"050 (B033) - The Terror in the Navy (1937-04) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

India Allison choked. "WhatЧwhat didЧ"
"It was harmless paper," Doc Savage said quietly. "You substituted it for their paper impregnated with poison chemicals."
"You knew that!" she gasped. "How?"
Doc appeared not to hear her query, and put one of his own.
"Why are you here?" he asked.
"Listen!" she said rapidly. "When I heard they were afraid of you, I determined to get to you the first chance I could and ask you for help!"
Doc got to his feet. The young woman got up, also, and gripped one of his arms tightly with both her hands.
"They brought that piece of note paper to me, and I knew it was a death instrument," she said. "I decided they were going to trap you. They would use such a clever murder method only on some one such as you. So I exchanged a harmless piece of paper for the other one. Then I followed them here."
She crowded closer to the bronze man.
"I climbed the fire escape, intending to wait until you came," she continued. "You were here, and just as I came, I saw you burn the paper."
Doc Savage walked to the window, not because he wanted to see the window, but because he wanted to get away from the disturbing presence of the young woman.
There was a fire escape outside the window. The street below was beginning to fill with traffic.
"What is your story?" he asked.
Exquisitely beautiful India Allison brought her soft presence close again and took hold of his arm.
"I'm scared!" she said. "We are menaced by something you can't see!"
DOC SAVAGE looked at the hand on his arm, and reflected that he had never seen a more perfectly shaped feminine extremity.
"Five weeks ago, it started," the girl said. "First it was onlyЧboxes and things falling off shelves. Once, a piano upset. Chairs turned over."
She gave the most violent shudder which Doc Savage had ever seen a young woman give, holding onto his arm tightly as she did so.
"Then Lieber Von Zidney was seized andЧand hurled against a wall and badly bruised by somethingЧsomething he could not see!"
"It sounds rather ghostly," Doc offered.
"You don't believe me!" she said wearily. "I didn't expect you to! It's too fantastic to think there can be a forceЧsomething invisibleЧwhich can seize persons and hurl them about. Or which can grab one's car and force it off the road, which is what happened to me at one time."
"The navy ships which met disaster last night," Doc reminded her. "There was talk of some mysterious force, according to the newspapers."
The girl gathered herself. "Two weeks ago, a man with a sawed-off shotgun appeared. He said he was there to protect us against the mysterious attacks, and that we were to stay inside and inform no one of what was happening. The man refused to say who he was, why he was there, or what he was doing. He said he was there to guard us against what he calledЧa horrible thing."
"I see." Doc noted the exquisite texture of the skin of the slender hand on his arm.
"I am Von Zidney's ghost writer," said the girl. "Von Zidney does technical articles for American journals on foreign trade. He is an importer of optical instruments. He is not good with English, and I speak his native language fluently, and can turn his work into English. I am also his secretary."
"Continue, please." Doc was aware of some of the young woman's exquisite curves, and of the warm grip she was keeping on his arm.
"We had never seen the man who walked in before," said the girl. "He simply took up his job of guarding us."
"Why?" Doc asked.
"I don't know." The young woman squeezed Doc's arm. "And I don't know why the mysterious attacks were aimed at us in the first place."
Doc Savage reached out and almost patted the young woman's small, marvelously built hand, almost took it in his own bronze fingers. Then some solidity of thought returned, and he drew in a breath and stepped away, so that the shapely hand slipped from his sleeve.
"Know anything else?" he asked, his voice vaguely stirred.
"No." The young woman gave the bronze man a glance which was nothing if not disturbing.
"Does Lieber Von Zidney know what it is all about?" Doc persisted.
"Not that he had told me," India Allison said, and looked as if she might get disturbingly close again.
"Let's talk to him!" Doc said hastily, and moved toward the door.
The newsboy selling the newspapers with the story of the five mysterious naval disasters of the night was doing a big business in front of the Parkview. If he saw Doc Savage, he gave no sign, and yet he could have hardly helped seeing the bronze man and his enchanting feminine companion enter the car at the curb.
Doc Savage stopped his convertible coupщ just before it came in sight of the big, blocky house of Lieber Von Zidney. He looked at a near-by clump by bushes.
"Monk!" he called.
The bushes stirred, and India AllisonЧshe had hold of Doc's arm againЧemitted a soft, startled sound which would have been an outcry had Doc not hastily placed a hand over her soft lips.
A man had come out of the brush. He looked like exactly the kind of man one should expect to come out of brush. He would weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds. His arms were preceptibly longer than his legs.
He had a titanic chest and no hips to speak of, and his mouth was big beyond all sense; his eyes were small and almost lost in pits of gristle, and he was covered with coarse, reddish hairs which looked as if they might be clipped off, straightened out and used by a carpenter for finishing nails.
Doc Savage said, "This is one of my five aids, the world-renowned chemist, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair."
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair gave the pretty young lady a big grin with a face that was so homely it was, almost unbelievably, pleasant.
"Them that ain't afraid to, calls me Monk, miss," he said, in a very small voice which sounded as if it belonged to a juvenile.
"I'm not afraid of you," smiled India Allison, and extended a hand.
"MONK" made his grin even bigger. Monk was something of a connoisseur where feminine pulchritude was concerned, and he obviously rated this young woman high.
Doc asked, "Monk, has anything happened?"
"Nope," Monk said, in his small voice. "Lieber Von Zidney and that other guy with the shotgun are still around. Von Zidney is in the house. The other guy is mowing the lawn."
"The man with the shotgun is one of the gang, left there to watch us," said the girl. "I managed to give him the slip." Then India Allison gave Monk a sweetly angelic smile, and put her hand lightly on Doc Savage's sleeve.
"Now I see how you knew about my switching a harmless piece of paper for the deadly one!" she said. "But how did you happen to be watching?"