by Paul Malmont
Across the countryside Communist rebellions increased in ferocity and nipped at the flanks of the Kuomintang. One of Chiang’s generals formed an army of his own and brought it against Chiang in Nanking with help from British and American warships. Mei found the shifting political landscape dizzying, as complicated as the beautiful game of chess that the Russian diplomats had once enjoyed so ferociously in the courtyards of Shenyang Palace.
Zuolin himself now commanded an army of a million men. He joked that he longed for the days when he rode with only two hundred warriors at his side. Mei had seen the burning campfires of six hundred thousand of those troops turn a valley at night into a lake of fire. Battles had been fought at forlorn places with names such as Xuzhou, Lincheng, Jiujiang, Xuehuashan Mountain, and Longtan. Yet still Chiang’s Kuomintang pounded back at them with relentless force. And now, at last, Zuolin was retreating from Beijing.
The Japanese had landed troops at Jinan. Mi-Ying had assured him that they were only securing their vital national interests, but the old warlord saw what Mei had warned him of for so long: the Japanese were establishing a beachhead in order to pave the way for an invasion one day should the civil war weaken the Chinese to the point where that opportunity would present itself. Zuolin ended his alliance with the Japanese and Mi-Ying, who stayed behind in Beijing to await his next master. Or his fate. Without Japanese support, Zuolin’s position as the ruler of China was untenable.
“We will return to Manchuria, the land of our fathers,” the warlord told his sons. “Let them have this sewer. Behind the protection of our mountains and walls we will wait and grow stronger, and when they are weak we shall come again. We are not leaving China. China is with us.”
Lu Zhi sobbed at the thought of leaving her beloved library behind. Beijing had been her home all her life and leaving grieved her. His son was eager to ride the train and see his grandfather’s great palace. Mei had assured him that it was not only more beautiful than Beijing’s but cleaner. The boy’s eyes had glittered eagerly in the lamplight at bedtime as Mei described the wondrous things he would see in Lianoning: the caves they would explore, the mountains they would climb, the surf they would swim in, the kites they would fly, the birds they would catch, the deer they would hunt. Until the early morning when he had ridden out in preparation for the retreat, he and his wife had lain together and known love.
His men were certain that Shenyang City was secure. Some Communists had been executed and the families of the remaining Japanese were taken to the port for deportation. Flags of joy for the return of the Emperor of the Northern Lands hung from doorways and trees and flew from rooftops.
On the morning of their arrival he took a train from Shenyang Palace to Huanggudun Station on the far outskirts of the city. He had decided to surprise his wife and son by meeting them here and joining them for the remainder of the journey instead of waiting for them to arrive. Even weary Zuolin would be pleased to see him. His son loved trains. He had an elaborate collection of American tin miniatures which he spent hours with. He thought the metal dragons the most incredible inventions, and most of all Mei wanted to share in at least a part of his son’s thrill in riding one.
There was a small crowd at the station hoping to catch a glimpse of their leader. The bees hung in the air much as they had a morning long ago in a distant copse at the far end of a rice paddy. He brushed the soot from his clothes; on his trip from the palace, the train windows had been open to let the fresh summer morning air in. He heard the distant whistle of the train announcing that it was clearing the final mountain pass several miles away, and his heart leapt. He could feel his Shaozu’s arms around his neck, taste Lu Zhi’s lips. On the horizon, a thin gray cloud of smoke mixed with steam appeared above the trees.
There was a face in the crowd, turning quickly from him as if to avoid his eyes. Mei moved his head to catch a better glimpse. The man was furtive. Mei pushed toward him, calling for assistance from his detail. The man broke into a run at the sound of his voice. Mei recognized him. Mi-Ying. There is no reason for him to be in Shenyang, Mei thought, and at the same moment he knew, of course there is.
The explosion threw great chunks of the train into the sky. They ascended so gracefully, so slowly through black ash that they almost appeared like dry leaves driven before the wild wind. Then the sound reached his ears, a mighty roar, and the power that lifted those sections of the train revealed itself. At the station people began to murmur, then scream.
