Death out of Thin Air (7 page)

“Do you think there will be any more séances after what happened to Mlle. Zsgany?”

“Yes,” Chandler said. “There will be one tonight. The Count phoned me just before I called you.”

Diavolo said, “The papers were out with the story by then. Doesn't he know anything about his medium's death?”

Chandler shook his head, “I don't know. He simply said that the sitting tonight was to make another attempt to break the Vampire's power and send him back to his grave. The Count has been trying — or pretending to try to do that ever since the Vampire appeared.”

“Good. Then you're taking the Maharajah of Vdai-Loo, a gentleman who is deeply interested in occult matters — a gentleman who can make a few occult passes himself on occasion. Are you reporting the theft of your money to the police?”

“Yes,” Chandler replied. “But not just yet. If I went to them with the story I've got, they'd think — what did you say?”

“Nothing,” Diavolo said. “Go on.” What he had started to say was “Inspector Church would have you in a padded cell quicker than I can vanish a thin dime.”

“And,” Chandler continued, “I doubt if they could get a thing on the Count. He's too clever. But I think you could. Phony spirit phenomena are right up your alley.”

“I don't like alleys,” Don said, taking the phone and dialing a number, “especially dark alleys but I'm afraid I'll have to barge into this one. I haven't much choice. I'm missing my first evening show right now and I won't be able to go on again until I can prove to the Inspector that Chan and I didn't kill the girl. And Kaselmeyer the tightwad, will dock me for every cent he — Hello! Pat?…. I want you to dress as the Maharanee of Vdai-Loo. I'll pick you up in half an hour.”

“We're going to meet the Bat in person.
What!
”

Pat's voice over the phone was saying, “I'm sorry. I couldn't possibly, I have a date tonight. You should have called earlier, darling.”

With her voice, on the phone, there came a faint intermittent scratching sound. Diavolo paid more attention to this than to her words.

Then he said, “All right. See if you can stall him, I'm on my way!”

Diavolo slammed the receiver back on the hook, turned and raced for the door.

Chandler, his mouth open, called after him, “What — where—?”

Don shouted back, “She says she doesn't want to meet The Bat! He's there!”

Diavolo was gone. And as he raced for the elevators he was thinking, “He must be able to be in two places at once! Even if he can fly he'd have to go like a — My God! —
like a bat out of hell!
”

C
HAPTER
VIII

Handcuffs for a Wizard

S
HORTLY
after Diavolo and Mickey had gone from the Reverend Van Lio's house in the Village, the detectives, their search fruitless, left the house next door. Pat saw them go as she watched through the mirror.

Karl Hartz, the Scarlet Wizard's private scientific wizard, was the man who designed and built, to Don's order, all the curious gadgets and offstage mechanisms which were the secret of many of the Diavolo illusions. He locked the door behind the dicks and waved an “All clear” signal toward the mirror.

He had known that Diavolo and the girls had returned from the theater and were next door. One of the skulls that served as bookends on the library table had told him that. He had seen it grin at him when its lower jaw moved ever so slightly, downward. The grinning skull always meant that the Reverend's house was occupied.

Karl is a stoop-shouldered little man with a great bushy shock of white hair and thick-lensed glasses. After his graduation from a famous European University Karl's eyesight had failed him so that he was unable to pursue his chosen profession of construction engineer.

Instead, for many years, he had toured the vaudeville stages of the world as Prof. Memo, lightning calculator and memory expert. Karl, hearing their names called off but once, can immediately recite the names of the playing cards in a shuffled deck, forwards, backwards or both ways from the center.

Ask him to give you the square of 1,684 or add ten four-digit figures in his head and he gives you the correct answer before an adding machine can make up its mind. For amusement. Karl plays chess, blindfolded.

Diavolo had met Karl in Budapest at a time when the latter was being treated by a famous eye surgeon. The treatments were eventually successful enough so that Karl, aided by his thick-lensed glasses, could see once again. But now the profession of engineering wanted younger men, and so Karl had turned to contriving whatever mechanical hocus-pocus was necessary for the Mysteries of Diavolo. The House of Magic was almost entirely the product of his ingenuity.

When Pat saw his signal she turned to a large three-sheet poster on the wall that bore a picture of Hermann the Great. She made a simple pass before it with her hand. The poster slid upward out of sight. She walked through the opening into the Diavolo living room and the doorway closed automatically behind her. No hint of such an entrance showed in the paneled wall of the living room.

“Hello, Pat,” Karl said. “Where's Don? And what has he been up to now? Why did those detectives—?”

Pat's frown was worried. “They want him for murder, Karl. They've already arrested Chan.”

Karl, whose ingenious surprises had astonished thousands, now took a big dose of his own medicine. “But … but what—” Karl floundered, baffled by Pat's announcement.

Pat sat down and rapidly gave him the whole story. “Karl,” she said, finishing, “can a — a man climb straight up the side of a sheer wall?”

Karl frowned, thinking over her story. “Nothing's impossible, Pat,” he answered after a moment. “You should know that by now. Give me time and money enough and I'll deliver any miracle you name — or something that looks a lot like it, at any rate.”

“Yes, I know,” Pat replied. “A magician can
appear
to do almost anything. But, Karl, the Bat didn't just look as if he was climbing that wall. He actually
did.
He got into Don's dressing room and out again by the window! There was no other way—”

Pat stopped abruptly and Karl sprang to his feet.

