The others stared, silent.
“No? I thought not. Give the signal! You there at the wireless! Send the signal out!”
The pasty-faced man turned his head and looked questioningly at Carlit. Owl-Eyes nodded. The radio man’s finger touched a switch and vacuum bulbs glowed into sudden light on the table. The finger moved again, reaching for the telegraph key that would send out a signal for America’s destruction, a signal that could not be recalled…
The radio man slithered down in his chair, thudded from it to the floor. A fine, pungent mist followed him down, a mist that had jetted in that final instant across the room.
“Hold it!” husked from the partition door, flung open now. “Just as you are. Move a muscle and I let you have it!”
The shadow that had prowled the lean-to roof was poised, black, ominous, in the doorway. The blackness was that of an ebon-hued cloak enveloping a tensely vibrant form. A black felt hat was pulled low over a countenance faceless because it was completely hidden behind a stygian mask through which only eye-glint showed. One black-gloved hand was visible, menacing Carlit and Horon and the Third Man with the curiously thick-barrelled pistol from which the spray had jetted that had paralysed the radio operator.
The fingers that grasped the butt of that odd weapon were black. That which was curled about the pistols trigger was red, the red of spurting, arterial blood!
“Red Finger!” the Third Man gasped, staggering back a pace as if stunned by the sight of that scarlet digit, then freezing at a menacing dart of the thick-mouthed gun. “Red Finger!”
“Red Finger it is,” the shadow’s ghastly voice agreed. “The one man in America your schemers could not fool. Red Finger, here to greet the new ambassador from.…”
“The second reason for my being sent here,” the Third Man interrupted. “The Leader has empowered me to offer the headship of his American Secret Service when we shall have conquered the United States, at a million dollars a year.”
A short mocking laugh came from beneath the black mask.
Mask, robe, that scarlet trigger finger, were the badge of America’s greatest counter-spy. Known only as Red Finger, he was execrated in half the chancelleries of the world. It might have been the blood of his country’s enemies with which was dyed the digit that gave him his name, so many of them had died because of him.
“Your leader will never conquer the United.…”
A noose, flicking out of the darkness behind him, closed on Red Finger’s throat and choked the sentence off. Another went lower, pinioning his arms, in the same brief instant a hand, darting past his elbow, slashed his gas gun from his hand. He was caught at last! Red Finger was fairly caught at last!
The Third Man laughed, his great belly shaking jelly-like. “The one American we did not fool,” he spluttered. “The great Red Finger.”
The other two moved forward.
The counter-spy made no attempt at a fruitless struggle. He stood erect, seeming somehow supremely unconquered though the tight lariat cut into his arms, though he must be half-strangled by the noose on his throat.
“It was too easy,” the Third Man chuckled. “When I stepped back at your so melodramatic entrance I stepped into the invisible beam of a photo-ray apparatus that alarmed the watchers at the door below. You did not think we conferred here blissfully without protection of any sort, did you?”
“No,” Red Finger managed to push through his clamped larynx. “No.”
There was no longer any humor in the Third Man’s high voice, none in his face. “And so the career of Red Finger is over. My mission is indeed a success.”
“Shall I let him have it now, Your Excellency?” The gruff question came from behind Red Finger. “I have a knife. I can slit him here, under the left shoulder, and he won’t bleed at all.”
The Third Man’s wee mouth twitched. “No,” he said softly. “Not just yet. First he shall watch us send the signal that means his country’s end. Carlit. You can manipulate that wireless, can you not?”
“Yes, your Excellency,” Black Band responded.
“Then go ahead.”
Black Band turned, thumped stiff-legged toward the instrument…
“Wait!” Red Finger snapped. “Don’t touch that key if you do not wish to die!”
Lashed and helpless as he was, something in the way he said that carried utter conviction. Momentarily at least. Carlit hesitated, half-turned…
The Third Man peered at the counterspy intently.
