River of Ice

CHAPTER X Death’s Hammer

The Avenger and his aides were all in the great room on the top floor of their Bleek Street headquarters. Smitty was tinkering with Josh’s little radio. These tiny radios were rather marvelous things. Run on tiny but powerful batteries, they were encased in small metal containers curved to fit the waist and hardly larger than cigar cases. They would transmit as well as receive and had a range up to forty miles. Benson and each of his helpers always wore one strapped to his belt; and they had saved the little crew a lot of grief.

Since the radios were Smitty’s own invention, he found the bug in Josh’s pretty quickly and fixed it. “There, Josh. Bet you ate so many maple-nut sundaes that you bulged in the meal case and loosened the connection,” said Smitty, handing back the tiny radio.

Josh grinned. The lanky Negro’s consuming passion was sticky maple-nut sundaes. He had been known to eat six of them at a sitting; and four or five were nothing at all.

“Ye’ll be breakin’ me up in business, Josh,” said Mac solemnly, “if ye keep on lappin’ up the sundaes in my drugstore during yer spare time.”

The drugstore had been bought by Benson and turned over to MacMurdie. It was an ordinary drugstore in front; but in the rear it was highly extraordinary. Back there, Smitty had a long bench at which he worked on his electrical inventions, and Mac had an equally long table where he concocted drugs that so often turned out to be revolutionary in the world of medicine — and of crime fighting.

The Avenger sat at a teak desk near a rear window, with late sun slanting in on his white, thick hair through what seemed ordinary Venetian blinds. Only instead of being wood, the slats of the blinds were made of nickel-steel, set in the masonry at a forty-five degree angle to admit light but deflect bullets.

Nellie Gray looked at the chief, as they all called him. Benson was staring at the desk top with eyes as cold and still as his face. Nellie knew that look. He was driving through mystery and evasions on a path half of chill logic and half of an almost feminine intuition. He stared suddenly at the group. “Mac. Josh.”

The Scot with the big ears and feet and the sleepy looking Negro went to the desk. “I think we’d better locate the caves where Lini Waller and her brother found the ancient relics,” Benson said calmly to Mac. “You and Josh had better hop out there and look around. There has been no word from her brother since that last message we caught on their wave length about his having had ‘a little trouble’ but that ‘everything is all right now.’ ”

Mac gasped. “D’ye think we can find the cave, Muster Benson? The girrrl has made it her chief business to keep the secret of that location, ever since coming to New York. She didn’t tell even the men who are to give her two and a half million dollars for the stuff in the caves.”

“I think we can reason out about where the caves are,” Benson repeated. “The nature of the sample she brought to New York is about enough. A bundle of hides which, after all, is quite a perishable thing. Now how could thin hides last for forty or fifty thousand years? Only in one way — preserved by intense cold. You could find such cold only in polar regions, or in glacial ice. Since it is unlikely that the girl went on a polar expedition with her brother, the glacial idea is indicated. This would be borne out too by her talk of being held in an ice cave here in New York.”

Benson took out the map on which Smitty had ruled the line laid out by the radio direction-finder when the words came from Brent Waller in the far away cave. “There are no glaciers inland anywhere near this line,” he said. “But there are two within a hundred and ten miles of it; one is almost on the line, along the Pacific coast. You two take the fast plane out there and try to locate that glacier from which the stuff came. Look for one which has recently cracked so that it might expose an object heretofore hidden. You might be able to find whatever Indians guided the Wallers recently, and get an even closer line on the location. Radio back the minute you have something to report.”

Josh and Mac went out. The Avenger had half a dozen planes, small and large, built variously for speed or to transport heavy loads. They’d be in one of the fastest in about half an hour, winging their way toward the virgin fir forests of northern British Columbia.

Neither had said a word to the command. They were all prepared for such instant trips to far corners of the continent. They occurred frequently in the strenuous fights against crime for which the indomitable little crew existed.

Nellie Gray turned her lovely face toward Benson. “What do I do?” she asked. “You haven’t given me a thing to do so far.”

“There will probably be plenty for you to do before this is over,” said Benson. “But for the moment there is nothing.” He got up, moving, as always, so smoothly that he seemed slow, but getting to the door in about half the time you’d expect. “It’s nearly seven o’clock,” he said. “Well after standard office hours. I’m going to have a quick look at the offices of Werner and Mallory and Wittwar. I’ll be back soon.”

He left; and Nellie, sighing for action, picked up the late afternoon paper. There was a lot in it about the strange death of Conroy. Nothing was said of murder. Benson had told of the inconspicuous needle when he reported to the police; but for their own reasons they were soft-pedaling the murder angle. They thought they’d have less reporters interfering in a murder chase, possibly. Nellie smiled a little. There was only one man alive who could solve that murder, she reflected loyally. That was the scourge of the underworld — The Avenger.

The Wittwar Packing Co. had its own five-story office building in lower Manhattan. The building was deserted when Benson reached it; too late for late workers, too early for scrubwomen. Which was precisely what Benson wanted.

It was night now. No trick for the gray steel bar of a man to slide like a shadow up the fire escape of the next building, walk a narrow ledge and get into the building absolutely unseen through a third-story window. Wittwar’s big office was on the top floor. It was unlocked; there was nothing furtive about it.

