“Yes.”
“But I utilize the invisible infra-red rays, which have a penetrative power far beyond that of visible light. Searching the sky with these, despite darkness or fog, my invention can…”
“Professor!” the girl broke in. “Just a minute.” She was at the safe-door, had been manipulating its silvery dial, but had not opened it. Her hand remained on its knob.
“Er—what is it, Jane? Why do you interrupt me?”
“You’ve forgotten to ask these gentlemen for their credentials. After all, we have only their word for their identity.”
General Johnson laughed humorlessly. “Of course. Here they are.” He brought a leather folder out of his pocket, flipped it open. Rodney peered near-sightedly at it. The seal of the United States was embossed across its lines of printing and writing, across a pasted photograph of the man who held it.
“This seems to be correct, Jane.” He muttered. “I have no doubt this gentleman is whom he represents himself to be.”
“General Johnson!” The girl seemed not yet to be satisfied. “How high does an eagle fly?”
“How high…?” The man stopped. A sudden, brittle silence shut down. Then there was a gun in his hand, shouting at the girl. “You are too smart for your own good, young lady.” The other man’s automatic, too, was out, was covering the professor. “You caught me with that password question but that will not prevent us from getting what we came for.”
Jane twirled the safe knob, stepped away from it. “I didn’t catch you with that question. The real General Johnson would not have known the answer and would have said so. There isn’t any answer.” She smiled grimly. “What betrayed you is the shoes you both are wearing, but I had to make sure.”
“The shoes…! They’re dress shoes of the United States army. Regular issue. We were careful about that as about everything else.”
“Too careful. Generals in the American army purchase their own shoes. They are the same as any civilian’s. Yours…”
“You’re an ass, Gorslum.” The putative General Sloane, silent till now, darted a vicious glare at his comrade. “But we’re wasting time. The plans are in that safe. Open it, girl.”
The corners of Jane’s mouth twitched. “And if I don’t?”
“You will.” There was no suavity in his accents, only a hissing threat the more horrible because of its low tone. “We have ways of making you and they are not—pleasant.”
“Very well.” The girl shrugged. She turned, manipulated the combination dial. The painted steel swung open—and a mass of charred, smoldering ashes spilled out. “If you can make anything out of these you’re good,” Jane chuckled. “That last flip I gave the knob detonated a little bomb in here that I set for action while Professor Rodney was starting his lecture.”
“You witch!” Gorslum exclaimed. He sprang forward, slammed the side of his gun against the girl’s cheek, gashing it. “You she-devil…!”
The blow jolted the girl backward, against the table on which the rheostat rested. Her elbow struck the rheostat-handle, jammed it against the terminal marked, “HIGH.” Sparks coruscated from the miniature field-guns within the cage and the little boxes glowed cherry-red, white. Melted down into shapeless lumps.
“And that finishes the last trace of Kurt Rodney’s secret,” Jane Adams gritted, through teeth clamped on the pain of her wound. “He knows now why I insisted on supplying the rig-up with far more current than it could safely take.”
“Jane,” the old man groaned. “Jane. You are wiser than I. Far wiser…”
“Destroyed the secret, eh!” Gorslum was white-faced with wrath, but his thick mouth was tight and very cruel. “Has she destroyed the secret, Trano?”
The other man licked dry lips with a pink tongue. “She has not. It still lives—in its creator’s brain.” And then the two men moved, quickly, purposefully, as though at an unspoken signal. When they were through both the Americans were in chairs, lashed and helpless. “He will tell us, and be glad to tell us,” Trano continued, as though nothing had intervened, “all about it before we are done with him.”
“Never.” Rodney had come out of his daze. “I will die before I speak.” He was somehow majestic, bound as he was, somehow awesome. “And my invention will die with me.”
The sound Trano made might have been intended for a laugh, but the girl shuddered at its evil implication. “You will pray for death, my dear professor,” he lipped. “You will think death a blessing.”
