The Wittwar Packing Co. had its own five-story office building in lower Manhattan. The building was deserted when Benson reached it; too late for late workers, too early for scrubwomen. Which was precisely what Benson wanted.
It was night now. No trick for the gray steel bar of a man to slide like a shadow up the fire escape of the next building, walk a narrow ledge and get into the building absolutely unseen through a third-story window. Wittwar’s big office was on the top floor. It was unlocked; there was nothing furtive about it.
The Avenger went in. The powerful little flashlight played around on a big vault, two desks and several chairs. He went to the vault first. The combination of the vault was good, but not as elaborate as that of a safe in which money and other valuables might be kept. Benson, with sensitive fingertips, felt out the numbers worn by constant use and swung open the door. There was nothing in the vault that didn’t refer to the meat business.
He went to the desks, a huge one for Wittwar and a smaller one for a secretary. In the top drawer of Wittwar’s desk was a large tablet of blank paper, with the top dozen sheets covered with lines of figures. The numbers were quite common. They related to the electric-power companies on the North American continent: output per year, gross income, net profits, et cetera. The Avenger replaced the big pad of paper and continued his search. And found nothing!
He left the building the way he had come in and went to Werner’s office. There was not one thing in the office that even the genius of The Avenger could connect with the kidnaping of Lini or the theft of age-old relics.
Benson went on to Mallory’s office. The vice-president and general manager of Wittwar’s big company had his office in the uptown branch of the company, not in the main office building where Wittwar’s was located. The branch was over on Tenth Avenue; and the neighborhood was dark even at this early hour. Dark and deserted.
The Avenger stopped his car a block from the address and went on foot to the building. He seemed to be walking normally, but such was the inconspicuousness of his tread that you probably would not have noticed him. Indeed, from the way he managed to keep within what shadows there were along the fairly lighted sidewalk, you probably would not have seen him at all. Benson was a master at taking advantage of cover where there would seem to be no cover. Enemies sometimes swore he could make himself invisible.
At any rate, the man in the car a hundred feet down from the branch entrance did not see Benson. But The Avenger saw him. A long dark sedan, with the smooth motor idling; a man at the wheel who could be distinguished only as a dark shadow at the top of which a little red glow now and again indicated the puffing of a cigarette.
Benson came as near the car as he could along the sidewalk, then took to the street. He moved in a line that would keep his body hidden from the rear-view mirror by the blind spot caused by the upright between glass windows at side and rear. At the tail of the car, he crouched and looked around. There was no one near enough to see what went on. He moved, head low, along the side of the car.
The first thing the man at the wheel knew of the presence of someone else in the night was when a hand, not large but strong as a steel cable, whipped up from the side of the car and slapped over his mouth. The next thing he knew, as he flopped in the seat and tried to get away from the hand and yell, was that another hand was compressing the back of his neck.
It was the strangest attack. First, there was a feel of terrific pain, making him squeal behind the sound-deadening hand over his lips. Then there was a sort of swift fadeout of the surrounding neighborhood. And finally, the man was falling into a world of fog that got blacker and blacker and had no bottom.
The Avenger released the pressure on the great nerves at the base of the skull that could kill if held long enough. He left the man still slouched in a fairly upright position behind the steering column and went back to the entrance. The door was locked. Apparently the man was a guard, to prevent anyone from going in, not a lookout for someone who had already entered.
Benson softly forced the lock and went in. He went to Mallory’s office on the second floor of the two stories of the branch housed in the five-story warehouse structure. The Avenger had heard no sound as he went up the stairs, but he found his ears straining for any noise.
Danger! He felt it, instinctively, with the sixth sense that animals of prey develop. He moved by memory to the door of Mallory’s office, not showing the flashlight. He went in, closed the door, and only then did he turn on the beam.
There is a technique of searching. An ordinary man could take a day to search one room as it should be searched. The police could do the same job in an hour or less. The Avenger could do it in about eight minutes. In six, he had found more than had turned up in all the rest of his investigations to date.
First, at the rear of the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, there was a ragged corner of something that seemed to have been torn from a parchment page. But it was not parchment. Benson studied it in the white beam of his flashlight. It was thin hide, strange looking, obviously very old and yet well preserved. It was a corner from one of the thin hides making up the ancient volume Lini had brought from the ice caves.
With his eyes glittering like chromium slits, Benson recalled his conviction that from the manuscript he had studied in the Foundation office, one page near the front was missing. This corner, it seemed, had been inadvertently torn off that missing page. And on the corner were the ends of three jagged lines tooled in the thin, queer leather.
In the top drawer of Mallory’s desk was a measuring compass. Quite a large one. Experimentally, The Avenger drew a half circle on a large letterhead from the drawer. The half circle was the approximate size of a human skull from the ears up. He tried the compass on it. It was large enough to span the half circle easily, and large enough to measure off a given segment of it.
There was still another thing. A section of the wash-stand paneling sounded loose under a soft tap. Benson’s deft, steely fingers found the end, pulled it forward. A flat space showed between panel and rough plaster. In the space was a hammer. It was a curious hammer, with a narrow, long striking head, and with sharp prongs on the opposite end. Benson nodded. An archaeologist’s hammer, used for the delicate chipping away of stone and hard earth from valuable objects long buried.
A hammer, a piece torn from the lost page of the ancient book and a measuring compass large enough to be used on a human skull…
The door of the office swung softly open as Benson stood with his back to it. Light flared on! Benson whirled.
“Just keep where you are, with your mitts in sight,” said the man in the doorway. The man had a machine gun trained on Benson’s body. Behind him, two men had automatics also trained on the same target.
“Burn him down,” snarled one of the men behind the machine gunner. “What’re you waiting for, Nick? Burn him down!”
CHAPTER XI
Disaster Calls
Nellie Gray was spoiling for action. To look at the lovely little blonde, you’d have thought she would never have an idea about anything more sinister than the latest lure in perfume, or the most modern thing in handbags. But Nellie’s ideas were confined, ninety percent of the time, to thoughts of guns and gangsters.