The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  Lester Dent and an engineer were inspecting the engine on the closed-cabin Beechcraft. Dent beamed when he caught sight of Gibson. The big man jumped lightly off the stepladder, ducked under the plane, and came toward Gibson, wiping oil from his hands onto his jumpsuit.

  “Gonna name this one the Albatross II?” Gibson called out as he walked toward it. The wind kept threatening to pull the light objects under his arm away. “Keep tempting the fates?”

  Dent shook his head. “Picked another name for him.”

  “Him?”

  “Figured if ships are female, this fella’s gotta be a male. Like it?”

  “He’s impressive. Heroic.” He shook Lester’s hand. “You’re really moving back to Missouri?”

  “I’ve got a contract for four more years of Doc, at least. Hopefully I can find more time to write some stories for the glossies. And maybe I can finally get around to writing a real bestseller.”

  “I hope you do. How about the Sweet Flower mystery? After all, you sure earned the right. You found out how it ended.”

  “I told you that night back at the White Horse, those literary bestsellers need to be chock-full of metaphors, analogies, and irony, and there’s none of that in this story. It’s too simple.”

  Gibson nodded. They watched the wind stir the flags near the hangars.

  “You didn’t have to come out to see us off,” Lester said quietly.

  “Sure I did,” he replied, before being hit in the side by a heavy yet soft object. The impact of Norma’s embrace nearly lifted him off the ground.

  “Walter!” she cried, planting a kiss on his cheek.

  “All packed up?” he replied, and she nodded. “New York’s not going to be the same without you.”

  “I know,” Norma said. “But I promised Lester fewer adventures.”

  “But if there’s a Chinatown in La Plata, I’d steer clear.”

  “Actually”—Dent cleared his throat and gestured at the plane—“we’re taking a little Chinatown with us.”

  “Hurry up!” cried little Ham as he leaned halfway out of the cockpit’s open window. “I could walk there faster!”

  His brother pulled him back inside to safety. Mr. Yee gave them an apologetic wave from inside the plane, as fathers will when their sons have embarrassed them. Gibson smiled and waved back.

  “We’re going to help him open La Plata’s first Chinese restaurant. Norma thinks his pot stickers are a treasure worth sharing back home.”

  “Dumplings,” she corrected him. “How is Litzka?”

  “She’s on the road again. Somewhere on the West Coast. I probably won’t see her until the fall. If I see her again. If she comes back, I mean.”

  “Maybe things will work out in the future. That’s what the future’s for, right?”

  “That’s what she says. And if you can’t believe a psychic when it comes to the future, who can you believe?”

  She squeezed his hand. “Then trust her.”

  He smiled. “I wanted you to have a few things before you left. That’s one of the reasons I came out here.” He handed Dent a mag. “It’s the next issue of The Shadow. With everything that happened I kind of fell behind on my writing, so I asked Nanovic to run this one.”

  Dent took it. He looked at it for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice was thick with emotion, “The Golden Vulture!” He was glowing as he handed the magazine to Norma.

  “Hot off the presses. And there’s something else too. Since I didn’t have to write this month’s episode of The Shadow I was able to throw our idea to Nanovic. And he loved it!” He drew the board from under his arm and proudly peeled back the brown covering paper so the Dents could see it. “Says it might even get him to forget about the Kent Allard incident.”

  They recognized Rozen’s signature flourishes on the painting immediately: a dead-faced man, wielding pistols, emerging amidst a swirl of gas pouring from the mouth of a hideously alive, golden Chinese statue. Gibson chose not to tell them that his descriptions of the hero to George Rozen had been based on the look he had seen on Lester Dent’s face that one horrible moment in the temple. “Meet Street & Smith’s newest hero. The Avenger!”

  “It’s remarkable,” Norma said.

  “So this is where it all winds up,” Lester said, studying the painting. “In the pulps.”

  “Where it should stay.”

  Lester nodded.

  “Nanovic says he’ll run it. But only if we both write it. He wants us to switch off. I can write it one month and you can write it the next. If you’ve got the time.”

