The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  Lester nodded. “Sure.” He tore a chunk of fried dough from a dunker and before any of the surprised men at the table, Smith included, could stop him, he had popped it into his mouth. Conversation at the table stopped. He chewed unsuspectingly for a moment and then his jaws stopped moving. “Is that mint?”

  Smith nodded. Dent shrugged and swallowed. Then he took a second bite. “You fellas talk about writing here. I’ve got a question for you. Anyone know the origin of the expression ‘and the horse you rode in on’? As in, ‘to hell with you and the horse you rode in on’? I was writing that today and I got to wondering where it had actually come from.”

  “Nick Carter?” The Flash said, reminding them of the first Street & Smith hero, who had fathered their profession. “From the days of the real Old West.”

  “I first heard it during a poker game in Texas,” Smith said. “So that could be it.”

  “Like everything else,” Hogan interjected, “it’s from Shakespeare. ‘Some hilding fellow, that had stolen the horse he rode in on.’ Not sure which play, though.”

  “Thanks, Bob. Maybe I’ll try and work that tidbit in. Somehow.” He pulled out his pipe and a leather tobacco pouch. Unlike his hat and suit and watch, which looked new and expensive, The Flash noted, both the pipe and pouch were old and worn. Dent packed and lit the pipe. Its stem was well chewed. He pointed it at The Flash. A thin tendril of smoke leaked out of its small opening. “You know, Mrs. Dent and I made an accidental detour into the Reich last summer on our trip to Europe.”

  “Sounds like fun,” The Flash offered. He wished he had been so adventurous as to visit Germany. Dent must have come up with some great story ideas there. He decided he should travel more.

  “Nazi soldiers shot up our car and chased us back across Bavaria.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let me ask you something, Lester.” Hogan was scratched at his balding head. “I always wondered how you came up with Doc Savage.”

  “Well. Nanovic wanted a new Shadow series. Only better. So I took some of that and then I came across some articles by an old Street & Smith writer named Richard Henry Savage, who fought in Loring’s Egyptian army in 1861. He turned in some fine stories of his time over there, and when he came back he became an engineer, a lawyer, and a playwright. So he was kind of interesting too. I don’t know, maybe that’s it. Soon after reading about Savage, I woke up with an image of Hercules riding on the running board of a car down Broadway toward some great adventure. Sure, laugh at that. It’s kind of funny. But it’s important for kids to know about Hercules and I don’t know if they even teach mythology like that in schools anymore like they did when we were young.

  “Like I said, when I woke up there he stood, bigger than life, as big as myth, standing in front of my eyes with a brown wool coat over his shoulders instead of a lion’s hide, a ripped shirt revealing skin tanned during exploits in equatorial jungles and deserts. And my fingers began to get that itch.” Every man at the table nodded knowingly. “Then I had to use my imagination.”

  “Is there much of you personally in there?” Hogan asked him.

  Dent shot the man a look of scoffing derision. “You mean like that Miller fella in Tropic of Cancer!” That got almost as big a laugh from the table as The Flash’s crack had. Almost. “Hell no! I make stuff up. That’s what they pay me for.”

  “I meant,” continued Hogan, unperturbed, “for example, that Doc’s own father created a physical and mental regimen designed to turn him into a superhuman. He turned his own son into a science experiment. Do you think he has any problems with that?”

  “Why would he? His father made him a hero.”

  “But do you draw on your own life to make stuff like that up?”

  “I see what you’re saying. No. My own father couldn’t read a book and didn’t care if I learned to. So no.” He smiled, gazing into the bowl of his pipe as if reading tea leaves. “Not in the least.”

  No one seemed to want to pick up the dropped thread of conversation. “How do you think Ah Hoon died?” The Flash heard himself asking Dent.

  “What’s that about?” Smith asked, curious.

  The Flash quickly explained the story of the Sweet Flower mystery up to its unresolved ending. For a moment he felt as if his telling the story had revealed an ending, but when he got there, the story trailed off just as it had when Gibson told it. The ending The Flash thought he was going to come up with just wasn’t good enough. He shrugged and bailed out with a cryptic-seeming “We may never know.”

