Excited shouts went up from the crowd around him. Greenford was sitting on the sidewalk with a dazed look on his face. He was like a man afflicted with a sudden apoplectic stroke. The crowd stopped, drew around him in a ring, staring with dumb, gaping eyes.
“He’s drunk,” someone said.
“He’s sick,” said another. No one made a move to do anything about it. A lethargy of curiosity had settled over the people around—the lethargy of the typical city crowd.
Then a man broke through the barrier of gaping people. His face was concerned. He was a dignified-looking man, gray at the temples, heavy featured. He had a professional air about him. The man was Agent “X” come back.
He felt Greenford’s pulse—rolled his eyelid down and stared at the iris.
“I’m a physician,” he said. “Call a cab—at once. This man seems to be ill.”
Someone at the edge of the crowd signaled a taxi. The cab drew up to the curb. Someone else helped Agent “X” lift Greenford to his feet. In a minute he was inside the vehicle. Then, with Agent “X” holding him solicitously, the cab sped away.
Chapter V
Greenford’s Double
“TO the nearest hospital,” ordered Agent “X,” still maintaining his professional manner. The driver nodded, heading the cab into a long avenue, honking his horn to keep traffic back.
In the interior of the cab, slumped on the seat, Greenford’s body joggled like a sack of meal. His head swayed grotesquely on his shoulder. His dazed eyes stared ahead unseeingly.
But as seconds passed, the vagueness of his eyes began to diminish. It was as though a curtain were slowly going up. Agent “X” opened a side window. Cold night air blew on Greenford’s face. A little of the laxity left his body. He shook himself, opened his eyes wider. A sound like a sigh came from his lips. Suddenly he moved his head, stared at the man beside him. His gaze met the strangely burning eyes of Agent “X.” A snarl came from Greenford’s lips, then color rushed back into his cheeks, mottling them darkly.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Agent “X” did not answer immediately. He reached forward with one hand, slid the glass panel behind the driver’s seat shut.
“Silence!” he said harshly.
“See here—” Greenford was crouched back on the seat now like an animal at bay. “Let me out of this cab or I’ll—”
There was thickness in his voice, the thickness of some foreign accent carefully hidden. He yanked his arm away from the Agent’s grasp, his fingers moved suddenly toward his pocket, then hesitated. The burning, strange light in “X’s” eyes seemed to hold his fascinated. “X’s” right hand had moved, drawn his gas gun out so quickly that Greenford had been unable to follow the motion. The gun was pointed directly at him now. He could not know that its sinister black muzzle held only sleep, not death. The look in the Agent’s eyes was deadly.
The Agent offered no explanation, gave no inkling of his plans. But the look of anger in Greenford’s face turned to one of fear. A sickly doughiness came over his features. He began to tremble. There had been murders. Murder was in the air. In the eyes of this strange man beside him he seemed to read a sinister threat.
“Don’t shoot,” he babbled suddenly. “Don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you say.”
Here was the voice of a coward speaking, a man whose aggression left him when he saw himself cornered. There was contempt in the Agent’s eyes. He had met this breed before. He held the gun steadily. Then he slid the panel behind the driver’s seat open, again.
“Never mind the hospital,” he said. “Drive to the St. James apartments—ninety Jefferson Avenue.”
The cabman gave one puzzled glance and obeyed. If he thought at all, he must have concluded that the address given was a doctor’s office.
Greenford continued to tremble, staring with terrified eyes at the man beside him. Agent “X” seemed to radiate mystery and power. There was inexorable command in his glowing eyes. Their glance was almost hypnotic. Greenford wilted beneath it.
The cab drew up at the address given. A big but not too expensive apartment rose at the side of the street.
Agent “X” thrust the gas gun in his pocket, but kept the muzzle still pointing at Greenford through the cloth of his overcoat.
“Make any break and—” “X” did not finish his sentence, but he pressed the hard snout of the gun against Greenford’s side.
