“I—I can’t go through with this—this awful thing!” Malthus sobbed out. “You’ve got to stop it!”
“No, I fail to understand.”
“Then, whether you understand or not, the deal is off. I’d rather starve.”
“It is not as easy as that, Mr. Malthus,” the voice continued monotonously. “One may not stop an avalanche with a feather.”
“I—I’ll be a murderer if this goes on. You must stop it!” Malthus choked. “If you persist, I’ll see Ingram tonight. I’ll have him cancel the policy. Ingram will be here tonight.”
“I see,” said the Brain. “Now that you feel like a murderer, Mr. Malthus, has it occurred to you that it is better to feel like a murderer than like a murder victim?”
Silence for a moment—then Malthus’s hoarse voice: “Yes, damn it!”
“And you remember, according to the terms of our contract, one-half the proceeds come to me. That being thoroughly understood, I need not remain longer. Good night.”
And in dark silence, the Brain left the way he had come.
Malthus stumbled across the room, peered through the French windows, and saw not a sign of the mysterious visitor.
“After all,” he mused, “perhaps two hundred thousand dollars is worth it. At least, the bogey of bankruptcy will stop haunting me.”
It was the cuisine of Aaron Malthus’s chef, rather than the personality of their host, that made men eager to attend Malthus’s bachelor dinners. Shortly after the departure of the Brain, the guests began to arrive. Aaron Malthus greeted Dr. Stuart Ormand with mechanical graciousness. Ormand gave Malthus’s hand a vigorous pumping, all the time puffing clouds of his noxious tobacco smoke into Malthus’s face.
Men liked Ormand in spite of his pipe and its sturdy mixture of perique and Algerian tobaccos. Ormand carried his bedside manner into social life, mingling with the guests, showing interest in their most trivial grievances, and seldom talking about himself.
In addition to Dr. Ormand, there was Thomas Ingram, a small, birdlike man who hopped about and made himself noxious by selling things—anything from his own particular brand of cigarettes to a new headache remedy that, in his opinion, far surpassed anything he had yet tried. Thomas Ingram was a successful life-insurance underwriter.
With Ingram came Major Sidney Hatfield, an Australian by birth, who had traveled the world over, played soldier-of-fortune, and was at present in some mysterious way connected with Ingram’s insurance firm.
Then there was McAdam, partner of the murdered Corlears; McAdam who was fat and porky-pink, who wore a frozen smile because his mouth was somewhat cramped with excessively large false teeth.
It was to such a dinner that Agent X came, at least as far as the front hall. He wore the disguise that had started his adventure with the sign of sudden death—the impersonation of Henry Jackson, crack agent of the F.B.I.
A servant seated X in a hall chair beside a screen of Chinese metal work and told him that he would ask if Mr. Malthus could see him. X had waited perhaps five minutes when catlike footsteps attracted his attention. The footsteps ended abruptly, as though their owner were listening intently for some one he feared might have followed him.
Just on the other side of the screen, the cat-footing man stopped. There was the distinct click of a telephone receiver being lifted from its hook, followed by the ratcheting of a telephone dial.
Long silence, and Agent X stood up in order to peer through the intricate piercing in the top of the Chinese screen.
“Hello,” a man’s voice whispered.
Elbow and shoulder rammed the screen and sent it toppling backwards. The man at the phone had turned at just the wrong moment and had detected the gleam of the Agent’s spying eye. The whisperer had moved, quickly and violently, but not quite fast enough to trap Agent X under the fallen screen. X had sprung clear of the screen and now stood facing the whisperer, a man of about thirty-five years of age, blond and handsome except for a badly broken nose. And the man was in the act of drawing a gun.
X sprang across the Chinese screen, met the man’s gun wrist with his left hand. A short, chopping blow to the man’s biceps left the fingers that held the gun numb and unresisting. X pulled the small automatic from the man’s hand and stepped back.
“Now,” he said quietly, “what is this?”
The broken-nosed man gulped, reached over and returned the telephone hand-set to its cradle. He said nothing.
