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

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  “You?” she quavered. “You…”

  “I’ll follow. But I’ve got to take that bomb with me. It is more important that all this be covered up than that those fellows be brought to justice. They’ll fix up some story that will satisfy the police. The people must never know what happened here. Or that song will be sung no longer. Go. Quickly.”

  “But—but will I never see you again?”

  “Never! I have no right to—GO!” His shout was choked, shaken. It sent her flying out through the door to which he motioned—out of his life…!

  * * * *

  The next morning Ford Duane, sleepy-eyed, languid, unlocked the door of his second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue and bent to pick up the mail that had been thrust under it. Circulars. Bills. A small gray envelope addressed in tiny handwriting as clean-cut and beautifully formed as engraving.

  Within, a card. “Never say never to a woman.” That was all except for the signature. “The Flower.”

  RED FINGER — SPY POISON!

  A maroon sedan bored steadily into the night, its headlights picking a deserted, narrow road out of the darkness. It was coming from Washington, but it was approaching New York from the north. The Captain of Infantry who drove it had changed its license plates three times since its stealthy departure. He was in civilian clothes, as were his two grizzled, stalwart passengers.

  The hat-brims of all three were pulled low over their brows, their coat collars turned up about their jaws to hide their faces even in the auto’s dark interior.

  The man on the right of the rear seat glanced at the glowing dial of his wristwatch. “Eight-thirty, General,” he muttered. “We’ll be there in half an hour, right on time. I, for one, will be damned glad of it.”

  “No more than I, Johnson,” his companion growled. “This damned secrecy is nonsensical. Here we are, the commanders of the Coast Defense Forces and the Air Corps, sneaking through our own country like a couple of hunted criminals. One would think we were at war and in enemy territory.”

  “The Secretary of War’s orders, sir. He…”

  “The Secretary’s an ass! Strictly between ourselves, of course.” The speaker swayed as the car started to round a curve that was a dark tunnel through thick set, overhanging trees. “The Intelligence outfit’s balderdash about espionage has him bulldo—” Abrupt brakes cut him off, jarred him forward. The car-horn blared raucously. “What the…?”

  “Unlighted car blocking the road, sir,” the chauffeur explained crisply. “I’ll have to…” Something thumped on the running board. The captain’s hand darted to his holstered gun. The door crashed open.

  A black figure lurched in, flailed a blackjack against the driver’s skull before he could draw his weapon. In the same moment, others, springing masked and shapeless out of the leafy murk, invaded the rear. Muffled shouts, a brief struggle, ended in two meaty thuds. Someone groaned.

  “Work quickly,” a guttural voice grunted. “We have no time to lose!”

  * * * *

  Street lamps made little impression on the gloom of the Fourth Avenue block that is known as the Port of Missing Books. The atmosphere seemed filled with a dusty haze rising from the countless ancient volumes housed in the second-hand bookstores that border its dingy walks.

  The drowsy shops were darkened, shut for the night. All but the one whose drab sign read, Duane’s Second-Hand Bookstore. Through that one’s dirt-encrusted windows a dim luminance still seeped and in its open doorway an alpaca-coated form stood gaunt and tall despite its stoop.

  Ford Duane’s silhouette was that of an age-wearied man, worn and languid and as nearly ready for the rubbish-heap as the merchandise he purveyed. Had the light fallen across his face it would have been revealed as too young for one who spent his life in this back-eddy of the Metropolis, its lid-veiled eyes too blue and keen… Some peculiar quality there was in that furtive keenness. A wary fierceness such as lives in the eyes of a jungle beast that is hunter and hunted at once. There was Death in those eyes. Death which their owner had dealt and would deal again. Death that inevitably would be dealt to him were their ceaseless vigilance even momentarily relaxed.

  A strange bookseller? Strange indeed. An unnamed, unnameable soldier in the invisible, endless war that knows no screaming headlines, no marching bands. In the war without glory and without honor whose insidious plot and counterplot endangers an unknowing nation more virulently than even booming cannon and zooming planes.

