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

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  “Our friend seems to be not quite comfortable,” one of the standing men said. “Perhaps you have bound him too tightly, Kusai, and the cords cut into his flesh.” The words were precisely enunciated—too precisely to be pronounced by one to whom English was a native tongue—and an odd sibilance ran through them.

  “He will not be troubled by it long,” the one addressed as Kusai replied. “We will release him in just a minute.” They were speaking to one another, these two, but each remark they made was patently a cruel taunt intended for their helpless prisoner. “Yet, he will remain here much longer than he expected.”

  “Yes. His precautions to hide himself will unfortunately be in vain. He will be found here by the police.”

  “But he will not know it, Hoan.” Kusai’s laugh was an inhalation of breath between tight lips. He turned to a scarred dresser against the wall, pulled one of the topped drawers completely out. There were papers in the hand he reached into the space from which the drawer had come, and there were none when it came out. “Do you think the police will surely find the documents where apparently he concealed them?” he asked as he replaced the drawer.

  “Let it remain a little open, the papers preventing its shutting.” Hoan was placing some objects on the rumpled bed—a tiny vial, a hypodermic syringe. “Are you certain that you have placed everything there?”

  “Yes. His commission as agent of the Ogpu, genuine. A letter in Russian, forged, directing him to destroy the New York Subway. Giving the details, even to the time, of what we intend. Making certain that his nation will be blamed for the catastrophe.”

  “Very good. These cigarettes, with the damning circulars within their tubes, printed on rice paper, and calling upon the slaves of the Subway barons to rise, we shall place in his pocket, one broken so that its contents will be noted.”

  Again that hissing laugh from Kusai. He came back to the bound man and there was now a wadded rag in his hand, a rag from which came a queerly pungent odor. “You will feel no pain, my friend,” he whispered, “and in a little while you will feel nothing at all.” He placed the wad gently, almost tenderly, over the dimly seen nose and mouth.

  The great body in the chair quivered. Biceps swelled against the tight cords, but they did not give. The chair creaked, but did not break. Hoan sighed. The big man slumped and was very still.

  “In truth,” Kusai remarked, “his name should be inscribed on the Tablet of the Honored Dead. Living, he was the Empire’s enemy; dead, he will be its friend. But thanks to this invention of our honorable chemists he will not be gathered to his ancestors for another hour.”

  “Enough,” the other snapped. “We have work to do. Unbind him.”

  It was done, deftly and swiftly. The two small men took a last look about the room, moved to the window.

  Kusai lifted the shade, slowly, careful to make no sound. White light dotted the shutter beyond the open sash, probed through its chinks. Hoan felt of his pocket and a sly smile crossed his hairless, saffron countenance as a brass tag clinked against a key. Outside, there was the roar of a train coming into the station, the rattle of opening gates. The two killers waited.

  Gates slammed and starting bells tinkled. Hoan touched Kusai’s elbow, and the Oriental moved the shutter outward. The train was pounding into renewed motion. The upper half of a store sign jutted up across the cornice outside the window, so that Hoan could not be observed from below as he climbed out. The “El” platform’s railing was only two feet from the sign, and the departing train had emptied it. Hoan leaped the space, was over the railing in a twinkling, was signaling to Kusai that the way was clear.

  The latter went out on the cornice and squirmed around the shutter edge. It closed and the room was shadowed once more. Shadowed and very silent, for the space of thirty heart-beats. Then there was sound again in it, the scrape of metal against metal from the door, the click of a lock. The door slid open and a new form slipped in through the slitted aperture.

  This man was tall, gaunt, slightly stooped. He wore a black hat whose wide brim turned down to conceal his face. He glanced swiftly around the room, seemed startled at sight of the inert body in the chair, crossed to it. Long, tapering fingers propped the chin of the moribund man, turning his face up to view. The intruder whirled, took in all of the room in a single darting glance, noted the jutting bureau drawer. He was at it, pulling it out, and fishing out the papers Kusai had placed there with a clumsy imitation of concealment.

