by Lin Carter
Nick Naldini and Scorchy Muldoon, who had jumped nervously at her cry, came about, fists balled for action.
Zarkon was at the girl’s side in one swift stride. His hand went reassuringly to cradle her elbow as she gulped, turned pale, and seemed about to faint.
“What is it?” he asked swiftly.
She gulped again, pointing at the window. Zarkon turned, alert and wary, to follow her gesture. Suddenly a flat, odd-looking pistol had appeared as if by magic in his long fingers.
“A face,” the girl gulped. “Yellow ... slant-eyed ...and evil.”
Just then a shot rang out, deafeningly. Zarkon staggered backward and went down as if kicked by an invisible mule. Before any of them could think or move, a second shot followed upon the first. And this time the lights went out in a shower of hot glass from the chandelier. The room was plunged into darkness.
“The chief!” bawled Scorchy in a voice filled with raw fury. “He drilled the chief!”
A dim shadowy figure hovered at the broken window for a moment. Then it was gone.
CHAPTER 13 — House of Shadows
It seemed to take hours for the train to reach its destination. Despite the lateness of the hour, Chandra Lal did not permit his vigilance to relax. He did not dare to nod or doze; for if the Chinese youth crept from the train during one such doze, the hawk-faced Hindu would never be able to redeem himself in his own eyes. Prince Zarkon was depending upon him, Chandra Lal knew: he swore by all his gods that he would prove himself worthy of that trust.
The train paused briefly at Hollis, then at the huge Jamaica station. Then it passed under the river, and emerged in time to the tracks under Knickerbocker City itself.
“Penn Station, next stop,” announced the conductor, strolling through the cars. Chandra Lal looked through dust-smudged windows but could discern nothing. The tunnel through which the train clanked and swayed was black as death itself, its dank gloom broken only by the eerie glimmer of blue signal lights.
As it happened, Chandra Lal had done very little travel in the great metropolis on his own. He was an almost complete stranger to Knickerbocker City, having passed only briefly through with his master, who had hired him months before during a visit to the Rajput country in India. The tall Hindu looked gloomy and sternly repressed a shiver. If the Chinese boy were to emerge into the city streets above their heads, Chandra Lal had little chance of being able to follow him unobserved and undetected. Or even of following him at all, since the hawk-faced Hindu did not in the least know his way around the metropolis.
He shrugged, muttering imprecations to his native pantheon.
The train pulled into the terminal at Pennsylvania Station. This, booming loudspeakers announced in a reverberating voice, was the end of the line.
Chandra Lal got quickly to his feet and ducked out of the car. He clung precariously to the narrow platform between the cars, peering through the glass doors to watch the movements of Pei Ling. The train ground to a squealing halt.
Pei Ling got off the train, with Chandra Lal trailing him some distance behind. The Chinese youth seemed to have no inkling of the fact that the Hindu followed almost at his heels, like a second shadow. The boy never once looked back.
The subway had a station in the lower levels of the mammoth train terminal. It is possible to go from the railroad train to a subway car without once emerging on the street. Pei Ling did so. Chandra Lal almost lost him when he was forced to pause in line long enough to buy a subway token. He made the last car in a desperate sprint and squeezed through the closing doors just as the train started up.
Pei Ling was nowhere to be seen in the car, which was all but deserted at this late hour. Chandra Lal walked through the swaying cars until he spied the Oriental boy ahead. He could not enter the car without taking the chance that the boy would look up and see him and, most likely, recognize him. So the Hindu straddled the jarring space between the cars and hung on for dear life. At every stop, as the doors swung open, Chandra Lal peered through the door window to make certain the boy was still on the train.
Finally the subway train reached a station at which Pei Ling got off. The station was deserted. Chandra Lai concealed himself behind a tall soft-drink dispensing machine until the boy had gone through the turnstile at the end of the platform, then raced for the exit. Emerging into the street, he peered first this way and then that. At length he spied the Chinese boy hurrying down a crooked, poorly-lit street. Sliding like a wraith, stealing from doorway to doorway, the tall Hindu followed.
