by John Denis
The racing wheels of the skates fixed to her boots screeched jarringly on the marble as she clipped a corner and shot into a corridor.
The few girl clerks, more soigné secretaries, and portly office managers in her way, scattered in horror and flattened themselves against walls or ducked into open doors to give her a clear passage.
Accelerating all the time, she pumped powerfully and unstoppably down the corridor, and from there to another, hunched forward in racing style, her arms swinging in surging rhythm, her eyes pools of brightness in the dark hood, a black knapsack clipped to her back.
Through a third corridor she rushed and a fourth, navigating a half-open glass door, and with more hair-raising right-angled turns, until she knew she was once more at the rear of the building.
It was an exhibition of breathtaking skill, streaking through knots of terrified people, skimming obstacles, trolleys, file-toting clerks, all the while gaining power and acceleration.
And finally, she was in a cul-de-sac.
She looked steadily ahead, gritting her teeth, bunching her muscles.
The passage ended not in a wall but in a floor-to-ceiling picture window. Sabrina careered towards it, went into an even lower crouch, let loose a yell of exultation, and sprang into the air.
She launched herself at the glass, booted feet and gloved fists leading, and pulped it to smithereens, bursting through into the cool air in a shower of splintered fragments.
Arms wheeling like a ski-jumper, she cleared the sidewalk and a disbelieving pedestrian. She landed fully-balanced in the roadway and, without stopping, leaned into a turn and roared away down the slight gradient.
An areaway, no more than an alley, came up on her right, just where it should have been, just the way she had planned it.
She sped into it, dodging garbage bins, and reached a sheltered open space at the back of an off-centre theatre.
Behind her she heard the wailing of klaxons, and the shouts of guards and police who were belatedly on her track. Sabrina spun to a stop, and slipped off her skates, stowing them in the unclipped haversack. With a key from her belt she let herself into the almost deserted theatre.
The people goggling at the unaccustomed activity in the quiet street, took the dazzlingly lovely girl in the pant suit for an actress, even if only because she had exited from a theatre. She had a large tote-bag slung over her shoulder, and she smiled winningly at the guards tearing past her.
Once in the Weesperplein, Sabrina caught a tram to the Rijksmuseum, spent half an hour there soaking up the Rembrandts, and walked through the pedestrian precinct to the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square.
* * *
At the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, the Deputy Director and the security manager were comparing notes with the police.
‘I make it probably four hundred thousand dollars’ worth in the unlocked boxes,’ the Deputy Director said, ruefully. ‘Thank God it was a slack weekend, and there wasn’t more there.’
‘It was enough,’ the security manager intoned. ‘My, oh my, it was enough.’ He breathed out noisily, and shook his head in tragi-comic weariness. ‘Roller skates. I ask you — roller skates.’
‘What about my client’s gold?’ demanded the agent of Kees van der Goes.
‘Nothing leaves here,’ interjected a stern-faced and harassed policeman. ‘Those are the orders.’
‘But the seals,’ the agent bleated, ‘they are untouched. The crates are as they were on Friday evening.’
And they were. With the sole exception of the wine bottles — which she left on the floor out of sheer devilment — Sabrina had stowed everything carefully away in the crates, and repaired the end panels. With luck, they would pass scrutiny.
‘So where, then,’ the policeman inquired icily, ‘did the guy in black spring from? Hey? And where did these bloody bottles come from? Huh?’
For once, the agent had no ready answer.
THREE
Enter the Black Spider-man.
There are times, even at night, when New York City — and particularly the canyons of the great avenues — seems to be made of glass.
Curtain walls of opaque smoothness, rising hundreds of feet into the air, suddenly, from different angles, come on like Christmas Trees, and reflect the whole exotic panorama of skyscraper and strip-bar, cathedral and cat-house.
Generally speaking, the bigger buildings are where the bigger people live, or work, or occasionally love, when they are not too preoccupied with living and working.
