by Paul Malmont
“What’re they printing?”
“I don’t know,” Gibson said and then pointed to the end of the block. “But I do know how we can find out.” They headed to the dilapidated newsstand on the corner. A German shepherd barked at them as they arrived.
“Easy, killer,” Gibson said to the alert hound. “Sammy the Boxer sent us.”
An old man in a battered fedora rubbed the nape of the dog’s neck. It sat back on its haunches. The old man squinted at them. At least one eye seemed to. The other eye was long since gone.
“Yeah,” he grunted with a phlegmatic rattle.
Gibson folded a bill into the tin cup the man left out for change. “You, uh, keep your eye on the runner?”
“What do you think?”
“Hey, mac,” Manny said, impatiently, “you know what goes on in that building back there?”
“Well,” the old man said, “if you’d asked me that this morning I’d have said I didn’t know. But since Sammy told me to watch the runners and they seemed particularly interested in it, I got a customer who’s a rocketeer to find out for me.”
“What’s a rocketeer?”
“The post office guys that operate everything coming and going through the pneumatic tubes are called rocketeers. Okay, all the post offices in the city are connected by pneumatic tubes, thirty miles of ’em or more, with cylinders about this long”—he held out his hands to indicate a span of about two feet—“that go whizzing through them all day and all night. My rocketeer wrote down his question and put it in the tube at the Church Street office and it shot up to Times Square. Then it went to the Ansonia station, then on and on to the Planetarium office, the Cathedral office, and the Morningside office, before it finally gets to the Manhattanville station on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, where someone who finally knows something about the building works. Two hours later, my rocketeer’s back with the answer. Ain’t the modern age great?” He unfolded a crumpled piece of paper. “That building there is the American Bank Note Company. Ever hear of it?”
Gibson shook his head.
“No? They print up money for other countries. It’s a foreign currency mint.”
Gibson pushed the now insistently nuzzling dog away from his crotch. “Did they go inside?”
“Nope. After a little while of looking it over and talking, the car drove off. I couldn’t follow that.”
“Of course not.” Gibson grimaced with disappointment, feeling the trail of pursuit suddenly grow cold.
“Not the car. No. But that big Chinaman, he left on foot.”
“Tell me you sent your dog after him, right?”
“Hell no! Shep minds the store. I followed him,” he pointed north, toward Chinatown. “Went down an alley on Doyers. The door with the red light over it.”
“You know,” Manny said to him as they climbed back in the car, “a red light in Chinatown? That means opium.”
“I know.”
Manny turned the cab into the twisted net of Chinatown streets. He pulled up in front of an alley. At the back of the alley was a door. The red lightbulb flickered weakly in the darkness.
“This fella. He owe you money?”
“Nope.”
“You owe him money?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then what’s he to you? What do you want with him?”
“He’s got the ending to my story.”
He opened the cab door, stepped out, closed the door, and leaned in through the window, placing some bills in his hand. Manny would find out later that Gibson had slipped him a hundred bucks.
“You sure you want to go in there?”
Gibson shrugged. “You know, it probably won’t even be the worst place I’ve been in this week.”
“You want I should stick around?”
“No. I might be a while.”
“Some game, huh?”
“Yeah,” he replied, “sure was. Really kept our eye on the runner.”
He watched the cab drive away. After a night spent calling on what felt like half of New York he suddenly was all alone. He looked down the long alley to the dark door. Extra innings, he told himself, and headed toward it, his footfalls echoing softly.
“Fook yuen? Fook yuen?” the smoke peddler called as Gibson slipped him money to enter. He had been in opium dens before, and this was an opulent example of one. Men lying on red silk pads on pallets on the floor behind carved screens were being tended to by a few men with pipes. The thick, richly sweet smoke hung low in the air. Several musicians played odd stringed instruments, a slow, meandering melody that sounded to Gibson like the memory of a brook in spring. An ancient staircase to the left vanished into the darkness upstairs. “Fook yuen?” the man asked again, trying to tug him toward a low couch.
Gibson shook his head. He held up a hand for caution and slowly reached into his jacket, pulling out the long, lethal knife which he had found in the corpse of Jeffords. He presented it, hilt first, to the little man, who seemed gnarled right to the tips of his tinted, curved fingernails.
The sleek peddler’s eyes narrowed cagily. Gibson stared back at him. The men slipped away behind some curtains for a few moments. Then he returned, and the knife was gone. The man drew back the curtains. Gibson could see a simple iron spiral staircase leading up into darkness. Another Chinese man was guarding it; this man did not look like the smoke peddlers, who were shifty and cowed. He stood proud and alert. Gibson placed him for a soldier. He approached the man and attempted to stare him down as well. This man wasn’t going for it. After several moments he smirked at Gibson and turned and climbed the staircase. Gibson followed.
The staircase opened onto a landing. Another Chinese man was guarding the door. This man appeared to have had his jaw broken recently. It was swollen and purplish and pushed about an inch too far to its right. A red bandana was wound tightly around his head. The pain must have been significant but he stoically held his post. The first man spoke to him. Through his clenched jaw the second man uttered a sound which could have been a chuckle. Then he opened the door.
