Trouble! Danger in the lobby!
Benson walked past the desk, not seeming to move fast, yet getting to the elevators in an incredibly short time.
The three men who habitually lounged in the lobby were all starting for him, now. One had his gun halfway out. The Avenger slid into the cage waiting at the lobby floor, and closed the metal doors with a jerk at the lever.
“Hey—” began the rat-eyed boy at the controls.
He stopped as the pale and awful eyes bored into his own.
“Luckow’s floor,” The Avenger said to the elevator operator.
“It’s f-five,” said the boy.
He stopped. There was something about the icy glare in those eyes that robbed his will of the ability to lie. Anyhow, Luckow had enough rodmen around to take care of any one man — even one like this. So he didn’t see why he should risk his skin to conceal the floor on which the mob leader had his office.
“Two!” he corrected himself, sending the cage upward as he spoke.
He was almost smiling when he opened the elevator door on the second floor. Luckow’s men would take care of this smart ape with the snow-white hair and the dead pan and the white-steel eyes.
As Benson came out of the cage, a man in the hall turned idly; then he stiffened as he saw a stranger. His gun came out with a swiftness of draw that would have compared with the draw of the old Western gun-fighters.
But it wasn’t fast enough.
The Avenger had taken one step from the cage door. It was an easy, flowing motion, but it was actually so swift that it made the moves of the hall guard seem like those in a moving picture retarded ten times.
Benson’s fist flashed up. It caught the wrist behind the gun. The automatic spun up, butt over muzzle, while the man watched with gaping jaws.
The Avenger caught the gun expertly, while the guard rubbed his wrist and wondered if the bone were broken. Benson whirled toward the cage.
The operator had his hand at the back of his neck, where a knife was snuggled under his collar. At the glare in the pale eyes, he slowly took his hand away, trying unconvincingly to smile. And with a shaky whistle to show that he was really the most harmless fellow alive, he shut the cage door and started back toward the lobby.
“I want to see Luckow,” said Benson.
His voice was quiet. There was no more emotion in it than there was in his dead, still face. The guard stopped rubbing his wrist as he began to realize who this man was. He had heard tales, too. He was willing to believe all of them, now. Any guy with guts enough to come here, alone—
He did not realize, of course, nor did the world at large, that the guts of Richard Henry Benson came not from ordinary courage, but from a sort of supercourage springing from the fact that he didn’t care whether he lived or not.
Some day, he knew, he was going to die in a brush with professional killers. But he was entirely indifferent to that prospect. The sooner he died, the sooner he would be united with wife and daughter again.
A man who genuinely doesn’t care whether he dies or lives, can do almost impossible things.
“Well,” Benson said, still not raising his voice and yet getting a whiplash effect from it, “show me to Luckow.”
“O.K., pal,” said the man.
He started down the hall.
The office was at the front end. The path lay past several open doors; one of them was No. 236. As The Avenger went past this, his quick eyes noticed that it was open an inch and also noted a man within.
The man was walking slowly up and down the room, face twisted with rage and anger. He did not look like the type usually to be found here.
Benson stopped, and swung the door farther open.
“On second thought,” he said to the man with the injured wrist, “I won’t see Luckow. Not yet, anyway. I’ll stop in here first.”
“Want me to come in, too?” said the man, resigned to being held a prisoner so that he couldn’t give the alarm.
“No! Stay out.”
The man’s mouth hung open in surprise. This human hurricane with the steely eyes and the white hair was, in effect, giving him a free hand to call as many pals as he pleased.
He acted in a hurry, running toward the front of the hall where Luckow sat in his office.
Benson shut the door and turned to Tom, who was staring in surprise. The Avenger knew that a lot of alarms had already been given. One more, by the hall guard, wouldn’t matter much.
“You’re Tom Crimm, of course,” he said smoothly, eyes cold and calm and impersonal.
“Yes. I—”
“And you have come to this gang for help in your father’s death. I don’t blame you. The idea, on the surface, would seem to have merit. But, believe me, it is the wrong way to go about it. There is danger that—”
“I get you now,” said Tom, staring fixedly. “You’re this Avenger guy Wayne talked about.”
“Some call me that,” said Benson. “Please, there is little time—”
“And Wayne sent you to pick me up,” said Tom, getting louder of tone. “Sent you out like a nursemaid, to take me home and wipe my little nose for me. Well, I can wipe my own nose.”
The chill, pale eyes daunted Tom; but he kept on, working himself up into a fury.
“What’s your racket, anyhow? Everybody’s got one. So what’s yours? Think you can get all my father’s money, if you recover it? This stuff of working just to help people in distress is the bunk. I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“I knew you had sense, the first time I saw you,” a voice purred from the doorway.
Tom and The Avenger turned. Nicky Luckow was coming in on padded, soundless feet, like a great cat. His dull eyes turned on Benson.
“I’ve heard of you,” he said. “I have the same ideas as Tom, here. What’s your racket, pal? Why the sympathy for the underdog?”
“I don’t believe you’d care to hear about that,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips, face as emotionless as the face of the moon. He had lost! He’d known it the moment he looked into Tom’s cynical, dark eyes, and noted the wise sneer on his lips when he spoke of rackets.
There were steps in the hall. A lot of steps. Nicky Luckow’s hand slid from his coat pocket. There was a belly gun in it — a squat, small thing designed to blow a man’s abdomen into a streaming red crater.
“The boys will be glad to hear anything you’d care to say about anything,” purred Luckow. “They’ll be glad—”
There were at least a dozen men in the corridor. The many steps told that. And there the mob leader stood, to hold The Avenger at gunpoint till the gang could get in here. Benson shrugged. His stainless steel chips of eyes reflected on the odds coming to face him, and in their cold depths was a calm decision that it was too much trouble to deal with them.
Benson’s foot flashed up and out.
The Avenger had learned about all the arts of fighting, both officially and defensively, that there were. One was la savate, originating in Paris among the Apaches.
Luckow had been warily watching the pale and deadly eyes; so the movement of Benson’s foot didn’t catch his vision till it was almost to his waist. And then there wasn’t time to do anything about it.
The toe of Benson’s shoe cracked on his wrist, and the runt weapon spanged against the far wall. Luckow snarled, and leaped.
Benson’s fist went out. It didn’t seem to travel more than four or five inches. But Luckow stopped as if he had banged into a stone wall. Stopped, and sagged to the floor.
The Avenger went to the window.
“I’d appreciate it if you would visit me. Bleek Street is the address,” he said to Tom Crimm.
Tom’s sneer was shaken, but it was still in place on his lips. And the skepticism was undiminished in his eyes.
Benson opened the window. Down in the street, a few people stared up at the sound of the window’s opening. More stared swiftly, when a man with a white, dead face and snow-white but virile hair dropped from that window like a trained acrobat, lighting like a feather on the sidewalk.