Authors: Kim Newman
Chinatown child, you’re a Chinatown child, cursed by the temple your father defiled
.
Chinatown Blues, jasmine and lotus, the sad…
Susan shuddered, bounced her mind off an imaginary brick wall and caught it. She closed her eyes and concentrated for a second, shaking the blues from her thoughts.
The temple was brightly lit. Candles burned in niches. The clientele going in and out of the place wore all-enveloping robes, but their posture and the expensive cars suggested they were somewhat richer than most of the people who lived in the neighbourhood. Shimmers, or something more sinister. Uniformed chauffeurs stood by their proud machines in the parking lot.
‘Come on.’
Tunney led her around the side of the building. Ribbons of light spoked across the alley, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entrance. The bars of light made diagonals across them. Tunney reached for the blind, slanted up the edge and bowed his way in. His hand, lingering behind a moment, made a hook for her to follow. For a second she stood alone, livid weals striping her from head to foot.
Susan took Tunney’s hand and was pulled inside.
The foyer was empty. Patterned rugs adorned the floor and the walls. Potted jungle plants were everywhere. The heat was tropical. There were more idols, and some of the rugs had ouija-board designs or pentagrams woven into them. Somewhere a victrola was squeaking. She thought the song was ‘Paper Moon’, but wasn’t sure.
Say it’s only a paper
… No!
‘Kruger must be upstairs. He may be dangerous. You have a gun?’
Everybody had a gun. Hers was in her handbag.
‘Come on. This way.’
She bit down, grinding her teeth. She wanted to tell Tunney about the songs. They were strong here. That must mean danger. But she couldn’t talk and concentrate.
Tunney found a spiral staircase rising through a hole in the ceiling. It was made of twisted black metal, ornamented with Eastern demons and orgies. They climbed, passing up through a zebra-crossing kaleidoscope of dark and light. On the first landing, incense hung in the air like a muslin veil. Tunney had his Richie Quick snub-nosed automatic out. She held her own gun in her handbag.
Susan was sleepy. How could she be sleepy in a dream? She would think about it in the morning. Good night.
Susan snapped back.
‘It’s doped somehow,’ Tunney said. ‘Careful.’
She held her breath, and they climbed up again. And again.
‘Tom, we’ve gone up three flights. Outside, it was a two-storey building.’
‘Continuity error. I’ve been spotting them all evening. Shhhhh, this looks promising.’
They were in a dressing room. Robes hung from pegs along one wall.
‘I’ve seen outfits like that before,’ Tunney said. ‘The last time I was in Chinatown. An old fortune teller was wearing one.’
He took one habit down and slipped it on over his street clothes. The hood even covered his hat comfortably, and put his face in shadow.
‘You too.’
He gave her the get-up, and she got into it.
Behind a door, they could hear an audience shuffling, coughing and waiting for a show to start. Tunney stabbed towards the door with a thumb.
‘I guess we should go through and see what the picture is. Okay by you?’
‘Sure.’
‘Ladies first…’
‘Thanks a lot.’
I
had to admit the girl had guts. Or maybe the gun gave her the guts. That’s the way it was with a lot of people. Back in the world, the marshal – Juliet – had struck me that way. The hardware gave her a shell that helped her cope. But I thought Susan was tough all the way through.
She flipped the hood up over her head, fussed with it, then pushed through into the unknown.
It was a theatre, full of the Krazy Klan. Steeple-hooded types were settling into their seats, or buying refreshments and programmes from usherettes dressed in spangled tights and top hats. A magician’s hat, with a rabbit grinning out of it, was printed on the velvet curtains, with crossed wands beneath it.
Susan and I sauntered down the aisle and took seats a few rows back. Eventually, the lights dimmed, everyone hushed, the curtains parted and the show began.
Otto Kruger came out, robed, but with his hood down. He looked urbane and utterly untrustworthy. Peter Lorre was with him. He had a spherical head and fish eyes, and stayed respectfully in the background.
‘Blessed be,’ singsonged Kruger.
‘Blessed be,’ chorused the audience. We joined in, not too far off the beat to be noticed.
‘Brethen, sistren, welcome to our little
seance.
