The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril Read online

  “An hour after sunrise, the chief of police led a phalanx of reporters, photographers, reformers, and politicians past the few remaining On Leong revelers, into the hotel, up to the third floor, down the line of ten cops standing at attention, and up to the big Swede. The chief of police himself proudly opened the door to introduce Ah Hoon to the rest of his life and announce to the world that the resolve of the Hip Sing tong had been broken and that peace would reign forever and for all time in Chinatown.

  “The bullet hole had made a perfect dot in the center of Ah Hoon’s forehead, giving the appearance of a third eye. He sat cross-legged on his bed, stiff and cold in a pool of his own drying blood. Legend has it that it wasn’t even a bullet hole, it was the touch of a demon.

  “Flies were already buzzing curiously about his head, which faced the single window. Still opposite a solid brick wall. Still jammed at less than two inches open. And as the chief of police roared his outrage and the flashbulbs popped, and as the word spread through Chinatown like a flash fire that the Sweet Flower War was over and the Hip Sing, not the On Leong, had won, and as an entirely new celebration began, the wide-eyed expression on Ah Hoon’s face seemed to say one simple thing:

  “Now that’s funny!”

  Gibson closed his fist around the tin stallion and reopened it. It had vanished. “The winds changed that morning, and after months of coldly clinging to every nail and stone and board, the Chinatown death cloud rolled back out to sea and vanished as completely as the life from Ah Hoon’s body.” He closed his fingers into a fist again and then opened them suddenly. A fresh cigarette, tip glowing, now lay crooked between his first two fingers. A simple French drop with a flourish for dramatic punctuation. His tale was told. He inhaled the smoke deeply and waited for the reaction. He could tell a lot about a fella by the way he reacted to a story or a magic trick. They either bought it, didn’t, or tried to find some little flaw that could let them feel like they hadn’t been conned into enjoying it when they really had. He figured Hubbard for the last type.

  “The cops were in on it.”

  Gibson was right. “They weren’t. And you forgot what I asked in the first place,” he reminded Hubbard, the booze making him sound more arrogant than he wanted to be. “I asked you to tell me what’s real and what’s pulp.”

  “Well.” Hubbard thought a moment. “The way Mock Duck fired his guns sounded kind of pulp.”

  Gibson shook his head. “True story.”

  “When all her fingers got cut off?”

  Again Gibson shook his head.

  “What happened to Sweet Flower?” Hubbard asked.

  Gibson shrugged. “No one knows. Some say she may have killed herself. Others suppose her husband kept her sequestered in his house until he died. But no one really knows.”

  It looked like Hubbard was about to speak again when he was suddenly interrupted by a strong cough from the bar behind him. When they looked to see who had coughed, the man began to speak.

  “Actually, it’s not fairly common knowledge, so I’m not surprised you passed over this, Mr. Gibson, but Sweet Flower, considered defiled, was driven from the house of her husband and ended up living at the mercy of others.”

  Gibson looked at the tall man leaning against the bar placidly smoking his pipe and found himself gritting his teeth. What the hell brought him out tonight?

  “It’s a trick question,” said a man from behind them. “Because the whole story is true. If it were pulp it would have a better ending.”

  Dent.

  “It’s real if it’s a lie. If it’s a pack of lies,” Lester Dent said with definitive superiority, “it’s a pulp.”

  Gibson tried not to let his expression change. Dent. Here. Tonight. What were the odds? Everyone said he was a teetotaler anyway. But here he was in the White Horse hoisting a mug of beer and looking as smug as an ape on a pile of bananas. Of course there was a good chance that Dent had dropped off his latest Doc Savage manuscript at Street & Smith earlier and decided to celebrate with a beer. For a moment Gibson wondered just how many books Dent was up to, then decided he didn’t care. At that moment.

  “Not to say that there can’t be true stories in pulps, but most true stories don’t have good endings. Pulps need great endings. Mr. Gibson’s tale doesn’t have a good ending. In fact, it has no ending. The problem with the Tale of the Sweet Flower War is that Mr. Gibson ends it just when it’s about to turn into pulp.”

  Gibson felt his blood rising. “I can’t believe you’re going to lecture me on what makes great pulp. I am pulp.”