  Breath hissed between his teeth and the man was at the window, back to it, reading that damning letter. There was abruptly on the page a blaze of white light let in by the opening shutter. A saffron arm, muscular, steel-strong, whipped about the lean man’s neck, and the shutter slammed closed again as Kusai leaped in to make his garroting hold good.

  A storm of combat broke loose in that dim room, a savage battle the more weird because of the silence in which it was fought. There was no sound except the muted gasp of choked breath, the pad of rubber-soled feet on the carpeted floor.

  Kusai’s hold did not slip, but the lank man’s elbow was driven back into the Oriental’s belly so that the Mongol could not gain the leverage necessary to entirely cut off his antagonist’s breath. The latter managed to half-twist and bring the pressure of that hold against the side of his neck instead of the larynx. His free hand dived into a pocket, flashed out with a strangely thick-barreled, flare-muzzled pistol.

  The queer gun reached up to his shoulder, sprayed a fine mist over it. Kusai’s grip relaxed, and suddenly he was a lax, inanimate bundle on the floor. The tall man loosed another burst of spray at him, pocketed the odd weapon, dropped to his side. The long fingers made a rapid search of the fallen Mongol’s pockets, came out empty. It bothered him a bit.

  “No evidence of who and what he is,” the man muttered. “If they find him here, he will be imprisoned as a sneak thief. He will not come to in time to warn his comrades.”

  He stood up, glanced hurriedly at the letter again. A grey horror filled his face at what he read. He darted out of the room and locked it once more with the skeleton key that had afforded him entrance.

  * * * *

  A squat, saffron-complexioned man paced the platform of the Bowling Green station of the New York Subway. He was inconspicuous in a navy blue Homburg and an oxford-grey Chesterfield topcoat that might have been tailored on Fifth Avenue. He carried a small black bag, like a physician’s, and he seemed to have an appointment with someone here, so frequently did he glance at his wrist watch.

  With each stride up the platform he came nearer its downtown end, where the tracks curved into a tunnel whose roof was already rounding for the long passage under the East River. The rails pitched steeply downward for the curve was very deep.

  Hoan reached the very end of the station just at the moment of ten. He slipped a key out of his pocket and dropped it there. The key’s tag was stamped: Winston Hotel, Room 3. The Oriental glanced around, saw no sign of being watched, hopped down a set of four iron steps to the roadbed and was running at once down that steep incline into the depths of the river tube.

  Ten is the time of change-over from the morning rush-hour schedule to the more leisurely time-table of the middle of the day. There would be only one train through the tube for thirteen minutes, and thirteen minutes was ample for what he had to accomplish.

  The white tile of the station environs gave place to drab, whitewashed walls. The passage narrowed to a single-tracked tube. Hoan ignored the red and green signal bull’s-eyes but he counted very carefully the spaced blue lights that mark off distances in the Subway. He knew exactly his objective, the point where the shoreline ends and there is over the tunnel only a hundred yards of silt and the—river.

  Here it was, a niche in the side-wall making a place of refuge for a trackwalker trapped between trains. Hoan knelt in the recess, placed his bag on the groun
d, opened it very carefully. It was almost filled by an oblong steel box and within this there was enough of a certain explosive to smash the tube and let the river into the tunnel.

  Hoan fished two coils of wire out of the bag, one end of each attached to opposite ends of the steel bomb. The free end of one he wrapped around the nearest rail, making sure that the contact was firm. From the lining of his coat, he drew a slender bamboo rod and fastened to its tip the free end of the second wire.

  The rails were humming now, with the sound of an approaching train. Hoan shrank back into the recess, waiting for it to pass. When it had gone by he would reach out and touch the tip of the rod he held to the third rail.

  The oncoming train sent its thunder before it. There would be nothing left of Hoan after the explosion. That was unavoidable. The whole carefully worked out scheme could not be left to the vagaries of any mechanism. Only the human hand was sure not to fail—only the hand of Hoan. Hoan had been very glad when that was decided. It was such an honor as few men merit, this opportunity to die in the service of the Emperor.