“I’ve got one of your Mills bombs in my other hand,” Red Finger continued, “under this cloak. The pin is out and the lever is held down only by my thumb. If you move another inch I’ll let go—and the explosion will set off all the bales of them on this floor.”
“You lie,” Carlit growled.
“Move and see… You in back of me, I feel your knife against my back. Sink it, if you dare. A dead thumb will not hold the grenade lever down.”
What little color there had been was drained from Owl Eyes’ face. “You will be the first to die. There are thousands of bombs out there, they’ll go off…”
“None of us will have to be buried,” Red Finger agreed. “But that signal of yours will not be sent.
“No.” His faceless head moved to the Third Man. “I did not imagine that your conference was unguarded. It was too easy for me to approach and eavesdrop on it, so I took my precautions. The game’s up, Your Excellency, and you know it.”
The Third Man blinked.
“What is it you wish me to do?”
Red Finger spoke briskly.
“You have a choice. Order your man Carlit to send a message I shall dictate, give me your parole of honor that Carlit and Horon will go back across the sea on the first available steamer, and remain there, and I will permit you to go to Washington and take up your duties as ambassador. Refuse, and I lift my thumb from the lever.”
The fat-thickened lids slitted, so that the tiny eyes beneath them almost vanished. There was a moment of brittle silence, while the fate of two nations hung in the balance of one man’s decision. Then:
“What is the message you wish sent?” the Third Man sighed. “It will be sent exactly as you wish.” There was something magnificent in the way he accepted defeat.
Red Finger shrugged. “I shall be sure of that. I can read the code—in any language. Ready Mr. Carlit?”
Black Band nodded, his face purple with a rage that did not permit speech, his hand on the instrument’s key.
“Here is the message. ‘To all Green Shirt units wherever located. Our plans have been countermanded by the Leader.’” The whistling signal was clearly audible from the ear-phones that had been jerked from the operator’s head as he fell. “‘All previous orders are cancelled. Destroy all munitions caches. Destroy all weapons in your possession. Disband all units. By authority of the Leader’s personal ambassador.’”
It was finished. The Third Man spread his gross arms wide, in a gesture almost pathetic. “What now, Red Finger?”
“Now,” the shadow answered, “you will order these ropes removed from me and we shall go down, single file, out of this place, Horon carrying the radio man. Then I shall bid you goodbye.”
The Third Man nodded slowly, gestured to Carlo and Horon, and led the way from the room.
Five figures slithered out of a riverfront alley’s mouth, paused in the center of the wide cobbled street that was now deserted, though in a few hours it would resound with the roar of traffic.
“Where’s Red Finger?” Horon inquired. “Where’s—” His voice was drowned by a thunderous explosion, by a red flame spurting high into the heavens.…
“I don’t know where Red Finger went,” the Third Man husked, “but there went the end of a dream of empire.”
* * * *
; A Week after the events related herewith, Ford Duane stood in the doorway of his second-hand bookshop on Fourth Avenue. It was a glorious morning and even in that dusty thoroughfare the sun was a white glory.
Duane held a newspaper in his hands.
The headlines across its outspread page read:
COAL MINE AGREEMENT SIGNED, LONGSHOREMEN VOTE NO STRIKE.
PRESIDENT’S FIRESIDE CHAT HAILS DAWN OF NEW ERA OF INDUSTRIAL GOOD WILL.
Down near the middle of the sheet, just below the fold, a much smaller headline announced that a certain incoming ambassador to Washington, having presented his credentials, in a special interview had predicted a lessening of war tension.
And at the bottom of the page, a brief cabled dispatch from that envoy’s country described the “return from maneuvers” of the dictator’s armed aerial forces and the dispersal of their pilots and observers to civilian life.…
A brief smile flicked across the gaunt bookseller’s weary face and faded. He turned, and moved slowly to his desk.
A grey silk scarf was arranged in a swirl beneath the goose-neck lamp. On the scarf there rested a corrugated metal ball the size of a coconut, a tiny lever wired down to its surface.