The big people like to have the trophies, the spoils, of their rich and rewarding lives around them, if only to remind them how richly rewarded they are. Then they pay other, more talented, people to arrange the trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing ways, and invite yet more people, who are less richly rewarded than they are, to come to their palaces and admire both them and their gewgaws.
The process serves two useful purposes: it teaches the visitors that the deadly sin of envy is a magnificent driving force; and it provides the means for the Pollocks, the Ming jars and the Mayan masks to get the occasional dusting.
There is, though, one drawback: certain small-minded persons are importunate enough to wish to steal the spoils of the moguls. Thus, the trophies have to be guarded with such fanatical zeal that the pretty penthouse palaces become fortresses, or, worse, virtually prisons.
Happily, most of the lairs of the truly rich are well-nigh impregnable, and it must be a source of comfort to the criminal classes that these good citizens can sleep easily in their beds at night. So euphoric do the big people sometimes feel, that they will gladly lend out their treasures for public exhibition so that a great many people may see them, and slaver at the unostentatious plaque that makes it perfectly plain who is doing the lending.
If anything, these public displays are protected with even greater care and devotion than the private gloatings, for while the truly rich may not sincerely appreciate their treasures, they are the very devil when it comes to collecting insurance pay-offs.
When the Black Spider-man gets bored with stealing from the millionaires’ palaces, he will penetrate the public exhibition places with equally contemptuous ease.
In Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue there are many glass mansions, as a latter-day prophet might put it. One stands in the block between 5th and 58th and 59th. A poster tastefully mounted on an easel outside the building says: ‘LOAN EXHIBITION. THE T’ANG TREASURES. 38th FLOOR EXHIBITION HALL’.
Much of the building is in darkness, but the lobby is well-lit, especially the elevators. Two men, both armed and in the livery of security guards, sit and talk and smoke …
* * *
Up the steel-beamed glass wall C.W. crept. He was black-clad and black of skin, his bare toes as prehensile as his gloved hands. He did not have far to go. Twenty feet above him sat a window washer’s gondola, attached to the vertical inset steel I-beam by a wheeled device.
C.W. reached it without breaking sweat, and climbed in. Slowly the gondola rose, almost to the peak of the building. C.W. scorned to count the floors: he would know the 38th when he reached it.
He looked down, and from side to side. The avenue, stretching out as far as he could see in one direction, was a ribbon of moving light-specks. The other way lay the dark menace of Central Park.
The 38th floor exhibition suite was not completely darkened. Though the exhibition had closed for the night, the choicest masterpieces of Chinese sculpture and metalwork were perman ently illumined; some gaudily, where they needed it, others hardly touched by fingers of light that picked out salient features of wonderful artistry and delicacy.
C.W. peered through the window, and located the centrepiece — a magnificent T’ang Dynasty Flying Horse. The Black Spider-man drew in his breath. The sculpture was almost too exquisite to handle. But it was his target. He had a commission to steal it, and in any case he would own it for a few brief, precious hours.
C.W. also noted the other form of illumination in the exhib
ition suite’s main hall. Light-beams, laser-powered, criss-crossed each other like searchlights, seeking out and protecting the exhibits with a sureness that no human guard could match.
An intruder had merely to touch one of the glowing rays, and alarm bells rang out — not just in the exhibition suite and the lobby, and in the apartment of the building’s security chief, but also at Manhattan Central and two other police precincts. The Flying Horse sat there, graceful and elegant, but dramatically charged with the suggestion of enormous, coiled power.
C.W. conceived the loony notion that all he had to do was whistle, and the horse would leap out of its prison into his arms. He tried it, and his warm breath blew back into his face from the window. He thought the horse winked, but he wasn’t sure.
He sighed, and picked up from the floor of the gondola a large rubber suction cup. He clamped the cup to the window, and fixed the cord running from it to the stanchion of the I-beam. Then he took from his belt a diamond-tipped scalpel, and patiently traced a perfect circle around the perimeter of the cup.
