his very blue eyes freeze suddenly to icy points and the scalp tightens under his brown shock of unruly hair. The glance of a passerby has lingered a fraction of a second too long on his spare frame!

  Lithe muscles coil like steel springs, thin nostrils flare imperceptibly…but the paunchy man with the rusted-black derby shambles on and Duane relaxes. He knows there is nothing to fear from this particular individual; but how he knows, he cannot tell you. There is a sixth sense common to a hunter and hunted by which they recognize each other’s presence. And as both hunter and hunted, Ford Duane possesses that sense to a marked degree…

  His head turns slowly to a tinny rattle from up the avenue. Its source is revealed as a leisurely approaching pushcart, piled high with gleaming kitchen utensils and shoved by a stocky, shirt-sleeved and sweating man. As Duane spies the portable store a raucous voice calls out: “Pails, axes, teenvare. Pails, axes, teenvare.” The corner of the bookseller’s mouth quirks.

  A bent old woman, Victorian bonnet fastened to the straggly gray remnants of her hair by that almost obsolete instrument, a hat-pin, appears from the interior of his shop. One almost transparent claw grips a dog-eared volume of Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw and a professional gleam comes into Duane’s eye as he slouches erect, scenting a sale. “I can let you have that for…” he begins, but his face falls as the supposed customer squeaks, “Oh, I just want to get a pail from the man; my old one sprang a leak this morning.”

  “By Jove,” the bookseller exclaims, “so did mine! Maybe we can get them cheaper if one of us buys two at a time. Here, you wait and let me get them.”

  “Pails, axes, teenvare,” the peddler’s shout is repeated. He has other items in his cart, but his cry is unvarying. Does it convey any meaning to Duane? Is i
t merely coincidence that the same initial letters recur now in the pushcart man’s shout? “Pails, axes, teenvare.” Perhaps. But the shopkeeper’s stroll to the curb is too nonchalant, too open to have an ulterior meaning. Duane scarcely glances at the pails the peddler hands him at last, certainly they are twins, and the one he turns over to the old woman in exchange for her twenty-two cents is taken at random.

  * * * *

  DUANE moves through his shop with no apparent haste. He pauses to straighten a shelf and the shining bucket whose bail he has thrust over his arm clangs against its edge. But, veiled by the lax droop of their lids, Duane’s eyes slide over the idlers in the shadows, discreet challenge in their hazed depths. Only the old, familiar figures lurk in the shadows. A tiny muscle twitches in Duane’s smooth cheek and he reaches the half-open curtain swinging before the narrow alcove. There, only a rumpled camp cot and a two-burner gas plate indicate his living quarters. He turns to the right, is momentarily hidden from the store-room beyond. A slender wall of tight-packed books moves suddenly on well oiled hinges, swings back into place. The incident is lightning-fast. The musty alcove is just as it was before. Except that Ford Duane has vanished from it.

  Behind that wall of shelved books is a cramped, windowless cubicle, not more than a yard square. When Duane seats himself on a high stool and sets the pail, top down, on a narrow wooden ledge attached to the inner wall, a fair-sized rat would have trouble finding room to squeeze in. A switch clicks and a powerful light, high up in the ceiling, pours down its radiance. The man’s sharp-edged face is no longer impassive. His eyes are ablaze with excitement and eagerness, his thin lips half parted. His long-fingered hand trembles slightly as he pulls out a drawer beneath the shelf and extracts from it a jeweler’s magnifying glass.

  Fitting the lens into his right eye, Duane bends over the tin bucket, and scrutinizes its upturned bottom. Faint breath hisses from between his teeth and his hands tighten on the shelf edge. But the powerful light beating down on the tin disk reveals only a number of almost microscopic indentations, scattered at random over its shiny surface, tiny, pointed scratches such as no polished surface can escape, no matter how carefully it be handled.

  The pseudo-bookman reaches for the drawer again, brings out a pencil, a sheet of paper, and another object. It is a disk of transparent celluloid, and as Duane places it on the pail bottom he sees that it is engraved with a series of close, concentric circles and radiating lines. Around the outermost circumference a series of letters are etched, and a circular space at the center is blank, except for three scratches very like those on the pail, triangularly arranged. Strangely enough a little juggling of the celluloid makes the three tiny markings in the center of tin coincide with the trio on the transparent disk. Duane grunts with satisfaction.

  Each of the other scratches, seen through the engraved film, falls exactly within one of the tiny arcs marked off by the whitish circles and straight lines, and no two are between the same two circles. Duane catches up his pencil and jots down letters, swiftly.

  In seconds, he is staring at this cabalistic line:

  SBTRS * PLN * DSTRY * GSMSK * PLT * B * T

  and his face is suddenly bleak, his mouth a straight, thin gash. His pencil moves again, swiftly, putting in omitted vowels:

  SABOTEURS PLAN DESTROY GASMASK PLANT B—T

  Duane’s lids narrow to hairline slits, and two white spots appear either side his pinched nostrils. Why has the mysterious individual known only as “T,” head of the American Counter-espionage Service, sent it to him?

