But he ceased playing when ten o’clock came and when he saw the gross form of Nick Baroni entering the room.
For a moment the big gangster, puffing on a cigar, swept the gambling tables with cold, alert eyes. Then, while his bodyguards moved quietly into chairs around him, he settled himself before one of the roulette wheels. He began playing with the elaborate, solemn concentration of a man to whom gambling is a serious business.
Tonight, Baroni had more torpedoes with him than usual. There were six of the sleekly dressed, vicious-looking young men. With cigarettes dangling from their bloodless lips, their eyes were ever alert. It seemed that their right hands were never far from their right coat pockets, where flat automatics rested. There was a tenseness about them as though they expected trouble. Had Sam Dwyer, terror of the river front, made some veiled threat, warned Baroni that this was his territory?
The tenseness increased when, toward midnight, Baroni left the gambling room and seated himself at a dinner table. The Secret Agent saw why. He saw Baroni’s sloe-black eyes shift across the room. Saw his face muscles stiffen.
There, seated at a table near the wall, was Sam Dwyer, Baroni’s hated rival. The river-front gangster was a thinner, younger man. There was a mocking light in his eyes as he looked across the room at Baroni.
Spatted, immaculately dressed, with the corner of a white handkerchief thrusting from his upper coat pocket, Dwyer looked like a fashion plate. But there was a hard, lean wolfishness about him that matched the older man’s pudgy viciousness.
Ostentatiously Dwyer rose from his seat and walked across the room. Elaborately he bowed to Baroni and gripped his fat white hand. The two men smiled, stared at each other, and hatred glared from their eyes. Baroni’s bodyguards edged nearer, their chalky faces glowing like pale, evil moons against the shadows of the room, their hands tensing like talons. Dwyer’s crafty eyes flashed toward them. He smiled again. The Agent couldn’t hear what was being said, but he knew that Dwyer was giving vent to some mocking pleasantry. The two men seemed like old friends. It was only the bitter lights in their eyes that revealed the murderous enmity they bore each other. The room grew silent, tense.
But Dwyer walked quietly back to his table. He appeared to have no bodyguards around him. He appeared to have come to the Mephistopheles Club alone; but, while he had been talking to Baroni, the tables around the entranceway had filled. Well-dressed, quiet-moving young men, singly and in groups, had entered.
They paid no attention to Dwyer, or he to them. But when Nick Baroni saw the newcomers, a pastiness crept over his fat face. The Agent, watching hawklike, saw the pudgy fingers holding the cigar begin to tremble.
Smiling slightly, Sam Dwyer was studying his menu. The waiters scurrying about the room looked suddenly like small scared rabbits. Whispers ran among them and among the guests. There were covert glances. Frightened gestures. The manager of the Mephistopheles Club walked jerkily across the floor and went up to Dwyer’s table. His face was pale. He remonstrated with the gangster.
Dwyer waved him airily away.
Many guests, still in the middle of their meals, began to rise and hastily leave. Girls, the color suddenly gone from their faces, asked their escorts to take them out. The room was slowly emptying, as the stalking shadows of murder crept out from the walls.
The orchestra on its stand played on, but the music took on a thin, sickly quality. The eyes of the musicians darted from their printed notes to the two groups of men facing each other. Their hands trembled on the keys of their instruments. The rhythm became broken, macabre, like a dance of death.
Baroni was slumped in his seat now. He was trying not to show the fear that made his features dough colored—trying not to let on that he was aware of the showdown that faced him. The stubs of two cigarettes spiraled smoke in the ash tray before him. He lit another and dribbled smoke through his heavy lips and nostrils. The whites of his eyes had taken on a yellow tinge as they wandered toward those tables across the room. He and his bodyguards were outnumbered. Dwyer’s friends had come in strength of two to one.
The Agent’s gaze was upon Dwyer. What would the signal be that would let hell loose in this room?
The sleek, bland face of Sam Dwyer gave no hint But, as the Agent watched, Dwyer’s well-manicured fingers lifted slowly and touched the handkerchief in his front coat pocket. He took it out, wiped his lips delicately. When he replaced it, he thrust it down out of sight.
