Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  When he finally does get around to Wu Fong Sam, we are treated to such dialogue as: "Missee Hollee no likee blooey lound losee timee." (Which makes no sense no matter how many times you look at it.) And "Maybe so slun plochee. Me no suree." (Likewise.) And "Everything go darkee, no see. Allee blackee." Old Eternity Bill seems to understand, though—so well, in fact, that he determines to have Wu watched.

  The scene shifts to the underground lair of Whang Sut Soon, deep in the bowels of Chinatown, where Holly Blunt is being held captive. (The place is outfitted with Japanese trappings, however, in an effort to fool Holly into believing the Japanese are responsible for her abduction.) First we meet Cherry Blossom, Whang's subjugated mistress, also outfitted as a Japanese; she is being kept by Whang against her will, we learn later, and is really a good person who takes pity on Holly. Then we meet Whang himself, who has a heart of stone and takes pity on no one. When Holly refuses to write a note that would "arouse her father," Whang makes his vow to show her a spectacle "not for the eyes of children or old women, or even men with weak stomachs." Whereupon Holly, good heroine that she is, promptly faints.

  Upon awakening, she realizes she has been carried into a damp chamber of some sort and leaned against a yard-square pane of heavy plate glass, through which she can see a stonewalled room that is "exactly like an old-fashioned, dome-shaped beehive." In its center is a well capped with a brass dome. This "den of horror" smells of "sea-water and death, of rotting fish and flesh, the empty shells of crabs and gnawed bones." And "atop all of that ungodly filth of broken shells and scattered bones on the wet floor, two human skeletons lay grinning in the murky light."

  But that's not all. Cowering against the inner side of the room is a naked, terrified Japanese; "his heavy shock of wild black hair seemed to be standing on end." A moment later Holly discovers the source of his terror.

  A finger had appeared on the well curbing—a dark and slimy finger nervously feeling. Another joined it, then another. Slowly, a dark, elongated head started to rise, a monstrosity, all ugly head and tentacles. Two wicked, bloodshot little eyes seemed to take stock of the room. The thing slipped over the curbing with alarming swiftness. It came down with a clatter on the bones and broken shells. A shapeless, rapidly moving mass, it coiled, curled and jerked its way to the other side of the room, and settled down to a dark, furiously watching lump.

  It was a twenty-pound octopus. -

  No sooner does the octopus settle its slimy form against the wall than a second appears. And a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, all about the same size, all "quick as light." Confronted by them, the naked Japanese becomes "a cringing, shaking thing who seemed robbed of all his blood." But the worst horror is yet to appear.

  From the well now came a short, pig-like grunting.

  A shiny thing, like the black head of a torpedo, started taking shape, rising. Longer, stronger tentacles were gripping the curbing. Two reddish eyes studied the cringing man against the wall. A low grunting and smacking made itself known.

  A wail of terror came from the man. . . . That ungodly thing in front of him seemed to fill the well. Like a giant diver from the depths, it was waiting. Suddenly, a tentacle, as large around at the butt as the calf of a man's leg, shot forward. Like a giant feeler it tapped the man on the shoulder.

  Exit the naked Japanese.

  Badly shaken by this experience, Holly agrees to write the note to her father. But she's a stout-hearted and clever young woman, in spite of her penchant for swooning, and manages to bear down on certain letters in the note, thus creating a kind of message that Old Eternity Bill deciphers. The message reads "C-H-I-N-K-S!" This confirms Mandell's suspicions that Chinese villains are behind both the kidnapping and the effort to provoke war between the United States and Japan—suspicions born because of some dubious detective work involving Wu Fong Sam. As he says to Admiral Blunt, "Even if Holly hadn't been born in China, so that she knew a Chinaman from a Jap immediately, we were progressing on this case. Yes, sir!"

  From this point onward, events come fast and furious. Wu Fong Sam disappears from the Blunt house; but Old Eternity Bill has had men watching the house on all sides and they swear that he never left the premises. When Old Eternity and Captain Lee investigate, they discover a hidden manhole in the cellar, opening into an old abandoned sewer that Mandell speculates must predate the 1906 earthquake. Hotheaded Lee determines to go exploring in the sewer, since this must not only be the means by which Wu Fong escaped the house but the means by which Holly was spirited away. Old Eternity Bill is too fat to fit through the manhole; Lee enters the sewer alone.

