House of Death

CHAPTER X Answer in Arabic

The second Shan Haygar, who had had the first clubbed and stabbed to death under The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes, was not at all a fool. Before binding Benson, he had had a man search him.

The man, gingerly going over the average-sized body that had proved so amazingly strong, had come across Mike and Ike.

The two little weapons, so deadly in Benson’s slim, steely hands, did not look like much by themselves.

“Nothing but a funny little gun,” said the searcher, sliding Mike back into the slim leg holster, “and a small knife with a peculiar handle.” He slid Ike back, too. “Want me to—”

“Leave them in place,” said the tall leader indifferently. “We might as well throw them overboard on him as by themselves.”

For, after all, what could a man with his hands bound behind his back do with any amount of queer small weapons?

Probably no other man could have done much. But the moment Dick hit the water and was dragged under, he bent his strong body backward like a spring.

He could touch the back of his head with the soles of his feet, like a contortionist. But he didn’t bend that far. He arched his spine till his bound hands could touch Ike, below his left knee.

All this time he was being dragged swiftly down by the section of iron rail. There was already a drumming at his ears and a tight feeling like a band around his head.

Thirty-five or forty feet, he judged it, from an adventurous past in which, for a time, he had been a pearl diver. He sawed at the tough rope from ankles to iron.

At sixty feet, there was a sensation of colored lights bursting behind his eyeballs, and his body ached. Even he could not take much more…

The rope parted, the iron went on down, and Benson began slowly to rise. He was not yet in distress for oxygen; he could hold his breath a little over three minutes, if it were imperative.

He did not try to accelerate his rise to the top, just went up at the slow pace, natural to a sunken body with air in it. And meanwhile he worked at the rope around his wrists.

He held life literally by a hair in his fingers in the shape of the little throwing knife. If he ever dropped Ike from his awkward clasp, it was the end!

He didn’t try to saw through the cords. He maneuvered the knife till he got the point and then the edge up under the bonds and between his wrists. After that he just pressed, and was thankful for the hair-splitting edge on the fine steel blade.

He was beginning to want air, so he kicked his bound feet to speed his ascent a little before cutting the rope from his ankles. He sheathed Ike, saw dim pink as the surface was almost reached, then saw it blotted out, and felt his head strike something firm but yielding.

His pale eyes probed the water. It was a body. A blue and mottled face peered at him with sightless orbs, and he recognized the features of Shan Haygar — or at least the man who had called himself that before being killed by another who insisted that he was Shan Haygar.

The Avenger caught the body by the shoulders and eased it slowly up till his own head was hidden by its bulk. He could feel as well as hear the throb of the boat’s propeller and knew it was not too far off.

He waited there in the growing dawn till he couldn’t hear it any more, then looked over the sodden bulk of the dead man.

The boat was a speck far off. Benson swam toward shore, towing the dead man with him.

He came out at Governor’s Island. He searched the dead man. The other fellow had left little in his pockets. The only thing that seemed to have any significance was part of a newspaper page, with a faint mark at an ad.

He left the body to be found by the regular police. A night watchman at a nearby dock greeted him sympathetically when he said he had fallen off a boat and had to swim to shore. There was a little stove in the watchman’s shack. The Avenger dried his clothes, took a ferry back to Manhattan, and examined the bit of newspaper again.

It was from an Arabic paper. The ad marked was that of an enterprising boat concern that rented cruisers of all types for special trips.

He phoned it, as soon as the morning was advanced enough for places of business to begin opening.

“Yes,” said whoever answered the phone at the boat firm, “a fellow such as you describe rented a boat yesterday. A Turk, from his looks and name. We get a good many customers from our ads in foreign-language newspapers—”

“Did the man say where he wanted to go?” Benson interrupted the flow.

“Who did you say you were?” said the voice cautiously.

“Police calling,” said Benson. That was true enough. He held a special badge. Probably, with this murder charge hanging over him, it had been recalled. But there was no need to go into that here.

“I got an idea that the man was going to some island off the coast of Maine,” the voice replied. “He kept mentioning the Maine coast and looking at a chart we have. But he didn’t say which one. So that is only a guess.”

