The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER XV Singer and Death!

The little man with the odd ears was propped against the wall of the dim receiving room. Propped next to him was a most peculiar case.

It looked like an overnight bag; but its contents were such as no overnight bag ever held.

In the top tray were dozens of fragile, tissue-thin semispheres with different colored pupils painted on them. They were tiny cups which The Avenger could slip over his eyeballs to change their flaring colorlessness when wanted.

Under the top tray were all the known make-up aids, plus a few of Benson’s own designing, which could be utilized to change the man’s gray steel appearance.

The case was laid so that a small mirror was on a level with the little man’s face, and right next to it, Benson was seated before the two, looking into the mirror one second and at the man’s face the next.

When the face of Richard Benson had been paralyzed by the terrific nerve shock that also whitened his thick, virile hair, something had happened to the facial muscles that even the doctors couldn’t explain.

The facial flesh had not only gone dead, from the standpoint of no longer responding to nerve impulses, but it had also lost all natural elasticity. It was like dead wax. Where it was put, it stayed, till it was put carefully back again into place.

The Avenger, with about eight minutes to go before the gang should return to the building, finished shaping his dead face to match the face of the man with the queer ears. He pinched his own ears into points to correspond with the others, put on a brown wig over his white hair, slipped eye-cups with brownish pupils over his pale orbs, and stood up.

He wasn’t Benson any more. He was the other man, line for line.

He put on the other man’s clothes, compressing his shoulders to resemble the narrower shoulders of the other.

“Take him to Bleek Street,” Benson said to Smitty, nodding to the unconscious man.

The giant held the little man up with an arm under his shoulder as if he were drunk instead of unconscious and walked him toward the door. Benson followed him soon after and climbed into a cab.

He went again to Singer’s hotel suite.

When The Avenger made up as another person, he always, if possible, studied that person’s walk and mannerisms, too, because a man is known by his gestures as well as his face.

In this case, he’d had no chance to do that. He could only trust that the amazingly accurate facial imitation would be enough. It looked as if it were going to be.

The man guarding the lower elevator door nodded to him on sight. He didn’t say a word, just passed him to the elevator. It appeared that the little man whom Benson was replacing had the run of the place.

Benson went up to the top floor and was similarly passed by the foyer guard. He walked into the big room where Singer had his desk.

Singer was seated there. He looked up at Benson, at the brownish pupils, hair, and the rest of The Avenger’s disguise. The financier’s eyes were keen. Would he—

“Well, Rann,” Singer said to the man he saw entering.

And Benson knew it was all right. At least for a little while.

He went on to the desk. And Singer stared with coldly smoldering eyes and a face that was frightening in its wrath.

“I’m glad you came, Rann,” Singer said, voice too smooth to be comforting. “I’ve come to a nasty conclusion in the last few hours of thinking things over. The conclusion is—that you’ve been double-crossing me!”

Benson shook his head in a bewildered, too-innocent manner.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“No?” snapped Singer. “I think you do. Your face gives you away. There was no surprise or any other emotion on it when I said that. I was watching. It only confirms what I’ve been thinking.”

“But—” faltered Benson.

“I’ve got the wrecking of my house all figured out,” said Singer. “The private detectives I hired have helped a little. I guessed the rest.

“You went to the Henderlin coal and oil people with that damned process of yours, after getting into my confidence. Highest bid to get it — and to the devil with me if I wouldn’t pay as much as they offered. You gave them a small sample, to prove you had the goods. They tested it, and it worked as miraculously as it had when I tested it. They believed you and gave you a figure. You did not accept — thought you could get more. They tried, of course, to analyze the sample. It defied analysis, as you knew it would. Meanwhile, they learned that I was tied in with you, after the run-out the four Poles took on me. So they tried to kill me by blowing up my house. You were directly responsible for that, and it’s only luck that I’m alive.”

“But Mr. Singer,” said Benson, “you’re letting a lot of guesswork condemn me in your mind as guilty of—”

“Even your voice is different,” snarled Singer. “Your guilt shows in everything you say and do.”

“Look at all I’ve done in the interests of the two of us,” said Benson, stabbing in the dark. “That should prove—”

“It proves nothing, Rann. What you’ve done was in my interest as well as yours—only if you did not freeze me out. Which is precisely what I believe you have in mind, right now.”

