THE SPIDER-City of Doom (4 page)

But now the steel was no longer flexible. Now it would crumble and split when the strain was put upon it. Was it his imagination tricking him or was the stately rhythmic movement of the building a little jerky? By Kali and by Siva, the doom of the Sky Building, of the thousands its fall would kill, was already upon it.

Ram Singh strained against his ropes. It wrenched his wounded shoulder and he groaned feebly against his gag. Blackness swarmed about him. Through it he could feel the sickening sway of the building, hear the mounting wail of the wind as if it already mourned the dead . . . .

WENTWORTH had a blowout on the way to New York City. The eastern sky was graying when he skidded to a halt before the Centre Street headquarters of the New York City police and took the steps three at a time. It was just after seven o'clock—but the winter dawn came late—and there was a chance that Stanley Kirkpatrick, the commissioner, might be at his desk.

The sergeant in the anteroom recognized Wentworth, nodded alertly. "Commissioner's in his office, sir," he said. "Shall I . . . ?"

He stared at a vanishing back as Wentworth pushed into the private office of the police commissioner. Kirkpatrick's head came up sharply at the abrupt entrance; his eyes narrowed as they saw the tightness of Wentworth's face.

"What is it, Dick?" he asked quickly.

"Ram Singh!" Wentworth snapped out. "That shooting scrape on Jerome Avenue!"

Kirkpatrick stared, frowning, thumbed through a file of reports on his desk, paused to study one. "Unidentified man, apparently a Negro, shot in a telephone-booth and carried off by assailants," he summarized swiftly.

Wentworth cursed harshly, dropped into a chair and sat stiffly on six inches of the seat. His fists were clenched on his knees.

"They got Ram Singh," he said dully. The two men, Wentworth and Kirkpatrick, were much alike in a general way as they sat there facing each other—two men who had been violent enemies and now were friends. Both were dark and had lean, hard jaws. Kirkpatrick had a saturnine countenance, harsh lines chiseled about a firm-lipped mouth that was emphasized by a straight pointed mustache. His gray eyes peered out straightly from under broad, level brows and his black hair lay flat against his head. There was a calmness about the man as he rested his elbows on the desk and rubbed his palms together with a dry whisper of sound. "Tell me about it," he urged, his voice incisive, accents clipped.

Wentworth nodded. "You know what the
Spider
did in Middleton tonight?" he queried, and when Kirkpatrick nodded, Wentworth explained that he had set Ram Singh to searching for Devil Hackerson since one of the men killed by the
Spider
in Middleton was a Hackerson hood.

There was a slight ironic twist of Kirkpatrick's lips as he listened that had nothing to do with the seriousness of the situation. His mockery was because both of them spoke of the
Spider
as though he were a third person.

Kirkpatrick had battled the
Spider
for many months, though secretly he admired and respected this swift avenger who struck down the criminals that the law-hedged police could not reach. Finally he had confronted Wentworth, told him flatly that he knew he was the
Spider,
but that he lacked proof. Until such time as positive evidence fell into his hands, he said, he would assist Wentworth and the
Spider
in every legal way. But if that evidence came into his possession, he would prosecute to the full extent of his powers. It was an armed truce. Never again had either of them referred to Wentworth's possible connection with the
Spider.
But it often amused Kirkpatrick, and the mockery touched Wentworth's face, too.

His gray-blue eyes met Kirkpatrick's directly as he talked, explaining about the activities in Middleton, how they confirmed his own suspicion that there was a tie-up between the death of the chemist, Jim Collins, and the robbery of the bank. But there was mockery in Wentworth's tip-tilted eyebrows though there was grave seriousness in the set, determined mouth and chin, the thin-bridged intelligent nose, the calm broad forehead. His black hair crisped across his brow, swept down to hide a thin scar upon his right temple, relic of an old knife fight. There was a throbbing in that wound now, but that was the only symptom in his vital, keen face that the alarm over Ram Singh gnawed at his heart.