The Avenger thanked his informant and hung up, pale eyes glinting as they stared at the scrap of paper with the strange Arabic characters printed on it. An answer in Arabic? It might very well turn out to be.

That early morning light found the giant, Smitty, and the diminutive blond bombshell, Nellie Gray, trailing a taxi out through Newark toward, apparently, the airport.

Neither of them had had breakfast, and they were a bit snappish about it. Smitty usually ordered breakfast eggs by the dozen; and Nellie, for all her dainty smallness of size, could do a fine, thorough job on a rasher of bacon and a pile of toast.

They hadn’t had breakfast because, in turns, they had been watching an entrance way all night — one dozing beside the wheel while the other, ready for instant motion, glued his eyes on the door.

It was the door of a second-rate building in which resided a person named von Bolen Haygar.

The Avenger had come in direct contact with persons calling themselves Shan Haygar, Carmella Haygar, and Harlik Haygar. As the woods seemed to be so full of Haygars, he had decided to look around and see if there were still more.

Benson had a private espionage system that was unparalleled for efficiency. Clerks in rental agencies, men in stores, boys at newsstands, subway workers — a host of people, following occupations that exposed them to the public, did occasional searching for The Avenger. He had thrown this machine into gear and had come up with some additional facts.

There were more Haygars.

There was a Sharnoff Haygar, described by a delicatessen-store owner in lower Manhattan as a customer. There was a von Bolen Haygar.

Also, from an old Who’s Who came the information that there had been a Wendell Haygar; and following that lead had been unearthed the story of old Wendell’s death, the return of an estranged son, and his residence on a Maine island.

Benson had shelved that for the moment and set Nellie and Smitty on von Bolen’s trail and Mac and Josh on the trail of Sharnoff.

Von Bolen was now on his way somewhere with a suitcase in a taxicab, with Smitty and Nellie faithfully behind.

“You know,” said Smitty sourly, “this is one of the goofiest affairs yet. It didn’t look like much of anything when it started. A girl comes and says somebody is out to kill her and asks us to guard her for forty-eight hours. She has a gold metal for which, it seems, she was kidnapped, and there are a couple of other unexplained murders. Then zing! We’re in it up to our necks. And we still know nothing at all about it.”

“We know there are other medals besides the one Carmella had,” said Nellie. “I believe the chief is working on the theory that another one of the things was the motive for the murder of Milky Morley and Simon the Grind.”

Smitty thought hungrily of about eighteen fried eggs reposing on half a dozen pieces of ham. Large pieces.

“We wouldn’t be in this at all,” he grumbled, “if that nitwit Carmella hadn’t sneaked away from Bleek Street. Now the chief is afraid she’s in danger.”

“We’d be in it without Carmella,” contradicted Nellie. “The chief wants to know the secret of those golden disks. It’s something pretty big, and pretty dangerous, which is exactly the kind of thing he takes on.”

“I wonder what is the secret? What do the gold medallions mean?”

“They’re just keepsakes,” mimicked Nellie. “They mean nothing; have little value. We Haygars treasure them because they have sentimental value. Bah! If—”

The taxi ahead of them turned into Newark Airport, as they’d had an idea it would.

Smitty stopped their car at the gate, and he and Nellie walked in. Ahead of them, they could see von Bolen legging it for one of the small hangars at the east end of the field. Apparently he had made all arrangements in advance for a plane.

They hurried a little, and then it commenced — an apparent attempt in broad daylight, on a field swarming with attendants, at either murder or kidnapping.

Four men had been talking together, apparently on some business matter, next to the hangar toward which von Bolen had been hastening. They turned suddenly and raced up to the Prussian-looking gentleman.

“Smitty!” gasped Nellie.

But the giant was already moving — and moving fast. He weighed nearly three hundred, but he could move like a slim kid if he had to. He got to von Bolen almost as soon as the four surprise attackers.

He would have gotten there equally soon, but he had to duck back for an instant to avoid being run down by a car, and that cost him a couple of seconds.

There was a man with a tense face at the wheel of the car, and he stopped his vehicle a few feet away and waited with motor racing.