The Agent paid the cabby then, and, with Greenford moving slightly ahead, they entered the apartment building. There was no doorman. A switchboard operator glanced at them casually. Agent “X” pressed the button of an automatic elevator. When the car came into sight, he motioned Greenford into it. He pressed another button, and they ascended to the fifth floor.
Greenford, still trembling with fear, was marshaled down a long corridor and into a simply furnished apartment. The door of the apartment closed after him.
“What do you want?” he asked in a croaking voice. “Who are you? I haven’t got—” He did not finish the sentence. He checked himself, stared at the Agent.
The Agent was silent. His burning eyes were still upon Greenford. He seemed to be studying him, seemed to be analyzing every movement that the man made. Greenford spoke again.
“What is it you want. Don’t—”
Again he stopped in the middle of a sentence. His lips opened to scream, but the scream ended in a gasp. For, as quickly as the flash of a snake’s tongue, Agent “X” had whipped his gas gun out. His finger pressed the trigger. There was a barely audible hiss. A jet of gas sprayed into Greenford’s face, filled his mouth. Without a sound, the man staggered back and collapsed on the rug.
THE Agent pocketed his gun; then drew an open-faced watch from his pocket and glanced at it. It was long after ten now. The telegram he had taken from Greenford had given twelve as the hour of the mysterious rendezvous at Bradley Square. Time was a vital element.
He stooped over Greenford, picked him up. Unobtrusive but steel-like muscles in the Agent’s shoulders snapped into life. As easily as though he had been a child, he carried Greenford’s unconscious body to a big chair and deposited it there, placing pillows behind Greenford’s back, propping him.
Then once again he began studying the man’s face. He studied it from all angles, noting the planes of it and the lines.
He walked to a closet in the apartment, drew a suitcase out, and turned it upside down. He pressed two brass studs in the suitcase’s underside and disclosed a cleverly concealed false bottom that would never have been suspected unless the suitcase’s sides and depth were measured. From this secret compartment he took an assemblage of make-up material. Thin vials of pigments and volatile plastic substances.
He locked the apartment door, spread his make-up equipment before a bureau mirror, and set to work. Glancing from time to time at the unconscious man in the chair, his fingers performed the magic that had made the Agent’s name one to conjure with. The man of a thousand faces—a thousand disguises—a thousand surprises, was at work again.
For twenty minutes his fingers moved dexterously. When he turned at last from the mirror, Greenford’s double seemed to be in the room. Agent “X” walked across the floor practicing Greenford’s characteristic movements. The Agent’s disguises went further than make-up. They became a study in muscular coordination as well. He spoke a few sentences, mimicked Greenford’s slightly blurred accent.
He searched Greenford then, took a wallet and papers from his pocket and found a money belt strapped around his middle next to his skin. The Agent’s fingers were tense as he opened this. It was stuffed with bank notes—bills of high denomination. He looked at their corners. A one and two noughts showed. Century notes!
He counted them. Fifty of them—five thousand dollars! Stacking the bills in a neat sheaf, the Agent pocketed them. They were not for himself. He had no need of money with the account in the First National Bank always ready to draw on. He had never made the test, but he felt sure that his own resou
rces were practically unlimited. But he had a strange outlet for money confiscated from criminals.
There were blank papers in Greenford’s wallet. Agent “X” suspected that they held writing in invisible ink. They might give insight into Greenford’s strange vocation. But there wasn’t time to search for a chemical developer now—and the Agent had already drawn his own conclusions regarding Greenford’s character.
He drew the small hypo needle from his pocket again; emptied the colorless liquid from its tubular syringe, and refilled it from a small vial. This he injected into Greenford’s arm, close to a vein. The man would stay unconscious for a specific time now, or until “X” chose to administer an antidote.
Next he put Greenford’s slumped body into a ventilated closet and locked the door.
It was now after eleven. He descended to the street floor and passed the switchboard operator, who took him for a departing guest. He walked several blocks and hailed a cab. What strange and sinister adventure, he wondered, lay ahead of him at No. 40 Bradley Square?
