“I suppose,” said Smitty to Mac, “you’d rather have the old buildings stand till they tumble down around your ears. I suppose you’re against all progress. The horse and buggy is good enough for you, huh? If everyone figured the same way—”
“Look out!” yelled MacMurdie. But the car had already swerved to the right under Benson’s deft hand till both Smitty and Mac were almost thrown to the floor. Smitty could see why Mac had yelled and what The Avenger’s swift eyes had caught even before Mac’s. Something like a mountain falling on them!
The car had approached the building that was being demolished. It had been rolling past the boarded-off sidewalk, with the planks throwing back the rhythmic swishing of the tires. And then the building wall had started to fall on them. At the same instant they heard a rumbling boom.
The remaining wall of the old building was nearly six stories high. It was leaning out and over the car as if it would never stop tilting. And Benson was driving the sedan right at it! Instead of trying to speed ahead of destruction, he had swung the wheel around so that the car dove straight for the base of the falling masonry and mortar. It would have been impossible to get ahead of the fall by going forward; but any other man on earth would have automatically tried it, too frightened to think otherwise.
Not Benson. Instead, the sedan was rocketing at the base of the leaning wall. It jounced over curbing, sent planks in all directions and jammed half through the opening that had formerly been the entrance of the place. Mac and Smitty didn’t know whether they were yelling or not. They rather thought they were. But if they had been, no one would have heard them.
Six stories of brick wall falling outward from its base! The roar of that collapse drowned all sound for blocks. The top began tumbling down over the front of the building on the other side of the street. The wall disintegrated, seeming almost as liquid as an ocean wave. Bricks and great stone blocks tossed up high fell again. The street at that section was a choked welter of debris with several parked cars buried somewhere beneath many feet of brick and rock.
“Whoosh!” sighed Mac, in the sedan. “Ye can consider me faintin’ like a young girl. ’Tis a miracle we’re alive.” And yet not such a miracle. The Avenger had shot the car into the one spot where it had the chance of escape: half through the base of the wall itself. The structure had leaned out and down away from them, instead of falling on them. The top of the sedan was dented where assorted fragments of brick and cement had collapsed through the top of the entrance frame, but that was all.
However, it was close enough, even for these men whose lives were made up of close calls. They got out of the sedan, with Smitty using his enormous strength to jam open a door that was bent less badly than the rest. “Go on to the address Miss Waller gave,” Benson said quietly to Mac. “Smitty and I will return to Bleek Street. I’d like to ask the girl a few questions.”
“And she’d better answer them pretty straight too,” said Smitty hotly. “It’s a pretty odd coincidence that we were sent along a street where a building wall was ready to collapse just as we came along.”
But there were no questions to be asked. Lini was not at Bleek Street! Benson called Nellie Gray down from the top floor after he had gone to her room on the second and found it empty. “Slipped away!” said Nellie ruefully. “It’s all my fault, chief. But, naturally, I wasn’t looking for her to do a thing like that. Why would she come here begging for help and then steal away again after we’d promised it?”
MacMurdie got back from the address given by Lini. “No room’s rented there under her name or the name of anybody else lookin’ like her,” he said sourly. “She’s a schemin’ little skurlie. She came here only to lead us into a death trap. The trap failed and now she’s cleared out.” But The Avenger shook his white head, his pale eyes searching as if through far mists for the whole of a truth of which, as yet, he could only suspect a small part.
CHAPTER VII
The Alibi
Next morning at about ten o’clock, Benson left the Greenwich Precinct Station with his white face as expressionless as always, but with his pallid, deadly eyes glittering as they did when he was pitted against large-scale crime.
That this was super crime he was now sure since hearing the results of police investigations of the collapse of the building wall. The wall had been made to fall by a charge of explosive cleverly placed at the base, in the cellar. The explosive had been touched off from a distance, when Benson came along in his massive sedan. It had been a streamlined death trap, all right. And it seemed as if Lini Waller must have deliberately sent him into it.
And yet how could that be so? It would indicate that the girl was fighting against her own best interests, allied with forces who were trying to get the relics away from her. Who wanted to eliminate The Avenger from the game before he could get a chance to move against them?
Benson went from the Greenwich Station to the Kembridge Building. Wittwar, Conroy, Werner and Mallory were all there in the Foundation office. They were neglecting their own businesses, it seemed, while they made sure of getting the priceless relics of a race that had died out over fifty thousand years ago. They were pretty angry when Benson came in. Wittwar didn’t bother to say “Hello.” He opened up with, “We’re in a fine mess now, Mr. Benson. We were to meet that girl here and arrange for the trip west to wherever those caves are — and she hasn’t shown up. She was to come at nine o’clock.”
“I’ve told you what she has done,” snapped Werner, testily. “She has gone somewhere else. She has approached some other foundation or museum or something, in an effort to get more money. She has crossed us up.”
“So we asked you to come in for a minute or two and advise us,” said Mallory. “We thought possibly you could tell us how to locate her. You see, we don’t know where she is staying, or anything. We have asked her for an address, and she has refused to give us one.”
The Avenger quietly seated himself at one of the chairs placed around the conference table. “She may be in after all,” he said. “There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn’t — and every reason why she should — with two and a half million dollars and much, much more at stake.” It didn’t seem a hundred percent intelligible to the four at the table, from the slightly perplexed looks on their faces, but they didn’t ask for an explanation. You just didn’t demand explanations from the man with the white, paralyzed face.
“I still think there may be something crooked about this business,” snapped Werner. “Not the ancient manuscript. That has been proven to be genuine. But something crooked about the girl. I’ll bet the manuscript is the only thing she and her brother found — if there is a brother.”
“Why would she act as she has?” objected Mallory. “If the bundle of ancient records is all there is, why go through the act of selling us more? She knows she won’t get any money till all the rest of the stuff she has mentioned is located by our men.”
Werner shrugged. “I don’t know what game she has in mind, but it could easily be crooked. Look at the way she acts; won’t even tell where she is staying in New York!”
As they talked, The Avenger studied the four men out of colorless, brilliant eyes. One of these four, he thought, was a crook, an employer of thugs and murderers who would send a six-story wall toppling down on a sedan with three men in it — or would kidnap a girl. Lini Waller had sworn she had told only the four directors of the Wittwar Foundation about the discovery of the ancient relics. Benson believed her. But if that were true, then one of these four was trying to steal the objects instead of buy them — and might be attempting to get the two and a half millions from the Foundation for the relics, and take the relics too. But all of them were respected men in the city.