  “You’re not pulp. The Shadow is pulp. Doc Savage is pulp. In fact, I will tell you what makes pulp. Of course there’s blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, vengeance, heroes, and villains. That’s just a good foundation. To make true pulp, really great stomach-churning, white-knuckle, turn-your-hair-white pulp, you have to fill it with a pack of outright lies. Secret identities and disguises.” Dent began ticking off the items on his fingers to emphasize the point he was making. “The Yellow Peril. Super-weapons. Global schemes. Hideous deaths. Cliff-hanging escapes. These are the packs of lies you won’t find in any slick or glossy or literary hardcover bestseller. Horrors from the grave. Lost lands. Overwhelming odds. Impossible heroics. Unflagging courage. Oh, and I almost forgot! Guntotin’, lingo-slingin’ cowboys.” He looked at Ron with a mischievous smile, knowing that Hubbard was guilty of perpetrating more than his share of outlandish cowboy tales. “Can’t be a true pulp without a genuine gun-slingin’, tabaccy-spattin’ cowboy, right, Ron?”

  As if charged by the sudden burst of electrical tension in the air, Hubbard’s gregariousness had increased substantially. He was practically bursting with joy at the fact that Lester Dent knew his name. “That’s right, Mr. Dent!” he said loudly and eagerly, nodding like Nipper responding to his master’s voice over the Victrola.

  Mr. Dent? What was it about the guy that made the kids like Hubbard call him Mr. Dent while he, Walter, was always Walt or Gib or, God forbid, occasionally Wally? Sure, Dent had a good ten years on Hubbard, but Gibson was still a few years older than Dent. It had to be the height.

  Gibson, who barely cracked five eight, had never grown accustomed to being the short man. Gibson had heard from eds and other writers that Lester was the athletic type who liked sailing and mountain climbing. Gibson didn’t know if it was true or not but Dent certainly was broad-shouldered as well as tall. Sitting in a chair now as Dent loomed nearby only encouraged his sense of resentment that Dent had shown up here to ruin his night. Dent hadn’t even bothered to take his overcoat off. And Christ, he was smoking his damn pipe like some longhair! Couldn’t he smoke cigarettes like a normal man? Only eds and socialists smoked pipes.

  “Walter.” Dent nodded after a long pause in which he seemed to scrutinize Gibson through his thick glasses. His broad mustache twitched in the vaguest manner. Dent, thought Gibson, was tweaking him. Gibson felt the alcohol pulsing through his veins. It was a sensation that began at the back of his neck. He shouldn’t have started on the shots so early.

  Dent’s eyes then flicked back to Hubbard and his hard expression seemed to soften. “It’s all about the formula. Just throw enough of the right lies into the mix and add a great ending, and that’s the formula for a pulp.”

  Dent spoke with a flattened midwestern intonation. Gibson tried to remember if he knew whether or not Dent was from Illinois. Dent’s inflections were more rough-hewn, he decided, even less sophisticated than Illinois. Arkansas, possibly. Then he remembered. Missouri. Nanovic had told him that once. Definitely Missouri. “To make the Tale of the Sweet Flower War pulp you would have to find out that Ah Hoon’s enemies had released a venomous snake into the room through an old mouse hole; what everyone thought was a bullet hole was actually a bite, and the cops never even looked for the serpent, which remained coiled behind a radiator.”

  “Excuse me. So the Sweet Flower War. It’s true? Both of you know about it?” Hubbard asked, looking concerned.

&nb
sp; Both men nodded simultaneously.

  “What I want to know is how come I never heard of it?” He looked from Gibson to Dent. “And do you know what really happened to Ah Hoon?”

  “I don’t have a clue. Then again I’ve never tried to pass the Sweet Flower War off as a pulp. But if I wanted to know for sure, I’d start by going down to Chinatown and doing some research. Right, Walter? You used to be a newspaperman. Weren’t you the cub reporter who exclusively interviewed Al Capone behind bars? You know how to research a story. And you used to know how to get that ending.” He looked directly at Hubbard. “That’s the kind of work you have to do if you want to be a good enough writer to get yourself out of the pulp biz and into the glossies, slicks, and hardcovers. Where the real writing matters.”

