The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (4 page)

“A fake?” gasped Smitty.

“Yes. It’s only a copy of the real painting. A clever one, but still a copy.”

“Then why on earth,” said Nellie, “was murder committed for it?”

“I would like to know that, too,” said The Avenger, with the cold interest appearing in his eyes that promised bad news to some racketeer, somewhere.

“You’re sure of this, chief?” persisted Smitty.

“I’m sure. We’ll make a few tests, but I’m sure without them. I remember this picture vividly, and the original was not quite the same in one respect—the boy’s nose. Gauguin made it red, but not that red.”

If anyone else had talked like this, Smitty and Nellie would have laughed. The idea of remembering every tint in a picture, seen thousands of miles away and years ago, enough to spot a copy as a fake, sounded preposterous.

But they knew the marvelous eye for color Benson had, and his equally marvelous memory, and they believed. They’d have put the picture down as a fake just on his word, without any of the X-ray tests he proceeded to make.

The tests, though, proved it conclusively. The painting was only a copy, smuggled out of France.

“That settles a point,” said Nellie suddenly.

“What?” said Smitty.

“I thought Teebo was a stranger to this country when he talked to us. I’m sure, now. No one knowing anything about American collectors would be ignorant of the kind of man the chief is. And no man in his right mind, knowing about the chief, would dream of trying to sell him a phony painting!”

Smitty nodded agreement. “That brings us back to the first thought—that it was Teebo’s own gang that killed him. Maybe one of them saw him pulling the boner of trying to sell a fake to The Avenger, and killed him so the sale wouldn’t go through and the racket be discovered.”

“Phooey!” said Nellie. “They wouldn’t have to kill Teebo to prevent a sale. All they’d have to do would be to tell him to lay off.”

Benson said nothing. To the exclusion of everything else, he was staring at the picture. Particularly at the little boy’s sun-reddened nose.

Smitty sighed with something like disappointment.

“Anyhow, it begins to look like just another racket—a swell time to smuggle copies of famous paintings into the United States and sell them for fancy prices as originals. So what? The police can handle that without the services of Justice, Inc.”

It was just then that the vestibule buzzer sounded.

Nellie stepped to a table on which was a little black box. The box was a miniature television set, a marvel of its kind, designed by Smitty. It showed whoever was in the vestibule downstairs.

The little blonde stared at the person who had rung for admittance at one-thirty in the morning.

“Tall, athletic, fair-haired, well-dressed,” she said. “About thirty. Very good-looking,” she added.

Smitty snorted. Nellie was always pretending interest in handsome strangers, which burned up the giant.

The Avenger nodded and Nellie pressed the buzzer which opened the door from vestibule to tiny elevator that went only to this top-floor room.

If this sounds careless in a place where giant plans against the underworld are hatched, reckless in men who are so hated by criminals that anyone of a hundred would have given all he had to kill them, remember the character of the place.

The Avenger’s headquarters was like a fortress. The elevator was automatically sealed so that a visitor could get off nowhere but on the top floor. There, an electric eye searched him for weapons. Further, there were, in the vast room, half a hundred devices that could be discharged by secret pressures to disable an attacker.

It was unthinkable that anyone should be able to just walk in and do any harm to the place or its occupants. It was so unthinkable that it didn’t occur to any of the members of Justice, Inc.

They were about to get a lesson on the possibility of the impossible.

The elevator door slid back with a smooth sound, and their visitor stepped into the room. Nellie watched the recorder of the electric eye. There was no indication of metal in large enough bulk to be a weapon. No hint of dagger or gun. The eye went from the soles of a man’s feet to the crown of his head, too. Even a weapon hidden in a shoe or a hat would have been indicated.

“Good evening,” said the man. “Are you, sir, Mr. Benson?”

“I am Benson,” The Avenger said, his face calm.

“You’ll pardon the lateness of the hour,” said the man.

He looked worried, almost frightened. “But such is the urgency of my business that I could not wait till morning.”

Benson merely nodded, icy-pale eyes like beams of light on the handsome, worried face.

“My name is Harris,” said the man. “And the business I have to take up with you—concerns that painting! Don’t move, any of you!”

He was worried-looking no longer. Instead, desperate triumph was in his eyes. And in his hand was a flat pink flask of colorless but oily-looking liquid that Smitty identified on sight, with a feeling of ice along his spine, as nitroglycerin.

“If any of the three of you moves a muscle,” said the man tensely but calmly, “I’ll drop this. Needless to describe what a pint of this stuff can do to the building and to us all.”

Smitty found himself holding his breath. So was Nellie. The Avenger stood near the table on which was “The Dock,” not moving an inch, not even an expression on his face.

“I am aware,” said the man composedly, “that you have many trick inventions in here. But please remember that no one of them could overpower me quickly enough to prevent me from dropping this nitroglycerin. In fact, even if I were struck instantly dead, in my falling would come your destruction.”

Smitty stared with fascination at Dick’s calmness. They were in the deadliest danger of their lives. There was no doubt of that. Each of them knew surely that this man was not bluffing. They did as he wanted, or they died!

But the expressionlessness of The Avenger’s face persisted. He seemed so unmoved, indeed, that the man who called himself Harris was urged to cold anger.

