The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER XI Puzzle Pieces

In the Bleek Street headquarters of The Avenger was probably the world’s finest laboratory. Certainly the work done in there, and the products that periodically issued forth, were beyond those boasted by any other, no matter how huge.

Benson went into the laboratory on his return from the Henderlin penthouse. It was there that he received Mac and Josh and heard their story of the New Jersey house. He was now conducting a few tests so simple, to him at least, as to be child’s play.

He had extracted the traces of Henderlin’s bath water from the blotter. A dozen or so drops. He had analyzed it thoroughly, with Mac, himself a brilliant chemist, watching him.

“ ’Tis just plain water, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “H₂O. That’s all. With a tiny trace of rich man’s epidermis and very personal dirt in it. Coal and oil barons, ye’d gather, sweat just as hard and get just about as dirrrty as ordinary folk.”

Benson said nothing. Apparently, he had not yet even heard. He began doing a curious thing with the drops of water.

He put them in a small steel shell with a tiny hole in one end. Through the hole he inserted a wire. Then he put that shell inside another, larger shell of the marvelous, unbreakable celluglass from which their bulletproof shirts were woven.

“Ye’re thinkin’ maybe that stuff will explode with an electric spark?” asked Mac. “But, mon, how can it be? Tis ordinary water.”

Benson moved to the small switch controlling current in the wire.

“Henderlin’s bath water apparently exploded,” he said, throwing the switch.

Nothing happened after that. The movement of the switch had produced a small hot spark in the metal shell containing the bath water. But there was no response to the spark.

Benson nodded, and took the shell out. He got another, identical one. Then he took from the laboratory safe the vial containing the sample of Sodolow’s stomach contents.

The Avenger brought out a thin sheet of rubber about a yard square. In the center of the sheet, the rubber went down to form fingers. It was like a pair of rubber gloves on the same gauntlet, that gauntlet being a square yard in size.

The Avenger put the vial and the new metal shell in a bag formed of the thin rubber. He sealed the bag with swift moves of a little vulcanizer he had recently perfected, and exhausted most of the air from the bag with a vacuum pump. Then he put his hands in the glove part.

Now he could handle the vial and the shell, by touch, in a fairly airtight compartment.

Inside the bag, he withdrew the vial’s tight stopper and poured a little of its contents into the shell. Again he inserted the wire, cramming it in so that it stopped up the small hole completely.

He slit the bag open, took out shell and vial, and put the vial back into the safe. The shell he put once more into the larger celluglass container in which the shell with the bath water had been a moment before.

He threw the switch a second time.

There was a soft, roaring explosion that seemed to make the whole building quiver. The metal shell with the teaspoonful or so of stomach contents in it had burst into a thousand pieces with such violence as to seam the unbreakable celluglass in myriad places.

The fluid from Sodolow’s stomach had gone up in white flame. The sample from Henderlin’s bath had not. That was all that Mac, watching the work, could gather. It was amazing, of course, that the second shell had exploded. But what it all meant, he could not guess.

The laboratory door opened, and Nellie Gray came in. She looked as dainty and fragile as a Dresden doll in that masculine place of retorts and paraphernalia.

“We just got a report on the man Mac and Josh saw die, breathing flame, at the New Jersey place,” she said.

Benson waited in silence for it, brilliant, pale eyes half closed. He had anticipated a fast report when the fingerprints of the dead flame breather, turned in to the police when Mac got back, were looked up.

“The man was Robert Kohuen,” said Nellie, reading from a piece of paper ribbon on which, teletype fashion, all conversations of any of The Avenger’s telephones were mechanically recorded. “He was a private detective, rather prosperous. His last job was with the Henderlin Corp.; nature of the work unspecified.”

“The police are sure his last work was for the Henderlin coal and oil interests?” said Benson.

Nellie nodded. “They are quite sure. It was easy to find out. Kohuen’s secretary took the orders, from Mr. Henderlin himself only a week ago. She told about it.”

Benson left the laboratory with Mac and Nellie and went to the huge third-floor room. There, he seated himself thoughtfully at his desk and stared with pale, unseeing eyes through the steel slats over a window.

The Avenger began to talk slowly, vibrantly to Nellie and Mac, Smitty and Josh and Rosabel. Every now and then it was his habit to list verbally the points of a case brought out to date. He was talking to himself, really. But his aides always listened enthralled. For always, crystal clear, they defined the method, motive and leading forces in the case at hand.

As a rule, however, it was only later that they could look back and see that definition. At the time, they seldom were able to follow Benson’s mercurial thoughts to the goal that was no less certain for being, at that stage, without definite proof.