  Gibson took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the cloud in Dent’s direction. He knew Dent’s beef with him, but he was not going to rise to the bait. He just wasn’t going to do it.

  “Well, that Sweet Flower yarn. It’s a helluva story,” Hubbard said to them. “You fellas, uh, mind if I take a crack at writing it? I believe I’d like to.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Ron,” Gibson said, “the reason the Sweet Flower War was on my mind tonight was that it just inspired a big part of the Shadow story I just dropped off today. The Art of Murder. There’s a locked-room murder in it which was inspired by the Sweet Flower War. And Lester, you’ll be happy to know that I propose a solution. A pulp solution.”

  In his latest book, his 217th, The Shadow, the hero who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, had set out to solve a series of murders which had taken place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Priceless antiquities arriving from distant lands had been stolen from a locked vault deep within the museum, while guards inside the vault had been found dead come the morning. Slinking from dark corner to dark corner without making a sound, ink-black in his greatcoat and slouch hat, becoming nearly invisible by merely acting invisible, The Shadow had penetrated the museum, eluded the well-meaning guards, and entered the vault, where he had, earlier that day as Lamont Cranston, his millionaire playboy alter ego, made a big show of donating a lost Rembrandt. The door had slammed shut behind him: The Shadow had been betrayed by one of his very own agents, the dedicated and devoted who owed him their lives, men and women whose vigilance constantly provided him with information from every corner of the city, and who carried out his orders without question. Except for this one, who had turned rogue.

  Sometime before the dawn the vault door had opened and the sinister crime lord behind the plot had entered and, to his delight, laid eyes upon the murdered corpse of The Shadow, enemy to the criminal demimonde. As his hands had fallen upon his new prize, The Shadow’s eerie laugh—a haunting, piercing, maddening sound which rattled in the black minds of the guilty—had filled the air around him. But the corpse remained still. The crime lord shut himself in the room, knowing it would be safe. At that moment, The Shadow revealed the key to the mystery. A secret panel under the floor flipped up and The Shadow leapt out, nickel-plated .45s drawn. The corpse in The Shadow’s coat had been none other than the traitorous agent, who had been lying in wait under the floor. When he had attacked, The Shadow’s justice had been swift and merciless, as it would now be with this evildoer. The struggle to the death began.

  In the morning, when the museum guards opened the locked room, three dead bodies were found inside beside a note from the mysterious Shadow explaining all, identifying the villains, and giving directions to the location of the rest of the stolen art. In the resulting confusion and general throng of visitors to the scene of the crime to examine the secret hiding spot, no one had noticed as one of the corpses suddenly arose and vanished into the crowd. Later, no one would be able to say for sure whether there had actually been a third body.

  “Trapdoor? Not bad. It’s pulp.” Dent puffed on his pipe. “Of course, I went completely pulp when I proposed a solution in the very first issue of Doc Savage. I had a Mayan with a rifle scale the girders of the unfinished top floors of the Chrysler Building and take a shot at Doc Savage, who was ten blocks away. Of course, he missed because his target was a decoy statue. I’m sure you read it, Mr. Gibson. It was just six years ago. Right after the Golden Vulture disappeared.”

  And there it was. The Golden Vulture. He’d brought it up. All of a sudden Gibson could sense Dent’s particular dislike of him. It was there in his penetrating gaze, and Gibson felt a sudden rising pang of guilt, which he tried to force back down with angry self-righteousness.

  “The Golden Vulture,” Hubbard interrupted. “What’s that?”

  “Like the Sweet Flower War, it’s a story that’s become a legend. And like the murder of Ah Hoon, it’s something only two people know the truth about. The one who held the gun and the one who got shot.”

  Gibson leapt to his feet. He was quivering with anger. “Why don’t you call a spade a spade and tell me what you want to say, Dent?”