He leapt upon a horse and rode in the direction of the noise and the fire. It wasn’t what he thought, he told himself. It wasn’t the right train, he prayed. Shaozu was special, he knew, favored by the gods. And the gods would protect him.
The woods were aflame. Great pieces of shrapnel lay in craters, smoldering. He tried to drive his horse through the flames to the twisted wreckage beyond, but there was no approach. The horse was not a soldier’s mount and responded to the command with fear. It bucked and reared and threw its rider. As he fell through the air like another piece of debris, Mei knew that the bomb had been placed with devastating precision for maximum impact.
They were all dead, was his last thought as his head hit the earth. And he knew it was true.
Episode Twenty-Seven
“WHERE THE hell is The Shadow?” Orson Welles’s voice boomed through the movie theater. His ribbing cracked through Gibson’s headache like an anarchist’s brick through a government office window. “Is he even in this piece of crap? It’s called The Shadow Strikes. Where’s the goddamn Shadow and when in hell is he going to strike?”
The pain in Walter’s head had been growing steadily since his leaving the train yard. A long morning of defending his book to Nanovic hadn’t helped anything either. Nanovic must have gotten a good night’s sleep because he had torn into Gibson’s writing as if the formula for writing these stories was so simple that anyone but Walter B. Gibson could write them. He knew that Nanovic sometimes did that when he wanted to feel more like a writer and less like a glorified proofreader. Since the appearance of Kent Allard and the debacle which had followed, Nanovic had taken great pains to drag a fine-tooth comb across each page, questioning Gibson’s every word choice. He was taking great pains to see that nothing like that was ever going to happen again.
After the meeting Gibson had placed a call to the Providence police department and told them he suspected some kind of dustup at the medical lab down by the docks. There had been a long silence at the other end, and then the voice said, “So?”
“Don’t you think you ought to look into it?” he had asked.
“It’s looked into,” the voice replied. “What’s your name?”
Gibson had hung up. Seemed like old Aunt Annie had been right again regarding the competence, if not the outright complicity, of the Providence police force.
He had met Welles for lunch at the Automat. Welles had grumpily complained about how he wanted to go to Reuben’s for one of their eponymous sandwiches: corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing toasted under the broiler. But too many magicians lunched there. Reuben’s was very popular with the crowd who patronized Tannen’s Magic Shop. Guys like Tommy Hanlon Jr., who worked with Orson at his theater; Herman Hanson, who had understudied Thurston and was so good at impersonating him that when the master had suddenly died of a stroke during an intermission last year, Hanson had taken the stage for the second act and anyone in the audience would have sworn that he had seen Thurston; and Joe Kavalier, a quiet artist who had a fascination with Harry Houdini and prodded Gibson for an anecdote every time they came together. Welles knew all those fellows as well. He was a proficient amateur magician and admired their talent. He constantly pushed Walter to star in his own show. Walter always retorted that he’d star in a show when Orson started writing pulps.
Gibson could not face too much scrutiny from the brotherhood. Not as long as he was having an affair with one of its members’ wives. The group prided itself on its closely held age-old secrets, s
o it was hard to keep a secret from them. He knew that there were already whispers.
He’d had to explain this situation to Welles to get him to stop grumbling so peevishly about the sandwich that Gibson had so cruelly deprived him of. Fortunately the only thing which improved the young man’s mood more than food was gossip, and the storm clouds of despair which had overshadowed his normally exuberant and optimistic nature had parted instantly.
“You’re breaking up a marriage?” Welles had asked, conspiratorially. “And she’s fifteen years younger than you? I must meet this Salome!”
“I’m not breaking up a marriage,” Gibson had replied. “And if you think I’m too old for her, he’s nearly sixty! He married her young to lock her up. And now he’s loaning her to Blackstone anyway.”
“Well, it’s obvious she has her type. You’ve got to admit that. Let’s say she likes her men somewhat experienced, shall we? Wasn’t she the bird who used to have a chicken act?”
