This, however, wasn’t the Agent’s reason for returning to that place of sinister repute. He had another, more daring motive, based on the startling deduction he had made.
It was late, long after midnight, yet the orchestra in the Montmorency Club was still blaring raucously. Tipsy couples were still moving around the polished dance floor. A few late-comers were still arriving, nighthawks who made a practice of flitting from one gay dive to another.
As Agent “X” shuffled past the front of the club, somber and inconspicuous in his dark clothes, a gay foursome stepped from a limousine. Two youths in high silk hats; the girls in evening wraps, with painted, powdered faces wreathed in smiles. Slummers from uptown. Members of society, possibly, come down to rub shoulders with the city’s underworld.
He heard their empty laughter as they hurried into the vestibule. Their mirth would change to gasps of fear, they would run from the place, if they knew what he knew — and suspected the thing he had come to inquire into.
He didn’t go to the club’s front entrance. Its tawdry, gilded portals were not meant for such as he appeared to be. The doorman, who hours before had welcomed him as Bugs Gary, would order him away now.
A grim smile twitched the Secret Agent’s lips. Like a flitting shadow he moved around the side of the building, pausing at a basement doorway. This was below the level of the kitchen. Yet a dim light was burning somewhere inside. He would need all the caution at his command in the thing he planned to do.
He took his kit of special chromium tools from an inner pocket, selected those he needed, and went to work skillfully on the lock. In a moment, under the probing pressure of a small goose-necked bit of steel, it clicked back and the Agent opened the door. He found himself in what had formerly been a luxurious speakeasy. But now it was closed. Now the club had moved upstairs, screaming its tawdriness to the whole world, in renovated quarters above.
Behind the speakeasy were chambers which might contain sleeping quarters for some of Sanzoni’s men. “X” did not explore these. Basing his actions on a hunch he had arrived at, he searched for and found a door that led to the building’s cellar.
As he opened it, and moved down a stairway toward the dusty room beneath where a light in a wire cage burned, he heard the clanking of a shovel. He reached the foot of the stairs and crouched.
A MAN’S shadow lay like some fallen monster across the floor. It was the shadow of the janitor, fixing the furnace, keeping steam up, that revelers above might have tropic heat.
Agent “X” crept toward him swiftly, silently. When the man turned at last to put the shovel away, the black figure of “X” was directly at his elbow. A gun in “X’s” hand was pointed straight at his head.
The cry that the janitor started to give was stifled utterly by the jet of gas that spurted from the gun’s muzzle into his open mouth. It was harmless anesthetizing vapor that would merely keep him unconscious for a period of time. He collapsed soundlessly to the floor.
“X” gathered him up quickly, took him to the far end of the cellar room, and laid him on a pile of old burlap. Then he began the quick, shrewd search of the building’s basement — which was his real purpose in coming.
For the Secret Agent’s amazing deductive faculties had led him to the conclusion that one of the nitro-picrolene bombs might be hidden here.
It was a spot where a man of the Terror’s ruthless, systematic character would appear to have reason for laying one of the eggs of doom. Gus Sanzoni was working for him, gathering in the loot to be divided with his master. Sanzoni was a greedy, unscrupulous criminal, a man who would turn on his boss, double-cross him if the chance came. He had not hesitated to double-cross Bugs Gary, take his girl away while he was in jail, and put him to torture when he came back.
And surely the Terror, whoever he was, would make certain that he could wipe out Sanzoni any instant he chose. What better means than concealing a bomb directly under Sanzoni’s stronghold?
So certain was “X” that this deduction was right, that he had come prepared with special equipment. Besides his regular tool kit, he carried in one pocket a small leather case containing instruments as compact as they were powerful.
The bomb hidden in the brick building on Baldwin Island had given him his cue. It had been cemented in the wall, and “X” knew that the criminal mind ever works in a routine manner. The gang who laid the Terror’s bombs for him would surely use the same means again.
He took a powerful flash and chisel-like scraping instrument from his pocket. With these he set to work. He began systematically at the farthest end of the cellar room. The beam of his light was like a round probing eye. It crept along the soot-blackened walls from floor to ceiling. Again and again at any spot that even slightly aroused his suspicions, he scraped with his edged tool.
Slowly he progressed forward till he had covered one side of the cellar. He went to another, searched over every inch of that without results. A third side followed, and still Agent “X” was persistent, still undiscouraged.
Several times he came to places on the plaster that stirred his interest. Either the soot didn’t seem quite as black or something about the surface held his attention. At such times he took a small watchlike instrument from his pocket. It had a tiny needle on its face, slender as a hair. It was a delicate magnetic galvanometer, fashioned to detect minute electric currents produced by the presence of metals.
He pressed this against the suspicious spots, watched the needle eagerly. Once it swung sharply, making his pulse quicken. But a brief scratching on the surface exposed a hidden water pipe.
He went on to the cellar’s fourth side, and here he found a small door, held fast with a padlock. This he undid easily. Inside was a square, cool wine cellar, with hundreds of bottles stored away in straw-filled bins. Here was the wine that trickled down the thirsty throats of the criminals and slummers in the gay rooms overhead.
The Agent’s eyes gleamed. This room was locked, hidden away from ordinary prying eyes. It was a likely spot to look. He began searching the walls quickly, and almost at once he found a place where the layer of accumulated dust seemed a shade too thick.
To his eager, observant eyes it appeared that this dust had been sprinkled there. His sharp tool scraped it loose. He found that the plaster beneath was whiter, fresher — found that it was a spot like that on the wall of the room on Baldwin Island, where he and Betty Dale had faced awful death.
And when he touched the galvanometer against this spot, the tiny hair-like needle swung instantly upward and remained like a trembling finger of warning. Tense with eagerness, knowing that he might be close to a bomb as terrible as any existing in the world, Agent “X” paused a moment.
LISTENING, he could hear, faint and far away, the throbbing pulse of the dance orchestra, hear the vibration of moving feet. Men and women were dancing over a veritable hell that they did not even suspect — dancing on Death itself, that lay silent and hidden in that dark cellar.
The Secret Agent set to work quickly. There was an electric bulb above him. He unscrewed it, put a plug in with a long cord attached, and inserted this plug into the handle of one of the tools he had brought. A miniature electric motor, sealed in a sound-proof shell, began to whirl. A cutting point with a rubber cap around it spun at the drill’s end. Agent “X” pressed this and the rubber deadened sound against the wall at the fatal spot. This was one of the devices with which he had come prepared, anticipating that he would have to cut through cement.