The thud was followed by a moment’s silence. Agent “X” thought the unseen assassin was taking aim at him. But instead there came a frenzied curse in the darkness and the crash of a falling vase. It was not accidental, for swift footsteps moved across the floor, then another vase was shattered, and still another.
A madman seemed to have entered the chamber under cover of that blinding dark. He appeared to be preoccupied in some inexplicable work of destruction all his own. For “X” could hear him crushing the pieces of broken pottery underfoot, stamping among them, breathing in great gasps.
Every muscle tense, the Agent suddenly leaped forward. He could learn nothing by crouching in the dark. His curiosity was aroused to the point of risking death.
A man snarled. “X’s” plunging body struck yielding flesh. Something crashed against his shoulder, and a second shot sounded deafeningly in his ear. But no bullet struck him, and his fingers closed over a human arm.
He dug in, swung his left arm around the man he had gripped, and knocked the mysterious visitor off his feet. In a tumbling, crashing heap, they went down together among the pieces of splintered vase.
Deliberately then the Agent reached forward to feel the man’s head, expecting to encounter one of the round helmets such as he had touched in the bank. But this man, though he could obviously see in the dark, was not wearing the same sort of helmet. His was softer, more wrinkled, fitted with a cord around his thin neck. The Agent tried to tear it loose, and the man seemed to go insane.
He was bony, lean almost to the point of emaciation, but possessed with the superhuman strength that some inward fire of emotion gave him. He fought like a madman, biting, clawing, kicking.
The Agent drove a knuckled fist against his jaw; but the pliable helmet deadened the blow. The other’s head snapped back, but he did not pass out. And, able to see, when “X” couldn’t, he succeeded in bringing the muzzle of his gun down on the Agent’s wrist with paralyzing force. “X” felt his fingers loosening, felt the muscles of his arm where the blow had fallen going limp. He levered his other arm forward, grabbed the gun, and jerked it free. But as he did so, the lean man rolled away across the floor.
“X” heard the window grate again. He swung the gun toward it, started to pump the trigger, but held his fire. His quick mind was already checking over impressions. Something had clicked in his memory.
THE window slammed back as a man leaped out. A shoe scraped against stone in the darkness outside, no blacker than that in the room. But in another moment, as “X” picked his way gingerly over the floor, nursing his bruised arm, lightness began to come. Not through the window, but from the bulbs overhead. The darkness was lifting again, as mysteriously as it had fallen—and it lifted on a room of death.
For Vivian de Graf lay sprawled on the rug by the overturned table. Crimson was spread over her blue pajama coat; crimson, just under the heart, darkening the glisten of the silken fabric.
The Agent crossed to her in one swift stride. He bent down and pressed his fingers on her outflung wrist. But there was no pulse flutter. That single shot, fired in the dark, had done its work well. Vivian de Graf was dead. Even so, she was beautiful, red lips a splash of color across the whiteness of her face, eyes closed as if in sleep.
But the Agent did not pause to stare. Hers was not the only beauty that had been stricken in that room. The frenzied slayer’s passion had not stopped at taking human life. Among the splintered pieces of pottery lay the stems and petals of a score of saffron orchids. The Agent’s eyes darted along the floor. Three vases filled with the flowers had been smashed. The spotted blossoms had been trampled on, their destruction as deliberate as the woman’s death, and done in the same murderous fury.
A single orchid, kicked accidentally under a chair, had escaped. The Agent picked it up, stared curiously. The poisonously spotted petals curled like living things. The flower’s dark center seemed an accusing eye.
He took an envelope from his pocket, dropped the flower in and slipped it in his coat. Then he glanced at the woman again, and noticed for the first time that the rug at her feet had been kicked away by her silken leg as she fell. Under the rug’s edge, close to the table, was a small metallic plate set just above the level of the floor. Some sort of electric switch—and the Agent’s eyes narrowed instantly.
