The Shadow (15 page)

Cranston turned away from her to get control of himself. It was certainly more than “a voice” that had put the pistol into her hands. Like the coin, it was another message from Khan: Khan’s way of indicating how vulnerable The Shadow was to exposure. He grabbed his shirt from the clothes rack, pulled it on, and whirled on her. “Then why did you come
here?’

“I—I don’t know.”

He worked his jaw. “Get out.”

She spied a bottle of bourbon on the desk and rushed to it, pouring a tumblerful and downing it in one swallow. “I don’t even know how I got here.”

“Go. Now.”

“I came to kill The Shadow . . . and there was only you.” She regarded him with sudden suspicion. Emboldened, she said, “Show me your eyes—the way they were on the street tonight.”

He grinned menacingly as he backed her toward the door once more. “You want to see into my eyes?” He took her by the shoulders and shoved her lightly. “Go ahead, look at them.”

“I know something,” Margo was saying. “I knew before—”

“Look at them!”

Margo was shaking her head at him. “Something strange about you. I could feel it—”

Cranston was only a foot from her now. “But I’ve got to warn you, you won’t like what you see.”

“That static in my head. Whenever I was near you. I knew, I knew—”

“You’re in danger,” Cranston growled.

The color drained from her face. “You’re The Shadow. You’re
The Shadow
.”

Cranston’s face contorted. He balled up his left hand and threw it at her.

Margo shut her eyes, bracing herself for the impact of his fist. But instead, his blow whizzed past her left ear and struck the door panel. Open-handed. Then, just as quickly as he had grabbed her, he released her and recoiled to the center of the room, shaking his hand. His behavior confused her, this sudden show of, what . . . mercy? Shame? Perhaps because of what the world had learned of him over the years—the violence, the many deaths.

Margo was trembling uncontrollably. But she had a clear memory of the evening now: the phone call from her father, the trip to his lab, the dead Marines, the mayhem . . . The last thing she recalled was stepping out onto the balcony and staring at the cigarette advertisement. Then, then . . .

She tensed as a memory that didn’t seem to belong to her blossomed into consciousness. The memory of an Asian man dressed in robes. His hands on her bare back as he had slipped the black stole from her shoulders. Her father displaying a wooden case that held the dueling pistol. The bullet the Asian had inserted into the chamber . . . Margo’s eyes darted to her hands, as if she were still holding the thing. Shiwan Khan, she thought, remembering herself speaking his name while she was on the laboratory balcony. Was he responsible for the killings at the lab? Had he abducted her father?

She looked at Cranston, who was buttoning his shirt and averting his gaze. She was frightened of how he would react, but she knew she had to get to him, to make the most of the moment.

“My father has disappeared from the lab. I was there. There were signs of a horrible fight. I went out onto the balcony, and that’s when I heard the voice in my head. I think it was someone named Khan who took my father and sent me here to kill you. I’m afraid to go to the police. If you really are The Shadow, you’re the only one who can help me find him.”

Cranston turned to regard her with a mix of cruelty and sadness. “Don’t be here when I get back,” he warned. He started for the door, but she blocked his path.

“How do you know I won’t tell anyone who you really are?” She tried to make it sound convincing.

Cranston got up in her face again, glaring at her. “I know,” he seethed.

And this time, she knew better than to follow him.

While The Shadow had devoted the previous five years to perfecting his physical skills, Cranston told himself, Shiwan Khan had been devoting himself to perfecting the craft of psychic concentration. How else to explain the apparent ease with which he had remotely hypnotized the Lanes? If The Shadow was going to thwart Khan the way he had other archfiends of crimedom—men like the Brothers of Doom, the Green Hoods, the Gray Fist, and the Silent Seven—Cranston would have to prepare his mind for the coming battle. And what better place to do that than the subterranean headquarters, his cave, his chamber of solitude.

He was in the rear of Shrevnitz’s cab, and they were closing on the Times Square alley that afforded access to the sanctum. It was almost midnight, and the city had been rained on again. Still seething over the encounter with Margo—not the attempt at murder but her threat to unmask him—he had said little to the hackie since climbing into the Cord five minutes earlier. Shrevnitz was accustomed to the brooding silences, however . . . the silences and much worse.

