The inspector’s pale, aquiline face registered no recognition. He was in a dangerous mood, though, ready to grasp at any straw that came his way. The press was clamoring that the “Torture Trust” be smashed. The police were being criticized.
“Who the devil are you?” he snapped.
The Secret Agent adjusted his glasses again, stroking the black cord.
“I told this fellow here,” he drawled, gesturing toward the cop. “My name’s Fellingsfort, in case you want to know.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“A bit of financial work. Bond selling and that sort of thing.”
“What have you got to prove it?”
The Agent reached into his coat pocket, drew out a wallet and opened it. He carried a dozen or more cards with him always, different names upon them. His disguises went more than skin deep. He avoided trouble by checkmating it in advance.
From a deep inner pocket in the wallet, he drew a card bearing the name Claude Fellingsfort, with the legend “High Grade Bonds” directly after it. With an elaborate flourish he presented it to the inspector. Burks glared at it suspiciously.
“What were you doing climbing down off the fire escape, Fellingsfort?”
“One couldn’t stay on it forever,” said Agent “X” suavely. “Since I went up, I had to come down.”
“Why did you go up in the first place?”
“I thought I saw a fellow sneaking around up there as it were. It turned out I was right”
The inspector’s eyes narrowed into aggressive pinpoints of light.
“What the hell do you mean?”
Deftly the Secret Agent stretched out his arm, pulled up his coat, and drew back his cuff. An inflamed spot showed on his wrist where the skin had been burned.
“The bally idiot threw acid down on me, you know. Sort of an unfriendly devil. I didn’t linger to pursue our acquaintance.”
“Acid!” Burks’s voice had the sharpness of a whiplash.
“Quite. There’s the spot—burned rather painfully if I do say so.”
“Where did the man who threw it go?”
“Down the block—fifth house from the end. It might pay you, inspector, to send a couple of men to search the place.”
For an instant the tone of the man who called himself Claude Fellingsfort changed. Then he resumed his irritating drawl.
“And now, if you’ve no objections, I’ll be on my way.”
Burks reply was icy.
“You’ll go down to the station house, Fellingsfort. I’m going to hold you for investigation—check up on your credentials.”
He gestured toward two husky cops.
“Take this man down to the station—keep him there till I come.”
“I say!” protested Fellingsfort. “That’s what I call gratitude! I’m late for an appointment now. I really can’t sanction this!”
He drew a gold watch from his pocket and looked at it with a frown.
“Take him away, boys,” was the inspector’s answer.
The two cops stepped forward, one on each side of the Secret Agent. The watch was still in the Agent’s hand, and suddenly a strange thing happened. His thumb moved delicately. There was a faint click inside the timepiece. Then the Agent’s arm described a quick arc in the air before the two cops’ faces and a thin jet of vapor spurted from the watch’s stem.
With gasps the two policemen fell back, wiping their eyes, momentarily blinded by harmless tear gas. And, quick as a fleeing wraith, the Agent leaped to the door and ran down the stairs.
Inspector Burks cried out harshly and another cop at the entrance attempted to stop “X,” but a second jet of gas sent the patrolman back. An instant later and the Secret Agent, alias Claude Fellingsfort, had run into the street and disappeared, lost in the crowd.
Inspector Burks stared again at the card Fellingsfort had given him, then gave a sudden gasp of amazement.
The card had turned black in his hands, the name disappearing. In the center of the card a glaring white figure stood out. It was a mysterious letter “X,” come there as though by magic.
IT wasn’t until twenty-four hours later that Agent “X” returned to the Bellaire Club—and this time he went alone. In the meantime he had followed reports in the papers, questioned numerous people, and done all he could to trace down the hidden members of the “Torture Trust.” But in each instance he had drawn a blank.
There was one lead still open, however—the most significant of all, the one upon which Agent “X” depended for success—or death.
