“What are you going to do?” chattered Birch.
So Fiume told exactly what they were going to do. He took a malicious pleasure in it.
“We’ve got thermite bombs all over this old shack. See? The minute Benson steps through that door, he steps into a trap that chutes him right down to the basement. Then the bombs go off. Ever try to put out a thermite fire? You can’t. This old firetrap will be a furnace. And in the center of it will be this Benson guy and everybody working for him.”
“Fire! Burning them to death!” Birch swayed. “My heavens, you can’t—”
A man jumped into the hall from a vacant front room almost at their elbow. The room had a window on the street, and the man had been posted at that window.
“Guy coming,” he said swiftly. “Holds his head down so that his hat’ll cover his face. He’s coming for this door.”
Louie glared murder at the white-faced bank director.
“So now there isn’t time for you to get out of here!” he raved. “All right. You’ll stay and see it, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll get a belly full before we’re done.”
“Let me out—” began Birch wildly.
“And tip off Benson, coming up to the door? Hardly! Take him, Pike. Stick close to him. When it’s all set, you drag out with him and pile into one of the getaway cars.”
The man called Pike dragged Birch with him down the hall. The dim candle in the hall was extinguished, plunging everything into complete darkness.
There was a light tap at the door.
“Got crust,” admitted Louie grudgingly. “Coming right up and knocking.”
The man at the door turned the key, then leaped far back. The door was opened by the man outside.
The man came in, looked around inquiringly. At least it seemed as if he were doing that; it was so dark they could only see a vague movement of his head. Then he took a forward step, yelled, and fell fifteen feet to the basement floor.
“Got him!” shouted Fiume, with an unholy triumph in his voice. “Set ’em off, you guys!”
Five men raced to five parts of the building where thermite bombs waited to make an inferno of the condemned tenement building. In about ten minutes blazing walls, roof, floors would smash down on the helpless man in the basement, and his bound aides.
“Fire ’em!” yelled Louie again.
There seemed to be an echo to his words. But the echo did not repeat the syllables.
“Don’t do it,” said the echo.
But the echo was in the cold, terrible voice of The Avenger.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Fiume laughed. It was a diabolical laugh, full of murderous amusement.
“Don’t do it, huh?” he said. “You down there. The guy that has the nerve to call himself The Avenger. Why shouldn’t we do it?”
The only answer was a repetition, words clear and cold, calm and steady.
“Don’t do it!”
Louie yelled to the scattered members of his gang:
“You heard me. Set ’em off. Wait till the fire’s going good, to be sure that guy don’t get up out of the basement. Then hightail it out the front door.”
There were soft flares of whitish light as the thermite was started at its deadly task.
That wooden building, never any good even when new, had been drying and rotting for a long time. It started to blaze like tinder.
In the room where the candle glittered on the box, Mac and Nellie and Smitty and Josh saw flickering red tongues show under the crack of the closed door. They stared at each other, instantly getting the whole thing.
Fire! And they were bound in here — helpless as rats in a burning ship—
Swiftly the building caught. In four minutes the heat was beginning to be felt even in the hall, where no bombs had been placed. The man in the basement was screaming incoherently. His fingers appeared at the edge of the hole through which he had been chuted. The fingers looked like pale asparagus stalks in the firelight.
Louie laughed, and stamped on them. Quiveringly they lost their hold, and their owner crashed again to the basement.
“O.K.,” Louie yelled. “Out!”
But, now, something very queer was happening to the door they were to flee through.
It sprang into living flame.
Door and jamb were suddenly a fierce red glow. It was as if that whole section were a great match which had been struck and had spontaneously ignited.
Yells of astonishment, and then of growing fear, came from Louie Fiume’s gang. Now that they were all together near the front door, it could be seen that over a dozen were here.
Several sprang for the door, blazing though it was. They clawed at it to get it open, fell back squalling with burned hands.
And behind the gang, the hall suddenly became an inferno, too.
They were trapped between a portal too fiery to flee out of, and a roaring flame in the center of the hall that leaped higher even as they watched.
Fiume’s gang was normally disciplined. But it lost all that, now. It was every man for himself.
Some burned their hands again trying to get near the front door and open it. Some raced to the front room and yanked at iron bars placed there long ago to render the first floor burglar-proof. Only about half the crew had sense enough to take the one possible way out:
Over the roofs.
These jammed the staircase in the dark, looking like figures out of hell with the reflected red light of fire licking at them.
They scrambled up those stairs to the roof.
“Lam! Everybody! The fire department’ll be here in a second, and the cops, too—”
That was Fiume’s voice. Seven of his men were going to be charred sticks in the ashes of that fire. But the leader, himself, at least, had gotten clear.
The scattered members of the gang streaked to the left, down the pitch of the roof to the flat one next door.
But a compact group also moved more methodically to the right, to the opposite roof. The group took a fire escape to the ground, three buildings down the line.
The Avenger’s car was at the curb. They all piled into it. Nellie and Mac, Josh and Smitty — and a man who appeared to be the bank director, Frederick Birch.
But “Birch” reached to his face and took thin glass eyecups from blazing, colorless eyes. Those eyecups had pupils painted on them resembling in color the pupils of Birch’s eyes. And the face, with flesh as dead and pliant as any plastic, had been shaped to resemble Birch’s face.
The Avenger became himself, again, with all but Smitty staring at him in a kind of awe. Smitty was driving, fast, to get away from the scene of the fire and couldn’t stare at anything but the traffic.
“One of that gang fired at me from the warehouse roof in Bleek Street,” Benson said, voice and eyes as cold and emotionless as if he were merely remarking on what a nice, starry night it was. “I trailed him to the tenement. Then”—he raised his voice so that the giant at the wheel could hear—“your latest invention came in handy, Smitty.”
Smitty listened. That latest invention was something the utility companies would have paid a fabulous sum for. It was a radio-telephonic hookup. The Avenger’s phone was wired to a radio transmitter on a constant wavelength. When the phone rang, his radio buzzed. With a power signal activating an induction coil near the phone, he shorted the instrument, in a sense, and listened to the phone message, and could answer the speaker, over his own radio transmitter, even though he was miles away.
“I trailed the men to the tenement and then I saw Birch coming down the street,” said the Avenger quietly. “I don’t know what he was coming for. We’ll never know. I slugged him, and made up to resemble him. Then I took his watch and wallet and let him lay. I figured he’d think he had been attacked by a common thief, when he regained consciousness, and go on with whatever business he had in mind. Which he did.”