The Avenger went in. The powerful little flashlight played around on a big vault, two desks and several chairs. He went to the vault first. The combination of the vault was good, but not as elaborate as that of a safe in which money and other valuables might be kept. Benson, with sensitive fingertips, felt out the numbers worn by constant use and swung open the door. There was nothing in the vault that didn’t refer to the meat business.

He went to the desks, a huge one for Wittwar and a smaller one for a secretary. In the top drawer of Wittwar’s desk was a large tablet of blank paper, with the top dozen sheets covered with lines of figures. The numbers were quite common. They related to the electric-power companies on the North American continent: output per year, gross income, net profits, et cetera. The Avenger replaced the big pad of paper and continued his search. And found nothing!

He left the building the way he had come in and went to Werner’s office. There was not one thing in the office that even the genius of The Avenger could connect with the kidnaping of Lini or the theft of age-old relics.

Benson went on to Mallory’s office. The vice-president and general manager of Wittwar’s big company had his office in the uptown branch of the company, not in the main office building where Wittwar’s was located. The branch was over on Tenth Avenue; and the neighborhood was dark even at this early hour. Dark and deserted.

The Avenger stopped his car a block from the address and went on foot to the building. He seemed to be walking normally, but such was the inconspicuousness of his tread that you probably would not have noticed him. Indeed, from the way he managed to keep within what shadows there were along the fairly lighted sidewalk, you probably would not have seen him at all. Benson was a master at taking advantage of cover where there would seem to be no cover. Enemies sometimes swore he could make himself invisible.

At any rate, the man in the car a hundred feet down from the branch entrance did not see Benson. But The Avenger saw him. A long dark sedan, with the smooth motor idling; a man at the wheel who could be distinguished only as a dark shadow at the top of which a little red glow now and again indicated the puffing of a cigarette.

Benson came as near the car as he could along the sidewalk, then took to the street. He moved in a line that would keep his body hidden from the rear-view mirror by the blind spot caused by the upright between glass windows at side and rear. At the tail of the car, he crouched and looked around. There was no one near enough to see what went on. He moved, head low, along the side of the car.

The first thing the man at the wheel knew of the presence of someone else in the night was when a hand, not large but strong as a steel cable, whipped up from the side of the car and slapped over his mouth. The next thing he knew, as he flopped in the seat and tried to get away from the hand and yell, was that another hand was compressing the back of his neck.

It was the strangest attack. First, there was a feel of terrific pain, making him squeal behind the sound-deadening hand over his lips. Then there was a sort of swift fadeout of the surrounding neighborhood. And finally, the man was falling into a world of fog that got blacker and blacker and had no bottom.

The Avenger released the pressure on the great nerves at the base of the skull that could kill if held long enough. He left the man still slouched in a fairly upright position behind the steering column and went back to the entrance. The door was locked. Apparently the man was a guard, to prevent anyone from going in, not a lookout for someone who had already entered.

Benson softly forced the lock and went in. He went to Mallory’s office on the second floor of the two stories of the branch housed in the five-story warehouse structure. The Avenger had heard no sound as he went up the stairs, but he found his ears straining for any noise.

Danger! He felt it, instinctively, with the sixth sense that animals of prey develop. He moved by memory to the door of Mallory’s office, not showing the flashlight. He went in, closed the door, and only then did he turn on the beam.

There is a technique of searching. An ordinary man could take a day to search one room as it should be searched. The police could do the same job in an hour or less. The Avenger could do it in about eight minutes. In six, he had found more than had turned up in all the rest of his investigations to date.

First, at the rear of the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, there was a ragged corner of something that seemed to have been torn from a parchment page. But it was not parchment. Benson studied it in the white beam of his flashlight. It was thin hide, strange looking, obviously very old and yet well preserved. It was a corner from one of the thin hides making up the ancient volume Lini had brought from the ice caves.

With his eyes glittering like chromium slits, Benson recalled his conviction that from the manuscript he had studied in the Foundation office, one page near the front was missing. This corner, it seemed, had been inadvertently torn off that missing page. And on the corner were the ends of three jagged lines tooled in the thin, queer leather.

In the top drawer of Mallory’s desk was a measuring compass. Quite a large one. Experimentally, The Avenger drew a half circle on a large letterhead from the drawer. The half circle was the approximate size of a human skull from the ears up. He tried the compass on it. It was large enough to span the half circle easily, and large enough to measure off a given segment of it.

There was still another thing. A section of the wash-stand paneling sounded loose under a soft tap. Benson’s deft, steely fingers found the end, pulled it forward. A flat space showed between panel and rough plaster. In the space was a hammer. It was a curious hammer, with a narrow, long striking head, and with sharp prongs on the opposite end. Benson nodded. An archaeologist’s hammer, used for the delicate chipping away of stone and hard earth from valuable objects long buried.

A hammer, a piece torn from the lost page of the ancient book and a measuring compass large enough to be used on a human skull…

The door of the office swung softly open as Benson stood with his back to it. Light flared on! Benson whirled.

“Just keep where you are, with your mitts in sight,” said the man in the doorway. The man had a machine gun trained on Benson’s body. Behind him, two men had automatics also trained on the same target.

“Burn him down,” snarled one of the men behind the machine gunner. “What’re you waiting for, Nick? Burn him down!”