As a news item, the escape of Jason Hertz from the State penitentiary had not been important. The story had been tucked away on the second and third pages of the metropolitan papers. The police hadn’t linked up his break for liberty with the sinister activities of the “Torture Trust.” But Agent “X” knew that somewhere in the city knowing eyes had read of Hertz’s escape.
He returned therefore to the Bellaire Club disguised as a young man-about-town. But into his disguise he injected a sleekness of appearance, a sharp, hungry look, that any one acute enough would sense. He had the appearance of a man possessed with the gambling fever.
And only after he had lost two hundred dollars at cards, allaying the suspicions of Mike Panagakos and the detectives stationed around the room, did he seat himself at a table by the dance floor. He ordered a drink and sat hunched over it, smoking a cigarette morosely, like a man despondent at the loss he has suffered.
The table wasn’t ten feet from the blue vase on its polished settee.
Minutes passed, and the Agent’s hand moved to the cord of the table-light running below the cloth. No one noticed, but in his fingers was a pair of singularly shaped pliers. They bit down on the cord and did not sever it; but a needle point thrust itself through the outer silk covering into the two copper cables inside.
There was a small spark, a hiss, the odor of burned insulation, and every light in the room went out as the main fuses blew. “X” had deliberately caused a short circuit.
In the hubbub that followed he moved quickly. He crossed in the darkness to the blue vase, slipped his hand inside and withdrew it. In his fingers was a piece of paper.
He pulled the pliers from the light cord, stopping the short circuit. When the blown fuses had been replaced by someone in the kitchen, Agent “X” was again sitting quietly at his table. A half hour later, attracting little attention, he gathered up his coat and left.
It wasn’t till he reached a secluded avenue that he opened the note in the hollow of his hand. Then his heart leaped with excitement.
“Come to Forty-four MacDonough Street, J. H., and ring the bell seven times,” the note said. And Agent “X” knew that in those brief words lay the seeds of success—or hideous death—depending on his own wits and the cards that Fate dealt him.
Chapter VII
Masters of Death
FOR hours that night, the Agent worked in his secret room in the old Montgomery mansion. Rats scuttled across the deserted floors. Mice squeaked in the walls of the ancient house. From outside came the occasional noises of the city. The rumble of a heavy truck. The faint blare of a taxi horn. But the Agent’s chamber was like a little world in itself shut away from the lives of ordinary men.
He had been extraordinarily careful tonight. He had studied closely the faithful recording apparatus in the cellar, making sure that no one had disturbed the privacy of the house. He had taken special pains to throw any possible shadower off the track.
Now, feeling secure, he set to work methodically to achieve the most masterly disguise of his career. On its perfection his very life depended, and perhaps the lives of others, innocent victims of the “Torture Trust.”
He took out the movie films, the sound record, and the measurements made during his interview with Jason Hertz. The film he had already developed in his small photographic laboratory.
He set a projector on a tripod, focused it on a silver screen, and switched off the lights in the
room. Then he snapped on the bulb behind the projector and started the machine in motion.
Hertz’s image appeared on the screen. Agent “X” studied it again and again, noting each movement and facial expression. He had made a series of still enlargements from the movie film, and these he studied also.
He placed the hard-rubber record on a phonographic machine and listened to Hertz’s voice.
For twenty minutes he practised the vowel and consonant sounds, perfecting tongue and lip movements, until he had mastered the timbre and pitch—until it seemed that Hertz himself was speaking in the small room. Then he seated himself before his triple mirror, and, with the measurement chart at his side, began the elaborate make-up.
He used his finest pigments, built up his plastic material, working in thin layers with constant reference to the notes he had made. He reconstructed each plane and line of the ex-convict’s features; then practised characteristic expressions. He laughed, frowned, registered fear, surprise, and arrogance as he had seen Jason Hertz do.
Even then he wasn’t satisfied—not until he had risen and moved about the room, imitating Hertz’s walk and arm movements. When at last he put his equipment away, Hertz’s own mother wouldn’t have known that the man in the room was not her son.