  A shabby derelict of the night shambled past. A distant, single bong vibrated against the city’s never-ceasing hum. Duane glanced up at the Consolidated Gas Company’s tower clock, hanging like a yellow, figured moon over Fourteenth Street. Eight-thirty. He sighed, turned to go in.

  The deep purr of a high-powered motor stopped him, the sough of its brakes. Imperceptibly Duane tensed, came slowly around again to the street. To a sleek limousine from out of which a liveried chauffeur jumped.

  The man opened the rear door. The act turned on a light, and made a small, taupe-upholstered room of the car’s interior.

  “Come here, please.” The voice was high-pitched, querulous. An incredibly wrinkled little face peered out at Duane. The old woman was tiny in the big seat, was swathed in funereal silk. An ebony cane diagonaled from seat-edge to floor and the woman’s hand gripping it was gray and shriveled like old bone.

  Ford Duane’s hand, sliding into his trouser pocket, touched metal. He slouched across the sidewalk, halted a foot before he reached the mechanic who stood stiffly at attention, holding open the door. Duane’s position was such that he had man and mistress in range of his vision, could act swiftly at any overt move on the part of either.

  “Yes, madame,” he said quietly. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can come nearer,” she snapped, her tone that of one used to authority and its exercise. “Do you expect me to shout my business to the town?” Duane saw that there was a flat, square package on the seat beside her. “Pat won’t let the door slam on you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Will you, Pat?”

  “No, ma’am.” The man touched an extended finger to his cap visor. “I will not.” But Duane didn’t hear him. There had been the slightest of slight stresses on the repeated name, Pat. A muscle twitched in the bookman’s cheek. That name was spelled P-A-T. The three letters had a meaning for him… His fingers slipped from the automatic in his pocket and he put a foot on the running board, leaning in.

  “What is it?” he asked again, loud enough for any possible eavesdropper in the shadows to hear. “You were looking for me?”

  “No. I came to New York to see Laroux, the art dealer at the end of the block. But this insane motorcar went mad in Jersey City and by the time Pat brought it to its senses it had made us late. I’m selling the evil thing tomorrow and putting my brougham back into service. That is if there are any decent coach horses left alive. I have a dinner appointment at the Marie Antoinette, I haven’t time to go hunting for Laroux. Will you take this landscape and give it to him in the morning?” She jerked her skeleton hand at the package on the seat.

  “Gladly.” Duane reached for it. “What shall I tell him?”

  “To send me a check for it and not rob me too much.”

  “But who…?”

  “Never mind who. He knows who owns Corot’s ‘Pastorale au Thiers’.” P-A-T again! “Thank you. Good-bye.” There was another word, breathed so low Duane was not quite sure he heard it. “Good luck!” And then, high-pitched and peremptory again: “Hurry, Pat. The Médoc is too warm already, I’m afraid.”

  * * * *

  The limousine whispered away. Ford Duane was hesitant for a moment, the wrapped canvas under his arm. He looked up the block at Laroux’s art store, as if debating whether to rout him out. He shrugged, shambled, without haste, across the sidewalk into his own shop. He locked the door, lef
t the lights on. Went wearily between the high, gray stacks to the curtained-off backroom that was his living quarters and put the package on a table. From outside half of it was visible, half was hidden by the tied-back drapes behind which Duane slouched.

  He whirled, as the portière hid him, went down on his knees. A keen-bladed knife in his hand pried open the end of the flat package that was concealed from out front. Wary that his operations should not move the wrappings, he slid out an unframed canvas, stood up. Any one peering from outside would have been very sure the bundle with which he had been entrusted was untouched.

  The picture glowed in the drab light. An ungainly peasant guided a plow through a wheat-field whose every blade was distinct, detailed, as though the master had spent an hour in limning it. Scattered clouds were fleecy, soft in a sun-bright sky.

