“Do you think I’m a child?” jeered Henderlin.
He raised his voice in triumphant command. “You — out there in the hall — come in and get them!”
Thirteen men came into the room. Eleven had automatics in their hands. The other two had submachine guns.
“Make sure of all four of them,” Henderlin said. “And take the girl, too—”
His voice died as if it had been stuck back down his throat. He stared at the men, and the vein in his forehead pulsed like a living thing.
The two machine guns were trained on him. Not on the other four.
This was the wrong gang. These weren’t Henderlin’s men; these were Singer’s men!
“Help!” croaked Henderlin. It was meant for a shout. It came out as a whisper. Then the vast chatter of the machine guns roared out.
They roared only toward Henderlin. But Rann, crazed with fear, leaped the wrong way, and the slugs sliced into him, too.
Benson and the rest were next. They knew that even as Henderlin and Rann were falling. The gang couldn’t leave them alive as witnesses, even if they’d wanted to.
The Avenger’s aides moved with the prompt and wordless efficiency that made them the greatest little fighting unit on earth.
They scattered.
Smitty leaped for the machine gunners, calmly pouring more lead into the dead men. The Avenger shot three times — the three slugs left in Mike’s tiny cylinder. Then he began clubbing, leaping from side to side like a shifting gray shadow.
Mac took a man with a bony right fist just as a bullet from the man’s gun creased his outstanding left ear.
Two of the men fired point-blank at Josh, from opposite sides, and got each other in the stomach and throat instead, as the Negro danced to the right and swiftly crouched.
Smitty had the two machine gunners, with a neck in each vast paw. They were jabbing at him with the guns, letting off short bursts of slugs when they thought the line was right, missing each time by a scant inch.
The Avenger ducked, bored in as a bullet went over his head. The room was a shambles, with the gang already half down, and the rest unable to fire freely for fear of killing each other — as two men already had.
Benson got a red-headed killer with a blow that must have broken his jaw.
Then it was suddenly over.
There had been a sound like two ripe melons hitting. That was when Smitty knocked the heads of the two machine gunners together. He stood, with one of their deadly guns in his big paws, weaving the muzzle slowly from side to side.
“It’s all up,” he bellowed. “Unless some of you want a taste—”
One man shot at the giant. And then he went down with six machine gun slugs through his thigh. The rest let their guns drop.
“Take them to the hall, Smitty,” said Benson. His dead, white face, expressionless even at this moment, was something from which the cowed gangsters shrank. His eyes were unholy, unhuman, in their colorless, cold ferocity. “You will find others there — the men Henderlin thought would come in when he called.”
In Smitty’s eyes a light dawned.
“That’s why you wanted us to leave Bleek Street openly! So this gang would trail us here — and tangle with the other — summoned by the guy who was tipped off by the hole burned in the door!”
“That’s right,” said Benson. “Fourteen men against eight — thirteen, taking out the one I hit on Bleek Street. The scuffling in the hall and on the stairs a while ago was when thirteen men sneaked up and slugged eight who had their backs turned, waiting for the call Henderlin gave.”
The girl with the black eyes, which were softer and more beautiful now stared at the white, still face with a look of awe.
“You worked it out that way!” she breathed. “You planned, like a chess player with death as the queen, to have that man destroy himself when he called for men to come and destroy you.”
Benson shrugged, eyes pale holes in his white face.
“I do not kill, myself. So I make the men I fight annihilate themselves. It saves the State the cost of fighting great wealth; yet it puts no blood on my soul.”
Smitty had the men herded to the stairs by now. The others, a few dead, the rest with cracked heads, were out there as The Avenger had predicted. Smitty felt as if ice were being drawn up and down his backbone. Long as he had worked for Benson, much as he esteemed him, The Avenger’s uncanny mastery over men and events was more than the giant could ever accustom himself to.
Benson stared at Henderlin’s corpse.
“A billion dollars! It was enough to make Henderlin forget everything else on earth — including his wife, killed in that faked-up explosion. Enough to make Singer quite willing to have done as much, save that Rann gave his enemy the upper hand. Enough for Rann to be a murdering monster for whom the chair was too good.”
He shook his head a little.
“What Rann knew, plus the secret chemical in the bottoms of the vats in Warsaw, could turn water into explosive fuel. With Rann’s death, a great invention dies. Light, heat, power, from water! The loss is a colossal defeat for mankind.”
Diana eyed him with a look that many women wore when they finally came to know this man a little. A baffled but breathless look.
“It is a great triumph for you, though,” she said. “You have brought to justice a man too powerful for any man-made laws to convict. And you saw the end of the murderer, Rann, too. A great victory, Mr. Benson.”
But The Avenger said nothing. It was doubtful if he heard her. Certainly in his pale, icy eyes there was no look of triumph.
No victory over the great crime syndicates he fought could bring him a sense of triumph. There was no room in his life for anything but more crime fighting — and more — till at last some super-killer should defeat him at his own game.
Meanwhile he would continue to be — The Avenger!