by Otto Penzler
The Yellow Doctor’s voice was audible from across the council room. As Traile ran toward the spot, the rainbow-colored smoke billowed from a sudden draft. He saw three or four of the Gray Men dashing to the rear door. Eric was hastily drawing Sonya away from the flames. The girl swayed against him, almost overcome by the smoke.
From the direction of the torture chamber came a rattle of shots. Traile heard Allen bawl out something. He stumbled on toward the other side of the room. The pile of stolen bonds was blazing fiercely, and by the glare he caught sight of a yellow-robed figure only a few yards away. He leaped to bar the opening for which Doctor Yen Sin was making.
The Crime Emperor gave a baffled snarl, whirled to spring past the heap of blazing paper. The flames eddied out at him. He threw one hand before his eyes, staggered back into the vault. Then a wall of rainbow fire billowed across the entrance.
The heat forced Traile back. His feet struck Kang Fu’s body, and as he tripped to his knees he saw part of a rainbow skeleton where Bannister had dropped. The draft sent the smoke whirling again, and he saw Allen and two of his men charge into the room, handkerchiefs held at their nostrils.
“Watch out!” Traile called huskily as they neared him. “Some of Yen Sin’s killers may still be here.”
The senior agent limped toward him, his mouth bleeding, and his clothes torn half from him.
“I think the damned rats are taking it on the lam,” he said thickly through the handkerchief. “The other four squads finally got in through that restaurant.”
Traile quickly pointed toward the blazing bonds.
“Keep your guns trained over there. Yen Sin was forced into that vault, and if the smoke hasn’t stupefied him he’ll try to make a break.”
A few moments later Eric reappeared, but Sonya was not to be seen. Eric met his gaze firmly.
“I helped her escape, Michael.”
Traile slowly nodded.
“I understand, old man. I hope she gets away.”
Allen came over to them, stared through one of the open bay panels at the Golden Skull. Traile saw the grimace which came to his face.
“Then you guessed what that X-ray was?”
The F.B.I. man grimly wagged his head.
“Yes, when Eric told me that Yen Sin had threatened to cut off his head and shrink it for a present to you. I doped it out then that Meredith’s shrunken head was inside the Golden Skull. Poor old Stone must have made an X-ray of the skull at the last minute. Nobody thought to look at the machine, and later that forged paper must have been X-rayed on the same film.”
“It was a fiendish idea,” Traile muttered. “The original Golden Skull was probably only a symbol, but Yen Sin used this one to keep a merciless hold on the Gray Men. I suspect that he tricked a number of them into helping kill Meredith, perhaps by threat of torture. Those tiny marks we saw on the forehead are undoubtedly the signatures of the members of the cult.”
—
The two agents with Allen stared in astonishment at Traile’s revelations. He peered toward the vault, went on hurriedly.
“After cutting off the ears, and mutilating the nose and lips, he simply plated the head with gold to hide what it really was and to preserve the signatures. That way, he had the corpus delicti and what amounted to a signed confession in form he could easily move from one place to another. Those other shrunken heads evidently served the same purpose for later members. If someone hadn’t taken the real skull to Courtland’s home instead of one of the seals, we’d probably never have known.”
“Well, we’ll know plenty when we get another X-ray and read those names,” muttered Allen.
Traile’s dark eyes were grave.
“We’d better forget the Gray Men, Allen. To publish the truth about this might wreck Wall Street—and the country. Better by far to drop the skull in that fire and destroy the heads later. After all, most of those poor wretches were driven by torture and blackmail, and tricked into those killings.”
Allen looked fiercely toward the vault.
“I hope I’m there to see it when they strap Yen Sin in the chair!”
Traile shook his head.
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that. The yellow butcher is probably roasted by now.”
To his amazement, the voice of Yen Sin replied sonorously through the Golden Skull.
“I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Traile. The ‘Yellow Butcher’ is quite alive—as you may soon regret.”
Traile stared down, speechless.
“Holy Moses!” Eric breathed. “He’s evidently got away to some other part of the base.”
Traile looked grimly at the now silent skull.
“That vault looked solid. But I was a fool not to suspect there was another entrance.”
“We might still catch him!” grated Allen.
A briefly bitter smile came to Traile’s lips.
“No, he wouldn’t have mocked us if he hadn’t already been safe.” Then his eyes fell on the colored flames consuming the stolen bonds. “But there’s one thing certain. He’ll find no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.”
Villains: Multiple
We Are All Dead
BRUNO FISCHER
THE MULTITALENTED BRUNO FISCHER (1908–1992; sometimes recorded as 1995) began his writing career as a contributor to literary journals, which were as nonlucrative in the 1930s as they are today. When he discovered pulp magazines, he knew he had found his home and produced more than three hundred stories between the late 1930s and the late 1950s.
Under his own name but even more frequently using the pseudonyms Russell Gray and Harrison Storm, Fischer gravitated toward stories of terror in the short-lived subgenre known as “weird menace” pulps. Deformed and depraved villains were abundant, as were beautiful women to stalk, torture, and terrorize—frequently saved by stalwart heroes, although not always, which maintained a level of suspense.
