River of Ice

CHAPTER VI Falling Death!

The Avenger had his headquarters in one of the most curious buildings in New York City. It was on Bleek Street, which is only one short block long, and in effect, Benson owned the block. On the side where his headquarters were, he had all the buildings under long lease or straight ownership. The entire other side of the block was taken up by the windowless back of a huge storage warehouse.

Three dingy, old apartment buildings had been thrown into one, and their top floors had been made into one tremendous room. The Avenger and his aides were up in this room now with a map spread out on the great center table. Next to the table was a radio, the likes of which no commercial manufacturing company had ever seen, with a special radio-directional antenna. This had been devised by the man who was at the moment delicately adjusting the range-finder.

He didn’t look like a person capable of inventing anything at all. He was a giant, and his moon face appeared more good-natured than intelligent. But regardless of his looks, he was one of the finest electrical and radio engineers in the world. “No more’s coming over that wave length,” he said.

“Let me listen, mon,” said the man standing next to him, reaching for the special earphone in which every last bit of distant radio sound could be gathered and further amplified. “Ye couldn’t hear a gunshot on a quiet day if the bullet whizzed right past yer ear.”

“All right, smart guy,” said the giant.

The other man took the earphone. He was the tall, bony Scot, Fergus MacMurdie. “Thanks for the compliment, Algernon,” he said.

The giant flushed wrathfully. He had been christened Algernon Heathcote Smith, but folks who valued their health called him Smitty. Except for Mac, who sometimes could use the Algernon and get away with it.

Richard Benson had tuned the radio in on the wave length he had noted at the empty rooms of Lini Waller. Smitty had listened over the silent wave length for some time. Then a voice had sounded.

“Sis? You still there? Everything’s O.K. on this end. There was a little trouble, but everything’s all right now. Good night.”

After that, there had been no more sounds at all. But the few words that had been spoken enabled Smitty to swing his direction-finder to a point he felt sure was accurate. A line drawn on the map, along the direction noted, ended somewhere along the Pacific coast in northern British Columbia. But there was no telling from where, along the line, the radio had transmitted the words.

Nellie Gray, the diminutive blonde member of The Avenger’s crime-fighting unit, sat at the table. “You said the girl had left her brother behind to guard the spot where the relics were hidden,” she said to The Avenger. “So that must have been her brother radioing that all’s well in the caves.”

“That’s what it sounds like,” nodded Benson, pale eyes like polished agate as he stared at the marked map on the table.

“And the sister,” said Nellie sympathetically, “isn’t at her radio to hear.”

“No,” said The Avenger.

“Do you think she has been murdered?” asked Joshua Elijah Newton. The gangling sleepy looking Negro was another of Benson’s aides.

“No,” The Avenger answered his question, “I don’t think Lini Waller has been killed. That radio message came from quite a distance, didn’t it, Smitty?”

“Yes,” nodded the giant. “But from just what distance I can’t say, of course.”

“Could it have come from the British Columbia coast?” asked Benson, pale eyes on the map.

“Sure!”

MacMurdie put down the earphone. “Well, ye overgrown mass of muscle,” he said to Smitty, “I guess there’s nothing more to hear, at that. The other end’s gone dead and stays dead.”

“Wish I could have heard a little more, to check my direction,” said Smitty. “But I guess I got it pretty exactly…”

At the door of the great room, a red speck glowed. “See who’s downstairs, Josh,” said Benson.

Josh went to another smaller table. Here was a small radio set, reflecting perfect, if very shortrange television pictures. It showed whoever was in the vestibule downstairs at the street entrance. Josh looked surprised. “Why, I think—” he said. “I think it’s the girl you’ve been talking about, chief! Her looks tally with your description.” Before the words had ceased, Benson was staring into the television set. Then his finger pressed the button that released the door catch.

In a moment Lini Waller came in through the doorway.