It was a slight gesture, almost insignificant; but it was the prearranged gesture that started the fireworks. It was the fuse that lighted the bomb of human hate and ferocity.
In one and the same moment, the men around him left their tables and backed against the wall, drawn guns suddenly appeared in their hands. Dwyer slipped out of his seat as quickly and gracefully as a dancer executing a pirouette. With a hoarse bellow of fear, Nick Baroni lurched sidewise in his chair, deliberately flinging himself flat on the floor. He did it to escape the stream of bullets that lashed the spot where his body had been.
Chapter XIV
To the Death
THE Agent had witnessed many gun fights, but never one which began with such deadly sudden ferocity as this. Both sides were shooting to kill, shooting to achieve the greatest slaughter in the shortest space of time.
Baroni had escaped the first blast of bullets. His huge body was half hidden by the table which he had overturned. It was all that saved him. His bodyguards were crouching, their eyes black, evil slits. Like Dwyer’s men, guns had appeared miraculously in their hands. They answered the fusillade from across the room with a volley that sent a wave of sound blasting back against the walls.
The musicians left their stand, stumbling off it amid a jumble of hastily dropped instruments. They scurried out of sight. The few remaining guests outside of the members of the two gangs, leaped to safety. Only Agent “X” remained as witness of the crimson carnage that was taking place.
He sat at a table close against the wall. There was a heavy portière near by. He drew it in front of him.
The fighting men paid him no heed; but he knew that he risked a stray bullet any moment.
One of Dwyer’s men had fallen to the polished floor of the club. He pressed a hand to his side, screamed, thinly, horribly. A gunman in the employ of Baroni suddenly threw up his hands and took three staggering steps forward. There was a blue hole in the center of his forehead, a surprised look on his evil face. Even before his body hit the floor, there came the vicious splat of three more bullets striking him. He crumpled up and lay still, a crimson stain slowly spreading outward.
Dwyer, a gun in his hand, and the look of a demon on his face, was edging forward. He shouted some orders to his men. They spread out, slinking along the walls, creeping closer to the group who faced them. Dwyer himself crouched behind a chair. His gun spat.
Another Baroni man dropped to the floor. Lying with one arm twisted under him, he kept up a murderous fire, until his automatic clicked emptily. Then, painfully, slowly, he began filling the clip from his pocket until a second bullet shattered his wrist. He screamed then and crawled away toward the wall.
Baroni was getting the worst of it. There was no question about that. This was a battle to the death. Dwyer was fighting to wipe out a rival group, to eliminate competition with the quick scalpel of hot lead. And Baroni’s small bodyguard was already reduced by two.
Slowly, mercilessly, Dwyer’s men moved in fanshaped formation, trying to reach a point where their crossfire would do the most damage. Baroni, his eyes bulging, his face sagging with fright, still lay on the floor. Either the big gangster carried no gun or he was afraid to draw it. He was depending on his men, waiting for death, palsied with terror.
A third Baroni man dropped his gun now. His arm hung limply. He tried to pick the gun up with his left hand, failed. There were only three of them left, crouching, white-faced youths whose lives had been spent under the shadow of fear and quick death. They were fighting with the desperation of cornered
animals, knowing that their minutes were numbered.
“Get Baroni,” Dwyer hissed. “The yellow-bellied punk is hiding behind that table.”
Agent “X” saw the mobsters’ fire shift, saw splinters begin to fly from the table behind which Baroni crouched like a sodden, frightened hog.
Then quietly, deftly, the Agent moved his hands. He took a small tool from his pocket—a pair of pliers. They were not ordinary pliers. There was a trough in the middle of them for wires to slip into, a needle point centering in this trough. He snapped the pliers over the cord of the electric table light. His wrist tensed. The needle point was driven through the rubberized insulation, through the strands of copper wire beneath. It formed an instantaneous short circuit. There was a brilliant spark, a puff of smoke. The lights went out as every fuse in the building blew.
The Agent slipped out of his seat. Risking death from the leaden hail of bullets, he crossed the floor, slipped to the side of Baroni. He touched the man’s arm, heard him cry out in fear.