"You see the seriousness of what threatens," Wentworth said swiftly. "If these criminals use their steel-eater widely, there won't be a bank in the country safe from their attack. Just before Ram Singh was—" Wentworth paused and swallowed hard; the muscles bulged along his jaw line, "before he was shot, he shouted something about the Sky Building. I don't know whether he meant a robbery was being staged there or whether he meant Hackerson had a headquarters there. But if you are willing, I'd like to go there with you and see what we can discover."

Kirkpatrick nodded gravely, but it was nearly two hours later—two hours in which they had thrown every resource of the police into the search for Ram Singh—that Kirkpatrick stepped to a wardrobe in a corner and shrugged into a dark-blue belted topcoat. He set a derby straight across his brows and together he and Wentworth strode from the building.

The commissioner's heavy private car made swift speed through the thickening traffic. The wind whipped past the closed windows with a thin whining, and though there was a heater in the tonneau, their breath made small wavering puffs before their mouths as they talked.

"If they bothered to carry Ram Singh away," Kirkpatrick mused. "It's likely he was only wounded."

"Probably," Wentworth agreed. He stared out at the stone buildings, gray in the early morning light as they slid past. The car had swept up Lafayette now, spun west to Fifth Avenue and was stepping north along the broad thoroughfare. Men and women struggled against the wind as against a savage undertow, coats whipping about their thighs.

"The tail end of that Hatteras gale is hitting here today," Kirkpatrick said absently. "The Sky Building will be rocking like a tree."

Wentworth nodded again, wordlessly. He was trying to think what Ram Singh could have meant by that last shout about the Sky Building. "They are pl . . ." he had got out just before the shot. Perhaps that last word had been "planning," but planning what? Wentworth could not guess at Ram Singh's fearful secret, at the horror that tortured the faithful Hindu now, wounded and a prisoner of tight ropes, as he struggled for freedom high in the groaning Sky Building.

How could Wentworth guess that the Sky Building was slated for destruction, that even now its weakened steel girders were yielding beneath the lash of the rising wind? He knew, of course, of the steel-eater, but why would anyone wish to raze the building? Even Devil Hackerson, who had carried out the orders for the Master and put the "stuff" on the girders, had not been able to understand why it should be destroyed.

As they sped farther north, the sidewalks were thick with crowds of people going to work. It was a little after nine, the height of the rush hour. Girls ducked their heads into the wind, pulled their coats tight about their hips and plunged across the street on their high heels. Men ploughed doggedly into the rising gale's thrust clasping hats to their heads with freezing hands. Even from the car, the cherry red of cold-burnt ears could be seen, but Wentworth beheld the tapestry of New York going to work only subconsciously. His mind was still busy with the problem of Ram Singh and the Sky building.

The squat broad base of the building came into sight, hinting even in the briefly truncated view below the auto roof of the majesty that soared above. Wentworth, alighting from the car, paused on the sidewalk, holding his derby firmly in place while he leaned back to peer up at the heights that rose a fifth of a mile into the sky. Sunlight glinted coldly on the strips of chromium that streaked its sides, but bustling gray clouds would soon blot that out. The gale was on the way. It would soon be blowing sixty miles an hour and better up there where the rounded dome of the dirigible mooring-mast met the clouds.

Wentworth frowned, walked into the elaborate lobby with Kirkpatrick at his side. Kirkpatrick looked sideways at him curiously. It was rarely that his friend was so preoccupied, engrossed though he might be in the battles of mankind, in the defense of humanity against the underworld.

"Just what do we do now that we're here?" he asked.

"I'm not quite sure," Wentworth confessed.

He asked some apparently aimless questions of the elevator starter and learned that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred in the building. He knew already that there had been no robbery reports from the vicinity the night before. He turned away abruptly, stalked to Kirkpatrick's side. He had a feeling that the answer to his bewilderment was within reach, but that he could not fathom it. It was within reach all right, no farther away than the thick walls that encased the steel basic supports of the building, eaten by the Master's "stuff" until they would crack when the strain of the gale came . . .

"Let's go up to the tower," Wentworth said abruptly. "I always get a thrill out of the sway in windy weather, out of the feeling of power in man's conquest of the elements."

Kirkpatrick smiled wryly. "Seeking inspiration, Dick?"