Chapter VI
The House of Mystery
ONE thing he saw in his first glimpse of the house, and he gave a start of amazement. The building was closed up. It was a four-story brownstone mansion belonging apparently to the Victorian era. Protective boarding covered the windows on the first floor. The others on the floors above were dark and curtainless. There was a “for sale” sign on the building, showing whitely under the glow of the corner light. Bradley Square had become run down. Its past glories were gone. It was a place of quiet and decay. The once-flourishing park in its center had been turned into a playground for poor children. Deserted swings hung forlornly in the darkness like gibbets.
A drunken man moved tipsily toward the garish doors of a beer saloon at the far end of the square. A few rooming houses on the side where number forty stood showed dim lights through dusty windows.
The Agent walked past the house of mystery several times. What mad thing was this to bring a man to a deserted house? The dark, empty windows seemed to frown down upon him. Were there eyes watching him furtively somewhere in the blackness?
He looked at his watch again. Exactly midnight. A clock blocks away boomed the hour, sending cracked echoes across the square. The icy branches of the trees rattled in the night wind, making him think again of Bill Scanlon’s staring eyes and protruding tongue. Death seemed to lurk in the night around him. There was a grimly sardonic gleam in the depths of his eyes. It was into such situations, such places, that his strange commission led him.
He mounted the steps of number forty, pulled the metal end of an ancient bell wire. Somewhere far back in the empty house a thin jingle sounded. He listened. There was no answering sound of footsteps. He pulled the bell wire again. The jangle that awoke faint echoes seemed almost sacrilegious, as though he were disturbing the quiet of a mausoleum—disturbing the dead.
Then the hair on his scalp rose. He held himself tensely. Before him, the weather-worn door of the house opened. There was no one in sight, no sound of a human being, only the faint rusty movement of the hinges. A draft of stale air struck his face. The hallway before him was starkly empty. It was uncanny, awe-inspiring—more so than the sight of any sinister figure. The ghostly movement of the door made him think of the phantom strangler, of the invisible, awful thing that had already snuffed out the lives of four people.
But he moved into the house. It was cold inside with the coldness of a place that has long been empty. Behind him, with an eeriness that made his hair rise, the door swung shut. He was in absolute darkness. Was this a death trap? Had someone planned to lure Greenford to his doom? The Agent smiled bleakly again. He had lived too long in the presence of the Grim Reaper to fear him now. He had cast fear from his heart.
He struck a match, moved forward along the ancient hallway toward a flight of stairs ahead. The paint on the old walls was cracked and blackened with dust. The red plush carpet beneath his feet gave out little puffs of dust as he moved, and ahead, in the doorway leading to the big old-fashioned parlor, tattered, moth-eaten draperies hung, a last relic of decayed and dead gentility.
The parlor was as black as the opening of a tomb. He passed it quickly, ascending the stairs. “Top floor, rear,” the telegram had said. He moved past floor after floor, striking matches. In the wavering brief light that they shed, his shadow seemed to pursue him like a stalking fiend. He did not use his flash light. To do so would be out of character. It might throw suspicion on him if unseen eyes were watching.
He came at last to the top floor. Here all street noises were excluded. There was no sound anywhere in the old house. The house seemed to be silent, crouching, like a beast waiting for its prey.
The door of the rear top room was shut. He opened it, passed inside. The curtainless windows admitted a ghostly glow from the light in the next street far below. He saw a few pieces of broken furniture that the last tenants of the house had left behind. A springless iron bed, a chair with one rocker gone, a metal washstand twisted into a shapeless mass of rusty iron. There was no one in the room—no living thing. There was a closet and he opened the door of it, struck a match, looked in. That too was empty, save for a man’s old overcoat hanging there like a withered corpse.
BUT as he stepped to the center of the room again, a voice suddenly sounded—a voice so close and so harsh that it was like a dash of icy water thrown on him.