  Dent took a step forward from the bar and drew himself up and over Gibson, looking down at him. “I just did. Anyway, it’s all just spilled ink, Mr. Gibson,” Dent said. He put his beer stein down in front of Hubbard, who, having been oblivious to the tension, was now registering an expression of complete surprise at their open hostility. “I believe I’m done,” Dent said. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Not around, Dent.” Gibson put the palm of his hand on Dent’s chest. For a moment Gibson thought that the brick wall he could feel under Dent’s jacket and shirt was muscle, but then he realized what his palm was on. If Dent had placed his hand on Gibson’s chest, he would have felt the same thing. A Street & Smith–issued notebook was always next to a pulp writer’s heart. “Behind. You’ll always be behind me. The number two. They’re not making Hollywood movies of Doc Savage. Doc’s not on the radio. The Shadow is. My Shadow.” People were starting to look over at them. Gibson saw men he knew recognize him, whisper about him. He didn’t care. It was time to put Lester Dent in his place. “And you can forget about cracking the glossies. You ain’t gonna see your name on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker. ’Cause you’re just a nickel-a-word pulp monkey like me, selling daydreams at wholesale prices to soda jerkers in Boise and schoolboys in Kansas City while your house name, Kenneth Robeson, gets all the glory! So take that, and your Doc Savage oath, and blow it out your pipe.”

  Gibson knew Dent would take the first swing. When he swiped at him, Gibson was going to try to punch his lights out with one hit. He even had the spot on his chin that he was going to go after. Then the big man would probably pummel him into a pulp. He had only been in a few scraps in his life, two of those in the army and one in the Bowery, but those had been years ago. On the plus side he had come out of those dustups better than the other guys. Instead of making an aggressive move, Dent looked passively down at the floor for a moment. For some reason this made Gibson even angrier. Why wouldn’t the guy just put his mitts up?

  “I may not be Jack London, or Ernest Hemingway, but I will make it out of the pulps and into the glossies,” he said. He put on his hat, his eyes almost disappearing beneath the brim. Then he nodded toward Ron. “Ron, it was nice seeing you.”

  Ron cast about for something to say. “How about coming by the Knickerbocker on Friday?”

  “Your pulp writers mixer? I just might.” Dent puffed on his pipe to make sure it was burning. Without looking at Gibson he said, “That soda jerker and that schoolboy? They’re good people. Until I get out of the pulps they’ll get my best month after month. I know you’re happy to just do pulp—that’s the big difference between us—but are you still giving your readers your best?” He walked slowly around the table, deliberately in no hurry as he headed toward the door.

  “Holy…,” muttered Hubbard as Gibson dropped into his chair and swallowed another drink.

  “Yep.” Gibson sighed. The anger was evaporating. The gaze of the spectators was moving on. “A regular Algonquin roundtable here at the White Horse Tavern. Witho
ut the sex. Or the witty banter. But mostly without the sex.”

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “The Golden Vulture. It’s his beef with me.”

  “So what’s the Golden Vulture? A legend? A statue like the Maltese Falcon?”

  “It’s a story. Just a goddamned book.” He wanted to say that it was something that he felt bad about but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. “When you get the number one and number two bestselling writers in America together, there’s bound to be some rivalries. Some misunderstandings. Some shit.”

  “Why don’t you try and straighten things out with him?”

  Gibson shrugged. “Because I’m still number one and Doc Savage is still number two.”

  “You mean Lester Dent?”

  “Of course.”

  He waited for Hubbard’s contemptuous response. Something deserved that would just wither his spirit. He still felt like he needed the pounding from the fight with Dent that he hadn’t received. Combat might have vindicated him, at least restored his honor. Instead he had received nothing from his rival but a lecture. His own notebook felt heavy in his breast pocket against his chest. He carried it out of habit, but had he made any entries in it lately? Weren’t all the notes and observations in it kind of stale? Maybe Dent was right. Maybe he hadn’t been delivering his best lately.

  Instead the young man asked, “Do you guys really make a nickel a word? ’Cause I’m only making two and a half cents. What do you think I can do to make more?”

  Gibson decided at that moment, as Hubbard spoke, that not only was Nanovic going to pay for all the drinks tonight, but the ed was about to drop a substantial down payment on his future bar tab.

  “I got a boat back in Washington. Sure do miss her,” Hubbard rattled on. “You know, I went to China once. It was okay. You get better Chinese food here, though.”