Secret Agent X : The Complete Series Volume 3

by Emile C. Tepperman

  On an alley-like street at the edge of these slums, close to this area of tinsel and crime, Agent “X” stopped. He got out of his car, strolled along the narrow pavement in the role of a plainly dressed young man—with no particular destination in mind. But his eyes were alert. He was definitely looking for some one.

  The morning bustle of the section had begun. Pushcarts loaded with fruit, vegetables, and sea food rattled by. The streets were filling up with early shoppers, old women with kerchiefs over their heads, young children sent out to buy a few pennies’ worth of food.

  The Agent noted all these, but his gaze drifted on. He crossed the alley, came to a wider street at the edge of the criminal quarter, paused at a corner to look in both directions. Then suddenly a flitting smile curved his lips.

  A thin, scarecrow of a man with sightless sockets for eyes, was coming down the block. He was walking steadily, surely, along the pavement, with no cane to guide him. His head was tilted back. He was sniffing the cool morning air. Before him, tied around his middle with a piece of string, was a small tray holding a few packets of chewing gum; Agent “X” knew this man.

  Thaddeus Penny was his name. Once, disguised as a character, “Robbins,” “X” had helped Penny, saved him from being thrown out of his small furnished room for the non-payment of rent. Since then “X” had often met Penny, and the blind beggar was ever grateful to the man he knew only as Robbins.

  Agent “X” walked forward now. Penny was blind, stone blind, having lost his eyesight years before in a tenement fire. But, because of his affliction, his wits and all his other faculties seemed to have grown keener. He could walk about without a cane, could read by means of the Braille system, could identify men by their voices and the minute sounds they made.

  THE blind beggar suddenly paused as “X” came opposite. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Intelligence brightened his sensitive, sightless face. Agent “X” moved by, watching. Penny turned around then, looked after him, as though those empty sockets were gifted with some strange second sight. But “X” knew the blind man was receiving impressions through his ears alone. He paused, returned, and as he passed this time, Thaddeus Penny spoke:

  “Mr. Robbins!” he said. “I thought it was your step. Now I know—you’re trying to play tricks on me!”

  Unhesitatingly, Penny came forward and laid a hand on “X’s” arm. His fingers clasped the Agent’s for a moment in a friendly grip.

  “Right, Thaddeus,” said “X.” “You’re out early this morning. I saw you and wondered if I could sneak by—but I might have known I couldn’t. Let’s have a piece of that gum.”

  Penny was silent for a second or two, his pale, lined face expressionless. He seemed to be listening—or thinking.

  “You didn’t just stop me to say hello or to buy gum,” he said suddenly. “You’re worried about something. You’re breathing faster and not so deep as usual, Mr. Robbins. Anything the matter?”

  Agent “X” threw back his head and laughed—something he seldom did, grim manhunter that he was. But Thaddeus Penny’s amazing powers of concentration and deduction always amused him.

  “It’s lucky, Thaddeus,” he said, “that you don’t go in for crime. If you did, nobody would be safe!”

  “Crime!” said the blind man. “So, that’s it! You’re always talking about crime, Mr. Robbins.” Penny smiled knowingly, staring vacantly into space. “I once told you you were a detective, you remember. Then I took it back, because you don’t act like any detective I’ve ever known before.”

  “How do I act, Thaddeus?” asked Agent “X” suddenly. Blind as Penny was, he was one man whom Agent “X” suspected of knowing more than he admitted. “X” could come to him in any disguise. It was his voice and step that Penny recognized. But it sometimes seemed that Penny, with his remarkable brain, sensed the strange, magnetic qualities of Agent “X,” also.

  “You act like a man,” said Penny slowly, “who sees farther than any eye could reach. And you act like a man who has a lot to think about.”

  “The latter is true, anyhow, Thaddeus. I’ve got a lot to think about. And this morning I’m thinking about crime, as you say.” The Agent sank his voice lower then, so that no one passing on the street might hear. “There’ve been a great many robberies and murders this past week, Thaddeus, a great deal of crime in this town. Some say the police are being bribed. Others say they’re scared. I don’t know which is right. But there must be criminals who are getting rich and fat. I’d like, for private reasons, to know who they are.”

