The Shadow (19 page)

Even so, Cranston had refused to send for a doctor. Removing the bullet and dressing the wound had been left to Margo, whose mother—a volunteer during the war—had taught her just enough first aid to meet Cranston’s needs. Too, the Shadow kept what amounted to a hospital medicine cabinet in the house, the reason for which Margo understood when she saw him with his shirt off: the man had more scar tissue than undamaged flesh. Under a bandage he had applied to his right shoulder only two nights earlier was a gash from an arrow.

It was the middle of the night, and Margo, wearing Cranston’s brown-and-gold-patterned silk robe, was in the upstairs hallway, returning to his room with a glass bowl of cool water when she heard him moan in anguish. Clenched hands to his chest, face beaded with sweat, he was tossing and turning when she entered the room and moved to the edge of the bed to comfort him. She dipped a cloth into the bowl and began to mop his brow. Leaning toward him she thought he was awake but soon realized that he was dreaming with his eyes open!

Looking into someone’s eyes without that person being aware of you was like looking into the eyes of a blind person, and Margo didn’t like it one bit. Still, she felt drawn to his unfocused gaze, which seemed lit from within, by flames that flickered deep in his soul. Drawn, mothlike to those flames; so much so that she seemed to leave her own body and plunge into the fiery heart of him—

Suddenly finding herself standing by a fireplace in the dank confines of a stone castle. Light from the fire illuminated the back of a thronelike chair on the far side of the room, and in it, the figure of man, whose right hand rested on the chair’s elaborately carved arm. Over the knuckles of that hand rolled a seed capsule of some sort, in a way that brought to Margo’s mind an image of Lamont Cranston on the night they met, manipulating a coin with his fingers.

She wanted a closer look at the seated figure, and to her astonishment, she found that she could actually navigate this dreamscape. Like some wraith floating on the drafts of the castle, she approached the chair and began to edge around it. Cranston himself was slouched there, long-haired and unwashed, though dressed in richly detailed black silk. And once more a memory surfaced in Margo’s mind: of the entranced few minutes she had spent in the company of Shiwan Khan.

Cranston seemed to be aware of her presence. His filthy hand gripped the seed capsule, and he looked up at her sharply, his empty eyes underscored by the dark circles of addiction.

“Who invited you here?”
he asked her.

A log shifted in the fireplace, and Margo whirled toward it. She seemed to merge with the fire, its flames engulfing everything. But in them, as sometimes happened in clouds, images took shape: of a battlefield strewn with bloodied corpses; of hordes of soldiers on horseback racing down a mountainside; of Cranston himself, saber in hand, face streaked with blood and dirt, voicing a battle cry—

The cry seemed to become her own as she recoiled from the violence of his mind, retreating to the safe harbor of her own body, in his bedroom, her gaze still fixed on the flames in his eyes, but her mind cut off from the rage and brutality of his former life.

Cranston awakened and, with some effort, sat up, dazed.

“You were dreaming,” she whispered.

He thought for a moment, staring at her. “You saw?”

When she nodded, he turned away from her.

“I’ve done things I can never forgive myself for,” he said weakly.

She tried to quiet his distress. “Whoever you were, whatever you did, it’s in the past.”

He shook his head. “Not for me, Margo. Never for me.”

She leaned her face to his, and their lips met in a languid kiss.

A
slow news week, the papers were unusually attentive to Khan’s issued threats. The banner headline of
The New York Daily World-Telegram
read:
MADMAN THREATENS TO BLOW CITY SKY-HIGH WITH ATOMIC DEVICE, DEMANDS BILLIONS IN RANSOM
! And beneath that:
WARNS PRESIDENT
: “
JOIN ME OR PERISH
.”

Street corner newsboys gave voice to the front page, doling out papers by the stackful to panicked crowds of pedestrians. Families gathered round their radios, eager for news updates. By telegraph, teletype, telephone, and shortwave, word of Khan’s “New Order” spread round the world.

In the mansion drawing room, Cranston crunched the front page of the
World-Telegram
into a ball and pitched it across the room. The press was having a field day with the story, apparently indifferent to the fact that Khan had already been implicated in at least one kidnapping and as many as five deaths—the museum guard, an innocent cabbie, the two Marine sentries, and a sailor who may have inadvertently insulted him at the Empire State Building. But only
The Classic
was playing up those angles—and then only because of efforts by The Shadow’s agents.

