The Shadow (10 page)

Anyone peering through the grimy panel would have seen a darkened room, barren save for an overturned trash can. The doorway in one wall probably led to a closet.

Centered in the door’s lower, wooden panel was a letter chute that had a hinged brass lid. Satisfied that he wasn’t being observed, Cardona drew a creamy white envelope from the inner pocket of his coat. The envelope bore neither stamp nor address. He lifted the brass lid and bent to insert the envelope; it wasn’t halfway in when it was eagerly accepted, with a quick but audible pneumatic hiss.

The letter chute opened on a pneumatic tube of the sort used to route mail through multilevel offices, or through entire buildings themselves. However, this particular tube—an open-ended, brass-banded canister waiting in its mouth—was part of a vastly more extensive network, years in the designing and installing, its existence known to a select few, its purpose not to undermine the U.S. mail system but to thwart the sinister spread of crime, as counterpart to the shady rumor mill of the underground.

The tube disappeared into the south wall of The Shadow’s way station, where it made a ninety-degree turn and coursed through the chase wall of the building, sometimes running parallel to gas lines, pipes, electrical conduits, and air-exchange shafts, sometimes having the entire wall to itself.

It exited on the roof and plunged down over a ledge, around a corner, and up the side of an adjacent structure, before bridging a narrow canyon and penetrating the exterior wall of another building, where it cozied up to dumbwaiters and elevators, subflooring and lath, and wormed its way through the empty sash pockets of double-hung windows, winding and twisting its way through the hidden heart of Manhattan . . .

Clattering along a brick wall over the heads of sleeping drunks and alley cats; masquerading as a radiator pipe bracketed to the kitchen ceiling of an apartment belonging to an elderly couple who dismissed the overhead rattling and the occasional chunk of loosened plaster for sympathetic subway vibrations; infiltrating an office, where the swift transport of its cargo set watercoolers bubbling . . . Through basements, up walls, across rooftops crowned with water towers, pigeon coops, toilet vents, and billboards, emerging finally at a distant egress elsewhere in the city, and discharging its canister into the waiting hands of the system’s seldom seen postmaster, known to The Shadow’s agents and operatives only as Burbank. A person as mysterious as the cloaked avenger himself, sole denizen of his hidden crypt, a creature who rarely ventured outdoors and who seemed to be as much a part of the system as the hardware itself: the pneumatic tubes, the canisters, the couplings and elbows, and the vacuum pumps that breathed life into them.

Was he forty years of age? Fifty? He might have been either. Did he sport a mustache or beard? He might have. Were his eyes blue, brown, green, some combination of all three? More than likely.

More than thirty pneumatic tubes spilled into his high-ceilinged room and curved down to enclose him on three sides, their gaping termini within easy reach. Seated in his swivel chair at his massive desk, he might have been master of some kind of perverse pipe organ. Four lights dangling from the ceiling cast a crazy quilt of shadows across the entire arrangement. A glass-blocked portion of ceiling revealed the rapid strides of pedestrians.

Affixed to one wall of the room was a large map of the city, overlaid with the silhouette of The Shadow and stippled with colored pins to denote locations whose import could only be guessed at. Crime scenes, surely. But what else: the residences and workplaces of agents? Of potential collaborators? Of the known enemies of justice?

Only Burbank knew.

On that desk sat a radio rig and its boxy microphone, a headset, a typewriter, a magnifying glass in a brass holder, books devoted to methods of encryption, pens of marbled Bakelite, message canisters, an extra pair of spectacles, an ashtray, a tall thermos filled with strong java, and a signet ring that stamped a profile of a shadowy figure in brimmed hat and cloak.

Cardona’s envelope came into Burbank’s hands—bony, manicured hands that disappeared into the gartered sleeves of a pin-striped shirt. Over the shirt he wore a brown tweed vest, whose matching jacket was neatly draped over the back of the swivel.

Burbank slit the envelope with an antique letter opener and studied the contents of the detective’s short note. And even while he read, the hand that bore the ruby-red ring of fraternity was inching toward the inset button switch on the right side of the desktop.