He strode to it, placed his foot on the thing tentatively, and pressed down. Almost at once the lights above his head grew dimmer, and there was that strange buzzing in his ears. He took his foot off and the sensation stopped. He understood now. This was how the darkness had been made.
There was a hidden mechanism to produce it somewhere in the room. Wires led from it to this floor switch. Vivian de Graf had tricked him when she pretended to reach for the phone. She had stepped on the switch beneath the rug, started the mechanism in motion. The shot that found her heart and made her fall, had released her weight from the plate and automatically turned the mechanism off.
Agent “X” began a hurried search for the thing that could bring darkness blacker than night to human eyes. It would be hidden, but it must be somewhere in this chamber. He bent above the floor switch again, intent on seeing which way the wires beneath it led.
But abruptly his search ceased. For a car whined in the night outside and came to a purring halt. Then voices muttered and footsteps sounded close to the vestibule door. The bell of Vivian de Graf’s apartment made a silver tinkle in the kitchenette, a moment passed, and a key grated in the lock.
The Agent leaped from his kneeling position over the switch. He must not be found here, whether by bandit members or police. There was much to be done, a fresh lead he believed he could follow, a new line of action to pursue. He flung toward the window soundlessly on his rubber-soled shoes. He opened a side of the casement with quick care, stepped through into the darkness of a court as the unseen assassin had done. A moment more and the shadows of the night had swallowed him completely.
HE emerged from shadow fifteen minutes later to cross the rear yard of an ancient brownstone house. He had climbed fences, come through other yards to get here. Light from a single large window in the house before him cast dim illumination on the stone flagging at his feet. The Agent looked like a flitting ghost as he moved forward. He was still disguised, as Lorenzo Courtney. His eyes were raised to the window above. There was a look of intense concentration on his face.
For a man’s head moved across the window, turned and moved again. Some one was pacing restlessly in the lighted room, some one who could not keep still, though the hour was late and the rest of the house was dark.
The Agent slipped through an alley at the building’s side. He passed into the quiet street. Here he turned and silently mounted a flight of steps. There was a door before him and a bell button to press, but he did not touch the latter. His set of oddly shaped chromium tools came out. Under the pencil-thin beam of a tiny electric flash he probed in the keyhole.
So quickly and silently that the pacing man was unaware. Agent “X” entered the hallway of the house. He moved directly toward the rear, toward that single lighted room. His eyes were gleaming, his whole body was alert, and in his right hand was the gun he had taken from the mysterious killer who had come to Vivian de Graf’s. But as he pushed the door before him softly open, he held the weapon behind him.
The man in the room was thin, stoop-shouldered, with the look of a scholar about him. His gaunt face had a sickly, ghastly pallor. When he saw what appeared to be Lorenzo Courtney standing specterlike in the door he gasped and crouched back.
A thin smile curved the Agent’s lips. He was watching the other’s actions intently. And he had learned from them what he wanted to know. “I see that you recognize me, de Graf!”
The man who had been pacing the lighted laboratory in the old-fashioned house, leaned against a chair and passed a shaking hand across his face. He looked ten years older than when the Agent had last seen him. He raised haggard eyes, stared at the Agent dully.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t know who you are. Get out of here—before I call the police.”
The Agent’s answer came relentlessly. “Emil de Graf, you’re lying. I recognized you when we fought—even though I couldn’t see you! And this is your gun.”
He thrust the weapon into sight, saw the scientist start guiltily.
“It’s the gun you killed your wife with. You are a murderer, de Graf—the murderer of your own wife!”
The face of de Graf had become grayer still. He was swaying on his feet, staring dazedly at his accuser, and Agent “X” continued:
“I know your motive. You were jealous, de Graf—insanely jealous. Behind that pretended calm of yours, behind that tolerance you professed, you were angry at your wife’s interest in other men. That’s why you killed her!”
Emil de Graf clenched his fists. “I should have killed you, too, fool that I was!” he cried. Then added hoarsely: “For God’s sake who are you? What do you want?”
