by Paul Malmont
“How are you feeling?” he asked in his low, deep voice. She still felt his soft rumble in her toes—the same way she had when she had responded to an ad for a Western Union clerk back in Carrolton, Missouri, and Lester had answered the phone. God, she thought, that was thirteen years ago. Lester almost never raised his voice over that whispery rumble, yet she never had trouble hearing him, even in a crowded restaurant or on the noisy elevated train.
“I’m okay,” she shrugged, sipping at the martini. She saw him furrow his brow in concern. She knew it had been difficult for him to understand how so much more of her mind and heart had suffered than her body. The blood, the physical pain—he could understand that, she knew. He could act on that, and he had. During the emergency of the miscarriage and the traumatic recovery afterward, he had responded swiftly, with decisive, caring purpose. It was only later, during the long fall and the cold of early winter, that she could sense his occasional frustration and impatience with her. Because he didn’t understand. It had happened to him too, it was true. And she knew she had to acknowledge that he had lost too. But what had he really lost? A figment of a future? Not a life that he could feel within him the way she had.
She had wanted four children. She had ended up with four miscarriages. Her doctor had told her that her uterus wouldn’t support life, that it was a hostile environment. What a horrible thing to say to a woman.
On the coffee table she could still see the edge of the cover of the one present she had allowed herself to purchase when she first realized she was pregnant this last time. It was a children’s book which had been published just around Christmastime: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. It had been purchased in hope. Now it was buried under a mound of Doc Savage magazines which she had meant to read but hadn’t.
She had lost another life in blood, and this time nearly lost hers as well. And in the months since the miscarriage, while her body mended, while she spent her days in dark places removing that child from her dreams of the future, she had grown angry at Lester for being there too much and not being there enough. It wasn’t that he was angry with her, but maybe she wanted him to be. Maybe she wanted him to scream at her, tell her it was her fault, that she had made a mess of everything because of who she was. Recently, while making a pot roast (because cooking seemed to be the only thing she did lately), she realized that she had been waiting for the past six months for him to blame her. She wanted him to be angry with her, yell at her to stop wallowing. She wanted him to deck the doctors with a patented Doc Savage double-fisted haymaker to the jaw and set everything right. But that wasn’t Lester. Although strong and dependable and loving with her, he had never been a forceful person. And in the end it wouldn’t have fixed her.
So she had dug herself out of her hole. Somewhat. She had begun by focusing on things other than her loss. For example, making sure that Lester had proper meals at the right time was an important step. It was a small goal she could achieve on a daily basis, and a more realistic goal than finding a lost treasure.
“I’m going to go out tonight,” he said, “to a Fiction Guild meeting at the Knickerbocker.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “I have ham steak for dinner.”
After a hesitation in which he only blinked three or four times, he said, “I thought we might go down to Chinatown this weekend and visit Mr. Yee’s.” And by that she knew that he couldn’t care less about ham steaks or pot roasts.
Mr. Yee’s was one of their touchstone places in the city. On their first night in New York four years ago they had taken the wrong train and ended up in Chinatown in a blizzard. It was as far from La Plata, Missouri, as either of them had ever been; it might as well have been China, as lost and lonely as they were then. Mr. Yee had been one of the few brave souls to keep his restaurant open and had welcomed them graciously. Treating them as his special guests, he had brought forth to their table a large tank holding live fish and asked them to make a selection. She could still remember how grateful she felt that someone could be nice to her in a city that everyone had warned them about. He had been as thrilled to have customers that night as they had been to find a warm and friendly place: his restaurant had only been open a week. They talked to him for hours, and listened, as he told them all about how to get around their new adopted city. Mr. Yee had been their particular friend ever since, and Lester consulted with him often on the Chinese details that gave the Doc Savage books a special level of authenticity.
He chewed on his pipe stem and waited for her to answer. He wasn’t used to her taking her time to make a decision.
“Let’s move to New York so I can be a pulp mag writer for Street & Smith. They’ve already hired me to write a Shadow story for them and I did it. It’s called The Golden Vulture. Walter Gibson, the fella that usually writes The Shadow, just has to sign off on it and they’re gonna run it. John Nanovic says there could be a whole lot of work for me up there.”
“That sounds nice. Let’s go.”
He would go to Mr. Yee’s without her if she didn’t want to go; she knew that. Lately he had been going out more and more on his own. He had recently come home in a foul mood from an evening at a bar where some of his fellow pulp writers went. He was disinclined to discuss his night, but he had spent the next day looking through his old story file instead of writing. At the end of the day he had mailed off several stories to the Saturday Evening Post. She wished he could be satisfied writing Doc Savage. He was more successful than almost any other writer in America. But she knew how much he wanted public recognition of his talents under his own name, how much he despised being forced to publish under the name Kenneth Robeson. He craved, with a depth she could only imagine, the vindication of being published in one of the so-called classier magazines. She understood that about as well as he understood her pain, she supposed. After so many years of marriage it was good that they still had things they needed to learn about each other.
