The Big Book of Rogues and Villains
Page 112
He did not dial operator. The phone had a direct line to the building across the way. He simply picked up the receiver and said softly: “Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east wall. Hop it!”
In the National State Building a man at an improvised switchboard on the ground floor turned to another. “Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east. Get everybody.”
The second man ran toward the night elevator. He went from floor to floor. At each floor he opened the door and signaled. And on each floor two men, who had been watching the corridors along the north side, ran silently toward the other local elevators, which had shaft doors on every floor all the way up to the top. At the same time a third man, at the stairs, drew his gun as he prepared to guard more carefully yet the staircase, rarely used, threading up beside the shafts.
And on the ground floor within fifty yards of the man at the switchboard, a chuckle came from the masked lips of a red-robed figure who stood straight and tall in a red-lit room.
Across the street the man with the binoculars suddenly picked up the phone again.
“Damn it—they tricked us. Somebody took the money in on the sixty-third floor!”
Changed orders vibrated through the great building. And the red-robed figure in the room at the heart of the maze chuckled again—and moved toward the bench.
Doctor Satan picked up one of the dolls remaining there. It was the image of Kessler. He placed it on the iron plate, which was already heated by the wires trailing from the socket. He watched the little doll broodingly.
It writhed and twisted as the heat melted its wax feet. It fell to the plate. And from the street, far away, sounded a horrible scream.
Doctor Satan’s head jerked back as if the shriek were music to his ears. Then, once more, his hissing chuckle sounded out.
“For disobeying commands, my friend,” he muttered. “But I knew you’d be obstinate enough to try it—”
He stopped. For a second he stood as rigid as a statue swathed in red. Then, slowly, he turned; and in his coal-black, blazing eyes was fury—and fear.
There was an inner door to the developing-room, but the door was locked, and it still stood locked. It had not been touched. Neither had the outer door. Yet in that room with the red-robed figure was another figure now. That of Ascott Keane.
He stood as rigid as Doctor Satan himself, and stared at his adversary out of steel-gray, level eyes.
“It seems we are alone,” Keane said slowly. “Bostiff, I suppose, is retrieving the money from Kessler. And Girse? Where is he?”
Doctor Satan’s snarl was the only answer. He moved toward Keane, red-swathed hands clenching as he came. Keane stood his ground. Satan stopped.
“How—” he asked.
“Surely you do not need to ask that,” said Keane. “You must have penetrated the secret of transferring substance, including your own, from one place to another by sheer power of thought.”
“I have not!” rasped Doctor Satan. “Nor have you!”
Keane shrugged. “I am here.”
“You discovered my hiding-place and hid here while I was out, a short time ago!”
Keane’s smile was a deadly thing. “Perhaps I did. Perhaps not. You can provide your own answer. The only thing of importance is that I am here—”
“And shall stay here!” Doctor Satan’s soft voice lifted. The fear was fading from his eyes and leaving only fury there. “You have interfered in my plans once too often, Keane!”
As he spoke he raised his right hand with the thumb and forefinger forming an odd, eery angle.
“ ‘Out of the everywhere into the here,’ ” he quoted softly. “I have servants more powerful than Girse, whom you destroyed, Ascott Keane. One comes now—to your own destruction!”
As he spoke, a strange tensity seized the air of the dim room. Keane paled a little at the blaze in the coal-black eyes. Then he stared suddenly at a spot in thin air to Doctor Satan’s right.
Something was happening there. The air was shimmering as though it danced over an open fire. It wavered, grew misty, swayed in a sinuous column.
“ ‘Out of the everywhere into the here,’ ” Doctor Satan’s voice was raised in final triumph. “The old legends had a basis, Keane. The tales of dragons…There was such a thing, is such a thing. Only the creations the ancients called dragons do not ordinarily roam Earth in visible form.”
The sinuous misty column at the right of the red-robed form was materializing into a thing to stagger a man’s reason.