THE SPY WHO SOLD DEATH
Even the brilliance of the morning sun and the crisp, tangy morning breeze, could not make the bookstall-lined Fourth Avenue block other than a sluggish back-eddy of the city’s flood. Grey men dwelt sleepily here among their grey books; men and books equally withdrawn from life. Elsewhere, the eager day was beginning for thousands of school children, stenographers and clerks, laborers and brokers, shopkeepers and mechanics. Here the night’s sleep yawned only into a waking drowse, a desultory dealing in tattered volumes, a browsing among out-dated magazines.
Elsewhere, life was vibrant, earnest; here it was a quiet flow of featureless days. The booksellers of Fourth Avenue want only to be left alone by a troubled world less real to them than printed words on yellow, crumbling leaves. These Keepers of the Port of Missing Books were, for the most part, grey old men.
Ford Duane, tall and gaunt, stooped under the weight of a lassitude dreary as his dog-eared stock-in-trade, was not old, but he was grey and droop-lidded and musty as the rest. He lounged in the doorway of his store, his shabby alpaca smock hanging loose from his lank frame, and to the chance observer he seemed affected by a vast disinterest in anything save the flicker of shadows on the sidewalk at his feet.
It would have taken a close observer, indeed, to have noted that beneath their veiling curtains his grey eyes were sharply keen, that they flicked to every passer-by with a swift, almost terror-inspired sizing up.
It was impossible to see that within his enveloping smock muscles were coiled like steel springs, ready for any call, and that in its pocket was an unobtrusive weapon on whose instant availability Duane’s very life might depend.
His life and, perhaps, far more than his life. Ford Duane was far other than he seemed. The quiet that lay about him was the brooding quiet of perpetual peril, that with which he dwelt was the eternal threat of death.
* * * *
Beyond this quiet street, beyond the hurly-burly of the awakening city, beyond the billowing ocean at the confluence of whose trackless highways it stands, the peoples of two Continents are arming and armed and trembling on the brink of war. Incident after incident, challenge after challenge occur, strife seems at last inevitable, yet at the final moment, at many final moments, it is averted. Strange that no one of these hot sparks sets the tinderbox of the Old World aflame? Yes, strange indeed, unless one comprehends that the balance of power and strength is equal balanced to a hairsbreadth, that there can be no hope of victory for either side, unless…
Unless the Giant of the West can somehow be induced to place its weight in one or the other scale. Unless unwilling America can, somehow, be drawn into the conflict.
To this end, an unseen army wages an invisible, continuous war between these far-flung coasts of ours, a war one against the other but both against our integrity, our reluctance to be embroiled in a strife that concerns us not. Against this end, a small but gallant company wages a secret defence. Unknown, unhonored, unacknowledged, devoted men toil to prevent the holocaust and disaster those other secret ones would bring upon us.
Of this invisible company Ford Duane was one.
Perhaps he was thinking of this. Perhaps he was recalling that in a dozen chancelleries there was a price posted on his head. Perhaps he was thinking only that it had been a month or more since a summons had come to him to prepare for special action against his country’s secret enemies.
* * * *
A small boy went whistling along the sidewalk. A spate of traffic, released by the signal light’s flick from red to green, surged between the curbs. A postman, blue-grey shoulder tugged down by his laden bag, trudged slowly toward Duane.
The postman turned in between the trestled boxes wherein were displayed Bargains in Books and nodded a good morning to the youth. He delved into his bag, handed Ford Duane a small package and retreated.
Duane turned the paper-wrapped bundle in his long, tapering fingers till the address was uppermost. Printed in a childish, unformed hand the return card told a message which only he knew—
FROM PATRICIA ANN THOMAS
PATTISON, AUSTIN CO., TEXAS
A muscle twitched at the corner of Duane’s sharp jaw. There was no other sign that what he read had any meaning. But the initials, P-A-T, of the putative sender; the initials, P-A-T, repeated in her address, told him that there was a message contained in the package—perchance the very summons for which he had been waiting.
