There was one course open to him, one he planned to follow. He would haunt the Mephistopheles Club, watch developments there, shadow Nick Baroni.
WHEN night came, he was among the first arrivals. Disguised as a young man about town, he played heavily at the gambling tables to avert suspicion. He began to win. Here was more money that would go into Betty Dale’s fund for crime victims.
But he ceased playing when ten o’clock came and when he saw the gross form of Nick Baroni entering the room.
For a moment the big gangster, puffing on a cigar, swept the gambling tables with cold, alert eyes. Then, while his bodyguards moved quietly into chairs around him, he settled himself before one of the roulette wheels. He began playing with the elaborate, solemn concentration of a man to whom gambling is a serious business.
Tonight, Baroni had more torpedoes with him than usual. There were six of the sleekly dressed, vicious-looking young men. With cigarettes dangling from their bloodless lips, their eyes were ever alert. It seemed that their right hands were never far from their right coat pockets, where flat automatics rested. There was a tenseness about them as though they expected trouble. Had Sam Dwyer, terror of the river front, made some veiled threat, warned Baroni that this was his territory?
The tenseness increased when, toward midnight, Baroni left the gambling room and seated himself at a dinner table. The Secret Agent saw why. He saw Baroni’s sloe-black eyes shift across the room. Saw his face muscles stiffen.
There, seated at a table near the wall, was Sam Dwyer, Baroni’s hated rival. The river-front gangster was a thinner, younger man. There was a mocking light in his eyes as he looked across the room at Baroni.
Spatted, immaculately dressed, with the corner of a white handkerchief thrusting from his upper coat pocket, Dwyer looked like a fashion plate. But there was a hard, lean wolfishness about him that matched the older man’s pudgy viciousness.
Ostentatiously Dwyer rose from his seat and walked across the room. Elaborately he bowed to Baroni and gripped his fat white hand. The two men smiled, stared at each other, and hatred glared from their eyes. Baroni’s bodyguards edged nearer, their chalky faces glowing like pale, evil moons against the shadows of the room, their hands tensing like talons. Dwyer’s crafty eyes flashed toward them. He smiled again. The Agent couldn’t hear what was being said, but he knew that Dwyer was giving vent to some mocking pleasantry. The two men seemed like old friends. It was only the bitter lights in their eyes that revealed the murderous enmity they bore each other. The room grew silent, tense.
But Dwyer walked quietly back to his table. He appeared to have no bodyguards around him. He appeared to have come to the Mephistopheles Club alone; but, while he had been talking to Baroni, the tables around the entranceway had filled. Well-dressed, quiet-moving young men, singly and in groups, had entered.
They paid no attention to Dwyer, or he to them. But when Nick Baroni saw the newcomers, a pastiness crept over his fat face. The Agent, watching hawklike, saw the pudgy fingers holding the cigar begin to tremble.
Smiling slightly, Sam Dwyer was studying his menu. The waiters scurrying about the room looked suddenly like small scared rabbits. Whispers ran among them and among the guests. There were covert glances. Frightened gestures. The manager of the Mephistopheles Club walked jerkily across the floor and went up to Dwyer’s table. His face was pale. He remonstrated with the gangster.
Dwyer waved him airily away.
Many guests, still in the middle of their meals, began to rise and hastily leave. Girls, the color suddenly gone from their faces, asked their escorts to take them out. The room was slowly emptying, as the stalking shadows of murder crept out from the walls.
The orchestra on its stand played on, but the music took on a thin, sickly quality. The eyes of the musicians darted from their printed notes to the two groups of men facing each other. Their hands trembled on the keys of their instruments. The rhythm became broken, macabre, like a dance of death.
Baroni was slumped in his seat now. He was trying not to show the fear that made his features dough colored — trying not to let on that he was aware of the showdown that faced him. The stubs of two cigarettes spiraled smoke in the ash tray before him. He lit another and dribbled smoke through his heavy lips and nostrils. The whites of his eyes had taken on a yellow tinge as they wandered toward those tables across the room. He and his bodyguards were outnumbered. Dwyer’s friends had come in strength of two to one.
The Agent’s gaze was upon Dwyer. What would the signal be that would let hell loose in this room?
The sleek, bland face of Sam Dwyer gave no hint But, as the Agent watched, Dwyer’s well-manicured fingers lifted slowly and touched the handkerchief in his front coat pocket. He took it out, wiped his lips delicately. When he replaced it, he thrust it down out of sight.
It was a slight gesture, almost insignificant; but it was the prearranged gesture that started the fireworks. It was the fuse that lighted the bomb of human hate and ferocity.
In one and the same moment, the men around him left their tables and backed against the wall, drawn guns suddenly appeared in their hands. Dwyer slipped out of his seat as quickly and gracefully as a dancer executing a pirouette. With a hoarse bellow of fear, Nick Baroni lurched sidewise in his chair, deliberately flinging himself flat on the floor. He did it to escape the stream of bullets that lashed the spot where his body had been.
Chapter XIV
THE Agent had witnessed many gun fights, but never one which began with such deadly sudden ferocity as this. Both sides were shooting to kill, shooting to achieve the greatest slaughter in the shortest space of time.
Baroni had escaped the first blast of bullets. His huge body was half hidden by the table which he had overturned. It was all that saved him. His bodyguards were crouching, their eyes black, evil slits. Like Dwyer’s men, guns had appeared miraculously in their hands. They answered the fusillade from across the room with a volley that sent a wave of sound blasting back against the walls.
The musicians left their stand, stumbling off it amid a jumble of hastily dropped instruments. They scurried out of sight. The few remaining guests outside of the members of the two gangs, leaped to safety. Only Agent “X” remained as witness of the crimson carnage that was taking place.
He sat at a table close against the wall. There was a heavy portière near by. He drew it in front of him.
The fighting men paid him no heed; but he knew that he risked a stray bullet any moment.
One of Dwyer’s men had fallen to the polished floor of the club. He pressed a hand to his side, screamed, thinly, horribly. A gunman in the employ of Baroni suddenly threw up his hands and took three staggering steps forward. There was a blue hole in the center of his forehead, a surprised look on his evil face. Even before his body hit the floor, there came the vicious splat of three more bullets striking him. He crumpled up and lay still, a crimson stain slowly spreading outward.
Dwyer, a gun in his hand, and the look of a demon on his face, was edging forward. He shouted some orders to his men. They spread out, slinking along the walls, creeping closer to the group who faced them. Dwyer himself crouched behind a chair. His gun spat.
Another Baroni man dropped to the floor. Lying with one arm twisted under him, he kept up a murderous fire, until his automatic clicked emptily. Then, painfully, slowly, he began filling the clip from his pocket until a second bullet shattered his wrist. He screamed then and crawled away toward the wall.