Serenti got three little capsules from Karloff. The drug addict gulped them down like a famished dog swallowing a bit of meat. His nerves quieted. He relaxed and leaned against the bars, sighing contentedly. But Karloff was not as kind as his manner indicated.
Suddenly Serenti stiffened. His eyes all but popped from their sockets. His veins bulged and seemed to writhe like snakes. He choked and struggled in a terrible agony for breath. He howled like some wounded creature in the wilderness.
“Karloff! Karloff—you fiend! The—the green death!”
“Yes,” breathed Karloff, “the green death.”
IN amazement the Agent watched a startling transformation in the pigmentation of Serenti’s skin. The tortured man suddenly slumped to the floor. “X” knew he was dead. That was not astounding, considering the treachery of Karloff. But what opened the Agent’s eyes was that Serenti’s skin had turned green, a horrible, deathly, muddy green—the hue of some dread arsenical poison.
“Come, gentlemen,” said Karloff softly.
Not once had the leader scowled or smiled or sneered. Only his gentle voice had the tone of ugly insinuation. He moved away with the softness of a cat. In the big room, he handed “X” a small square of powdered narcotic wrapped in white paper. By this time the Agent was cleverly simulating frayed nerves, playing his part of Louie Corbeau. He grabbed the deck of dope, opened it with trembling fingers.
At least, he appeared to open the one Karloff had given him. But right before the sinister man’s searching, penetrating ferret eyes, “X” performed a brilliant trick of sleight-of-hand. He had palmed another square of power—a harmless powder. This one he opened, having palmed the one Karloff handed him. Quickly, dexterously he poured the powder on the back of his hand, and sniffed it. Immediately he straightened up, squared his shoulders and smiled.
Karloff was gone. He had drifted away again, his tread as soft as a cat’s. The Agent found himself alone with Gus Tansley. After a few minutes of idle conversation, “X” decided that he could learn something from Tansley by skillfully guiding the talk. He worked around to the subject of dope, and the trafficking of this drug.
“What I can’t understand, Tansley,” he said, “is why we risk our lives, why fellows like Serenti get the green death, all to transport and distribute dope that is given away!”
The Secret Agent’s eyes were brightly alert. He hoped he was close to a solution of the enigma that had puzzled him all along—the purpose behind the dope ring’s free distribution of the dread stuff. His questioning of Tansley was a shot in the dark, but it connected.
Tansley laughed wickedly.
“You’re a sappy guy, Corbeau. I figured you was wiser than that.”
The Agent waited tensely for Tansley to go on. For a moment it seemed that the mobster would say no more. Then, with the arrogance of one who feels himself in possession of superior wisdom he continued:
“You saw how Serenti was howling for the junk. You know yourself how shaky you was before Karloff handed you a deck. It takes a week to make a hoppy. How many ever get off the stuff?”
The Agent shrugged. He knew that the percentage was very small. The cure depended on the will of the addict, and most of them were weak-willed at the outset. The drug undermined what little moral strength they had, so most cases were hopeless.
“Not many, I guess,” answered “X.” “But I still can’t figure why we’re going in for this gift proposition.”
“Till America’s right in our fist, Corbeau! That’s why.”
“It don’t seem smart, Gus,” returned the Agent. “I know a little about dope. I know that a hundred tons of opium are enough to give the docs of the world all they need. Yet more than two thousand tons are being turned out—and a lot of that tonnage is coming to America. We get everybody twitching and jerking for a shot, and guys like this Martel will jump in and cop the business.”
TANSLEY smirked. “For a little while, yes,” he said. “But it costs a hell of a lot to smuggle dope into the country—and half the junk the peddlers handle is adulterated with about fifty percent sugar of milk. Lots of guys fork over two bucks for a deck, and get nothing but a pinch of salt. But we’ll sell the straight stuff—and underbid any dope ring in America. Even with all of this free junk we’ll make profits the first day we start selling. Now do you get the idea, sap?”
Agent “X” nodded. He got the idea all right. A chill seemed to pass slowly through his blood. The free samples constituted a hideous advertising campaign, a build-up for a tremendous sales onslaught that could not fail. In all his experience with vicious criminals he had never run into anything more appalling than this.
