X had started to sit down, but at that moment, his eyes strayed to one of the French windows directly behind Recklow. The pavilion was only dimly lighted by a decorative lamp of far less intensity than the illumination of the roof-garden proper. For that reason, X was able to see a line of light beneath the French windows and also a shadow—a shadow that moved.
Two strides took X to the window. He seized the knob and jerked the window open. There, her surprise artfully veiled, stood the insolently beautiful Countess Savinna.
X held the door open. “Please step in, miss,” he said coldly. “You’ll be able to hear much better.”
Countess Savinna looked over her slightly raised shoulder. She was smiling archly at some one whom X could not see. “Am I right, Inspector Burks, in saying that your detective’s behavior is extraordinary—if, indeed, he is a detective at all?”
Inspector Burks’ huge figure moved into the opening. His face was an angry red, and the brow beneath the brim of his turned-up hat bore a puzzled frown. “Oh, he’s a detective, all right, but after tonight I guess he’ll be something else!” He poked a huge finger at Agent X. “Look here, Scallot, what’s the meaning of this? This lady and I heard that crack of yours about being a federal agent. And what’s your idea of carrying on a private investigation when you had orders to wait for me? Insubordination, Scallot. Ever hear of that before?”
“Yes sir,” replied X meekly. Everything depended on meekness at that moment. Not that he feared apprehension. His disguise was too perfect for that. But Timothy Scallot was a most important cog in the Agent’s secret machine. It was a long and tedious process that had put Scallot in a position whereby he could relay police information to Harvey Bates. X dared not risk having Scallot’s reputation as a trustworthy detective ruined.
“I think you’re in the wrong, sir,” put in Recklow mildly.
“I am, am I?” roared Burks, obviously insulted. “And who are you?”
“That is a matter I shall be glad to discuss with you at some other time and—” with a glance at Countess Savinna—“in private. And perhaps this man is a federal agent.”
Burks’ eyes narrowed. He looked hard at X. “So you say you’re a federal dick, now, Scallot. I’ve had my eye on you, boy. Commissioner Foster says things have been leaking out of headquarters lately—secret stuff. I been watchin’ all the lads, but I didn’t think Tim Scallot would ever get down that low. Think you’d better start pounding a beat tomorrow, Scallot, till I get a chance to look into things.”
X took a step backwards. He knew that he dared not risk Scallot’s dismissal from the detective force. There was only one course open to him—a hazardous one.
“That won’t be necessary, Inspector Burks,” he said. “You see, I’m no more Timothy Scallot than you are. Scallot has been unavoidably detained in the manager’s office.”
Inspector Burks’ round face was sliced by an unpleasant grin. “That being the case, there’s a ‘welcome’ doormat in front of a nice cell for you, Mr. Secret Agent X!”
X whipped out his powerful gas gun. Covering Burks and the countess, he slowly backed towards another of the French windows. “Keep your hands away from your gun, inspector,” he warned. “And, countess, one hand will be sufficient to hold your handbag. In spite of the good turn your eavesdropping may have done Burks, the inspector knows of a law that is supposed to prevent women from carrying concealed weapons.”
Out of the corner of his eye, X saw that Robert Recklow was moving. X half turned, to threaten Recklow with his gun, but Recklow had already made his desperate attempt. Recklow had seized a large bottle, and had sent it with amazing speed straight at Agent X. The bottle struck the Agent’s gun wrist a numbing blow. The gun dropped from X’s nerveless fingers. At the same time, Inspector Burks drew his .38, and shouted at the top of his lungs for his men.
X swung toward a French window that burst open before he had taken a step. He found himself facing three detectives whose guns were trained upon him.
“One move, Agent X, a flicker of an eyelash, and you’ll get it!” Burks warned. “Handcuffs and steel bars won’t hold this lad—but lead will!”
Chapter III
THE SQUAW’S DIVE
X REALIZED that his chances with the police had never been so slim. Fifteen long feet separated him from the nearest French window that was not occupied by police. And at that very moment, the French window was opening. Out of the corner of his unblinking eyes, Agent X saw a slender blonde vision with a pencil stuck in her golden hair and a notebook waving in her right hand. Betty Dale.