They were at the edge of Chinatown now, in one of the poorest sections of Knickerbocker City. The buildings here were ramshackle and dilapidated, the streets narrow, dirty, and cloaked in darkness. The smell of Chinese cooking hung heavy on the still night air. Somewhere an ash can clattered and an alley cat yowled mournfully. The dirt-scummed windows seemed to peer blindly down upon Chandra Lal as the Hindu stalked his quarry through the dismal lonely ways.
Still without looking back, the boy crossed a deserted street and approached a squalid building. It was three stories tall, with dusty plate-glass windows in front, piled high with boxes. Chinese letters in faded gilt spelled out a message upon the windows, but it was not one which Chandra Lal could read. The boy knocked on the door, paused, then knocked again. After a moment the door creaked open and the youth slid inside and vanished from sight.
Irresolutely, the Hindu hung around for a time, thinking the youth might emerge. But he did not reappear. Chandra Lal chewed on his underlip in an agony of indecision. Across the street, on the corner, was a glassed-in telephone booth, dimly illuminated by the street-lamp.
Five minutes went by; nothing happened.
Ten. Fifteen.
Finally, Chandra Lal left the dark doorway he had chosen for a place of concealment and stealthily approached the telephone booth. In one pocket he found a coin, inserted it in the slot, and dialed the number of Streiger’s mansion on Long Island.
The phone rang and rang and rang. Chandra Lal held the receiver to his ear, cursing under his breath in the name of every god he knew. Finally, a surly voice answered. It was Borg, the dead millionaire’s bodyguard.
“Whozzat?”
“This humble person is Chandra Lal.”
“Hunh? Who?”
“Chandra Lal.”
Borg stifled a gasp. When he spoke again, his tone was guarded.
“Chandra, huh? Where you at, pal? Ever’body been wonderin’ where you had got to —”
“I have no time for idle conversation,” said the Hindu swiftly. “Pass my message along to the sahib Prince — the Chinese youth whom I followed hither entered the city and has gone inside —” He recited the address, and also gave the name of the establishment, for over the door a shabby sign lettered in English gave the name of Wang Foo’s Tea Shop. Borg grunted, but repeated the message word for word.
Borg was about to question the Hindu further, when suddenly he heard a gasp, the crash of splintering glass, and what sounded like a gunshot.
“Chandra? You there, pal? Hey, what’s goin’ on?” he barked. There was no answer. Borg clicked the connection a couple of times. But there was nothing further.
On a street corner near a row of squalid buildings on the dingy edge of Chinatown, a telephone booth stood empty in the dim luminance of a street-lamp.
The glass door was broken, as if a gun-barrel had been thrust through the pane.
Shards of broken glass crunched underfoot. They were stained with wet redness.
The receiver dangled, swaying at the end of the cord. But the booth was empty.
Muffled in darkness, three shadowy figures slunk across the street, bearing a fourth, which hung limply in their arms. The figures entered the doorway of Wang Foo’s Tea Shop. The interior of the building was thick with shadows. The dark figures mingled with the gloom of the interior and vanished from view.
CHAPTER 14 — Race Against Time
A match sizzled in the darkness, clenched in the long f
ingers of Nick Naldini. With a quick stride, the stage magician crossed the room and touched the flame to tall tapers which stood in a ten-branched silver candelabra on the sideboard. The resultant illumination was feeble, but sufficient. Scorchy knelt to examine the body of Zarkon. The feisty little bantam-weight was pale as the wax of the candles, and his hands shook.
“I’m all right, Scorchy,” Zarkon gasped. The bullet had caught him in the side, just beneath the ribs. It had knocked the breath out of him for a moment, like a punch to the solar plexus. The shot would have injured the Ultimate Man had it not been for the fact that he was wearing one of his special “business suits,” as he called them. This one had a very special lining to its jacket; the lining was of plates of tough, segmented plastic, akin to the plastic worn by infantrymen in flak jackets or body armor. In effect, it made a light but effective bullet-proof jacket.
