The last thing he saw was fire.
Part 3: Corruption
IT WAS ’35, or thereabouts, that I had my first run-in with the Green Lama, so to speak. I was on a date with—Oh Lord, I can’t even recall his name anymore; maybe it was Brad or Brian. He was rich, from a good family, balding, and goodness, his teeth. I suppose it should go without saying it was set up by my mother. He took me to see the opera, something by Mozart, followed by dinner at one of those four star restaurants where the entire menu is in French and the waiters look down their noses at you as if you’ve insulted them with your very presence. My date had drank a little too much wine during dinner and grown a bit more aggressive for even my less-than-conservative tastes. After a third failed attempt to kiss me, I demanded to be taken home. Our walk down Broadway was spent in silence while I hoped and prayed a checker cab would swing by and steal me away from that dreadful evening.
We had just made it past Times Square when a sudden burst of heat and sound shot through the air. Perhaps a more logical response would have been to cover my head and fall to the ground—as my balding, groping date had—but, instead, I whirled around and ran toward the source.
A crowd had formed around the source of the explosion like moths to a flame. Say what you will about us New Yorkers, we do love our violence. The police were only beginning to arrive; a couple of uniformed officers were fighting their way through the crush of spectators. They tried to get us to move back from the scene, but even they seemed to know it was an exercise in futility. There was no way any of us were going to miss this.
Someone grabbed my arm, bony fingers dug into my bicep. Dust covered my date’s thinning hair; his face was red with anger. “This is no place for a young lady to be,” he said, his lips pressed so tightly together they were almost purple. I pulled my arm free and told him he didn’t tell me where I should or shouldn’t be. Ben or Brian scowled; angry stress lines extended all the way up his expanding forehead. It was almost comical. “I’m sure your mother will appreciate knowing what an impetuous child her daughter is,” he said very slowly, as if every word was meant to stab into me. I told him to take a walk, I’d find my own way home, and that I was sure his mother would appreciate knowing what a letch her son was. He swore under his breath and stormed off.
I stayed behind and tried to watch the excitement, but the crowd had grown too thick to navigate. Unable to press my way through, I stood on my toes, barely able to make out the faintest bit of action. I could see the devastated side of a building where the explosion had no doubt occurred. Policemen had surrounded the scene, but none seemed eager to enter the fray. (This was before Caraway ran the Special Crime Squad, mind you, before men were braver.) Through the gaping hole in the wall, I caught a blur of motion, here, a flash of green light, there; the muffled staccato of gunfire throughout. Nearby, a window shattered and a body flew out, crashing to the ground. There was a collective gasp and somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed. Of course, the man wasn’t dead; the Green Lama didn’t kill. A cloaked silhouette walked up to the broken window and said in a whisper that seemed to echo all around us: “Om! Ma-ni Pad-me Hum!” There was another flash of green light, and the cloaked man was gone.
“What do you think that means?” I asked no one in particular.
Standing next to me, a man in a fedora shook his head in disbelief. “That there are maybe finally heroes among us…”
A few days later I was sitting with my mother during our daily afternoon tea. My mother was a gossip hound, constantly rattling on about the scandalous to-dos of her “friends,” but it was in between a rant about the death of an Astor and a tirade about Mayor La Guardia that she brought up the Green Lama and my ears pricked up.
“I’m sorry, the green what?” I remember asking, cautiously sipping at my still scalding beverage.
“Hm?” my mother sounded. “Oh, that new vigilante running around the city these days, you remember the one that put the letter out to all the newspapers late last year; the Green Llama.” She poured herself another cup of tea, and dropped two sugars in, one after the other. “Like the animal.”
I probably rolled my eyes then; I did that often around my mother. “I’m pretty sure it’s one ‘L,’ Mother, like a monk that prays,” I corrected. “The animal has two and spits.”
She waved this away. “If you say so, dear.”
“So what is he doing? Running around beating up gangsters and pickpockets like all those other nutcases?”
“Something of the sort. You remember those terrorists who tried to blow up the Empire State Building some months ago?”