Keane found himself gazing at a shimmering figure that looked like a great lizard, save that it was larger than any lizard, and had smaller legs. It was almost like a snake with legs, but it was a snake two feet through at its thickest part, and only about fourteen feet long, which is not typical serpentine proportion. There were vestigial stubs of wings spreading from its trunk about a yard back of its great, triangular head; and it had eyes such as no true lizard ever had—eight inches across and glittering like evil gems.
“A dragon, Keane,” Doctor Satan purred. “You have seen old pictures of some such thing, painted by artists who had caught a glimpse of these things that can only visit earth when some necromancer conjures them to. A ‘mythical’ creature, Keane. But you shall feel how ‘mythical’ it is when it attacks you.”
A hiss sounded in the dim room. The serpentine form was so solidly materialized now that it would scarcely be seen through. And in a few more seconds it was opaque. And weighty! The floor quivered a little as it moved—toward Keane.
Its great, gem-like eyes glinted like colored glass as it advanced, foot by foot, on the man who had pitted himself against Doctor Satan till the death of one of them should end the bitter war. But, Keane did not move. He stood with shoulders squared and arms at his sides, facing the red-robed form.
“ ‘Out of the everywhere into the here,’ ” he murmured. His lips were pale but his voice was calm. “There is another saying, Doctor Satan. It is a little different…‘Out of the hereafter into the here!’ ”
The unbelievable thing Doctor Satan had called into being in the midst of a city that would have scoffed at the idea of its existence suddenly halted its slow, deadly approach toward Keane. Its hiss sounded again, and it raised a taloned foot and clawed the thin air in a direction to Keane’s left.
It retreated a step, slinking low to the floor, its talons and scales rattling on the smooth cement. It seemed to see something beyond the reach of mortal eyes. But in a moment the things it saw were perceptible to the eyes of the two men, too. And as Doctor Satan saw them an imprecation came from his masked lips.
Three figures, distorted, horrible, yet familiar! Three things like statues of mist that became less misty and more solid-seeming by the second!
Three men who writhed as though in mortal torment, and whose lips jerked with soundless shrieks—which gradually became not entirely soundless but came to the ears of Satan and Keane like far-off cries dimly heard.
And the three were Varley and Croy and Kessler.
A gasp came from Doctor Satan’s concealed lips. He shrank back, even as the monstrosity he had called into earthly being shrank back.
“ ‘Out of the hereafter into the here,’ ” Keane said. “These three you killed, Doctor Satan. They will now kill you!”
—
Varley and Croy and Kessler advanced on the red-robed form. As they came they screamed with the pain of burning, and their blackened hands advanced, with fingers flexed, toward Satan. Such hatred was in their dead, glazed eyes, that waves of it seemed to surge about the room like a river in flood.
“They’re shades,” panted Doctor Satan. “They’re not real, they can’t actually do harm—”
“You will see how real they are when they attack you,” Keane paraphrased Satan’s words.
The three screaming figures converged on Doctor Satan. From death they had come, and before them was the man who had sent them to death. Their eyes were wells of fury and despair.
The hissing of the dragon-thing he had called into existence was inaudible. Its form was hardly to be seen. It was fleeing back into whatever realm it had come from. But the screaming three were advancing ever farther into our earthly plane as they crept toward the cowering body of Doctor Satan.
“My God!” Satan cried. “Not that! Not deliverance into the hands of those I—”
The three leaped. And Keane, with his face white as death at the horror he was witnessing, knew that the fight between him and the incarnate evil known as Doctor Satan was to end in this room.
The three leaped, and the red-robed figure went down…
There was a thunderous battering at the door, and the bellow of men outside: “Open up, in the name of the law!”
Keane cried out, as though knife-blades had been thrust under his nails. Doctor Satan screamed, and thrust away from the three furies, while the three themselves mouthed and swayed like birds of prey in indecision over a field in which hunters bristle suddenly.