“If you think I won’t do it—” he began.

“I am quite sure you would,” said Benson evenly. “What do you want us to do?”

“I want you to stay right where you are, moving neither feet nor hands, while I walk out with that painting,” said the man.

“Aren’t you taking desperate risks just to get hold of a fake?” The Avenger suggested.

“A fake?” Harris repeated. He was quite indifferent about it. “Is it, really?”

“It is only a worthless copy.”

“Regardless,” said Harris, “I’ll have it. Don’t move!”

He came calmly toward The Avenger, passing within easy reach of the trained hands, slim and not strong-looking but which were like chilled steel in their incredible strength.

And Benson didn’t reach with those hands.

Harris picked up the painting and backed toward the door. Not the elevator door, because he could be trapped in that tiny cage and knew it. He went toward the door leading to a stairway, which could not be entered from below but could be used as an exit by anyone inside, due to a system of intricate one-way locks.

In the doorway, the man paused. There was still triumph on his face but there was no gloating there. He was not only a brave man, he was an intelligent one. He knew that while he had beaten The Avenger, that did not mean that Benson wasn’t a dangerous antagonist.

“You might trap me on the stairs,” he said, “but even there, if I dropped this flask, the whole building would go down, burying you in it. I leave it to you to decide whether the loss of a fake painting is worth that.”

He turned, and Smitty looked at Nellie, angry and undecided and astounded. That someone should walk in here—here—and be able to pick up an object and walk out again in defiance of them all was simply unbelievable.

“Hey! Nobody can do that to us!” groaned the giant.

“It seems that it is being done,” said Dick Benson evenly.

“We’ve got to stop him!”

“Go ahead,” said Nellie. “The job’s all yours.” And she shivered as she remembered the TNT—enough to blow them all sky-high.

Meanwhile, they heard the steady sound of Harris’ feet descending the stairs.

The Avenger went to his huge desk and sat down. He seemed almost indifferent.

“The electric indicator gave no warning,” he said, “because the man’s weapon was of glass instead of metal. We must remedy that defect so that this cannot happen again.”

They distinctly heard the outer door, three floors down, open and close.

“Chief, he’s getting away!” wailed Nellie.

The pale, icy eyes were expressionless.

“Let him go,” Benson said. “Why not? The painting is without value. And we have had a chance to examine it for any significant peculiarities.”

Smitty and Nellie hadn’t thought of that. After all, there was no reason to fight and bleed and die for something worthless.

But then Nellie had a thought.

“Say! That picture wasn’t worth anything as a picture—but maybe it had some important message on it. Under the paint, for example.”

“You forget that we X-rayed it. No message of any kind was revealed,” said The Avenger.

The ice-pale eyes were intent in thought.

“That was a brave man,” he mused. “And a desperate man. So desperate that he would have blown himself to pieces along with us rather than fail in his mission. Yet, he knew the picture was valueless; he showed no surprise when I told him. One thing is certain. No criminal would risk his life like that even for a genuine painting worth a hundred thousand dollars. That means that whatever this picture business may be, it is not an ordinary racket.”

“But that only means that, somehow, the thing has great importance,” mourned Smitty. “And we had to let him get away!”

For an instant something that might almost have been a smile touched the corners of Dick Benson’s lips.

“Stand where I was standing, at that table on which the picture rested,” he said to Smitty.

Wondering, the giant took his place there.

“Now, look behind you.”

Smitty looked and exclaimed aloud. He had forgotten something that rested behind that table; and it was odd that he should have forgotten it was because he was its inventor.

There was a cabinet there, and the front of the cabinet was a screen over which soft fluorescence played constantly, though it was almost unnoticeable in the brilliant illumination of the daylight bulbs. The cabinet was the container of the last word in television sets, as far beyond the standard commercial sets as they, in turn, are beyond the old crystal sets.

The power was on and had been on all during the deadly interview. And most of the action had taken place where the transmitter would catch it all.

“I signaled Mac’s drugstore with my toe against the floor switch when Harris drew out the flask,” Benson said. “Someone must be following him, now.”

At first glance the store seemed just what it appeared to be—an ordinary drugstore. And so it was, in front. But the rear room, which was twice as big as the store part and which was partitioned off in steel, was not at all what you’d have expected to find in the back of a drugstore.

It was a huge dual laboratory. One side was taken up with electrical and radio apparatus, and it was here that Smitty conducted his experiments.

The other half was for chemical experiments. Here worked the proprietor of the store, Fergus MacMurdie.

MacMurdie had been about to close up the shop when the signal came for him to stand by for a television message from the Bleek Street headquarters.

Benson was the one who had set Mac up in this store. Benson was Mac’s chief, whose orders he obeyed instantly and without question. Mac would have died for Dick Benson.

So he almost dropped a vial of concentrated sulphuric on his toes in his haste to get to the screen when the signal light glowed.

Mac was tall and bony and had bleak blue eyes. His hair was coarse and reddish and so was his skin. He had ears that stood out from his head like sails, and a pair of the biggest feet in captivity. But no one ever laughed at Mac. Not twice, anyway.

His dour blue eyes took in about five seconds of the tableau on the television screen, and then he yelled: “Cole! Cole Wilson!”