The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack: 12 Tales of the Masked Hero

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  “Careful,” the apparent leader said sharply. “Watch your feet.”

  That halted the prowlers—on the edge of what seemed a cliff dropping down and down in terraced descent. Far below there was a tiny glint of water. Vision cleared, and it became evident that they were standing on the brink of a gigantic, man-built basin. Ahead, a vast gray bulk loomed, like some unbelievably enormous prehistoric monster asleep in the depression.

  “The Missitucky gentlemen!” the putative marine announced. “Pride of the American navy!” There was something obscene in the way he lipped the words, something suggestive of a gourmet about to devour a Lucullan feast. A murmur came from his companions, the smacking of lips that drooled lewd anticipation.

  A chaos of long timbers jutted out from the sides of the drydock, holding the dreadnaught erect in its ways. From a few paces to the left, a spiderly gangplank soared out over vacancy to reach the battleship’s deck. Somehow in the drab dimness over there, the measured thump of pacing feet sounded. The shadowy figure of a lonely deck watch appeared from around a turret, pounded slowly aft.

  “All right, G-X, take him.” The leader’s snapped command was scarcely audible, but one of the others dropped to his knees. His arms lifted. He was aiming a squat, grotesquely thick gun. The sound it made was only the dull ffft of an air rifle, but aboard the Missitucky, the solitary sailor pitched forward, pudded down, asprawl.

  “Quick! Before anyone sees him!” Three silhouettes flitted across the gangplank stark against a leaden sky. They clotted momentarily about that pathetic blotch on the vessel’s deck. Then they were out of sight from the dockside and nothing broke the wide, faintly luminous expanse of steel…

  For minutes there was no sign of a living presence there. Then, once more the measured thump of pacing feet sounded and from behind the forward turret, the dim-described figure of a sailor appeared to pound slowly aft in the appointed round of the dreadnaught’s deck watch…

  * * * *

  Down through the silent, deserted hold of the battleship, two stealthy skulkers descended, their steps almost inaudible on the steel companionways. He who was garbed as a marine led the way, his whole frame vibrant as a poisonous bushmaster snake tracking its prey. The other, more timorous in his progress, was shapeless in the voluminous topcoat he wore despite the heat. He was carrying something, a large box—carrying it gingerly as though he were in a deathly fear of it.

  “Here we are!” the fake marine breathed. In the dim reaches of the lowermost hold, illuminated by a single pendant light, the vast loom of the vessel’s engine-room stretched away. “Get busy!”

  The other man lurched past him, deposited his mysterious burden close against the base of a gigantic Diesel engine, did something with shaking hands. A sharp metallic click splintered the silence, was repeated, became a ticking.

  “All set, H-T?” he asked. “You’re sure?”

  His vis-à-vis turned. “Sure. In twenty minutes there will be no more Missitucky.”

  “And the explosion that destroys it will set the world aflame. Look here!” He held out the strange metallic fragment. “When they find this in the wreckage, they will be sure they know which nation inspired the deed.” With the muzzle of his revolver he pointed out words stamped into the metal: “Creusot Frères et Cie.”

  The other chuckled. “I’ll say they will be! What price ‘no entangling alliances’ then?”

  “A hundred for a pfennig!” The supposed marine bent swiftly to place that lying piece of evidence on the floor. “These aloof Americans will be begging us to ally ourselves with them, and we will—on our own terms. But we’d better get out of here in a hurry. Come!” He turned to the hatchway behind him…

  And he did not take the pace he had intended! A tall, unearthly figure was advancing out of its darkness, as though spawned by deathly night.

  But that which froze the saboteurs into fear-struck rigidity was the one, black-gloved hand that was visible, clutching a wide barreled, queer weapon. Not the weapon itself. These prowlers of the dark were, after all, brave men. But it was the finger that curled about the trigger, the scarlet finger that told them who it was that had tracked them down. The dread name dripped from the spy leader’s white lips:

  “Red Finger! Gott im Himmel! Es ist der rote Finger!”

