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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

Page 23

by Paul Malmont


  “It’s not my story,” Otis said. The two men sat across from the Dents at their comfortable little kitchen table, which had once belonged to Norma’s grandmother. He seemed reluctant to speak and she gave him a smile of encouragement. “Ron’s the one saying he’s who he says he was. Maybe he’s just been hiding out in Providence this whole time while Gibson’s gas was killin’ him slowly, but before it did he came down to New York. Don’t I know that it’s easy enough to go underground. And that it’s easy enough to go crazy while you’re doing it. All I know is some poor son of a bitch died in a bar, pardon my French, ma’am.”

  “That’s all right,” she replied. “I’m fluent.”

  Lester cleared his throat. “And you haven’t found Mr. Gibson?” He rose and went to the bookshelf while they answered.

  They shook their heads simultaneously. It was almost comical how perfectly they were matched, she thought. Like Laurel and Hardy except that Otis was much better looking than Stan Laurel. More like Leslie Howard. But together they were quite a pair.

  “Absolutely not, Mr. Dent. Absolutely not. We actually tried to find him, but we haven’t had any luck. We’ve been to his apartment and the doorman said he hasn’t been there in days,” Ron said. “And Nanovic told us that he missed a couple of story meetings for the first time. We went by his train. We can’t find him.”

  “If this is something Walter Gibson is involved in,” Norma said crossly, “then we want no part of it.” She folded her arms defiantly and looked at the two men. “His is not a welcome presence in my home.”

  “I…I’m sorry, Mrs. Dent.” Otis looked at Hubbard. “I thought you said they were friends.”

  The word made Norma laugh. “A friend? Walter Gibson? I can think of a lot of things that Walter is, but a friend is not one of them! Do you know that he nearly ruined us once?”

  “Look, Mr. and Mrs. Dent, I’m really sorry about all this.” Otis lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling. “I don’t really know Mr. Gibson. But it seems to me that whenever his name comes up, it’s always in relation to something that’s almost impossible to believe.”

  “Hey!” Hubbard sat up.

  “Listen, brother. I wasn’t there for the night watchman. I wasn’t there for any of the talk you had with that rummy, and that’s what I’m calling him, ’cause that’s what he was. I do know, however, when I came back he was dead. But for all I know everything else is just a big lie.”

  “Or a pack of lies?” Lester asked, still at the bookcase. He held a large chart book of northeastern waters and was thumbing through the index.

  “Exactly!” affirmed Otis with satisfaction.

  “Well. In the absence of Mr. Gibson, one way to find out whether this is pulp or real would be to find Harmony Isle.”

  “Uh…” Otis seemed confused. “Okay.”

  “But there is no Harmony Isle in Long Island Sound.” Lester studied a page closely.

  “Are you sure?” Ron said, sounding disappointed.

  “Well, this is a pretty comprehensive survey of the coast from Nova Scotia down to the Outer Banks. There is no Harmony Isle.”

  “Damn!” Ron slammed his hand down, rattling the coffee cups on the kitchen table.

  “Nope. Like I said. No Harmony Isle.” Lester said, shooting Norma a sly grin. “But there is a Haimoni Isle.” He put the chart on the table and pointed to a tiny isle between Long Island and Connecticut. “Haimoni sounds a good bit like Harmony when you think about it. Doesn’t it?”

  Both men nodded. “When you put that New England accent behind it, it could,” Otis said begrudgingly. Norma found herself wishing that she could introduce him to some of her friends back in La Plata. The unmarried ones.

  Lester thumbed quickly through another book and found what he was looking for. “Haimoni. I thought it rang a bell.” He snapped the book shut. “The Haimoni Indians lived in hut villages along the coast of Connecticut thousands of years before the Pequot and Quinnipiac tribes took over the area. Haimoni Isle was the site of their sacred stone. It was an altar upon which their shaman would perform ritual human sacrifices to the fishing spirits.