“Khan is demanding priceless works of art, precious gems, even silks,” Margo was saying, after bringing the papers to Cranston’s attention. “He’s demanding that everything be delivered by midnight, the start of the Chinese New Year.”

Cranston gently massaged his wounded shoulder. He was dressed in a white shirt and high-waisted black trousers supported by braces. Margo was wearing his robe and was barefoot.

Scowling, Cranston turned away from the room’s wall of tall Palladium windows. “Funds to finance renovations of Xanadu, no doubt,” he muttered.

A butler appeared with coffee. Cranston and Margo rendezvoused with him in the center of the room.

“The government is refusing to cede to his demands,” Margo went on. “The Secretary of Defense claims that an atom bomb can’t be built.”

The butler served the coffee, handing Cranston a cup. “They don’t want to admit that they’ve been beaten to the punch,” he said. “Find Khan, and we’ll find the bomb.” He cut his eyes to Margo. “Did you learn anything about that vacant lot?”

Margo compressed her lips and took the cup from his hand before he had a chance to sip. “Not much, I’m afraid. It was the site of the Hotel Monolith. The building was almost completed seven years ago—wine cellar, furnishings, ballroom, the works—but it never opened. The owner went bankrupt in the Crash and committed suicide, and the building had to be sold.”

Cranston considered it. “The Monolith. I remember it. Twelve stories tall, very Moderne. A top-floor club or something . . .”

“It seems like that’s all that
anybody
can remember about it. The property was purchased by an Asian buyer five years ago, but the buyer and the city couldn’t come to terms about the height of the hotel in relation to the width of the street, or some damn thing, and the building was torn down.”

Cranston frowned. “What year was that?”

Margo shook her head. “I know this sounds strange, but I haven’t been able to find out. I made a few calls to the newspapers and such, but all anybody remembers is the suicide and the sale—nothing about the actual demolition. Everyone seems to know it was torn down, but not when or by whom.”

Cranston snatched the cup back and took a sip. “Or
if
.”

Two hours later, Cranston and Margo were standing across the street from the lot itself, and he was regarding it with stunned disbelief.

“He actually did it,” Cranston said, more to himself. “He has mastered Marpa Tulku’s greatest feat.”

Margo eyed the trash-filled, fenced-in lot dubiously. “He who—Shiwan Khan?” Turning toward Cranston, she realized that he was deep in concentration. His eyes were narrowed, his face was rigid, and the veins in his neck were bulging slightly. “Lamont!” she said, hoping to pull him out of it.

But her distress wasn’t registering. Or if it was, she saw no evidence of it. As she watched, the veins in his forehead began to distend and throb; in fact, his entire head seemed to be quivering.

They had stopped by her apartment on their way downtown, where she’d changed into a blue satin dress, its cuffs and V-neckline accented with velvet ribbon. Over that she wore a nubby wool coat, trimmed with black Persian lamb fur. Her hands were jammed into a black muff, and she wore a flat, black hat, tilted low over one eye. Shrevnitz, seated at the wheel of his hack, had supplied the transportation. Though some people were dismissing Khan’s threats as those of a raving lunatic, the city was in an anxious mood, uncertain it would survive to see another day. Even Shrevvy, who had seen more oddities than most people, was plainly worried.

“Lamont, please,” Margo tried again. Cranston’s features, nose and eyebrows especially, were undergoing a change. She was about to take hold of him and shake him out of it when on his own he emerged from the trance.

“Good god, it’s beautiful,” he said.

Margo followed his rapt gaze but saw nothing but the lot, auto and pedestrian traffic hurrying past it. “What’s beautiful?”

Finally he acknowledged her. “The Hotel Monolith. It’s there, still standing! He has somehow hypnotized the entire city into believing that it was torn down, and cloaked it from sight.” He laughed wickedly. “The ways of the master mind are many and devious, and the clouded mind sees
nothingl
”

Margo stared at him in transparent concern. He was taking on that familiar look, that look she’d seen outside the Cobalt Club and in the bedroom of the mansion. As if there was something frightful building inside him. Only more so, now. His profile appeared almost hawkish; his eyes had become sharp orbs of burning, blue power.