He completed the manoeuvre several times, and replaced the scalpel. With the knuckles of both hands, he rapped the area of glass surrounding the suction cup, which was sitting on the skin of the window like a black carbuncle.
The ring of glass broke free, and C.W. carefully caught the suction cup and allowed it and its new glass cap to hang by the cord against the side of the building. He crawled through the circular hole, carefully avoiding a low, slanting light-beam, and stood in the exhibition hall getting his bearings and adjusting his eyes and body to the changed lighting and temperature. He breathed in deeply and evenly, and tensed his muscles for what, at best, could be only a ten-second sprint to the horse, and back out to freedom.
For the Black Spider-man knew that he had not even the remotest chance of stealing the horse and escaping undetected. That might be achieved by an army of electronic experts and technicians, but C.W., as always, was one man, alone. For him, it had to be the hard way.
His sole aids were his pantherish strength, his astonishing nerve, his natural ferocity, and his boundless contempt for danger.
He had one other (for his chosen trade) admirable quality: he was always self-contained, and rarely dealt in violence. Violence against things, or obstacles — yes. Against locks, doors, safes, secur ity devices; but hardly ever against people. C.W. valued people — even the truly rich — almost as much as he valued the beautiful creations they owned.
Drawing breath again, he let it out explosively, and launched himself towards the centre of the room.
* * *
When you are baptized Clarence Wilkins Whitlock and your schoolfriends ask you which name you want them to call you by and you say ‘Neither’, then you might have to fight to protect your nominal integrity. Clarence Wilkins Whitlock reached this small crisis early on in life, and established his right to be known simply as ‘C.W.’ over a bloody, but gratifyingly brief, period in one of the less favoured districts of Tallahassee, Florida.
C.W. came from the wrong side of the tracks before the tracks were even laid. He had an innate appreciation of the natural beauty of that part of Northern Florida where Tallahassee sits on its perch high above the sea, in a nest of rolling hills, lakes and streams. When C. W. could get away, this was where he liked to be, sitting by — or more likely in — the little tumbling brooks, sunning himself on the quiet uplands, and climbing the giant magnolia trees and majestic oaks, hung in season with Spanish moss.
For C.W., home was always the haven, not of peace, but of resentment; an island of poverty and bitterness in a sea of plenty. Above all, it was the place where his racism (and C.W. would accept that he qualified as a black racist) was nurtured. His youth had been the time of the awakening of black race consciousness, and that false dawn had a magnetic attraction for him. He did not actively loathe whites, but he was deeply afraid of them; and fear, he decided, was a more powerful emotion altogether than hate.
Only later, when he was beginning to establish himself to an unarguable degree, did C.W. discover that his fear of whites had turned to cautious regard, and then to grudging awareness, and finally to acceptance of them as a necessary aspect of his society. For without them, who would be the negro’s negro? The Jew, perhaps? Polacks? Spics? Dagos? Wops?
Juvenile crime was a way of life for C.W. Whitlock before any alternative path had even been considered. And when, as he grew older, the question arose in his mind of a career, the choice — as it had been for Sabrina Carver — was easy.
For apart from a cool head crowning his lithe body, C.W. possessed one priceless accomplishment: he could climb anything, by day or night, any structure that he had ever been asked to climb, or been forced to. Some in his vicious circle of cronies dubbed him ‘Monkey’, and quickly learned that C.W. did not take kindly to nick-names. Later he secretly revelled in being known to the American Underworld as ‘The Black Spider-man’: that, he felt, was a fitting tribute to an impressive talent.
But in the early days, he concentrated on going from strength to strength — or, more properly, from height to height. He devised ever more complex and daring pathways to robbery, and his gangster acquaintances were not surprised when he quickly outgrew his need for the basic talents of thuggery which were the limits of their collective repertoire.
