The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER II Task for Justice, Inc

It was probably the strangest drugstore in existence. It was the drugstore at Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, in New York City, run by Fergus MacMurdie.

The store itself was small and looked like any other drugstore. It was the rear that made it unusual. The rear was twice as big as the front and was locked off from the store part by a heavy iron door.

In this big back room was a double laboratory. Along one side ran all the paraphernalia used by an expert chemist, which modestly described Fergus MacMurdie’s abilities. Along the other, was all the equipment needed by a first-rank electrical engineer. And this was used by Smitty.

In the front of the store was one customer, seated at the soda fountain, consuming his fifth maple-nut sundae.

The customer was a gangling, sleepy-looking Negro. He looked as if he didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain — or to refrain from killing himself with maple-nut sundaes. Actually, Josh Newton was smart enough to be counted as one of the best aides of the odd, grim character called The Avenger.

In the dual laboratory, Smitty was working on his side. He was trying to perfect a television radio set that could be carried in a case the size of a small cigar box which, as any radio engineer could tell you, can’t be done. But the six-foot-nine giant thought he’d be doing it very soon now.

Smitty — to call him by his true name, Algernon Heathcote Smith, was to court annihilation — looked slow-witted but he, too, along with Josh Newton and the store proprietor, Fergus MacMurdie, was another of The Avenger’s aides.

The Scot wasn’t working on his side of the fence. He was looking through the evening paper. He had just finished concocting a little pellet which, when crumbled between thumb and forefinger, would form a dust that would blot up an incredible amount of poison gas, leaving the air fit to breathe again. The pellet would be useful in counterattacks.

Smitty laid down a miniature photoelectric cell and swore fervently. Mac stared at him out of bleak blue eyes.

“Tsk, tsk,” he chided mildly. “Such language, mon. Ye’re reddenin’ my poor old ears.”

“They couldn’t be any redder than they naturally are,” snapped Smitty.

“I judge ye’re havin’ difficulties with yon silly work,” Mac said.

“Silly, is it?” howled the gigantic Smitty.

“Of course,” burred the Scot. “Ye’ve already perfected little receiving and transmitting sets over which we can talk to each other and to the chief. Now ye want us to see each other while we’re talkin’. And all in the size of a coffee cup. ’Tis totally unnecessary to gild the lily like that.”

“Yeah?” said the giant morosely. “Sometimes a set gets into the wrong hands, and we think it’s one of us talking and get in a jam. If we could see the talker, as well as hear… But I’m not coming along so fast on the thing.”

“ ’Tis to your credit that ye keep at your toys so persistently,” said Mac tolerantly folding his newspaper and beginning to peruse the second page. “I admire ye, Heathcote.”

Smitty purpled. There were very few people alive who could call him Heathcote. There were even fewer who could call the results of his brilliant work in radio, toys. But a look at the Scot’s face stopped any wrathful words Smitty might have hurled at him.

“What’s up, Mac?” he said.

“A friend of mine died last night in Montreal,” the Scot said soberly. “A mon named Veck. We were classmates at college. I remember he could hardly speak English when he first came to this country from Poland. And marvelous he was in chemistry, too. I rrremember.”

“How’d he die?” said the giant, looking at the tiny photoelectric cell.

“Acute indigestion, the paper says. But there’s a curious hint—”

Mac stopped, and stared at the paper without really seeing it. He was silent so long that Smitty turned from his bench to stare at him again.

“Verra odd business, Smitty,” Mac said softly. “What would ye think if a mon was hinted to have died of poison; but there was no poison to be traced anywhere? And what would ye think if living flame had apparently come from the mon’s mouth and nose before he died?”

“I’d think the first was improbable and the second absolutely impossible,” said the giant. “What gives you that brainstorm?”

“The poison is hinted all through the newspaper item, Smitty, though they call it acute indigestion. And the fire? My friend was found lyin’ on his side, very soon after a mon in the room below heard him fall. From Veck’s mouth and nostrils, for a yard along the carpet, the nap was seared as if by fire. The leg of a chair at the end of the seared streak was scorched. And Veck’s flesh was blackened, as if the mon breathed out flame before he died.”

Smitty shrugged.

“Nobody can breathe flame; so it couldn’t be what it seems. Now if you’ll give me a lift here—”

“I’ll give ye no lift,” said the Scot. “Not till I have contacted the chief on that funny lookin’ black box of yours.”

The box in question was the main television set communicating from the store to the headquarters of Richard Henry Benson, known as The Avenger.

Smitty had already perfected television far beyond the accomplishments of the big commercial studios. It was condensing it in tiny form that was bothering him at the moment.

Mac stepped to the big set and twisted dials.

A curious sort of screen took up most of the front of the big cabinet. As the magnificent set warmed, a clouded appearance mottled the screen. Then the clouded look faded out, and a face appeared.

