The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  “So how does a reporter from Philadelphia arrive at all this?” Rozen made an exaggerated gesture of showing off the entire office. It looked as if a bomb had recently been detonated in its center.

  “Houdini again. Okay, so about seven years ago Street & Smith decided to start advertising on the radio. They sponsored a program called the Detective Story Hour and every week they would take a story from one of the mags and turn it into a radio play and put it on the air. And the host of the show, some actor, decided it would be clever if he called himself The Shadow. He’d put out these messages to his agents. Say things like, “Agent 57, be on alert. Report to me immediately any skulduggery in the Bowery,” and things like that. And you know how people are about the radio. They started wondering if The Shadow was real and whether or not, at least, he had a mag of his own. So Ralston and Nanovic cooked up a little story for their new hero series, and they had liked my Houdini book, and they knew because of my magic articles that I could write really fast. They sent me a telegram making me an offer. I caught the train up and here I am. At the mercy, as you say, of my muse!

  “Now I’m stuck. Pays too well for me to be doing anything else, but not well enough that I don’t have to do it.”

  Rozen nodded in commiseration and picked up his paintbrush to add a few sparks here and there. Gibson poured himself another drink and sat on the edge of his desk. To this day he attempted to maintain the illusion that The Shadow was real. Each month’s story was printed “as told to” instead of “written by” Maxwell Grant. He looked out the window toward lower Manhattan. The winter had been so brutally cold that sheets of ice had formed on the Hudson River all the way to the Battery. Folks said it was the same on the Brooklyn side with the East River. He had never seen a winter in New York cold enough for that to happen.

  He wanted to call Litzka before he left and try to explain himself to her. But he knew she would then want to see him this evening, and he had to go to Providence. She would think he was pushing her off again and get even more mad at him. It might be better to wait until he came back to talk to her. He thought about sending her some flowers at the theater, but the things he needed to say to her couldn’t be said with a card and flowers. For a second or two he envied Lester Dent; now there was a man who seemed to have made a good, strong marriage and wasn’t plagued by the absurd impulses of women.

  Rozen cleared his throat, indicating that he was finished. “So,” he asked, stepping aside, “how would you know if this person or that person is worth writing about should you meet him? How do you know if someone is a Houdini or a Capone? Do you know, as your Shadow knows, what lurks in their hearts?”

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. It was the catchphrase of the day. It was on the lips of every American. Thanks to the radio shows, they now knew to follow the statement with The Shadow’s signature maniacal laugh. Walter thought for a moment about the inspiration of the phrase. There had been a German magician of the previous century, Alexander Herrmann, who billed himself as “the man who knows.” What exactly he knew was up to the audience to divine, but that simple sentence had outlived the man and Gibson had always wanted to write about a character who lived up to that title. When he finally had been able, in his first description of The Shadow, to begin the sentence, “Who knows,” he had been surprised to see his fingers type, “what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” It sounded sinister and right.

  Gibson stared at the painting. The Shadow’s eyes were going to give more than one kid a memory that would last a lifetime. Years from now those kids, grown to manhood with The Shadow long forgotten, would wake up from nightmares and wonder where those piercing eyes that haunted them came from. He knew.

  “Yes,” he finally answered.

  Issue 2:

  I Am Providence

  Episode Nine

  THE LEGEND of Zhang Mei, the Dragon of Terror and Peril, begins in this way:

  The man who would be his father was a Manchu and he rode from the west, from the Nulu’erhu Mountains, across the windswept, snowy plains of Lianoning Province behind Zhang Zuolin, the warlord. With him were three hundred militia men, temple-trained in Northern Shaolin mountain fighting techniques. Chua’an fa had turned their muscles into wood and their skin into iron. No sword could cut them and no bullet could pierce them.

  They swept into the village of the woman who would be his mother just past dawn and put to the sword all the men who had accepted the god of the ocean men. The man who would be his father took the woman who would be his mother to be his second wife. His first had produced no sons.