How could I forget? It had happened shortly after the explosion in Times Square and even if I had, the story had been on the front page of every paper in big, bold caps for nearly a week. “Colonel Starliss’s men?”
“Yes. The Medusa something or other,” she said with that obnoxious finger wag she did like she was my private tutor. “Well, from what I hear they were quite close to succeeding, lined the whole building with explosives. What mess that would have been. Well, from what Andy, you know, Mrs. Basore’s boy on the police force—Well, Andy told me that it all would have gone up in a big bang of brick and steel had the Green Lama not secreted himself inside and took all of Starliss’s men single handedly.”
“That wasn’t in the papers,” I said, reminding myself to ask my friend Diane Elliot at the Amalgamated Press for more information.
“Why would the police publicly admit to needing a masked—well, hooded—vigilante to do their work?”
She had a point, I’ll admit. “He was armed, of course? Can’t imagine someone going into a mess like that without a gun of some sort.”
My mother furrowed her brow at that. She never furrowed her brow. It gave her wrinkles, she used to say. Her mouth firmed up and her eyes fluttered. She was thinking. My mother never stopped to think before she spoke. “That’s the queerest thing about it,” she said after a moment. “Andy said the Green Lama doesn’t use any weapons. Just flicked his wrists and those villains fell down like dominoes one after another.”
“And how did Andy see all of this? Was he inside when all this happened? I remember reading the police barricade was across the street from the building.”
My mother shrugged. “There are such things called windows, aren’t there, dear?”
I’m fairly certain I sighed audibly right about then. “Isn’t Andy fond of whiskey?”
“Oh, but he was quite sober this time... Suffice to say, it still seems very odd that a grown man would dress up, hide his face, and try to take the law into his own hands. Though it seems to be going around with the bat fellow and that doctor gentleman. It all seems like something out of those… Oh, dear what are they called? Those short films that continue every week…” She took a long, slurping sip of her tea, to show she was waiting for an answer.
“The serials?”
“Yes, those dreadful things. It’s all very ridiculous, if you ask me.”
“Well, he’s trying to do good,” I made a point of saying.
My mother scoffed at that. “‘Do good.’ What does that even mean? Evangl, my darling, you’re young and naïve, but you will learn,” she said, patting my hand. “Keep your head down and marry a rich man and don’t get involved and you’ll live a very long and possibly happy life. More often than not, ‘doing good’ will only end up getting you into more trouble than you’ll be able to handle.”
Chapter 14: Downfall
THE BLAZE towered into the night, a shimmering, fluttering pillar of red and yellow light that twisted into smoke. An army of firemen dressed in their black overcoats and helmets shot jets of water into the blistering structure of 823½ Park Avenue as ladders were extended up to the windows. Policemen worked to keep the crowd back, but nothing could barricade the curiosity of a city. Mixing in with the roar of fire and water, the shouts of firemen, and the intermittent crinkle of windowpanes exploding, was the snap-pop of photographers’ cameras, ensuring this e
vent would live on in the front pages of every major paper in the city for the next two days.
And Betty Dale was going to make sure the Herald-Tribune had the inside scoop.
Elbowing her way through the crush, pencil and pad hooked in her right hand, she made her way up to the barricade a few feet away from Fire Chief Daniel Langer. With his thick black jacket, bloated ruddy cheeks that extended out past his ears, and a drooping mustache that drooped down to his chin, the comparison to an upright walrus was hard to avoid.
Betty leaned over the wooden cordon, cupped a hand around her mouth and shouted, “Chief Langer! Chief Langer! Betty Dale, Herald-Tribune. Can you tell us what happened here?”
“Kinda obvious isn’t it, Miss Dale?” Langer barked back without needing to turn around.
But Betty was undeterred. “That’s Jethro Dumont’s penthouse, right?” She aimed a finger at the top floor of the burning building. “Jethro. Dumont. People usually preamble the name with ‘millionaire playboy’ just in case anyone gets confused.”
“Can’t confirm anything, Miss Dale.”
“Humor me, Chief! I’ve got a million something readers that are gonna need some answers!”
“Still just a few million short of the Planet.”