AT THAT moment, Aaron Malthus, Dr. Ormand and Malthus’s other guests trooped into the hall, attracted, evidently, by the clang of the fallen screen. Malthus looked from X to the man with the broken nose. “Birr,” he said to the latter, “what does this mean?” Then he addressed X: “You are Mr. Jackson?”
X nodded. “And who, may I ask, is this china-shop bull who goes around wrecking your bric-a-brac and attempting to shoot your callers?”
“Birr, did you attempt to shoot Mr. Jackson? Birr, Mr. Jackson, is my secretary. He has never exhibited any of these strains of insanity before. Nelson Birr, did you hear me addressing you? What does this mean?”
“I heard you,” said Birr unpleasantly. “I regret any damage to the Chinese screen. There is a possibility that I acted hastily.” He turned to X and stuck out his hand. “May I have my gun? I have a permit to carry such weapons, something which is quite possible you have not.”
“True,” said X dryly. He returned the gun to Birr. If he was to accomplish his ends, it might be best if he appeared as little like an investigator as possible. He turned to Malthus. “May I see you a moment, Mr. Malthus, alone, if you please.”
“Certainly,” agreed Malthus. He waved his hand to Birr. His guests had already discreetly retired to the other room.
Agent X took out Jackson’s wallet from his own pocket, and also the federal man’s badge. Aaron Malthus’s dark skin became suddenly pale. Muscles at the corners of his unpleasant mouth twitched. “F-from the—Department of Justice,” he stammered dully.
“Exactly.” X returned wallet and badge to his pocket. “I would very much like to attend your dinner party.”
“Wh-what for? I mean, of course you’re welcome. But really, I’ve read of these G-men, but never expected to meet one face to face.”
It was hardly face to face, X thought as he said: “I do not want to alarm you, Mr. Malthus, but there is the possibility that you are in something of a tight spot.”
“You—you mean something might happen—to me?”
“Now, don’t alarm yourself in the least.” Malthus was heading for a nervous crackup, the Agent thought. “Just permit me to be one of your guests tonight. Is that agreeable?”
“Of course. I-I—” Malthus closed his mouth very tight. Then he waved his hand toward the room where the others had disappeared. X bowed slightly and joined Malthus’s guests.
“What is this I hear about you having a run-in with cops and robbers, Dr. Ormand?” inquired Charles McAdam as he seated himself in a chair. Dr. Ormand’s eyes and rimless glasses scintillated in the warm yellow light. “Oh, nothing at all.” He puffed contentedly at his foul, under-slung pipe.
“Particularly reticent about the encounter, isn’t he?” Ingram twitted. He looked at Major Sidney Hatfield and winked.
“Perhaps he was on the wrong side of the legal line,” Hatfield boomed jovially. Then he noticed Agent X and stiffened slightly.
Malthus introduced X lamely as “an old friend of my mother,” which, because of the youthful face X wore, probably seemed a bit strange to all present.
X kept an eye on Birr, the secretary. Birr was restless, but it was a more ponderous restlessness than that displayed by the birdlike Ingram.
“Tell us about it, Ormand,” Ingram insisted. Then he begged that X have one of his cigarettes—“positively the finest weed on the market today.”
“Well, I was simply called to the aid of a man who had been wounded,” Ormand explained. “ ‘Called’ is hardly the word, when you stop to consider that the man w
ho called me was a person known as Lefty Laughlin and the patient was Lewey Cassino.” He slowly and modestly related the encounter he had had the previous night.
Agent X hoped fervently that Ormand did not notice that he, Agent X, carried his left arm a little stiffly because of the self-inflicted wound.
While Ormand was concluding his story, X saw that Birr, the secretary, had again slipped from the room. The Agent turned quietly and reentered the hall, to catch Birr just as the latter was again lifting the phone.
Birr put the phone down as though it weighed a ton. His blond skin flamed.
Then hell broke loose.
THE SOUND was something like the explosion of a pack of fire-crackers, except that it was louder and more startling and somehow foreboding. Birr heard the sound, turned pale, and cursed. Agent X heard it and sprang toward the front door. Malthus’s guests heard it and tried to get through the hall door in a body.
Major Hatfield was heard to shout idiotically enough: “That’s gun fire!”
