He stooped over Greenford, picked him up. Unobtrusive but steel-like muscles in the Agent’s shoulders snapped into life. As easily as though he had been a child, he carried Greenford’s unconscious body to a big chair and deposited it there, placing pillows behind Greenford’s back, propping him.
Then once again he began studying the man’s face. He studied it from all angles, noting the planes of it and the lines.
He walked to a closet in the apartment, drew a suitcase out, and turned it upside down. He pressed two brass studs in the suitcase’s underside and disclosed a cleverly concealed false bottom that would never have been suspected unless the suitcase’s sides and depth were measured. From this secret compartment he took an assemblage of make-up material. Thin vials of pigments and volatile plastic substances.
He locked the apartment door, spread his make-up equipment before a bureau mirror, and set to work. Glancing from time to time at the unconscious man in the chair, his fingers performed the magic that had made the Agent’s name one to conjure with. The man of a thousand faces — a thousand disguises — a thousand surprises, was at work again.
For twenty minutes his fingers moved dexterously. When he turned at last from the mirror, Greenford’s double seemed to be in the room. Agent “X” walked across the floor practicing Greenford’s characteristic movements. The Agent’s disguises went further than make-up. They became a study in muscular coordination as well. He spoke a few sentences, mimicked Greenford’s slightly blurred accent.
He searched Greenford then, took a wallet and papers from his pocket and found a money belt strapped around his middle next to his skin. The Agent’s fingers were tense as he opened this. It was stuffed with bank notes — bills of high denomination. He looked at their corners. A one and two noughts showed. Century notes!
He counted them. Fifty of them — five thousand dollars! Stacking the bills in a neat sheaf, the Agent pocketed them. They were not for himself. He had no need of money with the account in the First National Bank always ready to draw on. He had never made the test, but he felt sure that his own resources were practically unlimited. But he had a strange outlet for money confiscated from criminals.
There were blank papers in Greenford’s wallet. Agent “X” suspected that they held writing in invisible ink. They might give insight into Greenford’s strange vocation. But there wasn’t time to search for a chemical developer now — and the Agent had already drawn his own conclusions regarding Greenford’s character.
He drew the small hypo needle from his pocket again; emptied the colorless liquid from its tubular syringe, and refilled it from a small vial. This he injected into Greenford’s arm, close to a vein. The man would stay unconscious for a specific time now, or until “X” chose to administer an antidote.
Next he put Greenford’s slumped body into a ventilated closet and locked the door.
It was now after eleven. He descended to the street floor and passed the switchboard operator, who took him for a departing guest. He walked several blocks and hailed a cab. What strange and sinister adventure, he wondered, lay ahead of him at No. 40 Bradley Square?
Chapter VI
ONE thing he saw in his first glimpse of the house, and he gave a start of amazement. The building was closed up. It was a four-story brownstone mansion belonging apparently to the Victorian era. Protective boarding covered the windows on the first floor. The others on the floors above were dark and curtainless. There was a “for sale” sign on the building, showing whitely under the glow of the corner light. Bradley Square had become run down. Its past glories were gone. It was a place of quiet and decay. The once-flourishing park in its center had been turned into a playground for poor children. Deserted swings hung forlornly in the darkness like gibbets.
A drunken man moved tipsily toward the garish doors of a beer saloon at the far end of the square. A few rooming houses on the side where number forty stood showed dim lights through dusty windows.
The Agent walked past the house of mystery several times. What mad thing was this to bring a man to a deserted house? The dark, empty windows seemed to frown down upon him. Were there eyes watching him furtively somewhere in the blackness?
He looked at his watch again. Exactly midnight. A clock blocks away boomed the hour, sending cracked echoes across the square. The icy branches of the trees rattled in the night wind, making him think again of Bill Scanlon’s staring eyes and protruding tongue. Death seemed to lurk in the night around him. There was a grimly sardonic gleam in the depths of his eyes. It was into such situations, such places, that his strange commission led him.
He mounted the steps of number forty, pulled the metal end of an ancient bell wire. Somewhere far back in the empty house a thin jingle sounded. He listened. There was no answering sound of footsteps. He pulled the bell wire again. The jangle that awoke faint echoes seemed almost sacrilegious, as though he were disturbing the quiet of a mausoleum — disturbing the dead.
Then the hair on his scalp rose. He held himself tensely. Before him, the weather-worn door of the house opened. There was no one in sight, no sound of a human being, only the faint rusty movement of the hinges. A draft of stale air struck his face. The hallway before him was starkly empty. It was uncanny, awe-inspiring — more so than the sight of any sinister figure. The ghostly movement of the door made him think of the phantom strangler, of the invisible, awful thing that had already snuffed out the lives of four people.
But he moved into the house. It was cold inside with the coldness of a place that has long been empty. Behind him, with an eeriness that made his hair rise, the door swung shut. He was in absolute darkness. Was this a death trap? Had someone planned to lure Greenford to his doom? The Agent smiled bleakly again. He had lived too long in the presence of the Grim Reaper to fear him now. He had cast fear from his heart.
He struck a match, moved forward along the ancient hallway toward a flight of stairs ahead. The paint on the old walls was cracked and blackened with dust. The red plush carpet beneath his feet gave out little puffs of dust as he moved, and ahead, in the doorway leading to the big old-fashioned parlor, tattered, moth-eaten draperies hung, a last relic of decayed and dead gentility.
The parlor was as black as the opening of a tomb. He passed it quickly, ascending the stairs. “Top floor, rear,” the telegram had said. He moved past floor after floor, striking matches. In the wavering brief light that they shed, his shadow seemed to pursue him like a stalking fiend. He did not use his flash light. To do so would be out of character. It might throw suspicion on him if unseen eyes were watching.
He came at last to the top floor. Here all street noises were excluded. There was no sound anywhere in the old house. The house seemed to be silent, crouching, like a beast waiting for its prey.
The door of the rear top room was shut. He opened it, passed inside. The curtainless windows admitted a ghostly glow from the light in the next street far below. He saw a few pieces of broken furniture that the last tenants of the house had left behind. A springless iron bed, a chair with one rocker gone, a metal washstand twisted into a shapeless mass of rusty iron. There was no one in the room — no living thing. There was a closet and he opened the door of it, struck a match, looked in. That too was empty, save for a man’s old overcoat hanging there like a withered corpse.
BUT as he stepped to the center of the room again, a voice suddenly sounded — a voice so close and so harsh that it was like a dash of icy water thrown on him.