Baron had been faking unconsciousness when Rodney Mason had searched him.

He had seen Mason write down the car's license number. As soon as Mason had left, Baron had loosened his bonds. The rest was easy for a well-organized gang.

Smiling broadly, Sam Baron sauntered along the sidewalk. He entered the delicatessen run by Otto Muller.

CHAPTER XIII.

BEHIND THE BROWN BEARD.

MULLER'S delicatessen was crowded. Two clerks behind a long counter were having their hands full serving customers. They paid no particular attention to Sam Baron.

Sam seemed to be in no hurry. He lighted a cigarette and his gaze drifted leisurely about the store.

None of the other customers noticed Sam. If they had, it would have been impossible to guess the real direction of Baron's interest. His eyes remained dull as he stared briefly at the two things that had brought him into this busy store.

One was a dingy door at the back of the shop. The other was a mechanical piano that stood near the lunch tables along the side wall.

Baron sauntered over to the piano. It was a nickel-in-the-slot variety.

Behind a gla.s.s panel was a card with a printed list of the selections that thepiano played. A lever at the side moved a pointer to the various popular tunes to which a person might listen.

Baron grinned faintly when he saw that No. 9 on the list had been covered by a slip of paper. On the pasted paper was a typewritten line in smudged capital letters: "OUT OF ORDER."

It was to this particular line that Sam Baron moved the selection lever.

He dropped a nickel into the slot. Evidently the sign meant nothing, for the piano immediately began to play.

Baron was not surprised. He knew that the printed warning was merely a ruse to keep ordinary customers from playing a tune that was a pa.s.sword to a criminal fence.

The tune was a popular one: "There's ice in my heart, Since you said we must part; You thought it was nice, when you handed me ice, You laughed when I said I was blue!

But now I am glad, It is you who is sad, For I'm handing the ice back to yo-o-ou!"

When the tune was finished, Baron moved the pointer away from the selection. He glanced toward the door in the rear of the shop. It opened almost instantly. A man in a white ap.r.o.n entered from a rear room.

He was a cheerful, bustling man who looked pleased at the number of customers in the store. He had friendly, wrinkled eyes and a brown-bearded face.

Baron nodded to him. "Good evening, Mr. Muller."

"Goot evening, sir. Haff you been waited on?"

"I want a can of imported sardines."

"Certainly."

He selected a can from the shelf, began to wrap it in paper.

"Make sure that sardine can has a key with it," Baron said. "The last one didn't."

Otto Muller chuckled genially. "This one you will haff no trouble with."

Baron paid for his purchase and left the shop. Another customer approached Muller, but Muller avoided him deftly. He nodded briefly at one of his clerks to wait on the man; then bustled away with the air of one who has forgotten something.

He hurried into the rear of the store, closing the door softly behind him.

MEANWHILE, Sam Baron was walking swiftly toward the corner. He had already ripped the wrapping away from his can of sardines. The usual tiny key was glued to the top of the tin, but Baron paid no attention to it. He was grinning at a second key that had been deftly wrapped with the purchase by the wily Otto Muller. This was a large bra.s.s one.

Baron slipped it into his pocket. He tossed the sardines into a trash barrel and continued leisurely to the head of a dark, narrow alley. The alley led to a concrete courtyard in the rear of the delicatessen shop.

There was no back door leading from the store. But there was a slanting cellar door set in the concrete. It looked like painted gray wood. When Baron touched it, he felt the cold surface of steel.

Glancing cautiously around, he made sure that he was un.o.bserved. Then heopened the cellar door with his bra.s.s key. A moment later, he had descended from sight, locking the cellar door above his head.

The glow of his flashlight disclosed an empty room. Baron played his torch on the bare inner wall. He waited.

In a moment, a section of the wall moved aside. A cheerful glow from within disclosed the smiling face of brown-bearded Otto Muller.

Baron walked through the opening. He found himself in a luxuriously furnished chamber. There were rugs on the floor, shaded lamps, every evidence of wealth and comfort. Sam grinned as he accepted an expensive cigar from Muller. It wasn't the first time he had been here.

Otto Muller was Baron's superior in an efficient criminal organization for the theft and disposal of precious stones.

Muller's delicatessen was merely a blind to deceive the police. His real business was crooked. He was the fence for the gang. He was also contact man for the unknown leader who directed the mob. Criminal orders, sent secretly to Muller, were carried out by Sam Baron and his picked gunmen.

Both men were delighted with the easy capture of Rodney Mason.

"I knew Mason would head here right off the reel," Baron said, with a grin. "I was wide awake when he stole your note and took the license number of the sedan. He thought Squint and I were unconscious. But the minute he scrammed, we got loose in a hurry, You certainly worked fast, after I phoned."

Sam poured himself a drink of whisky from a bottle of Muller's. "So what now?"

"Another job," Muller said, grimly. "Tonight."

"Murder job?"

"Yes."

They used the word murder as casually as men discussing a haircut. Muller reached into a drawer and removed something wrapped in tissue paper. It was a gorgeous sapphire.

Muller held it to the light. He chuckled as he saw the crimson blur, like blood, imprisoned in the depths of the stone. It was one of the synthetic blood sapphires that Baron had stolen from the laboratory of Rodney Mason.

"The name of the next victim is Andrew Shafter," Muller said. "He's the last millionaire collector that we absolutely know has one of the original blood, sapphires, Your job is to steal the real gem and leave this fake one clutched in Shafter's dead hand."