  Thaddeus Penny nodded slowly, understandingly. A slow smile overspread his face, a knowing smile as though he suspected the purposes and motives of his friend Robbins and approved of them.

  He cocked his head to one side again, listening to all sounds on the block. Then he drew “X” against the wall of a building, leaned close and spoke, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  “I get about a bit,” he said, “and sometimes ears are better than eyes. Sometimes I hear and remember things that others quickly forget—because when a man’s blind all he has to amuse him are his thoughts. He plays games with himself—tries to fit things together.”

  Penny smiled and nodded slowly, tapping “X’s” arm. “Maybe you’ve heard of a fellow named Gus Sanzoni. He’s been quiet for years, isn’t rated as much of a big shot—but they say he made a pile of dough during prohibition. He had cookers working for him on a hundred stills and he had a mob. But when money comes easy, it goes easy, too. I heard that Sanzoni gambled away everything, lost his mob and his power, and had only a night club left. Then, lately, some of the fellows that used to work for him are calling him a big shot again instead of a cheap punk. There’s ‘Dutch’ Wilken, Mateo the Moocher, and ‘Little’ Dellman among ’em. They seem to feel frisky lately. The girls say they’re flashing big rolls. Don’t ask me how they get ’em. But when a crook has big money, there’s always blood on it. And Gus Sanzoni don’t pay men just because they’re his pals.”

  The eyes of Agent “X” shone brightly as he listened. Bates and Hobart had men drifting through the tenderloin section, probably within a stone’s throw of him now. Yet they had learned nothing. The lips of the underworld had remained closed to them. It had taken the sharp ears of a blind beggar to hear the whispers that the Agent wanted, the rumors, that might send him in desperate, daring conflict against the menace that lay like a curse of waiting death over the whole great city.

  Chapter X

  A STRAIGHT TIP

  HE thanked Thaddeus Penny quietly, withholding from his voice all trace of the deep excitement he felt. Yet Penny nodded wisely and laid a hand on “X’s” arm.

  “That’s the news you wanted, isn’t it?” he said. “It sort of fits in with something you had in mind. You’re breathing fast again. I can almost hear your heart beat. But don’t go and get into trouble. Even if you’re a detective stay away from Gus Sanzoni. He’s like the rats that come out from the cellars at night. They run if you go right after them—but like as not they’ll turn around and bite you in the back afterwards.”

  A thin smile twisted the lips of Agent “X.” “Don’t get into trouble,” Thaddeus Penny had said. But trouble was the Agent’s daily bread, trouble of the most bizarre and violent sort—trouble that other men would flinch from, but which he had grown hardened to.

  “I’ll take care of myself, Thaddeus,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry about me. Suppose you give me a package of that gum.”

  Agent “X” tossed a nickel into the old cigar box which Penny used as a tray; but along with it he dropped a crumpled five-dollar bill. This maneuver didn’t escape Penny’s sharp ears, however. The faint rustle of the bill was audible to him.

  “There you go again, Mr. Robbins, giving me a cash hand-out! I won’t take it, I—”

  “Your tip was worth it, Thaddeus. If you don’t need the money, give it to some friend who’s in a hole. I’ll be seeing you later. And thanks again.”

  Agent
“X” walked swiftly away from the blind beggar. He passed one of Jim Hobart’s men sauntering toward the tenderloin. But the detective didn’t guess for a moment that the person he’d brushed was the power behind his own employer, the man he had to thank for his job and his pay.

  In his small, fast car again, “X” sped uptown. Thaddeus Penny had given him a tip which demanded instant attention. The Agent parked his coupé, this time, close to a wide, luxurious drive bordering the river. Not far away was the yacht club where was anchored Monte Sutton’s yacht, the Osprey, and where Mayor Ballantine had tried to forget his troubles in an atmosphere of glamorous gaiety.