  “According to legend, a shaman once refused to sacrifice the woman he loved upon the altar. That night a storm raised the waters so high that they tipped the stone on its side. The entire tribe was swept away in the flood. Long after they vanished, the legend of the Haimoni Stone lived on and the other Indian tribes considered it a cursed place. Evil.”

  “Oh,” said Driftwood, “that Haimoni Isle!”

  Norma took up the chart and studied it. She traced her finger toward the little speck on the map and she could see her fingernail quiver as she did. “We should go,” she heard herself blurt out. The men turned to look at her. “We should go there.”

  “Norma, it’s the middle of the night in the dead of winter.”

  “It’s the only way to know for sure.”

  “But isn’t this Mr. Gibson’s problem?”

  “Oh, to hell with Mr. Gibson! What could he possibly know that we don’t know? Don’t you want to go see? I want to go see.”

  “It’s an easy trip from Providence,” said Lester. “Not so easy from New York. The Albatross is docked at Seventy-second Street. She’d have to be brought around the bottom of Manhattan and up the East River to get into the sound. If the winds prevail from the southeast it could take a day and a night’s sail just to get there. And that’s if I get her through Hell Gate in one piece.”

  “Mr. Dent,” Otis said in a reassuring tone. Norma found herself resenting his earnest charm because she found it so hard to resist. “I am an Annapolis graduate and a retired officer of the U.S. Navy. There’s no vessel I can’t sail and no sea I can’t sail her through.”

  “Now you want to go?” Lester asked.

  “I’m gonna wait for you to come back and tell me another story? Maybe this one will be about Atlantis! No. I’m going to see for myself what’s pulp and what’s real.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ron with a nervous note in his voice. “Did you say something about something being called Hell Gate? You’re actually considering sailing a boat through something called Hell Gate to get to a cursed Indian island? Maybe it’s just because I’m a pulp writer, but does any part of this sound like it might be a bad idea?”

  “Come on, Hubbard!” Otis replied. “Weren’t you the one telling about all your great sailing voyages on the USS Nitro, from Shanghai to Guam to Hawaii to Seattle on a three-masted corvette? From lookout to first mate too. Never saw a man rise that fast in the U.S. Navy. So I’m going to let you have the helm.”

  “I’m skipper,” Dent muttered, “that’s my decision.”

  “I recommend L. Ron Hubbard for the helm, skipper,” Otis said.

  “Sure,” Lester grunted.

  “No, wait!” Ron jumped up. His face was deep red. “I can sail. I can. That particular trip that, that there, my parents paid for.”

  “It was a cruise?” Driftwood was shocked.

  “Of a serious nature. And there were times when I performed a mate’s duties, bringing the coffee to the deck in the morning. And I did get to go up to the crow’s nest several times in calm seas as long as there was a sailor already up there.” He chewed on his finger. “I was fourteen.”

  “You made it sound like it was a year or two ago.”

  “He’s young at heart,” Norma rushed to his defense. Otis smiled and for her sake decided to stop haranguing Hubbard, for the time being.

  Lester, still concerned, asked Ron, “You do have a boat, right? You do sail a boat?”

  “I day-sail a sixteen-footer.”

  “Then you’re on winches.”

  Ron’s face was still red. Norma noticed that Ron was so mad at his companion that he couldn’t bring himself to look at Otis. Otis, appearing self-satisfied, pretended not to notice. She made a small show of pouring a fresh cup of coffee for him, adding sugar lumps and stirring it for him. When Otis rattled his cup for coffee, she left the pot at the sid
e of the table and he had to cross Ron to get it.

  Thump! Lester put his index finger heavily down on the map at the point where the East River merged into the Long Island Sound. “This is Hell Gate,” he said. “You see the East River is not really a river. It’s a tidal estuary. So it doesn’t really flow so much as it just sloshes back and forth like soup in a bowl. This spot right here is where the edge of the estuary flowing back and forth one way meets the currents of the sound flowing crosswise against it, which causes the water depth to change unpredictably. Which only matters because there are shallows and rocks which can sometimes spring up and slash a ship’s hull open. Meanwhile the wind is bringing additional pressure to bear on the irregular currents and sometimes opens a whirlpool. Hell Gate is an open water cemetery. In 1904 the steam ferry General Slocum on a Lutheran picnic outing caught fire and became trapped in the swirling waters of Hell Gate. Over a thousand women and children went down right there in broad daylight in full view of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. An entire New York neighborhood was destroyed in a single moment.” He tapped the ashes out of his pipe and gazed into the empty bowl for a moment.