  Dent looked at Norma. “He’ll find the time,” she said, with enthusiasm. Her eyes moved from the painting to the last mag rolled up in Gibson’s hand. “What’s that? Another surprise?”

  “Sort of. Yes.” He gave a wave back to the cab and after a moment a little boy stepped out. He came slowly across the tarmac toward them. “Kind of a favor, actually.”

  Norma slipped her hand into Dent’s as the little boy approached. He must have been about nine years old.

  “This is my son, Robert.” Gibson said, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “His mother agreed that he could spend this summer with me in New York. He’s a huge Doc Savage fan. He was wondering if he could get your autograph.”

  “Hi, Robert,” Dent said warmly. “Would you like Kenneth Robeson’s autograph?”

  The little boy shook his hand, shyly. Then he turned to his father. “Doesn’t Lester Dent write Doc Savage?”

  “That’s right,” Lester Dent said. “Kenneth Robeson is Lester Dent. That’s me.”

  He autographed the first-ever issue of Doc Savage for the boy and handed it back.

  “Thanks,” Robert said, and as he read the inscription, his face lit up.

  “He looks just like you,” Norma said to Walter.

  “You think so?”

  “Those Gibson boys are handsome.”

  “Looks like you’ve got a good tailwind today,” Gibson said as the wind ruffled his hair.

  “Should be a quick flight,” Norma replied. “If we don’t stop for any adventures along the way.”

  “You never know,” said Lester. “Adventures have a way of stopping for us.”

  Gibson took Robert’s hand as they stepped from the airstrip to the grass. Dent slammed the door shut and Gibson laughed when he saw that Doc 1 was stenciled in dramatic letters across the hatch. Robert clutched his newest possession tightly against his chest. Gibson rested his arm across the boy’s shoulder. It felt good.

  “Where’s the pilot?” Robert asked him.

  “Look,” he said.

  Norma and Lester took their seats in the cockpit—pilot and copilot. He and Robert waved and the Dents saluted them. Then Norma turned her attention to the control panel, and a few moments later, the engine roared to life. Before the turning of the plane blocked them from view, Walter caught one last glimpse of Norma speaking excitedly to her husband and pointing out something in the distance. Lester, as always, was nodding his big head in complete agreement.

  With a thunderous roar the plane sped away from them and lifted gracefully into the air. Soon it was a speck in the sky, no bigger than the nearest gull as it grew closer to the clouds.

  “Hungry?” Walter asked Robert.

  His son nodded.

  “Let’s go get some lunch. I’ve got a story to tell you.”

  He looked back once, but the Dents had gone over the horizon.

  “So did Zhang Mei say anything to you before he died?” asked the man they still called Otis P. Driftwood, even though they now knew his name was Bob Heinlein.

  Gibson raised a forkful of steak to his mouth. “Who says he died?” he asked, and then bit into the beef. The expressions on the faces of his dining companions were ones never to forget. Driftwood and Robert, his son, were intrigued, but Hubbard looked astonished. He was glad that the two young men had been able to come to Rosoff’s and meet his son. He felt a certain sadness as he realized that
his circle of new friends, which had seemed so large so recently, was suddenly dwindling away. The Dents were now gone. Lew, the poet cowboy, had hopped a train to Baton Rouge in search of the ship’s company’s paymaster after having been evicted from the captain’s quarters aboard the Star of Baltimore when the Department of the Navy had seized it. He felt he was owed quite a good bit of money for his services as acting captain of the vessel and he was “aimin’ to collec’.” Dent had made certain to retrieve his pistol before the young man had embarked upon this quest.

  Driftwood would also be leaving New York in the next few days. Yesterday he had read in the newspaper that the man who had tried to take over his silver mine, the man who had killed his partner and forced him into a fugitive’s secretive life, had been found shot to death in a coffee shop in Los Angeles. The cops had arrested a luckless gangster as the gunman. When pressed about what his future held, Driftwood joked that he might run for a congressional district seat that had opened up back home. Or he might become a writer. Whichever promised the most money and least work.

  “You’re saying he didn’t die.” Hubbard gaped. “But I was there.”

  “Were you?”