“Keep quiet,” the Agent hissed. “I put the lights out. I can save you.”
He had a reason for this. He felt no friendship, no sympathy for the craven gang lord who had, in his day, ordered the deaths of many men. But there was a chance that Baroni could lead him where he wanted to go—along the trail of the Black Master.
Dwyer’s men, taking advantage of the blackness, were circling in like sinister wolves in the night. A bullet plucked at the sleeve of the Agent’s coat close to the shoulder.
Then someone, a member of Dwyer’s gang, clicked on a flash light, setting it on a chair and leaping back. Its rays illumined one of Baroni’s decimated bodyguards. A volley of bullets riddled him, made him collapse like a slumped sack of grain, before he struck. Only two were left now.
THE Agent smiled grimly. Dwyer’s men were all around them. Guarding the exits, guarding the windows. Dwyer planned to wipe Baroni and every man of his gang out, leave no witnesses of the terrible battle. He would kill the Agent, too, if he got the chance.
But Agent “X” was busy. From a deep inner pocket, he took a small vial with a screw cap. It seemed a strange thing to bring out at such a time, a strange thing to pit against a dozen flaming automatics. In the vial were a score of tiny pellets, like pills.
He unscrewed the top of the vial with deft, quick fingers, then waited a moment while air seeped in. There had been only a vacuum in the vial before. It had been airtight.
On contact with the air the tiny pellets began to smoke and glow.
Suddenly the Agent made a sweeping motion with his arm. The pellets left the mouth of the vial, scattering around the room, rattling on the floor.
A second later one made a report like a giant firecracker exploding. It seemed fantastic that such force could be contained in such a small body. A second exploded close to one of Dwyer’s men. The man screamed with fear, dropped his automatic, and leaped back.
The firing ceased abruptly. Dwyer cursed and screamed orders.
Then a half-dozen of the Agent’s harmless-looking pellets let go, and the room became a crashing, exploding medley of sound. Air waves hurtled this way and that. The windows rattled.
The Agent, calm through it all, spoke sharply in Baroni’s ear.
“They are harmless—come with me.”
The fat gang leader, shaking with terror, floundered to his feet. He stood dazed, rocking, while the din of the exploding pellets kept up.
Leaving his side a moment, the Agent went to the nearest of his henchmen who was still alive.
“Come,” he said.
The man turned with the squeal of a rat, tried to shoot; but the Agent knocked the gun from his hand.
“Fool!” he hissed.
He rounded up the other man, drew them to Baroni’s side. The gang leader gave a brief explanation.
“This guy did it,” he said. “Let’s scram.”
They slunk out of the room, passed an exit from which Dwyer’s men had fled in terror as one of the Agent’s pellets burst close to it. They crept down the stairs unmolested, and out into the street.
An excited crowd was gathering outside. Baroni lumbered through it, scattering people right and left like a hippo ploughing through reeds. His two henchmen and the Agent trailed him.
Down the block two big limousines stood, the fenders of one touching the rear of the other. Baroni piled into the first car. One of his surviving torpedoes took the wheel. Baroni, the other gunman, and the Secret Agent were in the rear. “X” was sticking close to the gangster now, calmly carrying out a preconceived plan.
Gears whined and the car sped away into the darkness. Behind them, police sirens were screaming as a half-dozen radio cruisers, summoned by the frantic appeals from headquarters, converged on the Mephistopheles Club. No doubt the emergency squad cars would be called out, too. It was the biggest gangster battle of the season.
Nick Baroni, slumped and speechless, was mopping his fat face with a silk handkerchief. Rhythmically, monotonously, his plump hands moved round and round. It seemed to afford him relief. His gunman, shivering and crouched like a frightened rat, said nothing as the car tore ahead. But once his eyes shifted strangely, fearfully, to the face of the Secret Agent.
The Agent’s features were the bland, even features of a young clubman. His immaculate tuxedo was not even creased. He fingered his tie for a moment, straightened it. Only his burning eyes showed the dynamic fire of hidden emotions.