“Oh, Inspector Burks! You’ve got to tell me something quick!”
“Stay out of here!” Burks bellowed.
But heedless of Burks’ warning, Betty ran into the room—ran straight between X and the police guns.
It was the millionth chance, and X didn’t let it slip. At the very moment that Betty was between him and the police, there could be no shooting. Any one of the men would have died before they would have knowingly harmed Betty Dale. And the girl’s trick had given X a split second in which to act. He whirled up a chair in his left hand and sent it sailing over Betty’s head to crash into the legs of three detectives at the door. Then he dashed toward the door Betty had left open for him. He slammed the door behind him. A pane of glass was drilled by a shot that sang its death song over his head. Two uniformed police, attracted by the shot, came running toward X.
“In there!” shouted X, pointing over his shoulder at the pavilion. “Burks has cornered a killer!”
Never doubting but what X was Timothy Scallot, the two police hurried toward the pavilion and out of X’s way. A single leap and he cleared the flight of six steps leading from the roof-garden. A wide-mouthed elevator boy saw him coming toward the cage, and recognizing him as a detective, climbed from his stool and had his hand ready on the lever when X sprang over the sill.
“Get me down fast. Someone’s trying to get away.”
X smiled inwardly at the thought of the timely action of his devoted ally, Betty Dale. Like as not, at this moment, she was giving the roaring Inspector Burks an innocent stare and asking him if she had done something wrong. But that smile was driven off by a foreboding shadow. Inspector Burks, though hampered by the chains of conventional police tactics, possessed a keen mind. If Betty’s move was properly interpreted, and she was established as a friend of X, she could hope for nothing less than a prison sentence.
As the elevator gained the lobby of the Franconia Hotel, X bounded from the car, and was on his way through a doorway cluttered with hurrying people, onto the sidewalk to run half a block to the corner where his parked car awaited him. A sticker on the windshield and the bellow of a traffic policeman, who had kept strict account of parking time, were lost to Agent X. The super-motor beneath the hood of his gray sedan became a hundred and twenty winged horses at a touch of the starter button. And to the blustering policeman at the curb it was a silver projectile that at any moment threatened to leap from the street and rocket to the planet Mars.
FOR several blocks, the Agent’s feet knew but one pedal on the dash beneath him—the accelerator. Then he swung through the wide door of a parking garage operated by a loyal member of the Bates group of secret operatives. He turned the car into an inclined runway that led to the basement, knowing that he could later order alterations that would prevent its recognition by the police.
Leaving the car, a small elevator carried the Agent to the street level, and into a dark hall which connected with an alley. Next door to the garage, was the office building where X leased an office in the guise of A.J. Martin, ace reporter for the Associated Press. But when X entered the office building from the rear, a remarkable change had come over his face.
The toupee, that had cleverly counterfeited the hair of Timothy Scallot, was gone. The high cheek bones had been flattened and the shape of the nose and chin altered—all within the brief space of time in which X had been in the dark alley. X entered the elevator,
and in another minute he was behind locked doors and seated at his own desk.
His first move was to call the respective headquarters of Harvey Bates and Jim Hobart. Both were to be informed to look out for any facts in regard to Countess Savinna and her activities. X also told both Hobart and Bates all that he had learned from Recklow regarding the aerial attack on the Franconia Roof.
When Jim Hobart was told of Emperor Zero and the poison gas used by the mysterious bat-creatures, he uttered a low whistle.
“Then you’ve dropped that business of the escape of Vonicky from Alcatraz?” asked Hobart.
“Unless it is connected with the Zero affair,” X replied. “Got any information?”
“Perhaps. You know that rotten dive known as the Squaw’s Place?”
“Yes. Formerly under Vonicky’s ‘protection,’ now a hideout for any sort of scum.”
“Well, one of our boys was covering it, looking for Vonicky, when hell broke loose in the tenement next door. A white-haired old man crashed out of a third story window—danced out, Wilkins told me. That attracted the cops, and when they got inside the building they found the place was a cross between an old people’s home and a morgue. White-haired corpses and old people dying from some sort of fit. The crazy part of it is, that even the bodies of the children looked old.”
