Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  “Oh, babushka,” the little girl said. “Please? Just one more buketik…”

  “You should listen to your grandmother,” the old man said.

  They started back across the square.

  There were pigeons in the street again. They batted a rotten biscuit in zigzags back and forth along the asphalt, racing for crumbs and fighting for precedence, and for a moment their coos and wingbeats remained the loudest sound that could be heard.

  In mid-crossing, the dog stopped short, his ears pricking up. An instant later, pigeons stopped pecking. The old man stopped as well. The old woman pulled the little girl toward her.

  The squeal of tires came first, from the corner of Novaya Ploschad’, and then a sleek white sports car (a serpent ondoyant vert vorant a child gules) sped into the square, a swarm of bits of paper and cigarette butts roiling in its wake. Bass notes of a nightclub-favorite song beat themselves against the car’s closed windows, toned too dark to see the driver, their echo adding to the flutter of startled pigeons’ wings. The car careened straight at the little girl and her grandmother; the old woman's mouth opened in a silent O as she reached forward with her free hand as if to ward it off.

  The dog stepped forward. The fur rose on its neck, it growled, far too softly to hear inside the car, but in an instant the car swerved, tires screaming, slewed into the flower bed, fishtailed in a spray of soil and petals, scraped a shower of sparks off the pavement as it leaped off the curb, and sped away to disappear on the other side of the statue.

  The dog shook himself and looked up at the man again. The old man brushed his free hand down each lapel, once, and adjusted his hat.

  The old woman took a breath, then let it out slowly. Her hand drew into a fist; she shook at the dying roar of the retreating car.

  "A curse on you!" she said, her voice shaking in anger. "A curse on all you bull-necked New Russians, on all the merchants who make you pay whatever they want for food and clothes! On all you mafiozniki, on all the hooligans who stop good people in the street, on all the bribe-takers and look-the-other-ways, let the devil take you, devil and Stalin!" She paused, looked down, her forehead creasing, eyes squeezing shut. “Things might be better if he’d come back,” she said quietly. She let go of her granddaughter's hand, grasped and kneaded the little girl's shoulders. “Lots of people wish he’d come back,” she whispered.

  There was a silence for a second or two, deeper, it seemed, than any silence could be on a Moscow street. A cloud slipped across the sun; shadows grew indistinct, the statue darkened, and the facade behind it lost its peach hue, turning exactly the color of a sliver of bone protruding from a compound fracture.

  “Babushka! Babushka! Look,” the little girl yelled. “The nice sobachka is smiling!”

  THE CROOKED SMILE KILLERS

  James Lowder

  James Lowder's story "The Crooked Smile Killers" is part of a cycle of stories about Chicago's mystery avenger. Both an homage and a deconstruction of the pulp genre, it features a mysterious masked avenger who brings a rough justice to a fantasy version of 1920's Chicago.

  The 1920s heralded the birth of the hardboiled detective. Carroll John Daly is credited as having introduced the hardboiled detective with his story "The False Burton Combs." The story was published in the magazine Black Mask, which soon also published the work of Dashiell Hammett creator of Sam Spade, and Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe. The hardboiled detective is cynical, ruthless, and violent. In classic noir, the detective is male, but recent works have featured a number of hard-bitten female detectives. No matter how cynical and pessimistic the detective may be, he or she will not stop once a mystery has been solved. These characters were particularly violent in the pulp magazines and comics, in which they would pursue a case without rest or remorse until they exacted vengeance on the evildoer. The hardboiled detective pretends not to care, but secretly desperately wants to do the right thing.

  In the 1930s, The Shadow arrived in the pages of pulp magazines and was later featured in a radio drama. The Shadow was something of a detective superhero, since in addition to finely honed detective skills he had a supernatural ability to become invisible. The Shadow was a direct influence on the creators of Batman, who, in his first comic book appearances, was as violent, terrifying, and morally murky as any other hardboiled detective. These detectives and vigilantes were the guardians of their cities. They used pragmatic skills and fear of the supernatural to intimidate crooks and save the innocent.