NICK BARONI spoke then as the speeding limousine carried them to safety, carried them beyond the noise and turmoil of the Mephistopheles Club.
“What’s your name, guy—an’ what made you chisel in?”
The Agent spoke quickly. This was a question he had been expecting. He was ready for it.
“You seemed to be getting a tough break—and I felt like a little excitement.”
The crafty eyes of Nick Baroni, regaining some of their arrogant poise now, focused on him thoughtfully, taking in his patent leather shoes, his sharply creased trousers, his well-fitted coat.
“Just a playboy out for a little fun, eh!” he said.
The Agent stiffened. Irritation leaped into his eyes for a moment.
“Did I act like a playboy?” he asked harshly.
Baroni seemed to wilt. He opened his mouth, spoke quickly. There was a sudden uneasy look in his eyes, as though he sensed for the first time the uncanny power of the stranger beside him.
“Don’t get me wrong, mister. You came in at the right time. It’s O.K. by me. Those Dwyer rats might have made it a little tough for me. And that popcorn of yours? What the hell was it? How did you think it up?”
“Just a few fireworks,” said the Agent quietly. He had slipped back into his role, hiding his dislike for the man beside him, hiding his contempt for the man’s arrogance and callousness. For Baroni was pretending now that he would have won the fight with Dwyer anyway. He was ignoring the fact that four of his bodyguard lay dead on the floor of the Mephistopheles Club.
“I’ll get that rat, Dwyer,” Baroni was breathing. “I’ll burn his guts for this.” He turned fiercely on the man beside him.
“What do I pay you lice for? Why did you let him get the drop on us?”
“You’re talking through your hat, boss,” said the gunman sullenly. “Burnie, Monk, Steve, and Fred were wiped out. The rest of us would have got it too, if this mug hadn’t edged in.”
Baroni lapsed into silence, mopping his fat face again.
“I gotta have a drink,” he said presently. “My nerves are shot. Stop at Frenchy’s place, Al.”
The torpedo driving the car nodded. A block farther on, brakes squealed and the big car slid to a halt before the door of an underworld dive.
“Come in, guy, and I’ll set you up a snifter,” said Baroni expansively.
The Agent followed the trio to the door of this joint that was still a speak-easy, even though prohibition had been repealed. A slit-eyed man with spiky mustaches opened the door, stared at them th
rough the grating, and admitted them when he recognized Baroni.
“Where’s the rest of the boys?” he asked.
“They got into a little trouble, Frenchy. Fix up some Scotch.”
Darting an inquisitive look at the Secret Agent, the little Frenchman went off to obey orders. Baroni motioned toward a back room and heaved himself into a chair. He was still perspiring. His hands were trembling. His pasty, soggy face showed evidences of the terror that had almost paralyzed him. He gulped three glasses of whisky before turning to the Agent.
“Now,” he said. “What’s your name and who the hell are you?”
“James Porter,” said the Agent quickly. It was one of his many aliases. He drew a card from his wallet, handed it to Baroni to prove it.
The big gangster stared at the card impressed.
“What do you do for a living?”
“Dabble in the stock market a little.”
Baroni’s eyes showed cunning.
“You ain’t making much money now?”
“No,” said the Agent. “You know what happened to the market.”
Baroni rested his fat chin on one hand, placed his elbow on the table.
“Listen,” he said. “You seem like a good guy. Maybe I could give you a job that would bring in some kale. Then you could hit the high places regular. Four of my torpedoes were wiped out tonight. I gotta get some more. How would you like to be one of them?”
The Agent nodded slowly.
“I’ll think it over,” he said. This was what he wanted. This would give him a chance to see what, if any, were Baroni’s connections with the hideous strangler murders. But he didn’t want to appear too anxious.
Baroni took another drink and his self-confidence and suavity increased.
“I got Dwyer’s number,” he said. “I’m going to get him and take over his rackets. There may not be as much dough as when we was running alky—but there’ll be plenty. There’s a dope racket that I’m gonna look in on. You could contact the rich guys and high-steppin’ dames with that million-dollar manner of yours. We could clean up.”
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 21