  After some futile searching, he is set upon by a "huge Chinaman, well over six feet tall—a one-eyed, noseless beast of a thing with his ears trimmed and sharpened devil fashion." Lee subdues the giant, after which he turns the man over to a pair of Mandell's house-watching crew who have followed Lee into the labyrinth of underground passages. Then the captain continues alone on his quest for Holly.

  He finds her in short order, after wading through "soup-thick" water like the "soft, rot-jellied belly of some slimy dead monster." She is having nasty things said to her by Whang Sut Soon. (" 'By the blood of the Great White Cock, you are a fool, my pale flower! Would you have your own slender bones grace a fire-hydrant or lean with a leering grin against a lamppost?' ") The reason for this harangue is that Whang wants her to write another inflammatory letter to her father, and Holly keeps refusing. "You are a monster," she says to him, "oh, a laughing, sneering monster, whose every pore reeks with the stench of dead men's blood."

  Overhearing this, Andy Lee is compelled to act. He is about to break down the door that separates him from Holly and Whang when Wu Fong Sam, the traitorous houseboy, appears with a nickel-plated revolver gleaming in his hand. Lee is quicker on the shoot, however; he puts a bullet squarely between Wu's eyes. But before he can get through the door, he is amazed to see the noseless beast of the sewer whom he had fought earlier and who must have somehow escaped from Mandeli's men. The noseless beast smacks Lee on the head with a brick. Unconscious, Lee doesn't see him clap "his sticky hands together like a suddenly happy gorilla" or hear him laugh in "a strong, far-reaching yah! yah! yah! that was exactly like the braying of a wild ass."

  When Lee wakes up, he is in the chamber of Whang's cohort, Yang Po-liang, the All-Seeing, All-Omnipotent Imperial Master of the Seventh Temple of Yama, the King of Hell. Lee and Yang Po-liang, a little old man who looks as if he might be a thousand years old, trade racial insults (" 'You white fools kill quickly when you kill!'" "'No faster than you Chinks!'") Then Yang beats on a gong, and Holly is brought in. She pretends not to know who Lee is, but the All-Omnipotent sees through her protective ruse and decrees that they must both be tossed naked into the octopus pit at midnight.

  Just then they all hear a great booming explosion from somewhere outside the underground lair—and in that moment, another man, a white man this time, enters the chamber. Captain Lee is shocked when he recognizes the man as "none other than Dr. Rodin Lafferty, surgeon extraordinary of Police Headquarters!"

  Old Eternity Bill, meanwhile, learns that one of his men has been killed by Lee's adversary, the noseless beast of the sewer.

  Reluctantly he calls in the local police and then once more attempts to wedge his bulk through the manhole in the Blunts' cellar, this time after stripping off all his clothes. He is stuck halfway through, naked, when a bunch of reporters come in and take photographs of him. This so unnerves Mandell that he lets out a roar and slides the rest of the way through into the sewer.

  While he's down there, dressed again and searching with the coppers, he too hears the tremendous explosion. The head of the police contingent, Captain Shade, telephones headquarters and learns that the mysterious submarine is responsible. It has surfaced in San Francisco Bay, discharged three torpedoes at the place where a Japanese man-of-war had been berthed (why the Japanese man-of-war has been allowed to berth in San Francisco Bay is never explained), and then "streake
d" for the open sea. But it so happens that a heavy fog was blanketing the bay at this time, and "the submarine's murder-crazed commanders" were unable to see that the Japanese ship had left a short while before and that the berth was then occupied by an American freighter. The freighter has been sunk with all hands.

  This latest act of villainy mobilizes Secret Service, police, and the navy into a single fighting-mad unit. Ignoring orders from Washington, ignoring property rights and the efforts of "swarms of shyster lawyers, politicians, and bandy-legged judges," they begin a systematic sack of Chinatown. ("Old Eternity Bill and Admiral Beauregard Blunt were going through Chinatown with the ruthlessness of cannon-balls splattering holes in the roofs of shingled houses.")

  As all this is going on, Andy and Holly are trussed up together in a tiny room, awaiting the octopi. Holly breaks down into tears after telling him about watching the monster devour the naked Japanese. But then, "woman-like, with that ever gallant fighting spirit that had made woman the goddess-supreme and the queen of courage and sympathy mother-comforter of all the earth," she tries to console him a short time later.