The menace of a foreign invasion had been abolished. But in its place was this monstrous, hydra-headed scheme that was just as terrible. And it was not only possible, but too imminently probable.
Agent “X” knew that statisticians claimed that one-fourth of China’s four hundred million were opium smokers. A hundred million drug addicts in Asia alone. And every twelfth person in India chewed or smoked opium. What if that fate visited America, a land of highly organized nervous systems, keyed up to the pitch of modern civilization? Would the filth, the squalor, the untold misery of the Far East become the Fate of America?
“X” was about to ask how this drug ring could possibly smuggle enough of the stuff in to underbid the other rings, when he noticed a slender thread of wire, colored the mahogany of the furniture, that ran down the leg of the table at which they sat. Quickly he reached his hand under the table and felt a small, hard-rubber disc. A dictograph.
“Yeah,” Gus Tansley was saying, “in another month we’ll all be on the gravy train. Hell, us that’ve got in the outfit early will be drawing in so much cash, we’ll have to hire bookkeepers to tally each day’s take. Gold mines and oil wells ain’t in it. They peter out. But a cokehead ain’t gonna stop sniffin’ till he croaks!”
“You’ve said enough,” spoke a soft voice behind Tansley.
“X,” who had been tensely alert, had not heard the approach of Karloff. The chief came out of the gloom as softly as a cloud. There was no anger in his voice, but just a faint reproach that was deadly in its gentleness.
“Corbeau,” said Karloff somberly, “you are too inquisitive. Tansley, you are too willing to answer questions. I have listened and I am not pleased. I was not pleased with the way Serenti regaled the police with secrets. You know what happened to Serenti!”
Tansley instantly sank to his knees and clutched at Karloff’s legs. He began sobbing, pleading. In a flash all the arrogance had left him. He was a quivering craven, blubbering for mercy, from a man who bad no mercy in his soul.
Agent “X” stood up, aloof, a certain grim majesty in his bearing, his eyes cold with deadly challenge.
“Karloff!” shrieked Tansley. “You—you’re not going to give it to us? Not the—green death!”
“Yes, Tansley,” said Karloff with his faint lisp. “I’m going to give it to you and Corbeau both. You’re gabbing, gossiping fools who have no place in this organization. You’ll be squealing next, telling secrets to the police—the way Serenti did. You have earned the green death!”
Chapter V
CRIMSON MENACE
THE Agent looked quickly about the big room. Karloff had forestalled a dash for an exit. There were five doorways, though only one led to the tunnel. Framed in each opening was a vicious mobster, gripping an automatic. They were shaking, drug-famished men, eager for the favor of their chief. They had been companions of Tansley and Corbeau, had laughed and joked and eaten with them, and had risked their lives side by side. But now they would riddle the two with lead, if Karloff gave the word.
The reason was plainly apparent. Mastered by drugs, they had seen the horrible torture that deprivation had inflicted on Serenti. And they were sick, suffering men. No doubt Karloff had promised a bonus of white powder for this job. Karloff had but to nod, and their guns would crash. They were his slaves, for their drug supply depended upon him.
The Agent hesitated. Even to raise his hand would bring a hurricane of lead. And Karloff was about four feet away. Not much chance of delivering a knock-out punch, either. These mobsters would press triggers before he took a step.
Realizing their advantage they were closing in. Insanity glittered in their eyes. They were palsied, shaking like victims of St. Vitus’ dance. Along with the deathly peril which these hopheads symbolized, the sight of them in their loathsome wretchedness was sickening.
The Agent’s eyes were magnetic, impelling, hypnotic, as they fixed on the chief with a withering stare.
Karloff felt the power behind those eyes. One shoulder raised in a defensive attitude. He made an apologetic gesture with his hand. Yet there was irony in Karloff’s manner. He held the winning card and was gloating in that fact.
Looking straight at him, “X” spoke, still in the role of Corbeau.
“You’re a sap, Karloff,” he said in a contemptuous voice. “You’ve got so few brains you have to get tough all the time. A weak sister, Karloff, that’s you. Without dope, and a lot of dopies to manhandle guys for you you’d be hanging out in the municipal lodging house.”