  Kusai had been jealous. A banal role had been assigned to him, to remain behind to make certain that nothing interfered with the plant that would place blame for the disaster on the representative of the Ogpu.

  This last moment of waiting was hard to bear, however, with sound deafening Hoan, with gale of that rushing train a tornado screaming across his niche. Moment? It was eternal. Something must have happened to the train. Hoan dared to peer out past the corner of the recess.

  It was a juggernaut, red-eyed and green-eyed, roaring down upon him. A juggernaut he would destroy, hurling a tidal wave of waters after its thunderbolt when it had passed. A black splotch blotted its front—a monstrous black form on the little shelf projecting beyond the train’s closed front door, a thing of black, swirling draperies clinging to the little chains across the door with one black gloved hand, while another stretched out before it, clenching a queerly thick-barreled, flaring-muzzled pistol!

  Hoan saw this great black man-bat in a flash, saw that the finger curled on the trigger of that weird gun was not black but scarlet. His own hand darted under his lapel, snapped out with a gun, and he was firing at the grotesque Thing.

  The crack of Hoan’s gun was lost in the thunder but he saw the black draperies jump to the bullet. Once more! Fine spray spat at him from Red Finger’s weapon, spat into his brain. He went down, down into oblivion, but just as darkness claimed him he saw that black bat swoop from the front of the train—

  “It didn’t work, Hoan,” a voice came from the grotesque shape. “There will be no torrent of indignation sweeping this land against the nation upon whom you planned to foist the blame for the outrage you schemed, sweeping it into war allied with your Empire and making certain the defeat of your Empire’s enemy.”

  “Kill me, Red Finger,” Hoan begged.

  “No, Hoan. I shall not kill you. I shall let you go, and the secret of what you tried to do shall remain with me.”

  The Oriental rose to his feet. He turned and went totteringly off up the long slope of the Subway’s tunnel. He went to death, despite the forebearance of him who had defeated him. To death by the sword of a samurai, inserted into the bowels in accordance with the proper ritual, in accordance with the immemorial rites of the hari-kari.

  * * * *

  Dusk was creeping into Fourth Avenue when Ford Duane came sleepily to the door of his shop. Weariness lined his face, but under his drooped eyelids there was a glint of content.

  Otto Rumpf peered near-sightedly at him. “Ach,” he quavered. “You look better.”

  “Yes,” Ford Duane sighed. “I enjoyed my sleep. It was very restful. For sometime I should feel—at peace.”

  RED FINGER’S MURDER MESSENGER

  The shadows of a late spring dusk crept almost stealthily into that block of second-hand bookstores on New York’s Fourth Avenue that is known as the Port of Ancient Books. From afar there came into its drowsy quiet a growling rumble compounded of the roar of traffic, the chatter of the mighty millions—all the tumult of the teeming city. Here, sound was limited to the soft slither of a rag lovingly dusting some rare volume, the rustle of sere pages under the hand of some browser at the sidewalk boxes trestled in front of the grimed windows of the shops, the scrape of feet as a shabbily dressed man shambled slowly down the sidewalk.

  Ford Duane leaned against the doorpost of his store, that was different from the others in the block only because his name was lettered in scabrous gilt across its cornice. The drab alpaca smock, hanging loosely from his shoulders, cloaked a tall, loose-jointed figure. There seemed only lassitude in his gaunt, hollow-checked countenance, a vast disinterest in life.

  Beneath Duane’s drooped lids, his eyes watched with a fierce intentness the man who slowly approached. Every muscle in that apparently relaxed frame of Duane’s was now gathered for instant action. So might a moving tiger have tautened with the drift of a shadow through the sunlit jungle—a shadow that might be merely a cloud drifting across the sky…or death crouching to leap upon him.

  For to Ford Duane, buyer and seller of discarded tomes, human flotsam in this back eddy of life’s stream, death, and worse than death, was a constant threat, eternal vigilance the price of safety.