  We have always looked for heroes to guard our cities. Sometimes, as in Superman, those heroes are clean-cut, morally righteous representatives of all that is good. But often we crave anti-heroes who represent the city at its darkest and most corrupt. These flawed, violent characters tell us that good can rise from the darkest shadows. Sometimes the triumph and often they fail, but they are always watching out for the parts of the city that are most forgotten and most at risk.

  ***

  CHAPTER ONE

  Slaves of the Silver Key

  The blonde leveled the still-smoking revolver at the man sprawled at her feet. “Of course I love you,” she said.

  Everything about Julia Halloran seemed to proclaim those words a lie. Her voice was cold and even, her piercing blue-gray eyes unmisted by tears. Her hand stayed steady as she trained the .38 at what remained of the dying man’s head. The first shot had been a little high. A small chunk of his skull was gone, but his features were intact. She took careful aim, intent on correcting that mistake.

  Julia paused then, her mask of resolve slipping just enough to reveal her pain. She choked back a sob and searched her husband’s eyes one last time for some hint of understanding. She could finish it without going mad if Sean recognized that she really was acting out of love.

  Julia didn’t find what she was looking for in his eyes. Head haloed by a spreading crimson pool, Sean Halloran stared up at the apartment’s water-stained ceiling. His expression betrayed no misery, no surprise, only a profound weariness. Slowly his gaze moved to his wife. Her love had been the lifeblood of his dreams, at least the ones he’d not bartered away or allowed to wither. Now those last surviving hopes abandoned him.

  With their passing, Sean Halloran’s eyes became fixed, as inexpressive as stone.

  Not so his mouth, which was already quirked up at one end in an exaggerated, unnatural smirk. That smirk grew. It pushed up into his cheek, lips stretching until they fissured at a dozen bloodless faults. His jaw shifted as the gash of his mouth crept higher. The sound of bones cracking drowned out his bubbling, labored breaths.

  The sight robbed Julia of her resolve. Her arms dropped to her sides, the gun dangling from numb fingers. “God help us,” she whispered. “Too late.”

  “Yes, Julia Halloran,” said a sepulchral voice. “He belongs to Hell now.”

  A figure wrapped in a ragged black cloak slipped through the open window leading to the fire escape. He adjusted the aim of his twin pistols as he emerged from the darkness and crossed the room, one gun fixed on the dying man, the other on the would-be murderer. His movements were effortless and menacing, a drop of poison gliding along a dagger’s edge.

  For an instant Julia mistook the weird figure for Death itself. The threadbare cloak fluttered behind him like wings as he approached. Beneath the brim of his black fedora, his gaunt face was cadaverous, with blue-white flesh pulled tight over jutting bones. An awful, inhuman light—a crimson promise of justice, swift and merciless—flickered in the voids of his eyes.

  He loomed over Sean Halloran for a moment and studied the dying man’s growing hideousness. The whites of Sean’s eyes had darkened to the purple and yellow of old bruises. The darkness devoured the brown of his irises. It crept hungrily across his face and body, staining his skin. Wherever the purple discoloration appeared, the flesh spasmed. Sean’s mouth was shuddering, too. It had shifted so much that it ran in a nearly vertical line, from his chin to the side of his nose. The inhuman maw
gabbled and chuckled in a language heard only in the nightmares of the hopelessly mad.

  The cloaked stranger nodded slowly, as if he understood every word.

  There was no hesitation as he squeezed the trigger. Three bullets obliterated Sean Halloran’s head and silenced the eerie gibbering. The body trembled, tried to rise. Arms dark and bloated to near bursting struggled to push the torso from the floor. Finally, it collapsed and lay still.

  All during the execution, the stranger kept his second automatic trained on the woman. The muzzle was poised a handbreadth from her face. “Your gun,” he said without looking at her. “Drop it.”

  The .38 slipped from her fingers and thudded to the floor.

  “The police will be here soon to investigate the gunshots,” he said. “I need some information from you before they arrive.”

  “I know who you are now. I didn’t at first, but now I know. You’re that vigilante—the one the papers call the Corpse. The Tribune said you’d left town and you weren’t coming back.”

