The Shadow (17 page)

Interested, he sat down on the edge of the bed. “Really? So did I. What went on in yours?”

She rolled over on her back and closed her eyes for a moment, eager to grasp the dream before it fled to that place from which there was no retrieving it. “I was on a beach somewhere. In the South Seas, maybe. I was naked, and the waves were just covering my toes.” Provocatively, she ran her hand along her body to her face and lowered her voice to a sexy whisper. “The sun was beating down on me, but my skin seemed to be cool and hot at the same time. It felt wonderful.” She took a deep breath and looked at him. “What did you dream?”

“That I ripped the flesh off my face and found someone else’s face underneath,” he said matter-of-factly.

She dropped the seductive act and straightened somewhat against the headboard. “You have problems.”

“I’m aware of that.” He got up and started for the door. “I’ll wait outside while you dress.”

“No, that’s okay,” she said quickly. “You can stay.” She climbed from the bed and went to where she had tossed her cut-velvet dress and stole. Cranston, the gentleman, all of a sudden, averted his gaze. Sort of.

Maybe there was a man inside him, after all, she thought. But further testing was required. She regarded the ensemble with embroidered dismay. “Oh, these are all rumpled.”

Cranston glanced at the dress, then her, then walked around the bed to the wardrobe. “There are some things in here that might fit. They belong to . . . my Aunt Rose. She stays here sometimes.”

Hardly matronly, the garment he showed her was a sheer black satin charmeuse, open in the back and belted, with a keyhole opening at the neckline. The label showed that it had come from Natacha Rambova, on East Fifty-second Street. A glance at the other garments hanging in the wardrobe revealed them to be equally haute couture.

“Quite the fashion plate, my Aunt Rose,” Cranston said, as if reading her thoughts.

Margo held the frock to herself. “She’s obviously kept her figure, as well.” Dress in hand, she disappeared behind the changing screen. The clothes seemed to bear out the rumors about Cranston the ladies’ man. But just how much of his cavorting had been perpetrated to maintain appearances? she wondered.

“Listen,” he was saying from the other side of the screen, “I’ve got a—”

“—taxi waiting downstairs?” she completed. It would have been a safe bet, but the words really had popped into her mind. She poked her head from behind the screen to regard him. “That
is
what you were about to say, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, clearly peeved. “But—”

“Hey, this telepathy business is getting easier the more I’m around you. You’re like reading a book.” She shrugged out of her slip and draped it over the top of the screen where he couldn’t help but notice it. Or her, with the light streaming in through the windows behind her.

Cranston was quiet for a long moment, then said. “About the cab—”

“Well, thank you very much, but I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do. I have things—”

“Great. I’ll come with you.”

“Excuse me?”

She poked her head from behind the screen once more. “I’ll come with you.”

“No. Last night we agreed—”

“I didn’t agree to anything,” she interrupted in a rush.

“Do you mind if I just get one short sentence out here, thank you very much. Last night we both agreed that you were going to leave this morning.”

She slipped into the dress. “No,
you
agreed I was going to leave. I agreed to no such thing.” She looked at him and forced a sure smile. “We need each—”

The Shadow’s laugh interrupted, wordless but more expressive than a statement. “No, we don’t.”

“We have a connection.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Then how do you explain that I can read your thoughts?”

“My thoughts are hard to miss.”

“And why’s that?”

“Psychically, I’m very well endowed.”

She laughed shortly and gave him a quick once-over. “I’ll bet you are.” She disappeared to finish dressing. “Okay, so you don’t need me. But I need you. And if your present plans happen to include finding out what’s happening to my father, then I’m coming with you. All he knows is his research. He’s helpless away from the lab. He can’t even tell red from green, much less escape from Shiwan Khan.”

She emerged from behind the screen, confident that the dress made her look like a million. And, indeed, the human side of The Shadow was drinking her in.

She smiled, and exhaled. “So, where do we start?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Suppose you tell me.”

It was a wonderful day for sightseeing: mild temperature, clear skies, hardly any wind. Shiwan Khan and his eminently suggestible subject, Reinhardt Lane, stood on the uppermost observation deck of the Empire State Building, one thousand feet above the city streets.