They trooped out of the house. Malthus brought up the rear, murmuring words that were halfway between prayer and blasphemy. On the front lawn, Agent X looked right and left, saw a black car sweep around the corner on two wheels. Nelson Birr had his gun out and would have fired at the careening car had not X checked him.
In the street, not far from the approach walk in front of the Malthus house, something showed like a ghost on the pavement—the body of a man, X saw, as he ran up. The corpse was encircled with a ring of white paint. A white cross quartered the circle and passed over the center of the body. There was a gory mess of blood and white paint on the breast of the man’s dinner jacket.
A policeman came up, his whistle shrilling. His call brought another who ran back to the corner call box to contact the Homicide Department. Agent X showed his, or rather Jackson’s, card to the police officer. The patrolman welcomed the assistance of a federal man, for he admitted that death of this nature was something that had not occurred on his beat before.
X knelt beside the body, looked at it without touching it. The man had been middle-aged, gray, and respectable-looking. He had dressed carefully, though his dinner kit was a trifle shabby.
“By thunder, Malthus,” Ingram exclaimed, “that’s your what’s-his-name!”
Agent X looked at the faces about him. Ingram was sputtery, Major Hatfield as immobile as a wooden Indian. McAdam was regarding Malthus strangely, and the fixed smile his false teeth made was somehow ghastly at a murder scene. Dr. Ormand was looking on with professional interest, placidly puffing his pipe. Birr was red and white by turns; his fingers seemed trying to squeeze assurance from the little automatic he carried. Aaron Malthus looked as though he sought a nice spot in which to faint.
“Know this man, Malthus?” X demanded.
“He—why, yes—of course I know him. Known him for years.”
“Then, why in hell don’t you speak up?” demanded one of the cops.
“He’s one of my partners,” Malthus explained. “His name is John Phelps. And what my firm will do without poor Phelps, I don’t know.”
“If you ask me,” Ingram said, “mine’s the firm that will suffer.”
A police car pulled to the curb, and Inspector John Burks tramped out, followed by four of his men. Agent X was immediately on his guard, for no one was better acquainted with X’s many tricks than Inspector John Burks. X turned his head slightly to watch the approaching police. His attention, however, leaped to the tall man who walked beside Burks. Then X quickly turned his head away. He stood up, muscles tense, and moved sidewise in Burks’s direction.
For the man beside Burks was not of the city police force. Impossible as it might seem, Burks’s companion was G-man Henry Jackson, himself.
CHAPTER VI
Dead Man’s Trap
THERE was no immediate explanation of what happened. The Agent’s movements were just a little too swift for the human eye to grasp the details. Every muscle in his lithe body seemed to explode in a bombshell of energy that left everyone breathless and baffled.
X turned on G-man Henry Jackson with the savagery of a tiger. His left fist, clutched tightly over something, jabbed for Jackson’s body and swerved sharply as though the punch had missed its mark. At the same time, his right hand went to the G-man’s collar, seized collar and tie-knot. He dragged Jackson’s body forward until their two heads all but touched, then thrust out his jaw and cried: “Got you, faker!”
McAdam pointed a shaky finger at X and the G-man and shouted: “Two of them!”
Burks saw double, too; but knowing of the Agent’s mastery in the art of impersonation, he knew that one of the two Jacksons was certainly X.
Jackson tried a punch that X skillfully thwarted and then returned with interest. Burks, and one of his men, stepped in and separated the two. That last punch of the Agent’s had not been without definite purpose. His hard, lean fist had driven all the breath out of Jackson and rendered the G-man speechless. So it was that X got in the first words, spat out furiously in perfect imitation of Jackson’s voice:
“Let me get that guy! He’s Agent X. He and a big fellow wearing a mask attacked me, laid me out someway, and stole my credentials and badge. The big guy kept me locked up in the bathroom. I’d be there yet, if I hadn’t managed to put over a fast one.”
Jackson, after catching his breath, said: “That’s my story, you crook!”
“And you’re stuck with it,” Jackson’s voice echoed from the lips of Agent X. X tore away from the detective and would have started the battle afresh had not Inspector Burks been in the way. Even then, he got a well-concealed chuckle out of landing a hefty blow on the inspector’s chest. The detective had X under control again, or thought he did.