"It'll be a sweet job," Baron promised. "No gunplay to attract cops. I'll either use a knife or I'll strangle the guy."

Muller shook his head. There was a cold glint in his pitiless eyes.

"You're wrong, Sam. There will be no knife. And no strangulation. Andrew Shafter is going to have his throat torn out by a ghostly dog. A dog that no one will ever see!"

Baron shivered slightly. "Nix on that dog stuff! I haven't forgotten yet the battle I had with that d.a.m.ned mutt of Peter Randolph's. I'm not crowding my luck with any more dogs!"

Otto Muller uttered a croaking laugh.

"This time, my friend, you will not have to worry about a living animal.

The dog you will use to rip out Andrew Shafter's throat - will be a mechanical one!"

"Huh?"

"Take a look at this!" Muller said.

MULLER walked to a tall steel cabinet and unlocked it. He took out something that looked like an orchestra leader's baton. But the shaft of that strange implement was thick and solid. It was tipped at one end by five claws,like, those commonly used in a Chinese back scratcher.

Sam Baron's breath gulped at sight of those shining claws. They were tempered steel, ground to sharp, ugly edges at the broad points. Sam picked up the implement and hefted it in his muscular hand. He was not an imaginative man, but he could guess what would happen to a man's throat if those steel claws were hooked into soft flesh and ripped loose with a powerful jerk.

"You like it?" Muller whispered. "Can you see what the police will think when they find Shafter's body? Can you see what the newspapers will print?

Every man, woman and child in the city will be convinced that Andrew Shafter died from the same ghostly attack that killed Randolph!

"The criminal will be the nude, golden statue of a pagan G.o.ddess - a woman with the head of a snarling dog! The newspapers will say she was avenging the sacrilegious theft of the Necklace of Purity from her temple in India!"

With a shudder, Sam Baron eyed the deadly device in his hand.

"Where the devil did you get it?" he grated.

"A little idea of the boss's," Muller said huskily. "It came by messenger this afternoon. You've got to hand it to the big-shot. Whoever he is, the man is a genius! He never misses a trick."

Baron nodded. He felt the same way. He grinned and returned to the subject of the blood sapphires.

"We've got ten of the real ones now," he muttered. "Right?"

"Right!" Muller said.

"That makes eleven, after I croak Shafter tonight. There were twenty-one jewels in the original Necklace of Purity. Have you been able to locate the

ten.

stones that are still missing?"

"No," Muller admitted, and there was anger in his grunt. "Shafter's is the last I have any line on. That's why the boss wants us to play up the supernatural stuff. We're depending on that to scare the guts out of those ten unknown collectors who still hold sapphires.

"Some of 'em will surely try to get rid of their dangerous stones.

They'll be afraid to go to the police, because the law would know they purchased stolen property. So they'll try to dispose of their sapphires in the underworld market."

"And?" Baron suggested.

"Any underworld contact they make will lead them to my door. I'm the only fence in the city who handles big-time stuff. The minute I get a proposition, I'll play cagey.

"I'll pretend I'm afraid to do business for fear of getting a visit from the Dog G.o.ddess. But I'll take good care to find out who the owners are - and you'll have some more murder jobs to do. You see how the thing works? We'll use fear! Not to buy the sapphires, but to find out where they are!"

Otto Muller rose to his feet. His voice became crisp.

"O.K., Sam. Scram! You haven't got much time to line up the Shafter job."

Baron took another drink of Muller's whisky, while the rascally delicatessen dealer wrapped up the steel-clawed implement of death.

FIVE minutes later, Sam was outside the panel of Muller's ornate hiding place. He was in the bare chamber that gave access to the slanting cellar door.

He opened the door, went out into the courtyard. A quick sneak took him through the dark alley to the street. He hailed a cab and drove quietly away.

Otto Muller waited a while before he left his luxuriously furnishedoffice. He seemed in no hurry. Finally, he turned out the lights and opened another secret panel - one that gave on to the storeroom-cellar of the delicatessen. Muller's clerks knew nothing of his secret chamber in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

A flight of wooden steps led aloft. Muller climbed to the rear room from which he had first appeared to sell Baron a can of sardines, and entered the store. He spoke in a slow, kindly voice to the clerks behind the counter.

"I'm leaving now. I may be back a little later in the evening. Goot night."

"Good night, Mr. Muller."

The fence grinned faintly as he walked past a manhole cover near the curb.

He entered a taxicab and was driven downtown. But Muller didn't drive straight to his destination. At Seventy-second Street, he alighted and walked a block or two. A second taxi carried him the rest of his journey.

His goal was a sedate second-cla.s.s hotel on the lower West Side.

Muller went straight to a room on the seventh floor. A quick stride brought him to the bathroom, where he turned on the hot water. Chuckling, he began to peel off his clothes.

The splash of the water drowned the thin whisper of Muller's laugh, as he stood naked in front of the mirror eyeing his benevolent, brown-bearded face.

His hand reached into the medicine cabinet and came out with a bottle and a small spirit lamp.

Working with unhurried patience, Muller removed his brown beard.

The change was startling. The real, clean-shaven face under that beard altered Otto Muller's whole appearance. The eyes were keener, the face stamped with aristocratic pride. This was a man of wealth and social distinction.

He was Julius Hankey, owner of the most famous jewelry shop on Fifth Avenue!

HANKEY bathed and dressed leisurely. The shabby clothing of Otto Muller was hung neatly away in a closet. From the same closet came the expensive, well-chosen garments of the jeweler.