cubicle behind his bookshop. Deft fingers twitched off a wig, erased skillfully applied paint, removed collodion strips that had widened nostrils, broadened a thin mouth. A flicker of movement, and a pajamaed young man moved slowly about his meagre living quarters, donning the dusty habiliments of a dreaming, other-wordly bookseller.
No one would wonder if he dozed off at his pamphlet-cluttered desk out there between the bookshelves. He always looked as if he were half-asleep anyway.
DEATH RIDES THE SOUND
THE shabby stores along lower Fourth Avenue are somehow furtive despite the apparent frankness of their decrepit outside-boxes of “Bargains in Used Books.” A film of gritty dust grimes these bedraggled offerings, smuts the unwashed window-fronts, seeps into the gloomy interiors of the shops and spreads gray haze over the absorbed browsers and somnolent attendants within. Those who frequent the vicinity know, or think they know, that its air of hangdog stealth cloaks neither sly criminality nor high intrigue, that it is rather the pitiable camouflage of outlived writings, and of men who have never known life.
Nowhere, perhaps, is there a drowsier back-eddy of musty quiet and stagnant uneventfulness than this. Yet, over one of the drab shops in this sleepy row the scythe of Death is suspended by a spider-filament taut to the breaking point. The merest whisper of suspicion into the ear of one of a half-score thin-lipped, stony-faced men sitting behind the guarded doors of secret rooms in far-off capitals would map that thread. The slightest hint reaching one of a hundred others; ghostly wraiths waging unacknowledged war in the dim underways of a world ostensibly at peace; and eager fingers would reach thousands of miles to sever its tenuous fibre. For something more than the life of a man hangs by that easily parted strand. A Nation’s fate depends on its strength.
Death, and the fear of death are silent, invisible sentinels at either side of the pamphlet-hung doorway in which Ford Duane folded his lanky limbs into a broken-backed swivel chair. Beneath their drooping lids his very blue eyes freeze suddenly to icy points and the scalp tightens under his brown shock of unruly hair. The glance of a passerby has lingered a fraction of a second too long on his spare frame!
Lithe muscles coil like steel springs, thin nostrils flare imperceptibly…but the paunchy man with the rusted-black derby shambles on and Duane relaxes. He knows there is nothing to fear from this particular individual; but how he knows, he cannot tell you. There is a sixth sense common to a hunter and hunted by which they recognize each other’s presence. And as both hunter and hunted, Ford Duane possesses that sense to a marked degree…
His head turns slowly to a tinny rattle from up the avenue. Its source is revealed as a leisurely approaching pushcart, piled high with gleaming kitchen utensils and shoved by a stocky, shirt-sleeved and sweating man. As Duane spies the portable store a raucous voice calls out: “Pails, axes, teenvare. Pails, axes, teenvare.” The corner of the bookseller’s mouth quirks.
A bent old woman, Victorian bonnet fastened to the straggly gray remnants of her hair by that almost obsolete instrument, a hat-pin, appears from the interior of his shop. One almost transparent claw grips a dog-eared volume of Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw and a professional gleam comes into Duane’s eye as he slouches erect, scenting a sale. “I can let you have that for…” he begins, but his face falls as the supposed customer squeaks, “Oh, I just want to get a pail from the man; my old one sprang a leak this morning.”
“By Jove,” the bookseller exclaims, “so did mine! Maybe we can get them cheaper if one of us buys two at a time. Here, you wait and let me get them.”
“Pails, axes, teenvare,” the peddler’s shout is repeated. He has other items in his cart, but his cry is unvarying. Does it convey any meaning to Duane? Is it merely coincidence that the same initial letters recur now in the pushcart man’s shout? “Pails, axes, teenvare.” Perhaps. But the shopkeeper’s stroll to the curb is too nonchalant, too open to have an ulterior meaning. Duane scarcely glances at the pails the peddler hands him at last, certainly they are twins, and the one he turns over to the old woman in exchange for her twenty-two cents is taken at random.
* * * *
DUANE moves through his shop with no apparent haste. He pauses to straighten a shelf and the shining bucket whose bail he has thrust over his arm clangs against its edge. But, veiled by the lax droop of their lids, Duane’s eyes slide over the idlers in the shadows, discreet challenge in their hazed depths. Only the old, familiar figures lurk in the shadows. A tiny muscle twitches in Duane’s smooth cheek and he reaches the half-open curtain swinging before the narrow alcove. There, only a rumpled camp cot and a two-burner gas plate indicate his living quarters. He turns to the right, is momentarily hidden from the store-room beyond. A slender wall of tight-packed books moves suddenly on well oiled hinges, swings back into place. The incident is lightning-fast. The musty alcove is just as it was before. Except that Ford Duane has vanished from it.
Behind that wall of shelved books is a cramped, windowless cubicle, not more than a yard square. When Duane seats himself on a high stool and sets the pail, top down, on a narrow wooden ledge attached to the inner wall, a fair-sized rat would have trouble finding room to squeeze in. A switch clicks and a powerful light, high up in the ceiling, pours down its radiance. The man’s sharp-edged face is no longer impassive. His eyes are ablaze with excitement and eagerness, his thin lips half parted. His long-fingered hand trembles slightly as he pulls out a drawer beneath the shelf and extracts from it a jeweler’s magnifying glass.
Fitting the lens into his right eye, Duane bends over the tin bucket, and scrutinizes its upturned bottom. Faint breath hisses from between his teeth and his hands tighten on the shelf edge. But the powerful light beating down on the tin disk reveals only a number of almost microscopic indentations, scattered at random over its shiny surface, tiny, pointed scratches such as no polished surface can escape, no matter how carefully it be handled.
The pseudo-bookman reaches for the drawer again, brings out a pencil, a sheet of paper, and another object. It is a disk of transparent celluloid, and as Duane places it on the pail bottom he sees that it is engraved with a series of close, concentric circles and radiating lines. Around the outermost circumference a series of letters are etched, and a circular space at the center is blank, except for three scratches very like those on the pail, triangularly arranged. Strangely enough a little juggling of the celluloid makes the three tiny markings in the center of tin coincide with the trio on the transparent disk. Duane grunts with satisfaction.
Each of the other scratches, seen through the engraved film, falls exactly within one of the tiny arcs marked off by the whitish circles and straight lines, and no two are between the same two circles. Duane catches up his pencil and jots down letters, swiftly.
In seconds, he is staring at this cabalistic line:
SBTRS * PLN * DSTRY * GSMSK * PLT * B * T
and his face is suddenly bleak, his mouth a straight, thin gash. His pencil moves again, swiftly, putting in omitted vowels:
SABOTEURS PLAN DESTROY GASMASK PLANT B—T
Duane’s lids narrow to hairline slits, and two white spots appear either side his pinched nostrils. Why has the mysterious individual known only as “T,” head of the American Counter-espionage Service, sent it to him?
For a long time there is no movement in the hidden chamber, no slightest sound except the deep, even breathing of a man sunk in deep thought. On the ancient continent that lies over the blue curve of the earth and sea armies are on the march, their grim weapons charged and ready, while the dictators who have set them moving mouth-phrases about “usual maneuvers” that they do not expect to be believed. The ranks are forming, but in each bristling front there is a vacant space. Holocaust waits for America, and America, remembering what Europe would have her forget,