The Agent’s answer was to walk slowly forward, the gun pointed at de Graf. His stare had the inexorable quality of Fate itself.
“Then you admit it,” he said quietly. “You admit you killed your wife!”
The scientist cringed, backed away. “No! No!” he gasped. “I admit nothing. You can’t have me arrested. They can’t send me to the chair. There’s no proof—” He broke off, breathing heavily, and stood as though transfixed by the Agent’s level, accusing stare.
“You are a scientist, de Graf,” “X” said quietly. “You know that, given certain facts, you can discover the truth about natural phenomena. It is the same for human actions. I know that you were jealous of your wife. I know you tried once to throw acid in her face, so that other men would not find her beautiful. I know that when your attempt to mar her beauty failed, you became desperate to the point of madness. Can you deny that?” The Agent stepped closer to de Graf. “I know that you came to Vivian de Graf’s apartment an hour ago. I fought with you in the darkness. Your wife lies dead in that room now, shot through the heart. Here is the gun from which the shot was fired. Your gun, de Graf! You killed your wife!”
Clammy moisture beaded de Graf’s forehead. His shoulders drooped. He seemed on the verge of collapse as he nodded slowly, unable to face the Agent’s accusing eyes.
“Yes—” he said dully. “Yes—I shot her, as you say.” The smoldering fires of passion flamed in his eyes. “But she gave me cause! She has tricked me, humiliated me, hurt my pride for years. She was a poor girl when I married her. She looked up to me as a great scientific worker. I took her out of the impoverished life she had known. We traveled, met interesting people. Then she got a taste for luxury. Men flattered her. It went to her head. She forgot all I’d done for her, forgot the vows she’d made. She called it being modern. When I objected she threatened to leave me. To keep her, I had to agree to her ways. She dragged my name through the public press, created scandals. She even took up with—a criminal.”
The Agent’s eyes flashed. He leaned forward. “This criminal, de Graf, who was he?”
“I don’t know his name. But she dared brag to me—boasted that she’d grown tired of Roswell Sully, and had found some one who suited her better. A criminal who, she said, was a greater scientist than I. She was a child about such things. I didn’t believe her until I visited her one night at her apartment, and she turned the darkness on me from a mechanism this man had given her. She laughed at me under cover of it, and said she was afraid of me no longer—and would leave me for good—” He broke off, trembling.
“And so you set to work to find out what the darkness was,” Secret Agent “X” prompted, “and made a helmet to combat it. You learned that it wasn’t darkness at all, but a force that blinded human eyes.”
“Yes,” the scientist nodded eagerly. “I had to show her I was as good a man as that lover of hers—even though I couldn’t shower her with orchids. And I—I—”
“You succeeded—and you killed her.”
De Graf nodded. “Yes, I succeeded, and now that you know the truth you’re going to turn me over to the law. You are a detective, of course.”
The Agent shook his head. “No. Hunting criminals is my work—just as yours is science. But I’m not interested in crimes such as yours—crimes of passion.”
“Then why did you come here?” de Graf snarled. “What do you want?”
“Only one thing,” the Agent said sternly. “The helmet—the one you used tonight. Give me that and the law shall never hear from my lips that you are the murderer of your wife.”
Chapter XVII
THE NIGHT’S NEMESIS
THE following afternoon Secret Agent “X” stood near the marble and chromium main entrance of S. Carleton & Company. Shabby clothing covered the powerful, athletic lines of his body. Nondescript features disguised his face. His manner was dejected. The fiery alertness of his eyes was hidden by the wilted brim of an ancient felt hat.
He attracted little attention from the throngs surging in and out of the city’s largest department store. Once an old lady, touched by his appearance of abject want, slipped a dime into his ungloved hand. The Agent, living up to his role of down-and-outer, acted humbly grateful as he pocketed the coin.
