"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 166 - Crime Rides The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

While Pell and other officers were telling of the disaster, Harry
observed
a hawk-faced man who was talking with police who had arrived from the
boardwalk.
From his attire, it was difficult to tell whether the individual was a
passenger
from the Ozark, or a member of the crew. Each group could easily have supposed
that he belonged to the other.
Whatever the hawkish man had to say, it impressed the police. They
hurried
away, and Harry Vincent had a hunch that they would soon spread the news of
crooks who were riding the high seas, not many miles from Atlantic City.
That wasn't all, however. The police complied with a request made by the
hawk-faced spokesman. For, shortly, uniformed attendants arrived from a
beach-front hotel and politely invited the men from the Ozark to follow them.
Soon, passengers and crew found themselves in a palatial lobby, where
clerks were assigning them to rooms. A head waiter was also present, bowing
the
way to the dining room, where a welcome breakfast awaited.
Cliff had joined Harry. Both were standing by the desk, looking for the
personage who had made these excellent arrangements. Just then, a clerk
answered the telephone. The Shadow's agents heard him say:
"Yes, Mr. Cranston. Their names... Mr. Vincent and Mr. Marsland... I'll
find them right away, sir..."
Harry and Cliff promptly identified themselves. The clerk told them that
Mr. Lamont Cranston was having breakfast in his suite on the sixth floor and
would like them to join him. They went up to the suite; when they rapped, a
quiet voice ordered them to enter.
Lamont Cranston stood awaiting them. His thin lips gave a slight smile,
for the benefit of the two men who knew him to be The Shadow. Both Harry and
Cliff had met their chief in such a guise before. Yet neither, for the life of
him, could have sworn that The Shadow was Lamont Cranston.
There was something masklike about his hawkish countenance, that gave it
the look of a well-formed disguise when its owner stood in the glare of
daylight, as he was now doing, beside the wide windows of the hotel room.
True, there was such a person as Lamont Cranston, a wealthy globe-trotter
who spent his leisure time in New York. But there had also been occasions -
remembered only by The Shadow's agents - when two Cranstons had appeared in
different places at the same time.
As Harry and Cliff seated themselves at a well-stocked breakfast table,
their chief pointed from the window, toward the wide expanse of inlet at the
north of Absecon Island. Off beyond the limits of Atlantic City, trim
speedboats were putting out to sea, bound in search of the crooks who had fled
the sinking Ozark.
Turning from the window, The Shadow picked up a wrapped roll of thin
canvas that a bellboy had brought from the lifeboat. From it, he took a
rumpled
cloak and flattened slouch hat, together with a brace of automatics. He packed
those in a table drawer, then joined his agents at breakfast.
"Those crooks are likely to escape," declared The Shadow, in an even tone