The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (10 page)

Benson turned the massive gold plate over in slim, powerful fingers. On the curved back, which was still worn smooth from years of contact, centuries before, with the abdomen of King Montezuma the Second, were carved more ancient ideographs.

Benson stared at the hieroglyphs with icily flaring pale eyes.

“If only we had an idea who’d be next, so that we could prevent tragedy!” he said.

Though no mortal mind could have guessed it at that stage of the game, the next person was to be an old man in a storeroom at the Metropolitan Museum.

It was nearly midnight. Dr. Brunniger was reluctantly putting away the primitives he had been examining earlier in the evening. Time to go home. He reached into a locker for his hat and coat, and turned to put them on.

There was a man standing in the storeroom doorway, with his back to the west wing of one of the public display rooms. The man wore a black suit with dark-gray shirt and black hat. He was not bad-looking, very dark of hair and skin, with narrowed black eyes.

“Dr. Brunniger?”

“Why, yes,” said the old man. “But who are you, and how did you get in at this hour? The watchman—”

“I looked for the watchman, to get official permission to see you, but he wasn’t around. The door wasn’t locked, so I just came in.”

“That’s very odd,” said Brunniger. Then: “You wanted to see me? Why?”

“I’ve been told you’re the best-known authority in the country in Indian picture writing,” the dark man said. “So I came to you with some of the stuff to see if you could read it for me.”

“Queer,” said Brunniger. “Another person was in here several hours ago with the same request.”

“That
is
funny,” said the man. His smile grew set, stony, then was carefully made natural again. “But I wouldn’t know anything about that. Would you try the sign language for me?”

“Why, yes, I guess so,” said the old man. “Our mission is to serve the public. Let’s see it.”

The man took out a sheet of paper, covered with ideographs. But this was not like the paper Benson had had. This had the ideographs in reverse. They had been formed by inking the surface on which the hieroglyphs had originally been carved, and then pressing the paper to that surface. So the picture symbols were white on a dark background.

The old man put on glasses and took the paper to the nearest light. He peered at it, back to the man in black.

“Curious,” he said, after studying it for a time. “It seems to have some sort of topographical description in it. There is something about a great rock image on a hill or cliff. I think the rock image is a freak of nature, like a natural bridge, not carved by human hands. But I can’t be sure. These hieroglyphs have so many meanings that they can’t be accurately read except in totality of subject. And this message is incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” said the man in black.

“Oh, yes. There is obviously much more of it. This is just a fragment of a much longer message.”

The man’s smile grew more ingratiating.

“It’s swell of you to help me out,” he said. “Is there any more besides a cliff and a rock statue?”

“There’s a symbol here that has two meanings, again depending on the context of the rest of the message. One meaning is the setting sun. The other is gold.”

“It’s either a symbol for the setting sun—or gold?” said the man pleasantly.

“Yes. There’s no way to tell wh—”

The word was terminated before its conclusion. So was the kindly old man’s life.

The man in black stared, still smiling, at the body of the old expert, lying on the stone floor with red dabbling his gray hair. He wiped the barrel of his gun, which had clubbed Brunniger down, on the frock coat the old man wore, and then put the gun in its shoulder holster.

He went out, past the body of the watchman at the big front door, and strolled away from the huge building.

The watchman lay there, breathing harshly and unevenly as a man does from concussion of the brain.

Next morning, in a hospital bed, the watchman’s breathing was better. He was conscious now. He stared up into pale eyes like colorless fire, set in a dead, immobile face that itself had no color whatever.

“Can you remember at all what the man looked like?” Benson asked urgently. Over his shoulder, Lieutenant of Detectives Hogarth peered anxiously.

The watchman was too weak to talk normally. He whispered:

“He had black eyes, and his skin was very dark. That’s all I could see. He had his left hand over his face like a mask.”

“How did you come to open the door for him that late at night?”

“I heard a tapping at the door. I called out, and got an answer that it was Van Zyder, who is a director in the museum. I thought he had something important to tell Dr. Brunniger, who was still there. I opened the small door in the big metal one. This man shoved a gun in my stomach. He made me turn around after the door was closed behind us, and slugged me.”

“And all you saw was that he wore dark clothes and had black eyes and a dark skin?”

The wounded watchman thought a minute.

“Just one thing more,” he whispered. “The man had his hat back just a little from his forehead. Enough for me to see that his hair was black too, and grew down on his forehead in a little peak. Widow’s peak, they call it.”

Benson’s pale eyes burned on Hogarth’s face.

“Not enough,” Hogarth growled. “I don’t think we can place the guy with such a meager description. But we’ll try, of course.”

Nellie Gray was as fragile-looking as a porcelain doll. Dainty and small, slim and pink and white, she looked as though life owed her a satin pillow on which to sit and dream in sheltered seclusion. No one could look at her and guess the amazing deftness and strength there was in her slimly rounded body.

And no one at this moment could have guessed the desperate thing she was turning over in her quick brain.

She sat on one of the divans in the Bleek Street headquarters. She sat on one foot, like a little girl, and she tapped her red underlip with the tip of a slim and fragile-looking finger in deep thought.