  Yes, they were brave men. No cowards take part in the secret war. But to see before them the avatar of their trade—to be caught in flagrante delicto by HIM was enough to break nerves of the stoutest villain, enough to make the hottest blood turn to water in gelid veins.

  “Red Finger!” The planter of the infernal machine whispered it. “God have mercy!”

  Then silence, through which cut the tick, tick, tick of the bomb. Silence for a long, accusing minute, while Red Finger stood statuesque, ominous, and the destroyers cringed spineless before him. Silence, till a husky, intonationless voice dripped from behind the gray mask:

  “Yes, Adolf Mauerer. Red Finger. You did not really hope to escape me, did you?”

  The American’s strange gun was rock-steady, jutting pointblank at the others. “Shut off that machine, Mauerer. Shut it off.” His command thudded, word by slow word, into an atmosphere somehow unnaturally thick.

  H-T started to move, but somehow Mauerer’s shoulder was in his way, halting him. “Impossible, Red Finger,” the latter responded, in a dead, flat voice. “Once started, the bomb cannot again be stopped!”

  Tick. Tick. Tick. It was as if Death’s heels clicked, approaching slowly, inexorably. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  “No?” There was no emotion in the masked man’s tones. “Then we stay here, we three, till it explodes.”

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Mauerer was immovable, indomitable as the implacable enemy who faced him. Tickticktick. But his companion’s frame was taken by an ague, by a shiver, imperceptible at first, that grew more and more violent, until…

  “No,” a wild, thin shriek rang out. “No! I will not die! Ach Gott! I will not die like dot!” He twisted, Mauerer struck at him viciously. The blow staggered him, he plunged to the floor. A soft hiss sounded from Red Finger’s gun, a jet of fine mist spat from it, sprayed Mauerer’s face. The spy-leader lurched away, clawing at his throat. Crumpled. H-T was crawling across the deck, writhing toward the mechanism that ticked Death’s approach. He reached it, scrabbled at it…

  Red Finger whirled to the pound of a footfall on a steel companionway. A sailor was coming down the stairs, a sailor from beneath whose canted cap blonde lair strayed. The American’s tension relaxed, he started to turn away.

  “Fritz,” the man at the infernal machine squealed. “Get him! Kill him!”

  A knife flashed into the sailor’s hand and he launched from the stairs in a wild leap at Red Finger, the lethal steel arcking. Red Finger’s gun spat mist again.

  The sailor stumbled, slid lifelessly to lie in a crumpled heap over the body of his leader. Red Finger jerked around to the last of the trio. “Shut it off!” he barked. “Or we’ll all go up.”

  The man’s shaking hand tugged at the apparatus. “It’s stuck,” he whimpered. “I cannot push the lever over!”

  He popped to his feet, his mouth aslaver, his eyes utterly insane. “Let me out,” he squealed. “Let me out!” He hurtled toward the hatchway, his face twisted to a semblance of ratlike ferocity, hurtled past Red Finger. The American let him go, dropped to his knees before the ticking bomb. There were seconds left, perhaps he could yet get it stopped. He had seen what the other had been trying to do…

  The retreating footsteps of the man whom fear had driven mad resounded loudly up the steel stairway, but it did not drown out the awful tickticktick of the infernal machine. Red Finger tore at the switches, ripped his gloves. His fingers dripped blood. Tickticktick…

  “Halt!” A sharp challenge, distance-muffled, rang out. The cou
nterspy was conscious of the pound of many feet, far above. Good Lord! There were men on board now, they were coming down here, they would be caught in the explosion. He had to—get this damn’ thing—stopped.

  “Ah!” Suddenly it was done. The obdurate lever slid over, the ticking was stilled. A warrant-officer pounded into the engine room, revolver in hand. Red Finger rose to meet him, hands above his head. “Keep those others out,” he snapped, “till I have a chance to talk with you.”

  * * * *

  The morning sun burned down into the canyon that is Fourth Avenue. Ford Duane sat in a broken-backed swivel chair in the doorway of his second-hand bookshop, and yawned. Then he continued his languid perusal of the morning newspaper. One item seemed to arrest his attention momentarily.