  When the moon was new and black, the warriors, including the man who was his father, rode out from the village. Zhang Zuolin turned his men south toward Beijing. Toward the war. Toward the foreign invaders.

  It was the year 4597, the Year of the Rat. And the men of the Fists of Righteousness and Harmony rode to glory.

  Episode Ten

  “YOU KNOW why the streets of Chinatown are curved?” Lester was asking, or rather telling, Norma. Trying to listen, she neatly sidestepped a slop-smelling gap in the cobblestones. She was wearing her smart brown leather button-up boots today and was not about to get rotting cabbage leaf on them—even if that meant she occasionally had to put all her attention on where she was stepping and ignore Lester’s ongoing travelogue. She was wearing the gray wool dress she had bought last winter at Gimbel’s; it made her feel very attractive. And nothing in Chinatown, no stain from sauce or slime or oil, no drop of cabbage-filled puddle water, was going to stop her from feeling that way about herself today, finally.

  “To confuse the hell out of all the demons,” he continued, oblivious to her street gymnastics, although he always seemed to have a helpful arm out for her, instinctively. He was wearing a brown tweed suit which she had bought him, and which she thought made him look very dashing. She felt they must seem quite the pair.

  The shadows of the low buildings hung heavily over the sidewalks in the late afternoon. Her long legs kept pace with his swinging stride as they left the Quong Yuen Shing and Company store and headed south on Mott Street. Lester loved doing research in the little market and it was always their first stop upon entering the exotic enclave below Canal Street. While Norma fingered the delicate silks and carved ivory and jade figurines, he would prowl beneath the store’s ornate bower, carved from oak and stained with years of tobacco smoke, discovering exotic herbs and medicine and testing the bemused patience of the owner with questions about their Chinese names and powers. Astragalus (huang qi) for the heart; ginseng (ren shen) for fertility and diabetes; skullcap for hay fever; angelica (dong quai) for anemia; and licorice (mi gan cao) for infections, hepatitis, and colic. Bia Yia Pian pills and Ping Chua pills for strong lungs; Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang for the health of “delicate” areas. The stranger the better, as far as Lester was concerned. It was all ammo for the gun. Clark “Doc” Savage Jr. was, among many other things, the greatest chemist in the world, and it behooved his creator to know as much about as many interesting substances as possible.

  Lester towered over most of the men on the street around him, and he forged easily through the crowd. “That’s the headquarters of the On Leong tong.” He pointed out a nondescript building across the street. “They protect the laundrymen.”

  “I thought the tongs were gone.”

  “Not gone. Just rehabilitated.”

  There was never any room to move in Chinatown. The streets were narrow and clogged with Chinese, mostly men, who seemed to have a total disregard for anyone’s personal space. Every now and then a sullen-faced Chinaman would careen off Lester like a small marble hitting a big one.

  A new blue Packard squeezed past a double-parked horse-drawn cart; the horse didn’t even twitch an ear at its horn blasts. Two men were unloading eviscerated whitish-pink pig carcasses from the back of the cart and tossing them into bins. Other men were rolling the full bins of porcine husks to different destinations within their enclave, the cobb
lestones causing the hind legs to rattle against the sides of the bins like thick drumsticks.

  Across the street a bloated Irish cop, his uniform too tight, his face as red as the crimson on the many prosperity banners which hung in shop windows, was angrily berating a fishmonger. Norma could not tell what he was so angry about, but she thought that his tipping over a bushel of crabs was uncalled for. An elderly woman rushed from the fishmonger’s stall pleading loudly and carrying some fish wrapped in paper. The cop patted her patronizingly on the head, took the fish, and swaggered up the street.

  Norma turned to Lester. “You should get his badge number and report him.”

  She saw the tiniest crinkle of a wince at the corner of his eyes. He didn’t want to do it; it would interrupt his plans. He didn’t want to, but he would.