Just now, the hackie’s eyes kept moving to the rearview mirror, but not, apparently, to check on Cranston.

“What it is, Shrevvy?” he asked at last.

“Something I don’t like about the black-and-yellow behind us. I saw it on Fifty-third when we were leaving the house. That’s why I’ve been taking the long route to Broadway. But this bird’s following my every move.” He turned to look over the seat back. “I think we’ve got a tail.”

Cranston took him at his word. “All right, let’s take him on a tour of downtown. If he’s still with us by the time we reach Canal Street, pull over and let me out.”

Shrevnitz nodded and increased speed, angling the taxicab back toward the East Side. The tail stayed with them, all the way south on Park, Second, then Bowery, until they were almost in Chinatown. Cranston got out near Canal, across the street from a funeral home, and continued walking south, stopping once to give a downward tug to his homburg—and to glance into the side mirror of a parked car. Less than a block behind him was one of Khan’s underlings. That the man was in full battle regalia suggested that Cranston was meant to make him.

Another of Shiwan Khan’s tests, Cranston thought, back in motion once more. Just down the street was a bakery, and just past that a dark, recessed doorway. Quickening his pace, he cut diagonally across the wide sidewalk; then, employing a Hawkeye maneuver, he made a sudden right into the doorway and cloaked himself in the inky blackness. The Mongol’s bootsteps became urgent, but by the time he reached the doorway, Cranston had disappeared. Nonplussed—or at least pretending to be—Khan’s man hurried away, seemingly unaware of the black pool that gathered itself from the door and began to glide down the street behind him.

The Cord followed at a discreet distance.

The Mongol didn’t turn until he had reached Pell Street, in the heart of Chinatown; then he veered west under a flat arch onto a short street bustling with pre-Chinese New Year activity, even at the late hour. Firecrackers pinwheeled on the support posts of the arch. People crowded around tables spread with exotic fruits and vegetables, Peking ducks, eels, birds’ nests, and live turtles—for soup. Grinning tourists and uniformed soldiers mingled shoulder to shoulder with Asians hawking goose paté, fish, incense sticks, and assorted fireworks. Red lanterns hung from ropes strung between overhead balconies. The air smelled of saffron, gunpowder, moldy eggs, and roasted suckling pig.

Cranston was familiar with the area, because The Shadow had had dealings with a merchant named Loo Look, proprietor of a shop on Pell and Mott that sold tourist junk.

Fifty yards along, where a group of women were butchering fattened geese, the Mongol climbed the stairs to the Sun Yet Kitchen. Cranston stayed with him.

On the wall at the top of the stairs was a coiled firehose, and to the left of that the beaded entry to the restaurant itself. Cranston parted the curtain and had a look inside: a columned interior, red-tiled floor, an empty cashier’s booth off to one side, a kitchen to the other—steam issuing from pots. There were a dozen tables, unoccupied save for one in the rear. Attended to by a waiter in pajamas and a skullcap, Shiwan Khan sat hunched over a plate of what looked like meat and goat cheese. He wore a dark blue Brooks Brothers suit and was eating with his right hand. His long hair glistened with pomade. The Mongol who had led the way to the rendezvous was nowhere to be seen.

“Nice tie,” Cranston commented on approaching the table. It was the exact tie he had been wearing when Khan turned up in the sanctum.

Khan looked up from his plate and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Thank you. Hasn’t it been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?”

“Too bad you aren’t interested in imitating my good deeds.”

“Or you my bad ones.” Khan motioned to the chair opposite his.

Cranston removed his gloves and placed them, along with his hat and coat, on a neighboring table. “Not quite the headquarters I’d imagined for a prepotent conqueror.”

Khan’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t my headquarters.”

“Oh, no? Then where
are
you located?”

Khan laughed. “Must you take the fun out of everything?”

Cranston rocked his head from side to side. “It was you who sent Professor Lane’s daughter to kill me, wasn’t it? Just so I’m clear on that point.”

“Kill you, Ying Ko?” Khan snorted. “If I wanted you dead, I would be dining on your liver instead of this hunk of meat. No, I sent the meddlesome woman
to be killed.
You did kill her?”

“Sorry to disappoint you. She’s alive and well.”