“Is this about something you’re writing?” She always liked to help him research his stories, help open the doors which lead to adventure. Well, she used to. She hadn’t even been able to bring herself around enough to be able to read the last three issues of Doc Savage.
“Sort of.”
There was something else, she was sure of it. But his face was nearly impassive. She looked at the yellow corner of the children’s book on the coffee table. A pang of sadness and fear stabbed at her, but she said, “You know, I’ve missed his dumplings. That sounds nice.”
She hoped it would be. She hadn’t left the apartment in six months.
Episode Seven
“DID YOU know Howard Lovecraft?” Dr. Elmer Smith asked him.
The Flash shook his head, as did the other men at his table. Bob Hogan, who wrote the G-8 and His Battle Aces hero series, shrugged; his angular, bony shoulders bounced up and down beneath his suit. “Who was he?”
“He wrote a few things for the shudders.”
“I never even heard of him,” Hogan said.
“Yeah, he never broke through,” Smith said. “And he didn’t live here in New York. He lived in Providence.” He was a heavyset man; his girth was an occupational hazard. Doc Smith was a pulp writer, but he was also a real scientist, a chemist, who created tasty mixes for the Dawn Doughnut Company. He could always be counted upon to bring fresh samples of his newest creations to the Knickerbocker gettogethers. Tonight the big boxes of blueberry dunkers were being received with great enthusiasm. Not so much for the coffee-strawberry.
Smith wasn’t the only one afflicted with an expansive waistline. The Flash looked around the room. Fat and hemorrhoids were the plagues of his field. Even the skinny men in the room shared another common misery with the fat ones: their shoulders were all stooped and the head of each and every one hung from his neck so it looked as if the room were full of strange, gray vultures. This was the ultimate reward for hunching over a typewriter for long, hard hours. The Flash shifted his weight, straightening his posture, feeling the tendons crac
k in his neck as he did so. When he was rich he would have a masseuse and a chef on staff. And he would dictate his stories from a comfortable position, perhaps on a sofa, to a secretary.
Smith continued, “His stories were all about ancient horrible monsters from outer space who have been on earth in a state of suspended animation for eons waiting for the day when their leader would arrive and help them to take over the world. Meanwhile, while they sleep, their dreams have enough power to drive men insane. Very strange stuff. Full of reanimated corpses and shuffling dread fish creatures and mysterious, fog-bound islands that don’t appear on any chart.”
“Sounds surefire. Surprising that stuff didn’t sell,” The Flash said with a tone of enlightened disdain. He reached for a blueberry doughnut, his third, but he hoped that the other men hadn’t seen him take the first one and would think it was only his second. He looked around the room. The turnout tonight was quite good; he nodded to himself. Four tables full of writers, drinking coffee and talking about writing. Some of them were very successful, like Hogan and Smith; some were just starting out, like his friend Al van Vogt, who had recently moved to New York from Canada to rustle up more work. Then there were the grizzled old veterans like the Brit, Talbot Mundy, who claimed to have tramped around the whole of the Empire, hunted tigers in Afghanistan, fought in the Boer War, and published his first adventure story in The Scrap Book in 1911. The Flash had been reading Mundy’s stories since he was a little boy and was always thrilled whenever he could spend time in the man’s company.
A low rumble made the chandeliers shake and tinkle. It had been a while since they had been cleaned well; the Knickerbocker was no longer in its prime, and dust trickled down in a slow flurry. He covered his coffee cup. Knowing that the vibration was caused by the subway which ran under the hotel didn’t exactly reassure him. The shudder felt too much like the earthquakes he had known so well back in Washington. He didn’t trust the subway and only took cabs or the el. Tonight he had taken the trolley to the hotel on the corner of Forty-second and Broadway. Once upon a more elegant time the Knickerbocker had been part of the social pulse of the highest levels of the Manhattan elite. Now it was just another stop for the merchant class.
“He and Robert Howard were good friends,” Smith continued his impromptu eulogy.
“Aw jeez! Was he a suicide too?” asked Norman Daniels, a man who was often hired by publishers looking to imitate the success of Doc Savage or The Shadow. Howard, a Weird Tales writer who over the last ten years had authored a series of bold adventures about a mythical land traveled by a fearsome, amoral barbarian named Conan, had put a bullet into his brain with a .38 Colt revolver last year outside his home in Texas. Rumor had it that he had been upset by the irreversible coma his mother had slid into. He had been only thirty years old.
Smith shook his head. “Some kind of cancer, I heard. But here’s the weird thing they both had in common.” He lowered his voice and the men at the table leaned in to hear him. “They both lived at home with their mothers.”
