"020 (B026) - Death in Silver (1934-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

THE building housing Paine L. Winthrop's shipping company, the Seven Seas, was not the most imposing in the Wall Street sector, but it narrowly missed that designation. Penthouses ornamented the tops of most of the skyscrapers in the district, and this one was no exception.



The penthouse on this building was a pretentious affair with numerous glass walls which afforded the occupant full sunlight. Most of the glass had been shattered by the blast below. In fact, it was a miracle that the whole structure had not gone down, with a resultant vast loss of life.



One of the penthouse rooms contained many work benches, and these supported racks holding innumerable test tubes, retorts, microscopes, mixing trays, pestles and bottled chemicals. That the benches had supported this array would be more correct, for most of the stuff was now on the floor. Several small chemical fires had started.



A remarkable-looking man was picking himself up from the mess of glass and liquids. He jumped up and down and emitted a roar, for he had been slightly burned by a vial of acid.



The roar and the way the fellow bounced about gave the impression of a great, angry ape. The man's appearance did little to detract from the impression. He had practically no forehead; his thick, muscle-gnarled arms were longer than his legs, and his skin was leathery and covered with bristles which resembled rusty nails. His mouth was so unnaturally large that it looked as if there had been an accident in the assembling of his pleasantly ugly face.



"Habeas!" the apish man bellowed.



A pig came galloping into view, squealing excitedly - an almost incredibly grotesque specimen of the porker family, as homely in his way as was the man who had called him. The shote had long, doglike legs, a scrawny body, an inquisitive snout, and ears almost large enough to serve as wings.



"Dang it, Habeas," the homely chemist grinned, "I was afraid that dude lawyer had thrown a grenade at you."



Some one seemed to be trying to open a near-by door. Loud kicks sounded, wood crunched, and the door fell inward.



The man who came through was slender, waspish, and attired to the height of sartorial perfection. He had a high forehead, the mobile mouth of an orator. In one hand he gripped a thin black cane which was slightly separated at a joint near the handle, thus disclosing the object to be a sword cane with a razor-sharp blade.



The well-dressed man glared at the homely chemist, his expression that of a gentleman who had just found a toad on his breakfast table.



"Monk, I always did know you would blow us up with some of your idiotical chemical experiments," he snapped.