Wings of the Black Death/Chapter 6

With those deaths at the home of Mrs. Gainsborough began the most amazing reign of terror the modern world had ever known. Newspaper headlines flung the ghastly news at their readers in letters two inches high. Wherever people gathered in frightened groups on street corners and public squares, they repeated over and over those three grim words: “The Black Death.” They were shouted above the clatter and roar of the subways, whispered in awed tones over the family supper table. Mothers glanced with worried faces at their children; and men went about their work with drawn lips and haggard eyes.

For the dread Black Death that had swept England, that had wiped out whole cities, had laid its horrid skeleton hand upon New York. It was fortunate the panic-stricken multitudes did not know, as Wentworth did, that the deaths were of human agency, perpetrated by a monster whose fiendishness was almost beyond belief.

The Bubonic plague had appeared in modern times before; it had killed its thousands in the East, but never had it been known in so virulent form as now. For the present disease was almost instantaneous, killing within twenty-four hours. And the form doctors had known and studied had an incubation period of four days. They had devised two serums for it; one which gave a partial immunity immediately and was effective for five days; another which acted more slowly but which was effective over a longer period.

Both of these had been used in the present outbreak and both had proved futile. Doctors spent long hours over their test tubes; laboratories worked frantically turning out the serums. But it was slow work and nearly hopeless.

Wentworth, lean-faced and burning-eyed, blaming himself for the death of those innocents, flaming with a white-hot rage against the man who called himself tauntingly “The Black Death,” was summoned into conference by Stanley Kirkpatrick, the Commissioner of Police.

There was a never-fading scowl upon Kirkpatrick's saturnine face as the two men, sitting across the desk from each other, sought to lay plans for the capture of the criminal. But what information Wentworth had he could not reveal lest he also betray the fact that he was the Spider, a man now sought vengefully by the police for the murder of two of their comrades.

He could not tell him of the connection between that battle in the pawnshop, of John Harper and the gloating laugh of a man over a wire foredooming two children and an entire household to the Black Death, threatening the city's millions.

It was midnight when Wentworth left police headquarters and, entering his Lancia limousine, drove uptown with unseeing eyes fixed upon the turbaned head of Ram Singh. The car snaked through traffic, turned west to the poorly lighted streets along the waterfront, and Wentworth pressed the button that opened the secret wardrobe behind the cushions.

He rapidly extracted and strapped beneath his shirt his compact kit of chrome steel tools, dropped into his pocket a small but deadly automatic, and closed the compartment.

At Seventy-Fourth Street the Lancia turned its nose east into a district of cheap lodging houses whose stingy light barely penetrated dust-filmed windows. Wentworth rapped sharply on the glass. Ram Singh glided smoothly to the curb, and, with a few parting instructions, Wentworth, the Spider now, strode rapidly up the street, eyeing the dimly revealed numbers of the houses.

He spotted the one he sought near the corner, went deliberately up the steps. The door resisted his skilled use of the lock-pick only a few seconds, and the Spider entered.

But this time the Spider was bent on no errand of justice; nor was he out to exact the penalty for some crime. The girl whose cry that she had been framed for forgery had won his sympathy lived here, and he hoped she might give him some clue to the master of the plague. But this was an errand that Richard Wentworth could not perform in his true identity. It must be the Spider who interviewed the girl, lest later inquiries by the police link the two personalities and identify them as the same man.

Up two flights of steps he crept, and in the darkness of the third floor his hand slipped beneath his coat and once more a black silk mask hid the face of Richard Wentworth.

At each door on the third floor he listened carefully, but found nothing suspicious. Finally he knocked lightly at the one which opened into the girl's room.

A pregnant silence followed his tap. But a moment later he heard a hesitant step and a feminine voice quaver through the thin board panel.

“Who—who is it?”

“Your friend,” said Wentworth softly, “—the Spider.”

There was a gasp and for a long moment more, silence. Then a key grated in the lock, and the door swung open. The Spider slipped in.

He shut the door swiftly behind him. Before his masked face the girl retreated with slow and fearful steps. Her face was pale beneath the glowing red of hair that showered about her shoulders. Her hands clutched about her a cheap negligee of green silk, to which the fresh youth of her body lent dignity. Her mouth was open and a scream had caught in her throat.

“Don't be alarmed, Miss Doeg,”' the Spider said. “It is necessary that I wear a mask, lest my enemies in some way learn who I am.”

His words reassured the girl somewhat and she dropped to a seat on the side of the shoddy white-iron bed which, with a second hand dresser and chair, completed the furnishings of her small room.