Shrevnitz had had a slow morning, a couple of rides for the distance, an airport run, but most of the driving had been strictly round-the-block affairs. Bundled-up tourists, unwilling to walk from one trap to the next, not what you’d call your big tippers. Same was apparently true for his fellow hackies, most of whom were milling around in front of one sandwich joint or another, jawing about how bad business was instead of prowling for fares.

The middle-aged couple in the rear looked like a couple of out-of-towners, but they’d turned out to be from the Island, just in Manhattan to do some shopping. The guy was carrying two packages tied with twine; his wife’s red hair came straight from a bottle, and she was wearing lapin and imitation pearls.

Shrevnitz had them figured for nickel tippers, so he was taking them a little out of the way, keeping them distracted—well,
entertained
was how he liked to think of it—with a nonstop monologue, one of his patented stories, maneuvering with the best of them, right arm flung over the seat back, corner of his left eye on the road.

“So I say to her, ‘Shirl, what do we need a washing machine for, when we already got a washing machine.
You!’
”

The couple were clinging to each other like lint on velvet, terrified they were going to end their days in the back of a taxicab. The guy’s mouth was half open, one hand pointing out the windshield.

“Uh, that car—that truck—that, that—”

Shrevnitz swung the Cord deftly around each obstacle—delivery truck, flivver, another hack—rescuing his fares from the brink without so much as facing forward. “So, you get it? I told her, ‘
You!’ ”
He laughed loud enough for the three of them.

It wasn’t that he got some kind of screwy kick out of scaring them senseless. More like he just wanted them to return to their picket-fenced homes, in Westhampton or wherever, with interesting tales to tell about their exploits in the Big City. Top-flight Broadway shows, moving pictures, swank shops, crazy cabbies.

He was still laughing when the ring on his right hand began to glow. He swung around in the seat, bolt upright while he studied the pattern of the flashes. That much done, he threw the taxi into a sudden left-hand turn, cutting off a bicyclist and a Dodge pickup truck, and nearly running over a young kid in a brimmed cap.

He threw the Cord to the curb and whirled on the couple. “Out!” he told them.

The woman regarded him with blanched concern. “Here? But we’re not anywhere near—”

“You’re near enough,” Shrevnitz cut her off. “Out.”

The man led the way as they hurried to the sidewalk, indignant but relieved, scarcely getting the door shut before the Cord raced off.

“Maybe we should walk back to our hotel,” the man said, clutching his chest.

“Yes, let’s walk.”

They hadn’t gone a block when the kid in the cap bumped shoulders with the man, neatly lifting the guy’s wallet.

Lamont Cranston had been dressing when his ring received Burbank’s transmission. Much like Inspector Joe Cardona and so many others, Cranston had a story ready when people asked about the
girasole
ring—a fire opal, in whose strange depths ran an ever-shifting gamut of rainbow hues. Numerous stories, actually, though none ever touched on Kent Allard’s short-lived career as a espionage agent known as the Dark Eagle in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, his fling as a Royalist and supporter of Czar Nicholas, his brush with the Mad Monk Rasputin; or about the Sacred Cabochon of the subcontinent, which had spawned the myriad ovals The Shadow had dispensed over the years.

But unlike those scions, there was something hypnotic lurking in the iridescence of Cranston’s stone, as if, in its lesser way, the ring had absorbed some of The Shadow’s own mesmeric power.

Cranston was waiting at the front door of the mansion when Shrevnitz pulled up to the iron gate.

“Where to, boss?” the hackie asked as Cranston slid into the rear seat.

Cranston’s response had an edge to it. “The Sanctum.”

Shrevvy’s big foot sent the gas pedal to the floor.

S
hrevnitz jockeyed the hack through the traffic in Times Square. It was a bad time of day to be there—the matinees about to start, the soldiers on leave, the hawkers, three-card monte dealers, and pickpocket teams gearing up for action. And the traffic lights.

“I’m sorry, boss,” Shrevnitz said. ‘There’s no way to beat all these new lights they’re putting up.”

“Never mind,” Cranston said from the rear, “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Shrevnitz angled the cab curbside, and Cranston climbed out. He put on his black homburg and set off at a brisk pace, one leather-gloved hand in the pocket of his overcoat as he negotiated the pedestrian flow. A couple of blocks away, he began to slow down, waiting for the crowds to thin out. Then, just past Zamansky Jewelers, he cut left into an alleyway, its brick walls painted with advertisements for Personality Cigars and Zalo bread. On the right was Stern Brothers, Embalming, then a local chapter of the Young Men’s Total Assistance Society.

