The Frosted Death

CHAPTER XIII Roof-Top Trail

The many windows in the enormous room on the top floor at Benson’s Bleek Street headquarters seemed to have Venetian blinds over them. But they were not Venetian blinds.

The slats were not wooden strips and could not be tilted. They were strips of nickel-steel, set at a forty-five degree angle; so no bullet could penetrate the windows. Their ends were embedded in the masonry of the building.

Through the slits, the flaring colorless eyes of The Avenger stared down from a rear window. The view back there was over the low roof of a one-story garage, fronting on the next street.

There were two men on the roof. They were in regular suits; but their coats were cut a little long, and looked almost like military garments. The erect, stolid carriage of the two men looked military, too.

Benson paced with his panther tread to the front of the room and looked out on Bleek Street.

There were two men across from the doorway, over which hung the Justice sign. There were two more at the dead end of the block. There were three at the opposite end of the street.

The Avenger’s face, dead as wax, motionless as gray steel, disappeared from behind the slats of the blind. His colorless, marksman’s eyes were as brilliant as moonstones with a light behind them.

This was no crew of thugs. This was no criminal gang. It was something on the order of an army corps stationed all around the Bleek Street headquarters. He was up against the method and precision of a military machine, not fighting unorganized killers.

Nellie Gray watched him from the long table in the center of the room.

“How are you going to get out of here, chief?” she said.

“I’m not worrying about getting out,” Benson said. “But I want to get out unobserved. And that seems a bit tricky.”

He walked to the television radio and tried once more to get Mac at the drugstore. But the call was unanswered by either Mac or Josh.

“They wouldn’t have left,” said Benson, “unless Mac had discovered what he was hunting for: an antidote to the frosted death. And if he had found that, they wouldn’t have rested till they had come here with it.”

Nellie nodded, her shrewd brain pacing his own.

“So,” she said, “something has happened to them.”

“And to the antidote it is reasonable to suppose Mac found,” Benson nodded.

He glanced once more at the two big, square-shouldered men on the garage roof.

“Is Miss Sangaman down on the second floor?” he asked.

Nellie Gray nodded. “She’s asleep, poor lamb. Worn out.”

“What room has she? I wouldn’t want to disturb her.”

“The blue room, in front.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Benson. “Unless something goes wrong, she won’t hear anything.”

He went down to the second floor.

The corridor there ended in the rear, it seemed, in solid plaster and brick wall. But Benson went toward the wall as if he intended to walk right through. Which, as a matter of fact, he did.

He pressed a certain spot. The end of the hall, five by seven and a half, moved a little. The entire end wall was a secret door, leading out onto the garage roof. Out there, serrated edges of red brick, that you would never notice when they were properly in place, moved a bit with The Avenger’s push.

Having unbarred the secret door, Benson opened a panel in it which consisted of one brick that telescoped down into the false one beneath it, at the touch of a button. He peered out the little opening.

One of the two men out on the roof was staring over the edge into the narrow areaway beside the garage. The other — glared with startled eyes directly into Benson’s colorless ones. He had just happened to be looking right at that spot of innocent brick wall when one of the bricks seemed to melt out of it.

Benson’s right hand whipped down to the calf of his leg. It whipped up again with Mike, the silenced, special .22, leveled through the aperture.

The Avenger didn’t seem to aim at all. Yet the slug that lisped from Mike’s silenced muzzle hit its target within a sixteenth of an inch. As, indeed, it would have to, to conform to The Avenger’s rule of disabling but never killing with his own hand.

It went through a stiffly worn derby at precisely the spot to slam against the very top of the man’s skull, to “crease” it, and stretch the man out on the roof as unconscious as if he had been chloroformed.

The man had started to yell to his comrade when the bullet clipped him. However, his gasp must have warned the other, at the roof edge, for he whirled and saw his prone accomplice.

The result was funny, in a mad, dangerous sort of way. The man didn’t know what had happened. Something had knocked his comrade out, but nothing was in evidence. There was no other person on the roof. On one side was thin air, where the garage fronted. On the other was blank wall for ten feet, and then closed windows of the top-floor room.

The man dropped swiftly to his knees, gun whipping out. He looked all around, trying to see in every direction, at once — and saw nothing, anywhere.