Scorchy let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. In a few moments they had Zarkon on his feet. Redford Pickett and his uncle, Constable Gibbs, had raced outside the room with guns ready shortly after the burst of pistol-fire had knocked out the ceiling light. Now they returned, woeful-faced, having found no trace of the culprit. However, a swift search of the premises showed that Charlie Wong, the newly hired cook for the household of Ogilvie Mather, was nowhere to be found on the premises.
“Shore looks as how yew wuz right, Mister Prince,” drawled Constable Oglethorpe Gibbs glumly. “But hit still heats me how yew cotched on to hit all so quick-like.”
Zarkon, still a bit stiff and lame, was exercising the stiffness away. He smiled faintly at the Constable’s question.
“A guess, nothing more, Constable,” said the Nemesis of Evil. “Once I learned that the murderer of Jerred Streiger was of Chinese extraction and had been hired through the Herrolds Employment Bureau, I looked for a similar situation in the household of Ogilvie Mather. I have found that, in such cases of extortion and multiple murders, there is usually a pattern, a sequence of common factors. All you have to do is to examine the facts in the case, looking for striking similarities, and you have a good chance of spotting the pattern.”
“Which reminds me, chief,” Nick Naldini spoke up. “Back in the car, earlier this evening, remember you said that you already had a pretty good notion that Streiger’s assassin was the Chinese kid, Pei Ling? That was before he had given himself away by getting out of Twelve Oaks so surreptitiously, with a phony cover-story and all. Back at the time I was wonderin’ how you stumbled to him so fast, but too many things were going on for me to get into it then. Remember the occasion? Mind explaining how you knew it?”
Zarkon shook his head. “To have used the Invisible Death against Jerred Streiger, the murderer had to be within fifteen feet of the victim — if I am correct as to the method of murder. There was no place within Streiger’s study where the murderer could have been concealed. It seemed therefore likely that he was standing in the bushes outside of the French windows. I looked and found his footprints.”
“So?” drawled the lanky magician, doubtfully. “How’d you know they were Pei Ling’s footprints?”
“I didn’t, until I questioned him,” smiled the Prince. “But they were the prints of a person wearing very small size shoes, and Pei Ling had the smallest feet of any of the servants, including the maids. Also, the prints in the earth outside the study window were gouged deeper at the toe than at the heel, which suggested that the murderer had been standing on tiptoes. The most likely reason for him to do that would be that he was not very tall. Pei Ling is quite a short young man — just about the right height to have had to stand on tiptoes in order to use the murder weapon through the window.”
“No use asking you what the murder weapon was, I suppose?” asked Nick sardonically, with a knowing grin. Zarkon looked vaguely uncomfortable.
“I’d rather not say until I am certain,” he murmured. “There was, however, one further bit of evidence which suggested that the murderer was Pei Ling, the gardener’s boy.”
“So what was that?” inquired Nick Naldini.
Zarkon shrugged. “It was about the time of night when Jerred Streiger had the spotlights turned on which illuminate the exterior of the house. The murderer, therefore, ran considerable risk of being noticed as he stood there in the bushes. This risk, however, would be alleviated if he should turn out to be one of the gardeners. Who would most likely be pottering around in the shrubbery, if not one of the gardeners?”
“You got a point there, chief,” admitted Nick Naldini.
“And the same thing goes for footprints,” Zarkon added. “If Constable Gibbs here had noticed the prints of Pei Ling’s shoes directly under the French windows, they could easily have been explained. They belonged to the gardener’s boy. And the boy could have claimed they were days old, since, as Sherrinford tells me, they have had no rain in Holmwood for some time.”
Constable Oglethorpe Gibbs was following this absently, still preoccupied with the fact that Zarkon admitted he had some notion as to the murder weapon.
He scratched his long, bestubbled jaw thoughtfully, screwing up his knobby bald brow.
“Did I hear yew right back thar, Mister Prince?” he grumbled questioningly. “Dew yew know how this-here Invisible Death trick wuz worked?” His shrewd eyes were questioning, his voice hoarse with awe. The Man of Mysteries displayed a prescience beyond the Constable’s experience.
Zarkon admitted that he had a pretty good idea of how it was done.
“If that shore don’t beat all,” swore the Constable with feeling.