  Duane’s lips set in a thin, grim line. He turns again, faces a book-shelved wall. He reaches out, touches a volume, another, a third. The wall moves suddenly on well-oiled hinges, swings back again. There is no one, any longer, in the cubicle with its rumpled camp cot, its gas burner on an up-ended stove, and its hacked table.

  In a cramped, windowless cubicle behind that shelved wall Ford Duane clicks on a glaring bulb. He puts the canvas on a narrow ledge jutting from an inner wall. He takes down a bottle from a shelf, wets with its limpid, colorless contents a wad of absorbent cotton. Brushes the soaked fibres across the picture.

  A pungent aroma taints the air. In the pictured wheat-field some of the interlaced stalks change color. They make letters, running across the landscape. Faint breath hissed from between Duane’s teeth. His eyes blaze suddenly, and as suddenly are veiled.

  “Williamsbridge Road,” he mutters. “At nine. It will take me an hour— They were delayed!”

  The volatile compound to which the pastoral had given up its message evaporates. The picture is only a picture again. It is back in its wrappings, that all this time have not moved, and the opening through which it was slid has been repaired. The lights go out in Duane’s Bookshop. No one has been seen to go out. But there is no movement in the darkened store. No hint of any presence.

  * * * *

  Williamsbridge Road runs through the Borough of the Bronx of the City of New York, but its upper reaches are still largely rural. A weathered old house sat far back from the flagstoned sidewalk to which its unkempt lawn sloped and even had its windows not been closely shuttered there were no neighbors to spy on the curious proceedings within it.

  “Jane!” A squat, thick-set man with a leonine mane of white hair stopped pacing, suddenly, in a large room inside that house, lit only by a desk lamp near which a girl sat. “What time is it?”

  “Half-past eight, Professor.” Jane Adams looked up. “They aren’t due here till nine.” Her tan laboratory cloak did not altogether hide the lissome suppleness of her figure. “We shall just have to wait.” Tawny lights glinted in her russet hair. The small oval of her face was lined with fatigue and there were faint blue shadows under her gray eyes.

  “Wait!” Kurt Rodney’s long, sculptor’s fingers plucked nervously at the frayed hem of his stained jacket. “I have waited twenty years. Waited and worked, since the night I stood on a London Street and stared at the bits of scattered flesh and bloody bone that an instant before had been a happy family, mother and father and golden-haired child, strolling the war-darkened pavement. But now that only thirty minutes remain, I can wait no longer!”

  “You must be patient.”

  “I don’t know why it is that this fever possesses me now,” the old man ran on. “A fever of dread. Of fear. Fear! Till you came to my laboratory at the University and persuaded me to take myself and my apparatus into hiding I did not know what that word meant. There was only my spectroscopes, and my dynamometers, and the joy of discovering hitherto unknown forces. You made me ask for Sabbatical leave. You made me board the Around-the-World liner and then sneak ashore again in disguise. You made me come here to this benighted hide-away and remain here a prisoner—for six months.”

  “For your sake—and for our country’s sake, Professor.” There was compassion in Jane’s tone, and firmness. “If the secret of what you were doing, have done, were to be learned by America’s enemies…?”

  “They would use it against her and my work would be in vain,” Rodney broke in. “Yes. I know. That was why I consented. Excuse me, Jane. I am a silly old man.” An endearing smile of apology seemed to light up the craggy, seamed countenance.

  “You are a very great scientist, and a greater humanitarian. You have saved our cities, their teeming millions, from the nightmare horrors of the inevitable Next War. When the Army officers see what you have devised, when you demonstrate it to them…”

  “Jane! Suppose something is wrong! Suppose it doesn’t work. They will laugh at me…”

  “It will work. A hundred times it has worked. There’s no reason why…”

  “Let’s try it again. We have time. We must make sure.”

  “Very well.” The girl lifted, wearily, moved to a wall. A click and the chamber was flooded with light.

