The place was far downtown, near the water front. The entrance to it was shadowed by the elevated which snaked overhead like an endless black serpent. There were small cluttered shops of Syrian, Armenian, and Arabian pastries along the street. Agent “X” smiled. If she made a practice of coming all this distance to dine, she would undoubtedly keep it up.
The Agent, looking like a sight-seer who had casually wandered in, entered the grimy doorway of the Café Levant.
It was nothing more than a small, smoky restaurant serving Russian and Oriental foods. The large, greasy proprietor stood behind the cashier’s desk near the door. There were a dozen people in the room, sitting at the small, soiled tables, and Agent “X” noticed one thing immediately.
The buzz of conversation ceased as he entered. This was a place where the same diners came night after night. It was a place unadvertized, unknown to the world uptown. The coming of a stranger was noticed at once.
But the Agent sat down casually at a table near the door.
He did not at first return the glances that were directed his way. Conversation began to rise again after a time. It seemed to him that it came in a medley of many different tongues.
His gaze swept the mixed men and women diners, and he saw then that their faces like their voices showed the blood of many countries. The Café Levant was the meeting place of at least a dozen different nationalities—the meeting place perhaps of international spies. And suddenly he bent down, staring at the menu card, hiding the glow of excitement that filled his eyes. For, sitting at a far corner table, talking to a shabbily dressed man, was the woman he sought, the blonde spy, Nina Rocazy.
Chapter XX
The Spy’s Bargain
FROWNING at the bill of fare as though its exotic dishes were unfamiliar to him, the Agent finally signaled the hovering waiter. He ordered coffee and pastry.
Over the steaming cup of thick Turkish mocha, he furtively scrutinized each face in the room. However shabby their clothing might be, the people around him had a sharpness, an intelligence that seemed out of keeping in this smoky little place. There was a tenseness in their manner, an avid look in their eyes.
He had suddenly the impression that the room was filled with human vultures, quarreling, distrustful, hovering near some prize piece of carrion.
The blonde, Nina, did not glance his way, or, if she did, saw nothing to make her gaze linger. She looked older, more strained. The man with her was as tense and bright-eyed as a hunting hawk. They fitted in with the general atmosphere of this room. It was as though the murders of the past few days had whetted their appetite to possess the Black Master’s secret weapon, as the sight of raw meat whets the appetites of a group of tigers. The heads of Nina and the man were close together.
What was she telling him, “X” wondered? Was she attempting to blackmail him also, as she had Greenford? Apparently not, for the man’s face had the intentness, the greed, of someone who expects gain.
Agent “X” finished his light meal and left the Café Levant, walking swiftly away. At the end of the block, staring back over his shoulder, he saw the greasy-skinned proprietor come out onto the sidewalk and stare after him.
Agent “X” circled quickly, walked around the block and approached the café from the other direction on the opposite side of the street. There were little shops here, closed up for the night, their windows dark. He backed into the entranceway of one, fumbled a moment with one of his master keys, and opened the door softly.
In the dark interior he crouched, waiting. Looking through the dusty window at a slant he could see the door of the Café Levant. Those coming out of it would never see him, never suspect that they were being spied upon. He could take no chances now. Too many lives hung in the balance.
If the Black Master was not caught soon, the sinister threat of his presence would grow into a horror that would shock the whole nation. “X” had seen the gangsters wiped out like insects. The thought of innocent people being destroyed in the same way made something clutch at his heart as though icy fingers were pressing there.
There was no question in his mind but that those men and women in the Café Levant were spies, here in America to dicker for the Black Master’s secret. Just as crooks sought each other’s company, so, too, there were places where the undercover operatives of various nations gathered. But these in the Café Levant were, he guessed, for the most part the rabble. Their loyalty could probably be bought by any country willing to pay the price.
Several people entered the Café Levant; several emerged; but it wasn’t until nearly an hour had passed that the blonde Nina made her appearance. The hawk-faced man was with her. He was tall, slightly stooped. He was still talking excitedly, leaning over her. They were absorbed, their faces close together in the darkness. This was no mere amorous intrigue. The softness of love in any form was not upon them. They were like two stalking jungle animals, male and female.
When they had nearly reached the end of the block, the Agent emerged. He closed the door of the shop softly after him, moved along in the shadows under the elevated structure. They took a cab down the block, and the Agent followed in his car.
Blocks away, in a Bohemian section of the city, the cab stopped and they got out. Agent “X” parked and got out also. He followed them again until the trail led to one of a row of small, old-time houses on a crooked little street.
Here artists and writers lived, radicals and long-haired poets. Here, too, apparently, international spies found refuge, for the man opened the door of the house with a key and entered with the blonde at his side.
There were no lights in the old house until Nina or the man pressed a switch. Then a glow appeared in a second-floor room. Apparently they had come here to continue the subject under discussion.
The Agent thought quickly. An impulse stronger than a hunch told him that these two were after the death weapon of the Black Master. Nina herself had informed him that that was her purpose in coming to America. She wasn’t the type of woman to give up easily a thing she coveted.