“No one reads that gadget obsessed prick anymore, Langer!” she protested, slapping the barricade. “Come on, give me a quote and I’ll make sure the picture editor picks the most dashing photo of you we can find. Front page and everything. I’ll make you look like one of the costumes.”
“Sweetheart, if I wanted that I woulda put on a mask a long time ago.”
“Or a hood,” she commented under her breath. Betty had discovered Dumont’s secret a year ago during the Bartlett incident, but had chosen—against her journalistic instincts—to keep the truth hidden from the public. Dumont’s abilities were unparalleled amongst others of his kind. That such an inferno could engulf Dumont’s home could only mean the Green Lama had been defeated.
“Danny!” someone barked over the cacophony. “Danny, what the hell happened?” Betty knew that voice, but that was impossible, the man had been missing nearly six months, and the last time she saw him—
“Holy Christ on the Cross,” Langer shouted as a barrel-chested man rushed over. “John fucking Caraway, aren’t you supposed to be missing?”
“I got better,” Caraway groused in reply. He nodded at the building. “How bad is it?”
Langer waved a frustrated hand at the fire. “Pretty damn bad. We’re gettin’ a couple more engines from nearby, see if we can put this down before it spreads. I don’t want this to be our Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. That fucker’s blazin’ hotter than anything I’ve seen; there’s gotta be some kind of chemical fueling it.”
Caraway ran his hand over his face and cursed under his breath. “Dumont. Jethro Dumont, did you see him? Is he okay?”
Langer shook his head. “I don’t think he—”
“Lieutenant Caraway!”
Caraway looked to Betty and narrowed his eyes. “Do I know you?”
“Betty Dale, Herald-Tribune. We met in the sewers a while back. After the Bartlett,” Betty said, briefly glancing to the ground. “You weren’t exactly yourself.”
Caraway uncomfortably licked his lips. “I don’t exactly remember a whole lot of that.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I doubt you would.”
“Look, Dale, you want a quote?” Langer snapped, stepping. “Write this down ’cause I’m only saying this once: We’re doin’ all we can to get the fire under control. As to whether the ‘millionaire playboy’ Jethro Dumont was or is still inside the building, we’ve got no way of knowing, at least not yet.”
But Betty wasn’t listening. Something Langer had said had wormed its way into the back of her head. She looked up at the penthouse, the fire licking out the windows a faint green. She felt tears form in the corner of her eyes, either from the smoke or from fear she wasn’t certain. Her pencil snapped in her hand and Betty realized her knuckles were bone white.
“Chemicals…” she breathed, unconsciously bringing her hand to her mouth as the green flames began to brighten. “We’ve to get back! Langer! You’ve got get your men out of there!”
“Jesus, will you calm—!” Chief Langer finally deigned to turn his massive body toward her. “What the hell are you getting on about?”
Betty looked to Caraway, who immediately understood. “The salts,” he cursed under his breath, glancing up at the green flames dancing in the windows. “Danny, you need to get your men out of there now.”
The end of Langer’s mustache briefly pinched together. Above the green flames turned white. “What the hell are you two gettin’ on about? I know Dumont’s your friend, but—”
Caraway grabbed Langer by the arm. “I need you to trust me on this, Danny. Get your men—”
Betty felt the heat before she heard the blast, a searing pain that tore the ground out from under her and threw her into darkness.
The fireball that followed was seen for miles.
• • •
GAMMA BURST THROUGH the double doors into the facility’s fourth-level living quarters, his heels clipping against the linoleum. Murdoch and Metchnikoff stood outside a bedroom at the far end of the hall, Murdoch ruefully working his hands together as Gamma approached. They were days—maybe even hours—away from the breakthrough they had been waiting for and now this had to happen.
“Answers,” Gamma hissed.
“He—He followed Metchnikoff into the operating room,” Murdoch stuttered.
“He forced me!” Metchnikoff protested, holding his right wrist. “Threatened me! Savage!”
Gamma kept his gaze locked on Murdoch. “And where were you?”
“My room,” he replied, flapping his arms. “I’m allowed to sleep, aren’t I?”