  “Never mind,” she said. She didn’t want to turn their excursion into an incident. “Let’s not get involved.”

  His quickening resolve turned into relief, and as they headed away from confrontation, he picked up his discourse on Chinatown. She could tell that Lester was excited to have her out. He spoke rapidly as if he were trying to distract her, keep her mind from turning inward. She didn’t mind; she appreciated his efforts on her behalf. And it was good to be out, stretching her muscles.

  He turned them left onto Pell Street, passing around a steam cart selling huge white puffy rolls full of sweet pork. Pell was even darker and narrower than the cramped thoroughfare of Mott Street. The stores were smaller, more Chinese, more mysterious; red banners hung from doors and windows, adorned with gold symbols of blessing or curse. Chinese gods sat in windows holding sticks of richly smoking incense.

  Lester pointed out another building, taller and newer than its surroundings. “Another tong building,” he said. “We’re in Hip Sing territory now. This is their street.”

  “It doesn’t feel any different.”

  He looked at her for a moment before realizing that she was making a joke. His face relaxed and his mustache crinkled as he grinned. “Hard to believe what a man will decide to fight for, isn’t it? But a few years back these streets were red with tong warrior blood and visitors sometimes had to step over the bodies to go about their business.”

  It never ceased to amaze her how much Lester knew about so many things. He never stopped investigating or reading and his curiosity was limitless. Once he discovered an interest in a subject, he would obsessively devour all he could about it until he was an expert. The knowledge he acquired flowed from his mind into his stories. Not only was Doc Savage a chemist and a scientist and a global explorer; the men who kept his company were also remarkably accomplished in the fields of electricity, architecture, engineering, and law. Lester always tried to sneak information he thought boys needed into his mags. Millions of American boys knew about the malaria-resistant and ultraviolet properties of quinine, the writ of habeas corpus, the benefit of calisthenics, the virtues of Eastern meditation, the cultures of South America and the Caribbean, the steel cage construction of the skyscrapers, the history of the lost Maya, the physics of positive and negative electrons, and the use of the word superamalgamated as an expression of amazement through Doc and his band of merry adventurers: Monk and Ham and Renny and Long Tom and Johnny. But most of all they knew about friendship, courage, and loyalty.

  These were the qualities she was most proud of Lester for working into Doc Savage, and exactly the qualities which were missing from his other stories, although he could never see that. She knew he put down the Doc Savage series as mere formula, but she thought there was an integrity to the work that made it better than he thought it was. Lester Dent wasn’t happy being Kenneth Robeson; he wasn’t even all that satisfied being Lester Dent. He wanted to be John Steinbeck.

  They walked on past the utterly unthreatening building. She was disappointed that no one even glowered at them. At the intersection of Pell and Doyers, Lester paused.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. “Mr. Yee’s is down farther.”

  She saw the look in his eye again, the one he had had in the living room a few days ago. Something was eating him. He was obsessing about something he wanted to know about. She looked at his fingers and they were twitching, already typing out words on an imaginary typewriter.

  “I ran into Walter Gibson the other night,” he said, his eyes wandering down the street looking for something.

  “I hope you gave him a piece of your mind.”

  “Maybe a little piece.”

  “Good! I would have punched him.”

  “Maybe it’s time to let bygones be bygones.”

  “Bygones. He nearly ruined us. He tried to keep you from having a chance at writing.”

  “First of all, by getting Nanovic not to publish The Golden Vulture, which I got paid four hundred fifty dollars for, by the way, he may have done me a favor. I didn’t have to be his substitute writer.”

  “Some favor.”

  “If I had been writing Shadow stories, I never would have come up with Doc. And think how different our lives would be.”

  “He still had your very first story squashed, which was wrong of him to do because it was your big break. Thank God you were talented enough to land another break. But I don’t see how you can forgive him.”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to forgive,” Lester assured her. “I want to get one up on him.”