“But
I
see,” he said, sneering. “He can’t hide from me.”

Margo glanced at the lot. “See what, Lamont? Shiwan Khan? Is that who you see? Talk to me, Lamont!”

He looked right through her, denying her any actuality or presence. “You and Shrevnitz will soon receive instructions. Follow them precisely.” He whirled and went to the cab, opening the rear door and taking something from a compartment under the seat.

“Lamont,” she said, hurrying after him, “if you know where Khan is, we can get help.”

His only response was to slam the door and start off down the street, a parcel of black fabric tucked under his good arm. Margo cut her eyes to Shrevnitz, but he looked away, refusing to meet her gaze. Then she turned and followed Cranston, keeping a safe distance.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” she called after him. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Cranston hastened his pace, hurrying past a tavern, a haberdasher’s, a cleaning and dyeing shop. The day, which had begun overcast, was growing steadily darker, colder, and windier. A storm seemed imminent.

Cranston made a sudden turn into a dark alley. Margo pursued him. With the gloomy sky and closeness of the opposing brick walls, it may as well have been twilight.

Up ahead, Cranston had stopped. Margo watched silently as he pulled a wide-brimmed hat from the folds of his parcel and slipped it on, tugging it down over his forehead.

“Lamont, this isn’t who you are!” she said, aching for him.

Forked lightning split the sky overhead, brighter than a photographer’s flash, and ear-splitting thunder rumbled in the alley. Cranston raised his face enough for her to see into his eyes.

“A conjured storm to frighten the fainthearted,” he said in that same contemptuous tone. “A magician’s parlor trick.”

And all at once Lamont. Cranston was gone.

In his place, caparisoned in palpable blackness, stood The Shadow, a red scarf covering his mouth and chin, his long cloak rippling and billowing in the drafts.

“This is who I am,” he told Margo with an icy laugh.

She reeled back against the wall as he moved away from her into the day’s thickening darkness, a drop of ink dissolving into a blotter, his trailing laugh resounding over the strident sound of the wind and the peal of ominous thunder.

In the throne room, Reinhardt Lane’s implosion orb—now armed with individually sequestered bronzium bullets—hung suspended in Farley Claymore’s beryllium sphere. Lane, compliant and oblivious to all distractions, had his hands thrust deep into the sphere, working furiously to complete the wiring of the initiator and the shaped detonation charges.

Claymore stood over him, hectoring him. “Bet you wish you’d been nicer to me now, Professor. Bet you wish you’d listened to
my
idea for a change. Didn’t count on me being tight with a conqueror, did you?”

“That’s quite enough,” Khan ordered, much to the disappointment of the remaining members of the imperial guard.

Claymore gagged himself. Lane was finished anyway, and Claymore was finished with him.

Khan descended from his throne to appraise the completed device. “Activate the bomb,” he said when Lane had closed and secured the sphere’s quarter-section access lid. “These fool Americans dare to doubt me. Soon they will witness my wrath.”

Claymore had fitted a timer into the face of the sphere. The display consisted of five Nixie tubes behind a rectangular curved-glass panel a foot long. Each vacuum tube contained a complement of ten filament numerals that glowed red during activation. The timer mechanism itself was accessed by a second panel of equal size, located adjacent to and just below the display.

The timer had been preset to count down from two hours, zero minutes, zero seconds.

Khan caressed the sphere’s silvery surface as the seconds began to flash by. “You are certain you can fashion others as I require them?” he asked Claymore.

Claymore nodded with enthusiasm. “It’s a cinch.”

Khan glanced at Lane. “That renders Professor Lane redundant.” He looked to his guards. “Secure him in one of the rooms. His own invention will be the death of him.”

Larte reacted to the mention of his name. “That’s nice, dear,” he said blankly.

A delighted Claymore watched one of the guards lead Lane from the circular room. He waited until the pair had exited before sidling up to Shiwan Khan. “I know you must have this covered, but shouldn’t
we
be finalizing plans to leave the city?”

Khan regarded him with distaste. “A flying machine is waiting to take us to safety. We depart in one hour.”