THE NEW ADVENTURES OF
JIM ANTHONY, SUPER-DETECTIVE:
RED SHAMBHALA
by Josh Reynolds
A Pro Se Press Publication and a Volume of the Pulp Obscura imprint
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this publication are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part or whole of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.
Copyright © 2015 Josh Reynolds
All rights reserved.
1.
Shooter’s Island, Newark Bay
The sun was bright and the air was cold. It reminded Sergei of home, of Russia. His body ached from the beating he’d endured. That too reminded him of home. They had come for him on the street, as if this were Moscow or Berlin, rather than New York. Big men, hard men dressed in rough clothes, wielding clubs and fists and boots. Big men with no fear of an old Cossack.
It had all happened so quickly. The film had gotten out—Magda loved the films—and they had spilled out into the chilly New Jersey evening with the rest of the crowd, laughing and talking. He couldn’t recall a single detail of the film, though he knew it had been a horror picture. In truth, he hadn’t been paying much attention. He had a head full of horrors that no budget picture could compete with. Things that he had seen, things that he had done during the revolution clung like shadows to the walls of his mind.
They had circled he and Magda like wolves, drifting through the unheeding crowd. He had not noticed them until too late. His instincts had been dulled by age and too many years of soft living in America. He had only become aware of them when the first was reaching for him. Sergei had taken care of him though. He always carried a knife. Even in America. He had fumbled it from his pocket as the man’s hand had clamped down on his forearm, pressed the button to pop the stubby, curved blade, and had buried it in his attacker’s belly. Magda had screamed. The crowd had flowed away from them like frightened quail.
Sergei had stepped back, letting his attacker fall. He remembered the look on the latter’s face… surprise, mingled with fear. He had been young and strong and hadn’t been expecting the old man to gut him. Sergei had hesitated then. It had been almost two decades since he’d felt blood on his hands, and he’d been surprised by the sudden gush of warmth. The others had taken advantage of that. They’d rushed him. They’d beaten him down, not enough to kill him, but enough to take the fight out of him. His last memory, before he’d been bundled into a car, was of Magda still screaming.
Sergei hoped she was safe.
They had beaten him more, in the car, awkwardly and furiously, after blindfolding him. They had been forced to leave their comrade behind. They had not been pleased about that, and Sergei had been made to pay. He had been thrown from the car and dragged aboard a boat. He knew it was a boat, because he heard the engine and smelled the waters of Newark Bay. He had been brought somewhere, dragged ashore and then up a flight of stairs, where he had been tied down, spread-eagle, on the roof of this building, whatever sort of building it was. His blindfold had been removed, and his kidnappers had left without a word of explanation, warning, or insult. They had left him to sit and ache, as night gave way to day.
He wondered who they were. He had many enemies, both at home and abroad. Old Cossacks like him, who’d followed the wrong man, or who thought he had, or the Bolsheviks. Though he doubted the latter would have left him like this. No, they’d have dragged him back for a show trial and a speedy state execution.
Sergei could smell the bay, and he could hear the creak of metal in the surf. He couldn’t move his arms or his legs, no matter how much he struggled. His wrists and ankles were caught in knots of thick rope, pulled taut, elevating his bruised and battered body slightly, and somewhat painfully, above the wooden roof. Overhead, the blue curve of the sky filled his vision. He blinked blood encrusted eyelids and tried to focus.
The blue was split by black. Two shapes—birds, larger than any of the pigeons that infested this city—circled overhead, great wings catching unseen thermals and climbing into the heights. Sergei watched them and felt something shrivel inside him. He had faced death by bullet, blade, and horse. All shared one commonality… they were quick. But birds were not. He had seen wounded men eaten alive by birds on the battlefield.
He tugged against his bonds.
The birds swooped high and then plummeted. He jerked his head to the side. His eyes snapped shut. He felt a rush of air over his face and chest. He cracked one eye open. The scuffed tips of heavy riding boots filled his vision. Sergei looked up, tracing the boots up, past the military trousers, past the tooled gun belt with the holstered Nagant M1895 resting in its forward holster, past the loose silk shirt and the fur-lined coat and into the face of a ghost.
