by Paul Malmont
“What is it?” the cowboy asked. “Why are you laughin’? Damn it! What’s so funny, Otis?”
“Bob!” He shouted into the cool morning air, “My name’s Bob! I’m Bob again. Bob. Bob. Bob!” Then the laughter came on again and it all seemed so sublimely ridiculous. He couldn’t stop laughing or saying his name; to say it now seemed so simple and so funny. Bob. It was the funniest sound in the universe. In a little while, the sheer giddiness of it left him and he was able to speak again. “It feels so good just to hear my own name again after so many months of lying about it. Bob. My name’s Bob Heinlein, Lew.”
“Pleased to meet ya, Bob.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Likewise.” The deck metal felt cool against his back. It felt good. Everything felt good again. “I didn’t think I was gonna get out of that hole alive. I feel like I’ve been in that hole a very long time.”
The cowboy nodded.
Heinlein sat up, slowly. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good in all my life.” He smiled and drank in the feeling. “There’s only one thing that could make me feel any better, y’know?”
“A woman.” The cowboy nodded again.
“Or two.” He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it.
“Well, Bob. There was that little place down in Chinatown I was mentioning earlier.”
He opened his eyes. “What about him?” The sounds of Towers trying to kick the creatures off the barrels had reached his ears. He thought about looking into the pit to see what exactly was happening, but he knew he didn’t need to see exactly what was happening. The creatures would be swiping at Towers like lions in a zoo trying to pull a carcass from a meat hook.
“I reckon he might have other things on his mind than a few loose women.”
“Throw me a rope,” they heard him scream.
“Sorry, Colonel,” Driftwood said, as he rose to his feet, in a voice far too low for the colonel to hear. “I think your ship has finally sailed.”
Towers began to scream as the two men climbed down the cargo netting. By the time they reached what was left of the dock, the screams had turned to distant gurgles. And as they gingerly picked their way across the wrecked boards to safety, silence fell upon the Star of Baltimore.
Episode Forty-Three
“THERE WAS death afoot in the darkness.
“The eerie fog still gripped Chinatown and the red flag of war still flew from the top of the highest building. And while the cops and the On Leong tong had placed men all around the old hotel to protect Ah Hoon, what they forgot to watch was the rooftops,” Lester Dent told Walter Gibson. “Two Hip Sing men made their way furtively across the roofs, from one building to another. They stayed low because the fireworks were illuminating the sky and they didn’t want to be caught in the glare.
“Their meticulous trip took them several hours and it was early in the morning when they finally arrived at the building next door to the old hotel, the one with the windowless wall. Seven floors below them, on the opposite side of the gap, Ah Hoon sweated out the night. They had carried an old wooden chair with them and when they reached the building’s ledge, they tied some rope around it. Then one of the men tied the other man into the chair. He looped the rope around the chimney and lowered him down the wall.
“Remember, there was only about a three-foot gap between the buildings, and a lethal abyss waited below, so the man in the chair had one helluva lousy ride. When he finally reached the level of the window, he pulled out a rifle that he had carried with him and rested the barrel on the windowsill so that that the bullet wouldn’t shatter the glass. The little comic must have heard that small sound, that frightening tap. He sat up in his bed and slowly looked to the window. His eyes met those of the man dangling beyond the glass and he recognized his assassin. What he saw was Mock Duck, bound to a chair and dangling precariously outside his window like a side of Peking pork ribs in the window of a Chinese chop suey shop. Ah Hoon knew that Death had found him, but the sight of his once-feared antagonist’s face covered with flop sweat and glowing red from the tightness of the ropes, his clothes torn from the bouncing scrapes against the walls and his eyes wild from the terrors of the descent, was too much for the comedian. He showed his approval for the comedic efforts on his behalf the only way he knew how. He began to laugh.