  “Hooey,” Dent snorted. “There’s an ending to this story, maybe even a great one. I don’t yet know how Ah Hoon was killed but I’ve been turning it over in my head a great deal. And I tell you what. I’m going to find out. That’s what Walter Gibson should have done before he even started telling that story. I’m gonna find out and I’m gonna bring it back here and get up in front of all of you and tell you what happened.”

  The Flash now wished he had kept his mouth shut. Why hadn’t he just thought of solving the Sweet Flower mystery himself instead of asking Lester Dent’s opinion?

  “And then”—Dent grinned and puffed on his pipe contentedly—“I’m gonna write up the greatest pulp ever.”

  Episode Eight

  “SO, WALTER Gibson did not create The Shadow, eh? But one could say that The Shadow created Walter Gibson,” said George Rozen, with his tone of Viennese presumption. He was painting a cover for an upcoming issue of The Shadow, and blood seemed to flow from his fine brush as if it had pierced an artery in the hand that was holding it. “Without Walter Gibson would there still be a Shadow? Without The Shadow, would there be a Walter Gibson?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Walter replied, “but without The Shadow there would certainly be no Maxwell Grant.” Walter had cleared some old canvases from his desk and was lying on it while Rozen painted. He didn’t have much to offer the talented painter by way of inspiration or motivation, but the two men enjoyed each other’s company. He had been in a foul mood since Litzka had deserted him and he didn’t particularly want to be alone with himself. He could have gone to the Fiction Guild meeting at the Knickerbocker, but he didn’t particularly want to be around anyone else either. Sequestering himself in his office while Rozen painted was the perfect compromise. Rozen’s work could be a focus for both of them, offering conversation-free seclusion and the security of companionship at the same time. Except that for some reason Rozen was feeling expansively garrulous today.

  Gibson watched as a little bit more of The Shadow disappeared under paint. Strict with its resources, Street & Smith made all its artists get as much use out of stretched muslin as possible. This meant that the gloriously violent covers like the ones Walter had moved out of his way and the dozens more lying around the studio had all been painted over at least twice, and all were destined to be painted over at least once more. Then they would be thrown out.

  Rozen was the only artist ensconced on this floor, on editors’ row, but great sunlight poured through the large south-facing windows all day long, and Gibson had pressed Nanovic until he had given up and allowed Rozen to paint up here instead of in the large bullpen on the third floor with all the other artists. The argument was easy to make. Rozen was the best artist Street & Smith had, he painted the covers for the biggest mag the house had, and he deserved the light.

  The Shadow glared righteously at Gibson from the paintings, silver-black eyes flashing vengeance and retribution. There were dozens of canvases around his office, so the malevolent pupils blazed at him from every corner of the room; he shifted his head slightly to get a different perspective. The steely eyes above the character’s hawklike nose followed him. Walter shuddered and closed his eyes for a moment. The image of The Shadow’s glare hovered before his closed lids—alive, penetrating, and judging. He gasped and opened his eyes, suddenly shaking. There had been a few times since the creation of The Shadow that he had felt as if the character were real—this brief flicker had been one of those�
�and it always made his blood run cold. It meant The Shadow wanted something.

  He dragged his gaze from the old paintings and turned to watch the silver-haired old man concentrate on his art. The artist had originally based his conception of The Shadow on the profile of one of Street & Smith’s art directors, but over the last few years the character had taken on a life of its own.

  “Where do you get that?” Walter asked him. “The inspiration?”

  The old Austrian shrugged. “From The Shadow. Same as you, right?”

  The only artist in town who gave George Jerome Rozen a run for his money was his own brother, Jerome George Rozen, the second-best cover painter at Street & Smith. All Walter or his ed, Nanovic, needed to give Rozen was a thirty-second story rundown and then he was off to the races, creating the luminous and disturbing covers that did as much to sell the mag as the stories themselves did. More, in some months.

  “Well, if he’s lurking around, I haven’t heard from him lately.”