  “They were wrong.”

  “Yes, Sean said so, too. He said you’d be back.” She coughed a hollow, bitter laugh. “He was afraid of you.”

  “With good reason.” Holstering his guns, the Corpse crouched to examine the body.

  “Sean told me you killed Goose Vanderbilt.”

  “Vanderbilt was a criminal, a murderer, like Sean,” he said as he studied the dead man’s fingers. They were patterned with small blotches even darker than his skin’s purple cast. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from me.”

  “That’s why you had to come back. We’ve all done something wrong. Everyone in Chicago.” Julia looked down at her hand, still aching a little from the pistol’s recoil. “A lot of it’s as bad as the things that Sean and those friends of his had gotten into. Whatever rotten business it was that damned my poor, sad darling.”

  The crimefighter reached into Sean’s shirt for the thin chain circling his neck. He knew the chain would be there and what he’d find attached to it: an elaborately wrought silver key. Unlike the others he’d seen, though, this one was spotted with black paste. He yanked it free. “Where did this come from?”

  “The key? I don’t know, but he’s had it a few weeks.” Julia moved dazedly to a cabinet and took a box down from a shelf. “I first noticed it the day he smashed this.”

  She removed the handkerchief that covered the lidless box like she was pulling back a winding sheet. Inside lay the ruins of a homemade crystal radio set, the coil wrapped around an empty Albers Flapjack Flour package. “Sean wanted to be an announcer. He built this so he could listen to the Cubs games through an earpiece and call them for me. The day he broke it they were playing the Robins at Wrigley.” She set the box beside her husband’s body. “He was never good enough to play, but he could have been a great announcer. It’s all he ever really wanted. Any trouble he got himself into—before whatever that bastard Vanderbilt got him mixed up in—was from big ideas to get money for voice lessons or a suit for interviews. But then he just gave up. Smashed the radio and wouldn’t talk about it again.”

  “The rest of it started then, too,” the Corpse said. “The smile.”

  Julia nodded. The crooked smile was a constant after that, a badge Sean had shared with Vanderbilt and the other men who came to collect him for their late-night jobs. She’d come to loathe that expression, and to fear it. She hadn’t been to church since leaving Ireland, but she recognized the touch of the Devil readily enough.

  Out in the hallway the sound of small footfalls ended in pounding and a shout: “Ma,” a child bleated, “let me in quick! The bulls are all over the street!”

  A door creaked open to admit the boy. Before it slammed shut again, the noise from within the apartment grew momentarily louder. “Is everybody happy?” Ted Lewis asked from a scratched and skipping phonograph record. “Happy—happy—happy…?”

  The question cut through Julia’s shock. She gazed at the dead body with suddenly clear eyes, which then drifted up to take in the room. She was startled, as if she were seeing her squalid surroundings for the first time. “Sweet Jesus, but it’s hot in here,” she said. “And that awful smell.”

  The stench was the usual tenement funk and the less specific miasma of disease, decay, and death that lingered in such places. Though the Hallorans’ room was cleaner than most in the building, the smell there was no less oppressive. It had long ago permeated the floorboards and plaster. The tenants could no more escape it than they could silence the persistent drone of drunken shouts and curses, the bawl of hungry children, the harsh liquid hack of the sick, and the sobs of desperation that thrummed through the pipes and bled from every crack and corner joint.

  Wordlessly the Corpse watched the tears begin to well in Julia’s eyes and roll down her cheeks. The tears weren’t so much the mark of her sadness flowing out as the despair flooding in. Whatever defenses she’d erected against the misery of her life were disintegrating.

  The key cupped in the Corpse’s gloved hand glowed with a sickly blue radiance. He’d seen this before, with the keys he’d taken from Vanderbilt and three of Halloran’s other associates. It was feeding off her sorrow somehow. He slipped the key into the pocket of his bullet-torn coat and withdrew a silver tube. He emptied its contents onto the dead body at the center of the room. There was thunder now in the hall, the heavy-footed charge of policemen in the stairwell.