  Enter Dr. Rodin Lafferty, who turns out to be something of a megalomaniac, not to mention a raving lunatic. ("He was like a ghoul blown out of shape through a briar thicket by a harsh wind.") He had thrown in with Whang and Yang because of a lust for wealth and because there has always been a strain of evil in his family. He offers Andy a choice: join forces with him and Whang and Yang, which would spare both his life and Holly's, or face the octopi, as earlier decreed. He leaves them alone to think it over, but outside the room, he and Whang eavesdrop at a small earhole.

  But Andy has previously discovered the earhole, and he and Holly put on an act for the villains' benefit, with Lee pretending to want to accept Lafferty's offer and Holly pretending to be horrified. Whang and Lafferty fall for this, mainly because their minds are on other matters, such as which of them will get to deflower Holly ("'The white man loves the flesh—' "'No more than the yellow man, my good doctor!'").

  When Whang and Lafferty leave, Andy and Holly set about freeing themselves from their bonds. "Gnawing away beaverlike" with his teeth, Lee chews through the cords around Holly's wrists. Then she unties him. A little while later, Lafferty and Whang reappear and, lulled by what they overheard earlier, walk into the room without caution. Lee leaps to his feet and belts the surgeon on the chin, "jerking the doctor off his feet, lifting him, curving him backward, and sending him driving head-on against that solid concrete wall." Some punch. Then he hits Whang in the throat, grabs Lafferty's gun, and flees with Holly.

  A dizzying chase ensues. Andy and Holly encounter Cherry Blossom, Whang's unwilling mistress, and she endeavors to help them escape. But before they can, the noseless beast appears. Lee shoots the man, but the noseless one falls on top of him and Lee's head bangs into the concrete floor, knocking him unconscious. Holly is also recaptured.

  Elsewhere in this honeycomb of passageways, Old Eternity Bill, Admiral Blunt, and a swarm of navy bluejackets finally, after much blundering about, discover the entrance to Whang's lair. But Whang is gone by this time, along with Holly, Andy, and Lafferty; they have all been dispatched by Yang Po-liang to "the big house on the headland." What Old Eternity and the boys do find, first, is Cherry Blossom, unconscious from a pinprick tapping of veins in both her arms—Whang's punishment for her "treason." The second thing they find is the pit full of octopi.

  "Sounds came from it—a deep, pig-like grunting and a fiendishly delighted squealing." Four sailors have blundered into the chamber and been attacked by "a loathsome, gripping monster, alive with cold, anticipating intelligence, and moving as swiftly as a swallow." As Old Eternity and Admiral Blunt look on in horror, one of the sailors empties a navy pistol into the thing's "knotting and reknotting mass of pulpy body."

  But an octopus has no feeling. It has but one vital spot, and that is the devil-brain or heart in the back of what should be the monster's neck. It is a voracious, sack-like ball of body, a body as elastic as rubber, one that can stretch and expand into a snake. It is the world's most awful bundle of awfulness, a writhing, squirming mass of hell-fury, attaching itself to its victim with four hundred vacuum cups on its eight snaky legs. It is the ocean's most crafty thug, a killer and eater of sharks, and—at times—a fighting, darting villain that can put a sperm whale, their only natural enemy, to rout. A sharp knife will cut through it like butter, and yet it is an almost impossible thing to kill, for its strength is beyond measure. It is as soft as jelly, and yet as tough as a wire cable. In short, it is the monster-supreme of earth or sea or Hell.

  Squirting ink and grumbling, a master-devil grunting, smacking and squealing with the sheer joy of an opportunity to fight, the thing was rapidly drawing one of its victims to its mouth. And such a mouth! It was but a gaping pocket, soft and fleshy, yet just within lurked its big, horny beak, opened exactly like a parrot's bill to receive its first taste of the sailor's blood.

  Admiral Blunt and Old Eternity Bill plunge forward, "yelling like madmen." Blunt picks up a pick-axe one of the sailors dropped and whacks off a tentacle that shoots forward and curls around his ankle. "No blood came from that severed tentacle; there were just a few drops of blue ooze." Another tentacle tries to clutch Old Eternity Bill, but he rams his .38 "straight between the monster's slant eyes" and fires seven shots, at least one of which penetrates a vital spot and causes the giant octopus to sink back into the well. Then the blue-jackets wade in with axes, crow-bars, and pinch-bars and hack the mother and her smaller offspring into "stringy strings."