He kept one friend, and occasional accomplice, Pawnee Michaels, a full-blooded black Red Indian, for God’s sake. He went through Vietnam with Pawnee, and they travelled the road of crime together. But Pawnee was a liability, and knew it. Unadept and clumsy, he tried one day his own caper. C.W watched him fall from the City Bank in Trenton, New Jersey, and turned away because there could be no percentage in claiming what was left of the poor, smashed body.
Since then, he had worked alone. Like Sabrina Carver, he migrated to New York, where the buildings were taller and more challenging. Again like her, he fenced through Lorenz van Beck …
* * *
C.W. leapt the light-beams and glided between the statues, betraying no sign of his presence.
He landed on his toes by the central plinth, and froze, controlling his body, steeling his reactions. Then he plunged both hands into the cat’s-cradle of light, and seized the T’ang horse.
The infernal clangour of the alarms cut through the quiet of the building like a bolt of lightning. The security chief jerked awake and smashed the clock from his bedside table. He swore and reached for the telephone.
The lobby guards raced efficiently through their drill, the one haring for the elevator, and the other double-locking the front doors, then returning to bring down the three unused elevators. When they reached the ground floor, they would be immobilized.
He gazed hypnotically as the floor indicator of the occupied lift raced up to thirty-eight. The phone rang. He palmed the receiver and said ‘Check. Check. Right.’ Then he slammed it back on its rest, and crossed to where the three remaining elevators were settling, their doors opening in sequence.
The guard snapped off the operating switches to all three, and grinned. The bastard was trapped. Wherever he was hiding, he could not leave the building.
His security chief paused long enough to drag on his underpants, for he normally slept only in his gun. His apartment was immediately below the exhibition suite, and he made the stairwell in seven seconds.
There was no one on the stairs, either way. Nobody could have been quick enough to get clear, so the guy had still to be up there.
Security chief and guard entered the suite simultaneously from different doors, and came within an ace of killing each other. But they were professionals, with quicksilver reactions.
The chief muttered ‘Shit!’ when he saw the empty podium of the T’ang Flying Horse, and his guard shouted ‘There!’ as he spotted the big hole in the window.
They sprinted over to it, stuck their heads out, and looked down. Down was where the thief must be, should have been … but wasn’t. The security floodlights had been activated by the alarms
, and the whole front of the building was clearly visible. They doubted whether even a fly could pass unnoticed on the glass palace.
So it must be up. And both men fired at the trundling gondola, which even now was within a few yards of the top.
‘Get the roof!’ the chief yelled. ‘I’ll send Tommy up, and make sure the police chopper’s airborne.’ He leaned and fired again, and saw the bullets hit the metal frame, but could not be sure that they had penetrated.
C.W. flattened himself against the side of the gondola, and felt it judder to a halt as it reached the end of its track. He had been counting the bullets, and there was still the last of an estimated six to come. But he could delay his flight no longer.
He threw his body frantically upwards, and his questing fingers closed on the rough granite parapet which topped the building. Through the thin fabric of his gloves, he felt tiny chips of stone digging into his finger-tips. His toes clamped on to the smooth surface of the facade like limpets. The last shot came, and ploughed into the granite an inch away from his left hand. Two fingernails split as he tensed his whole frame in mental and physical anguish.
The little cradle bucked under his feet. He gulped another lungful of air and made a last supreme effort to haul himself over the parapet. With a throat-wrenching grunt, he landed on the roof, and raced for the wooden shed housing the head of the ventilation shaft and air-conditioning central station. He knew it could be only a matter of seconds before the security guards got someone up there to seek him out, and he had much to do.
He tore open the parcel he had stowed there a week before, and quickly assembled the contraption that would take him to freedom. As he strapped on the harness, he permitted himself the briefest of sardonic grins. There was no earthly doubt that he would make it, given a lucky break, a few more seconds, now … given that, he was safe.