“Still does. But she’s moved on to mind reading now and retired China Boy except for the kids. She’s a hell of a mentalist too, I gotta tell ya. She picked a few things out of my head I didn’t know I had up there.”
“What happened to the chicken?”
“You’re in the theater district a lot. Keep your eyes peeled. If you see a beautiful girl wearing a big floppy hat and carrying a basket with a black rooster’s head sticking out of it, that’s my gal.”
“I shall look for nothing else.” He had plunked another nickel in one of the cases and removed a second slice of apple pie. “Where do you think this can go, Wally, my friend? Do you think she’ll leave him? And think about this: do you really want her to? What would you do with her if you had her? Hm?”
“I want her,” Gibson had said without hesitation. “No. I don’t know. I want to see her. That’s all. If that means that I’m in love with her, I don’t know. I just want to go get her.”
“So go get her.”
“It’s Monday. The theater’s dark today and she’s not at her hotel. I sent her a telegram, though. Told her I want to see her again.”
“Then you must make her leave him and damn the consequences. And by God, make sure she brings that chicken.”
“She won’t. She just won’t. Have you ever been out with a married woman?”
“Of course! Married women are the most in need of someone to love and admire them. Single women get that from every man. Married women get it from none.”
He hadn’t told Welles about the Providence experience. It was an easy topic to avoid. Welles had wanted to hear gossip about Blackstone’s opening night party, which had been at Mamma Leone’s, the au courant Broadway restaurant where patrons could fish for their dinner from a trout-filled brook or converse with Mamma’s horse, which lived in its own special stable with Dutch doors that opened onto a vast dining room.
They had finished their lunch and made their way to the movie palace to catch this week’s chapter, the fifth, of the two-reeler serial adventure adaptation. Walter had written the first draft of The Shadow Strikes last October and sent it off to the Alexander brothers at Grand National Pictures in Hollywood. Welles and Gibson had eagerly sought out the serials for the past few weeks to see how their character had made the transition to the screen. Changes had been made.
Welles’s level of concern about the quality of the film was well placed; like Gibson, he had a vested interest in the character of The Shadow. Welles was starring as the voices of The Shadow and Lamont Cranston on the wildly popular weekly radio adaptation of Walter’s mag. A successful Shadow serial would create even more demand from which Gibson and Welles could profit. On the other hand, nobody wanted to be associated with a flop. Welles had made two significant contributions to the legend of The Shadow (three, if you took into account that he gave voice and life to an enigma). He had introduced a new character, Margot Lane, The Shadow’s faithful friend and companion, to banter with The Shadow on his adventures and to give him somebody to rescue from time to time. The Street & Smith policy toward women in The Shadow may have been for Walter to stop writing about them at the knees and start again at the neck, but Welles wanted something a little sexier and he got it. Welles had also conferred upon The Shadow the power of invisibility; on his show the avenger became a frightening voice from the ether which surrounded criminals and audiences alike through the mystical ability to cloud men’s minds. When Gibson, who spent long hours writing radio scripts with Welles, had initially and loudly questioned whether an audience would accept the trick of invisibility, the young man had earned his eternal respect by replying confidently, “If radio listeners will believe in a ventriloquist act they can’t see, they’ll believe even more in invisibility!” Gibson wrote it that way for the radio, and Welles was right—the audiences ate it up. But The Shadow would never be invisible in his mag. Not as long as he wrote it. In his mags The Shadow would always be there, if a person only knew where to look.
Despite the radio broadcasts’ tremendous success, the sponsor, Blue Coal, was threatening to pull out because it found Welles and his versatile troupe, the Mercury Theatre on the Air, too difficult to work with. They often missed deadlines and refused to allow the coal-mining executives to comment on scripts. The network had assured Welles, and Street & Smith, that the Goodyear Tire Company had expressed sponsorship interest and was waiting in the wings. Should Blue Coal drop out, The Shadow would soon be cautioning drivers about the evils of driving on wet roads with unsafe tires.