SILENTLY as a shadow, the Agent sprang up the steps of the old house and unlocked the door with one of his skeleton keys. Then he checked himself and tensed. He had almost made a fatal error. He could pick any modern lock, open any present-day door, but a protective device on the door of this old house had blocked his way.
There was a heavy brass chain inside, bolted to the wall, its end slipped into a slot on the door. He could not reach it with his fingers. He had almost pushed the door against it. To have done so would have meant a rattle that might have warned the two on the floor above.
Many minutes of patient work would be needed to devise a way of unfastening that chain. The lower front windows were shuttered.
Grim-lipped, the Agent moved swiftly along the block and went around to the rear of the house. The rear door, too, was fastened with a chain. There was no fire escape snaking up the back of the old place, no way of getting to the unshuttered windows on the floor above.
But the Agent wasn’t balked. There was still a possible way of learning what those two in the room were discussing. To do so, however, he had to reach the roof of the house they were in.
The houses in the row on the block were all of the same height and period. He walked along till he found another one empty. The old door, with no chain fastened, opened easily under one of the keys he carried. He closed it behind him and swiftly climbed the stairs.
Uncarpeted boarding creaked under his feet. A mouse squeaked and scurried away. There was a smell of dust and mold in the air. It reminded him of his own hideout in the old Montgomery mansion far up the drive.
He reached the attic, found an old iron ladder leading up to a skylight. It was the work of a moment to un-snap the four hooks that held the skylight cover in place. A second more and he was up on the tarred roof, three stories above the street.
Counting the houses as he moved, he crossed swiftly from roof to roof until he was on the building where the two had go
ne in. Looking cautiously over the coping, he could see the glow of their windows a story below. The shades were closely drawn. From his vantage point he could not look in. The skylight, he knew, was fastened on the inside. The two in the room imagined themselves safe from all listeners. But the Agent drew from his pocket a device which might invade their privacy.
He unfastened a flat, black leather case, took out the delicate mechanism it contained. It was perhaps the smallest telephonic amplifying device in existence—a thing that he had worked patiently on in his spare moments.
A dry battery like that in the smallest flash light gave it power. Wire hardly thicker than thread connected between the single earphone and the amplifying microphone of the instrument. He had fifty feet of the wire strung on a small reel like a spool. This spool was pivoted inside the case itself.
He walked softly to the chimney in the center of the roof, stood on his toes and stared down. It was a two-passage chimney connected with open fireplaces in the front and rear rooms. This he had guessed as soon as he had seen the old house. It had been built in the days when open fireplaces were the only means of heating. There was a faint glow visible far down the sooty throat of the chimney. But it was not the glow of a fire. No smoke or heat was coming up the chimney. It was the glow of the light in the room shining into the fireplace. A gas stove probably supplied heat, and they had not bothered to light a fire.
The Secret Agent held the microphone end of his miniature amplifier in his right hand and slowly lowered it down the chimney. He unreeled the threadlike wire with his left. He dared not drop it all the way. If it appeared in the square opening of the fireplace, it would give warning to those below.
By the length of the wire he had lowered, he estimated the distance. The bell-shaped microphone of his instrument must now be close to the room where the two had gone. It must be hanging just out of sight in the fireplace.
He made a turn of the wire around the chimney to hold it, then stooped and bent over his delicate mechanism. He switched on the small dry battery, the voltage of which had been stepped-up with special chemicals. Two brass screw heads gleamed inside the case. One induced clarity. The other regulated volume.
WITH the receiver of the amplifier clamped to his ear, the Agent crouched in the darkness of the roof and began to listen. At first only a faint blur of sound reached him. He turned the delicate knurled head of the clarifier adjustment. Gradually the blur of sound resolved itself into human voices. But they seemed faint and far away—the voices of pigmies talking in some subterranean cave.
His fingers remained on the clarifier adjustment till the sounds had reached needle sharpness. Then he turned on the volume control.
Like a distant radio station coming into earshot, the voices in the room below grew in size, grew till it seemed that the lips of the people who spoke were close to the Agent’s ear. His tiny-microphone, made with exact scientific skill, was doing its work.
He could even hear the extraneous noises that the two in the room made, the faint stirring of their feet, the creaking of a chair, the noise the man made as he cleared his throat.
It was Nina who was speaking at the moment.
“I am nervous, Gustav—always nervous since Grenfort was killed. I am ready almost to give up—and go back.”
Agent “X” heard the woman’s restless footsteps as she paced. A man’s harsh, jeering laughter sounded.
“That is the way of women—brave until danger comes!”
“But Grenfort—”
“Grenfort was a fool, a bungler. You are talking to Gustav Mogellen now. He does not bungle. Grenfort did something to anger this absurd madman who calls himself the Black Master. We don’t know what. We cannot say. But I have not angered him. I have treated him with deference like the lunatic he is.”
“You are a fool yourself to talk like that, Gustav. The Black Master is not mad. He is a criminal, and he wants money just as you and I do.”
“Bah—all Americans are mad.”
The man chuckled softly, then spoke to the woman again.
“They will have something to be mad about later when they find that a nation was willing to buy what they scorned and feared.”