“X” dressed himself as a criminal and gunman: a cheap, flashy suit, a striped silk shirt, a tie that shouted to the world.
But, in the linings of the suit, he hid other articles. There was no telling what desperate emergencies might arise. He took one keen took at the little chamber before leaving. It might, for all he knew, be the last he would ever get.
A taxi sped him to within a few blocks of MacDonough Street. He got out and paid the driver, doubting that the cabman would recognize him as Hertz. The police heads would know him. The detective force would be tipped off. He must avoid representatives of the law. But he didn’t fear citizens or ordinary cops except in the region that Jason Hertz had frequented.
MacDonough Street was in a dark, cluttered section near the river front. Number forty-four was in a block of ancient, unpainted houses that seemed like a stagnant backwater left by the city’s swift progress northward.
The Secret Agent’s heart beat faster as he climbed the stoop and pressed the bell of number forty-four seven times.
It was at least two minutes before the door opened. Then a slatternly old woman stood before him. Her beady, ratlike eyes were set in a face as evil as a witch’s. She licked thin, toothless gums and stared at him out of the black pit of the hall. Then she jerked her head.
“Come in,” she said harshly.
She hadn’t asked him his name. He knew she had recognized him as Jason Hertz. He followed her along a dusty smelling corridor into a rear room. Here she switched the light on, closed the door after her, and left him alone.
But he had the uncanny sense that eyes somewhere were studying him. He waited breathlessly, and seconds later a closet door opened and a man stepped out.
The man was small, dressed in gray, and his face had the dead, listless color of putty. His eyes, too, were listless, reptile-like; but they focused on “X’s” with cold, calculating intelligence.
For seconds the man studied “X” at close range, then took a pad from his pocket and the stub of a pencil. He scribbled a sentence on the pad and handed it to the Agent.
“Come with me,” the sentence read.
And “X” realized with a start that the gray-clad man before him was a deaf-mute. Looking closer, he saw that the mask-like face of the man seemed to conceal some horrible inner maladjustment. Was he insane, or a drug addict? There was something chillingly sinister about him, as though he were the very emissary of death.
HE led the Agent out a rear door of the house, through a back yard into another street as evil looking as the one in front. A car was waiting at the curb. It was a dark-colored, closed vehicle, and at the wheel of it was another man of the same type as “X’s” guide. His features were not the same; but there was a weird similarity of coloring and manner that puzzled the Agent.
He got into the car at a gesture from the guide. The auto moved away. It glided through deserted streets, passed narrow, one-way alleys, then, in a particularly black spot, the gray-clad man at “X’s” side leaned forward. In his hand was a strip of dark cloth. He raised it, slid it across “X’s” face and blindfolded him.
The act made the Secret Agent’s nerves tingle with excitement. There was no fear in his heart—except the fear of possible failure. The precautions taken by the deaf-mute warned the Agent that he was coming in contact with some supercriminal who left nothing undone.
The car stopped at last. Agent “X,” blindfolded, unable to see a step he took, was nevertheless making precise inner records. His uncanny memory was at work, his supersensitive faculties registering impressions.
He was drawn out of the car, guided by one of the evil gray men. He heard a door open, and marked in his mind the position of it. He was led along a passageway, and he kept track of each individual step. He turned to the right, went down a flight of stairs, up another, walked straight ahead through a second corridor.
His ears even registered the acoustic properties of the hall. Another flight of stairs and his guide stopped him. The Agent’s eyes behind the cloth were bright. Brief as the time had been, he felt certain he could retrace his steps. The blindfold had failed of its purpose.
Then Agent “X” had a sense of chill, a sense of quiet, a sense that he was in some old, dark building where gloomy shadows lay. Slowly he was pushed to the center of a room. The blindfold was taken from his face; footsteps withdrew; he was left in absolute darkness.