The Spider, with one swift glance, took in every detail, noting the drawn shade. He drew a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to her, but the girl shook her head, with a small smile, and in turn offered him a box from the dresser beside her bed. A white box with gold letters and long gold-tipped Dimetrios cigarettes.

She laughed shyly. “My one luxury,” she explained.

The Spider laughed, too. “Sorry I can't join you,” he said. “But the mask—” He left the sentence in the air, and snapped a light for her.

When she had the cigarette going Wentworth began his questioning.

“Do you know of any reason,” he asked, “why anyone should try to frame you?”

The half-smile which had hovered about the girl's lips faded entirely. She shook her red head.

“Do you have any idea why you were framed?”

“Not unless someone merely wanted to steal the bonds, and I was the most convenient person to hang it on.”

The Spider took an impatient turn up and down the room.

“You work in the office of MacDonald Pugh,” he said. “Who, beside yourself, would have an opportunity to substitute the forged bonds for the genuine?”

The girl's face clouded and her eyes dropped. But in the brief moment before her lids veiled them, Wentworth glimpsed something very much like fear.

“Come,” he said sharply, “what is it? This is important. If you want to be freed of the crime, if you want—”

The door knob rasped slightly. Wentworth turned toward it. But the movement was amazingly slow for the Spider, almost as if he wished to be—too late. His hand did not even move toward his gun, and he stared calmly, a thin smile on his hidden lips, into the face of the man, masked like himself, who stood just inside the door with leveled gun.

A smothered scream burst out behind him. Wentworth, ignoring the girl, studied the slitted eyes that glittered at him through the slits of the mask.

The man advanced slowly, the gun in his right hand, his left hidden in his coat pocket.

“Over by the window, you,” he ordered. Wentworth said “Certainly,” in a casual tone, as if he granted a minor favor to an acquaintance, and moved slowly backward.

The girl came again into the range of his vision and he studied her. Was she the innocent victim she pretended, or was she in league with the Black Death? The Spider had been certain after their clash in the pawnshop, that the criminal would seek to trap him. The only logical bait was the girl, and he had deliberately taken that bait, walked into the trap; for he knew of no other way to trace the man, and find him he must.

Otherwise the dread plague would stalk the streets; would lay its grisly hands upon man, woman and child—and the screams and meanings of the sufferers would rise to heaven like an unanswered prayer.

Wentworth felt the white thin scar upon his temple throbbing angrily. He knew sudden fury at the thought that this man, or his master, was responsible for the death of that curly haired boy he had snatched too late from his play with a plague-infested puppy. But the Spider forced himself to calmness, studied the girl narrowly.

She was standing tensely beside the bed, her hands clasped before her, shoulders hunched. Her red hair seemed to have drained all the color from her face. If she was actually in league with the Black Death and had deliberately betrayed Wentworth so that this man might trap him, she was as clever an actress as ever tricked a man.

Wentworth turned from her to the masked man again. The other's movements were wary, as he came forward toward the middle of the room now. The gun in his hand never wavered.

“Face the wall,” he ordered Wentworth, “hoist your hands.”

The Spider shrugged his shoulders slightly beneath the smooth fit of his dark tweeds, turned slowly and elevated his arms. A sharp cry from the girl, the sound of a blow whirled him about. But he was helpless. He only looked once more into the black muzzle of death.

The man bit out words, “I said 'Face the wall'!”

The girl was sprawled unconscious across the bed. From the man's left wrist dangled a blackjack.

“You filthy animal,” the Spider rasped. “Why was that necessary?”

“Face the wall!” snarled the man, and the gun inched forward like the head of a poisonous viper.

The Spider hesitated. But once more he controlled himself, his muscles taut with anger. He longed to crush this beast, as he knew he could any moment he chose. But it was more important that he obtain a definite clue to the Black Death than that the injury to this girl be immediately avenged. He was convinced now that this man was not the arch criminal himself. Slowly he obeyed the order and faced the wall.

“Put your hands behind you,” the man snapped and that, too, the Spider did. If he was to be bound, then at least his death was not intended now. He heard the man's heavy feet approach, and—lights blazed suddenly in his brain as a blow crashed against his skull. The Spider reeled against the wall, slid along it and slipped to the floor.

The man's knees gouged into his back. His wrists were jerked together and ropes bit into them. Wentworth felt the pain of the bonds. The blow had been no more than a tap behind the ear with the blackjack. He felt dizzy and sick, but rapidly recovered. Swiftly then he forced himself back to full control of his senses, for the man raised a slow hand and jerked the mask from the Spider's face!

Then jarring laughter rang in the room. “So Richard Wentworth is the Spider!” his captor jeered.