Mac’s tragedy — a criminal tragedy which had irreparably seared his, like Benson’s, life — showed in his bleak, bitter blue eyes. He had feet almost as big as Josh’s, bone mallets of fists, a sandy-red hide with big dim freckles just underneath, and ears that stood out like sails.
“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac aloud, after putting a drop of the unfinished anesthetic on the tail of an experimental rat and watching the tail shrivel. “‘Tis a fine substitute for sulphuric I’ve got — but no anesthetic. The devil take it!”
He started to work on a beaker of the stuff, then turned with a scowl. The big cabinet in the rear of the room was buzzing.
That cabinet, on Smitty’s side of the lab, was the last word in television sets, better than any the big corporations had yet produced. The buzz told that somebody wanted to talk to him on it.
Mac switched it on. In a big screen over the front of it a face formed. A full-moon face with wide, naïve eyes.
“Smitty!” snapped Mac. “Ye mountain of meat. D’ye know it’s after two in the mornin’? What d’ye mean by—?”
“Better get over to headquarters, Mac,” said Smitty, from the screen. “Looks like something’s breaking. The chief is out, but I’ve a hunch he’ll be back soon.”
“That’s different, mon,” said Mac. “I’ll be over at once.”
He reached there as Benson was rolling his car down the ramp to the basement garage.
Up in the big top-floor room, he looked at the girl, and at the Slavic-looking gangster snaked by the thin line from the middle of the gunfight.
The girl was moving under her own power, now, but the man was not. It seemed that Dick had struck a little harder than he intended, in the necessity for quick action back there off the parkway.
“Concussion,” judged MacMurdie.
Benson, an unparalleled physician himself, nodded.
“I’d judge so, too. I’m glad you’re here, Mac. I want you to work on him.”
“I’d rather work on the girrrl,” burred Mac, with a twinkle in his eyes that brought an answering wan smile to the lips of the dark-haired beauty.
“The man swallowed something,” said Benson. “Get a stomach pump and see what it was.”
“I can tell you that, I think,” said the girl. “It was a gold medallion.” She pointed to the coronetlike roll of her black hair, disarranged over the right ear. “I had it in my hair. While I was being driven in the car I felt a hand take it.”
“Gold medallion?” said Benson, turning his pale, agate-bright eyes on her.
“I — yes.” She stopped. “It was for the medallion that I was kidnapped, I think. It’s death! I had death in my hair.” She finished with the dramatic sense of her Latin ancestry.
“Why would the gold medallion be so important?”
The girl bit her lip.
“Will you think it terrible? I do not want to tell you. Not even you, Mr. Benson. Oh, I thank you so much for the quickness that let you trace me, and the cleverness that enabled you to rescue me.”
“You don’t care to tell me about the gold medallion?”
“Please. No. I tried to telephone you to ask you to hide me from death for forty-eight hours. Only that. Then I am to meet other members of my family, and I shall be safe.”
“Your family?”
The girl’s dark head went up and back.
“Very, very pretty,” whispered Smitty to Nellie.
The fragile-looking little blonde shot the girl a nasty glance and the giant a venomous one.
“Hm-m-m!” was all she said.
“I am from Spain. My name is Carmella Haygar,” the dark beauty said.
“Haygar?” repeated The Avenger, his eyes like chips of stainless steel in his calm face. “Of the international business-and-banking family of that name?”
“Yes.” There was regal bearing to Carmella’s head.
“A shining clan,” said The Avenger softly.
Some of the proud lift went from the dark head.
“It was a shining clan. Cut now — broken. Ruined! My branch of the family, the one that has lived in Spain for two hundred years, is typical. My father and brother were killed in the revolution there. Our fortune and lands were expropriated. I am the only one of the great Spanish Haygars left. I escaped to this country barely with my life and with a few meaningless keepsakes, such as the gold medallion I spoke of.”
“So meaningless,” snapped Nellie Gray in an aside to Smitty, “that men kill each other like flies to get it.”
The Avenger did not dwell on that fact.
“You are to meet others of the Haygar family in two days, you say?”
“Yes,” said the girl.
MacMurdie came in.
“Mon, even unconscious, he was reluctant to give it up,” he said. “But here it is.”
With an eager cry, Carmella took possession of the disk in Mac’s hand. The little gold medallion.
“May I see it?” said Dick, voice calm but compelling.
“Yes.” Carmella handed it to him. “Just a keepsake, as I said. But it is very valuable to me for… for sentimental reasons.”
The eyes of The Avenger expressed nothing as he examined the gold disk. They were as blank as bits of glacier ice, and as cold.
CHAPTER V
The Former Great
The building was on a shabby street just off Eleventh Avenue. On one side was a rope-and-cord factory, on the other a cheap candy company whose odors were guaranteed to make the passers-by decide never again to eat anything sweet.
The two-room space on the second floor in the rear of the building got the noise of the rope shop and the smells of the candy factory all day and most of the night. Now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, both were at their peak.
The name under the bell of the two rear rooms — a bell that had not been in working condition for at least ten years — was Harlik Haygar.
The occupant of the rooms was inside. He was dragging two chairs from the cubicle used as a bedroom and extending a broken-down studio couch to accommodate more people. He was preparing for company.
It was the man who had been slugged, about a half-mile from this spot. He didn’t have on the battered hat, but the frayed blue suit and his decisive but secretively narrowed eyes branded him.
The man who had been slugged, it seemed, was this Harlik Haygar.
About the time he had finished fixing the cot, there was a tap at the door, after a fruitless pressure on the bell button had disclosed the fact that it didn’t ring anything.
The man opened the door.
On the threshold was a heavy-set fellow of forty-five who took off a stiff-brimmed felt hat to disclose stiff, close-cropped gray hair. The man’s head had practically no back to it. He stood ramrod straight, and wore silver-rimmed spectacles with lenses so thick that it made his eyes seem enormous.
“Harlik Haygar?” this man said gutturally.
“Yes.”
The man with the Prussian head extended a hand with a jerky, precise gesture.
“Cousin!”
Harlik Haygar was not impressed.
“You are?”
“Von Bolen Haygar, Essen, Germany.”
“Ah, yes. You can prove that?”
The Prussian smiled stiffly.
“Yes. By this.”
He produced a small gold disk, about the size of a quarter but a bit thicker. On it were the letters v B H.
Only then did Harlik Haygar relax a little.
“Cousin,” he nodded, “come in.”
Von Bolen Haygar entered the room, set his stiff hat precisely on a table, and seated himself precisely in a chair next to it.
“My German is poor,” said Harlik. “My English is not much more better, but I would suggest that we speak in that tongue.”
The other man nodded. Then he looked long at his host.