“Open this door!” the voice thundered again. “We know there’s somebody in here—”
The shock of the change from the occult and unreal back to prosaic living was like the shock of being rudely waked from sound sleep when one has walked to the brink of a cliff and opens dazed eyes to stare at destruction. The introduction of such a thing as police, detectives, into a scene where two men were evoking powers beyond the ability of the average mortal even to comprehend, was like the insertion of an iron club into the intricate and fragile mechanism of a radio transmitting-station.
Keane literally staggered. Then he shouted: “For God’s sake—get away from that door—”
“Open up, or we’ll break in,” the bellowing voice overrode his own.
Keane cursed, and turned. The three revengeful forces he had evoked for the destruction of Doctor Satan were gone, shattered into non-existence again with the advance of the prosaic. And Doctor Satan—
Keane got one glimpse of a torn red robe, with dots of deeper crimson on its arm, as the man slid through the inner door of the room and out to—God knew where. Some retreat he had prepared in advance, no doubt.
And then the door crashed down and the men Kessler had stubbornly and ruinously retained in his fight with Doctor Satan burst in.
They charged toward Keane. “You’re under arrest for extortion,” the leader, a bull-necked man with a gun in his hand, roared out. “We traced the guy that took the dough from the skull here before we lost him.”
Keane only looked at him. And at something in his stare, though the detective did not know him from Adam, he wilted a little. “Stick out your hands while I handcuff you,” he tried to bluster.
Then the manager of the building ran in. “Did you get him?” he called to the detective. “Was he in here?” He saw the man the detective proposed to handcuff. “Keane! What has happened?”
“Doctor Satan has escaped,” said Keane. “That’s what has happened. I had him”—he held his hand out and slowly closed it—“like that! Then these well-intentioned blunderers broke in, and—”
His voice broke. His shoulders sagged. He stared at the door through which the red-robed figure had gone. Then his body straightened and his eyes grew calm again—though they were bleak with a weariness going far beyond physical fatigue.
“Gone,” he said, more to himself than to anyone in the red-lit room. “But I’ll find him again. And next time I’ll fight him in some place where no outside interference can save him.”
Rogue: Countess d’Yls
A Shock for the Countess
C. S. MONTANYE
THE STORIES OF CARLETON STEVENS MONTANYE (1892–1948) appeared in numerous pulp magazines, including Argosy, Top-Notch, Pep Stories, Thrilling Detective, Complete Stories, and he achieved the peak of any pulp writer’s career by selling numerous stories to Black Mask, beginning with the May 1920 issue and continuing through the issue of October 1939.
His most famous character, Captain Valentine, made his Black Mask debut on September 1, 1923, with “The Suite on the Seventh Floor,” and appeared nine more times in two years, concluding with “The Dice of Destiny” in the July 1925 issue. The gentleman rogue was also the protagonist of the novel Moons in Gold, published in 1936, in which the debonair Valentine, accompanied by his amazingly ingenious Chinese servant Tim, is in Paris, where he has his eye on the world’s most magnificent collection of opals.
Among his other characters were Johnny Castle, a private eye; detective Dave McClain; the Countess d’Yls, a wealthy, beautiful, brilliant, and laconic old-fashioned international jewel thief; Monahan, a tough, not-too-bright yegg; and Rider Lott, inventor of the perfect crime. Montanye also was one of the writers of the Phantom Detective series under the house name Robert Wallace.
“A Shock for the Countess” first appeared in the March 15, 1923, issue of Black Mask.
A SHOCK FOR THE COUNTESS
C. S. Montanye
FROM THE TERRACES of the Chateau d’Yls, the valley of Var was spread out below Gattiere, threaded with the broad bed of the River Var, swirling over its stony reaches from its cradle in the Hautes-Alpes. The snow-crowned mountains frowned ominously down but in the valley summertime warmth prevailed—quietude disturbed only by the song of birds and the voice of the river.