“X” had deliberately stung Karloff’s pride, yet the man was too well-schooled in poker-faced inscrutability to show anger.
“Quite a speech, Corbeau,” he said softly. “But I am not a free agent. I must answer to my superiors for the mistakes of my men. So I strike hard and swiftly.”
“Yeah—that’s what you say—and who are these guys that make you jump when they snap their fingers?”
Agent “X” hardly hoped to get information; and Karloff shook his head.
“I do not give away secrets like Tansley here—and like our friend Serenti. Perhaps that is why I keep my job, whereas you—”
That was as far as Karloff got in his explanation. The drug-craved mobsters were close. The Agent suddenly dived in a football tackle, his hard-muscled shoulder striking Karloff at the knees and knocking him to the cement floor. The chief shouted for his mobsters to shoot, but they could not, without hitting Karloff, for he was on top of “X.”
The Agent got his gun from his shoulder holster and shot out the lights, utilizing his lightninglike draw. The gunmen rushed toward the fallen pair. Gus Tansley scrambled to his feet and started for an exit. One of the other mobsters took a chance and shot wildly then, and Gus Tansley uttered a scream of agony.
“They got me, Corbeau!” he shrieked. “Right in the guts. Come on, you rats! I’m finished, but I’ll take some of you with me!”
Wounded, Tansley acquired the sudden courage that hysteria gives a coward whose doom is sealed. His automatic snarled fiercely. Someone screamed. Karloff was bellowing orders, but they only added to the wild confusion. The Agent was the single person with self-possession. He crawled toward Tansley, guided by the dope fiend’s frenzied voice.
“Quiet—and keep down!” “X” said in a low, tense voice. “There’s a chance of getting out of here. Shut up—or we’ll never make it!”
THE firing had ceased now, for the basement was as dark as a vat of tar, and the gunmen feared shooting one another. Crawling toward the door, “X” half dragged Tansley. The hophead wouldn’t have been in this mess except for his talk with the Agent. He was twisted, warped, less than half a man, but possibly there was something still to reclaim, something to justify his life. “X” would get him out of here and to an institution.
The gunmen were clustering around Karloff, who was threatening them with the green death. But their bravado was gone. Darkness and the chance of stopping a bullet took the fight out of them. So the Agent made the door and got Gus Tansley through the tunnel to the workman’s cottage. There the drug addict collapsed.
He was bleeding heavily, and “X” realized he was through. So did Tansley.
“I’m a goner, Corbeau,” he moaned. “Any of them rats would double-cross a brother or shoot his dad for a deck of coke. Croakin’ doesn’t seem so hard, but the pain, Corbeau—the pain! Geez! Give me a shot, just one little shot before I go!”
Tansley’s body relaxed. A fixed stare came to his glazed eyes. His mouth was half open. Another tragedy had been marked up to the evil of dope? Tansley was through, and his last words had been startlingly significant of the terrible power of narcotics. With death reaching out, Tansley had still been under dope’s insidious spell. His only request, before he passed into eternity was the plea of all dope slaves—“just one little shot—”
The gunmen were in the tunnel now. Tansley lay beyond help, so “X” dashed on through the door and down the alley. Shortly he had blended into the surge of the healthy, work-a-day world.
In a fever of excitement he took a devious route to one of his hideouts and began changing his disguise. A desperate plan had come to his mind—one of those strange schemes that made Secret Agent “X’s” method of work unpredictable and astounding. He had located one of the strongholds of the gang dispensing the free dope. There were dozens of vicious gunmen there, and a man who was more a fiend than a human being. “X” could not hope to round them up single-handed. And, so great was the peril of the spreading menace, that he could not leave these men to carry on with their devilish work. Something must be done and done quickly, and Agent “X” had made up his mind.
The impersonation that “X” created now was what he called one of his “stock disguises.” It was a makeup he had used before in other cities. It would do for the plan he had in mind.
Completely changed in appearance from the mobster Corbeau, he went across the city again to the office of Orrin Q. Mathews, local head of the Federal Narcotic Bureau.