The Avenger coldly and calmly ended his dilemma for him by squeezing Mike’s trigger again. The second man went down, unconscious.

Benson opened the secret door, walked out onto the roof, and picked up the nearest of the two. The limp figure was beefy, must have weighed around two hundred pounds; but The Avenger carried him without taxing his superb physique in the least.

He took the man into the building, shut the concealed door tightly again, and carried him lightly up the stairs.

In the big room he nodded wordlessly to Nellie. She knew what the nod meant. She went to a corner and got a small but very compact case and brought it to her chief.

A major miracle was about to occur.

The tremendous nervous shock that paralyzed Benson’s face had left it in a curiously plastic state. The features couldn’t move of themselves. But under prodding fingers, they could be molded into any shape desired — and would stay there. The result was that Benson had really two names to the underworld. He was The Avenger.

And he was the Man of a Thousand Faces.

He could deftly mold his countenance into the exact resemblance of almost any other face; and when proper color eyes and facial tinting were added, he was that other man.

He prepared to become somebody else now.

He propped up the unconscious man he had brought in from the roof. Beside the man’s face, he placed a small mirror. By looking into the mirror, Benson could see his own wax-white countenance close beside the other man’s florid face.

He opened the case.

It was a make-up kit such as couldn’t be duplicated anywhere outside of a large Hollywood studio. There was a tray in which dozens of tissue-thin glass shells reposed. The shells were tiny cups, designed to fit over Benson’s colorless eyeballs. On each pair was painted a slightly different colored pupil. Thus, by selection, The Avenger could acquire brown eyes, or blue, or amber, or any other color.

He slipped a pair of shells with gray-brown pupils over his eyeballs, holding the unconscious man’s eyelids open for an instant, to check the color again. Then he began to manipulate the modeling-clay texture of the flesh of his face.

The nose flattened, broadened, became slightly bulbous at the tip. The cheeks became shallower, fleshier-looking. With a careful hand, Benson tinted the result to the high, florid color of the man. Then over his shock of snow-white hair, he drew a wig with close-cropped, light brown hair.

He estimated the height of the man.

“Shoes,” he said to Nellie, “with two-and-one-quarter-inch lifts.”

He was in the unconscious man’s suit when Nellie Gray got back. He put on the height-adding, special shoes and the man’s derby, with the two little holes in it where Mike’s venomous small bullet had gone in and out again.

And The Avenger was that man!

Benson went through the pockets of the garments he wore. He was, he discovered, a man by the name of Molan Brocker. There was a recently stamped passport in his coat pocket, from a powerful European nation, announcing that fact.

Beside the passport, there was a little money. But there was only one bit of paper of any kind. That was the torn-off corner of an envelope. The corner contained a printed return address. The address read: Klammer Importing Co., Fifth Avenue.

Benson went back down to the second floor and out onto the roof. The other man was still lying there, deeply unconscious. It was possible that he had a mild concussion from the bullet’s crease; but his life was in no danger.

Benson went to the edge of the roof. There was a heavy rainpipe there; and it was up this that the two men had climbed in the first place. The Avenger went down the pipe and along the areaway to the street on which the garage fronted.

Two men promptly wheeled toward him from across the street, unconsciously marching in exact unison. Two more came toward him from down beyond the garage. It was so precisely and mechanically done that it was like the changing of the guard.

Benson was so good at judging men that he was almost psychic about it. At a glance he picked the one of the four with the most authority in the set of his jaw. This one he approached at once.

“Brocker!” the man said. “Why do you leave your post? Do you not know—”

The Avenger knew a dozen languages, and knew them so well that he had no accent in any. The knowledge was advantageous, now; the man spoke in the tongue of north Europe.

“There has been trouble,” Benson replied in the same language. He had had no chance to hear the real Brocker speak; so he could only guess at the proper, guttural intonation. “The man with the white hair — I believe he has gotten away.”

“Impossible!” snapped the authoritative-looking man. “All have been in place in front. And if you and Vogg have been properly on duty in the rear—”

Benson had only been waiting to learn the name of the other man.

“Vogg has been hurt.”

“Hurt! There was a fight?”

