“But — murder,” whispered Birch.
Grand stuck out his big jaw.
“This Ballandale stock,” he said. “Who’s got it? Which one of us? It isn’t me.”
Wallach smiled dryly.
“Of course, each of us would deny having it. I deny it, myself. So, I am sure, would Birch and Rath. What difference does it make which of us has it? The stock is safe, and we will gain control of the corporation in a few days, when the next meeting is scheduled. You all know how much we stand to make out of the transaction. And, afterward, we can dispose of the stock, a small block at a time, and pocket that money, too—”
Wallach stopped, and stared with a faint look of perplexity at Birch. The blustering, red-faced director was glaring with wide eyes at the door of the conference room. And, now, his face wasn’t even pale; it was a ghostly white.
Wallach turned to the door. Rath and Grand whirled, too. The door was opening.
There was no way for anyone to get into the bank after hours, save the banking officials themselves. Yet, that door was opening, and all the directors were in here. The guard wouldn’t be intruding — he’d had orders to stay on the floor below.
The door swung all the way back. On the threshold stood a man of average height and build, in a gray business suit, looking more like a machine of gray steel than a man.
The man’s face was as white as Birch’s; but fear had nothing to do with pallor in this case.
“Who are you?” boomed Grand, jaw out. “How dare you come in here?”
“How… how did you get in, anyway?” stammered Rath.
Birch tried to talk and couldn’t. Wallach was very still; dry, thin fingers for once not rubbing each other.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the chill, deadly figure in the doorway.
There was silence as The Avenger stepped into the conference room and calmly closed the door behind him. Grand’s jaw no longer stuck out. Birch’s face was more bloodless than ever.
“You may have heard of me,” said the white-faced, pale-eyed man. “Richard Benson.”
Birch swallowed audibly. Every one of them had heard that name. Richard Henry Benson! He was the peer of all of them in the realm of high finance. He was wealthier than all of them put together; could have bought and thrown away their bank.
But they’d heard of him in another way, recently, too. And it was this that froze their voices in their throats.
Richard Benson. Man of a Thousand Faces. The Avenger! Wherever crime had been done, that name could terrify. And under the circumstances, it could terrify in this sleek business room as well as in a gangster’s hangout. “I see you are very busy,” said Benson, with deadly irony in his voice. “I won’t take up much of your time. I came here to make a request.”
They stared at the pale, awful eyes like rabbits at a weasel.
“Millions of dollars worth of stock have been stolen,” said The Avenger. “Joseph Crimm’s stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. Three murders have been committed: Crimm’s, Maisley’s and Haskell’s.”
His face was as dead and emotionless as though he were discussing the best way to serve soup. His eyes were as expressionless as ice under moonlight. His voice was without emphasis. Somehow, that very calm, glacial tone was more horrifying than wild threats.
“Someone among you,” said Benson, “knows who is directly responsible for the murders. Someone among you can produce the stock. So here is my request: Return the stock to Tom and Wayne Crimm and give up the murderer, with a full confession to the law.”
The last two words echoed in the tense room.
“—the law.”
Wallach was the one who finally answered. There was cold nerve in his lanky body; courage of a sort in the brain behind his thin face.
“Mr. Benson, I can only assure you that we don’t know quite what you are talking about. We have read of the tragic deaths of Maisley and Crimm. But Crimm died naturally of a heart attack, and Maisley unfortunately drove his car too near a cliff edge and fell to his death. Neither of them has anything to do with murder, I’d say. As for the stock you mention—”
The icy, pale eyes had become colder and colder. And Wallach finally stopped, words trailing off into silence.
“You will accede to my request,” said Benson, “or I shall declare financial war on you. With your connections in banking and financial matters, you probably know whether or not that declaration would be important to you. I will expect an answer shortly.”
The Avenger turned and went out. And behind him, four frightened men stared at each other. Grand moved first.
“After him! He can’t get away like that! Get him!”
He sprang to the door. The door did not open to his jerking hands. This was for the very simple reason that a chair had been propped under the knob on the other side.
Grand ran from the door to the telephone and put a call through in a hurry to a number that had been listed with the first preparation for the Ballandale plot. An emergency number!
Down at the great bronze door of the bank, the bank guard stood with a queerly empty look on his face, and with eyes that seemed to look at things but not see them.
Benson went unhurriedly to the man. His pale, infallible eyes bored into the guard’s like diamond drills.
“You will open the doors for me,” he said, voice oddly monotonous. “You will lock them after I have gone out. In five minutes you will inject this into your thigh.”
He put a hypodermic needle into the man’s robot-like left hand. The guard opened the door, closed it when Benson went out to the deserted street.
Five minutes later the guard would use the hypodermic needle, blink, look around with a start, and hurry to where banging on a door sounded, from the direction of the conference room. But he wouldn’t be able to say anything about what he had done.
All he would be able to say would be that he had gone to the street door in response to a continued, urgent pounding there — and that he had stared through bullet-proofed glass to see two pale and deadly eyes that seemed to grow and grow till he fell into them and went to sleep.
The directors would know a miracle of hypnotism when they heard about it. But the guard wouldn’t know till he was told.
The Avenger turned the wheel of his car and swung into Sixth Avenue, near Thirty-fourth Street. He drove down Sixth, his face a mask, eyes like stainless steel chips. A car was following his closely. It had picked up the trail eight blocks above, about fifteen minutes after he he had left Town Bank and was on upper Broadway.
The driver of the trailing car was clever. He drove now with regular lights, now with cowl lights, flaring. He drove far behind for a while, then very close. Whenever a truck loomed, going in the same direction, he hung behind the tail of the truck and out of sight.
But The Avenger had faced precisely this sort of danger too often for any man to fool him.
He went on down Sixth Avenue, turned slowly into his own street — Bleek Street.
The car behind was powerful. It had a pickup like an electric locomotive. It screeched around the corner on two wheels, like an animal that had only been waiting for a dark spot from which to spring. It went half over the curb, and its nose rammed the side of Benson’s car.
The Avenger had been driving with the windows down. A touch of his finger, just before the crash, had snapped all windows up.
Four machine guns were suddenly chattering from the big sedan that held Benson’s car rammed against the blank wall of the storage warehouse across from his headquarters.
The glass of Benson’s car was starred in a hundred places, but did not break. The armor of its sides clanged under the leaden hail like a tin roof in a rainstorm, but was not pierced by it.