He couldn’t locate its direction. It seemed to fill the whole room. It seemed to come from his left; but only blank wall space was there. He listened.
“Greenford,” the voice said. “Greenford,” it repeated again and again. “You are nearly a minute late, Greenford. It is not wise to come late to this house when an appointment has been made. I expect those with whom I have dealings to be on time!”
The voice ceased as abruptly as it had begun. It was a man’s voice, harsh, grating. It was a voice that gave Secret Agent “X” some inkling of the sinister being that he was fighting, a voice that had the assurance and cruel arrogance of supreme power.
Mimicking Greenford’s accent, Secret Agent “X” answered.
“The slippery pavements made haste difficult tonight. I am sorry—so sorry.”
The voice spoke again.
“Some men learn by their mistakes. Others do not. You will learn to be punctual, or—”
A harsh laugh sounded—a laugh as brutal and evil as the scraping of a poisonous reptile’s scales. Then the voice continued:
“I have what you want, Greenford. By murder I gained the thing you sought. Gold would not buy it for you. Death gave it to me. But for gold I will part with it. What amount, Greenford, is your government prepared to pay? Consider well. You have twenty-four hours for cable negotiations. Come tomorrow night at this same time. Take warning! Do not be late! Speak in this room and I will hear. Let me know your answer. I have other customers if your price is not satisfactory. And make no attempt at trickery. You are helpless. You are in the hands of the Black Master.”
The voice ceased again, and silence descended on the room, as heavy as the silence of a tomb. Agent “X” pondered a moment.
B.M. had been the initials on the telegram Greenford had received. B.M.—The Black Master. But who was this criminal who held the city in a thrall of fear? Who was this killer who had brutally murdered four people, among them loyal, brave-hearted Bill Scanlon of the D.C.I.?
The silent room and the old house gave no hint.
The fingers of “X’s” right hand tautened for a moment, clenched till the knuckles went white. His lips moved slightly, whispered again that phrase that seemed to ring through his head.
“A kid and a woman are waiting!”
He had come close to the murderer of Scanlon—heard him speak. Yet it was as though rocky walls separated them. He dared not strike now, dared not search through that room as he wanted to. He must wait, watch, proceed with the caution and cunning of a fox. A false step—and all would be lost. The horror would go. Scanlon�
��s cruel killing would never be avenged.
He descended the dusty stairs quietly. His eyes held an inscrutable light. He had till tomorrow night to make a decision. But he was still in darkness, darkness as total as that in the black corridor below. The door opened for him again as though the ghost of some ancient, silent servant still lingered in the dim hallway.
He passed out into the street. Night wind struck his face. The ice-coated branches whispered like mocking laughter.
But as he moved along the street, it seemed for an instant that a shadow moved after him. He had trained himself to see such things. He had shadowed men himself and knew the arts of shadowing. He was being shadowed now. Of that he was certain.
For a bare second he paused. His only hope of running the killer to earth lay in seeming for the moment to comply with the voice of the Black Master. He walked on, conscious still of eyes upon him.
He passed beyond the square and came to a thoroughfare. Standing at the curb, he signaled a taxi. His eyes glinted grimly as, looking back, he saw another taxi go to the curb, pick a passenger up and follow.
“The Hotel Sherwood,” said Agent “X.”
Posing as Greenford, he must play the role of Greenford until—. It seemed now that the cunning of his brain was the only power on earth that could sever the terrible murder chain that unseen hands were forging.
His cab drew up before the bright lights of the Sherwood. The other taxi was no longer in sight. Agent “X” paid his fare and went into the lobby. He picked up Greenford’s key at the desk and ascended in the elevator. He was revolving a hundred plans in his mind, wondering what course was best to follow. The man he was battling was a monster—a criminal without scruple, and with infinite cunning. High stakes were at issue. The caution the Black Master had taken proved that. But, even if there were nothing else, the murder of Scanlon was motive enough to drive Agent “X” forward into the very gates of death.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 16