Khan looked concerned. “Then she’s a danger to you. She knows your identity.” A rueful smile took shape. “I wonder how long Ying Ko will allow her to go on living? How long before his pure survival instincts assert control?”

Cranston leaned forward conspiratorially. “I know your plan, Khan. The bronzium, Lane’s implosion device . . . But you still don’t have an initiator or a containment sphere. And without those, there’s no bomb.” He leaned closer still. “Besides, you know I’ll stop you.”

“You’ll fail.”

Cranston’s nostrils flared. “The Shadow never fails.”

Khan wiped his hands and mouth with a napkin and sat back in the chair. “You Americans are so confident. You think of your decadent nation as the new cradle of civilization. But let me remind you of one thing: the civilization that rules in one era is the manure for the next.”

Cranston aimed a finger at him in melodramatic admonishment. “That’s the U.S. of A. you’re talking about, pal.”

Khan scoffed at the notion. “The Doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven allows for the presumption that the fall of one dynasty and the accession of another is in itself evidence that the mandate has passed from one to the next. You talk of patriotism, nationalism,
jingoism,
when I’m talking about ruling the world!”

Cranston regarded him calmly and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarette case and lighter. “I’d like to give you a name—Dr. Leonard Levinsky. Brilliant psychiatrist. Specializes in paranoia, delusions of grandeur, that sort of thing. You talk, he listens. I think you’ll feel a lot better when you get some of these delusions off your—”

Khan bristled. “Your impudence is boring me!” Without warning he drew an unwieldy dagger from beneath the table and made a stab for Cranston’s hand.

Cranston, however, had calculated the trajectory of the tip and spread his fingers to accommodate its passage into the hardwood tabletop.

“Most impressive,” Khan said with mock sincerity.

Cranston’s eyes went to the ruthless face carved into the handle of the triple-bladed knife.

Khan deciphered the look and smiled, leaving the
phurba
where it stood. “I’m glad to see that you recognize it, Ying Ko—even if you do seem to have forgotten everything else about your life in Tibet. Yes, I took it from Marpa Tulku. No, allow me to amend that. I took it
out
of him. After I ran it through his heart.”

Hearing of the murder of his teacher, Cranston took hold of the
phurba
with both hands, yanking it from the table, feeling its power spread into his arms. But no sooner had he raised it to plunge into Khan, than the thing came alive as it had years earlier, the snarling face snapping at his flesh, until it had sunk its teeth deep into his wrist.

C
ranston’s pained cry brought a smile to Khan’s face.

“That’s right, you never did master the
phurba
.” Khan shot the dagger a look, and it scooted obediently across the table on its tip into his hand. “You still expect it to respond to brute force. When will you learn to control your baser instincts?”

“Instincts?” Cranston said. “I’ll show you instincts!” He lunged across the table, grabbing Khan by the throat with his uninjured hand. He was squeezing for all it was worth when he felt the cold touch of a gun barrel against his temple.

Khan’s guard backed away when Cranston released his hold. But the Mongol remained close at hand, showing twin .38s. Khan was breathing hard, though none the worse for wear.

“My warriors aren’t terribly bright,” he said, massaging his throat. “But they are loyal.”

Cranston relaxed in the chair, directing a concentrated sidelong look at the guard, whose heavy brow began to furrow in response.

“Accept the truth, Ying Ko,” Khan was saying. “Without light there is no shadow, and, together, we
are
that shadow.”

Cranston said nothing. The guard was struggling to maintain his stance in the face of Cranston’s psychic assault.

“I would sooner destroy a Rembrandt or a Ming Dynasty treasure than kill you, Ying Ko, but I promise I will—here,
now
—unless you give me the answer I crave. For the last time: are you with me or against me?”

Cranston only grinned. The guard had caught the headache he’d thrown and was biting down hard on his lip.

Khan returned the grin. “You can’t defeat me, you know. Or fool me. Your mind is an open book.”

Cranston finally glanced at him. “I’m sick of hearing that.”

He leapt from his seat, turning toward the guard, who—with an expression of unmitigated anguish—tossed him one of the revolvers.

Shiwan Khan was nothing if not quick, however. He upended the table, throwing Cranston to one side before he could draw a bead on Khan. When he looked again, Khan had torn the second .38 from his minion’s shaking grip.