When censors pressed for a shutdown or tempering of that violent horror market, Fischer learned to write crime stories for such pulps as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Real Detective Tales, among many others. As the pulps began to die in the late 1940s, he became one of the first authors to switch to the paperbacks that had pushed the magazines aside and published twenty-five novels, about half of which were published by various hardcover houses, though his most successful book was a Gold Medal paperback original, House of Flesh (1950), which sold nearly two million copies.
A lifelong Socialist, he was the editor of The Socialist Call, the official weekly of the Socialist Party, until his pulp writing was too great a drain on his time and energy. He retired in order to divide his time between New Mexico and a Socialist cooperative community in New York’s Putnam County.
“We Are All Dead” was originally published in the May 1955 issue of Manhunt.
WE ARE ALL DEAD
Bruno Fischer
1
THE CAPER went off without a hitch except that Wally Garden got plugged.
There were five of us. My idea had been that three would be enough, figuring the less there were the bigger the cut for each. But Oscar Trotter made the decisions.
Looking at Oscar, you might take him for a college professor—one of those lean, rangy characters with amused, intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sounded like one, too, when he didn’t feel like sounding like somebody else. Maybe he’d been one once, among all the other things he’d ever been.
But there was no question of what he was now. He could give the toughest hood the jitters by smiling at him a certain way, and he could organize and carry out a caper better than any man I knew.
He spent a couple of weeks casing this job and then said five men would be needed, no more and no less. So there were four of us going in soon after the payroll arrived on a Friday afternoon. The fifth, Wally Garden, was cruising outside in a stolen heap.
Wally was far and away the youngest of us, around twenty-three, and he wasn’t a regular. I didn’t know where Oscar had picked
him up; somebody had recommended him, he’d said. It must have been somebody Oscar had a lot of confidence in because Oscar was a mighty careful guy. Wally was supposed to be very good with a car, but I think what made Oscar pick him was that he was moon-faced and clear-eyed and looked like he was always helping old ladies across streets.
Protective coloration, Oscar called it. Have one appearance during the job and another while making the getaway.
So there was the kid, and Oscar Trotter who could pass for a professor, and Georgie Ross who had a wife and two children and made like a respectable citizen except for a few days a year, and Tiny who was an old-time Chicago gorilla but could have been your kindly gray-haired Uncle Tim.
As for me, I’d been around a long, long time in thirty-four years of living. I’d almost been a lawyer, once. I’d almost married a decent woman, once. I’d almost…
Never mind. I was thirty-four years old and had all my features in the right places, and whenever Oscar Trotter had a job I was there at his side.
Wally Garden’s part was to swipe a car early in the afternoon and pick us up on a country road and drop us off at the factory and drive slowly for five hundred feet and make a U-turn and drive slowly back. He picked out a nice car—a shiny big Buick.
The factory manufactured plastic pipe. It was in New Jersey, on the outskirts of Coast City where real estate was cheap. The office of the large, low, sprawling plant was in a wing off by itself. From that wing a side door opened directly out to a two-lane blacktop road that had little traffic. There was an armed guard who arrived with the payroll and stayed until it was distributed, but he was an old man who was given that job because he couldn’t work at anything else.
Oscar decided it would be a cinch. And it was.
We were in and out in seventy seconds—five seconds under the schedule Oscar had worked out. We barged in wearing caps and T-shirts and denim work pants, and we had Halloween masks on our faces and guns in our hands. Tiny had the guard’s gun before the sluggish old man knew what was up. Seven or eight others were in the office, men and women, but they were too scared to cause trouble. Which was just as well. We weren’t after hurting anybody if we could help it. We were after dough, and there it was on a long table in an adjoining room, in several hundred little yellow envelopes.
Seventy seconds—and we were coming out through the side door with two satchels holding the payroll, pulling off our masks and sticking away our guns before we stepped into the open air, then striding to the Buick Wally Garden was rolling over to us.
Some hero in the office got hold of a gun and started to fire it.
The newspapers next day said it was a bookkeeper who had it in his desk. One thing was sure—he didn’t know a lot about how to use it. He stood at a window and let fly wildly.
None of the slugs came near us. Anyway, not at the four of us out in the open he was firing at. But he got Wally who was still a good twenty feet away. Got him through the car window as if he’d been an innocent bystander.
The car jerked as his foot slipped off the throttle and it stalled and stopped after rolling a few more feet. Through the windshield we saw Wally slump over the wheel.
Oscar yelled something to me, but I knew what to do. Sometimes I could think for myself. I ran around to the left front door.
The shooting had stopped. No more bullets, I supposed.
Wally turned a pale, agonized face to me as I yanked open the car door. “I’m hit,” he moaned.
“Shove over,” I said.
He remained bowed over the wheel. I pushed him. Oscar got into the car through the opposite door and pulled him. Groaning, Wally slid along the seat. Georgie and Tiny were piling into the back seat with the satchels. There was plenty of screaming now in the office, but nobody was coming out, not even the hero. I took Wally’s place and got the stalled engine started and away we went.
Sagging between Oscar and me on the front seat, Wally started to cough, shaking all over.
“Where’s it hurt, son?” Oscar asked gently.