On the shaded promenade of the Chateau, the pretty Countess d’Yls stared thoughtfully at the unwinding river of the dust-powdered highway, twisting off into the dim distance. Beside her, a tall, well-built young man in tweeds absently flicked the ash from his cigarette and tinkled the ice in the thin glass he held.
Once or twice he surreptitiously considered the woman who reclined so indolently in the padded depths of a black wicker chair. The Countess seemed rarely lovely on this warm, lazy afternoon.
Her ash-blond hair caught what sunshine came in under the sand-colored awning above. Her blue eyes were dreamy and introspective, her red lips meditatively pursed. Yet for all of her abstraction there was something regal and almost imperious in her bearing; a subtle charm and distinction that was entirely her own.
“I do believe,” the Countess remarked at length, “we are about to entertain visitors.”
She motioned casually with a white hand toward the dust-filled road. The man beside her leaned a little forward. A mile or less distant he observed an approaching motor car that crawled up the road between clouds of dust.
“Visitors?”
The Countess inclined her head.
“So it would appear. And visitors, mon ami, who have come a long way to see us. Observe that the machine is travel-stained, that it appears to be weighted down with luggage. Possibly it is our old friend Murgier,” she added almost mischievously.
The face of the man in tweeds paled under its tan.
“Murgier!” he exclaimed under his breath.
The Countess smiled faintly.
“But it is probably only a motoring party up from Georges de Loup who have wandered off the main road, Armand.”
The man in tweeds had torn the cigarette between his fingers into rags. As if held in the spell of some strange fascination he watched the motor grow larger and larger.
“There are men in it!” he muttered, when the dusty car was abreast the lower wall of the Chateau. “Four men!”
The woman in the wicker chair seemed suddenly to grow animated.
“Mon Dieu!” she said in a low voice. “If it is he, that devil!”
The man she addressed made no reply, only the weaving of his fingers betraying his suppressed nervousness. The hum of the sturdy motor was heard from the drive, way among the terraces now.
There was an interlude—voices around a bend in the promenade—finally the appearance of a liveried automaton that was the butler.
“Monsieur Murgier, madame.”
The man in tweeds
stifled a groan. The Countess turned slowly in her chair.
“You may direct Monsieur Murgier here, Henri.”
The butler bowed and turned away. The man in tweeds closed his hands until the nails of them bit into the palms.
“God!”
The Countess laid a tense hand on his arm.
“Smile!” she commanded.
The Monsieur Murgier who presently sauntered down the shaded promenade of the Chateau was a tall, loose-jointed individual with a melancholy mustache and a deeply wrinkled face. A shabby, dusty suit hung loosely and voluminously about his spare figure. A soft straw hat was in one hand; he was gray at the temples.
When he bowed over the slender fingers of the Countess there was a hidden glow in his somber eyes.
“To be favored by the presence of the great!” the woman murmured softly. “Monsieur, this is an honor! May I make you acquainted with the Marquis de Remec?”
She introduced the visitor to the man in tweeds, who bowed stiffly. Somewhere back around the corner of the promenade the drone of the voices of those who had been in the car sounded faintly.
“A liqueur, m’sieu?” the Countess asked. “A cigar?”
Her visitor shook his head, gazed on the peaceful panorama of the valley of the Var.
“Thank you, no. My time is limited. My journey has been a long one and I must make a start for Paris with all due haste. You,” he explained courteously, “and the Marquis will put yourselves in readiness with as much rapidity as possible. You are both my guests for the return journey!”
The man in tweeds whitened to the lips. His startled glance darted to the Countess. The woman had settled herself back in the black wicker chair again and had joined her fingers, tip to tip.
“Accompany you to Paris?” she drawled. “Are you quite serious?”
The wrinkled face of Monsieur Murgier grew inflexible, brass-like!
“Quite serious,” he replied. “You are both under arrest—for the theft of the de Valois pearls!”