  Norma took his other hand. “We’ve been through Hell Gate before. Several times. Just the two of us.”

  “Not at night with ice on the water.” He rose and put the chart back on the bookcase.

  She took a cigarette from Otis’s open pack and lit it. The two young men both looked at her with surprise. Evidently they hadn’t been prepared for Lester Dent’s wife to show much interest in their goings-on. Am I up for another adventure? she thought to herself. No, was the answer. No. Don’t leave the house. Don’t leave your safe cave. There are grocery lists to prepare and biscuits to cook. You don’t need adventure to make Lester look at you the way you used to like him to. She rose and went to his side and spoke comfortingly to him.

  “We’ll have two more able-bodied seamen. We might find some proof, and then what a story you’ll have!”

  “And if not?”

  “Then at the least we’ll have had a bit of an adventure.”

  “I thought you didn’t want any more adventures.”

  Wrong, she countered in her head. I need adventure to make myself look at me the way I used to like to. “This will hardly be an adventure. More like an outing.”

  “Okay.” He nodded but he still looked gravely concerned.

  She gave him a quick kiss. “Ain’t adventure luck the goddamnedest thing?”

  Episode Thirty-Four

  “IS IT always this rough?” Hubbard hollered back from the bow of the Albatross. He was lying on his belly with his head hanging over the deck above the water and shining a light into the foam below.

  “Are you kidding?” Driftwood yelled back from the helm, the wheel ever so slightly under his hand. “This is some of the best sailing weather I’ve ever seen.”

  “Keep that torch on the water,” Dent roared from belowdecks where he was reading charts. “It’s the only way we’ll see the rocks coming.”

  Hubbard whipped the beam of light back onto the water. “And icebergs!” he shouted.

  “Ice drifts!” Dent bellowed. “There are no icebergs on the East River!”

  Driftwood smiled as he imagined what Hubbard was muttering to himself. From what he had seen of the man in the little time he had spent with him over the past week, Hubbard considered himself quite the dashing adventurer, so it was amusing to see how high-strung he turned out to be in what was admittedly a tense situation. The man could handle himself around a boat, though; Driftwood had to give him credit for that.

  He felt great. The wind was brisk and smacked his face like the northern Atlantic waters he had sailed only a few years before. The Albatross was a beautiful ketch: a forty-foot blue-water sailer with a clipper’s prow, which he adored on a boat. They had reefed in the jib and the mainsail, and with a little help from a sturdy engine she sliced through the East River at a handsome twelve knots with barely a groan from her solid planks as she heeled to port. Chunks of ice flowed by at a distance on either side.

  “It’s four a.m.,” Mrs. Dent said. She stood next to Driftwood in the open, the collar on her oilskin turned up. Her cheeks were flushed with windchill and excitement. Her blond hair spilled out from under her black wool cap. Under the pretense of thoroughly checking his sail trim, he snuck looks at her. She was a damn beautiful lady, he thought. She had those steel-gray eyes he loved in a woman, and the beautiful breasts he loved even more. She was tall, and from what he had seen she had some pair of legs as well.

  Between the silver mine and his time on the run, he hadn’t given much thought to women; that wasn’t his style in general. But now being this close to one who was as pretty as Mrs. Dent was really distracting. Fortunately he had the upcoming Hell Gate to keep his mind focused. Not to mention Mr. Dent.

  But did she have to have that low, come-hither voice as well? “You know there’s a fortune in treasure right below us?”

  “Hm?”