“Hello, Sergei,” the ghost said. “You look well.”
The eyes that held Sergei’s were blank, black marbles. They might as well have belonged to the two great golden eagles, which now clung to the thickly padded shoulders of the ghost’s fur coat. “You’re dead,” Sergei croaked.
“Yes. And you killed me. You, Kuzmin, Tornovsky, and Ungern-Sternberg,” the ghost said. “You shot me and left me for the wolves, while you went and hid away that which was mine by right. Ungern-Sternberg, at least, had an excuse. He was mad. But you—you, Sergei, were my friend. My loyal friend.”
The dark gaze bored into Sergei, and he flinched from its keen edge. “You led me into the wilderness, and left me in the snow. My good friend Sergei, who was ready to spare me the bullets of the Bolsheviks with his own body, but only so that he could have the pleasure of killing me.”
“No,” Sergei groaned.
“No? If not pleasure, then why, Sergei? Why did you murder me? Why did you collude with men you assured me were my saviours, men who would set me in my rightful place, and then leave me to die in the jaws of a ravening pack of wolves?”
Sergei said nothing. The ghost nudged him with the toe of his boot. “Well, Sergei? Speak up. You used to be quite the talker. Has age taken your tongue?” The ghost made a show of looking around. “You can speak freely, old friend. There is no one here but you and I and these, my most loyal servants,” he said, reaching up to ruffle the feathers of one of the eagles. It nipped at his fingers with its cruel beak and he chuckled. “This island has been abandoned since the war. It is nothing more than a graveyard for ships now, claimed by no one and forgotten, even as I was.”
“How did you survive?” Sergei said, finally.
“I didn’t. The boy you swore to protect died. His frail body bled and bled and bled until there was nothing left in his veins. All that had been him was left on the snow. But he found strength in death. A strength that had been long denied him.” The ghost held up a hand, and his black eyes examined the pale, scarred flesh of his fingers. To Sergei, the long, thin fingers of that hand looked like talons. The talons curled tight, making a fist, and the eyes flickered away.
Sergei looked into the face of the ghost, and tried to see some resemblance to the boy he had last seen gasping out his life in the snow amongst the trees. Traces of the boy clung to the hawk-like features. There was a hint of the easy smile that had haunted his nightmares for twenty years. But time had worn away the kind-hearted softness that had plagued the boy of his memory, leaving only unyielding stone and sharp edges.
“Alexei,” Sergei began.
He groped for the words. The ghost set a boot on his throat, silencing him.
“Shush, Sergei,” the ghost said. The eagles flapped their wings and gave shrill cries. “The boy is dead. My name is Koschei. Where is my treasure, Sergei? Did you spend it? You and the Mad Baron? Did you waste it on petty schemes to topple the Bolsheviks and exterminate the hidden Jews in Ikh Khuree? Or did you hide it?” The black eyes peered down at him. “Speak, old friend. Unburden your soul to Koschei.”
“I spent my share,” Sergei rasped. “America is expensive.”
“And I expect getting here was even more so,” Koschei said. He reached up and stroked one of his eagles. It clicked its beak in pleasure. “I expect Kuzmin did much the same. Or he claimed as much, when I caught up to him in London. But Ungern-Sternberg—ah, he was not as pragmatic as you, Sergei. He had the wealth of Mongolia at his disposal before he was forcibly returned to the Bhavacakra by the Bolsheviks, as well as money from the Japanese. And Tornovsky was his man, wasn’t he? They demanded the lion’s share, for a war chest. A lion’s share of an emperor’s ransom. I would have it back, Sergei. Tell me where it is.”
“I do not know,” Sergei said. His mouth was as dry as the Gobi, and his lips were bleeding. The eagles were watching him intently. They chirped, as if asking permission. Koschei stroked the birds, calming them. Sergei coughed and said, again, “I do not know. I left as soon as you—as soon as I could.” He looked away. “My wife, she was sick. I brought her here to save her. I brought her away from war and pain and death, away from the nightmare our country became. That is why I did it.”