“As Ah Hoon broke into his first peal of laughter an enormous skyrocket exploded overhead. The blast from its charge rattled the windows of buildings for blocks and its glittering flames drew all eyes. Under the cover of its storm and stress, Mock Duck pulled the trigger. The look of astonishment the police found on Ah Hoon’s face the next morning was the look of a man who found his own death ridiculously funny. Which is an appropriate epitaph for a comic.
“That one shot was all it took to end the reign of the On Leong tong and bring victory to the Hip Sing. The On Leong were crushed, demoralized. That one shot ended the Sweet Flower War and signaled the ascendancy of the Hip Sing. By noon of that day, as the menacing mist dissipated, the flag of war was lowered, and to this day it has never flown over Chinatown again.
“And that,” Kenneth Robeson told Maxwell Grant, “is the story as I got it direct from the horse’s or, in this case, the Duck’s mouth.”
Even as he sat across the dining room table from Lester Dent, Walter Gibson could feel his body craving opium. The coughing fits were killing his chest, and his throat was raw. He didn’t want to worry them, especially Litzka, but he was struggling to keep his words from slurring and his hands from shaking. Every time he closed his eyes he instantly envisioned the gas roiling up at him. Still, his mind felt more alert than it had in months, and he had the sensation that a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
Smith’s wife had informed them that the writer had already left but that he breakfasted every morning at a coffee shop in the vicinity of his doughnut laboratory—in order, she said, to see what doughnuts people favored. Hubbard had been dispatched to scour the area. While they waited for him to call, the conversation had turned to writing. Walter actually found it pleasant to have a conversation with Lester Dent. Dent was the only other writer in the pulp game who could understand the kind of pressure Gibson operated under.
“How much do you hate not being able to use your own name on Doc?” Gibson asked.
“Almost as much as I hate not being paid a percentage of the sales. John Nanovic showed me a list of house names to choose from and said take it or leave it. I picked Kenneth Robeson because it sounded rugged and adventurous, yet vaguely cosmopolitan,” Lester told him. “What about you?”
“I came up with Maxwell Grant from two friends of mine. One was Maxwell Holden, who had just retired from vaudeville to open a magic shop in New York. He had a hand shadow act in which he formed life-size silhouettes that moved across a screen. My other friend was U. F. Grant, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who invented an illusion used by the Great Blackstone in which he walks away from his own shadow, leaving it behind in full view.
“Since these were both devices that I intended to attribute to The Shadow in his role as an avenger, I felt that the pen name of Maxwell Grant would be appropriate, so I appropriated it.” He sipped his coffee.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Dent said. “Why did you mess with success?”
“Hmm?”
“The Allard thing? Why mess with your formula?”
Gibson thought for a moment. He hadn’t been able to answer the question for Welles or Rozen. He looked at his fingers. “I wanted to try and find out who The Shadow really was,” he said at last.
Dent leaned in. “And?”
“Only The Shadow knows.”
Norma came out of Gibson’s bedroom, having changed into the clothes Lester had brought from the boat: a brown skirt with a cream-colored blouse. She had refreshed herself with a shower. Gibson appraised her quickly, hoping her husband wasn’t watching him. Old Lester had done all right for himself, that much was for sure.
He heard a cough. Litzk
a was curled up on the sofa reading Hubbard’s Post. He saw her eyes flit from him to Norma. “Feeling better?”
“Much. Anything in the paper?”
“Nothing about the Bank Note building. Nothing on the radio either. You’d think something like that would at least be on the radio.”
“Towers,” said Gibson, simply. The two women agreed.
“Avenger,” murmured Dent. “Now that’s a good word. Avenger. The Avenger. I’ve been thinking of a new character who is a master of disguise, which is my favorite pulp trick. I have this image of this gray face, stone gray, like a dead man’s. Instead of using makeup, he’d actually be able to mold his face to look like the person he wanted to impersonate. And the only way his villains would know he wasn’t who they thought he was is that he is incapable of showing emotions.”
“As if the nerves of his face didn’t work?”