Wally pushed his face against Oscar’s shoulder, the way a frightened child would against his mother’s bosom.
He gasped, “I feel…it stabs…my insides…bleeding.”
He was the only one of us wearing a jacket. Oscar unbuttoned it and pulled it back. I glanced sideways and saw blood soaking a jagged splotch on the right side of his shirt. It looked bad.
Nobody said anything.
2
Tiny sat twisted around on the back seat watching through the rear window. It wasn’t what was behind us we had to worry about as much as what was ahead. Pretty soon there would be roadblocks.
We traveled three and two-tenths miles on that road, according to plan. Then I swung the Buick left, off blacktop and onto an oiled country road running through fields and woods.
It was a bright spring afternoon, the kind of day on which you took deep breaths and felt it was good to be alive. Beside me Wally Garden started to claw at his right side. Oscar had to hold his hand to keep him from making the wound worse than it was.
Again I made a left turn. This time there was no road to turn onto but only an open field. Wally screamed between clenched teeth as the rough ground jounced the car.
Beyond the field were woods—big stuff, mostly, oaks and maples, with a fringe of high shrubs. Two cars, a Ford and a Nash, were where we’d left them this morning behind the shrubs. I rolled the hot car, the Buick, quite a way in among the trees.
It was dim in there, and cool and quiet. Wally’s eyes were closed; he’d stopped squirming in agony. He would have toppled over if Oscar hadn’t been holding him.
“Passed out?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” Oscar said.
Getting out of the car, he eased Wally’s head and shoulder down on the seat. Wally lay on his side twitching and moaning and unconscious.
The Buick was going to be left right here—after, of course, we’d wiped off all our prints. The way we planned it, we’d hang around for two-three hours before starting back to New York in the two other cars. Until then we had plenty of time on our hands. We used some of it to make a quick count of the loot in the two satchels.
When Oscar Trotter had cased the job, he’d estimated that the take would be between forty and fifty grand. Actually it was around twenty-two grand.
What the hell! After a while you get to be part realist and part cynic, if the two aren’t the same thing in this rotten racket. Nothing is ever as good as you plan or hope or dream. You’re doing all right if you get fifty percent, and don’t lose your life or freedom while doing it.
Every now and then I’d leave the others to go over for a look at Wally. The third time I did his eyes were open.
“How d’you feel, kid?”
He had trouble speaking. He managed to let me know he was thirsty.
There wasn’t any water, but Georgie had a pint of rye. Wally, lying cramped on that car seat, gulped and coughed and gulped and pushed the bottle away. I thought it probably did him more harm than good.
“I’m burning up,” he moaned.
I felt his brow. He sure was.
I went over to where Oscar and Georgie and Tiny were changing their clothes beside the Nash. This would be an important part of our protective coloration—completely different and respectable clothes.
The alarm was out for five men in a Buick, at least four of whom had been seen wearing caps and T-shirts and denim pants. I felt kind of sorry for anybody within a hundred miles who would be in T-shirts and denim pants. But we wouldn’t be. We’d be wearing conservative business suits and shirts and neckties, and we’d be driving two in a Ford Georgie owned legally and three in a Nash Oscar owned legally, and why would any cop at a roadblock or toll gate waste time on such honest-looking citizens?
Except that in one of the cars there would be a wounded man. This was one contingency Oscar hadn’t foreseen.
I said to Tiny who was standing in his underwear, “Give me a hand with the kid. He’ll b
e more comfortable on the ground.”
Oscar stopped buttoning a freshly laundered white shirt. “Leave him where he is.”
“For how long?” I said.
There was a silence. I’d put our plight into words. This was as good a time as any to face it.
Oscar tossed me a smile. About the worst thing he did was smile. It was twisted and almost never mirthful.
“Until,” he said, “somebody blunders into these woods and finds him.” He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants and added hopefully, “It might take days.”
Wally was nobody to me. But I said, “We can’t do that.”
“Have you a better idea, Johnny?” Oscar said.
“You’re the big brain,” I said.
“Very well then.” Oscar, standing among us tall and slightly stooped, took off his horn-rimmed glasses. “Gentlemen, let us consider the situation.”
This was his professorial manner. He could put it on like a coat, and when he did you knew he was either going to show how bright he was or pull something dirty.
“The odds are highly favorable,” he drawled, “that before midnight we four will be out of New Jersey and in New York and each safe and snug at home. But not if we’re burdened by a wounded and probably dying man. We’ll never make it. If by chance we do make it, what do we do with him? At the least he needs a doctor. A doctor finds the bullet wound and calls in the police. Perhaps Wally wouldn’t talk. Perhaps he will. He may be delirious and not know he’s talking.” Oscar’s smile broadened. “There’s no question, gentlemen, that we’d deserve to have our heads chopped off if we stuck our necks out so far.”
Tiny said uneasily, “Yeah, but we can’t just leave him here to die.”
“Certainly not.” Oscar’s eyeglasses swung gently from his fingers. “He might die too slowly or scream and attract a passing car. There is, I’m afraid, only one alternative.”
All right, but why did he have to say it in that mocking, lecturing manner, and why did he have to keep smiling all the time?