Meanwhile, the four had von Bolen down, and two were trying to boot him on the head while the other two tried to get into his pockets. Von Bolen was squirming to avoid being brained, and the squirming also made a search impossible.

That was when Smitty got there.

With a growl a little like that of an annoyed grizzly, the giant plucked two men away from von Bolen and slammed them together. They smashed into each other chest to chest! They smashed so hard that they seemed to merge into one another; both slumped to their knees, gasping, when the vast hands released them.

One of the others was swinging a gun like a club at the huge fellow’s head. One of the blows landed slantingly, and Smitty got mad!

Paying no attention to the banging gun, he caught the man’s arm, swooped down for his left ankle, then straightened up. The fellow hung yelling for a instant. Then the huge shoulders heaved, and the man landed over twenty feet away!

The driver was racing the car motor in a wordless plea for escape. Von Bolen had torn from the grip of the fourth man and was beating it toward the hangar. Attendants from all parts of the field were running up.

The two who had been smashed together crawled weakly into the car. The one Smitty had thrown got in, too, dragging a crooked leg behind him. The fourth fellow turned from the giant with a scream; then the car door slammed, and the car was in motion.

It slammed through the airport gate and on down the wide road while Smitty ran after von Bolen with Nellie Gray close behind.

About ten airport attendants got in between.

“Out of the way!” roared Smitty, charging.

Four fell, but the other six got him, and he was handicapped by the fact that he didn’t want to hurt these guys.

Three clung to each leg, which slowed him a little, and then three more got to him and climbed his vast frame. Finally a small army of attendants managed to get him off his feet and swarm over him like ants over a caterpillar.

A plane came from the hangar at a fast clip and took off. Von Bolen was in it!

Smitty stopped fighting. The attendants warily let him up.

“And this,” said Nellie, when her dainty voice could be heard, “is the way we get thanked for saving the life of a stranger.”

“Huh?” said one of the attendants suspiciously.

“Four men tried to kill that man who just left in the plane,” said Nellie, her blond loveliness playing havoc with the attendant’s sense of justice. “We happened to see the attempt and drove the men off. Then you come and pile on my friend.”

“Look here — who was fighting who?” snapped another of the men.

“I just told you.”

“But if you saved the guy’s life, why did he buzz off without thanking you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nellie. “He’s a stranger to us.”

“If you didn’t know him, why did you—”

“We were just doing our good deed for the day,” said Nellie sweetly.

The men looked rather foolishly at each other. There was no one around to complain against the giant they gingerly held. There seemed to be no charge against him save that of disturbing the peace — a charge which apparently was never going to be pressed by anybody. And the little blonde with the appealing blue eyes certainly did not look like a crook.

They took Smitty’s name, and Nellie’s, and then let them go. There seemed nothing else to do. And the two went out fast enough.

The morning papers had all details of the chief’s being held in the clink for murder. The names of Dick Benson’s aides would be publicized, too. It was no time to get picked up for anything — even for disturbing the peace.

They started back to Manhattan with long faces. They had watched all night, gone without breakfast, and taken on a gang of crooks — with no other result than to inadvertently help the man they’d been trailing get away from them.

“Everything’s wrong!” wailed Nellie. “And on top of that, the chief is behind bars for maybe weeks or…”

But they found out that was a mistake when they got to Bleek Street.

“Well, for—” gasped Smitty, as the man with the colorless deadly eyes walked toward them in the huge top-floor room.

Nearby, Josh and Mac grinned at their confusion.

Josh and Mac had reported on Sharnoff, after being equally surprised to find The Avenger here when the papers all gave his pitcure behind bars at headquarters.

Nellie told what had happened.

“The plane was heading north, last we saw it,” she concluded.

Dick’s black-cropped head nodded.

“North. And Josh and Mac say Sharnoff Haygar also took a plane north — an amphibian — after mentioning an island off the Maine coast. The men I tangled with were going north by boat. And there seems to be a Goram Haygar, of the same mysterious clan, living on an island off Maine. So our next step is pretty clear.”

Smitty nodded his somewhat battered head.

“Haygar’s Island,” he said. “It looks as though there is to be a kind of family reunion up there, and I, for one, want to be in on it!”