The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (15 page)

It took the little band a minute to get it. But when they did, they got it hard.

Flowers! Orchids!
Black
orchids! Delivered here!

Tensely, they listened to leisurely steps mounting the stairs outside. Tensely, they watched for the door to open and the “messenger” to enter. Nellie shivered a little. Just what she expected in the way of a messenger, she didn’t know.

But it was distinctly an anticlimax when the door opened and an ordinary delivery boy came in. Death shouldn’t be sent by ordinary messenger service at two bits an errand.

“Mr. Benson?” the boy said, looking curiously around the vast room. “Flowers from Gresham Bros. Sign here.”

Benson signed; and, as he did so, Cole Wilson impulsively began to unwrap the box.

“No!”
Dick snapped at Cole.

The Avenger’s monosyllable was like a shot, it was so sharp and imperative. Cole dropped the box to the floor, he was so startled by it.

Benson picked it up, very carefully, and placed it on the desk. He turned to the gaping delivery boy.

“You were given this at the florist’s shop?”

“Yes, sir,” said the lad, shrinking a little from the pale, deadly eyes, though those eyes held no threat for him and he instinctively knew it.

“You know what’s in it?”

“Why, no, sir. Just flowers, I guess.”

The Avenger called Gresham Bros.

“Yes, sir, the box contains orchids,” the voice in the florist’s shop answered. There was pride in that voice. “Black orchids. Haven’t you opened the box, yet? They are our very finest.”

“Isn’t it a little unusual for even a large shop like yours to have black orchids?” said Benson evenly.

“Yes, it is,” the voice said cheerfully. “But a customer of ours has recently requested us always to carry them. He orders quite a few, so we do. Sometimes, it’s very hard to get them, but Gresham Bros, always gives the finest service in New—”

“Who is this customer?” The Avenger’s vibrant voice bit it out so that even over a telephone it became a compelling thing.

“Why, his n-name is Jones,” said the man at the other end of the wire. “He has given us several addresses. Always telephones his orders. That is r-really all I know about him.”

Smitty wondered if the man would have sounded so chipper if he’d read in the papers of the presence of black orchids in connection with the black deaths. But the man had not read this in the papers. No one had. For the reason that, without explanation, The Avenger had told the papers not to print that detail.

That reason now began to show itself. Benson had hoped from the start that, through the delivery of the flowers, there might be a slight chance to trace the Voice. And there would have been no more deliveries had florists been warned by reading of the way the orchids were being used as death symbols. For that matter, the Voice would have ordered no more, fearing a trap through his telephoning for them.

It looked as if the florist’s connection was to be just another failure, however.

Gresham Bros, had never seen their exotic customer. They knew nothing about him, save that he always paid promptly, sending a Western Union messenger with cash.

“Can I go, now?” said the boy, looking scared, and also looking so guilty that it was blatantly apparent he was innocent.

The Avenger nodded; the boy went hastily to the door and out.

And Rosabel said from the corner of the room.

“The television screen! Somethin’s coming through! And I think it is a Black Wings broadcast!”

They gathered around the cabinet, Smitty and Mac half crouching as if some tangible enemy were entering their midst whom they could spring at and batter.

The screen glowed brilliantly. It was a mess of lines and moving blurs till Smitty adjusted the unscrambler. Then they got it.

This time, instead of seeing the underground crypt which Hannon had once built under his tool house as a storage space for dangerous chemicals, they saw what seemed to be an ordinary bedroom.

There was a high-poster bed, a dresser, chintz curtains over a window and an overhead light that glared with special brightness, showing that oversized bulbs had been installed for clear transmission.

No one was in the bedroom at first, but then Josh muttered, “Here he comes!”

The glowing screen had darkened in the center, and the darkness took on a strange and sinister pattern. It was one with which they were all familiar, the thick black shadow of spread wings. It was probably formed by the simple trick of holding black paper cut that way over the television transmitter, but it was no less eerie for its simplicity.

The shadow faded out. And all in the big room gasped.

There was the Voice, all right—tall, lithe, with the black hood hiding his head and with the black wings outlined in a thin white line on his chest. But with him were seven other figures, all standing as still as statues.

And these figures were—Richard Benson, Cole Wilson, Nellie Gray, Josh and Rosabel Newton, Smitty, and MacMurdie.

In a line stood duplicates of all of Justice, Inc. And the fact that this time you could see plainly that the duplicates were wax, not living figures, did not take away from the blow of it. Because many deaths, it is claimed, have been dealt at a distance by sticking pins in wax statues of the victim.

Sticking pins in them—or handing them black orchids!

The deep, booming voice sounded out.

“Members of the Black Wings army—”

So this was being broadcast, as was the first, to all the cells; or whatever you wanted to call the groups organized by this devil worshiper. Just how many were viewing this? The band at Bleek Street would have given much to know.

“You have seen how three traitors to our cause have been given the black orchid of death. Austin Gailord, Edwin Maller and Frank Stanton. Stanton’s retribution you did not actually witness, but you saw accounts of it in the papers. Now, you are to see what happens to enemies of the Black Wings outside their ranks.”

The hooded figure reached behind him and brought into view a tangled black mass, like half a dozen sheets of crumpled tissue paper dipped in black ink.

“As you know, the Black Wings organization sprang into being to help our country in a time of war.”

“Oh-ho!” whispered Smitty. “The patriotic note! I’ve been kind of waiting for that.”

“Shut up!” snapped Nellie.

“More and more, our organization is taking over, forcing greedy manufacturers to produce more goods for our country’s defense at less profit: forcing potential traitors to the United States to keep their tongues from betraying secrets. But, now, another organization is opposing us. This band of enemy agents calls itself Justice, Inc. At its head is a man named Richard Benson. He would undo all our good work, so we shall deal with him. Now!”