  “How?”

  He stared down the block for a long moment. “I just want to take a look at something, real quick,” he said at last. She nodded, but he didn’t even notice. He was writing. He set off down Doyers and she hurried to keep up. He headed toward an aged building standing by itself by an alleyway. She followed, still fuming about Walter Gibson, whom she had never met and knew only as the man who had denied her husband his first steady writing job.

  The old building was boarded up with rotting black planks which smelled of oily pitch. The remnants of a faded marquee still clung stubbornly to the bricks over the row of double doors. Any glass in the windows had long since been pried away and covered over with tar paper; any trace of elegance in its façade was erased. It stood as an aching spot to be avoided, like a sore tooth. As an indication of its diseased state, the sidewalk before it was empty, as if the locals allowed the awareness of its existence to intrude upon their single-minded missions and purposes and avoided it instinctively by crossing the street or finding alternate routes. Even in the middle of one of the busiest neighborhoods in the busiest city in the world, it exuded vapors of quiet desertion. They were almost entirely alone as they approached it.

  “What is it?” she asked. Her pulse was quickening; her thoughts of Walter Gibson were fading away. Lester’s interest in the building was infectious. She felt a surge of treasure-hunting excitement, a feeling she could never get by sitting on her chesterfield doing research. She felt the weight of the last six months melting away.

  “The Chinese Theater,” he replied.

  “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

  “I guess it kind of is.” He showed only a passing interest in the building, preferring to investigate its surroundings. “It ran Chinese plays and operas for almost thirty years. The Salvation Army then tried to run a soup kitchen out of it, but nobody came. In the end it was a burlesque house, until La Guardia closed all of those down about five years ago. And now it’s just abandoned.

  “You know there are secret tunnels leading to and from this spot? They run all under Chinatown. A tong man could sneak in, whisper a garrote around a rival’s neck while he watched the show, and shneek!” He made a deathly horrific face. “Meet your ancestors. Then it’s back into the tunnels. The Irish cops think they’ve got a lid on it up here, but it’s down below, where they’ll never go, where you can find the real Chinatown. The gambling, the brothels, the opium dens, the slavers. It’s happening in rivers and torrents below us.”

  “Sounds like a brilliant story.”

  “Story! It would need to be a novel! An exposé ripping the cobblestones of
f Chinatown and getting the first real look into the demimonde.”

  “That’s your plan for getting back at Mr. Gibson? A novel?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m just trying to find the ending to a story.” He looked the building up and down. “The boardinghouse was over here,” he muttered.

  “What boardinghouse?” she responded. But he didn’t answer. Now that he was engaged, no matter what the outward Lester said or did, the inward Lester would be preoccupied with writing the next book. The words would have to be in place when he sat down at the typewriter so they could stream out in an uninterrupted flow onto the page. He walked off to the left side of the building, still muttering to himself. There was a gap about two feet wide, big enough for garbage cans and not much else, separating the windowless wall of the Chinese Theater from the tenement building on the other side. Lester stood in contemplation.

  Norma lost interest quickly in his woolgathering. He could have the boardinghouse, whatever it was, all to himself. She was falling in love with this old, faded beauty. She walked along the front of the theater, running a hand along what was left of the ornamentation which had once adorned its pillars; once powerful long, thin dragons had wound their way around them but they had been chipped at and worn away to the point that they had become nothing more than mere worms.

  Long, heavy beams had been posted with spikes over the front doors to the theater years ago. The beams were rough yet soft, slowly rotting away under the constant assault of the city’s elements. Gaps appeared between the planking, and wondering if she could see anything beyond, she stepped up to the hole, mindful not to actually touch the smelly wood, and tried to peer into the darkness. She assumed that the closed doors of the theater would be behind the boards, but the blackness between the cracks indicated that at least one of the doors had swung open or fallen off its hinges at some point. She could make out vague shapes in the gloom but nothing that she could recognize properly.