  Gibson knew that his efforts of late hadn’t been his best. He’d even hired a ghost for the first time, a guy named Tinsley, to pick up one of the two books he had to deliver each and every month. That’s why Dent’s needling had really worked its way under his skin. He had been having problems with endings in particular.

  “Not since Kent Allard, yes?”

  “That’s right. That whole Allard thing.”

  “What brought that on?”

  “I still don’t even know.”

  “I think The Shadow spoke to you, is what I think.”

  “I’m sure that’s it.” The painter either missed or ignored Gibson’s sarcasm.

  That Allard thing. An incident of creative impulsiveness he was still doing penance for. One morning it had come to him in a burst which Rozen might call inspiration and the result was The Shadow Unmasks. For seven years, readers had been told that The Shadow was actually secretly Lamont Cranston, playboy about town. In The Shadow Unmasks, Gibson had taken his readers’ expectations and thrown them out the window. What they discovered behind Rozen’s cover was that it had all been a lie. Cranston, it was revealed, was merely a disguise. The Shadow’s true identity was Kent Allard. Possibly. The implication was that Allard was only a disguise as well. Maybe seven years of success had made his eds complacent: Nanovic claimed to have read the tale, but Gibson suspected he hadn’t. When it ran, the vocal reaction from the fans was loud. Very loud. They didn’t like it. They considered it an outrageous betrayal akin to Arthur Conan Doyle’s pitching Sherlock Holmes over Reichenbach Falls. By the time the scope and extent of the outrage were clearly expressed by the incoming mail, several more issues had run with the Allard subplot and it was too late to turn back. There would be no stopping of the presses.

  Street & Smith’s management had been furious. Nanovic had taken a lot of heat and had passed most of it along to Gibson. He continued to, in fact. The scrutiny he was under was intense. The only reason Gibson kept his job was that the mags sold better after the Allard revelation than before! Gibson was glad of the success; it felt somewhat vindicating. The only problem was that when someone asked him why he had done it, why he had messed with a successful formula, he had no answer for them. He had no idea what had compelled him. The whole Allard thing was just there for the telling and he had told it.

  Since that incident he had felt a vague unease while he was writing, as if he doubted his own process. It hadn’t been as easy to let the powerful torrent of words conduct his fingers. If he were to be honest with himself, the torrent had slowed considerably. Maybe he could crank out 100,000 words a month right now—more than most writers and just enough for him to keep up with work, but compared to his usual output, a mere trickle. It wasn’t just the distraction of the affair with Litzka, with all its inherent emotional turmoil; he had been feeling this way for some time now. In fact, the compulsion, the need, to inflict some sensation on himself, to stab at himself or pummel himself in order to feel anything, emerged at the same time as Kent Allard. He had begun the affair with Litzka hot on the heels of Allard’s first appearance. Nineteen thirty-six had been one for the books. Nineteen thirty-seven was shaping up to be one hell of a sequel.

  The Shadow’s eyes were following him again. The words, the images, the stories—they weren’t his to control anymore; they were just coming from someplace within and he didn’t know where or how. At the same time he also knew not to question the process too deeply or it might just vanish altogether on him. Then where would he be? Out on his ass while Nanovic, his ed, tossed the mag, his mag, to some two-and-a-half-cent hack like Hubbard.

  The thought of Hubbard getting his mitts on The Shadow made Walter grimace. He could almost feel the kid’s triumphant gloat. Hubbard was an okay writer, and blazing fast, but his ambition was greater than his talent and he had none of the skills needed to wrestle The Shadow to the page. Walter shook his head to clear it. Between Litzka and his writing problems he had enough to worry about. He didn’t really have time to worry about Hubbard or whether or not The Shadow’s eyes were watching him. “Scotch?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Of course.” Rozen was from the Old World and had developed no puritan sense of impropriety about drinking before the sun set. Or even before the clock struck noon. Gibson heaved himself off the desk and pulled a bottle of White Horse scotch whiskey from the drawer where he had stashed it. He splashed the brown liquid into two vaguely clean glasses and handed one to Rozen. Then the two of them stood back to look at the cover for The Shadow of Death.