Inside the big store, three thousand shoppers, unaware that the hideous shadow of crime hovered just above their heads, crowded through the aisles, pushed into packed elevators, stood impatiently on escalators, jostled, talked and laughed. Scores of detectives, pretending to be shoppers also, mingled with them. These were picked men of the headquarters division, warned into utmost caution by strange orders they had received, and keeping their guns, blackjacks and bracelets carefully out of sight.
They had arrived from two o’clock on, singly and in pairs, converging on the store from many directions, entering unobtrusively through a dozen different entrances. And the Agent had smiled in grim satisfaction as he watched them come.
No one of the passing detectives gave his drooping, shabbily clad figure a second glance. They took him for what he appeared to be—merely a dejected member of the city’s army of unemployed. Yet it was he who was responsible for their coming there. It was he who had telephoned a startling message to the commissioner earlier in the day, giving the police head explicit directions.
Agent “X” had refused to tell his name. But his voice had carried the ring of absolute assurance, and he had made the police commissioner an amazing promise—so amazing, in fact, that though the commissioner was skeptical he dared not ignore what his nameless informant had said. And the steady but cautious arrival of detectives on the premises of S. Carleton & Company proved that he had acted at once.
As Agent “X” stood in front of the store, a newspaper dropped by a careless shopper, slid by his feet. The Agent picked it up like a down-and-outer, grateful for any small favor that circumstance bestowed.
Lurid headlines screamed the news: “Society Beauty Murdered.” A picture of Vivian de Graf stared arrogantly from the page. The words beneath described the finding of her body in her exclusive mews apartment. They stated also that her husband, Emil de Graf, distinguished professor of physics at City University, had been found murdered in the brownstone house where he lived in another part of the city.
This did not surprise the Agent; though he read the story with interest. He had promised not to mention de Graf’s crime to the law, and he had kept his word. But the criminals with whom Vivian de Graf had cast her lot had taken swift vengeance, guessing apparently, just as “X” had, who her slayer was.
He turned the page over, saw one more news item which held his attention for a moment. This told of the finding of Lorenzo Courtney’s body on a park bench early that morning. A patrolling cop had made the discovery. Letters and a wallet in the dead man’s pocket had led to speedy identification. Financial worries were supposed to be the cause of the suicide.
The real motive was known only to Secret Agent “X,” the man responsible for the placing of t
he body on the bench in the dead of night. For that had been his answer to the unknown Chairman of the criminal group—an answer that would lull suspicion. And only he, outside of the criminals themselves, knew how closely these three events—the murders of Vivian and Emil de Graf and the suicide of Courtney—connected.
He dropped the paper, strolled to a corner of the big store where he could see in both directions. Casual as his manner seemed, excitement pulsed through his tautly alert body. The zero hour of four was almost at hand.
Down the block, a small electric truck with the name of the city lighting company on its sides rattled into view. It stopped beside the curb and a man in overalls emerged, carrying a pair of large, heavy pliers. He looked like a workman. Another man in overalls followed him, a coil of black wire slung over his arm. They lifted a manhole cover and descended below street level.
A minute or two passed, and both reappeared, drawing the length of wire from the hole in the street back to the parked truck.
The thing seemed commonplace. No one passing gave it a second glance. But the grim light of battle sprang into the Secret Agent’s eyes. Collar turned up, blowing on his hands like a bum trying to keep warm, he shuffled nearer the workmen and their truck.
From the corner of his eye he saw two other cars draw up on the same block. There was an air of casualness about the young men within them. They didn’t get out at once, but lighted cigarettes and shuffled through the pages of small books like salesmen going over territory lists.
THE Secret Agent looked quickly across the street toward a window where a clock giving U. S. Naval Observatory time was visible. He watched the minute hand crawl around its arc till it touched the exact hour of four. Then he glanced back at the parked truck again. One of the men, as the Agent stared, disappeared inside.
A moment passed, and the Agent stiffened. A sharp tingle shot along his nerves. It was getting dark now. A cloud seemed to have passed over the sun, a gloom like twilight was settling down. And in the Agent’s head was the strange buzzing that foretold the coming of synthetic night.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 4 Page 11