“Stop the talk and get to work.” Gorslum seemed anxious, jittery. “I don’t want to keep that car standing out there overlong. We hid those we took it from well enough, but there is always the chance that they may be found and an alarm broadcast.”
“They will not be found,” the other grinned, horribly. “And if they are, they will not talk. I changed our friends’ instructions slightly. For the better, as you now understand. But…” He paused. “Ah! The professor has been good enough to provide me with just what I need.”
He darted to the table, snatched up an electric soldering-iron. “This develops a quite satisfactory degree of heat.” He thumbed its switch, watched its swollen end grow dull black, glisten, begin to turn cherry-red. He turned, prowled toward Rodney, the long cord trailing behind him. “Take off his shoes.”
Gorslum knelt, fumbled at the scientist’s laces. Jane watched him with dilated pupils, but oddly enough the expression of her eyes was not quite hopeless. She seemed to be listening, intently. Not to any sound in the room. Not to any sound that existed. Her gaze flickered away from the ominous group around the other chair, flitted to the shutter-blinded window…
And was pulled back by a piercing scream of agony from Rodney’s writhing mouth. By the acrid tang of burned flesh.
The scream died down to a moan. “Are you ready to talk?” Gorslum questioned. “Or shall my friend proceed?”
The professor’s blue lips quivered. He was an old man, Jane thought. How much could he endure? Was he breaking? Already?
“May you both…go to Hell!” From him, from the cloistered scientist, it was not a meaningless oath but a malediction and a terrible curse. “To Hell…!” And then he was screaming again, was writhing in anguish. The pungent smell of charred meat was nauseating…
The flies were buzzing, excitedly, in their cages. They smelled carrion, battered their wings against the wire, avid to get at it. Nausea retched at the girl’s stomach, thrust dizzy tentacles into her brain. The shrill sound of Rodney’s agony beat dully against her swimming ears. It stopped. A guttural voice was incoherent, meaningless…
It ended in a splintering crash—and a sudden silence. A silence that cleared Jane’s vision for her, that brought her back to realization of her surroundings.
* * * *
The two spies were frozen, statuesque, Gorslum holding Rodney’s bare ankles, Trano on his knees, the soldering-iron in his white-knuckled hand. The window-shutter was splintered, its aperture gaping. Someone was surging in through it. Someone—or something! The formless bulk that dropped lithely to the floor was a swirling mass of dark draperies, a black and grisly phantasm. It thudded on the wood, straightened.
“God!” Gorslum gulped. “Red Finger!”
The apparition was tall, draped in a long black cloak that obliterated its figure. A gray felt hat crowned it, and a gray mask made it faceless except for narrow slits behind which there was a blue, dangerous glitter. But that which made of it a macabre, fantastic threat was the hand that jabbed a revolver point-blank at the torturers. Black, that hand was, black gloved. Except for one finger, the finger that curled around the weapon’s trigger. That was a glaring scarlet as if it had been dipped in fresh blood.
“Yes. Red Finger!” The masked head nodded and the toneless acknowledgment seemed to savor the dread that name inspired among all who moved in the mu
rky underworld of international intrigue. “You forgot that New York is my district, Gorslum and Trano. Or did you think that you could succeed where so many others have failed?”
The only answer was a whimper from a clamped throat, a whimper of deadly fear. These men were brave. None but the brave enlist in the invisible war. But the man who stood before them was a whispered legend among their like a tradition of supernatural invincibility and relentless doom.
“Stand up!”
Gorslum dropped the professor’s ankles. Trano straightened, slowly— exploded into lightning action that flung the heated iron he held straight at Red Finger’s eye-slits.
The glove-held gun spat orange-yellow flame. The glowing iron clanged, smashed, in mid-air, into a hundred pieces that clattered down. But the momentary diversion had given the spies time to snatch out their own guns.