  * * * *

  A huge cage centered the room, a cage of mosquito screening. Its floor was covered by a miniature hamlet, tiny houses row on row along inch-wide streets. Surrounding the toy village, green-painted paper-maché simulated rolling country. Studding the line where town and country met were a number of small metal contrivances, curiously intricate. They might be models of field guns, except that the wee barrels were mounted on boxes out of whose surfaces quarter-inch glass lenses glittered. Threadlike, insulated wires connected these, coiled out through the wire meshes to a rheostat on a nearby cluttered table that in turn was joined to a wall-plug by a metal-covered cable.

  On one wall of the cage, just beneath its roof, a row of inch-square cages of the same wire netting were fastened. Within each one a common house-fly preened itself, and each tiny cage was provided with a small door that could be opened from outside to make its occupant free in the larger chamber.

  Rodney peered down into the cage. “Nonsensical, this display,” he growled. “Unscientific.”

  “But practical. The men who are coming here will be more impressed by it than by all your careful graphs and charts.” Jane gestured to the black face of a closed safe recessed into the further wall. “They are practical men, not theorists.”

  “Perhaps! Let us start!”

  The girl moved the rheostat handle, from switch-point to switch-point. Stopped it half-way of its arc. A vague, humming sound was perceptible. That was all, but it seemed to fill the room with tenseness, with a spine-prickling excitement. Professor Rodney’s gray face grew paler, his lips colorless.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  Jane stepped to the cage, lifted one of the small doors. The fly inside stopped preening itself. The girl tapped a sharp finger against the wire and the insect took wing.

  It circled momentarily, darted over Toytown. Darted towards Toytown. The tiny gun-tubes came alive, jerked upward, spat minuscule, shiny pellets. The almost microscopic projectiles struck the fly, fell with it to the cage floor.

  “Perfect,” Rodney exclaimed. “If that had been an enemy airplane, or a fleet of them, raiding the city by day or night, the infra-red rays would have aimed and shot the rifles at them, and destroyed them with the same efficiency. No matter how high they flew, no matter how silently. Our cities are safe from poison gas, from bombs. The same devices on our own planes, battleships, tanks, will make their marksmanship perfect. I have made America invincible.”

  “Invincible! And have insured peace.” There was elation in the girl’s face, overpowering joy. “Professor Rodney! You…!”

  A knock at the outside door checked her. It came again. There was a pause. Then the double rap was repeated.

  “They’re here,” the scienti
st gasped.

  “At last!”

  * * * *

  Jane Adams almost ran out of the room, into the small foyer that separated it from the entrance. In moments she was back, behind her two tall, military-appearing men whose hat-brims were pulled low over their brows, whose coat collars were turned up to screen their faces.

  The newcomers looked curiously at the astonishing contrivance in the center of the room. Then one turned.

  “Professor Rodney?” His voice was hoarse, guttural.

  “Yes. I am Kurt Rodney. And you are…?”

  “Generals Sloane and Johnson of the United States Army. You have some device here you wish to sell to the War Department.”

  “No!”

  “What do you mean? We were ordered here to…”

  “Not to sell. To give to the nation. Gentlemen! As you know, there is no question that any future declaration of war will at once he accompanied by air raids on civilian centers of population.”

  “There is no doubt of that. The next war will be directed against the non-belligerent populations of the adversary countries. It will be a holocaust…”

  “It will not. I have destroyed that fear for the United States for once and always.”

  “Interesting—if true.”

  The physicist’s face darkened with anger. “You doubt me? Here is the proof.” He thumped the huge cage. “Here.” The disturbed flies buzzed.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Rodney thrust a hand inside the breast-opening of his jacket, struck his familiar lecture posture. “My device is based on the principle of the photoelectric cell that is used in industry to open doors, stop and start machinery, inspect and throw out imperfect products, and so on. You are familiar with it. Yes?”