  The man whom Duane watched now shambled closer, peering at the shops as if he were searching for some particular establishment. His slow gait, and the stoop of his shoulders, did not come from age—for his face, faintly stubbled though it were, was that of one not far in his thirties. The horn-rimmed glasses, whose lenses were so thick they hid his eyes, the long hair fringing his ears, disorderly appearance of his worn clothing, stamped him as one of those accustomed to lurk in this abode of yellowed literature—a scholar to whom the search of knowledge is the only reality of life.

  He came abreast of Duane’s shop, turned and walked toward the tall bibliophile. Duane lifted away from the doorpost. “How do you do?” he said, before his visitor came too close.

  The fellow paused. “You are Mr. Duane?” he asked, accents slurred and hesitant, “the bookseller?”

  “Yes. At least, I am the Duane who keeps books and hopes that some one will buy them, occasionally. You are looking for me?”

  “Yes,” the other breathed. “I was told that if I want a book that is hard to find, you are the best man to come to.”

  “And you are looking for such a book now?” Duane prompted.

  Stub-fingered hands fumbled at a pile of tattered magazines in the box beside the student as the man gave its name, “Pantagruel at Toulouse. P. Atkins Townsend was the publisher, but he’s no longer in business and the book is out of print.”

  Duane’s expression did not change, but the pulse throbbed in his wrist. There was no such book, nor had there ever been such a publisher. In the title of that book and the name of the publisher, there was concealed a signal for Duane. Their initial letters were the same—P. A. T. In many forms, that signal had previously come to him. They were the credentials of messengers from the invisible head of the phantom organization to which Duane belonged. Each time messages, thus heralded, had come, it had meant that for a little while Ford Duane would be absent from Fourth Avenue. Later, after he had returned from his mission, some chancellery of Europe or Asia would cross off a name or two from a list of secret agents and some carefully worked out, secret political scheme would be marked, Defeated!

  “Pantagruel at Toulouse?” the seeming shopkeeper repeated. “I may be able to get it. But I am not sure. Can you tell me more about it?” He was far other than he seemed, this lank, almost cadaverous individual.

  Duane was a soldier in a war that knows no end—a mystery-cloaked, anonymous participant in the strife of spy and counter-spy, of saboteur and shadowy defender, that goes on eternally in a land that is at peace with all the world—and all the world apparently at peac
e with it.

  “I am sure you have the book,” said the stranger. “The person who sent me here told me he saw it on your shelves. Far to the rear, he said—he described its location perfectly. If you will let me, I can show you exactly where it is.”

  “All right.” If anything, Duane’s face was blanker than before. He stepped aside, motioned the spectacled man past him. They went into dimness, moved between high stacks of books that exhaled the distinctive odor of yellowing paper, of moldering binder’s cloth and worm-ridden leather, a musty smell like nothing else in the world.

  “You have something to give me?” Ford Duane asked, low-toned.

  “Yes,” the man answered, and whipped around. “This!” Metal gleamed in the shadows—a knife flailing straight for the bookseller’s heart!

  * * * *

  In Fourth Avenue the street lamps blinked on. The door of Ford Duane’s Secondhand Bookstore opened, and closed again. A stooped man, wearing glasses with lenses so thick they hid his eyes, shambled past the box that held a stack of tattered magazines, and shuffled along the sidewalk toward the corner. He moved slowly, because he held an open book in his hands, seemingly reading it. In spite of his glasses, he was so nearsighted that he had to hold the book high—and it concealed his face.

  The man’s shabby clothing was too tight—as it should have been, not belonging to him. The frayed hem of his trousers exposed inches of untidy sock. He reached the corner, turned east. Then he slammed shut his book, and abruptly his long legs began to move rapidly. He reached Third Avenue and turned again, hurrying past the bedraggled shops and drab tenement doorways of that thoroughfare. Halfway down the block, he ran up a broken-stepped stoop, shoved open a door scrawled over with the chalked obscenities of small boys and dived into a dark hallway which reeked with the stale smells of yesterday’s corned beef and cabbage.