“There are four Polish scientists,” said The Avenger. “They are friends and co-workers. They have made a great laboratory discovery. Being decent people, they desire to use this great discovery to benefit mankind. But they must have money before they can do anything at all with it. Do they try for financial backing in their own country, Poland, first? Quite possibly. That will be something to investigate—”

Nellie Gray had pencil and notebook in her hand. She took the words in shorthand, as usual in such soliloquies. The purpose was to note later just such “possibilities of investigation” as these, and set wheels in motion in the next few minutes.[1]

“The United States is vastly wealthy,” the clear but dreaming voice of the scourge of the underworld went on. “The four finally came here. Sodolow’s last words hint that they received their financial backing, all right. But it would seem that their ideas of benefiting mankind were out of order. Their backer, or backers, wanted to exploit mankind, instead.

“The four Polish scientists left. They fled from some ruthless, deadly force. They hid from it — Shewski in Berlin, Wencilau in Paris, Veck in Montreal, Sodolow in Algiers. Three died, terribly — the death of the flame breathers, though not in every case was the flame apparent on their dying breaths. Sodolow fled back to New York, probably to plead for his life with whatever force had relentlessly killed his three associates. But that can never be definitely known. Anyhow, he came back and suffered the same fate, shortly.”

Nellie’s pencil flew in the hushed silence of the group. It was maddening. Each felt that he should know, from the things said, all the answers. Yet none did.

“In each case,” Benson went on, “a former laboratory helper of the dead man was seen by someone just before the murder. For, of course, each was murder. A league of four ex-laboratory workers, it would appear, conspired in the deaths of the four scientists. After that, the scene shifts entirely to this country.

“On a Utah salt flat, a car was burned and the wreckage carefully hauled away in a closed van and hidden. The car must have been at the flat for a test of some sort. The test must have been a remarkable one, which certain interests wanted to be sure would be kept forever secret. So the test car was blotted out. Also, it is almost certain, the driver who conducted the test was killed to stop his tongue, forever.

“Quite near the salt flat, at about the same time, a plane was similarly being put through tests. A rancher has reported that he thought he saw a plane fly at a faster speed than he had ever seen one go before. And shortly after that, the plane exploded and rained to earth in unrecognizable bits — some of them stained with the blood of the pilot. Again, a test so remarkable must have been performed that certain interests utterly destroyed the plane and test pilot to insure secrecy.”

Smitty cleared his throat. It sounded like the rasp of a sandblaster. Mac and Nellie glared at him. The giant colored a little and spread his huge hands in an apologetic way.

“The four scientists, to get back to them, seemed to have been poisoned. Yet no laboratory has found a trace of any known poison. This poison, it seems, is explosive. At least, the sample taken quickly from Sodolow’s stomach exploded at a spark, in my laboratory. And the sample from Veck’s stomach may also have been, because the Montreal police laboratory went up in smoke and rubble about the time the lab men were due to work on the sample. But — how could any man with a normal sense of taste be induced to swallow enough of any known explosive to be burst like a bomb by it later? And why is the stuff they seem to have swallowed sometimes explosive and sometimes not explosive?”

Benson’s voice grew softer and yet, in a curious way, even more grim.

“Three more pieces remain to the puzzle bits, each containing smaller riddles:

“First, Lorens Singer’s home is utterly destroyed by something seeming to have filled every water pipe in the building, and eighteen people are killed. Singer was not in the building; so he was uninjured. He did not know who annihilated his home in an effort to kill him. He did not know why. I am certain he did not know. I have never seen such ruthless, cold anger as he displayed when he swore to get the people responsible.

“Second, a house is discovered in New Jersey that is elaborately heated and lighted, yet into which seems to run neither oil lines nor electric cables. Josh and Mac saw a half-inch pipe leading into the base of the furnace, but it would not seem to have been an oil line. Oilburners need electric motors to function, and there was no apparent electricity in the house. Josh later saw a similar pipe at the bank of a near creek, leading back in a way suggesting that that was the pipe that entered the house. During their search, they meet Xisco — a former laboratory helper of the late Veck — who says it is his home. Later, after the house is destroyed by fire, Xisco disappears. At the same time, the private detective, hired recently by the Henderlin Corp., who guided Mac and Josh there, dies with flame coming from his mouth and nose. And a car, occupants unseen, is heard driving away.

“Third, Henderlin’s bath is blown up in a manner to suggest that he had been soaking in gasoline or nitroglycerin instead of water and that a match had ignited the stuff. But a sample from his bath is — plain water.”

The dominant, cold voice stopped. Benson turned back from the window.

“Get me Warsaw, Poland, on the phone, Nellie.”

The musing of The Avenger was over. It was time for action again.

His aides were sure that behind the pale, awesome eyes of their chief the puzzle pieces were all neatly in place. But to them they were still only puzzle pieces.