The lips of Agent X drew into a hard straight line. His eyes were brilliant with cold fire. He knew well the tenement mentioned by Hobart. The majority of the persons who crowded in its narrow confines were innocent, ignorant objects of the Agent’s most profound pity. Money which he distributed to the needy had frequently found its way into this particular house of squalor.
“You still on the wire, Boss?” asked Hobart, for his announcement had for the moment stunned X into silence.
“Hobart, gas caused that slaughter,” rapped X. “War’s latest hell—Cartier-site! It bleaches hair white, it turns skin into parchment, and it kills, when a sufficient amount is inhaled, by stimulating the rate of the pulse beat to something beyond the endurance of human tissue.”
“And the work of this Zero?” muttered Hobart. “Where’s his motive for a killing like that?”
“Don’t know, Hobart. Any other information?”
“Not about that, Mr. Martin. Wilkins knocked some story out of a cokey about seeing Vonicky around the Squaw’s Place a few days ago. I don’t know how much of that you can believe, though, because the same cokey was filled to the eyebrows about seeing a bat the size of a man light on the roof of the Squaw’s early this evening.”
“Bat!” exclaimed X. “What’s the story?”
“That’s all of it. When the cokey saw that, he took it on the run. But he can’t get over babbling about it. Sorry I mentioned it. Probably a joke.”
SLOWLY, meditatively, X hung up. Then he yanked open a drawer in his desk and leafed through some onion skin record sheets. He stopped at a sheet bearing a brief note. That note told him that exactly one day before the arrival of Countess Savinna in New York, Leon Vonicky, late of the public enemy list, had escaped from Alcatraz. A plane from the Pacific coast could have made up that difference in time. Savinna and Vonicky—the forces of hell were convening.
But the Agent’s meditation was not long lasting. Lifting the flat bed of the desk, he disclosed a secret compartment containing an elaborate make-up kit, and triple mirror. Then X began his task.
Half an hour later, Secret Agent X left the office of A.J. Martin. He wore a suit of violent checks which greatly exaggerated shoulders that were already large. His protruding jaw was blue-black with beard stubble and his nose had obviously stopped too many knuckles. A cinnamon-brown hat was tugged down so far on his head that its brim pushed out grotesquely shaped ears. Even his hands were coarse looking.
Agent X secured another car and drove cautiously until he gained a narrow, run-down street that extended far to the east side of town and which he knew was a main artery through a poverty-stricken section of the city. Twenty minutes of jolting over rough pavement, brought him to a stop at a dingy doorway. Four stories of dingy brick work and crumbling mortar; dark windows—some of them painted and some of them so dirty that paint would have been superfluous—sagging steps which led to a door upon which the word Hotel had long since worn away. Such was the Squaw’s Place, known to the denizens of the underworld as a haven of refuge from the law. Next door was the tenement Hobart had mentioned—dark, silent, and empty.
Agent X kicked open the door of his car, shuffled across the sidewalk and up the steps of the Squaw’s Place. He swung his left shoulder forward as he encountered the door and burst it open. A woman, whose stoical countenance, coarse black hair, and high cheek bones had gained her the name of “Squaw,” sat before a checkerboard. There was no one else in the room. Her wooden face betrayed none of the surprise she must have felt at the sudden entrance of the brutal looking stranger.
X strode over to her, and stood with both hands on his hips.
After a moment the woman said: “Well?”
X jerked his head in the direction of the street. “You get somebody to get that car away. I’m stayin’ here for a few days.”
The woman’s lips moved woodenly. Her voice was as cold and placid as a lake in mid-winter. “I’ve never seen you before.”
X stooped over and jabbed at his flagrant vest with his thumb. “Me? You never seen me—Steve Yoritz?”
THE woman regarded him calmly, then looking down at the checkerboard, moved a black man so that the red would have to jump. “It’s a good name, if it’s yours,” she went on in the same tone. “But you might be Smith or Jones or Brown. Or maybe you’re a bull.” She raised her eyes for a second scrutiny. “Nope, with a pan like that, you’re no bull. Look like somethin’ after Bombshell Louis got through with it.” She raised her voice a little and called: “Joe.”