  “Early this morning,” it said, “the harbor police found the bodies of three men floating in the Bay. The bodies were clothed only in underwear. There were no marks of violence or any other indication of how they had died or who they were.”

  Duane yawned again. It was lucky that the commandant of the Navy Yard had listened to reason. A trial, even a military trial, would inevitably have involved the name of Mauerer’s nation. Skilled propagandists would have ferreted out the truth, published it…

  It was peaceful here in the hot sun…

  RED FINGER MEETS HIS MATCH

  EXCITEMENT ran like a fever through the manifold arteries of New York. Broadway quivered with its tremor, manifest in the fluttering of starry flags which tossed above a honking, eager rush of traffic and made vivid the drab, towering walls of the world’s most famous street. It surged tumultuous through the side-streets. Its hot thrill shuddered along Fifth Avenue and the broad sidewalks of the jeweled thoroughfare became murmurous and black with the thousands gathering to wait for the Procession that not yet for hours would file between the Golden Lamps. It hammered in the subways, buzzed in the ‘El’ trains, the buses, the street-cars whose racketing rush brought more and ever more of the city’s myriads to the city’s heart.

  The pulse of that heart was a vast throb in the air, a measured tuneless rhythm of drums beating martial time. Drums everywhere! The whole vast metropolis was their sounding board. Into every nook and cranny of the sprawling town their dull beat, beat, beat penetrated—into every alley, and every street…

  Even into the musty drowse of the Fourth Avenue block which is known as the Port of Ancient Books came that pervading throb, even into the dim dusk within the sleepiest of the sleepy, second-hand bookshops there—that of Ford Duane. Beat, beat, beat, it stirred even the dead dust filming the lofty, crowded shelves of forgotten tomes. Only Duane himself seemed immune to it, the young-old man whose drooped, tired-seeming lids veiled eyes somehow too blue, too keen for the lethargy of his tall, bent figure—for the dull, uneventful round of life in this black-eddy of the city’s torrential stream.

  Too keen? Perhaps they were not keen enough, those eyes. Perhaps some time they would not be quite watchful enough to forestall the sudden, flashing flicker of death which at any moment might strike at their owner. For death, to Ford Duane, was an ever-present, ever-imminent threat. There was a price on his head in half the chancelleries of the Eastern Hemisphere. There were those whose lust to slash steel into his heart—to blast lead into his flesh—needed no price to whet it. Sooner or later he knew, one of those must discover who the shambling bookseller he pretended to be really was. And then…

  From somewhere far off, a filament of silver sound threaded the beat, beat of the drums, a bugle singing the ta-tit, ta-tit, ta-tit taaa of ‘Assembly’.

  “Queer, isn’t it, that they couldn’t find anything but war music to play today?” There was a strangely sweet huskiness in the voice of the girl who turned to Duane from the shelf where she had been browsing. “You would think that He would hate the bugles and the drums and the brass bands to whose blare the soldiers have always marched to slaughter as much as He hates war itself.”

  Dark-suited and dark-hatted though her slender, supple small figure was, she glowed, somehow, in the grimy twilight of the grimy shop. It must be some transparency of her skin, the bookman thought, that gave that effect of an inner light, or maybe it was the way tawny lights glinted in her russet hair.

  “Even He has to use the old, primitive ways to put His idea across,” he responded. Both were capitalizing the masculine pronoun, neither seemed to doubt that the other understood who was meant. In New York that day it could mean only one man. “Always in the past parades have meant war. This one means peace—but it’s a parade anyway.”

  “Yes! A parade to tell Europe and Asia and Africa their propaganda has failed.” Her gray eyes were shining now with an almost fanatical luminescence. “To tell them America will never again take part in their quarrels—that America is a land of peace. Thousands—hundreds of thousands—following Him through the streets, tramping after Him with all the fervor of a Crusade. Shouting, and meaning their shouts, “No more war! No more war!”

  The girl’s speech was exalted, but then, the speech of most men these days was exalted, led to the heights as they were by the vision and the strength of the Great Man whose triumph the Peace Procession signalized.