  “Christ almighty,” Gibson breathed. “That is one son of a bitch of a painting.”

  It was one of Rozen’s favorite themes, The Shadow face-to-face with Death. In his paintings the characters mirrored each other’s nature. Many times they had met before; Death had lurked in tarot cards, behind Broadway curtains, in warehouse rafters, whispering in the ears of cruel-mouthed thugs. If The Shadow lacked an arch-nemesis within the pages of the mag, he never lacked for one on the cover. Against a background of flames and smoke, the two rivals challenged each other once again. One eye glittered, rolling loosely in the ivory skull. A skeletal hand held the book of Life and Death and with a bony finger he touched the word Shadow, written in flame on the page of Death. The Shadow seemed like a dark Lucifer about to take the throne of fate with a .45 and a sneer while Death appeared on the verge of taking his retribution upon the hero for usurping his role on Earth and sending more souls to hell than he. Only a slight turn of The Shadow’s head gave any indication of his recognition of his mortality. He might prevail this time, as he had before, but he was only human; sooner or later his enemy would have him.

  “Brother,” Gibson said, impressed. “I wish I could write what you paint.”

  “At least no codes this time,” Rozen replied, stirring up some red paint. Gibson loved codes and often included them in his stories. When he did, he liked Rozen to place messages on the cover for his readers to solve. Rozen hated painting the intricate symbols or numbers and letter sequences that Gibson required at those times.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “So, Walter. How about we finish up and go to Rosoff’s for some steak and beers?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to go to a funeral.”

  “Whose? Anyone I know?”

  “Howard Lovecraft. Ring a bell?”

  Rozen shook his head. “A writer?”

  “He tried.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “Not many did. I have to go up to Providence for the funeral. I wasn’t even going to go because I didn’t really know him all that well, although he could write letters like nobody’s business. But his aunt sent me a telegram asking me to attend. His will asked for me specifically. So…At least I can get some writing done on the train.”

  “A new Shadow book?”

  “Probably. I’m far enough behind that I ought to get crackin’ on one, that’s for sure. I don’t know, George. Maybe I’m just tired of writing about
The Shadow. Maybe I just need a break. I’ve been doing it steady for seven years now.”

  “Ha!” Rozen grinned. “The Shadow won’t let you.”

  The comment made Gibson give a little jerk. “What do you mean?”

  “Without you? Pfft! No Shadow. Maybe he won’t like that.”

  “I kind of miss investigating and reporting. I used to be quite the reporter back in my Philadelphia days. You know when Al Capone was being held at the federal prison there before his sentencing I was the only reporter he allowed to come interview him? It’s true. He was a big Houdini fan and had read the autobiography I wrote for him, Houdini’s Escapes, and he wanted me to do the same for him. Got him to tell me the really great stuff. His whole life story from Brooklyn to Chicago was right there on the paper. I was like his priest and he was the sinner making a confession.”

  “I have never heard of this book. What happened to it?”

  “Well, unfortunately, old, sick, fat Al confessed a little too much. After the first few articles were published in the paper, his lawyers were able to seize my notes and do God knows what with them. Probably burned them. To be fair, the things he told me about would have had his ass in the electric chair before the ink dried on the book. Ah, the stories I could tell you, brother, if only I weren’t afraid a lawyer would jump out of that spittoon there and serve me. But you know what? Every Christmas I get a card from old Al over in Alcatraz, so don’t believe he’s as brain-addled and feeble as he lets on to the papers. He’s a canny son of a bitch.”

  “If that kind of writing excites you, then you should find a way to do it. If your muse lets you. Of course, I would miss our collaborations. No one else here will take a drink in the afternoon.”

  Taking the hint, or taking it as a hint, Gibson refilled their glasses. “It ain’t easy finding a subject as interesting as Houdini, or Blackstone, or Capone to write about. They broke the mold when they made those guys. To be honest, I’m more interesting than most of the famous people I meet now and I wouldn’t want to read my autobiography. So until I meet someone who really captures my attention I’ll keep making up characters to write about.”