was trapped. A heave from his powerful shoulder burst open the bolt of the door. The door sprang open, and Krausman, gun in hand, stood in the room, looking bewilderedly about him.
Fassler, the scar-faced gunman, who for five years had been officially dead, had apparently vanished like a ghost.
His swarthy brow deeply furrowed, Krausman stared about the room. He walked over and opened the frosted glass door of the shower. Empty. He turned to a small linen-closet and opened it. Again he had drawn blank. But no—What was that square of blackness at one end of the closet? Krausman took a small fountain-pen flashlight from his pocket and switched on its needlelike ray. The light showed a large square hole that had been cut in the wall. It revealed the water pipes that led to the shower bath. Had this hole been left open in order to make the shower pipes accessible for repairs?
The alert mind behind the swarthy face of Peter Krausman had suggested a double purpose in this opening. He reached out his hand and touched the pipes with the tips of his fingers. His keen sense of touch had detected a slight vibration in those pipes. Then he knew how Fassler had engineered his surprising escape. The opening evidently extended down into the basement of the building. The pipes, had they been placed there expressly for the purpose, could not have offered a better means of descent.
But how had Fassler known of this opening? Surely he had not stumbled upon it by chance. For a moment, Krausman debated whether to follow. He decided that he wouldn’t. Fassler had gone unerringly to the one rat-hole that had offered him a means of escape. He had evidently the advantage of knowing much more about the building than the swarthy-faced man who, to all appearances, owned it.
It was an odd situation. And for a moment amusement glinted the eyes of the man who until an hour ago had never entered the Krausman Building. But it was a situation that to some extent explained the courageous actions of the man who appeared to be a wealthy merchant, unused to violence and hand to hand encounters with criminals.
For the swarthy face of the man, who at that moment had discovered a secret exit from the building, was merely the result of clever disguise. Beneath dark-colored pigment, beneath plastic material and face plates which had counterfeited Peter Krausman’s features in every detail, was a face that no living person had seen—the face of Secret Agent “X.”
Acting upon a tip that had traveled the length of the underworld’s grapevine telegraph, Agent “X” had taken advantage of the real Peter Krausman’s absence from New York. He had deliberately impersonated the wealthy jeweler, knowing to a certainty that the most ruthless gang of robbers that he had ever encountered had planned to loot the Krausman Store.
He had staked much to frustrate the thieves’ scheme. But his chief desire was to capture one of the members of the gang and thus dispel the mystery that had baffled the police. For though the idea seemed too ridiculous to warrant its publication in newspapers, the entire gang of murderous thieves seemed to be made up of criminals who had long since died. Scar Fassler was only one of a legion of corpse criminals.
Had some master scientist actually discovered the long-sought secret for reviving the dead? Had some mad doctor taken criminals, fresh from the execution room, and brought them back to life, to recruit a vast underworld army of men who, knowing death once, would not fear it a second time?
This was the riddle that Secret Agent “X” sought to solve. Wise in the way of the perverted geniuses who directed major crime groups, “X” knew that the knowledge of life eternal could be a greater scourge than all the lethal weapons that man could produce. Fear of death, he knew, was the only thing that prevented thousands of men from forsaking the law for the lawless.
CHAPTER II
GREEN EYES
* * * *
Turning from the shower room, Secret Agent “X” disguised as Krausman the jeweler, encountered the redheaded clerk who had conducted himself so courageously throughout the encounter with the criminals. His hair was a tangled mop, and his jaw was swollen.
“What happened to that scar-face?” he demanded excitedly. “I’ve seen that man before. He looked like a hood by the name of Fassler. But Fassler is supposed to be dead. You should have let me shoot him, Mr. Krausman.”
“No, Hobart. I wanted him alive,” declared Agent “X.” He conducted Jim Hobart to the closet in the shower room, and showed him the hole in the floor. “That will bear investigation, Jim. I hadn’t the slightest idea there was anything of that nature in here. It seems to be an avenue of escape well known to that criminal.”
Frowning, Jim Hobart looked from the opening in the floor to the swarthy face of the man who had employed him. Perhaps he was thinking that it was extremely odd that Peter Krausman did not know every detail of his own office.
“Did they get much loot?” Secret Agent “X” asked of his aide.
Hobart shook his head. “But that policeman was badly wounded. One of your customers, a Mr. Stinehope, was knocked out. That’s about all at this end of the line.”
“What do you mean by that?” inquired “X.”
“Why, Commissioner Foster is outside there now with a group of police and he told me that the officer who was shot got in an alarm before he entered the store. One of those special squad cars was on its way here when they encountered that mysterious black roadster with the mounted machine gun—the car that’s been made so much of in the papers.”
“X” seized Hobart by the arm. “Did it—”1
Hobart’s nod interrupted him. “The police car was completely wrecked. Only one of the men is expected to recover. No clues at all as to the mystery car. In fact, the mystery has deepened. It seems that the sole survivor of the police car wreck insists that he got in several shots at the driver of the death car. Two of the shots went home, he is certain. Yet the car steered unerringly on its course, the machine gun spitting death.”
“Maybe the driver of the black roadster wore a bulletproof vest,” the Agent suggested, “just as you and I did.”
Hobart nodded. “Possible, of course. But this cop, who’s expected to pull through, swears that he sent a bullet straight through the forehead of the driver of the mystery car. The driver didn’t so much as budge, he says. What is more, the cop recognized the man as Slash Carmody—who was executed in Sing Sing only a day or so ago.”
Frowning, Agent “X” turned toward the door of the office. On the other side of the broken glass, he saw a grave-faced man of medium height whom he recognized immediately as Police Commissioner Foster. Foster’s thin lips curved into a smile. He nodded at the man he supposed to be Krausman, opened the door and walked in.
“One of your customers informs me that you managed to frustrate this attempt to rob your store, Mr. Krausman. You are to be congratulated.”
Agent “X” shrugged. “I am afraid that your praise has fallen in the wrong place, commissioner. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Hobart, here, I wouldn’t be talking to you at this moment.”
* * * *
The police commissioner nodded at Hobart just a bit reservedly. Though the Hobart Detective Agency was rapidly making a name for itself, Foster habitually regarded all private detectives with suspicion.
Another man appeared in the office door. He was small, gray-eyed,