  Julia followed the Corpse over to the open window. “Find the monster that did this to him,” she said.

  He could see that she was already lost to whatever strangeness had sunk its claws into the city. “I promise you justice,” he replied. That promise sounded very much like the threat it really was.

  When the police broke down the door to the apartment, they found only the remains of Sean Halloran, upon which writhed a few dozen yellow-white maggots—the calling card of the Corpse. The vigilante and the widow were gone. The Corpse was, at that moment, dropping down into the alley from the bottom rung of the building’s fire escape. He paused for only a moment before he stepped over Julia Halloran’s body, a still, broken heap after her silent leap into oblivion. Then he turned his back on her shattered form and headed toward the low-rent theater district on South State, the locus of true magic in Chicago.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hearts and Spades

  The Mysterious Pharos sat crosslegged at the front edge of the stage, dead center, bathed in the harsh glare of a spotlight. He drew a playing card from the deck in his left hand, presented it to the empty seats arrayed before him, and asked, “This isn’t your card either, is it?” After a moment, he flicked the card into the darkness, where it joined a scattering of rejects, then drew again from the steadily diminishing deck. He was too caught up in his odd little game to notice the figure standing to the rear of the stage, out of the light.

  The Corpse was at home in the shadows. He’d escaped into their embrace more than two years earlier, when he was still just Tristram Holt, crusading assistant district attorney. He scarcely remembered his flight from the laboratory run by mobster “Schemer” Drucci. His memories of the lab, on the other hand, remained vivid. It was a chamber of horrors where a trio of doctors alternately pumped him full of chemicals and toyed with his nerves and sinews just to hear him scream. Only later did he learn that the butchers were trying to transform him into a living bomb intended to destroy the city’s secret Crime Commission. The doctors experimented on Holt for days before he escaped, albeit momentarily. Drucci’s soldiers gunned him down on the brink of safety. They thought him dead after his bullet-riddled body disappeared into the murk of the Chicago River. The chemical slurry running through Holt’s veins and the toughness he’d built up in the trenches of the Great War kept him alive long enough to crawl from the stinking river into a hobo den in the Levee. There, in that notorious cesspit of vice, he created a new identity for himself, one in keeping with the dead man’s pallor that clung
to his flesh and the cold passion for justice that gripped his soul: the Corpse.

  The dark had been the Corpse’s ally in his war against the gangs and the stranger, more terrible things that plagued Chicago. So it was little surprise that the Mysterious Pharos had not noticed the Corpse creeping through the gloomy theater, past the tossed cards and up onto the stage. Someone else had, though. Someone equally at home in the dark as the vigilante.

  “It’s a downbeat show, I admit,” said the woman as she stepped from of the wings. “But it beats the alternative.”

  Samantha Van Ayers wore a magician’s assistant costume. It was more revealing than some, less gaudy than most, if you discounted the especially large black ostrich feather jutting from the gauze headband. She appeared comfortable enough in the get-up, but it still seemed wrong for her. She was a little too short, not quite leggy enough to carry off the role of statuesque stage dressing. A casual observer might have dismissed Samantha as hopelessly plain, until she flashed her eyes. They revealed a young woman possessed of an indomitable self-confidence born of hard travels and harder fights. It was the defiance they blazed, particularly when she smiled and cocked her head just a little, that did it. That simple shift of expression banished the illusion of plainness. It wasn’t a feat of legerdemain or a clever illusion; no one mistook Samantha for anything but remarkable once they noticed her eyes.

  She took in the Corpse with a particularly defiant look as she crossed the stage to him. “Sometimes when he gets in these moods, he takes out the rabbits and—well, you wouldn’t want to be here for that. Or maybe it’d be a ghoulish enough spectacle that you’d enjoy it.”

  “Maybe. Did you decipher the symbols on the key?”

  Samantha started to reply, but Pharos broke in, “Do I hear the voice of the dead? Is it the Scourge of Evil himself, here on my stage?” He got to his feet and quick-shuffled the partial deck in his hands. “I have something for you.”