“I understand, Sergei. And I believe you. Neither you nor Kuzmin knew. Tornovsky knows, however. He is wily, that one. Where is he, Sergei?”
Sergei looked up at Koschei. For a moment, he thought he heard the voice of the boy he’d betrayed and left to the wolves. But when he met the black gaze of Koschei, the single spark of hope in his belly guttered and died. There was no pity there, only death.
“I do not know,” he said.
Koschei looked down at him. “You are lying. I will kill your wife, Sergei, if you do not tell me. I will stake her out, and I will serve her to my eagles, one strip of flesh at a time. Where is Tornovsky, Sergei?”
Sergei closed his eyes. Then, he spoke, croaking out an address in the city. “He wanted to meet. Tomorrow, sometime…” He opened his eyes. “You will spare my wife.”
“You have my word, old friend. And it is because I believe that you have told me the truth, that I shall accord you an honourable end, Sergei. More honourable than the one you gave me, at least.” Koschei snapped his fingers. The eagles flapped their wings and sprang into the sky in a swirl of feathers. They shrieked in savage joy. Sergei felt his skin crawl at the raw need in that sound. Koschei watched his pets catch the wind and ride high into the air.
Then, with a sigh, he drew a flat bladed knife from his belt. Sergei recognized its shape; he’d seen similar blades used by Mongolian wolf-hunters. Koschei sank to his haunches and grabbed Sergei’s jaw. “We are far enough away from habitation that I do not fear your screams. But death has taught me caution. And I want no interference. I have waited too long. So I will take your tongue. Forgive me, my friend, but you have brought this on yourself.”
Sergei opened his mouth to scream. The knife flashed in the sunlight. When he had finished, Koschei continued. “There is a practice, in the mountains and the steppes, known as a ‘sky burial’. The dead are placed out in high places, so that birds might strip away their flesh, and with it, their sins.”
Koschei looked down at Sergei as he thrashed in his bonds, choking and moaning. Absently, Koschei wiped his knife clean on one coat sleeve. “You have many sins, Sergei,” he said. “It will take the birds some time to tear them from you.”
2.
The Caribbean Sea
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Super-Detective himself,” Reinhardt Cloud said as he stepped back. He flung aside the handful of spirit gum and fake beard that he had just torn from the face of the man who’d been ransacking his office only minutes earlier. Jim Anthony, his arms solidly pinned behind his back by two of Cloud’s men, could only grimace in consternation. “It was a good disguise—but not good enough,” Cloud said, grinning at him. “I spotted you the minute you beat my rigged table, Mr. Anthony. Anyone else would have lost, but you couldn’t go that far, could you?”
“I don’t like to lose, Cloud,” Anthony said.
“No. A trait we share in common,” Cloud said. He tapped the books that had been wrestled out of Anthony’s hands by the men who held him. “My record books, I believe. Resorting to theft now, Mr. Anthony?”
“When in Rome,” Anthony said. He glanced at the men holding him. They were big and dressed like croupiers, but he doubted that was where their expertise lay. Cloud liked surrounding himself with brawn, rather than brains, and these two were no exception. They weren’t armed, so far as Anthony could tell, but then, they didn’t need to be.
Cloud laughed. He was a tall man, willowy and pale. He had frosty blue eyes, and hair like thick cotton, swept back from his sharp features. He wore a pale cream suit with ivory buttons, tailored to fit his thin frame, and his cufflinks were made from milky opals. His shirt was the only trace of color in the ensemble, and it was a deep black, bisected by the pale slash of his necktie. One of his coat sleeves was specially tailored to be an inch wider than its mate, to allow for the release of the spring-loaded, stripped down automatic pistol that Anthony knew was holstered along his forearm. The pistol and its delivery system had been devised by Cloud, who, besides having a head for games of chance, was also an engineer of some note. Anthony had witnessed the ingenious weapon up Cloud’s sleeve in action twice in their acquaintance, and much to his detriment the first time.