They all looked uncomfortably at each other, aware why Smith had lowered his voice. One by one they all snuck glances at Cornell Woolrich, the skinny, nervously fey detective writer who had begun his writing career in Black Mask, the pulp started by H. L. Mencken that had launched the career of the West Coast gumshoe pulp writer Dash Hammett into the stratosphere. Hollywood made movies of Hammett’s stories and real publishers put his books in libraries and bookstores. Woolrich’s star was rising as well; he now sold almost exclusively to the slicks, and there was gossip of a nice novel deal in the works (a novel, The Flash thought, how great would it be to have the stories he wrote considered fine enough to be novels instead of just pulps), but he still stayed tight with his pulp friends. The great Fitzgerald himself had taken an interest in Woolrich’s writing and had tried to persuade him to make a move to Hollywood. Woolrich refused to leave the Harlem hotel he lived in with his mother, who sat by his side now, possessively brushing imagined lint from his ill-fitted suit. The Flash had to admit that some very strange people were attracted to writing as a profession. They couldn’t all be as normal as he.
He wondered why some of these other fellas wrote. Smith, for example, had a great job and with his skills as a chemist could find all kinds of interesting work even if the American public suddenly rejected tasty doughnuts, so why was he here? There had to be better hobbies. And the same question applied to the perennial second-story man Emile Tepperman, over there under the chandelier with all the crystal missing. His meager monthly returns, cashwise, couldn’t compensate him for the effort he put into his silly Purple Invasion stories. He even seemed content with his place providing filler for other magazines. Maybe one Friday night he, The Flash, might introduce the topic of muses and see what these men had to say about that subject. He was sure it would be interesting. But tonight he had prepared a different topic for their discussion. It was time to introduce it.
The Flash excused himself from the table and moved to the lectern at the head of the room and raised his arms. “Gentlemen, gentlemen! Can I have your attention, please?” Smith clanked his spoon against his coffee cup and others picked up the call to attention. The Flash waited for the room to settle down and all eyes to be upon him. “Thanks all for coming and thanks for all getting your dues in to me on time. Let’s thank Dr. Smith for the doughnuts!” Everyone applauded. Smith heaved himself up and took a bow.
The Flash continued, “There’s no real news on the Guild front this time out. We’re always looking for new members, of course, so if you’ve got any buddies, bring ’em along.” A latecomer was entering the room. He removed his fedora and The Flash grinned. Lester Dent had come after all.
The big man looked a little lost. The Flash gave him a little wave, inviting him to join their table. Dent nodded and made his way to the table. The Flash could see the other writers sneaking furtive, envious looks at him. Of the men in the room, probably only Hogan and Woolrich had achieved a somewhat comparable level of financial success. Many of the men in here were second-story men, the guys who wrote the filler tales that ensured each book was the proper length each month.
Then he started to worry that his beckoning gesture to Dent had been too eager and enthusiastic. Had he looked foolish? It was important that he represent the Guild with dignity. Until he had campaigned for and won the presidency, the Guild hadn’t functioned as anything more than a glorified social club for men who, by the very nature of their work, spent their days in isolation. In the few months of his tenure he had been able to institute a few changes, including the circulation of a newsletter and the quiet distribution of a few Guild dues bucks to some established writers who had hit a streak of bad luck. He wasn’t trying to turn the Guild into some kind of commie labor union and he had no intention of going up against the powers that be at Street & Smith in any kind of negotiation. When it came to wages, it was every man for himself. He just thought that it was a good way for guys who had crossed a certain professional threshold to look out for one another.
The Flash continued as Dent took a seat at his table, next to Smith. “So let’s get down to why we’re really here tonight. Taking over the world!”
It got a great laugh and he grinned. If he had acted like a giddy fanatic when he had seen Dent, then it had been forgotten.
“A lot of us write about how to do it. Death rays. Vast armies. Rocket-powered missiles. Plagues. Lots of our characters have designs on the world. Our masters of menace: The Octopus, Doc Death, Doctor Satan, Dr. Yen Sen, Shiwan Khan, Fu Manchu, Wu Fang. What I want to discuss this evening is, what does someone do with the world once they’ve achieved their goal of world domination? Why do I think this is a relevant topic? Even to those of us who write cowboy stories?
“Hitler.”
There was a snort of derision from somewhere in the room. The Flash shrugged. “I know it seems ludicrous. But since he shredded the Treaty of Versailles and moved troops into the Rhineland and has started building his
forces, it made me start thinking that if someone could make a run at it, he could. If not the whole world, then three continents at least—Europe, Asia, and Africa. So, in trying to figure out if it is really possible for someone like Hitler to do it, I decided to backtrack and ask the question of all of you, would it be worth it? Could you, in fact, rule the world?
“Of course, I mean in the pulp sense. Say you managed to take over the world. What happens the next day? What kind of organization would you need to manage it? Would you have to be accountable in any way to anybody? How would you suppress an uprising of opposition which occurs on the other side of the world? Could you enjoy it? In short, to come back around to its relevance to Hitler, is ruling the world actually worth the effort? Go to it!”
He sat down as the room began to buzz with conversation again. He didn’t know if they were discussing his topic, but he certainly hoped so. He shook Dent’s hand. “Lester Dent! Glad you could make it. You know everybody here?” The Flash was thrilled that Lester had come. Adding him to the Guild would only burnish its reputation, which would help improve the image and status of its members, and by extension, its president.