A bleary-eyed, pot-bellied man came from behind a green curtain. “Sure,” he said, “that’s Steve Yoritz. Saw his picture in the Cleveland papers. Takin’ a powder?”
“Stayin’ out of circulation for a while till a blow-over,” X told him. Then to the woman. “You got the room? It’s worth a C note to you.”
“Cash?” asked the woman.
X brought out a roll of bills and peeled off a hundred-dollar note. He handed it to the Squaw. She examined it critically. “Go ditch the car, Joe. It’s hot,” she told the bleary-eyed man. Then she got up, and motioned X to follow her. X passed beneath the dusty green curtain into a small kitchen made considerably smaller by an over-sized electric-refrigerator—the only clean and white thing in the entire hovel.
The Squaw leaned gaunt shoulders against the refrigerator, and it rolled heavily to one side disclosing a door in the floor. Taking hold of an iron ring, she pulled open the door and pointed to a flight of steps.
“You’ll find a bunk down there, mister. I’ll send some one down with some food later on.”
“And a bottle of rye, don’t forget that,” ordered X as he stepped on the stairs. “And get this, sister, maybe some dick’ll raise the ante on me—two C notes, if you’ll squeal. I’ll get the chair, but not till they’ve slapped you down—with a spade in the face. Get me?”
“Sure,” said the woman. “A real tough guy. Don’t worry none. The boys’ll tell you I’m a clam.” And as X continued down the steps, the trapdoor dropped into place with a sepulchral boom.
It was not the first time that Agent X had been to the Squaw’s Place, but it was evidently the first time that the face of Steve Yoritz had been seen there. A man was waiting at the bottom of the steps—a tow-headed, gorilla-necked man whom X recognized as “Studsy” Parker, one-time henchman of Leon Vonicky. The appearance of Parker was encouraging.
Parker seemed to have had some acquaintance with the real Yoritz, for he slapped X on the shoulder and called him Steve.
“This ain’t exactly the Ritz, Steve,” Parker said, indicating the sparsely furnished basement room, “but it’s pretty cozy when you hear the bulls trompin’
the boards upstairs, and you know they can’t get down here after you.”
“If the wooden-faced dame upstairs keeps her trap shut, I’m satisfied,” grumbled X.
PARKER reiterated the fact that the proprietress was a “clam.” Then he said: “What kind of a job they tailin’ you for, Steve.”
“That’s my business,” X snapped. He turned threateningly on Studsy. “You get that, don’t you? My business—and drunk or sober I don’t talk.”
“Sure, Steve,” complied Studsy meekly. “I didn’t mean nothin’.”
“Anybody else stayin’ here?” asked X.
“Nobody but a dumb kid who’s in some sort of a jam. Go on in there and take a look at the cluck, if you’ve got ideas about him bein’ a phony.” And Parker thumbed toward a wooden door. “I’ll go up and see what I can scrape together for you to eat.”
“And drink,” added X as he shuffled toward the door Studsy had indicated.
The door squawked on its hinges. The room beyond was damp and dimly lighted by a single globe. Before a rickety table, a young man sprawled in a rocking chair. Aside from puffy eyelids, and hair that straggled in all directions, the young man was rather pleasant looking. X, judging the man by his features, thought him entirely out of his element. He was drunk and looked it, but he was anything but the typical criminal.
X growled some sort of a greeting to the man at the table and dropped into a chair. The man looked at X, said nothing. He poured liquor unsteadily from a bottle into a glass so that a pool of the stuff slopped on the top of the table. He downed the liquor at a gulp and then lounged on the table, drawing fanciful designs in the pool of liquid. X watched the man for awhile, then suddenly noticed the pointed tool, with which he was drawing, was the end of the wing insignia of the Army Air Corps.
X got to his feet and lumbered across the room. “Ever been in a plane?”
“Lotsh of timesh,” replied the man. He tossed the air-force insignia on the table. “Shee that? I was a lieutenant. Then I got into a fixsh. Up in the air there all alone, and shtill I got in trouble.”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 3