The sound of firing was continuous thunder in the room. Fiery jets laced the air. A lax body thudded down. Lead plucked at black cloth, sliced a fluttering fragment from it. A second body hung limply on the wire-mesh cage, sprayed a scarlet rain on Toytown.
Red Finger swayed, clutched at the window-sill for support. He hung there for a long moment. A darker patch spread, glistening, on the dark cloth of his cloak, at his side. He fumbled at the fluttering drapes and his gun was gone.
He was coming across the floor to the girl who called herself Jane Adams. He was staggering across the floor, clutching at the table, at a chair-back, to keep from falling. He got to her, fumbled at the knots that tied her.
He mumbled low words to her. “I got here as quickly as I could. The message was delayed.”
“I told you I would see you again.”
Her tone too, was low. But Kurt Rodney would not have heard them had they shouted. He had fainted. “When you sent me out of that office on Fifth Avenue and out of your life, I told you never to say never to a woman.”
“Flower!” Recognition seemed to give him new life, to staunch his wound. “You! Who are you, Flower? Who…?”
“Number six-one-three. Just a number, Red Finger, to the Force. But to you?”
“A girl who has no business in the Force. Get out, Flower. Get out before it’s too late. Before a bullet finds its billet in your soft, sweet body. Or worse happens to it. Worse…”
“And you, Red Finger?”
“I—I stay.”
“Then I stay, too. Red Finger! Are we neither of us to know life? Are we…?”
He was gone from her. He was across the room, at the window. She tried to rise, but she was still held light by the lashings he had not finished unfastening.
“It will take you a minute to free yourself.” He was out of the window. “Will you ever free me?” He vanished into the chilly night, without waiting for an answer.
* * * *
A week later Ford Duane, still weak and pale from the automobile accident that had sent him to a certain private and very discreet sanitarium in the Bronx, unlocked his bookshop. Among the litter of letters and bills that had been poked through the slit in this door during his absence was a russet rose. Impaled on its stem was a narrow slip of paper, and on that paper one word:
“Never!”
LOCKED IN WITH DEATH
ISOLATED by some accident of time and tide from the rushing currents of the vast ocean that is New York, a certain drab block on Fourth Avenue is a doldrum of stagnation. Here Time moves slowly, if at all. Here dust stirred up in busier streets sifts down to film sidewalk cases that wistfully offer tattered books to browsers who look but seldom buy. Here gray, drowsy men are content to dawdle undisturbed in their grimy shops that are derelict as the rotting wrecks in Neptune’s graveyard of forgotten ships.
Life moves slowly in this back-eddy of the seething metropolis, and Death seems to have passed it by—except in one dingy cubicle—and there Death is a livid, almost tangible presence.
Ford Duane’s Second-Hand Bookstore is no different, even to the most observant eye, from other berths of this port of missing books. Most deliberately it is no different in appearance from the shop of Radley Ransom on its left or that of Lazare Garreau on its right. But the shadows that lie heavily between its high stacks of dogeared volumes are the shadows of fear, and the quiet that broods in its dimness is the hush of an omnipresent dread.
One late afternoon Ford Duane stood, gawky and stooped, in the door of his shop. His shabby alpaca smock hung loosely on his lank frame, so that it seemed painfully, almost cadaverously thin, and heavy grooves were graven deep into his gaunt, expressionless countenance.
Duane’s face was evasively youthful for this abode of the aged and weary. Yet his eyelids were slitted as though the effort to raise them were too great and every line of him drooped with bone weariness… Concealed by the lackadaisical folds of his gray apparel there was slender strength—muscles like steel springs, hairtrigger nerves that could instantaneously command those muscles to lightning-like action. Behind those lowered lids, eyes of the keenest blue were eternally restless, eternally watchful. That leashed power, that unrelenting vigilance, was the price of Ford Duane’s safety—and the safety of a nation!