The Great Spirit of Turhan Bey is with us tonight, I assure you. The pool of the past will clear and mysteries will be unknotted, while the curtain of the future will part to reveal what lies awaiting us all. We are as but fleas on the camel of eternity, and yet to us is given the vision, the revelation and the power. As we enter the Age of The Goat and the Treefrog, Turhan Bey will guide our way towards the ultimate transcendence.’
There were cheers. Susan and I looked at each other, eyebrows going up under our hoods.
I recognised the scam. There were lots of possibilities. In
The Quick and the Dead
, I had had Richie Quick come up against a similar operator. Phoney psychics could milk their rich clients for years, charging fancy prices for rap sessions with the dear departed. And there were all sorts of ways of taking money away from the wealthy and stupid. Husbands and wives would spill juicy tidbits about their personal peccadilloes to a refined occultist during private sessions and find themselves being charmingly blackmailed. And there were people in this City who would pay well for things like inventories of valuable objects, plans of security arrangements and the combinations of private safes. Someone like Kruger was in a prime position to come by such scraps of information. I wondered if the Great God Turhan Bey was in for a cut, or if Otto was doing it all off his own bat.
A woman got up a few rows back, and threw the hood off her head. It was Margaret Dumont. She asked a question about her dead dog, and how happy little Foofles was in the afterlife. Nobody laughed, and Otto assured her in his best smoothie tones that said beast was scampering in the Elysian fields and piddling all over archangels’ sandals. Margie was happy and sat down again, a string of pearls clacking under her robe. Then a businessman asked whether he should buy this and that stock his broker had recommended on the sly, and – after a moment of concentration – Kruger gave him the word to hold off, presumably making a mental note to sweep the market himself. The Great God Turhan Bey had a lot of meaningless sayings, but his favourite proverb must be ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’.
I could have dozed off. We had to put up with a succession of dead grannies, occult trivia, psychic charades, aura readings and attempts to probe the future. As a magic show, it was a bust, but money kept changing hands. Kruger didn’t soil himself with the lucre, but Lorre had his fist out at every opportunity, and was wadding the bills into a fat, healthy roll while his master attempted union with the Infinite.
Kruger kept making little inspirational speeches about what Turhan Bey held for us all in the future. He picked people apparently at random, and told them which illnesses would strike. He recommended doctors. That must be another cute angle. He told ugly old women they would meet handsome young men soon, he told handsome young men they would meet large sums of money soon, he told dimwitted mothers that their sons wouldn’t be coming home in nice wooden boxes, from theatres of war with a 99 per cent casualty rate, he told collectors where they could locate that elusive antique backscratcher needed to complete a set. And every time he told someone something, money gravitated into Lorre’s bankroll.
Then the act took a new turn. One I didn’t like.
‘Death is abroad in this city,’ he told us, a solemn mood suddenly falling upon him. ‘This very night, three of my closest friends have – in supposedly unconnected incidents – met with a violent fate. I say supposedly, for as all who know Turhan Bey understand, everything is connected on the spiritual plane. My friends are still traumatised by the shock of passing over, but rest assured I shall soon be attempting communion with them. The murderers of Truro Daine, George Macready and Claude Rains shall not go free, the vicious killers will face cosmic justice, that I can promise…’
A ripple passed over his face, and he clutched his lectern. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and the cords of his neck worked against each other. Even Lorre took notice, and started forwards.
‘Brethren, sistren,’ Kruger gasped, waving his sidekick back. ‘Broken is the Golden Bowl, the spirit flown for ever, let the bell toll, a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river. I sense a presence. A presence forcing its way through from the Other Side. If you would all join hands, make a communion, perhaps we can assist our friend on his long journey to this vale of tears…’
I was already holding Susan’s hand. She held that of her neighbour and I, being on the end of the row, had awkwardly to turn and grasp the hand of the man sitting behind me. There was a certain amount of rearrangement as the whole audience linked. The lights went down further, and I guessed Kruger was working up to the big climax, whatever that was.
‘Yes, yes, yes. I can feel the presence looming enormous now. The veils are parting, the mists are rent asunder. I see, I see, I see…’
Kruger expanded, and his voice deepened. He relaxed, and smiled confidently. I didn’t like the smile. I had seen it on someone’s face recently. Someone not Otto Kruger.
