scarlet finger jerked, a dull plod sounded, a fine mist sprayed from the American’s gun muzzle, a vaporous cloud about the spy’s head. His body twitched, then, was limp. His hand opened. The ball was dropping—seemed to hang in space as if reluctant to loose the cataclysm it enclosed. Lightning quick, Red Finger sprang forward, his hand darted out, was under the death-sphere! The fragile crystal nestled into a soft, gloved palm; fingers, one carmine, closed gingerly about it. Before Odon’s flaccid form had thudded to the floor and settled to its final lax sprawl, the tiny murder-bomb had vanished into some interstice of the other’s clothing and his revolver was back again in the queerly-marked hand that had so dexterously averted disaster. Pent breath whistled from behind the mask, and a muffled voice exclaimed, “Close, by George! Too damn’ close for comfort.”
Red Finger allowed himself only that instant’s consideration of what would have followed failure. Then he dropped, lithely as all his motions were, to his knees beside the still form of his victim. A moment’s fumbling and the long roll of blueprints was transferred to his own person. The squat automatic was next. Red Finger’s hands trembled as they extracted a thin glass sliver containing a murky yellow jelly. The clipped letters that had been Lassiter’s doom appeared in the fanlike beam of the counter-spy’s torch. Red Finger held these for a moment, scrutinizing the handwriting. “Marie Prall,” he muttered. “Back at her old tricks. If Lassiter had only known what I do about her…”
Here lay the real tragedy of this incident in the underground warfare that wages continually between spy and counter-spy in every city of the world. The woman for whom the engineer had, with woefully mistaken chivalry, sacrificed his honor and his life was an international adventuress, her services at the command of the highest bidder…
* * * *
The packet stowed in the capacious recesses of his garments, Red Finger turned to contemplate Odon. “I’d like to leave you here,” he addressed the still figure grimly, “for the city cops to find. But your compatriot fireaters would welcome the indictment of the Baron Odon for murder in America, it might be just the spark they need to destroy the peace of the world. War’s coming sooner or later, but my jobs to stave it off as long as I can.” He shrugged, “And so, my dear Odon…”
Red Finger lifted himself erect, out of the glow of the torch that he had laid on the floor. Fabric rustled. A click, and the lamp came on, the black covering whisked from its shade. A red-haired youth was visible, freckled-faced and grinning, attired in the emerald green uniform of the St. Vincent’s bellhops. He was twenty-two or thereabouts, his deceptively slender body concealing muscles of steel, sinews of whipcord.
He bent again, lifted the squat spy effortlessly, propelled the unconscious man toward the door. So cleverly was it done that anyone watching would have sworn that he was a hotel guest who had drunk not wisely, but too well, who was being guided to his room by an urchin half-amused, half-bored. And it was thus that the two progressed through the dim-lit hotel corridor, up a flight of stairs, and into another room directly above that in which sudden death had come to one more dupe of the new international espionage.
Here Odon was tossed, still fully dressed, on a bed. The putative bellhop did a curious thing then. He got down on the floor, squirmed under that very bed. In seconds he was out again, dragging after him a small black box from which two filament-like wires trailed. On top of the flat contrivance a perforated disk showed, the earpiece of the device that combined stethoscope and radio-amplifier to make eavesdropping a facile thing. It was evident now how he had been able to time his appearance at the psychological moment.
The youth crossed to a window, pulled it up, and hurled the contrivance out. The crash of its landing came faintly up to him, at the end of a twenty-one story fall to hard concrete. There wouldn’t be enough left of the instrument to tell even a paleontologist what it had been. A last quick glance around to see if there were any other trace of his long vigil here, then the door opened and Odon was alone, sleeping stertorously on the bed where he had been placed. Peculiarly enough, when he woke in the morning he would find that the room had been registered in his name, the night’s rental paid. And, very wisely, he would slink away into the vagueness of the furtive land in which he moved, nursing a headache and the sourness of defeat…
* * * *
The stoop-shouldered man with a florid face bleared by bad liquor who shambled unsteadily up a slimy tenement stoop on Third Avenue resembled neither the dusty Ford Duane who kept a bookshop on Fourth, just behind, nor the red-haired, grinning bellhop of the Hotel St. Vincent. He had trouble in finding his key, this derelict, and a watchful cop had already started to walk over from across the cartracks before the unpainted door in the dark vestibule opened. Once in the dimly-lit hallway reeking with stale smell of yesterday’s corned beef and cabbage and the boiled fish of the week before, the man padded down creaking wooden steps silently, turned left between white-washed cellar walls to the shabby room that he rented from a hard-pressed janitor for a dollar a week. His hand closed on the knob of the skewed door. A voice said, “Hold it that way, you. Just that way.”
The man froze. From the shadows beyond, two forms materialized. Rough fingers clutched his arms, digging in. “Chees, guys,” the bum whined, “yer shinnying the wrong pole. I ain’t got a jit, honest I ain’t.”
A guttural chuckle sounded, then a second voice said, thickly, “You might so well not try that, Chohn O’Hara. Or maybe you like better that I call you Red Finger? Save your breath for a prayer, because your tricks are all through.”
The Bowery accent dropped from the captive’s speech, and he slumped wearily, the hands holding him apparently his only support. “Oscar Thorn!” he groaned in defeat, “you—” His speech choked suddenly, and he exploded into action. One foot lifted behind, lashed out and plunked into a soft groin. And Duane’s left arm was free.
His hand flashed to a armpit; a knife gleamed in the dimness. He whirled, and steely muscles ripped away from the other retaining clutch. His quick twist showed him a second blade sweeping down at him. He caught it on his own, parried it with consummate skill. His opponent, bulky, obese, grunted, dodged back, came in again with surprising agility. But the American’s muscles vibrated like tempered springs, he flashed in and out again—and the battle was over. A heavy form thudded to broken concrete.
Ford Duane whipped to the other man squirming on the basement floor. A pencil ray shot from a thin torch in his hand, kicked a brutish face out of the darkness, blue-jowled. He studied that face for a fleeting instant, came to a quick decision. “You,” he snapped. “Do you know what this is all about?”
The fellow groaned. “Cripes,” he blurted. “No! De guy asks me does I want ter make a sawbuck beatin’ a guy up an’ I says I’d work over me own gran’mudder fer dat. Den he brings me in here an’ we lays fer yuh. Gawd, if I’d knowed…”
“All right,” Duane interrupted. “That’s all I want to know. You can make that ten yet, and another like it if you will do as I say, and keep your mouth shut.”
“Gawd,” the other grunted, unbelievingly. “Ye’re an all right guy at that. What’ve I got ter do?”
* * * *
A half-hour later there was a new-made grave in the soft dirt of the tenement’s backyard. A bewildered gorilla was climbing a fence on the way to freedom. Duane watched his shadowy form disappear in the graying dawn, sighed, and turned wearily back into the basement.
Once more he was at the door of the cellar room that had once been a coal-bin. That door thudded softly behind him, and his tired footsteps seemed recurring echoes of that thud in the windowless dark. A bedstead creaked, hinges grated softly. And there was no longer anyone in that other room.
But—moments