“You are sure, Gustav? You do not intend to trifle with the Black Master?”
“Trifle! I might, in a gay moment, trifle with you, a charming woman, but I would not trifle with this madman. I tell you Gustav Mogellen is wise. He does not trifle with infants, animals, or madmen. What I have told him is true. My country is willing to meet his absurd price.”
“It seems unbelievable,” gasped Nina.
“Unbelievable! Unbelievable that a small nation like mine should want to possess a weapon that will give it dominance over others! In the event of war—” There was a slap as the man below struck his fist against the palm. A laugh followed the blow. “In the event of war we should win by the sheer horror we would inspire in our enemies. Armies would refuse to fight. Men would throw down their arms. In my two sessions with the crazy monster in that mad office of his, I have convinced him that I am not fooling. I would not dare fool. Each time I have left it, I have been followed, shadowed. One slip, and I would die like our dear friend Grenfort. Tonight I go to make final arrangements. Tomorrow night, to show my good faith. I will give him an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars—a mere option—but he has agreed to cease his sensational activities and wait quietly till the payments are completed. In a few weeks the weapon that all men fear will be ours.”
Chapter XXI
The Chamber of Death
FOR nearly an hour, or until the tiny battery in his amplifier began to give out, the Secret Agent listened. The man, Gustav Mogellen, gloating, triumphant, continued to impress the woman with his astuteness.
Agent “X” wondered if her fear were genuine, if she were not playing some deeper game. He wouldn’t trust her not to murder the man, say that he had been killed, and take whatever commission his government planned to pay.
But that didn’t interest him. It was the immediate future upon which his mind was set. A foreign power was planning to pay the Black Master his price, buy Mark Roemer’s stolen formula. This must not happen! The murderer of Bill Scanlon must not escape.
With tense, quick fingers the Secret Agent reeled in the threadlike wire of his amplifier. Carefully, fondly, he put it away in its case. That tiny instrument was all that had stood tonight between America and a plot that might become a menace of world importance.
His eyes were glowing with that strange, burning light as he left the roof by the way he had come. There was much to be done, a hundred chances that he might slip up.
Far down the block he waited, watching the door of that house where Gustav Mogellen had discussed his plans with the blonde. And it was toward midnight that he saw Mogellen emerge. The man, dressed in a dark overcoat walked quickly into the shadows.
Now as never before Secret Agent “X” used his uncanny skill as a shadower. Mogellen looked around once, saw nothing, and strode on. He seemed confident that no one guessed what affairs he was about.
Agent “X” saw him take a taxi at the junction of the street and a nearby avenue. The Agent followed blocks behind in his own car. His sharp, burning eyes, staring ahead, missed nothing.
When the taxi turned a corner, he sped up. When at last it slowed and stopped, he, too, parked, still blocks behind. But he almost ran through the darkness. He was watching as the man, Mogellen, entered a block of empty office buildings. The onward sweep of the city seemed to have left this section deserted. Business offices had been moved farther uptown. No wonder Mogellen in his talk with the blonde had referred to this place as the Black Master’s “mad office.”
The Agent saw Mogellen look around once, then fit a key into the building’s front door. He saw him disappear inside. Two hundred feet ahead, Agent “X” saw another flitting shadow.
He crouched back in the darkness. The man in front was the hophead, the murderous, vicious employee of the Black Ma
ster. He saw the man creep forward into the building after Mogellen. He stayed there, no doubt, close at hand, unseen, ready to kill the visitor if anything went wrong.
For twenty minutes the Agent waited amid the darkest shadows on the opposite side of the street. Then he saw Mogellen emerge and move rapidly off. The small, wicked-looking dope fiend slipped out of the building and followed after. The man, probably, had been instructed to shadow Mogellen all the way home, to kill if his actions became in any way suspicious. But Mogellen did not look back. He walked swiftly on, disappearing down the block.
Agent “X” remained in hiding a half-hour longer, then stole forth and quickly crossed the street. He was at the very gates of death now. But he gauged his time. He must search this building while the hophead was away shadowing Mogellen, and finish his search before the man got back.
Noiselessly he fitted a key into the lock and entered by the door through which the spy, Mogellen, had gone. Did the Black Master live here, or was it only his place of conducting business? The cold, damp chilliness of the unheated building made “X” believe that the latter was the case.
Risking sudden death, not knowing what he might find, he began probing with his tiny flash light. In the dust of the floor he was able to trace Mogellen’s tracks. He followed them, coming at last to the small, strange office on the second floor. The Agent saw instantly that there was only one door into this office.
He flashed his light, then waited breathlessly—waited for possible death. But nothing stirred. In that one flicker of light he had noticed the mirror covering the rear wall, the mirror with its metal panel down the center.
It had meant nothing to the disordered mind of Taub, the dope fiend. To Agent “X” it instantly conveyed meaning.
He had seen such mirrors in the doors of high-class speak-easies in the days of prohibition. From them the proprietors could look out, but no one could see in. The proprietors could tell just who was ringing the bell, customer or prohibition agent.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 25