“Where is he?”
Into the butler’s eyes came a look of cunning.
“All right. Put me down. I’ll tell you where to get him.”
Smitty put him down.
“His den,” said the butler, rubbing his neck, “is on the second floor, at the rear of the hall.”
So Smitty went up the broad, curved staircase, emerged onto the second floor — and then ducked far to the right and lunged forward.
The duck got his head out of the way of a gun barrel that had been whistling toward it. The lunge presented his hands with a pair of ankles.
The cunning look had been put into the butler’s eyes by the fact that two guards were at the head of those stairs, standing just around the corner, out of sight. As Smitty had ascended, they had crouched; and one had leaped when he topped the staircase.
This one yelled as his ankles seemed to be detached from the rest of his legs by those tremendous hands. He dropped his gun. On the other side, his companion charged in and started kicking at Smitty’s head.
Smitty was mad anyway, and this double-dealing didn’t put him in a more amiable frame of mind.
He straightened up, bringing the ankles up with him, which dumped the owner of the ankles rather harshly on his head. He whirled the man like an Indian club, and a skull drove into an abdomen!
Then Smitty left the two on the floor and walked, not toward the rear of the hall, but toward the front. It was not his experience to find the rooms inhabited by the master of any house in the rear. They were usually in front.
At the end of this hall there was a door. Smitty opened that door. A man, so thin that he looked transparent and with deep-set gray eyes like faint torches far back in his head, stared calmly at him.
“I’m Marr,” the elderly man said. “Who are you? Why have you forced your way in like this?”
CHAPTER V
Captive Giant
In the face of this courteous but blank reception, Smitty had nothing to say for a minute. He stood on the threshold, marshaling his thoughts. Then he stepped in.
“I work for Richard Benson,” he said.
Marr didn’t pretend not to know that name. He nodded.
“I know of Mr. Benson. A power in the financial world at one time, I believe. And still extremely wealthy the rumor has it.”
The rumor was right. Benson had access, from a former adventure, to all the gold of the Aztecs, their main hoard, hidden from the Spanish invaders centuries ago. It was possible that he could lay his hands on more wealth than any other man on earth. But Smitty didn’t bother to say any of that.
“What interest,” said old Marr, “would Benson have in me, that he should send a man of his here?”
“He didn’t send me,” said Smitty. “I just came in. I came because a girl I was after seemed about to enter here, and then was kidnaped.”
“I thought I heard a shot a moment ago,” said Marr. “So a girl was kidnaped. Who?”
“All I know is, her name is Doris Jackson,” said the giant Smitty.
“Why was she kidnaped?”
“I don’t know that. She is supposed to have some message to give Mr. Benson. But we don’t know what message, because she has never gotten through to him. Now, she has been taken away — to shut her up, I guess.”
He glowered at Marr, and Marr stared evenly back, quite a gentle-looking old man for one so powerful.
“Who is she, anyway?” Smitty snapped. None of Benson’s aides were impressed much by wealth or the owners thereof. “Why was she coming here?”
“I have never met anyone named Doris Jackson,” said Marr. And Smitty was reluctantly persuaded that there was truth in his voice. “I have no notion why she should have been coming here. If, indeed, she was. Are you sure of that?”
Smitty wasn’t sure. She might have been going any place along here.
“Well,” he rumbled, feeling awkward, “do you know a guy named Robert Mantis, then?”
“Never heard of him,” replied Marr. And again Smitty was grudgingly convinced he was telling the truth.
He tried one more thing, on the slightest of hunches. He was still wondering about the man in the cab who had so innocently blocked his path, during the chase of the taxi with the girl in it.
“A young fellow,” he said, “with very black and very live-looking eyes. Has hair that grows back from his forehead on each side and down in a wide peak in front. He’s a little bigger than average, and he walks and moves like he’s powerfully strong. Kind of handsome. Know him?”
Now, the other two he had asked about, he had designated by name. Marr had denied knowing of them, and Smitty had believed him. This third party, Smitty could only describe — and not too completely at that.
Yet, he did not quite believe Marr, when the auto magnate said: “No, I don’t think I have ever seen a man like that.”
The giant couldn’t have told you why he got a different reaction from this denial.
Not a muscle of Marr’s face changed a line. His eyes didn’t waver or have any different shading. But Smitty had felt inclined to believe him before, and this time he didn’t feel so inclined.
But he didn’t know what he could do about it. You don’t wring answers from a man like Marcus Marr, and then call him a liar and cuff him around when you don’t feel like believing the answers.
“Thanks for letting me have a few minutes of your time,” Smitty said, baffled.
“Not at all,” said Marr courteously. He stared at the giant’s tremendous torso. “Do my guards need… er… hospital attention?”
“Who?” said Smitty absently. “Oh — the guards. I don’t think so. I was pretty easy on them.”
Which, the guards might have said, when they came to about twenty minutes later, was certainly a matter of opinion. Quite definitely, they didn’t think he had been easy on them.
Smitty sighed and went downstairs and to the iron-grilled street door. Once again, he failed to note a vindictively pleased glint in the eyes of the butler.
The butler had been staring out the glass of the door, between the ornamental iron bars, for the last few minutes. And he had seen something that made him look forward to the next few.
But Smitty didn’t sense that at all. He didn’t even look at the outraged butler; he just opened the door and stepped across the small circle toward his cab, still at the curb.
He did take the precaution to note that his driver was at the wheel. He was thinking exclusively of Marr when he muttered to the man: “Bleek Street, Justice, Inc.”
He opened the cab door.
A man stared up malevolently from the floor, and from the same direction a .45 automatic slanted at him. It pointed toward his head, not toward his chest, which had the celluglass garment under the coat to shield him from bullets. Nothing shielded his head!
“What—” mumbled Smitty, caught completely off base, for once.
“Stand easy, big boy,” said the man, gun and eyes not moving at all.
Smitty’s physical faculties were trained to take powerful advantage of the slightest relaxation of an enemy’s guard. So were the faculties of all The Avenger’s aides.
But sometimes that very power of concentration can be a drawback. As it was in this instance. Because Smitty was watching so hard for a break from the gunman with the .45 leveled at his head, he didn’t hear steps as men tiptoed behind him.
From the door, however, the butler saw the three men sneak up. He had seen them arrive in a sedan and hide between this building and the next, after which the sedan had slid on down the block. He hugged himself as he saw the men get right up behind Smitty.
“All right,” said the man in the cab. “Lean down and get in the cab, on the floor.”
Smitty leaned, all right. He thought it was the break he’d been after. He leaned toward the man like a falling tower, to grab at that gun. And the foremost of the three unseen behind him, struck hard.