It was a face to make any man gasp, then turn to look again with a shiver compounded of awe and fear.

The countenance was as dead as the face of the moon, and as white and still. Over the face was a shock of snow-white hair; but its thickness and virility showed that the owner was still a very young man. In the face were set eyes that seemed to have no color at all. They were deadly, pale holes in the white flesh. Yet they flamed like ice under a polar dawn.

As though carved from white metal, with diamond drills for eyes, the face peered at the two men from the screen. And even these two, close friends and aides of The Avenger, felt a chill shock at the impact of the colorless eyes.

“Chief,” said Mac, “I contacted ye because I’ve just read a very odd thing. It’s about the death of a man in Montreal last night who…”

Words came from the awesome white countenance, though the dead flesh of the lips scarcely moved.

“The Polish scientist, Veck. Dead of poisoning, obviously, though the statement was otherwise. Apparently exhaled flame as he died.”

Mac had long since stopped being surprised when Benson seemed to know everything.

“That’s the mon,” said Mac. “Veck was a friend of mine, Muster Benson. We were classmates. I’d like ye to let me go to Montreal and investigate a little. He was a grrrand person, and I—”

“We’ll do better than that, Mac,” said the still, barely moving lips. “We will take this on officially. I suspect there is a task for Justice, Inc. here.”

“We will?” said the Scot, as surprised as he was pleased. “Splendid, Muster Benson. We’ll report to ye, at once. Smitty’s beside me, and Josh is out front — at his eterrrnal maple-nut sundaes.”

The sinister, dead face of The Avenger faded from the screen. And a mile or so from the drugstore Benson turned from his duplicate television transmitter-receiver.

The man whose white, emotionless countenance was the nightmare of every crook from Maine to California, was only of average size. But every move he made shouted the fact that he possessed, in that average-sized frame, a power such as is seldom seen in mortals.

“Flame, breathed from Veck’s mouth and nostrils,” The Avenger whispered to himself. His pale, infallible eyes were like stainless steel chips in his paralyzed face. “And flame, according to the servant, from the lips of the man in Berlin. Yes, it’s a case for Justice, Inc.”

Richard Benson’s life was devoted to the eradication of crime. Forced by his own personal tragedy — a criminal plot that had irreparably seared his soul — he had become The Avenger, the terrible enemy of the underworld.

Some of his battles were begun at the request of harassed individuals faced by dangers too great or subtle for the police to cope with. Some were begun as this one was — by the flaming genius of the man with the colorless eyes in picking significant bits from the news of the day.

A man had died in Berlin apparently breathing flame.

A man had died in Montreal apparently breathing flame.

The coincidence clicked over again and again in the mind behind the pale, deadly eyes. Benson walked, with his smooth stride hinting at great power, to the window and looked down at Bleek Street. There was nothing there for his unseeing gaze to rest on.

The Avenger’s headquarters was on a little back bay of a street in New York City that was only a block long. One side of the block was taken up entirely by the back of a huge storage building that was blank and windowless. The other side had a big vacant warehouse at one end, a loft building and a couple of stores at the other, and three old, three-story red brick buildings between.

The three buildings, though their exteriors did not show it, were thrown into one. And here, behind the middle door with the small sign, Justice, Inc., over it, The Avenger had his headquarters.

Benson had the vacant warehouse under lease and owned the other buildings; so that, with the opposite side taken up by the wall of the storage building, he literally owned the whole block.

In a corner of the huge room taking up the whole third floor of the three buildings, a teletype began its discreet clicking. Benson went over and watched the tape.

It was a wire-service dispatch. The associated news agencies always send a copy of events to the combined newspapers, the State Department — and Richard Henry Benson.

On the little tape words were forming that instantly riveted the pale gaze of The Avenger. For they had to do with the death of Veck in Montreal. The words clicked out:

Explosion — wrecks — Montreal — police — laboratory — samples — stomach — contents — Veck — being — analyzed — building — wrecked — three — killed.

Benson turned from the teletype with eyes as cold as a glacier in moonlight, and knowing more than ever now that the deaths of two men in far places were a thing for Justice, Inc. to look into.

The Avenger had received a little more news over the teletype than Mac had read in the paper. One bit of news relative to the persistent hint of poisoning, was that samples of the dead man’s stomach contents had been obtained, at once, and rushed to the police laboratory. All day Benson had been waiting for a report on the analysis. Apparently, the laboratory had been busy with other work and had not begun the Veck analysis till afternoon.

Then before the analysis could be concluded, the laboratory had been wrecked by an explosion!

The flame breathers! Explosion!

Had someone else, able to breathe flame but not die of it, furtively visited the police laboratory and destroyed it before Veck’s death could be investigated too thoroughly?