For seconds that seemed endless, he stood there, wondering what was to come next. There was no movement in the room, no sound. Then suddenly a light flashed on. It was a bulb set in a reflector, a small searchlight, and it was focused directly on his face.
He waited, staring toward the light, certain that other eyes behind it were upon him, certain that he was being observed, analyzed, picked to pieces. Would his disguise stand the test?
Gradually his gaze adjusted itself to the brightness of the light. He could see the faint illumination it shed in other parts of the room. He could see the walls, the furniture. Then he gave an inner start. Perfectly coordinated nerves held it in abeyance. But he let his face muscles sag as Jason Hertz would have done. He registered an uneasiness he didn’t feel.
For there were three black figures in the room. They sat on chairs like three ravens of death facing him. There were black hoods over their heads, trailing black cloth over their bodies. Through holes in the hoods he saw the evil glitter of eyes.
There was not one criminal, then, but three behind the murders that had taken place. He was in the presence of the “Torture Trust,” the men whose inhuman brains had plotted hideous villainy.
A voice came out of the gloom, cold and precise and dangerous as the buzz of a rattler’s tail.
“What have you got to say for yourself, Jason Hertz?”
The Agent gulped, stirred, and imitated Hertz’s tone as he had learned it from the phonographic record.
“I—I lammed out of stir. I figured maybe you’d have something fer me to do. That’s how come I dropped the note. A guy’s gotta eat.”
“We know you got out of the penitentiary. We have eyes. We read the papers. But we know your limitations, Hertz. It seems remarkable that you could have escaped without outside help. Will you please tell us exactly how you did it?”
The Agent knew at that moment how perilous was the ground upon which he stood. There were brains of diabolical cunning behind those sinister black hoods. His life hung upon the answer he made.
Chapter VIII
Terrible Seconds
SLOWLY he drew his lips into a smile. He straightened his body, threw out his chest, facing the spectral trio with the arrogance of a criminal proud of his handiwork.
He was a student of human psychology, and he acted now as he believed Ja
son Hertz would do in his shoes.
“You gotta hand it to me,” he said. “You’re king-pins an’ you’re smarter than me. But I pulled a fast one when I slipped outta the big house. There ain’t many guys could ’a done it.”
“You haven’t answered our question, Hertz!” There was a relentless note in that cultured, measured voice.
These men, “X” sensed, were not ordinary criminals. They bore no relation to the underworld of thugs, gunmen, racketeers, and gamblers—except that they lived by death and the fear of it that their deeds inspired.
He smiled again. “You wanta hear about it right from the start?”
“That’s what we want.”
“Well, I bought a hack saw from a snowbird named Cooper. His brudder smuggled it to him, see? An’ he was too shaky to use it. I give him money to buy coke instead. I snitched a key from a guard when he had his back turned talkin’ to another guy. The key was on a chain. I stuck a piece of soap on it, see, and made a nifty pattern.”
Agent “X,” alias the convict, Hertz, chuckled again as though at his own cleverness.
“There was tools in the machine shop,” he continued. “I was a good guy. They made me a trusty. I made me a key from the pattern in the piece of soap. When I got the chance I slipped out and went to the empty cell block up top. I cut a hole through the ceiling and got amongst the rafters. That’s the way a guy they told about in the papers did it.”
“Then,” came a voice in the gloom, “you cut the bars of an end window—and climbed down to the yard. We read all that, Hertz. But how about the wall?”
“X” laughed again.
“You must ’a seen about the rope, too,” he said. “I left it there. They’s lots of things a trusty can do. I snitched that rope in the cellar, the one they used to haul ash cans out on a pulley. I tied a bolt to it an’ slung it over the wall. There was a loop on it. I caught the loop on a brace that the wires on top of the wall was fastened to. I did a pretty slick job.”
There was silence as he finished his tale. He knew that evil brains were debating, weighing the story he had told. He believed it rang true. Hertz had been a trusty. Convicts in the past had used exactly the methods he had described to escape.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 5
