The Emperor of Death (3 page)
“He’s plotting a tremendous, world-wide revolution. As I understand it, his aim is to get all the civilized nations at each other’s throats through his machinations; to tear down governments and law by his alliance with the underworld, and then, when we’re weak and impotent, to crush us all with the mighty Red armies.”
Havens reached for a cigarette.
“A nice customer,” he said. “God, Van, if he can force his will on people as easily as he did on me, we’re done for.”
A vague fear was reflected in the publisher’s eyes as he spoke. Van Loan crossed the room and slapped him confidentially on the shoulder.
“Don’t let it get you, old man,” he said. “You’re naturally upset after what you went through this morning. Hesterberg hasn’t won yet. He —”
His words trailed off into nothingness as there came a sharp staccato rap at the door. Havens’s eyes stared into the detective’s.
“Who’s that?” he asked in a low tense voice.
Van loan stood perfectly still for a moment, yet the complete immobility of his body indicated that his mind was functioning smoothly, rapidly.
“You’ve been followed,” he said in a low voice. “Some one’s followed you to see if you really killed the Phantom. Open the door. I’ll stand back here. Pretend you’re upset. Act as if you’d really killed me, until I think of some way to turn this break to our advantage.”
Havens rose and walked toward the door, while Van carefully flattened himself up against the heavy drapes near the window. Havens opened the door, and did his best to look like a man who has just slain his best friend. His hands trembled as he held the door ajar.
His head was hung on his chest, and his voice broke as he asked:
“What is it?”
A burly man pushed past him, and glanced around the apartment.
Havens clutched at him.
“What is it? What do you want?” he demanded in a shrill voice.
The other pushed him aside brutally. “I’m looking for a corpse,” he said callously. “Did you do your little job?”
Havens uttered an exclamation of fear and shrank up against the wall. The visitor laughed harshly.
“Where’s the body?” he said.
Havens caught Van’s eye. With the air of a man who has been cornered he nodded his head toward the bathroom. The stranger took a step in that direction.
Van Loan made a swift movement with each hand. His right whipped an automatic from his shoulder holster, while the left slipped a black silk mask over his head. Unconcerned, the intruder walked toward the bathroom and looked in. Then he turned savagely to Havens.
“You rat! Don’t lie to me. Where’s the body? Where’s the Phantom?”
“The Phantom’s here. Both his body and his soul. Put up your hands!”
Havens laughed grimly. Their visitor turned an astonished face to the masked man who held the gun aimed directly at his heart. For a moment, Hesterberg’s henchman was too utterly amazed to move. Then an exclamation fell from his lips.
“God!” he said. “God!”
“So you’re rather surprised that I’m alive?”
“It’s never failed before,” said the man speaking more to himself than the others.
“But it’s failed now,” said Van. “But there’ll be another killing here that won’t fail unless you give me some information. Now talk.”
By now the stranger had taken a grip on himself.
“Talk?” he repeated. “About what?”
“Just talk,” said Van softly, but his eyes were hard. “About anything. But particularly about a Mad Red called Hesterberg, or about a cripple with remarkable eyes that impels men to go gunning for their friends. Best of all, tell me, where I can meet these charming gentlemen.”
The stranger frowned, opened his mouth, then closed it again. He stared steadily at the gun.
“I’m not talking,” he said laconically.
“Yes, you are,” contradicted Van. “You’re talking or you’re dying. I don’t bluff. I mean it.”
The other gazed at him steadily. Whatever his faults may have been, cowardice was not among them.
“I die anyway,” he said simply. “If I do talk, I’ll get worse from someone else than you can ever give me.”
“I’ll count three,” said Van, and his voice was jagged ice. “Then you get it.”
He began to count in a slow deliberate voice, and for the second time that day, death was in the room.
But the henchman of Hesterberg was not of the breed that waits for the reaper supinely. With a sudden swift motion he ducked his head. At the same moment his hand flashed to his hip. Something black and ominous appeared in his hand. Two staccato reports ripped through the room. One steel slug tore angrily through the plaster of the wall. The other crashed into human flesh, ripped a heart to shreds and wrenched a life from a body.