The observation deck of the five-year-old, largely empty skyscraper had played host to sky parties, wedding ceremonies, seances, lovers’ trysts, visits by horses and minicars, and radio broadcasts by the RKO Theater of the Air. With the wind currents born in the surrounding canyons, it often snowed
up
at the top, and sometimes
red,
owing to dust particles adhering to the flakes. In the past, the observation deck had been bombarded by pellets of barley launched from the Great Plains, and insects indigenous to areas fifteen hundred miles away. The tower itself—planned as a mooring mast for dirigibles—had even served as a battlement for a giant ape.

Looking south, one could see across the lower part of Manhattan Island and New York Harbor clear to the ocean. North—the direction Khan and Lane were facing—were the black ribbons of roadways, a miniature Central Park, the apartment houses of the Bronx and Queens.

How different from his native Mongolia, Shiwan Khan was telling himself. The Altai and Tien Shan mountain ranges, the Gobi, the vast forests of Siberia. Baked in summer, frozen in winter . . .

Lane, wearing his brown wool tweed suit, had one arm outstretched to the horizon. “From there . . . to there,” he said, describing a 180-degree arc that began in the hills of Westchester and ended beyond the Palisades of the Hudson River.

Khan, in his gold-beaded robe and a black-fur Mandarin cap, was visibly impressed. “That will be the range of destruction?”

Lane shook his head. A biplane was circling in the near distance. Overhead, the federal and state flags snapped in the wind. ‘That’s simply a rough estimate of the blast radius of the explosion. The destruction will extend well into the suburban areas. What with the shock wave and the firestorm, it’s impossible to predict the extent of the damage.”

“Ah, what a day,” Khan said in unabashed delight.

The curious cadence of the professor’s monotone might have puzzled anyone within earshot, but the observation deck wasn’t especially crowded at that time of day, just thirty or so tourists, bundled up in overcoats and hats, some with their own binoculars, others huddled around the deck’s several viewing scopes. Children scurried about, waving souvenir banners of New York City or the city’s baseball teams; elsewhere were groups of sailors on shore leave, in peajackets and caps.

A group of four sailors off the USS
Texas
walked past Khan and Lane. One of the group, a young man with thick eyebrows and swarthy good looks, felt obliged to comment on Khan’s costume. “Nice dress, toots,” he told the would-be ruler of the world. When Khan glared in indignation, the sailor blew him a kiss, which set everyone laughing.

Khan was not amused. Raising the fore and middle fingers of his left hand, he sent the sailor a minor reprimand. An easy prey, the sailor stopped short while his shipmates continued on their way to a corner viewing scope. Khan made a fist of his right hand and made beckoning motions with his left. The sailor turned and scampered to the top of the observation deck’s four-foot-high wall. A few more manual commands from Khan, and the visibly confounded sailor had scaled the eight-foot-high fence that crowned the wall. The fence had been added to deter potential leapers, since the suicide of a pretty but despondent young woman shortly after the building had been dedicated.

By then, people had observed the sailor’s actions and were pointing and gesticulating in helpless concern. A woman in a fur hat fainted, and someone knelt down to fan her with a tourist information leaflet. Others whirled away, terror-stricken by the sailor’s precarious hold on the blunt bars that comprised the fence. At last, one of his shipmates noticed him and alerted the rest.

“Bobby!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

Bobby swung him a panicked look. “I got no idea! Jeezus, get me down from here! Get me down!”

The only person watching Shiwan Khan was a young kid in a brimmed cap, holding a Yankees banner.

The sailors began to rush to their friend’s aid.

Khan raised a forefinger and twisted it in the air.

White with fright, Bobby put both legs over the top of the fence. The wind whipped at his peajacket and flat cap.

The crowd was pleading with him to come down, shouting for others to go for help.

Khan’s fist tightened into a white-knuckled lump of muscle, tendon, and bone.

“Bobby!” his shipmates yelled.

Khan understood that it was going to have to be a forceful jump; that more than simply
ordering
him off the building, he was going to have to propel him clear of the structure’s numerous ledges and setbacks as well.