  But for the moment Agent “X” had decided to tackle the menace that hung over the city from another angle. He had gone to the municipality’s highest executive without accomplishing anything except the crystallization of his own belief that something was radically wrong.

  Later he had found the Terror’s document in the mayor’s home. Now he would delve into the lowest depths of the criminal underworld—in an effort to trace down the Terror’s men and make contact with the Terror himself.

  Closing and locking the door of the coupé, “X” walked swiftly down a side street and stopped at last before a high brick wall. On the other side of this the gables and peaked roof of an old house showed. Even at a distance there was an air of desolation about the place, an air of disuse and decay.

  “X” stepped through a hedge of sparse evergreens. His form blended with the shadows along the wall for a moment. A key grated in an ancient lock. A rusty gate swung open, closed softly—and Agent “X” was in the mysterious, statue-strewn rear yard of the old Montgomery Mansion.

  He crossed it quickly to the back of the house that had been closed for years because of the bitter litigation of heirs. Here he descended a flight of stairs to a basement entrance, went inside and climbed more stairs to a butler’s pantry.

  Under his pressure on a secret lever, one of the big pantry shelves swung out. A door was revealed here, with a large room behind it, a chamber that no one except an architect going over the cubic space of the house would ever suspect. Agent “X” was in a hideout where none had ever been able to trace him.

  He went at once to a series of metal cabinets. Here were perhaps the most complete criminological files in the country. Here was data on famous criminals and lesser-known ones that even the police did not possess. Here were odd facts and strange human sidelights which aided the Secret Agent in his amazing work. Fingerprints and Bertillon measurements were included. The files had a cross index system, the result of painstaking hours of labor on the Agent’s part. He quickly drew out a small envelope containing the life history of Gus Sanzoni, the man of whom Thaddeus Penny had spoken.

  All the facts were given here, many of which “X” remembered. But he wanted to check up and make sure. The Gangster’s first steps in crime were recorded; his early thefts as a parcel snatcher. His leadership of a gang of hoodlums. His rise to power during the prohibition era when his business sharpness and brutal tactics made him the head of one of the city’s largest bootleg rings. Then the loss of his fortune and his decline into comparative obscurity as the owner of a night club when the repeal law was passed. Names of Sanzoni’s mobsters were included.

  The Agent quickly found an item that interested him. Two of Sanzoni’s former lieutenants, Floyd Kittredge and “Bugs” Gary, were in prison. They had been held in connection with a cop shooting during a liquor raid. Bugs Gary’s time was almost up. He had only a month more to serve. His term had been shortened owing to good behavior in prison.

  Agent “X” quickly memorized the data on Bugs Gary. It wasn’t quite as complete as he would have liked, yet it would serve his purpose. He left his hideout twenty minutes later, satisfied that he had a definite working plan.

  THAT afternoon a long-distance call was received in Washington by a man who preferred to be known only as K9. He was an official of the government, so high that a mere suggestion from his lips became a command elsewhere.

  For five minutes Secret Agent “X,” speaking in a low, guarded voice, and using a private wire straight to Capital Hill, talked to K9. K9 listened and agreed.

  The governor of the state in which crime had so strangely broken out and was racing unchecked, received an official government message within the hour. It suggested immediate clemency for the ex-gangster, Bugs Gary.

  This message was transmitted to the warden of the prison where Bugs was held. From then on, the wheels of the official machinery, which Secret Agent “X” had set in motion, moved speedily.

  Bugs was called into the warden’s office. He was told that because of good behavior, the governor had seen fit to shorten his sentence. He was handed his pardon, told that he was now a free man. And, slightly dazed, hardly believing his good fortune, he walked out of the prison gates, with money in his pocket and a new suit of clothes provided by the state on his back.

  He didn’t notice the inconspicuously featured man in brown, who at once trailed him. The stranger’s manner was so casual that even a criminal twice as clever as Bugs would not have suspected he was being followed.

  Yet when Bugs went to the station and swung aboard an express bound for the city, the man in brown was on the car, too. He took a seat close to Bugs, keeping the ex-gangster under surveillance through a tiny hole torn in the newspaper which he held before his face.

