In this low but steady light could be seen, through the glass lid, the occupant of the thing.
It was an elderly man, small, delicate, with a skin even more wax-white than dead skin usually is. The eyes were closed and sunken deep; but otherwise, so perfect a preserving job had been done that the body looked more like that of a sleeping man than a dead one.
The heavy owner of the house waddled deliberately to the side of the coffin and stood staring down.
“Hello, father,” he said.
There was a faint, far echo: “. . lo f…”
It was almost as if the stony lips in the casket, four years dead, had really replied. And with callous humor the grim fat man played up to the fantasy.
“I trust you are well this evening?”
The far echo whispered, “. . well… eve…”
“That’s fine. Did you know we had another visitor?” The elephantine humorist waited an instant as if the corpse had spoken. Then he went on: “Well, we did. A fellow managed the swim from the mainland again. I guess you weren’t as smart as you thought, when you bought this island. It would have been better to get one twenty or thirty miles out, instead of six, in spite of the difficulty of getting monthly supplies.”
He paused again, quite as if carrying on a conversation with the corpse.
“I know,” he nodded gravely. “You thought you were acting for the best. But you weren’t. If you had been, you’d have left something better than those damned medallions. A fine heritage they are.”
He hesitated, then shrugged.
“Oh, you think they are a good heritage! You would, revered father. But then, you quite evidently had a screw loose. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have insisted on being put here in the vault in an open coffin instead of being decently cremated or buried. Did you think you’d come to life again, with about six quarts of embalming fluid in you?”
The gross figure laughed, then turned and waddled back toward the stairs, unblinking, phlegmatic, moving like a tank rather than a human being. He left behind him the unburied corpse of Wendell Haygar, once the greatest of them all, builder of this house, father of what, it would seem, was a most irreverent son.
CHAPTER X
Answer in Arabic
The second Shan Haygar, who had had the first clubbed and stabbed to death under The Avenger’s cold, pale eyes, was not at all a fool. Before binding Benson, he had had a man search him.
The man, gingerly going over the average-sized body that had proved so amazingly strong, had come across Mike and Ike.
The two little weapons, so deadly in Benson’s slim, steely hands, did not look like much by themselves.
“Nothing but a funny little gun,” said the searcher, sliding Mike back into the slim leg holster, “and a small knife with a peculiar handle.” He slid Ike back, too. “Want me to—”
“Leave them in place,” said the tall leader indifferently. “We might as well throw them overboard on him as by themselves.”
For, after all, what could a man with his hands bound behind his back do with any amount of queer small weapons?
Probably no other man could have done much. But the moment Dick hit the water and was dragged under, he bent his strong body backward like a spring.
He could touch the back of his head with the soles of his feet, like a contortionist. But he didn’t bend that far. He arched his spine till his bound hands could touch Ike, below his left knee.
All this time he was being dragged swiftly down by the section of iron rail. There was already a drumming at his ears and a tight feeling like a band around his head.
Thirty-five or forty feet, he judged it, from an adventurous past in which, for a time, he had been a pearl diver. He sawed at the tough rope from ankles to iron.
At sixty feet, there was a sensation of colored lights bursting behind his eyeballs, and his body ached. Even he could not take much more…
The rope parted, the iron went on down, and Benson began slowly to rise. He was not yet in distress for oxygen; he could hold his breath a little over three minutes, if it were imperative.
He did not try to accelerate his rise to the top, just went up at the slow pace, natural to a sunken body with air in it. And meanwhile he worked at the rope around his wrists.
He held life literally by a hair in his fingers in the shape of the little throwing knife. If he ever dropped Ike from his awkward clasp, it was the end!
He didn’t try to saw through the cords. He maneuvered the knife till he got the point and then the edge up under the bonds and between his wrists. After that he just pressed, and was thankful for the hair-splitting edge on the fine steel blade.
He was beginning to want air, so he kicked his bound feet to speed his ascent a little before cutting the rope from his ankles. He sheathed Ike, saw dim pink as the surface was almost reached, then saw it blotted out, and felt his head strike something firm but yielding.
His pale eyes probed the water. It was a body. A blue and mottled face peered at him with sightless orbs, and he recognized the features of Shan Haygar — or at least the man who had called himself that before being killed by another who insisted that he was Shan Haygar.
The Avenger caught the body by the shoulders and eased it slowly up till his own head was hidden by its bulk. He could feel as well as hear the throb of the boat’s propeller and knew it was not too far off.
He waited there in the growing dawn till he couldn’t hear it any more, then looked over the sodden bulk of the dead man.
The boat was a speck far off. Benson swam toward shore, towing the dead man with him.
He came out at Governor’s Island. He searched the dead man. The other fellow had left little in his pockets. The only thing that seemed to have any significance was part of a newspaper page, with a faint mark at an ad.
He left the body to be found by the regular police. A night watchman at a nearby dock greeted him sympathetically when he said he had fallen off a boat and had to swim to shore. There was a little stove in the watchman’s shack. The Avenger dried his clothes, took a ferry back to Manhattan, and examined the bit of newspaper again.
It was from an Arabic paper. The ad marked was that of an enterprising boat concern that rented cruisers of all types for special trips.
He phoned it, as soon as the morning was advanced enough for places of business to begin opening.
“Yes,” said whoever answered the phone at the boat firm, “a fellow such as you describe rented a boat yesterday. A Turk, from his looks and name. We get a good many customers from our ads in foreign-language newspapers—”
“Did the man say where he wanted to go?” Benson interrupted the flow.
“Who did you say you were?” said the voice cautiously.
“Police calling,” said Benson. That was true enough. He held a special badge. Probably, with this murder charge hanging over him, it had been recalled. But there was no need to go into that here.
“I got an idea that the man was going to some island off the coast of Maine,” the voice replied. “He kept mentioning the Maine coast and looking at a chart we have. But he didn’t say which one. So that is only a guess.”
The Avenger thanked his informant and hung up, pale eyes glinting as they stared at the scrap of paper with the strange Arabic characters printed on it. An answer in Arabic? It might very well turn out to be.
That early morning light found the giant, Smitty, and the diminutive blond bombshell, Nellie Gray, trailing a taxi out through Newark toward, apparently, the airport.