It was early morning, yet the anteroom was filled with people. “X” saw that he might be kept waiting for an hour or more, and time was precious.
He took a piece of paper from his pocket and a pencil. In a moment he had written a carefully worded note, calculated to arouse the interest of the chief inside. It stated that the writer of the note had important information bearing on the drug evil that was menacing the city. This “X” folded and handed to an attendant with instructions to give it at once to Mathews.
It gained Agent “X” an interview immediately. Mathews was sitting behind his desk, his forehead creased with worry. In the person of Agent “X,” now calling himself Biggers, the narcotic head saw a drab-faced man who could have been an overworked bookkeeper. The Agent’s walk was shuffling, apologetic. He let his hands dangle at his side. His acting was perfect.
“What is it, Biggers?” demanded Mathews in a gruff voice. “I’m a busy man, as you must know. Have you really something to tell me, or are you just another crank seeking publicity or wanting to spread slander? Every man with a grudge against some one, it seems, is coming here trying to pin this narcotic business on some person he doesn’t like. My men are kept busy following false leads. Quick, what is it you have to tell me?”
“X” glanced at a clerk in the room with Mathews. He made a significant gesture with one eyebrow, and at a word from Mathews the clerk withdrew. Mathews and Agent “X” were left alone.
“Now,” said Mathews. “Quick, spill it!”
MATHEWS sat back in his chair. He produced a cigar and stuck it between his lips. The Agent smiled grimly. This suited him nicely. He quickly brought a lighter from his pocket—one that he kept for special uses.
“Allow me,” he said, snapping it into flame.
“X” lighted the cigar, and as Mathews puffed it energetically, waiting for “X” to begin, the Agent suddenly pressed a tiny lever on his briquet. The flame went out, and there was a hiss in its place. A jet of the same harmless gas that he had used in the dragon-headed ring in Chinatown went into Mathews’ nostrils. With
a single prolonged wheeze, the narcotic head sank slowly forward on his desk. The cigar dropped from inert fingers. The Agent’s anaesthetic gas, potent and concentrated, had acted as quickly as a punch to the jaw.
Holding his own breath so as not to inhale any of the vapors still in the air, Agent “X” dragged Mathews from his chair and stretched him on a small leather couch. Swiftly he locked the door and took his portable make-up materials from the pocket. These included his flesh-colored pigments and tubes of plastic paste that his expert fingers could model with such an amazing skill.
He studied Mathews’ features for nearly a minute, then went to work. The disguise of Biggers came off. In its place he built up a likeness of Mathews. He changed to Mathews’ clothes, and then, gagging the official, he placed him in a closet. A few minutes later “X” unlocked the door, as like Mathews as though he had been the federal man’s twin brother. He poked his head into the next office.
“Hayes,” he addressed the clerk who had gone out, imitating Mathews’ deep voice accurately. “Send Wells in. Tell Everts to get the Thompson guns ready. I want Creager to drive the car. Have Lorson and McAllister wait down below. We’re going to stage a raid that may make history.”
The men whose names “X” gave so fluently were members of the narcotic squad whose activities were known to him. The clerk hurried to follow instructions, tense with excitement.
“X” sat back in his desk chair, alert in mind and body. He had had little time to study the characteristics of Mathews. There was a chance that his daring impersonation of the man might be detected by his subordinates. But “X,” profound student of psychology, was counting on the excitement of the occasion to cover any slight errors he might make. An important raid would put the men on edge.
Wells was the first to come in. “X” was rustling through some papers on his desk. He did not speak until he had jumped up and grabbed his hat. Wells’ face showed no suspicion.
“Just got a tip,” said the Agent quickly. “Don’t know whether it has much basis or not, but I think it has. A lot of cranks have been yapping their heads off around here, as you know. But this time it looks like I’ve got something. Down at Haswell and Riverfront. An old condemned warehouse. The tip says it’s a headquarters for the dope ring that’s been giving the stuff away. Imagine that, Wells—snow selling for sixty-four bucks an ounce—and this gang handing it out free! Well, here’s a chance to stop ’em—maybe—and confiscate a pile of dope.”
Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3 Page 36