“No! I don’t know what happened. I turned, to see that Vogg was down. I ran to the areaway and looked down. There was a sound that I could hardly hear. I leaped back from the edge with these holes in my hat.” He pointed at the bullet holes. “Some one had shot me.”

“You saw no one?”

“I was not sure. I leaped back with my own gun out. I thought I saw a man running this way. A man, it seemed, with white hair showing under the rim of his hat.”

“No one, of any color hair, has come into this street. I am positive. But this is serious!”

“What shall I do now? Return to my post?”

“Of what use?” said the man bitterly. “If you and Vogg were attacked, it must have been that during the distraction our enemy did, indeed, manage to slip away. Is Vogg badly hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then leave him to look after himself. You — report to our superiors immediately. I shall get the rest, and we will comb the neighborhood before we accept, as fact, the white-haired man’s escape.”

He turned away, and Benson, walking with a stiff and military gait on his high-lift shoes, went down the street.

Report to our superiors!

He had intended only to get away from his headquarters. But with a glance at the men on this street, he had had a swift change of plan. It had seemed like an excellent time to find out a bit about this foreign, efficient corps on United States soil.

Klammer Importing Co., Fifth Avenue.

That might or might not be the headquarters for this ruthless crew. He could only chance it.

The Klammer office building was old, part apartments and part offices. The Klammer Co. was on the fourth floor, walk-up. Benson opened the door there.

He could not make his face express agitation — or anything else. So he did it by the swift pace of his entrance and his hurried tone to the young lady at a desk near the door.

“I must report at once! Important!”

“To whom?” asked the girl, in the same European tongue.

“To whom do you suppose, stupid?” Benson snapped. “Be quick—”

An inner door opened. A man with a paunch and a square-looking head stepped out.

“Very well, Brocker. Make your report.”

“The man with the white hair,” The Avenger said, making his voice urgent and wishing he could do the same with his moveless face, floridly made up in another man’s image. “He has gotten away from us.”

“Fool!” rasped the paunchy man. “Do you know how serious that is?” He stepped forward. “Where did he go? Did you follow? Have you any idea?”

“We didn’t have the chance to follow. He was too swift.”

The paunchy man paced up and down, hands twisting behind his back.

“Who can say where he has gone, now! Who can tell what harm he can work! We have just gotten the last of our reports on the meddler, Benson. They are most disquieting. You pack of fools!”

“We admit it, sir,” said Benson meekly, timidly. “And now — your orders?”

“Be at ease. Go where you like, you—” he searched for expletives and couldn’t seem to find any strong enough. “You and the others shall pay for this when we get back to the homeland. You know how you will pay.”

Brocker gave the salute of the land whose language he was talking and started for the door. He didn’t appear to do so, but he moved a little more slowly than he might have. Before he had gotten the door open, the paunchy man whirled to the girl.

“The telephone!” he rapped out. “They must be warned up on the coast—”

Benson went out.

“They must be warned up on the coast.” It told him a lot.

The ultimate use for the frosted death had become increasingly obvious, in the last twenty-four hours. It was to be a ghastly war weapon, to be shipped abroad. To the country from which had come these heavy-shouldered, phlegmatic-looking men who worked like a military machine rather than a gang.

Very well, but to be used by that country, it would have to be shipped there first. That meant two things.

The terrible white stuff was being cultivated somewhere in large quantities, and packaged somehow for handling.

It could not be shipped openly. Nor would anyone even try to smuggle it, on a large scale, on regular ships. Too much chance of its being discovered.

What craft could bear it most secretly? An undersea boat. Where would it head in to an obscure port?

“Up the coast,” the paunchy man had said.

Somewhere north of New York a submarine would be stealing in — if it had not anchored already. Almost certainly near there, some kind of hidden plant would be located, turning out the shipment for the sub.

But Benson shelved this valuable thought for the moment. At the time, that day, that Claudette Sangaman had almost been killed, a chemist at the Sangaman-Veshnir Corp. named Mickelson had been absent. He might have been the one to toss the glass capsule at her — though this would have upset considerably, the theories Benson had formulated. Or his absence might be a coincidence meaning nothing — or a lot.

Benson set out to discover what it did mean.