Van stood over the crimson torso of his fallen foe. He spoke rapidly to Havens. “Get out,” he said. “I can handle this better alone. I’ll communicate with you through our usual channels.”
For a moment Havens thought of protesting, but he had learned that when the Phantom issued orders it was expedient to obey. Silently he let himself out the door.
Van Loan bent swiftly over the corpse and ran facile fingers through the other’s pockets. He piled up on the table the articles he took from the dead man, then regarded them with no little wonder.
First, there was a red band, about six inches wide, with the Number 8 painted on it in white. Its use he could only conjecture. But he was quite familiar with the second object, though it was difficult to understand what a man was doing with it in the heart of New York at high noon.
It was a small rubberized silk gas mask of the type which covers the nose, leaving the mouth free. Van stared at these for some time. Then he began to go through the sheaf of papers that he had taken from the man’s inside pocket in the hope of finding some clue that would put him directly on the trail of the Mad Red.
Luck was with him. His pulses pounded with excitement as he stared at the yellow slip of paper in his hand. Typed neatly upon it was the message that would, God willing, give him the first personal contact with the man who had twice tried to slay the Phantom.
It read:
INSTRUCTIONS
FOR NUMBER 8
You will appear at midnight at the Morton Bank. You will wear your identification band. You will bring your gas mask. I shall lead the horde in person. You shall wait for me and remain by my side while the work is done.
O.
Van Loan sat down. He lit a cigarette and for a long time remained lost in thought. He was impervious to the bloody figure upon the floor. Impervious to everything save the fact that at midnight he was prepared to risk his life in order to come close to the man that he had vowed to track down.
The message was by no means clear to him. Then, too, there was always the alternative of calling in the police. Undoubtedly, the bluecoats, massed in sufficient numbers, could frustrate whatever plan Hesterberg had made. Yet that course would get the Phantom no closer to the Red madman.
No, to be successful, he, the Phantom, must play it alone. Number 8 had probably been sent to see that Havens carried out the instructions of the crippled hypnotist. Or, if not, he had come on his own to see the Phantom’s finish. In any event, it was a break Van could not afford to pass up.
Here at last was the chance to meet Hesterberg, to find out the man’s plans, and then to foil him. Once again, the Phantom would play a lone hand, spurning the aid of the police of the city, spurning all aid save that which his keen alert brain and his steady, courageous heart and hand could give him.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost five o’clock. That gave him over seven hours until his rendezvous. Until then he would rest, he decided. He might need that rest later. He glanced down at the body on the floor, and shrugged his shoulders. He had no time to bother with that.
He would check out and leave it there. After all, who could connect the entirely mythical Mr. Smith who had registered that morning with the Phantom?
He threw away his cigarette, removed his coat and lay down upon the bed. It was characteristic of him that neither the hazard that lay seven hours before him, nor the ugly shattered thing that lay on the floor, prevented him from falling into peaceful, untroubled slumber.
He awoke shortly before eleven o’clock. Rested and fresh, he sprang from the bed. After attending to his ablutions, he sat down before a mirror, and opened a black makeup box on the dressing table. Deftly, his fingers drew the sticks of grease paint across his face.
His complexion slowly changed color; his features gradually became those of another man. And when at last he had finished, he stared into the mirror carefully scrutinizing his disguise. And the face that stared so grimly back at him was the face of Number 8 of Hesterberg’s henchmen, whose corpse lay stiff and stark in the other room.
As he rose from his seat his eyes fell on the photograph of Muriel Havens on the table. Her limpid eyes stared at him from the brown paper. For a moment, he stood stock still. A sigh escaped from his lips. His heart was heavy. Then with the air of a man resolved to return to duty, no matter where his heart lay, he turned abruptly away, and, going into the other room, occupied himself with the gruesome task of divesting the dead man of his clothing.
At exactly three minutes before midnight the Phantom shot a quick glance out of the window of his cab at the illuminated dial of the clock that decorated the marble façade of the Morton National Bank Building. He was two short blocks from his destination; two short blocks from his mysterious rendezvous with Hesterberg, the Mad Red.