He tore the paper from it, there in full view of any who might be watching. He held up, plain in the sunlight, a belt woven from white beads, utterly without design.
Duane examined the belt in the sunlight, tried it about his waist. It was much too big. He pretended to laugh, turned and went into the gloomy interior of his shop. He went straight back between the high, dark bookstacks to a curtained opening in a partition at the rear, hooked the curtain back as he went through so that anyone who might happen to come in could see the unpainted wooden table within and the rumpled cot that marked the space as his living quarters. He tossed the belt on the table, carelessly, and it seemed only by accident that it fell flat. It was shadowy here and so only natural that he should turn on a two-socketed reading-lamp standing on the table. He did it quietly.
He threw himself on the cot, picked up a book that lay face down on it. He appeared to be reading the book but his look slid over its top and to the seemingly unregarded belt.
In the light from the lamp some of the beads glowed with a violet radiance of their own. Those which were thus fluorescent made an unsymmetrical pattern, thus:
. . _ . _ _ _ . _ . . . . _ _ . _ . . _ _ _ . . _ . _ . _ .
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . . . _ _ . _ . . _ . . . . _ _ _ _ _ . . .
. . _ _ _ _ . . _ . . _ . . . _ . . _ . _ _ . . _ . . . . _
. . . _ . _ . . _ . _ _ _
The dots and dashes were in the Morse code, and Duane read them as fluently as though they were in the common alphabet. He read; “Foreign agent Room 3 Winston Hotel Determine identity T.”
He reached out and twitched the strap from the table-top. A thread broke and the whole thing unravelled, the beads spilling to the floor. Duane heaved from his couch, looked ruefully down at the mess he had made, scratching his head.
A quarter hour later he was out on the sidewalk in front of his shop, was speaking to Otto Rumpf, the bearded, skull-capped owner of the bookstore next to him on the left. “I’m feeling rotten today,” he said. “If you’ll watch my place for me I’ll go in back and lie down.”
The man peered at him with bleared eyes magnified by thick lenses. “Ja,” he growled. “Your lips are cracked und dere iss no color in your f
ace. Go und rest. I vill tage care uff your shtore like mein own.”
Duane returned to the small room in the rear and lay down again, pulling the blankets up over his shoulders and his head. The long form tossed for a while and then was still.
Ford Duane crawled out from behind the cot, glanced backward to it. The lumped sheets under the blanket looked very realistic. No one glancing through the half-curtained opening would have any reason to doubt that he still lay there. He crawled to a side wall that could not be seen from outside and lifted to his feet. A touch of his finger on an excrescence in the plaster—and a panel slid noiselessly open to reveal a recessed niche. Duane went into the niche and the panel closed silently behind him.
* * * *
The Winston Hotel’s cheap facade leared at the crowded Bowery block, each shuttered window a separate, significant wink. A creaking sign over the shabby entrance said: Transients. Rooms $1.50.
There were no questions asked of the ‘transients’ who patronized the Winston. They paid their buck and a half at the desk, strictly in advance, took their keys and climbed uncarpeted stairs to rooms indicated by the numbered tags. If they chose to have slinking, furtive visitors of either sex no one cared. If they didn’t pay another buck and a half before nine in the morning they were requested to leave, none too politely. If they did pay, they were permitted to remain.
Stores on the ground floor left space only for the narrow lobby and the stairs, so Room 3 was one flight up level with the “El” station platform. Its shutters were tightly closed and the black shades drawn down, so that there was scarcely any light in it—and its three occupants were vague, shadowy figures.
Two of these figures, short, possessed of a curious litheness, were standing. The third was in a chair, bold upright with a strange rigidity, and his outlines showed him to be far bulkier than the others. The muffled sound he made was distinctly that of a throat trying to force words past a gag.
The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack: 12 Tales of the Masked Hero Page 16
