For a moment the Agent’s eyes narrowed. He was staring upward alone the brick facing of an apartment building opposite. There was a light showing behind the drawn shade in a window on the sixth floor.
The Agent fingered the black bat-wing tie above his immaculate shirt front, gave his silk muffler a deft twitch, then moved briskly out of the shadows and crossed the street.
He entered the building, passed through a small foyer where a switchboard operator was sitting, and ascended by an elevator. Walking left along a corridor, he pressed the button of apartment No. 6B.
There came a sound of high heels clicking over the parquet flooring inside. A moment later the door opened and a girl with blonde hair and a petite figure stood on the threshold.
She raised an uneasy hand, patted her gleaming coiffure nervously, and stared closely at Agent “X,” her blue eyes narrowing in worried speculation.
“Miss Betty Dale, I believe,” the Agent said. “May I come in?”
His voice now was cultured, softly modulated. The masterly disguise he had affected tonight hid his real identity. He was playing a part for a purpose.
“My name is Jeffrey Carter,” he continued. “I’d like to talk to you a few moments if you can spare the time.”
As he spoke, he watched the girl’s face narrowly. It expressed uneasiness, doubt, perplexity. Obviously she did not know who he was. Obviously to her he was a perfect stranger and a suspicious one at that.
“Come in,” she said at last, a note of reluctance in her tone.
She turned, her small pretty face screwed up in worry, and led the way into the sitting room.
The long, powerful hands of Jeffrey Carter moved then. One of them flickered out, the fingers holding something that was like a thin stick of pomade.
He made a quick movement close to the wall as he passed by, then slipped the mysterious stick back into his pocket. There was a faint smile on his face. His disguise had proven adequate under the gaze of a girl whose intelligence and cleverness he rated as high as her beauty.
He reached out and snapped off the electric light switch, plunging the room into darkness.
The girl gave a little gasp of surprise and fear; but the stranger’s voice reassured her.
“A beacon shines for all good mariners,” he said.
SHE turned. On the wall at her back was a glowing X, shimmering there with a strange eerie light. It was the mark of the Secret Agent — written in the purest radium paint — paint made by a secret formula and containing thousands of dollars’ worth of the world’s most expensive metal.
“It is you then?” she said, relief in her voice.
The Secret Agent had given her many moments of worry in his desire to use her as a test. He had come to her in dozens of different disguises. She never felt sure of her ground until he gave her some characteristic, identifying sign.
His manner changed now. He was no longer the suave clubman. There was a tenseness in his attitude that the girl sensed. When they were seated in the next room, Jeffrey Carter talked quickly moving his long-fingered hands, restlessly.
“Blue vases are the devil’s choice,” he said suddenly.
The words were incomprehensible to the girl; but she relaxed in her chair, all uneasiness gone. The Agent generally spoke in metaphors and parables, the significance of which she learned in due time. Almost everything he said had some double meaning.
Respect and intense loyalty mingled in her blue eyes as she regarded the man who tonight called himself Jeffrey Carter. Whoever the Secret Agent really was, she knew that he had been a friend of her dead father’s — the father who had been a police captain, slain by underworld bullets.
She had been brought up to feel an intense hatred of criminals. The death of her father had crystallized this feeling.
This man, her father’s friend, was working against the underworld. She trusted him, relied upon him, knew that he was kindly and brave. There had been times when he had placed sums of money collected from criminals in her hands — to give to charity, to help the poor and those who had been victimized by underworld plots.
She knew that he kept nothing for himself, asked nothing but to live dangerously, recklessly, gambling with Fate. There were moments when wonder filled her as to what sort of face lay behind those brilliant disguises. Would she ever know? Or would death claim him before she had penetrated the secrets of his life?
The Agent spoke mysteriously again, his eyes gleaming with some hidden emotion.
“You are an accomplished dancer, Miss Dale, and to dance beautifully is an art. Tonight I ask you to dance with me.”
She gave a start of surprise and flushed slightly. “What do you mean?”
“The Bellaire Club is calling us, Betty. There is music to be danced to and a blue vase to be looked at. Put on your best frock.”
SHE shrugged, nodded, and flashed him a smile. Something deeper than caprice and a love of dancing, she knew, lay behind his words. And when, at the end of ten minutes, she emerged from her boudoir, she was a vision of loveliness.
Betty Dale was a girl who knew how to wear clothes. Poise and refinement were instinctive with her and that good taste which is something inborn and can never be taught. Because of these things, she had gotten ahead in the world. She had won a career for herself as a star reporter on the Herald. When she was covering society stuff, she could meet and hobnob with fashionable people on their own plane. This made her invaluable both to the paper and the Agent.
More than once she had helped him by going places with him when he needed a feminine companion, by carrying out his orders, and by getting information that he required.
Tonight she was clad in a white evening dress with a fur wrap draped over her shoulders. Together they went to the street and signaled a taxi.
They were whirled through the brightly-lighted thoroughfares of the great city to the doors of the Bellaire Club, which, for all its gaudy ostentation, was a place of ill repute, a place where sinister things had happened.
It was frequented by the fast, wealthy set, and by gangsters and gamblers who had made big money. There were gambling tables in the rear, a dance floor and a large orchestra in front, with tables for couples to sit at and drink.
The Secret Agent had asked Betty Dale to accompany him tonight because a lone man or woman coming to the Bellaire Club was at once an object of curiosity to Mike Panagakos, the flabby-jowled, sloe-eyed manager. The Agent did not want that.
He whirled Betty Dale around the room once, and his eyes gleamed as he saw a blue vase on a low settee by one wall. It was a fine piece of Turkish pottery that somehow fitted in with the gaudy, exotic atmosphere of the club. It seemed to have been placed there as a receptacle for flowers, but it was empty now.
As they whirled past it, the Secret Agent’s hand flicked out. The note he had made Jason Hertz write fell into the vase.
By that act he believed he was opening a trail that might lead him into the shadow of hideous murder and mysterious death.
When the dance had ended, they seated themselves at a table to watch the moving crowds about them; the sinuous, over-painted women, and the immaculately dressed men.
Then Betty Dale suddenly caught her breath, and the Secret Agent’s head turned quickly.
Across the room a group of people had scattered. A woman gave a hoarse cry of fear.
From the center of the group, a man ran forward into the circular spot cast by an overhead light. He was holding his hands to his face, staggering drunkenly — and, as Agent “X” watched, he let forth a scream of agony that shivered through the air with the keenness of a knife thrust. Then he collapsed and lay writhing on the polished floor.