Gamma pinched the bridge of his nose. “There were protocols in place to prevent him from discovering—”
“All of which functioned to the best of their abilities,” Murdoch cut in. “I was alerted the moment he attacked Metchnikoff and I got there as fast I could.”
“But too late to stop anything.” Gamma began pacing the hallway. He should have anticipated this, but he had been too focused on the larger game and forgot to watch the individual players. “How would he even suspect?”
“With his past associations, is it any surprise he became suspicious?” Murdoch countered. “You knew the risks brining him here—”
Metchnikoff stamped his feet and held out his hand. “He injured me!”
“—He was bound to find out eventually.”
“But under controlled circumstances,” Gamma said deliberately. “When we were ready.”
“Twisted my arm and hurt my—”
“Shut up!” Gamma screeched through his teeth, spit flecking his lips. Metchnikoff shrank back, holding his wounded arm close to his body. Gamma looked to Murdoch. “Does he know about Pelham?”
Murdoch’s eyes fluttered. “What?”
“Does he know about Pelham?” Gamma hissed through his teeth.
“No.”
Gamma massaged his forehead. “At least we have that. Where is he?”
“In his room.”
Gamma’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “You put him… in his room?”
“Where else was I supposed to put him? A jail cell? Chain him to the wall? It’s not like he could have gotten away if he tried.”
“Put him in his room like a child.”
“What would you have done?”
Gamma glowered in reply. “I will speak with him,” he eventually said. He smoothed over his suit, adjusted his shirt cuffs, and stepped up to Valco’s door.
Murdoch moved to follow him. “Do you want me to come—?”
“Thank you, Dr. Murdoch,” Gamma said brusquely, “but I think you have done enough for today.”
Gamma dialed in the code to unlock Valco’s room and walked in. The room was sparse, but comfortable, replete with a full-s
ize bed, a closet, a desk and chair, and a bath with sink, mirror, and a toilet. Valco was seated on the edge of the bed, hands laced together on his lap. He looked haggard, with sunken, bloodshot eyes boring through the floor, pale skin, and a bushy, untrimmed mustache fading into several days of unshaven facial hair.
Gamma carefully shut the door behind him. “Dr. Valco,” he said evenly.
Valco slowly looked up from the floor. “Are you the Project Manager?” he quietly asked.
“I am not.” He placed his hands behind his back. “I suppose you may consider me the Project Manager’s supervisor, and, in a way, yours.”
Valco stared at him for a moment before he managed, “Gamma.”
Gamma blinked to mask his surprise. “Excuse me?”
Valco indicated the small gold Γ pin on his lapel. “The Greek letter, Gamma. Is it a code name?”
“Something like that,” he replied, smiling thinly. “Not many people would deduce that so quickly.”
Valco shrugged, unconsciously giving Gamma a bashful smile. “I’m a little rusty, but… Old habits.”
Gamma walked to the desk chair, brought it over by the bed, and sat down. He leaned his elbows onto his knees and laced his hands together. He needed to seem relaxed, even friendly. “Is that why you went searching into the operation room?”
“Is that what you call it?” Valco snapped with a biting laugh. “I know a torture chamber when I see one.”
“Do you?” Gamma frowned. “Dare I ask, Dr. Valco, what pray did you think you were doing here?”
Valco’s gaze fell to the floor. “That was my friend,” he whispered, choosing to ignore the question.
“Mr. Brown. Yes. I am aware,” Gamma said with a nod. “It must have been quite a shock, finding him in that state. I apologize for that. I would have spared you such a revelation, but here we are.” Gamma allowed the silence to sit between them and watched the knuckles on Valco’s shaking hands turn white. “You see, Dr. Valco, the Collective is much more than a place to play out scientific theories, as I’m sure you’ve since surmised. Everyone—everything—is part of a larger whole, a machine if you will, aimed toward a common goal. You are one part, as are doctors Murdoch and Metchnikoff, and Mr. Brown is another. It all fits together, Dr. Valco.” He laced his fingers together to underline his statement. It was a theatric gesture, but effective.
The Green Lama: Crimson Circle Page 25
