There were two men on the roof. They were in regular suits; but their coats were cut a little long, and looked almost like military garments. The erect, stolid carriage of the two men looked military, too.
Benson paced with his panther tread to the front of the room and looked out on Bleek Street.
There were two men across from the doorway, over which hung the Justice sign. There were two more at the dead end of the block. There were three at the opposite end of the street.
The Avenger’s face, dead as wax, motionless as gray steel, disappeared from behind the slats of the blind. His colorless, marksman’s eyes were as brilliant as moonstones with a light behind them.
This was no crew of thugs. This was no criminal gang. It was something on the order of an army corps stationed all around the Bleek Street headquarters. He was up against the method and precision of a military machine, not fighting unorganized killers.
Nellie Gray watched him from the long table in the center of the room.
“How are you going to get out of here, chief?” she said.
“I’m not worrying about getting out,” Benson said. “But I want to get out unobserved. And that seems a bit tricky.”
He walked to the television radio and tried once more to get Mac at the drugstore. But the call was unanswered by either Mac or Josh.
“They wouldn’t have left,” said Benson, “unless Mac had discovered what he was hunting for: an antidote to the frosted death. And if he had found that, they wouldn’t have rested till they had come here with it.”
Nellie nodded, her shrewd brain pacing his own.
“So,” she said, “something has happened to them.”
“And to the antidote it is reasonable to suppose Mac found,” Benson nodded.
He glanced once more at the two big, square-shouldered men on the garage roof.
“Is Miss Sangaman down on the second floor?” he asked.
Nellie Gray nodded. “She’s asleep, poor lamb. Worn out.”
“What room has she? I wouldn’t want to disturb her.”
“The blue room, in front.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Benson. “Unless something goes wrong, she won’t hear anything.”
He went down to the second floor.
The corridor there ended in the rear, it seemed, in solid plaster and brick wall. But Benson went toward the wall as if he intended to walk right through. Which, as a matter of fact, he did.
He pressed a certain spot. The end of the hall, five by seven and a half, moved a little. The entire end wall was a secret door, leading out onto the garage roof. Out there, serrated edges of red brick, that you would never notice when they were properly in place, moved a bit with The Avenger’s push.
Having unbarred the secret door, Benson opened a panel in it which consisted of one brick that telescoped down into the false one beneath it, at the touch of a button. He peered out the little opening.
One of the two men out on the roof was staring over the edge into the narrow areaway beside the garage. The other — glared with startled eyes directly into Benson’s colorless ones. He had just happened to be looking right at that spot of innocent brick wall when one of the bricks seemed to melt out of it.
Benson’s right hand whipped down to the calf of his leg. It whipped up again with Mike, the silenced, special .22, leveled through the aperture.
The Avenger didn’t seem to aim at all. Yet the slug that lisped from Mike’s silenced muzzle hit its target within a sixteenth of an inch. As, indeed, it would have to, to conform to The Avenger’s rule of disabling but never killing with his own hand.
It went through a stiffly worn derby at precisely the spot to slam against the very top of the man’s skull, to “crease” it, and stretch the man out on the roof as unconscious as if he had been chloroformed.
The man had started to yell to his comrade when the bullet clipped him. However, his gasp must have warned the other, at the roof edge, for he whirled and saw his prone accomplice.
The result was funny, in a mad, dangerous sort of way. The man didn’t know what had happened. Something had knocked his comrade out, but nothing was in evidence. There was no other person on the roof. On one side was thin air, where the garage fronted. On the other was blank wall for ten feet, and then closed windows of the top-floor room.
The man dropped swiftly to his knees, gun whipping out. He looked all around, trying to see in every direction, at once — and saw nothing, anywhere.
The Avenger coldly and calmly ended his dilemma for him by squeezing Mike’s trigger again. The second man went down, unconscious.
Benson opened the secret door, walked out onto the roof, and picked up the nearest of the two. The limp figure was beefy, must have weighed around two hundred pounds; but The Avenger carried him without taxing his superb physique in the least.
He took the man into the building, shut the concealed door tightly again, and carried him lightly up the stairs.
In the big room he nodded wordlessly to Nellie. She knew what the nod meant. She went to a corner and got a small but very compact case and brought it to her chief.
A major miracle was about to occur.
The tremendous nervous shock that paralyzed Benson’s face had left it in a curiously plastic state. The features couldn’t move of themselves. But under prodding fingers, they could be molded into any shape desired — and would stay there. The result was that Benson had really two names to the underworld. He was The Avenger.
And he was the Man of a Thousand Faces.
He could deftly mold his countenance into the exact resemblance of almost any other face; and when proper color eyes and facial tinting were added, he was that other man.
He prepared to become somebody else now.
He propped up the unconscious man he had brought in from the roof. Beside the man’s face, he placed a small mirror. By looking into the mirror, Benson could see his own wax-white countenance close beside the other man’s florid face.
He opened the case.
It was a make-up kit such as couldn’t be duplicated anywhere outside of a large Hollywood studio. There was a tray in which dozens of tissue-thin glass shells reposed. The shells were tiny cups, designed to fit over Benson’s colorless eyeballs. On each pair was painted a slightly different colored pupil. Thus, by selection, The Avenger could acquire brown eyes, or blue, or amber, or any other color.
He slipped a pair of shells with gray-brown pupils over his eyeballs, holding the unconscious man’s eyelids open for an instant, to check the color again. Then he began to manipulate the modeling-clay texture of the flesh of his face.
The nose flattened, broadened, became slightly bulbous at the tip. The cheeks became shallower, fleshier-looking. With a careful hand, Benson tinted the result to the high, florid color of the man. Then over his shock of snow-white hair, he drew a wig with close-cropped, light brown hair.
He estimated the height of the man.
“Shoes,” he said to Nellie, “with two-and-one-quarter-inch lifts.”
He was in the unconscious man’s suit when Nellie Gray got back. He put on the height-adding, special shoes and the man’s derby, with the two little holes in it where Mike’s venomous small bullet had gone in and out again.
And The Avenger was that man!
Benson went through the pockets of the garments he wore. He was, he discovered, a man by the name of Molan Brocker. There was a recently stamped passport in his coat pocket, from a powerful European nation, announcing that fact.
Beside the passport, there was a little money. But there was only one bit of paper of any kind. That was the torn-off corner of an envelope. The corner contained a printed return address. The address read: Klammer Importing Co., Fifth Avenue.