  Not long after this battle of battles, Old Eternity and his men find Yang Po-liang holed up in his Seventh Temple of Yama. ("God of gods," Mandell says, "this looks like the king dodo bird of them all.") They bully the old man, trying to get information about Holly and Andy out of him, but he refuses to say anything more than "Do not lay your hands upon me, vermin of the goat!" A group of sailors take axes and start to chop up the great statue of Yama which looms nearby, trying to "get to the bottom of the secrets of this hell-hole of torture." The great statue tilts forward like a cut tree about to fall, its jade eyes leering. Yang screeches and rushes forward, and of course the statue falls on him and crushes him flat under a ton of wreckage.

  The scene then switches to "the big house on the headland," an isolated place two hours north of San Francisco, flanked by a large lagoon that opens into the sea, where Holly and Andy are being held captive along with the "Japanese consulate," Mr. Takahasha. It is here that we meet the murder-crazed commanders of the mysterious submarine—"the three vons"—and here that the thrilling climax takes place.

  The three vons are German U-boat officers from World War I, who have become pirates and mercenaries of the sea and who, because they relish the thought of another war, have thrown in with Whang and Yang. The idea is to foment a global conflict that will wipe out the major powers of the time—the United States, England, Japan, even Germany—and thus leave world domination to the Chinese and their allies. The head von is Captain Felix von Zeigler, who speaks with "an affected Oxford whang" and who says things like "They tell me you are a deucedly clever scamp when it comes to making a bit of trouble." The other two vons are Lieutenant Friedrich von Rheim, who speaks broken English (" 'It vass dangerous pizness!' "), and Lieutenant Bruno von Schiller, who speaks with an American accent (" 'You have about as many brains as an empty bottle, my friend' ").

  The three vons want Takahasha to write a note that will "accidentally" fall into the hands of the US President, a note that is supposed to be top secret and that says that Japan is preparing to declare war on the United States. Takahasha refuses, which prompts von Zeigler to perform a torturing trick with a cigarette. After Lee intervenes on the Japanese's behalf, von Zeigler decides the prisoners need some time alone; besides, it is past time for the three vons to begin their nightly drunken bacchanal.

  Lee and Holly and Takahasha are taken into an underground passage that leads past four huge ye
llow guard dogs named Hans, Fritz, Katje, and Ada and into a mammoth cavern "like an awesome amphitheatre, a hundred and fifty feet high to the coral-red ceiling." In this cavern is a pool of saltwater, and in the pool is the mysterious submarine. It seems there is a great hole in the outer wall, underwater, which opens into the sea, and so the submarine can glide in and out at the will of the vons.

  The prisoners are put on board the submarine, under guard of a motley crew of Germans, South Americans, and Chinese. The three vons get drunk together. Dr. Lafferty worries that they ought to get out of there. Whang Sut Soon doesn't do much of anything. Then, after dark that night, Lafferty looks out to sea "and screeche[s] with terror" when he sees the starboard lights of fighting ships—US destroyers.

  The conspirators head for the submarine. But by this time, Lee, using his wiles and plenty of oil ("Submarines sweat oil . . . from every ladder rung . . . from every bulkhead"), has managed to slide off the chain binding his left wrist. He uses that length of chain to knock out a couple of the guards and then goes running around searching for weapons. In the torpedo compartment, he finds cases of hand grenades and removes three. He is helping Holly and Takahasha up into the conning tower when he hears Whang, Lafferty, and the three vons approaching.

  Lee whips out a grenade, yells for the villains to stop or "I'll blow you all to hell!" Lafferty and Whang stop, but the three vons are too drunk to be intimidated. A Luger pistol appears in Felix von Zeigler's hand; he sings a couple of lines of "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber alles," and then starts shooting. Which leaves Lee no choice except to hurl his grenades and blow Whang, Lafferty, and the three vons to hell as promised.

  Some time later, Old Eternity Bill arrives, having been told the location of the hideout by Cherry Blossom (whose real name turns out to be Dark Flower). Old Eternity says he is retiring, adopting Dark Flower and taking her east because "she'll be a lot of company for an old bat like me." Mr. Takahasha breaks down and pleads undying loyalty to the United States. And Lee kneels beside Holly, "her tears like a cooling rain against his cheek." One has the distinct impression that they will live happily ever after, and there will be lots of dingy-dingies to call him Papa.