As the first of the sailors reached the wall and began to climb to the rescue, Khan opened his hand, splaying tapering fingers—

And the sailor leapt like a frog into the howling wind, a blood-curdling scream tearing from his throat as he plunged. Screams rose from the tourists on the observation deck in eerie response. People buried their faces in their hands, or in the shoulders of those nearby.

Only the preteen with the baseball banner took note of the motionless academic in the tweed jacket and the slightly grinning Chinese with a hand cupped to his ear, singing, “Come on along and listen to, the lullaby of Broadway . . .”

T
he morning edition of
The Standard
had devoted space to the theft of a massive silver coffin from the Museum of Art and Antiquity, and a report that the police were investigating possible links between the recent deaths of a museum security guard and a hackie who had crashed his cab into a fuel truck. No mention was made of the disappearance of Dr. Reinhardt Lane, the deaths of the Marine sentries, or the bodies of five Asians found on the scene. Obviously the FBI was sitting tight on the story. Although—thanks to The Shadow’s agent, Clyde Burke—a small article on page six of
The Classic
mentioned a stabbing in a Chinatown restaurant that had left one man dead.

“Shiwan Khan still needs one component to complete the bomb,” Cranston was explaining to Margo as they hurried through Times Square toward the sanctum. He was wearing his customary black overcoat and homburg; Margo, “Aunt Rose’s” black cashmere coat, whose layered collar was adorned with pieces of jaguar pelt; a modified cloche, also trimmed with pelt; black pumps; black suede gloves; and tortoiseshell sunglasses.

“He imported the radioactive fuel from China,” Cranston went on. “The awesome potential of that substance can only be released by the intense pressure of an implosion lens—which is why he needs your father. But in order to initiate the reaction and contain the device up until the moment of detonation, he needs a supply of beryllium and polonium—”

“Farley Claymore,” Margo said. She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, causing a chain reaction of collisions among other scurrying pedestrians. “My father’s smarmy partner. He’s been trying to convince me to look at some kind of sphere he’s developed, and I’m sure he said it was made of beryllium.”

Cranston’s expression hardened. An implosion device and a beryllium sphere: benign inventions when taken singly, those brainstorms were being combined into a fearsome device. “Is the sphere in the Federal Building?”

Margo shook her head. “Farley’s been running underwater tests on the thing downtown. At Mari-Tech Labs. It’s on the lower West Side, near the Battery.”

“Good, very good,” Cranston said through gritted teeth.

Margo beamed at him. “See, I told you we had a connection.”

He nearly smiled. “Listen, I need your help on something. There’s a vacant lot at one-fifty-eight Second Avenue, where Second intersects Houston. It’s probably the former site of a mansion or something. But I need to know what that something was.”

“Sure. But why?”

“When I was chasing Khan last night, he gave me the slip in that area. And there was something about that lot . . .” He snapped out of it. “You’ll need help running a background check, so I’m going to put you in touch with some people who assist me from time to time—a man named Harry Vincent, and another named Rutledge Mann. I’ll instruct them to rendezvous with you at the city assessor’s office in City Hall. Can you find your way there?”

Margo was nodding, trying to keep everything straight. “But what about Farley?”

Cranston’s grin was anything but playful. “Mr. Claymore is going to receive a surprise visit from The Shadow.”

Mari-Tech Labs comprised a cluster of buildings spread along the Hudson River, near the western terminus of Canal Street. Prominent among them was a spherical structure approximately two stories high, inside of which electronic components were tested for watertightness. Constructed of rib-reinforced aluminum alloy, the sphere was banded at the top by a catwalk that was accessed by a curving, metal stairway. Given its porthole and spoked wheel, the sphere’s single doorway most resembled a submarine hatch.

The catwalk had become Claymore’s favorite haunt when he wasn’t busy supervising submersion tests on the beryllium sphere. Just now, he was pacing the walk, clucking and giggling to himself, his puffy eyes searching the horizon, as if for a long overdue storm. The January air smelled of the river. Close by, two tugboats were tied up at Mari-Tech’s pier.

“Scoff at Farley Claymore, will they?” he muttered. “Not for much longer. Not when they see what I’ve created, and what I’m about to become.” He wrapped his arms about himself. “Now you’ll come around, Margo Lane. You and all the rest who’ve spurned me.” He gave a downward tug to the sleeves of his camel-hair overcoat.