“There’s no Shadow in this movie!” Welles was nearly standing. Fortunately the theater was nearly empty. The Shadow as a movie character was a bust. Without the spectacle of Welles’s invisibility angle, or the detailed nightscape moods of Walter’s stories, what was it about? Just another detective story. On the screen, the former silent picture star Rod La Rocque, mostly famous for being Vilma Banky’s husband, poked around one of the phoniest mansions they had ever seen, occasionally running into someone he suspected of embezzling eleven million dollars. “When does he become The Shadow?”
“Maybe next episode?” Gibson said, hopefully. “I know I wrote him in.”
“Don’t they listen to the radio? They don’t even get Cranston’s name right! They keep calling LaRoque Granston. Don’t they read the magazines? Didn’t they read the script?”
“As I recall I think they started production before my script was in.”
“Don’t they know what they have here? Don’t they know what The Shadow is? You know what it is, what the thing is? They don’t have any respect for him. They think he’s just a pulp.” Welles dropped down, irked, in his seat. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat a few times and then he leaned over to Gibson. “Want to know how I’d make a Shadow movie if they gave me a chance?”
“Not a play?” Gibson asked. Welles had a brilliant imagination and a true knack for creating amazing stage scenes. Last June his Voodoo Macbeth, a Federal Theatre Project–WPA production, had created a bona fide New York craze. It was the event which put 125th Street on the A-train map for many white downtowners. The fashions inspired by the production could still be seen on the mannequins in the windows of Fifth Avenue eight months later. Walter had seen the production twice at the Lafayette and once at the Adelphia and been completely transported to another world. In those theaters, the rhythms of the islands had come to life and destiny moved through the fetid, steamy jungle Welles had realized in the middle of civilization. Welles had used Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of darkness. The production had made him the toast of the town. He was a sensation.
When the curtain had risen on that show, and on him, he was twenty-two years old.
“No,” was the reply, “a movie. A real movie.”
Walter squirmed again as Rod La Rocque lumbered through a phony fight scene. “Let’s hear it.”
“It will be dark,” Orson began softly, in the deep performance voice he used for The Shadow. “It will be dark. Perhaps the darkest movie ever made. Light will barely penet
rate the mists and darkness and when a shaft of life breaks through, it is only to shine for a moment on a brief moment of good which is to be snuffed out when it fades. Moonlight illuminates a sleeping baby. In the darkness she disappears. A man smokes a cigarette beneath a fading street lamp. When it flickers out he is mugged with a blackjack. This is the black world through which The Shadow moves.
“It doesn’t matter what the story is. What matters is the world. I would have The Shadow, or some part of him, in almost every shot. Somewhere. In the background, you might see a hint of his cloak, or the brim of his hat or the glint of his eyes. I’d set the story entirely in the criminal underworld. The villains would be the protagonists and The Shadow would be their antagonist. He’s a force of nature. He coalesces around evil the way clouds come together along a cold front to form a thunderstorm. His glee at being summoned again, at being needed, at being alive is what makes him laugh. It’s his thunder, and his actions are his lightning. My Shadow movie would be about the panic and fear he creates in the minds of the black-hearted.
“In this film, the darkness is something real, unconsciously shared and connected throughout all of humanity. It’s the darkness that we all share, that you’ve personified, given a name. The Shadow is the champion of despair. He is a trickster unleashed by the evil that men do to restore balance. It’s as if the act of evil deeds cracks the mantle of humankind and what bubbles up through the new crevasses, like a spring, is The Shadow. He can’t be unleashed until the crime is committed, but once it has been, he is the opposite reaction to the criminal’s action.”
“But doesn’t that make him part villain too?”
Welles thought about that for a moment. “Yes. Yes, of course he is! It takes a villain to know a villain, right? In some ways, the villain is even closer to him than the hero. Without the villain he wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t bubble up, as I was saying. He’d certainly have no purpose even if he did. The villain taps down directly into the liquid well of darkness, the sanctorum of The Shadow, and steals from him that which he safeguards, violence and fear. The Shadow manifests himself through the righteous, all his faithful agents, to retrieve what was his to begin with, that part of himself which was stolen, and to restore universal harmony.”