Gibson instantly recognized where he was. It’s the backstage of a theater, he thought. Indeed, the flies and drapes and boards were still intact, though covered with dust. The front of the stage was blocked by a great tattered backdrop. Seen in reverse, it appeared to be a Chinese temple scene. There was even a statue in front of it; he could see its shadow on the painted muslin.
There were stacks of long crates which were much cleaner, much newer, and the footprints and slide paths surrounding them showed that they had been placed here recently, probably by the small group of Chinese men who were right now sitting or leaning on them and looking at him. Some of them cleaned their knives. Some of them cleaned their guns. All of them glared at him.
“Zhang Mei,” he said loudly. “I want to speak with Zhang Mei.”
A voice rolled toward him from the shadows behind them; it was deep and melodious and fluidly inflected. It was a voice Welles would have admired. “Who are you?” it asked of him, simply.
“I’m your biographer.” It just came to him. There was long pause.
“Who are you?” The voice was more quizzical now.
Gibson took a few steps closer to the Chinese group. He still couldn’t see the speaker. He now stood in the midst of the Chinese. “I am a writer. I write for the pulp magazines. Popular stories.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Walter Gibson. The man from the docks in Providence. You saved my life.”
“Who are you?”
“My writing name is Maxwell Grant. I am the best-selling writer in this country.” His eyes were adjusting to the new, darker wing of the stage. He could make out a black figure now. “You have reached out your hand from your land and touched this land. Already your name is known here. But not your life’s story.”
“My life speaks for itself,” the shape said.
Gibson knew that he had been dismissed. He felt the men behind him begin to stir. It would only be
another second before a knife slid between his ribs, or a thin metal thread was pulled tightly around his throat.
“Al Capone!” he exclaimed. “You’ve heard of Al Capone.”
Even for a man from the other side of the world, that legendary name still had resonance. It gave the men creeping up behind him pause. The black shape before him shifted, and he realized that the man he had been speaking with had had his back turned to him the whole time. The figure stepped into the dim light and Gibson could see that this was indeed the man he’d been looking for. His eyes were glittering and hard but there was something in them that Gibson recognized. Something that again gave him the feeling that he might be looking into the eyes of his own creation.
“I was his biographer. And when he dies, his story will live on. He gave me what I wanted and I gave him what he wanted.”
“What is that?”
“Immortality.”
Zhang Mei smiled. It was a dead, mirthless smile. But it wasn’t menacing. Gibson had simply amused him to the extent that he was able to be amused.
“If you stay you cannot leave without it being my will. I may never will it so.”
“I know.”
“And you will have to write fast, then. For my story is long and our time is brief.”
“Well,” Gibson said with some modesty, “in addition to being the best-selling writer in America, I’m also the fastest.”
Zhang Mei nodded and the men fell back with soldierly ease and went about their crate-shifting exercise. Gibson took out his notebook and pencil. Gibson noticed that Zhang Mei had a delicate teacup filled with steaming tea and he wrote down that detail, accompanied by a note that the tea smelled like jasmine. Zhang Mei took a sip of the tea. “Well then, biographer, where should I begin?”
“Start with your parents,” Walter said, already writing his lead sentence. “Who were they? What were they like?”
“I never knew my father,” Zhang Mei said. He thought for a moment longer and then he spoke, and as he spoke, Gibson wrote. “The man who would be my father was a Manchu and he rode from the west, from the Nulu’erhu Mountains, across the windswept, snowy plains of the Lianoning Province, behind Zhang Zuolin, the warlord.”
Issue 4:
Hell Gate
Episode Thirty
SHE COULDN’T sleep. Lester didn’t seem to have the same problem. He was slumbering away in their bed. His snoring managed to be reassuring and irritating at the same time. She left the room and padded down the hallway to the living room to get another book from the shelf. Other books, which she had been poring over in an attempt to find some history of her statue, were strewn across the living room. It would require some explanation, she realized, as the room hadn’t looked like this when Lester had fallen asleep only hours ago.
They had been making love since their return from Chinatown the night before. She had thought they would be too tired, or overwhelmed, for passion, but in fact it was just the opposite. They stayed in bed and ate leftover Chinese food and made love over and over. It was the first time since sometime before the pregnancy ended. It was as if the excitement had ignited her need for him.
She added several of Lester’s research books to her of-interest pile and then her hand fell upon a German travel guide. Slowly she pulled the book down. The book fell open to the page she knew it would: the crease in the spine was permanent. She looked at the photo of the palace of Ludwig II, the mad king of Bavaria. Deep under his castle nestled high in the Alps was rumored to be a treasure guarded by a hall of mirrors so devious and fantastic that it could make someone mad within hours. This book had been in her purse last year in Switzerland. It had been the book she referred to when she begged Lester to take her just a little bit over the border, only twenty miles. She had even spoken with some locals and knew of an unpatrolled border crossing they could drive their little Citroën over. Lester hadn’t wanted to, but he did it.