“Search the pair of them,” Burks ordered. “This guy,” indicating Jackson, “just told me the same story in my office. These Feds are good, but they don’t know as much about handling Mr. X as I do.”
“Don’t be so damned sure, inspector,” X said. “Turn him over to me, and I’ll give you a first-class demonstration of what handling means.”
Jackson pointed furiously at X. “That’s my suit he’s got on. Any credentials you find on him are mine, and don’t you believe otherwise. He stole my papers and badge.”
And as the search progressed, Jackson forgot to talk. Makeup kit, a small tool kit, gas gun, and similar equipment, came from the pockets of the suit X was wearing. Jackson even looked as though he thought perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned the stealing of his clothes at all.
Burks asked, “Who stole what credentials and badge, my lad?” and thrust a wallet and a gold button under Jackson’s nose. “Those, I’ll have you know, I just took out of your pocket. Yet you told me he stole them!”
Jackson was beginning to feel a trifle dizzy. The badge and wallet were his. How they had appeared in his pocket, he couldn’t quite grasp. Had he thought about that first punch which X had brushed his body, he might have understood. That first punch X had handed out had been for but one purpose—to plant the stolen wallet and badge on their original owner.
Burks took charge of Jackson himself. “Keep a gun on the other guy’s head,” he warned the detective who had taken charge of X. “One of these boys is Agent X. And Agent X wears some kind of a screwy, bullet-proof vest that’s as good as a charmed life, almost. Get them into the house, and I’ll damned soon find out which of them is Mr. X.”
“I thought, Inspector,” said Major Hatfield, “that this was a murder investigation.”
“Huh?” grunted Burks. “Who d’yah think you are, mister?”
“Er, I happen to be connected with a certain life-insurance company as an investigator, and—” Hatfield began.
“Then you can confine your brilliance to shedding light on the poor widow’s sorrows.” Burks snapped.
“But,” Dr. Ormand objected, “you can’t leave a body in the street like that.”
“Oh, hello, Ormand,” said Burks, with slightly more respec
t than he deemed necessary in speaking to Hatfield. “The dead man can’t run away. Agent X can, as I have good reason to know.”
So the entire party was marched back into the Malthus house, where X and Jackson were forced back against the oak paneling of the staircase. X was standing beside the table on which the telephone lay. He contemplated the instrument as a possible weapon. He had never been more thoroughly cleaned out than by the detective who had just frisked him. Things began to take a more serious light.
Of the two “twins,” the innocent appeared by far the guiltiest. Inspector Burks approached Jackson, an unpleasant grin on his broad face. He reached up and pinched the end of Jackson’s nose. Jackson grunted:
“Ah, grow up, Inspector.”
Burks, less sure of himself, applied a fingernail to Jackson’s cheek. But he scraped off more skin than makeup. He knew instantly that he had drawn blank; that the other “Jackson” was Agent X. He wheeled on X, started to say something, but stood there, his powerful lower jaw sagging, and blood crowding his cheeks.
SECRET AGENT X held a flat, serviceable automatic in his hand. His gray eyes were mere steely points as they sighted over the weapon. Hands went up, police gun dropped beneath the menace of that gun and the cool-thinking man behind it. A mocking smile, that seemed especially for Inspector Burks, curved X’s lips as he backed from the room and out of the house. Then he wheeled and ran like a hare to disappear in the shadows.
The mystery man was gone, and Burks knew well enough that X would change his disguise en route, to become just another man among millions.
“But,” roared Burks, “where in hell did he get that gun? He was picked clean, yet right under my nose he snatches a gun out of empty air. By damn, the man’s clever!”
The only man who was more surprised than Inspector Burks was Agent X, himself. He didn’t know where that automatic had come from. He had detected the slight movement of something on the telephone table beside him. He had glanced down and seen a copy of a current magazine which had not been there a moment before. Furthermore, there was a large bulge in the magazine, as though its covers concealed some comparatively large object. Surreptitiously lifting the magazine front, his exploring fingers had closed on an automatic. A piece of paper had been clipped around the butt with a rubber band, and this he did not examine until he was safe in a nearby hideout—one of the many places of sanctuary he maintained throughout the city.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 46