The hooded figure of the Voice approached the seven life-sized figures.

“To you, Richard Benson, Algernon Smith—”

“I’ll sink his head down into his chest if I catch him—calling me Algernon,” said Smitty fiercely.

“Cole Wilson—” said the Voice; the other names had been lost in Smitty’s outburst—“I give these pretty flowers. You will presently find out what they mean. And you, fellow members of the Black Wings, watch the papers for seven more of the black deaths!”

In the hand of each wax figure was thrust a black orchid. The hooded figure faced the screen dramatically, the shadow of the black wings blotted him and the other figures out.

After that, the screen showed blank. But for another half minute the pale, glacial eyes of The Avenger probed at it as if he would resurrect the detail he had been staring at so fixedly during the last of the broadcast.

That detail had nothing to do with the hooded figure, the orchids or the wax statues.

He had been staring at the chintz curtains of the room. Those curtains had moved rhythmically, just a little, it had seemed to him. They had not swayed, exactly. They had
swung.
They—

“Cole!” Nellie cried suddenly. “Cole, what’s wrong?” All turned toward Cole with the cry, and all felt ice touch their spines.

Cole was swaying on his feet as if someone had struck him a tremendous blow. His forehead was covered with great drops of sweat. His skin had darkened a little. The darkness was not like that of tan; it was caused by a faint, purple blackness deep under the skin!

“Feel kind of . . . funny,” faltered Cole. “Hot . . . in here.”

“Cole—”

“Water—” whispered Cole. “Burning up—”

He fell with a crash to the floor.

“Muster Benson!” yelled Mac, turning to where The Avenger had stood.

“Chief!” wailed Nellie.

But The Avenger was no longer in the room with them.

“It can’t be true,” gritted Josh. “That hooded devil
can’t
kill from a distance like that!”

Cole’s face was blackening with each second. He was unconscious now, gasping for breath.

“But it
is
true!” Smitty breathed. “Cole’s got it.
The black death!”

The Avenger came back into the room with all the speed with which he’d left. From the laboratory, he carried a hypodermic needle, with the cylinder half full of amber stuff.

He injected this into the unconscious Cole’s arm.

His pale eyes were very grim as he answered MacMurdie’s unspoken question.

“It’s an antidote for the black death. At least, I hope it is. I’ve had no time to prove it by experiment. It may cure Cole. It may kill him!”

“What poison did you find on the orchids?” asked Mac. “I tried everything I could think of and found nothing.”

“That was because there is nothing about the orchids to kill anyone,” said Benson. “The poison is not in the flowers. It is in the ribbon tying the florist’s packages together.”

“The ribbon?” gasped Nellie. “Under the wrapping paper?”

“Yes. Use a strong lens on the ribbon from that package. You will find that very fine wire is interwoven with the thread. This wire is bent in dozens of places into almost microscopically small hooks, and the hooks are tipped with poison. You can’t even feel the hooks; yet they penetrate enough to inject the poison. Cole touched the inner ribbon.”

“Then,” said Smitty, “somebody in the florist’s shop must be in on the thing, after all. Whoever it is that wraps the boxes.”

Benson nodded toward his desk, and they all looked. They saw something they hadn’t caught at the time.

The phones there had a special switch at the base. When this switch was flipped over, it automatically connected with police headquarters so that they listened in on the conversation and rounded up the talkers.

The switch was flipped over on the phone Benson had used in talking to Gresham Bros. By now, everyone in the shop would be in police custody.

The Avenger looked anxiously at Cole. It seemed as if the unconscious man’s dreadful color was at least getting no deeper. But it didn’t seem to be lightening, either.

“Rosabel,” Benson said, “look after him, please. The rest of us will go after the Voice.” He turned to Smitty. “You got some sort of line with the directional finder, didn’t you?”

The giant nodded. He had adjusted his loop at the first of the broadcast in a line along which the impulses came strongest.

“But I’m afraid it won’t mean anything,” he said. “I just have a line—southwest. We have no way of knowing the distance. Might be ten miles. Might be a couple of hundred.”

“The line,” said Benson, “will be enough. We’ll take the big plane, bomber type, with the army markings, and head southwest.”

The watchword of the members of Justice, Inc. was obedience without question. In this case, as always, they gave the obedience. All of them but Cole and Rosabel were in the big plane in a remarkably short time. But they certainly were filled with questions.

The Avenger answered one of them, soon after the big ship had taken off.

“Did any of you notice the window curtains in that televised scene?” he asked.

They looked at each other. None had, particularly.

“They moved, rhythmically,” said Benson. Beneath them was the variegated landscape of New Jersey with a far glimpse of the sea. “The curtains swung.”

“You mean, with the movement of air currents?” asked Mac.

“I mean with the movement of water,” The Avenger said. “That bedroom is part of some floating structure somewhere.”

“It still seems like a big order, findin’ a ship in all the Atlantic,” said the Scot pessimistically. Mac was always gloomy till real danger was near. Then he got as optimistic and cheery as Pollyanna herself.

“Not such a big order. We can narrow it down. The floating structure is not a ship; the room had a standard window and sash, not a porthole or cabin window. And the movement of the curtains was slight, so the thing is not on the ocean. Coast Guard reports indicate a heavy swell at sea today.”

“So it’s on inland water,” nodded Nellie. Then she exclaimed aloud. “A houseboat!”

“That’s right,” said Benson. “Almost certainly a houseboat, on still water, in a line directly southwest. It should be sufficient.”

Mac’s bleak eyes were blue flames. “If the skurlies had thought to thumbtack the curtains down, any observer would have sworn they were in an ordinary house, and they could never be located.”