by Paul Malmont
Deep in the darkness something golden winked at her.
Something glittered, like a lone firefly just seen out of the corner of the eye—a momentary flash that had probably never really happened at all. Startled, she pulled her face back and looked around as if she had done something wrong. She leaned her head back to the position it had been before. She saw the flash again.
Excited, she reluctantly pulled herself away and ran to the side of the building where she had left her husband. Lester was trying and failing to scale the gap between the buildings by placing his hands and feet against the opposing walls and forcing himself upward. He was grunting with exertion and red-faced with frustration. The sight almost made her forget her own discovery. She watched in befuddled amusement as he strained and skidded obsessively against the bricks.
She was going to tell him not to rip his suit but she felt it would only be adding insult to his somewhat embarrassing struggle. She knew she’d read about this someday and it would all probably make sense. Watching Lester in this small space jogged her memory. There was a bigger alley on the other side of the theater. Set into the wall of the theater on that side was a stage door. She backed away from Lester, hoping no one they knew was in Chinatown that day; then she trotted quickly past the front of the theater to the other side.
The alley was dark. Distant sounds of pots being rattled came down from somewhere in the windows high above her. The shrill, high-pitched yammer of a faraway, very angry Chinese woman echoed through the air. The stage door was just to her left, but the alley continued on until it ended at the door of another building. A red lightbulb above the doorway was lit, as if the people behind that door were ignorant of the daylight.
She tested the doorknob on the stage door. To her surprise it responded with an affirmative twist and click. She gave the other door at the end of the alley another look and decided that no one was going to come out that portal anytime soon. She gave the door a little push and it opened with a rusty squeal onto the darkness of the Chinese Theater. As she stared into the gaping darkness spreading before her, she took a step back. Why had she come out? She should never have left the safety of her home. It wasn’t too late. She could turn now and get Lester and return. To what? The chicken thawing in her sink? The pace of her heart was quickening. She didn’t want to cook. She wanted to see.
The thick, sweet smell of ages-old incense greeted her as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the contrast of the auditorium’s darkness against the light pouring in through the door. It seemed as if much, if not most, of the light was absorbed by a decade’s worth of dust leaping into the air as she introduced oxygen into its vacuum. She stepped farther into the theater. Above her was a balcony floor. At its edge the room opened up to a cavernous yawn. Most of the seats were gone, but individual rows still remained like teeth in a jawbone. Torch lanterns that had been twisted in an attempt to wrest them away once upon a time were still affixed to the walls. The stage raked up from the brick proscenium arch. Thick rope hung like hemp cobwebs from the rafters. Tattered canvas backdrops and rotten set pieces lay scattered about the auditorium, some of them quite large—relics of performances decades old. But towering over all in its exotic glory was the object sitting center stage, her glittering attractor. She walked compulsively toward it, passing through pagodas painted on aged wood, across a muslin scrap depiction of the Great Wall, and emerging from a bamboo grove to see it clearly. So this is what it feels like to discover treasure, she thought.
The statue was gold, of that she was certain. She hadn’t worked at the jewelry counter of the Rike’s department store when she was sixteen and not come to know gold when she saw it. The figure of the man seated on a drapery-covered throne was nearly a dozen feet tall, she guessed. In appearance and presence it was horrible. Its angry face was dominated by a gaping mouth which forced its chin down to its chest. The body was draped in robes. In one hand the statue held a vase and in the other an upright sword which spired over its head. Both also appeared to have been forged of gold.
She stood before it at the lip of the stage gazing up as it seemed to look over her at an invisible congregation. How long had it sat here waiting for an audience? Well, it had her now.
“Hey!”
She spun around, choking back a gasp. Lester stood in the doorway. “That is the ugliest Buddha I’ve ever seen!”
“It’s not a Buddha,” she said. “It’s treasure. A real treasure.”
“It’s just an old piece of set dressing.”
She climbed up onto the stage. “Look how old it is. It’s practically ancient.”
“I don’t think you ought to mess around with it,” he cautioned her.
She knew that if it had been his discovery, he would already have been prying samples off to bring to a jeweler. She felt a small, fierce stab of pride; this was hers! She rubbed a hand slowly down the statue’s arm. “There’s not a speck of dust on it. Everything else is covered in dust, but this is spotless.” She held up her fingers for him to inspect.
“Someone’s been cleaning it,” he said, looking toward her feet. From where she now stood she could see that recent footprints had been left in the thick dust. They came from and led back to the stage left wing, but they seemed to stop short of the statue. A wide expanse of dust surrounding the pedestal of leaping lions was undisturbed. She was about to tell Lester this when something insectlike hummed past her ear. As if the entire world had suddenly grown thick and slow, she saw Lester’s expression change from concern to shock as his gaze moved from her to somewhere past her left shoulder.
The man emerging from the shadows of the wings was Chinese, but he had about him an attitude that was markedly different from the humbled westernized men on the streets just outside. He was dressed in a black variation of the standard gray pajamas that many Chinese men wore; around his waist the shirt was cinched with a tight yellow sash.