A voice behind them — a hard, insistent, steely voice commanded, “
Restez en repos!
”

Beyond the archway to the hall were the stairs. A figure stood on the steps halfway down, a grim and evil monstrosity whose long black cloak fused with the inky shadows around it and seemed part of them.

A black-gloved hand protruded from the folds of the flowing cape. It held an ugly square-nosed automatic.

Pat knew enough French to know that the voice had said, “Stand still!” But the phrasing was antique, almost obsolete. Frenchmen had not spoken the words for many centuries….

The dark ominously shaped shadow moved, continued down the stairs and came toward them. It stopped just outside the archway in the darkness of the hall, beyond the edge of light. But Pat and Karl could see more than they wanted of the details of that nightmare of a head.

Zoological authorities all agree that the face of the vampire bat is the most repulsive countenance in the whole realm of animal physiognomy. Pat and Karl were looking at such a face magnified many times.

The shape of the head, if it was like anything else at all possessed by any creature that ever walked or flew the face of the earth, was most nearly similar to that of the wolf. It had the same hungry snout and long, razor-sharp canine teeth. But it was a black wolfish head straight out of some maniac's disordered dream. Large, leathery, pointed ears stood up from the sides and top of the head and the nose bore a curious erect, spear-shaped appendage characteristic of the bat family. The mouth grinned diabolically and the small black eyes had a bright look.

The figure spoke again, its voice harsh. “
Tournez vous. À la fois!
”
The gun indicated Karl.

Karl obeyed slowly, turning his back on the archway and the figure beyond. His eyes rested on the nearby table and he tried to sidestep in its direction. Beneath its top edge was the hidden spring that controlled a trapdoor just within the archway. If he could get to it and if the Bat should come forward into the room….

But Karl never made it. The Bat moved too quickly. As soon as Karl's back had turned, he took three long strides forward and his gun hand swung. The hard muzzle of the automatic caught Karl behind the ear. He crumpled to the floor. Pat screamed.

Then, as the thing moved toward her, one arm outstretched, the phone rang.

The Bat's head turned quickly. “
Répondez!
” He motioned at the phone with his gun. Pat, partly from shock, partly from anger at what he had done to Karl, did not obey.

The fact that any human sound other than a bat's shrill squeal could issue from that mouth was astounding enough. But what he said now was even more strange.

“
Answer that! Be quick about it! And no funny business
.”

That broke the spell. Pat, as much from relief as anything else, laughed and got control of herself.

“Oh,” she said, “It speaks English.”

She got up and took the phone. The Bat, his gun on her every second, watched her intently.

In the phone she heard Diavolo's voice calling from Chandler's office and asking her to get ready to go with him to meet the Bat. Her mind worked like lightning.

“I' m sorry. I couldn't possibly, I have a date tonight,” she said breathlessly. “You should have called earlier, darling.”

But that wasn't all she did. Nor did the Bat see the slight intermittent scratching movement of her pointed thumbnail against the side of the phone receiver. The Bat didn't see it, but Diavolo heard it. The sounds carried a message to him which, translated, read: “
I've met the Bat already! He's here! Hurry!
”

And then, after Don had hung up, she stalled, pretending to carry on a conversation. This didn't work for long. Impatiently the gun moved closer. Pat finally had to hang up.

Then, at once — as she was replacing the receiver — she felt the gloved hands around her neck and the two fingers that pressed quickly and steadily in the hollows behind her ears. Blackness fell swiftly like a great curtain….

The black sedan bearing Mickey and Don Diavolo roared down Eleventh Avenue, southward beneath the pillars of the elevated highway where traffic lights were few. But even so, they were too late.

In the alleyway behind the house, Don pulled the car to a screeching stop.

“Take her in, Mickey,” he ordered as he leaped out and ran toward the wall on the right. Don jumped, caught the top of the wall and drew himself up.

He stopped, resting on his hands, his feet dangling. One of the second story windows at the back of his house was open, and, just below it on the wall, a black shadow moved down the side of the building — a vague shape just discernible, a bit blacker than the surrounding black.

Don started to throw his leg over the wall's top when a set of muscular hands suddenly fastened themselves in a tight grip on his ankles!

A voice shouted, “Haul him down, Dan!”

Dan hauled. Diavolo fell. A flashlight beam shot at him as he picked himself up. A handcuff snapped around his wrist. Its other cuff was fastened to the arm of a broad-shouldered six foot Irish cop.

The voice behind the flash came from a plainclothes man who said, “Well, well. Just look at what we've bagged! A Rajah, no less.”

Don said, “And the wrong man again — as usual!” He started to pull the cop with him. “The Bat! He'll get away.”

The detective, like Pat before him, said, “Hold him, Dan.” He drew his gun.

Diavolo growled at him. “Listen, gum-shoe. I tell you there's murder in that house. I saw the Bat outside the window.”

“Dan,” the dick said, unimpressed. “We'd better put in a call for the loony wagon.
He's
bats.”

Don's swift movement now was like lightning. While he talked, his fingers had worked feverishly at the handcuff. As it clicked open, he caught the cop's arm in a sudden jiu jitsu grip, stepped heavily on the man's right foot and levered him forward. The policeman fell, sprawling head-on into the detective with his gun. They both collapsed.