Chapter X

61

STRANGE FISH

Johnny Toms made an unpleasant clucking noise.

“You've come up in the world, Uncle Bill,” he said, “from picking pockets on Wall Street.”

Bill Hazel chuckled amiably. “Don't be nasty, Johnny. Or if you do, at least be clever. Actually, I'm doing a great thing for the world. Or trying to.”

“Oh. You're heroic now?” Toms said coldly.

“That's right. You ever hear of Erodus Helv?”

Doc Savage started. He looked at the others and decided that he was the only one who had heard of Helv. He wasn't too surprised. Helv's part in the horror that had trapped Europe for ten years or more was not widely known.

Bill Hazel smiled at them. “Babes in the wood,” he said. “You don't know the devil when he is called by name.”

“What,” Johnny Toms demanded, “are you talking about?”

“Erodus Helv. The bloody boy himself. Helv the Butcher, Helv, the fiend who personally with a Mauser pistol in his cursed right hand shot to death twenty−six captured American fliers—which was actually, sickeningly incredible though it seems, one of the smallest of the many murder−orgies in which he indulged.”

Johnny Toms frowned. “Never heard of him.”

“Okay. But the Allies have. He's wanted. He's one of the most wanted men in the world today. He is right at the head of the list of war−atrocity criminals.”

“What are you driving at?”

Bill Hazel said, “It's simple. I was hired by Johann Jon Berlitz to find war−criminal Erodus Helv. I got a clue to Helv's whereabouts. Helv's men got on my trail. I had to get rid of the clue fast, but get rid of it in a place where I could find it again. So I shipped it to Paris, my niece. It was a fish.”

“But I never got any fish!” Paris gasped.

“That,” said Bill Hazel, “complicates things.”

Chapter XI

DOC SAVAGE now took a back seat, as far as a part in the conversation was concerned. He sat back and watched. He listened to Uncle Bill Hazel elaborate the matter of the fish. Hazel seemed acutely conscious that the story had its silly side.

The fish, he explained, had been shipped from Occupied Europe. The fact that it had come to the United States was due, Bill Hazel explained, to his being frightened and excited at the time. He had been terribly scared, because Helv the Butcher's men were hot on his trail.