His lips curled in a thin, ironical smile. So be it! At last he was to come to grips with the fatal personality that hung like an oppressive pall over the money marts of the world.
The ornate pile of the bank loomed up a block away. The Phantom rapped smartly on the glass partition that separated him from the driver with hard knuckles. His cab wheeled into the curb and pulled up short with a harsh grinding of brakes.
One eye on the hands of the clock that slowly jerked over to three minutes of the hour, Van flung a bill at the cabbie, heard him shift into gear and wheel away. He paused a moment, irresolute, at the curb. The minute hand of the clock moved over another notch. Two minutes to go till the fatal hour struck.
He experienced a sharp tightening of the nerves along his spine as he traversed the last block on foot. He was aware of a strange eerie tenseness in the air; the atmosphere was super-charged with an uncanny chill of portentous doom.
Suddenly there was a black hole in the night where the brilliantly illumined dial of the clock had been but a moment before. The abrupt failure of that symbol of financial integrity that had shone down on Wall Street for the past sixty years, came as a ominous signal — a potential warning.
But of what?
The Phantom paused in his strides for a moment. And it was then that he realized for the first time that not only the lights of the clock had failed but all other lights along the canyoned thoroughfare as well. The knowledge came to him as a distinct shock. For a panicky second he stumbled forward in an abysmal tunnel of stygian gloom. What a moment before had been a mazda spangled street of granite was now empty of all light.
Empty of all light, yes; but not of life.
The nerves of the Phantom snapped out of their momentary lapse. He was distinctly aware of a horde of strangely masked figures rushing by him with purposeful haste. They seemed to materialize out of the very gloom of the street, that a moment before had been empty of all save himself.
They brushed by him, grotesque, goggle-eyed, long-nosed gargoyles in the heavy pall of darkness. The Phantom sensed without seeing that they were all converging on the massive doors of the bank building.
He measured stride with the surging throng about him, vainly trying to estimate their numbers. Then, a moment later a sound — a strange and sibilant sound — a sinister sound, pierced through the mental arithmetic of his brain. His finely arched nostrils quivered; his throat was suddenly parched with an acid streak of fire!
Gas! He understood it all then — those hideous masks for faces. Hesterberg was marshalling his forces to the attack under a barrage of gas. The noxious poison flicked at the lining of his lungs. With a practice and skill perfected in the Argonne he laced his own gas mask over his head and charged up the granite steps of the bank on the double quick.
A sharp pencil of light from a pocket flash played over the fantastic group of six around the bank’s door. The Phantom’s heart kicked out a steady hundred and thirty as it finally came to rest on him, picking out the bold letter eight on the sleeve of his coat.
A sharp cultured voice drilled into the Phantom’s consciousness — a voice he was never to forget.
“Good! Number 8! What word have you received?"
Some instinct, some cunning premonition told the Phantom that he was being addressed by the Mad Red himself. Twin pulses beat at his throat; the knotted veins of his gnarled hands stood out like whipcords. For a moment he was assailed with a swirl of mad chaotic emotions. Why not whip the automatic from his shoulder holster and empty its load of lethal death into the madman’s heart?
Then with Hesterberg’s sharp reiterated phrase came sanity. Van had no desire to commit suicide just then.
“Well, Number 8 — what word — what word?”
The Phantom knew now that the inquiry concerned his own demise.
“Dead!” he answered in a clear monotone.
A sharp breath whistled through Hesterberg’s nostrils.
“Magnificent, Number 8. Stand by my right. Details 1 and 4 are in the bank by now. 5 and 2 have the building surrounded and are holding the street.” A sharp grating as of steel on steel came from behind the massive doors of the bank, to be greeted by another sharp exhalation from Hesterberg’s nostrils. “So — the door opens to us — like all other doors in the world shall open at my command.”
The six-inch portals swung slowly inward. Hard at Hesterberg’s right with the detail of men close behind them, the Phantom moved swiftly across the threshold of the bank.