  “Hell, I was! I saw the whole thing!”

  “Yet you admit you don’t even know what happened to Zhang Mei.”

  “To hell with that!” Heinlein challenged. “Did he die or didn’t he?”

  “How does it end?” Robert was wide-eyed and spellbound.

  A vision briefly appeared before Gibson’s eyes: Zhang Mei’s darkly sparkling eyes vanishing behind soft enveloping veils of white gas spilling out of the canister. He could still feel the man’s hands as they slipped from the sword hilt. “How do you want it to end?”

  “What’s the question here? Zhang Mei’s dead!” cried out Hubbard.

  “His lifeless body lay at the feet of the Judge of the Dead, his hand still reaching out to help contain the deadly gas, frozen forever in his final redemptive act. That’s definitely one ending. But is it the right one?”

  “Malarkey!” Hubbard muttered.

  “Did you see his corpse? I seem to recall that you and Driftwood and Lew headed straight for the nearest tavern long before the cops started investigating. So if you didn’t even check to make sure he was dead, how can you be so sure what end he came to? But if you need an ending, I’ll give you an ending.”

  The two men set their forks down. Robert, however, continued to eat his club sandwich. Gibson felt his fingers twitch. He thought for a moment about dramatizing his story with a magic trick and then thought better of it. He would let it speak for itself.

  “Zhang Mei’s hands were ripped from the sword by the pressure of the escaping gas. He staggered back, surrounded by the poison, desperately holding his breath. This was enough to keep him from being fully exposed. He tried to find his biographer in the gas, but the man either had died or was lost in the haze. He plunged through the miasma toward the temple door. His head was swimming from lack of oxygen as he flung himself down the top flight of stairs and away from danger.

  “He reached the lobby of the building. Outside there were Hip Sing men and On Leong men and American police. He didn’t know what had happened to Towers but it was obvious that Towers had failed; whether the colonel had betrayed him, had died, or had been captured was irrelevant. What was relevant was that Zhang Mei was completely alone, a foreigner in a foreign land. But his skill was always survival. He looked around, knowing there is always a path to salvation, that there is always a way to the safety of the river. He spied the door to the basement, the stairs leading down, and rushed forward, the black fabric of the judge’s robe swirling around him. In the basement he discovered that the secret hatch to the Chinatown tunnels was still open. He leapt into the opening. But it was too late. The gas had poisoned him after all, and though he struggled on as mightily as any man could, he died as the sewage swallowed him up.”

  “Suitably tragic,” Heinlein said.

  “What’s the matter, Robert?” Gibson asked his son, who seemed downcast.

  “It’s sad.”

  “Most tragedy is,” Heinlein replied. “And this is a villain we’re talking about.”

  “But,” Robert insisted, “he was only a villain because of what Mi-Ying did to him.” He looked at Gibson. “And he was your friend, even though he did bad things. He was your friend, right?”

  “So you think he deserves a better ending?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good. Because there is another ending.”

  “There can’t be,” Hubbard insisted.

  “There is. With the dank waters washing away the worst of the poison, Zhang Mei makes his escape into the vast network of twisted tunnels which worm their way under Chinatown. He disappears into the gloom, rats swirling around his ankles, a hundred secret doors to safety awaiting him. A hundred chances. A hundred destinies. A hundred new stories. A hundred endings.”

  “Is that the real ending?” Robert asked. “He’s alive?”

  “If you want it to be, then let’s say it is. Zhang Mei lives to strike again!”

  “Careful, Robert,” Heinlein cautioned the kid with a wise smile. “Take any story a writer tells you with a grain of salt. Even if he’s your father. Especially if he’s your father!”

  “I don’t care if it’s real or not. I just like the story now.” Robert said, sure of himself.

  “What I really want to know,” said Hubbard, “is who’s got dibs on it?”

  “What?” Gibson asked.

  “It! This story! Our story. It’s bigger and better than the Sweet Flower story, by far!”

  Gibson smiled at the redheaded writer. Even Hubbard might soon be leaving New York. He and his wife had been exchanging letters of reconciliation and Gibson knew how he missed his children. If he did leave, Gibson would definitely miss him.