  There was more than mere curiosity in the stranger’s eyes. There was studied appraisal. He was watching hawk-eyed every gesture Bugs made. When the gangster asked the conductor a question about the train schedule, the man listened to each syllable of the criminal’s voice, storing it away carefully in his memory. At the big Union Depot where Bugs Gary alighted, the stranger strode behind him for some distance, noting the gangster’s walk.

  Bugs paused for a moment before the windows of a station haberdashery shop to eye admiringly a checked suit of latest cut, and a collection of startlingly bright ties. It was then that the man in brown brushed against him.

  Bugs felt a slight prick in his arm, hardly more than as though some tiny splinter of wood mixed with the cloth of his suit had been driven in. He heard the man in brown apologize for being clumsy, then move on—and Bugs thought nothing of it.

  But a moment later his legs began to rock and sway under him. Details of the building and people around him began to blur. Bugs opened his mouth to give a frightened cry; but no sound came. His tongue, like his legs, seemed to be out of commission. With a grunt, Bugs Gary collapsed to the station floor and lay there with a surprised expression on his heavy ugly face.

  THE man in brown came instantly to his side. He had whipped a black case from his pocket. He looked deeply concerned. A crowd began to gather. The man in brown spoke authoritatively.

  “Stand back! Give this man some air, I’m a doctor. He appears to have had a heart attack. Some one help me get him to my car outside. We’ll take him to a hospital at once!”

  A station attendant gave the required aid. Bugs Gary was carried limply to a small, compact coupé parked outside the station. A few slight dents in its sleek enamel which were carefully patched bullet holes didn’t attract the attendant’s attention. The man who had said he was a doctor drove swiftly away with the unconscious gangster at his side.

  But he didn’t go to a hospital. Instead, he drove swiftly to a garage back of a small suburban house. Once inside, he closed the garage door, and carried Bugs through a passageway to the house itself. This was empty. It was another of the Agent’s hideouts, and he had accomplished the capture of Bugs Gary by a means he had often used before—the injection of a quick-acting, harmless anesthetic.

  Bugs came to after awhile. Still in a dazed state, he found himself handcuffed in a chair and facing a man whose eyes had an uncanny, magnetic intentness. He was terrified at first, but the stranger soothed his fears. No harm would come to him if Bugs answered a few simple questions about his past. Because he couldn’t seem to help it under the steady stare
of those burning eyes, Bugs Gary did so.

  The stranger listened carefully, as much, it seemed, to the tones of his voice as to his words. He made minute examination of Bugs’ face and figure, asked him what sort of clothes he liked to wear, his eating preferences, and other odd, personal questions.

  At the end of it, the stranger offered Bugs a drink of liquor which the gangster eagerly accepted. He finished it, licked his lips and once more dozed off into dreamless slumber. Though he didn’t know it, he was due this time not to wake up for at least thirty-six hours—unless Agent “X” chose to administer a reviving stimulant...

  As dusk was again falling over the city, a man, who looked for all the world like Bugs Gary, stepped out of a taxi and swaggered toward the lighted doors of the Montmorency Club. This was the infamous underworld dive whose present proprietor was Gus Sanzoni.

  Evening papers had mentioned the fact that Bugs Gary had been pardoned. Whispers had run through crookdom. Bugs would surely be coming back to his old haunts.

  The doorman of the Montmorency Club wasn’t surprised therefore at the sight of the dapper figure in spats, checked suit and bright tie who came forward arrogantly.

  “If it ain’t Bugs,” the doorman said. “I saw about you in the paper a half hour ago. I thought you’d be coming around to see the boys. You look like a million dollars, Bugs. They must have fed you good up in the Big House.”

  The man who looked like Bugs flicked ashes from his cigarette and made a fitting wisecrack. All the while he was watching the reactions of the doorman intently. Inwardly he was elated. His disguise made old acquaintances recognize him in the way he wanted. The doorman of the Montmorency Club had no inkling that this man who seemed to be Bugs Gary, was really Agent “X,” famous criminal investigator, come to risk death in the headquarters of an underworld czar.