Hunter and hunted, stalker and stalked, Duane was far more than he seemed. There was a price on his head in more than one chancellery, but in a certain secret room in the nation’s capital he was a number, and a name quite different from that which the tarnished letters on the streaked plate glass above him spelled out.
Ford Duane turned smoothly to a whistle that lilted along the street. His furtive look flicked to the whistler, and a muscle that had twitched along the ridge of his sharp jaw relaxed. It was only a grimy-faced boy in the dark blue of a telegraph company who was approaching.
The messenger-boy glanced at a sheaf of white and blue envelopes in his hand, glanced up at Duane’s window. Stopped.
“Yuh Ford Duane?” the youngster asked.
“Yes. I’m Duane.”
“Postal—ah—Telegraph. Got a message fer yuh. Postal—ah—Telegraph.”
The phrasing was awkward. The pause between the two words of the name was awkward… A pulse pumped in Ford Duane’s wrist.
“All right. Let me have it.” There was nothing in the bookman’s voice to betray his sudden agitation. But behind his untroubled brow his thoughts were whirring. Postal—ah—Telegraph. It had been repeated, making three words out of what should have been two. Three words whose initials were, P-A-T!
“Sign here.”
Duane signed the book P-A-T. Those initial letters were a signal. Now and again they had been cryptically embodied in a peddler’s cry, a street singer’s appeal, a society dame’s querulous berating of her chauffeur. They meant something to Ford Duane. They meant action, and danger… Death! Surely for someone. Perhaps—for him!
“Here’s yuhr telegram.” The boy handed it over, turned away.
“Wait!” Duane’s command had halted him. “Wait a minute.” The book vendor was fumbling in his pocket for a tip, but his hand stayed there. There was startlement in the gray eyes that had sought his face. A sudden darkening in them. Of fear? No. Not fear, but some other obscure emotion. A lock of hair protruding from under the blue, red-braided cap was tawny.
“Flower!” Ford Duane’s exclamation was low-toned as he put a coin in an extended palm that was too white, too soft to be an urchin’s. “Flower! I told you to get out of the game. It’s too dangerous for a…”
“T’anks!” The messenger had whirled again, and was striding down the street. Duane dared not run after her…
There is one army in which a woman can serve as well as a man. It is a wraithlike army that secretly wages a war that never ends; a war of underground strategy; of silent, unsung heroisms; of trickery and deceit; in which triumphs go unrewarded and the participants fail only once.
Because they must remain unknown
to their antagonists, the soldiers of that secret army must be unknown to one another. That is the rule of the game. But they are human, nevertheless, and sometimes a mask slips, a disguise is penetrated. They are human, and though it is far better that they should not, they sometimes have human emotions.
The telegram was clutched in Ford Duane’s right hand. His left pressed furtively against the breast pocket of his smock. Something crackled under that pressure, as dried petals crackle, and a vague fragrance came from it, the perfume of a russet rose. Weeks before that rose had been a wordless message from a comrade whose name he did not even know—except that he called her Flower!
They are very human, the men and women who are phantom fighters in a phantom war.
“Bad news, Duane?” a voice asked, rustling and sere as dead leaves. Radley Ransom peered at him out of rheumy eyes. The old man had shuffled over from his own stall. White-bearded and senile, the only emotion left to him was curiosity. “Taint often any of us gets a telegram.”
“I don’t know, haven’t read it yet.” Ford ripped open the blue and white envelope, pulled out the sheet it contained. “No. Looks like a business message. I’ve been doing a little special trading lately for a couple of collectors. This is from one of them.”
Ransom made shift to get a view of the telegram. “Sure is a long one,” he mumbled, and doddered away. Time was, he ruminated, when he too had hopes of building up a trade among bibliophiles. There was money in it.
Duane’s thin lips were touched by the hint of a grim smile. This was a simple code, and effective because it was simple. Who would suspect the garrulous communication to be other than it seemed?
The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack: 12 Tales of the Masked Hero Page 11