  “Why don’t you write it, Ron? Hell, I’ll even give you a title. How about The Murder of the Shudder Man? Or The Terrors of Providence? The Trials of the Tong? Or Marooned on Tomb Island? Or The Heinous Heist. Maybe even The Pulp Heroes. Lots of titles. Lots of stories. Pick one.”

  “Yeah, but those aren’t my stories. They’re yours. I can’t tell those.”

  “They’re not all mine. Some of them are Dent’s. One of them belongs to Lovecraft, but he’s dead. As far as we know.”

  “Well, I guess I could tell The Tale of the Dead Man.”

  “I was there for that too,” Heinlein spoke up. “It could be my story. If I were a writer. And The Long Watch on the Ship of Doom is definitely mine. Definitely. For that one I just might have to become a writer.”

  “What happened in Chinatown was just the ending to a lot of other stories,” Gibson said, looking at Hubbard. “There’s lots of things that happened to us that we’ll never tell each other. For example, if I tried to write about how you saved those boys’ lives, I’d get it wrong. I wouldn’t get your details right. The personal details, the things you were thinking, the way you were feeling. You know, the messy true things that only slow down a great pulp. Am I right?”

  “Can I just use my imagination? Make stuff up? I am a writer, after all.”

  “There’s a difference between a lie and a story,” Heinlein said softly.

  Gibson nodded. “Oh, you could try to tell The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, but between the pack of lies you think is the truth and the truths you’ll never know about, you’ll be as lost as Zhang Mei in the forgotten tunnels under the streets. Unsure of which tunnel leads to freedom, you’ll splash through the wet darkness, fumbling for light, hoping the path you’re on is the right one, only to find yourself facing more dead ends than endings, the doors sealed shut by time and inertia and the dread that people have of the creatures that lie behind those doors.”

  “Do you think Zhang Mei is still down there?” Robert asked, his brows furrowed as he tried to imagine the fate that befell the adopted son of the warlord. “Do you think that he never came up from the tunnels? Maybe he dec
ided that he was safe down there. That no one would ever look for him. And that’s another ending, right, Dad? Maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said Gibson, and ran a reassuring hand through his son’s hair. It felt just like his own. “‘Maybe’ is how all writers, even pulp writers, begin their stories.”

  His mind suddenly raced back to that day in Chinatown as they all stood together, sharing in the joy that they were all alive and, more than that, triumphant. He remembered the way he had lowered his face from the clear sky to the ground, bowing his head in thanks. He recalled the ancient grating he had noticed set in the cobblestones. He thought of the shudder that had gripped his body as he caught a glimpse, only a glimpse, of a dark and familiar face sagely gazing up at him from below the surface of the earth. If he closed his eyes momentarily he could still see the complicated look sparkling in the eyes—the rage, the fear, the loss, the knowledge, the triumph. After that, all he could recall was Litzka, warmly pressing her firm body against his, and the distant fading echoes of footsteps splashing away into dark shadows. Afterward he wasn’t sure whether he had seen something or not. He told himself he would never be sure. But he was sure.

  He stood up and reached into his coat for his wallet. His belly felt full of good food and beer, and a fine feeling of contentment settled over him. Spring was in the air, he would be seeing Litzka soon enough, he felt good, and he felt like writing. “Maybe Zhang Mei will remain down there, lost and lurking forever in the catacombs as the world above him marches on and remembers him only as a phantasm they think they hear below their feet at night when the city is quiet. The master of his subterranean sanctum.” Robert stood up too and began putting on his jacket. Norma Dent was right, Robert did look just like him. “At any rate, my friends, my advice is to stay out of those tunnels. Because in the end you never know what you’ll find or who you’ll meet down there.”

  “Well, at least promise me that you’ll never write it,” Hubbard said.

  “It’s not my story either. I may use it. But I’ll never write it. I promise you.”

  Gibson tossed enough money down on the table to cover all their meals, plus a little extra. “Why don’t you fellas have a quick one in honor of Howard Lovecraft before you go. On me.”