“Exactly. Because maybe some bad guy did something to him to make him that way. Only he can’t keep up the disguise for very long. Just long enough to get into trouble or penetrate a group and find out evil plans. Everything else he’d have to handle with other skills. And his role would be a kind of an avenger for those who have nowhere else to turn.”
“That sounds like a character Street & Smith could get behind. You should talk to Nanovic.”
“Who knows?” Lester shrugged the suggestion off. “There just never seems to be enough time to write everything that needs to be written. I mean, sure, I could write The Avenger. But if I’m writing that, then I’m not writing something meaningful. Something great.”
“Doc Savage is great pulp. You shouldn’t put yourself down.”
“Yeah, but it’s not important.”
“To who? To a bunch of ivory-tower longhairs? To the fellas that run the slicks? To hell with them and the horses they rode in on! I read Doc Savage. It’s obvious how much you love writing it. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.”
“You read Doc Savage?”
“Of course I do. The only way to stay number one is to know what number two is doing.”
“Yeah. I feel the same way about The Shadow.”
Gibson smiled at him. Dent pulled out his pipe and his tobacco pouch. When he unzipped the pouch, water sloshed out of it and onto the coffee table. “Damn! Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. In case you haven’t noticed, the contents of this apartment include a chicken. A little water’s not going to hurt anything.”
“I don’t suppose you have any pipe tobacco?”
“No. Just cigarettes.”
Dent shook his head. “I’m a pipe man.”
“Well, there’s a smoke shop about five blocks down on the west side of the street. They should open in about fifteen minutes.”
After Dent left, Litzka helped Gibson drink a little more Bromo Seltzer; it soothed his headache. “You know, that’s the longest conversation I’ve ever had with Lester.”
“Well, he’s not much of a talker around people he doesn’t know very well,” Norma said, sitting down and picking up Lester’s unfinished coffee. Litzka flipped to the theater section. “He didn’t grow up around people, and they can make him nervous.”
“What do you mean, ‘he didn’t grow up around people’?”
“He had a lonely life growing up. I can’t imagine a lonelier life for a little boy and it makes my heart ache.
“Sometimes I see it in his eyes when he doesn’t know I’m watching him, that faraway look like he’s back out there in the middle of nowhere, alone and friendless and looking over the horizon and wondering if he’ll ever escape there. It’s one of the reasons he loves New York City so much; he likes to be surrounded by people. He likes the constant noise and the commotion and the sense that he can’t ever really be alone here, no matter what.”
“My family was a part of Philadelphia society,” Gibson said. “There were always parties to go to and people around.”
“But you looked at the horizon too,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be here doing what you’re doing.”
He nodded. “I guess you’re right.”
“What do you think Zhang Mei’s going to do with the gas?”
“I have no idea.”
“You said there was one drum of gas left on the truck that was never put aboard the ship. What do you think he’ll do with it?”
“Like I said, I don’t know.”
“You spent all that time with him writing about him. Think about him as if he’s one of your characters.”
“My characters aren’t usually that deep.”
“Maybe he’s not either. Maybe you just wrote him that way. What would he be after if he were your character?”
“Revenge. He’d seek revenge. If he couldn’t strike back at the Japanese, he’d try to find a way to strike back at Mi-Ying. But he’s ten thousand miles away back in China. It’d be just as hard to get back at him as it would be to get back at the Japanese. But that’s what I’d have my character do, anyway.”
“Ming!” Litzka suddenly interrupted, looking up in surprise from the Post.
“What?” Gibson asked.
“Ming, right? You said Ming?”
“Mi-Ying.”
“That’s what I said,” she snapped. She flipped back a few pages and then held out the newspaper. “The New York Chinese consul general’s name is Mi-Ying.”
Gibson scanned the small article. He smacked his forehead the way Norma had seen Lester do time and time again. He put the paper on the table. She could see one man whom the paper identified as General Chiang Kai-shek standing next to another man, Mi-Ying. “This is the same photo on the poster that Zhang Mei showed me. That’s why he said he would be celebrating with his brothers. If Mi-Ying is going to be there, Zhang Mei will be there as well.”