He walked under a rounded archway, past trash cans and wooden barrels, and made a right turn into what looked like an ordinary box canyon, whose rear wall was that of a low, brick building, with a couple of double-hung windows overlooking the alleyway. Drainage grates, just now blanketed with wet newspapers and autumn leaves, were set into the cobbled ground below the windows of what were seemingly basement apartments or storage rooms. A rusting fire-escape stairway climbed the right-hand wall of the canyon, and it was toward that that Cranston moved, not to ascend the flight but instead to place a hand on one of the steel stair brackets riveted to the outer face of the stringer. He accomplished this without so much as breaking stride, and continued on toward the back wall, where a curious transformation was already under way: the center portion of the grating had dropped to form three escalatorlike steps, and a door-size section of brick wall that contained one of the double-hung windows was sliding inward, just deeply enough to permit entry into the building itself.

Cranston took the stairs in stride and edged through the opening, making an immediate left-hand turn into a tight, dimly lighted corridor. Just inside the doorway on the left wall was an L-shaped metal bracket that was identical to the stair bracket. Cranston paused briefly to glance out the doorway, then slid the bracket toward him. With a hydraulic hiss, the two-foot-thick door reversed direction. In the dead end beyond the door, taking up several square yards, were the massive flywheels, pulleys, and chains of the mechanical apparatus that operated it.

The short corridor led to another set of iron stairways that right-angled down into an octagonal shaft, ten feet wide by some fifteen feet deep. No sooner did Cranston’s black Oxfords touch the first landing than eight roll-up doors began to pocket themselves into rounded arches at the bottom of the shaft.

The doors opened on a larger octagonal space with exposed girder beams, out of which had been fashioned two contiguous rooms and a narrow corridor that angled around behind the stairwell. The walls were constructed of beige limestone, banded at intervals with blocks of a deep tan. Wall sconces and lamps bathed the rooms in a faintly blue light.

Cranston entered the sanctum’s principal room and went directly to the desk, where he began flipping the toggle switches on a matte-black control panel. The desk encased him on three sides and was every bit as cluttered with books and devices as Burbank’s. Its centerpiece, though, was a maple radio cabinet as large and curvaceous as a head-and-shoulders bust of Helen of Troy. Where the rig’s tuning dial might have been was a silver disk surrounded by a spokelike array of slender light tubes.

The wall opposite the desk was a six-by-six-foot control panel, also matte-black, fed by electrical conduits three inches in diameter and surfaced top to bottom with coin-size red, green, and white telltales. Elsewhere in the room were Oriental rugs; a teletype machine; several Modernistic bronzes; a world globe as big around as a wrecking ball; and floor-to-ceiling cases crammed with books on criminology, the exact sciences, cryptography, the occult, law, anagrams, and stage magic.

Cranston sat in his black swivel chair while the sanctum’s abundance of prototype electronic devices powered up; in a moment the radio rig’s silver disk irised, and a noisy black-and-white image of Burbank appeared on a tiny circle of screen. Once, it would have been the image of The Shadow’s agent, Claude Fellows, transmitting from the Grandview Building; but Fellows had been killed in action.

“Report,” Cranston said into a microphone in a heavy stand.

“Our precinct agent reports a possible murder at the Museum of Art and Antiquity,” a squinting Burbank answered him through the rig’s speaker. “An elaborate coffin arrived from China during the night, and a museum guard is dead—made to look as if by his own hand. No suspects at present, but an investigation is in progress.”

Cranston steepled his long fingers. “Murder,” he mused.

“Agent suggests a separate inquiry may be warranted.”

“Understood,” Cranston said, keying the microphone’s kill switch and returning some of the toggles to their off positions. He was just shrugging out of his overcoat when he perceived someone behind him whirl on the stairway.

Standing in the middle of the bottom flight was an Asian man, swathed in antique green silk patterned with dragons, his short cape embellished by a fringe of black goat fur.

“Somehow I pictured you as taller,” the intruder said, affably enough. Compactly built, he had piercing eyes, shoulder-length hair, a thick growth of beard, and a crescent-shaped scar low on his right cheek.