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You will pardon this interruption, I am sure, but the interests of justice must be served.’
I placed the voice at once.
‘It’s Daine,’ I whispered to Susan.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘You would know, wouldn’t you, sir? I am indeed Truro Daine. The
late
Truro Daine.’
The audience turned sour. I found my hand being pulled by the man behind me: My shoulder ached. Of course, I couldn’t reach for my gun. Susan’s fingers were locked about mine. I tried to let her hand go, but nothing happened. Glancing down, I saw our hands joined in a smooth lump of flesh.
‘The reason I have chosen to inconvenience this auspicious gathering is that my foul murderer is among you.’
A massed intake of breath.
‘Stand up if you would, child of Cain!’
I crammed myself down into my seat, but something pulled at me. On limp legs, I stood erect. Then I was pulling Susan and the man behind me upright. I felt nothing under my shoes, and my soles tingled. I was floating inches off the floor.
Kruger-Daine’s eyes were glowing with malevolence. The crowd was on the point of becoming a lynch mob, but were still linked in a human chain. They grumbled and stirred like a waking kraken.
I was still rising, drawn upwards. Susan had hooked her legs under her seat. Our combined hand hurt. I saw pain in her face, and felt it rush up my arm. The man behind finally let go, and screamed, Susan was overcome, and floated up beside me. Kruger-Daine’s eyes were fixed on us. We hovered some six feet above the rows of seats. Angry fists waved up, and someone threw something – a cigarette lighter? – at me, striking my knee. In the air, we were manipulated like puppets. The invisible forces brought us together and made us waltz to an unheard tune. Then the music came from nowhere, the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’. Our robes billowed as we swung around.
In Susan’s eyes, I saw the music take hold. There was something about music, something that got to her. I had noticed it before. Now she was thoroughly hypnotised. Her mouth worked silently in time with the tune.
‘There’s blood on their hands, my friend,’ Kruger-Daine bellowed. ‘They are the Destroyers Turhan Bey has warned you against. Those who would stand between you and the Achievement of the Sacred Light.’
The audience were on their feet now, shouting curses and punching the air beneath us. A couple of them had produced flaming torches from nowhere and were brandishing them with all the zeal of a party of drunken Transylvanian peasants storming Castle Frankenstein during an electrical storm. Several hoarse voices suggested unpleasant possibilities for our disposal.
‘They must be punished,’ the possessed psychic shrieked. ‘I give them to you.’
‘String ’em up,’ drawled a Western voice.
‘Burn ’em,’ chipped in a Puritan.
‘Too good for ’em, torture ’em first,’ said someone with an unhealthy imagination.
‘Hang ’em, burn ’em, torture ’em, throw ’em to the wolves, cut off their ears and nail ’em to the notice board,’ shouted a particularly excited worshipper.
‘I guess this Turhan Bey isn’t a God of Peace, Forgiveness and Harmony then?’ I said.
Kruger-Daine grinned and shook his head.
Then the force suspending us up among the chandeliers evaporated. We plunged floorwards, and the lights went out.
S
he was hanging in a thick grey fog, just floating. There were faces in the fog, faces like masks. Ropes held her wrists and ankles, chafing her. She could remember someone or something smashing the back of her head, and then taking the high dive into ice-cream country. Rats, this heroine business wasn’t the cool breeze Vanessa Vail made it out to be.
Somewhere in the formless murk, a lone blues trumpet was improvising around ‘Love for Sale’. It was an agonised wailing, bluesy and brilliant. The notes were perfectly played, but inside the tune were ear-punishing discords struggling to get out. The soloist was keeping them down. Just.
The house lights came up again. It took a while to get the focus adjusted. And when she did, the effort wasn’t worth it.
She was wearing a sarong and several garlands of flowers. She was tied to a sacrificial altar. It wasn’t exactly comfortable. There was a Susan-shaped contour in the stone, so nothing was sticking into her, but rock-chill seeped through the flimsy but modest garment. An ugly idol loomed above her, horns scraping the low ceiling, tusk-teeth distorting its mouth, three or more jewelled eyes reflecting firelight.