She closed the book and put it back on the shelf. What the book didn’t say was that the palace had been turned into a Nazi troop bivouac. Books could be useless like that.
She spent some time cleaning up the books, putting them away. There were no answers to be found in them. No treasure clues.
She climbed back into bed. She could still hear the ringing voice of the young Nazi soldier who approached them as she leaped out of the car. She could hear Lester urgently asking her to get back in. Why had she stubbornly argued with him?
She lay back and curled up against him, pressing hard into his body, resting her leg over his, laying her head on his chest, rousing him. He wrapped his arms about her and kissed her forehead. “I think we’re going to miss church tomorrow. Today. We’ll go next week.”
“Mm-hm.” She toyed with the hairs on his chest. There were a few gray ones she hadn’t noticed before. “Why did you tell that cop your name was Kenneth Robeson?”
“Did I do that?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Really? I don’t remember that. I guess I felt more like Kenneth Robeson than Lester Dent.”
She could almost hear him thinking about the events at the restaurant, reliving them.
“I nearly got you killed twice.”
“Not bad for your first time out.”
“Don’t joke about it,” she insisted. “I get us in trouble.”
“I’m not joking.” He sat up. “Can’t we go out to dinner at our favorite restaurant and not have an adventure? You went into the theater without me. You mouthed off to that cop. It wasn’t quite as bad as getting us chased over the Alps with the entire German army shooting at us. But it was close.”
“Why don’t you stop me?”
“Because you’re a hard woman to say no to.” She rolled away from him onto her other side and was quiet for a while.
“I always get us into these things and you have to get us out. Don’t you get mad at me for it?”
She heard him exhale in frustration. “Maybe you’re just the kind of person that things like this happen to. You know, some people have good luck, some people have bad luck, some people have money luck or romance luck. Maybe you’ve got adventure luck and these things find you. And one of these times your adventure luck is going to run out and I’m not going to be able to save you, because you don’t let me protect you.”
“I thought you did a pretty swell job in Chinatown.”
“It could have gone the other way on a dime.”
“There are things you can’t protect me from, Lester. There have been and there will be.”
“I’m aware of that. But at least I feel that in some ways, I’m a good counterbalance to your adventure luck. I have a touch of protection luck. But only a touch. In the hospital, for example,” he went on. “Turns out you and I have the same blood type and I could give you a transfusion. But I couldn’t protect you from losing the baby.”
“You’re right,” she sniffled and then blew her nose on what she thought was rough for a handkerchief, but was really soft when it turned out to be a sock.
“So okay,” she said. “I’ll try to watch out for my adventure luck. I love you too much.”
“I love you too,” he said, and she wondered if he had heard her and understood her. It occurred to her that married people use “I love you” to convey a variety of meanings from “I’m sorry” to “I’m right, but…” to “This is great” to “I’ll do exactly what you say from this day on.” She thought he might be reading that very interpretation into her expression, when what she really had meant by “I love you” was that he was her man. But her emphasis had slipped at the last moment.
“I love you too,” she said, meaning that they didn’t have to continue their conversation right now. She knew the doctors had told Lester that she would never be able to carry a baby to term, and that he wanted to talk about what that meant for their life together. Lester may have finally been able to get her to leave the apartment, and that was a big step in the right direction, but she wasn’t ready to talk about their never
having a child together. She rolled over and looked up, trying to distinguish his features in the dark. She helped him glide a hand up her side to her breast, sliding her thigh against his. She parted her lips and kissed him.
The night after crossing the border back into Switzerland, they had made love the same way as they did now. She couldn’t smell him or hear his voice, not to mention look at him, without wanting to be enveloped by him. She could remember the way she felt when they had exited the Citroën and had seen the angry, punctured metal in the bonnet, torn through by the machine gun’s bullets.
It was a month after their return from Europe, after the day in Bavaria and the nights in the Alps, that they had discovered she was pregnant for what would be the last time.
Episode Thirty-One
LIGHT BROKE apart through the Rose Window and scattered in dappled fragments of color across Norma’s hymnal.
The pastor read from the Gospel of John, “Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’”
Holy Trinity Church was a Gothic structure on Central Park West. It was far bigger than the small Lutheran church she and Lester had attended back in La Plata, and sometimes she felt overwhelmed by its great presence: the elegance of the triptych of Christ rising behind the alabaster altar, the Louis Tiffany stained-glass windows, but especially the great pipe organ. Their old church had had a donated upright piano which had been lovingly tuned once a month. Holy Trinity incorporated much more music into its services than her old church had, and she loved that.
“Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’” She watched Lester’s fingers tap silently against his thighs, writing another book or transcribing the pastor’s sermon, she wasn’t sure which. He didn’t like church very much but he dutifully went along with her every Sunday. During a very busy period it could be the only time during a week that he stopped moving. He stifled a yawn. Almost.