  For a long time there is no movement in the hidden chamber, no slightest sound except the deep, even breathing of a man sunk in deep thought. On the ancient continent that lies over the blue curve of the earth and sea armies are on the march, their grim weapons charged and ready, while the dictators who have set them moving mouth-phrases about “usual maneuvers” that they do not expect to be believed. The ranks are forming, but in each bristling front there is a vacant space. Holocaust waits for America, and America, remembering what Europe would have her forget, smiles with veiled eyes and says quietly, “Not again. Once was enough!”

  On a still more ancient continent another race waits with inscrutable patience for the Day when the lowering Western sun shall be bathed with the hue of blood. But some among them are not content to wait…

  * * * *

  IN MOONLESS, misty darkness two figures paced the lightless margin of Long Island Sound. High above them the vault of a great bridge sprang in a soaring arch, behind them gigantic cylindrical tanks loomed ominously. Squat buildings leered at them from red-glowing windows, seeming somehow diabolical in the murk. But those were only the huge containers for illuminating gas that supply New York, the fires that encarnadined those windows only distilled that gas in long iron retorts of heated coal. Why then are blue-barreled rifles slanting across the shoulders of these slow-moving sentries; why should the men peer so tensely into the low-lying river haze? Why are soldiers on sentry go with loaded guns in a land at peace with all the world?

  “Gees, Sarge,” one of the guards voiced this very question. “I’m gettin’ the gimmicks watchin’ for somethin’—I don’t know what. What’s the big idea, haulin’ the battalion off Governor’s Island an’ shippin’ us over here? Labor trouble?”

  “No. No-o-o.” The free hand of the other rasped the graying bristles on his square jaw. “I dunno as I ought to tell you, but if you can keep your lips buttoned mebbe I will. You should ought to know what you’re looking for. Know what you’re guardin’, Jenkins?”

  “I’m askin’ you.”

  The sergeant’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Gas-masks—six million gas-masks!”

  “Yeah! What would we do with six million gas-masks? Hell, that’s enough for every man, woman an’ child in Noo Yawk.”

  “That’s just who they’re for.”

  The private chuckled. “Good stuff! But I ain’t a rookie. C’m on, what’s th’ straight dope?”

  “I jest give it to yuh.”

  “But what th’ hell would we want to be puttin’ masks on civvies for? Women an’ kids ain’t goin’ to do no fightin’!… ”

  “But they’re goin’ to git gassed in the next war. Judas Priest, wake up! Don’t yuh read the papers?”

  “Aw, those tabloids is all guff!”

  “You’d know if you’d been on guard at staff meetings, like me. I’m tellin’ yuh the next war is goin’ to see whole cities wiped out by gas before we get a chance to shoot off a rifle. But Uncle Sam ain’t asleep. We’ve got gas-mask plants an’ warehouses all along both seaboards, an’ at the first sign of trouble the masks gets put out to everybody, damn quick. This Plant B’s the biggest. Maybe they got a tip-off that it’s goin’ to be blown up or somethin’ tonight. That’s why we’re here. Orders is take any suspicious characters alive so that we can find out what country’s trying the stunt.”

  Jenkins was convinced. “Hell,” he spat. “Any country pulls anything like that, we’re going to hop all over ’em. We ain’t goin’ to take any more Black Toms layin’ down!”

  “Put my name on that detail too. I—Hell! What’s that?”

  The sergeant whirled, his rifle barrel slapping into his left palm, its butt jerking to his shoulder. “Who is there?” he challenged, the sharpness of his voice flatting at the river-mist.

  The private was taut, his gun also at the ready. “Whatja hear?” he muttered from the corner of his mouth.

  “Sounded like an oar. But I don’t see nothin’. Guess mebbe it was a water rat… ”

  “Or some sailor heaving garbage overboard from that Eyetalian tramp over there by Ward’s Island. Wonder to me they let her stay there.”

  “We can’t tip our hand by shyin’ every boat away from here. That would be a dead giveaway. Now, as I was sayin’…G-gaw… ”

  The
sergeant choked suddenly; the rifle dropped; his hands came up to claw at his throat, were reddened by a gush of blood from a gaping hole where an instant before his neck had been. He slumped to the gravel, the private’s lifeless form thudded atop him. And gray mist rolled over two twisted, gory corpses; a hazy mist-shroud that hid them with a softness more merciful than that of the men who had done this thing.

  For an instant the night held its breath in shocked silence, then stone grated against wood. The shadowy keel of a rowboat dug into the gravelly beach. It rocked a bit, and two stocky figures came over the gunwale, waded ashore. One slithered to the entangled bodies, bent swiftly to them, rose as swiftly. “Both dead. That was fine shooting, Dominic.”

  “And the silencer worked beautifully; the alarm has not been given.” The other hesitated a moment, then went on. “But I do not like it, Angelo. I tell you I do not like it. There is no war between our country and theirs. I am befouled with the murder of two brave soldiers.”

  “Dominic!” Angelo’s voice was sharp. “You forget yourself. It is not for us to question orders, for us only to obey. Our leader, the all-wise, has set this task for us. But hurry! We have ten minutes to get our bombs from the boat, plant them and return to the Santa Maria.”

  Dominic still temporised. “There were two sentries, not one as we were told. Perhaps there has been a leak, and the plant itself is also more thoroughly guarded.”

  “Bah! If I had known that you were such a coward I should have come alone. One of these is a sergeant, he but chanced to be here at the crucial moment. Come.”