  “The General Slocum’s only one of many ships that went down here. In 1780 the British war frigate the HMS Hussar, a privateer, sank here. Not only was she carrying the gold and silver for the payroll of the British troops in America during the Revolutionary War, but on the crossing she had seized one French ship and two American ships and taken their wealth. Then she had rendezvoused with another British treasure ship and its contents were transferred to her as well because her ribs were considerably stronger. She was supposed to deliver this fortune to the payroll office on Cherry Street. But upon entering the East River, her captain received intelligence that two French frigates were hot on her tail.

  “The ship was too weighed down to make it back into open water, so the captain decided to sail into the sound and seek the protection of the British forts and fleets which were stationed there. On her way through Hell Gate she hit a rock and sank like solid gold stone. No one’s ever been able to recover even a farthing, but they say that in today’s market the value of the treasure would easily be over one hundred million dollars. Only there’s no way to get at it.” She sighed and looked longingly down into the deep, dark water. “Can you imagine? All that treasure is probably less than sixty feet away.”

  “When you talk about treasure you get some look in your eyes,” he managed. “A glow.” He suddenly felt like he was falling in love. It was the best part of a romance, that falling. He tried out one of his most charming smiles on her as he slipped the wheel a few degrees against the deceptive currents. “You come alive.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Driftwood.” She smiled back, but her smile did not seem to acknowledge the magic of his smile.

  Driftwood. He hated lying to these nice people about who he was, hiding his identity like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. He’d love to tell Norma all about himself, see how he measured up in her eyes against her husband. But he was scared. That’s what it came down to. Fear. He didn’t believe that these three people could betray him to a murderous gangster back in California; it wasn’t about them. It was about never letting his guard down, not even for a moment.

  “Don’t we need an expert up here?” Hubbard shouted back.

  “Just keep her in the main channel for now,” Dent answered, already sounding distracted. This was followed by a brief racket.

  “Lester?” Norma called.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m sure you are. What are you doing?”

  “Getting some gear together.”

  “I don’t believe you’ll need your metal detector out here.”

  “We might.”

  “I don’t think so. Now how about coming up and helping out like you said you would?”

  “In a minute.”

  Otis caught her amused, affectionate smile and felt a spike of jealousy stab up through him. He was suddenly glad Lester was below. He gently pinched the boat up a couple of degrees and saw what he had been looking for.

  “Wake!” he called and the boat bobbed roughly over so
me small waves smacked back from the shoreline. He heard a crash from below, as of pots and pans clattering from cabinets, and an oath from Lester. The sudden list upset Norma’s balance, causing her to pivot and slide against him. He caught her and steadied her, feeling a hint of her body through the heavy fabric.

  “Watch those waves, sailor!” It sounded like Lester was extracting himself from whatever mess had been made.

  “Aye aye, Cap’n,” Driftwood called back, sounding as seriously innocent as he could. Norma secured her footing, though she remained close enough that he could sense her warmth, and he returned his hand to the wheel. “Sorry about that,” he said, sincerely. “Little rough out tonight.”

  “Does your wife know where you are tonight?” she suddenly asked him, touching the tanned ring finger on his left hand, right below the knuckle. It would be years before the sallowness of that thin band of flesh disappeared completely.

  Her directness caught him off balance just as his ship maneuver had, he hoped, caught her. Her eyes, which had seemed so placid and reflective moments ago, now snapped with electricity, focused on him. He felt as if he were the sole focus of her world, and his mouth went dry. When she arched a curious eyebrow, his resolutions about exposing himself vanished. He would answer any question she asked. He’d even give up his name. If she’d ask.

  “Actually, I’m divorced,” he said. “My former wife went crazy.”

  “Most men say that about their wives.”

  “Yeah, well, mine really did. I’ll give you the address of the asylum.”

  She blinked and he searched her eyes for any new meaning, empathy, compassion, comfort. The cold air was playing hell with his weak lungs and made his chest ache. He cleared his throat. “It all happened while I was away in the navy. She didn’t come out of the basement for weeks. They had to break the door down to get to her. Her parents wanted to help more than I could, and she responded to them better than to me. We found a judge who could divorce us so they could have more control over her care. You probably think that makes me a real heel.”

 

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