His contempt for them was palpable. He swung a length of chain in a long arc by his right side. It hummed in a hypnotically threatening way. In the same instant she took all this in, she realized that he must have already launched this at her once, that what had flicked past her ear had not been an insect but had, in fact, been the tip of the swinging chain.
“Nee how ma,” she heard Lester greet the man. Everything was happening so slowly and too fast at the same time. She wondered why Lester would be asking a man who had just tried to whip her with a chain how he was, and then she realized that the chain had moved so fast that Lester probably hadn’t seen it. She heard the chord of the chain deepen and knew it was a moment away from lashing out again. She felt the speed of the world return to normal as her head snapped around to Lester.
“Don’t just stand there!” she said simply. And then she flung herself toward the edge of the stage. In motion, she could feel the last of the chain as it whisked past her hair. There was a hollow metallic clang as the chain struck the statue.
They were frequent dancers at the Rainbow Room and Roseland. Lester was accustomed to the weight of her body in motion; his hands caught her waist and he used her momentum to swing her to her feet. She could see that the Chinese man had a grip on the long chain which stretched out from his hand in a straight line. Its other, more lethal end, a spike about seven inches long, was embedded in the soft gold of the statue. His expression hadn’t changed at all.
Lester spun her around, in control now. They sprinted for the door. They heard the chain hit the stage but there was no time to look back. They burst into the gloom of dusk. She could hear the man angrily slam the door open again, for their impact had caused it to swing back closed. The sidewalk was still ominously empty. They raced toward Pell Street, to people and to the welcoming neon sign of Mr. Yee’s. She looked back. The man was gaining on them.
They plowed into the human traffic at the intersection. Lester kept a viselike grip on her hand. Her calves were beginning to ache from running in heels and she began to have trouble catching her breath. Lester pulled her int
o the street. Cars squealed to a halt as they darted across. The uneven cobblestones didn’t help her balance, and Lester nearly threw her up to the sidewalk. She couldn’t run another step. She knew Lester knew too. She wanted him to keep running but she couldn’t speak.
Lester did the last thing she, and probably the man chasing them, expected. He stopped. The man was so close behind them he didn’t have time to react. Lester drew his arm back, his large hand clenched in anger, and he threw the first punch Norma had ever seen him throw. She could hear the threads in the shoulder of his jacket tear apart as his arm snapped out and his fist made contact with the man’s jaw.
The man’s face stopped instantly, but his feet continued the skid he had begun to try to stop himself. The impact threw his head back as his legs propelled his body forward, until, for a moment, his body seemed parallel to the pavement, suspended at the end of Lester’s arm. Then he collapsed to the ground. There were murmurs of surprise from the bystanders. At least, Norma thought as Lester grabbed her again, he had knocked that nasty look off the man’s face.
Lester was staring at the end of his fist, still suspended steadily in space several feet away from his nose. He gave a low whistle of amazement. In the stillness of the moment the eerie, floating, melodyless tune seemed to be the only sound in New York.
“Let’s go.” She snatched a handful of his jacket.
“Did you see that?” he said as he stumbled after her through the crowd toward a familiar destination.
“So lovely,” she had time to reply.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dent!” Mr. Yee greeted them outside his shop enthusiastically, waving off the small crowd of spectators. Norma looked back and saw that the man had managed to crawl off into the shadows somewhere. Life had returned to normal so quickly that except for her throbbing legs and Lester’s ripped jacket, there was no outward indication of any trouble. “How boo how?”
“No,” Lester said, massaging his swelling knuckles, “boo how doy!”
Mr. Yee’s ever-pleasant demeanor never changed. “The boo how doy are long gone, Mr. Dent.”
“I’m telling you, Mr. Yee,” Lester replied. “Mrs. Dent and I just met living history in all his glory. An honest-to-God hatchet man. In fact, I knocked him ass over teakettle!”
He began to tell the story of the chase but Norma interrupted. “Mr. Yee? Where are your dumplings?” She caught her breath and drew And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street from her handbag. She had wrapped it in colored crepe paper. “I have something for them.”
“Of course, Mrs. Dent, please come in off the street.” He ushered her into the building, where hugs and squeals of delight from little Monk and Ham, Mr. Yee’s dumplings, greeted her.
Episode Eleven
THE BOY, who was known only as Gousheng, dog food, left his village behind him and set off on the harvesters’ path through the rice paddies. The evenly spaced sprouts were growing in water that smelled dank and old. It was the smell of his grandmother, who worked these paddies. He hated his grandmother, who, in addition to smelling like cow dung, was shrill and quick to anger and favored his cousins before him because he was a bastard and his mother was dead.
The summer day was brilliant and clear. The sun was high in a sky with few clouds. If his cousins or friends were with him, the day’s fun would be to try to knock one another into the knee-deep, muck-filled water. This contest could last for hours.
A water buffalo gazed sagely at him, a huge wooden yoke upon its back. The ticks on its flank were swollen nuggets, the size of his thumb. The boy knew what the weight of the yoke around the beast’s neck felt like. It felt like his grandmother’s burning hatred.