  “Never in all the world,” the girl went on, “has there been such a march of victory as this one. Of His victory after all these months of lonely fighting, and struggle, and almost of despair. Victory over the Old World’s wily tricks to bring us in on one side or the other, knowing they must have us or be defeated. Victory over the shouters here at home, the jingoes, the profiteers, the honest but misguided zealots who still believe the way to Peace must be mired by the tears and the blood of war. A glorious parade!”

  “Glorious.” Ford Duane repeated the word, but no exaltation showed in his face that was too seamed, too grim for his youth. “And dangerous!”

  “Dangerous!” She gasped, her long, flexible fingers coming up to her breast. “What—what do you mean?” The drum-pulse was suddenly ominous in the hush of the bookstore, suddenly a dull and boding threat. For a long minute, a throbbing silence lasted, while Duane covertly studied her, and then he spoke.

  “The city is like a tinder box,” he explained slowly, wondering what there was about this girl that made him speak—he whose very existence so long had depended on silence. “The city and the whole country. Like a powder magazine needing only a spark to set off an explosion that will blast the world apart. The very frenzy for peace to which He has lashed us might, in the merest instant, be transformed to just as virulent, just as overpowering a tornado of destruction. And,” Duane’s voice dropped very low, “someone might be planning, right now, to do exactly that.”

  “How?” she gasped, her lips suddenly white. “How could anyone…?”

  “Suppose—suppose that four hours from now, while He is riding at the head of His Procession, He were to be shot down? What would happen, do you think…?”

  “They would tear his assassin into little pieces!” Her hands made small rending motions, somehow horrible. “Into such little pieces he might never have lived at all.”

  The fury that shook her was a strange and deadly passion in so slight a frame, but Duane went on, evenly. “And suppose it were discovered that the killer was not a madman but an emissary of one of the nations who are at each other’s throats across the sea?”

  “We’d sweep them off the face of the earth!” the girl flared. “Every man, every woman in America would rush to arms and…” she caught herself. Her eyes widened, their pupils dilating till they were staring, black pits. “Oh!” she moaned. “I see—but that would be insane. It would be mass suicide…!”

  Duane’s countenance was a gray, bleak mask, his mouth a straight, grim line somehow tortured. “Neither insane nor suicide. If the wrong nation were blamed for the deed!”

  “No,” the russet-haired girl groaned. “No. Men are not so horrible. Not so
vile…”

  “Dulce et decorum est,” Duane shrugged, “pro patria mori. Sweet and proper is it to die for one’s country. Not only to die. To make of oneself an abomination in the memory of decent men.” All the repression of his lonely calling, all his loathing of the human vermin he fought in the slimy, underground spy-world of the Endless War, spewed bitterness into his unaccustomed speech. “Not long ago the venerable Chancellor of a nation then the leader of the world’s culture forged a telegram to plunge half a continent into war, and boasted of it in his memoirs. Why I…”

  He stopped, startled, dismayed at his own garrulity. He had almost betrayed himself to this snip of a maid with a tiny, pert face and haunting eyes. What was there about her that shook him so out of the icy, impersonal calm to which necessity had schooled him? What…? The tramp, tramp of marching feet slogged in. A detachment of men were passing, marching soldier-like in straight lines, in perfect step to the thump, thump, thump of the omnipresent drumbeat. Marching soldier-like—but not in uniform, bearing no rifles. Wearing instead, proudly as an accolade of knighthood, each a broad, white satin ribbon across his breast with the single, scarlet word blazoned upon it: PEACE!

  “Oh!” the girl exclaimed. “I must be going. I’ve got to join my unit.” She started for the door.

  “Wait!” The word seemed torn from Ford Duane without any volition of his own. “Wait! I can’t let you go without knowing whether I’ll ever see you again, without knowing who you are.”

  She turned at the doorway. A mysterious smile hovered faintly about her pale lips, a brooding compassion tinctured her eyes with mystery. “We may not be permitted to meet again,” she half-whispered in that husky, heart-tearing voice of hers. “But I was instructed to tell you that my name is Patricia Ann Towndell.” Then she was gone, vanishing somehow into the pulsing, excited vastness of out-doors as though she had been only a glamorous dream.