In contrast to Cloud, Anthony was a big man, lean in the limbs, but broad in the chest and shoulders. He had a not-quite handsome face, all sharp angles between the thatch of curly dark hair and the strong jaw, with eyes that sparked and burned like a dying fire over a hatchet nose. Old scars, made by bullets, knives, strange acids, and teeth, curled across his bronze flesh, like markers on a map of a life hard lived.
Then, no one had ever said the life of the globe’s foremost criminologist and man-hunter would be anything but. As a hunter of criminals of all stripes—killers, thieves, and the occasional outré combination—Anthony had gained international repute. And, as the sole controller of one of the world’s largest fortunes, he could indulge in his passion gratis. Law enforcement agencies the world over, from the Surete in France to Scotland Yard, had requested his help, and Anthony was only too happy to acquiesce to those requests.
Such was the case now. The last time he had encountered Cloud, Anthony had left him in the hands of the Xoniran authorities. In retrospect, that had likely been a mistake. However he’d wriggled loose, Cloud had, by all accounts, picked up right where he’d left off, albeit exchanging high altitude hijacking for seagoing vice.
Anthony’s investigation into a case of blackmail had set him on Cloud’s trail, and he’d infiltrated the gambler’s yacht with the intention of finding what evidence he could as to Cloud’s schemes. Unfortunately, he’d tripped a hidden alarm and been caught.
“How did you escape from Xonira, Cloud? The last time I saw you, you were in the deepest hole they had and they intended to keep you,” Anthony said. He took a deep breath and carefully flexed his muscles. He could have easily shaken off the bruisers who held him, but the easiest way to find out the extent of Cloud’s schemes now was just to let Cloud talk. There were few things that the gambler loved more than the sound of his own voice.
“Sheer pluck, Anthony; well, that and a sizeable bribe,” Cloud said. “I knew you’d come after me the minute you heard I was out. I calculated the odds down to the percentile. I could have made a mint, if I’d put book on it.” He motioned at his men. “Strip him. He’s likely got tricks up his sleeves, pants’ legs, and in his waistband.”
The bruisers began to tear off Anthony’s clothes, leaving him only a pair of tight yellow swimming trunks. Cloud chuckled at the sight of them. “Planning on a dip, Anthony?” He kicked at the discarded clothes. “Pads sewn into your clothes to make you look heavier. But you looked shorter as well—how’d you manage that?” he asked.
“Yoga is useful for a lot more than just increasing limberness. I once folded up in a packing crate a third my size bound for Xonira from Shanghai. Only way to get into the country,” Anthony said. He caught sight of the waterproof pouch stashed inside his clothes. He’d been planning on putting the record books in it and escaping out a porthole, with Cloud none the wiser. “Then, you probably remember that, don’t you, Reinhardt?”
Cloud frowned. “I remember that damn audio-optimizer you used to hunt me down, if that’s what you mean.” His face darkened. “That airship was one of a kind, Anthony. It took me years to construct. And you and that Gaelic gorilla of yours crashed it into the ocean. I owe you for that, if nothing else.”
“You used that one-of-a-kind airship as part of a petty hijacking operation, Reinhardt. Whatever genius you’ve got, you’ve squandered it on paltry criminal schemes. Just like this operation,” Anthony said. “You’ve turned this yacht into one of the world’s premier gambling establishments, built it up from nothing, and for what? A blackmail scheme?”
“A multimillion dollar blackmail scheme, actually. Organizations like mine aren’t built on wishes and gumdrops, Anthony,” Cloud sneered. “The high and the mighty are flocking to my vessel, to lose their money at my tables, or lose their inhibitions in my below-decks brothels. Most of them think I’m just a poor, oppressed playboy, just like them. I’ve got the best gambling tub this side of the Heart of Fortune. The looks on their faces when I inform them of what’s what is almost worth the expense I’ve gone to all by itself.”
The New Adventures of Jim Anthony, Super-Detective Page 1