He came across the ridge to a copse on the far bank of the paddy. He stepped easily up the hill and looked around. From here he could see no one from his village. The buzzing of bees and the distant cry of cranes were the only sounds he could hear. The old women of the village (there were no old men, or any men, only boys) said that the thicket was haunted by demons and that no one should ever go there. So he escaped there whenever he could, for he knew no one would follow. He crept deeper into the grove of trees, pushing into the darkness for the clearing he knew lay ahead.
The temple was ancient, older than any old thing he had ever seen in his village, which meant that it was older than anything he had ever seen. There were stones embedded deep in the earth, grass growing up nearly over them. The clay tiles of the roof were gone in places. He knew there were no demons here.
Inside the temple were old stone statues of gods that he had never heard of and that no one worshipped anymore. Most had toppled from their bases ages ago and lay crumbling on a hard wooden floor. Their hands embraced holes carved through the centers of their chests in some ancient symbol of heavenly illumination. The large statue, still upright against the back wall, fascinated him in particular. This god’s face was not serene and meditative, like the faces of the others. It was wrathful. He liked to pretend that he was this god’s priest, and the caretaker of his temple, and here the people of his village could come to him for the interpretation of the whims of the gods, and he would instruct them that the gods would favor them if they were to drive his grandmother from the village or harness her to a yoke.
The sound of the horse snorting interrupted his daydream. He ran from the temple. A strong hand grabbed his shoulder and threw him to the ground. The sun was behind the demon and made it hard to see him when the boy looked up from the ground. His head hurt. He kicked out at the demon, his foot connecting with wooden shin armor. He couldn’t fight this. He thought about the beautiful day, the secret grove, his temple with its gods, his one god in particular, and he thought of his grandmother and the yoke on the water buffalo and realized he had nothing much more to live for and that this was a nice place to die. He smiled and closed his eyes, for he knew his life was over.
“Your father, who was my cousin, has died,” spoke the demon into his darkness. His voice was hard and commanding, but gentle. “I have come for you. You will sit behind me in my saddle and we shall ride from here together.”
“I shall never return here?”
“No,” said the demon. “You will find a new home.”
“Would my grandmother be able to find me?”
The demon laughed. It was fearsome and warm at the same time. “You will never see your grandmother again.”
The boy opened his eyes. “I will come with you,” he said, and the demon held out his hand to help him up.
And so the boy, who had been known in the village only as Gousheng, dog food, was adopted into the clan of the warlord Zuolin and took his surname, Zhang. But he was also given a name that honored his father’s spirit as a warrior who fights against the foreign invaders. His new name was now Zhang Mei. But he would not be known as the Dragon of Terror and Peril for many years yet.
Episode Twelve
“JESUS CHRIST!”
Walter could tell that Hubbard was a little impressed by his personal Pullman car.
“Holy jeez!”
He knew it was impressive.
“Son of a bitch!”
He had bought it to impress. “Like it?”
“Hell!”
“I couldn’t tell.” He threw his hat on the banquette. “Well. Come on in and make yourself at home. It’s not the distance to Providence that wears you out. It’s all the stops at nowhere in between.”
It had taken a couple of days to get the car hitched up to the New York and New England Railroad, over from its usual place on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, where Gibson used it to make frequent runs down to Miami. Often on those occasions when he wasn’t heading south, the railroad would rent the car out for him. This arrangement had already paid for the car. Yesterday, Friday, the car had been floated on a tug from the Oak Point rail yard in the Bronx to the New York Central rail yard at Seventy-second Street on the Hudson, where they were now boarding it to get to Providence and Lovecraft’s funeral tomorrow.
A Negro p
orter opened the door separating the living quarters, which they were in, from the sleeping quarters, and said, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Gibson,” with his smile of familiar affection.
“Hi, Chester,” Gibson greeted him back. “How’re the ladies?”
“Same as usual, Mr. Gibson. They all want me richer or deader. Or both.” Chester traveled with the car; tending to it often meant living in it. In the year since Gibson had hired him, Chester had kept the car as neat and trim as any ship.
Through Orson Welles, Gibson had met a number of people involved in the Federal Theatre Project and the Works Progress Administration. One of them had mentioned a talented young writer who had the misfortune to be both a Negro and a prison parolee but was on the straight and narrow and would work honestly and hard. Gibson had hired him with the words, “There’s typewriters in the car and lots of paper and lots more spare time. A man could put all that to some kind of use.” Gibson didn’t know whether or not the man had put it to good use because the car was always immaculately prepared for him whenever he arrived.
Chester hopped off the train to get their luggage from the nearby cab. He moved with an old, slow limp. The story was that he had fallen down an elevator shaft at some point in his life, before prison, and busted his leg up.
Gibson hung his coat on a hanger and put it in the small closet. He hadn’t traveled recently and the scents of varnish and polish made him smile. It was one of those particular combinations of favorite smells that he always remembered that he had forgotten once he remembered it.
“God damn!” There was a heavy thump behind him as Hubbard stumbled around the car. Being in a coach was kind of like being on a boat. There was never quite enough room and it took some getting used to.