Having limbered up his side to the point that the stiffness had faded, Zarkon now resumed his jacket. His expression was absent, his eyes preoccupied. He turned to Doc Jenkins.
“Something is beginning to connect in my mind,” he said thoughtfully. “Two of the Grim Reaper’s men we now know to be of Chinese extraction. Where there are two, there may very well be others. Doc, does the position at which Pei Ling’s signal faded out suggest anything to you, in connection with this?”
The big dumb-looking man with the mirage brain scratched his sandy hair reflectively. His dull, vacuous watery-blue eyes blinked. “Edge of Chinatown!” he said slowly. “Kirsten Street, the six-hundred block. Right smack on the edge of Chinatown!”
Zarkon nodded, magnetic eyes flashing.
“I thought as much,” he said.
Constable Gibbs took off his sweat-stained Stetson and turned it around and around in his big hands.
“Yew don’t mean t’suggest we air fightin’ some sorta gang o’ Chinamen?” he demanded incredulously. “Sounds like them crazy Tong wars they had down thar back in th’ twenties! Thought them thar Tongs wuz all closed down, long time ago.”
“It’s not necessarily a Tong, Constable,” said Zarkon. “And the Grim Reaper himself is probably not of Chinese extraction, but more than likely a white man. But there are Chinese criminals and gangsters, just as there are in every ethnic group.”
“The last known Tong group operating in Knickerbocker City was wiped out in 1940,” said Doc Jenkins, in the blank tone of voice he used when reciting from his photographic memory. “Wiped out or vanished or gone underground, whichever.”
The telephone rang. Scorchy scampered out of the room to get it. In a moment, the peppery little boxer returned.
“‘S for you, chief,” he piped. “Borg, back at Streiger’s.”
Zarkon went to take the call. A few moments later he returned with an expression of relief on his usually impassive features.
“Borg received a call from Chandra Lal,” he announced.
“Holy Houdini!” cried Nick. “Red blip number two! D’you mean the crook had the gall to —”
“Chandra Lal saw Pei Ling leaving Streiger’s estate and followed him earlier this evening,” explained the Man of Mysteries. “I had asked him to keep his eyes and ears open, and to watch the other servants for me. I am relieved to learn that my confidence in him was not misplaced.”
“So what did h
e say, chief?” asked Scorchy. “Where’d the China boy go?”
“To an establishment called Wang Foo’s Tea Shop,” said Zarkon grimly. “On Kirsten Street, in the six-hundred block. Right on the edge of Chinatown — where the signal faded out!”
“Hot dawg!” said Doc Jenkins delightedly, but somewhat inelegantly.
“Chinytown agin,” grumbled Constable Oglethorpe Gibbs under his breath. “If’n thet don’t beat all!”
“We had best get going,” said Zarkon. “Nick, get the cars around; we’ll drive back to Twelve Oaks and use the helicopter. That will take us into Knickerbocker City far more swiftly than we can drive.”
“What’s the col-sarned hurry, Mister Prince?” complained the Constable. “We kin use yew here to find this Charlie Wong feller.”
“You don’t need my assistance for that,” said Zarkon, shaking his head. “That’s a routine police affair. You can call in the highway patrol to lend you a hand. But Chandra Lal is in trouble. From the way his phone call broke off, the Grim Reaper’s men have captured him. They will interrogate him to find out why he was following Pei Ling. And when they have learned he was trying to help me, they will doubtless kill him. We may be able to save the faithful Hindu’s life,” he said grimly, “but it will be a race against time!”
CHAPTER 15 — The Hooded Man
Chandra Lal came gradually back to consciousness to find himself securely trussed, with his wrists bound tightly behind his back, and his feet tied together as well. Four slender Chinese in soft garments that looked for all the world like loose black silk pajamas were carrying him through dimly-lit rooms. They were piled high with boxes and crates, these rooms, and dust lay thickly upon the floors and hovered like an impalpable vapor in the air. The youths — for they all seemed very young — were nearly bent double beneath the weight of the rangy, long-legged Rajput, they grunted with effort, their feet, thrust into soft slippers, whispering over the warped boards of the flooring.