She walked up to Benson, while the rest stared in amazement. The chief had just told them how this girl had been taken away somewhere and was probably in grave danger. But here she was, visiting the Bleek Street headquarters alone and unharmed. At least, it seemed that she was unharmed. “Mr. Benson,” she said to The Avenger, “I have changed my mind about your offer.” Her manner was different than it had been at the Wittwar Foundation office. It was hard to spot that difference. Her voice seemed a shade mechanical; her eyes were a little duller; her face held less expression. The eyes of The Avenger were as brilliant as ice in moonlight as he studied that slight difference.

“You offered to help me — to guard me,” Lini said. “I would like to accept that kind offer now. Something has happened that makes me know I really am in danger.”

“The offer still stands,” said Benson, eyes like diamond drills as they probed her stolid face. “I was afraid you were already beyond help. I visited your hotel a short time ago, and it looked very much as if you had been kidnaped.”

“I was,” said Lini, with no fear in her tone. “Some men drugged me and took me away. I regained consciousness in an automobile. I got the door open and jumped out when the car stopped near a traffic officer, and the men didn’t dare to stop me. I came here at once. May I stay here with you and your friends?”

“You poor kid,” said Nellie Gray impulsively. “Certainly you can stay here. And all of us will see to it that nothing more happens to you.”

“First,” said Lini, looking at Benson, “there is something that ought to be done. You saw the manuscript I left with Mr. Wittwar and the others as a sample of the relics in the caves my brother and I discovered. Well, there are some other ancient things I brought too. I have them in a suitcase at a rooming house on Twelfth Street. I rented the room just to keep the things in; and I haven’t been back to it since for fear someone would trail me there. Would you have someone get those things and bring them here?”

“Of course,” said Benson. Lini thanked him and murmured an address.

“I’ll go, Muster Benson,” said MacMurdie.

“Perhaps,” said Lini, “several should go. It’s possible the men who tried to kidnap me might have learned the address from something in my other hotel suite. If so, there would be trouble.”

“ ’Tis just a messenger boy’s job,” persisted the Scot. “Smitty and me will go, Muster Benson—”

He stopped. The Avenger’s pale eyes were looking at, and seemingly through him, lost in thought. Mac repressed a shiver. Well as he knew Benson, those colorless, dreadful eyes could still make his heart skip a beat when they were turned on him. “The three of us will go,” said Benson quietly. “You and Smitty and I.”

Nellie looked hard at Benson’s white, dead face. She knew him perhaps a little better than the others. Intuition told her that Benson had sensed something very peculiar and that he was working on it with all the power of his amazing genius, but as yet he had come to no conclusion. That he expected danger was proved by the fact that he also meant to go on what seemed an easy errand. Benson allowed his helpers to take no risks that he himself would not share; and, of course, The Avenger frequently entered danger zones more sinister than he would let his followers face.

Benson turned to Lini Waller. “Make yourself at home here. Nellie, show her a room. We should be back soon with the suitcase, Miss Waller.”

“Thank you very much,” said Lini, in her slightly wooden, expressionless tone.

In the basement of the triple building was Benson’s garage. There were over a dozen cars down here of all kinds and sizes. Among them was a car with truck tires half again as big as ordinary tires. That was because the car, a sedan, was made of something like armor plate and weighed nearly five tons. Benson got into this car. “Lookin’ for trouble?” said Mac. “Perhaps,” said The Avenger. Smitty got in the back with Mac and a door rolled soundlessly up while Benson drove up a ramp and out over the sidewalk onto Bleek Street.

The address given by Lini Waller was a little north of Bleek Street. The heavy sedan nosed around the corner to the left, went up to Twelfth Street, and turned right. Down the second block loomed something that was a common sight in European cities. The wrecked shell of a building, standing stark and ragged in the night. It looked as if a bomb had gone right down through the center of it and exploded in the cellar. But New York was not being bombed, as yet. It was the work of ordinary wreckers, tearing down an old building to make way for a new one.

“Ye know,” said Mac pessimistically, “some day this city’ll be done. Then they won’t be forever tearin’ at your eardrums with rivetin’ machines, and shakin’ the gizzard out of you with subway blasts. But we’ll never live to see the day. Yon building, for example. It was good enough as it stood. But no! They have to yank it down and put up a marble and stainless steel prison that misguided apartment dwellers pay too much rent for.”