“Revenge?” Norma asked.
“Revenge,” he nodded. “He doesn’t care about anyone in Chinatown. Barely thinks they’re real people, let alone real Chinese. If he has to open that drum of gas to get his revenge, he’ll do it. But he’ll want to see Mi-Ying’s face when he dies.”
“What happens to Chinatown if he lets the gas out?” Litzka nervously toyed with China Boy’s feathers.
“Oh, my God!” Norma stood up. “Mr. Yee will be there. He’s throwing a banquet for his Hip Sing Association. And he’ll have Monk and Ham with him.”
“Who’s that?” Litzka asked.
“Friends. Children. My dumplings.”
Norma grabbed the telephone but the operator was unable to connect her with Mr. Yee’s restaurant or anyone who spoke English at the Hip Sing Association, and the police were lazily indifferent to her warning about a gas attack in Chinatown. “I’m going down there,” she said resolutely, hanging up. “I have to warn them.”
“Why don’t you wait for Lester?” Gibson said to her.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll be back before he is.”
“Let me get dressed,” he insisted. “I’ll come with you.” He heard his front door close as soon as he left the room.
The elevator took forever to work its way back up to his hallway. The building was coming to life in the morning and people got on at almost every floor. Finally it opened on the lobby and he got out. He rushed outside and saw Lester Dent sauntering down the sidewalk, puffing contentedly on his pipe.
“Hey.” Lester grinned at him. “What are you doing up?”
Quickly Gibson filled him in. Dent’s face clouded over and he threw his pipe aside. A family wagon was pulling away from the curb and Gibson watched in astonishment as Dent sprang upon its running board as he had had Doc Savage do a hundred times over. The little boy in the back seat looked through the window at him in naked amazement.
“Chinatown!” Dent loudly commanded and the driver complied by hitting the accelerator like Barney Oldfield. The momentum was too much for Dent. He was flung from the car and landed in a sprawling heap in the middle of the road. Amused, Gibson ran to help him up as the car rounded the corner and disap
peared from view, presumably still heading toward Chinatown.
“Okay,” he said, helping Dent up. “Looks like you found another thing that only happens in the pulps.”
Episode Forty-Four
THE WALL of noise was deafening.
“A Chinese festival can last for days!” Dent shouted to Gibson over the furious storm of firecrackers. “Not like American parades at all!”
“I’ve been to Chinatown before, Dent!”
The festival had started at dawn; streets were closed to traffic and the cabbie had been forced to let them off at Grand Street. The day was warming quickly. The sidewalks were thronged with revelers. In the streets, two-man lion dancers from one association squared off against a longer, dozen-man dragon costume from another, while men bearing wooden drums hung from straps on their necks beat the tempo. Bottle rockets blasted into the sky and exploded over their heads. Men waved boards plastered with solemn photos of General Chiang Kai-shek, and children shouted Chinese chants of solidarity with their brothers back home. Exotic aromas from a hundred kitchens filled the air like a haze.
The gate was still down at Mr. Yee’s restaurant and no amount of pounding seemed to rouse anyone from within. An old woman suddenly appeared by Lester’s side. He looked down into her wrinkled face. She spoke to him but he didn’t understand. Then she pointed away down toward Mott Street and Hip Sing territory. Lester grimly noted that the woman had no fingers on either hand; she gestured with a scarred knuckle-stub while she yammered urgently in Chinese.
They forced their way up the sidewalk toward the Hip Sing Association building. Lester plowed through the mass of people; his sheer bulk relative to the smaller people all around him made his progress almost unstoppable. At the same time he had never felt so powerless. He kept looking for that glint of golden hair which would be Norma, but there were no blondes on the streets of Chinatown today.
Gibson was out of breath. His face was gray and sweat poured profusely down it. He kept pace without complaining, but Dent had seen him stagger loosely once or twice as he was clipped by the elbows or shoulders of bystanders.