Wentworth nodded shortly. "I have a feeling that the answer is right here." He stretched out his gloved hand and closed the fingers palm upward. "But I can't quite grasp it. Something tells me that I know everything that is essential to finding the answer."

The elevator was wafted upward silently. Through the shaft, the wind moaned and made hollow bass whinings. While they were moving the sway of the building was not noticeable, but once they reached the observation room, it could be felt. Kirkpatrick looked about him with alert, quick glances. There were no visitors to the tower so early in the morning.

"You may like this swaying business, but I don't care for it at all," Kirkpatrick said.

"The building is entirely safe," Wentworth said shortly, staring about also, looking out over the city where the wind was snatching smoke from the chimneys, dancing bits of paper high in the air. "Engineers always allow a safety margin of three or four hundred percent in stresses. They probably did more than that here."

A particularly strenuous gust howled about the corners of the building, and somewhere deep in the building there was a faint, creaking groan.

Kirkpatrick grimaced. "I still don't like it," he muttered. "Are you going up any higher?"

Wentworth looked out once more over the gale-lashed city and nodded slowly. "I think I shall," he said. "There is something about wind . . ." He paused and cocked his head, listening. Above the screaming of the wind, he caught a faint regular sound, a muffled
thump, thump, thump.

"Do you hear that?" Wentworth asked quickly.

Kirkpatrick frowned at him. "I hear the wind and I hear the building making funny noises."

Wentworth moved his hand impatiently. "I don't mean that. I mean a sound like someone knocking. Listen."

They listened again to that faint muffled
thump, thump, thump.
On its heels came another sound from deep in the bowels of the building. Another creaking groan.

"Listen, Wentworth," Kirkpatrick's face was worried, "I'll swear this building is creaking."

Wentworth did not hear him. He was striding rapidly around a corner of the hall whence the thumping seemed to come. He stood there, waiting. Once more the sound reached his ears, more loudly this time. With a subdued cry, he sprang to the door of a porter's closet. He tried the knob, found it locked. His hand flew to the
Spider's
tool kit beneath his arm and rapidly he forced the lock. Kirkpatrick came around the corner just as the bolt snicked back and Wentworth yanked the door open.

Together they peered into the half-dark. Brooms and mops were stacked against the wall, pails were on the floor and among the pails lay something that moved. Wentworth splashed light from a pocket flash into the gloom and a cry spilled from his lips: "Ram Singh!"

The Hindu had beaten on the door with his bound feet. Now he tossed and bumped on the floor. He made fearful sounds behind his gag. Wentworth flung down on his knees, yanked away the cloth that blocked Ram Singh's speech.

"Quickly,
sahib!
" the Hindu's voice sounded sepulchral as it croaked from his dry throat. "Quickly! This building is going to fall!"

"What?" It was a startled curse from Kirkpatrick.

"God!" Wentworth barked. "That's it! Those fiends have put the steel-eater on the girders of this building! I knew the answer was here!"

He was hauling Ram Singh from the close confines of the closet, slicing off his bonds with a pocket knife.

"That is it,
sahib,'
"the Hindu gasped. "They left me here to die as a warning to . . ." He choked off the words, coughed down the "to the
Spider
" he had started to say. "They say that when the wind blows strong, it will fall."

The three men stood rigid, heard once more the groaning complaint of the building. It seemed louder than before. It seemed the moan of a living, suffering thing. As if all the thousands of men and women in the building knew what was about to happen and had joined their voices in one vast moan of universal terror. For an instant the sound held them in the grip like paralysis. They felt the building sway giddily . . . Unconsciously, they leaned the opposite way as if by their feeble weight they would counterbalance the catastrophe that loomed. Their hearts thumped swiftly, for they felt that doom was upon them.

"We're gone," said Kirkpatrick flatly. His face was white beneath its lean tan.

The sway ended. The building seemed to poise on the split edge of oblivion, then there was a slight jerk. It wavered back into the wind. Wentworth snapped from his motionlessness.

"We must clear the building, clear the streets and the neighboring places!" he poured out words. "Kirk, you get the reserves! I'll call out the fire department, send an alarm . . . ."