“You Scotch raven,” said Smitty, “stop croaking, will you? The new buildings are swell.”

Benson said nothing. But at the wheel, his pale, infallible eyes seemed to be looking at everything at once. Though still a young man, The Avenger had made a fortune in strange, dangerous places. He had made millions in minerals from Peru, more from engineering feats in Siam and Arabia and Africa. He had lived in antarctic wastes and tropical jungles. He had seen death in more guises than any dozen average adventurers. He could literally smell danger. And he smelled it now!

“I suppose,” said Smitty to Mac, “you’d rather have the old buildings stand till they tumble down around your ears. I suppose you’re against all progress. The horse and buggy is good enough for you, huh? If everyone figured the same way—”

“Look out!” yelled MacMurdie. But the car had already swerved to the right under Benson’s deft hand till both Smitty and Mac were almost thrown to the floor. Smitty could see why Mac had yelled and what The Avenger’s swift eyes had caught even before Mac’s. Something like a mountain falling on them!

The car had approached the building that was being demolished. It had been rolling past the boarded-off sidewalk, with the planks throwing back the rhythmic swishing of the tires. And then the building wall had started to fall on them. At the same instant they heard a rumbling boom.

The remaining wall of the old building was nearly six stories high. It was leaning out and over the car as if it would never stop tilting. And Benson was driving the sedan right at it! Instead of trying to speed ahead of destruction, he had swung the wheel around so that the car dove straight for the base of the falling masonry and mortar. It would have been impossible to get ahead of the fall by going forward; but any other man on earth would have automatically tried it, too frightened to think otherwise.

Not Benson. Instead, the sedan was rocketing at the base of the leaning wall. It jounced over curbing, sent planks in all directions and jammed half through the opening that had formerly been the entrance of the place. Mac and Smitty didn’t know whether they were yelling or not. They rather thought they were. But if they had been, no one would have heard them.

Six stories of brick wall falling outward from its base! The roar of that collapse drowned all sound for blocks. The top began tumbling down over the front of the building on the other side of the street. The wall disintegrated, seeming almost as liquid as an ocean wave. Bricks and great stone blocks tossed up high fell again. The street at that section was a choked welter of debris with several parked cars buried somewhere beneath many feet of brick and rock.

“Whoosh!” sighed Mac, in the sedan. “Ye can consider me faintin’ like a young girl. ’Tis a miracle we’re alive.” And yet not such a miracle. The Avenger had shot the car into the one spot where it had the chance of escape: half through the base of the wall itself. The structure had leaned out and down away from them, instead of falling on them. The top of the sedan was dented where assorted fragments of brick and cement had collapsed through the top of the entrance frame, but that was all.

However, it was close enough, even for these men whose lives were made up of close calls. They got out of the sedan, with Smitty using his enormous strength to jam open a door that was bent less badly than the rest. “Go on to the address Miss Waller gave,” Benson said quietly to Mac. “Smitty and I will return to Bleek Street. I’d like to ask the girl a few questions.”

“And she’d better answer them pretty straight too,” said Smitty hotly. “It’s a pretty odd coincidence that we were sent along a street where a building wall was ready to collapse just as we came along.”

But there were no questions to be asked. Lini was not at Bleek Street! Benson called Nellie Gray down from the top floor after he had gone to her room on the second and found it empty. “Slipped away!” said Nellie ruefully. “It’s all my fault, chief. But, naturally, I wasn’t looking for her to do a thing like that. Why would she come here begging for help and then steal away again after we’d promised it?”

MacMurdie got back from the address given by Lini. “No room’s rented there under her name or the name of anybody else lookin’ like her,” he said sourly. “She’s a schemin’ little skurlie. She came here only to lead us into a death trap. The trap failed and now she’s cleared out.” But The Avenger shook his white head, his pale eyes searching as if through far mists for the whole of a truth of which, as yet, he could only suspect a small part.