“If you’ll give me a little time, I think I can make you understand—”

“I’ll give you time, my friend,” said Singer. “I’ll give you plenty of time! I’m through with this fooling around.” He pressed a button on his desk. “You’ll be taken to a little factory that I own outside Newark. It’s abandoned at the moment. No one will interfere. There, you will give me every detail of that process. You might not do it in a day or a week. But eventually, after enough persuasion, you’ll come through. Then I won’t be dependent on you any more.”

“But, Mr. Singer—”

The door opened and two men came in. They were not of the type thought of as normal employees of a respectable businessman.

“Take him to the Newark flats,” said Singer, lighting a thin brown cigar.

“Please! Give me a chance!” Benson put all the acting he could into his voice, since, even now, he could not express anything with his face. It was fortunate that Singer was looking at his cigar instead of the man he called Rann, or he might have noticed that lack of expression in spite of his anger.

“Take him out,” Singer repeated.

One of the two men stepped up to Benson and his fist smashed out.

The fist got The Avenger just under the heart, in a blow that had knockout power behind it but still should not leave a mark where a casual observer could see it.

Benson slumped. The two calmly propelled him toward the elevator.

“Had a heart attack or somethin’,” one of them said cheerfully to the curiously staring operator. The operator, a direct employee of Singer’s, nodded indifferently.

The two got Benson through the lobby and into a big car. The car headed for Newark — for an abandoned building where The Avenger was to be tortured into giving up a secret he did not have, or, if discovered in his true identity, was to be slaughtered outright.

Smitty, in the cab that had recently left the warehouse bearing him and the unconscious little man with the pointed ears, suddenly went for his gun. He was too late!

The move that had caused the grab was so deftly performed that it was over before he realized it.

The driver of the taxi that had conveniently picked him up with his burden near the warehouse door, had swirled the cab into a one-way street going east and stopped. Just like that. Smitty had been thrown forward, which had delayed the gun-grabbing. And now he couldn’t draw because he was looking into a gun muzzle himself!

The gun was one that swung its yawning muzzle toward him before. A .45 looking like a battleship cannon. It was in a hand that had wielded it before — a small hand, but one that held the big gun very competently, indeed.

The driver was the girl with the coldly beautiful black eyes and the ink-black hair. The hair had been tucked cleverly into her driver’s cap; but Smitty felt like a fool, nevertheless. He should have spotted something funny the instant he looked at the figure at the wheel.

Trouble was, he hadn’t looked. Waiters and taxi drivers are people you don’t tend to notice individually without reason. And there hadn’t seemed to be any reason for Smitty’s giving an inquisition to a casual cab driver.

“You again!” he said bitterly. “And I once said you were kind of pretty. You’re no more pretty than a Gila monster—”

“Get out!” said the girl.

“Huh?” gasped the giant. The last thing he’d expected was to be captured by this gummer-upper of well-laid plans and then be turned loose again.

“I said, get out!” she snapped.

Smitty started to gather up the little man.

“Oh, no. Leave him right where he is.”

Smitty said things under his breath that would have burned the dainty ears off the girl if they’d been a little louder.

“Stop mumbling,” said the girl. “Get out of this cab, at once, or I’ll shoot.”

She would, too! There was no hesitancy in those jet-black eyes.

Feeling as impotent as three hundred pounds of angry jellyfish, Smitty clambered out of the cab. It sped off with a scream of tires. There were no cabs around here in which the giant could follow.

As easily as rolling off a ridge-pole, the girl had rescued the little man Benson had ordered taken to Bleek Street.

But it seemed that rescue was the wrong word.

The taxi went along for only half a mile or so; then it stopped in front of a loft building, each of the five floors of which was taken up by a small manufacturing company.

The girl stepped back to the body of the cab. The little man was stirring now, and moaning. She held an opened vial of ammonia under his nostrils. He coughed, looked up dazedly.

“Hello, Mr. Rann,” said a man in janitor’s clothes as the little man went into the door with the figure in cab driver’s worn garb beside him.

Rann bit his lips, said hello stiffly and went on in and up the stairs. There was a gun cleverly concealed, poking against his ribs.

He stopped on the top floor and opened a door marked: Krakow Distillate Co. He went in, with the girl behind him. The girl shut and locked the door without taking gun or eyes off Rann.

It seemed there was nothing to the Krakow Co. but several chairs and a bed. There were no machinery, no light workbenches, as on other floors of the loft building. It was only a hide-out for the man called Rann.

The girl took off her man’s cap and shook out her thick, black hair. She looked like an avenging fury, in worn black whipcord and with gauntlets disguising the telltale feminine daintiness of her hands. “This is what I’ve waited for,” she said. And with the words, Death fanned the air of the big, almost empty room with sable wings!