The gigantic Smitty was there, in the big room. MacMurdie was back at his store. He and Smitty had seen the other members of the expedition assigned to them by Dick Benson, and had turned in their reports.

Reports that told no more than had been found out before they were interviewed.

Nellie spoke to Smitty. “Mr. Benson has said several times that I’m not being held here. That I’m free to come and go as I choose.”

“That’s right,” said Smitty, eyes blue and ingenuous in his good-natured, full-moon face. “Say, you aren’t
still
suspicious of us?”

“No. Not any more.”

“Then why,” said Smitty, “did you ask if you could go out?”

“Because that’s what I want to do,” said Nellie. “And I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t try to stop me.”

“You want to go out!” gasped Smitty.

“Yes.”

“But you know the situation. It would be very dangerous for you to go roaming around alone! We’re up against a gang of killers. They’ve already tried twice to get you—once at the school, once when you were leaving police headquarters with the chief. And you’d go out and expose yourself to a third attempt!”

“I don’t think there’d be so much danger,” said Nellie pensively.

Smitty snorted explosively.

“Anyway, I want to go out. Will you let me?”

Smitty came and stood over her, gigantic, so muscled that his arms hung crooked at his sides like the arms of a gorilla. He made her appear smaller and daintier than ever.

“You put me in a spot,” he complained. “Sure, you’re free. I haven’t any orders to keep you from leaving. But hanged if I’d allow you to go out and maybe get snatched or knocked off before you’d gone two blocks. There’s a healthy chance this gang knows where our headquarters is and are watching it. They know the chief’s interest by now—and tried to bomb him.” Smitty’s eyes went venomously to the big canary cage in the corner where the bomber was sitting dejectedly on a wooden stool and peering through the bars.

“Then I’m
not
free!” said Nellie.

“I didn’t say that,” Smitty mumbled, with a harassed look.

“If you won’t let me go out, I’m not free. And if I’m being held a prisoner—”

“Oh, for gosh sake!” said Smitty. “Can’t you understand I’m just trying to keep you in for your own good?”

Nellie stood up. She could have walked under the giant’s outstretched arm and had plenty of room to spare. But she was in thorough, feminine command of the situation.

“Since you haven’t orders to keep me in, I’ll go out,” she said.

“But look here—” Smitty began hoarsely.

“I think my things are on the floor below. Goodbye.”

She went to the stairs leading down from the third floor headquarters.

“But—”

Smitty took a step toward her. Stopped. Started. Stopped.

She smiled sweetly at the giant, and went on down.

On the street, her smile became set and fixed on her full red lips. For her plan was indeed a desperate one.

Police, Benson, everyone, seemed to have made no real progress in finding her father’s murderer. And she burned to have that man found—and electrocuted! So she was going to try a little investigating on her own hook.

This gang wanted her. That was proven. They wanted her, probably, to wring information from her about the bricks. All right, let them catch her! Let them take her to wherever they hung out. There, she’d see just who were in the gang, so she could later identify them. She’d escape, and lead police back to wherever they’d taken her. They could capture the whole lot of them in one stroke.

Of course, it might not be quite as easy as that, to escape from them. But she was willing to gamble on that recklessly slim chance. She might look like a Dresden doll, but she had the will of a man as big as Smitty himself, and she was r’arin’ for action.

She thought the fact that the gang wanted her so badly would insure it. And—she was right.

She had gone three blocks, toward a cab stand, when she saw a man seem to detach himself from a doorway in which he had been leaning. She went on, got into a cab, and saw in the rear-view mirror that a long, dark sedan had slid to a stop a block in her wake. It was too far to see if the man was in it, but he probably was. And in addition, she could see the heads and hats of three others.

Four men against one girl. That should give them odds enough, Nellie thought, with a bitter quirk of her red lips.

“Where you want to go, miss?” the driver said.

Nellie didn’t think it mattered much. She didn’t think she’d be allowed to get to any address she wanted to mention. But she had to act natural.

“Drive north on Ninth Avenue,” she said. “To Forty-second Street.”

The cab started off. The sedan behind crept closer, almost at once. There’d never be a better spot for trouble than the warehouse and wholesale district they were in right now.

Nellie saw it coming.

“Look out!”
she screamed to the driver, taking a firm grip on the seat herself. “
From the left—”

With a motor scream like that of a charging animal, the sedan had shot abreast of them and veered powerfully to the right.

“Hey—” flared the taxi driver.

That was all. The sedan had his cab pinned against the curb like a bug under a student’s thumb. And the man was hanging over the wheel, knocked out when his head hit the window upright on the left.

Nellie wrenched at the door, screaming. But in the midst of a lot of wild acting, her eyes were cool and calculating. She had to act as if this were terrifying and unexpected, so the men would not suspect a trap. That was all.

They got her and dragged her from the cab, pulling her clutching fingers loose from the door handle. People were beginning to run up. They got her into the sedan. It screamed off, with the right front fender scraping the tire, crumpled down by the accident.