Authors: James Luceno
“Did you think you’d never hear from me again, Claymore?” The Shadow asked in a low tone.
Claymore swung the light in crazed arcs, ultimately catching sight of a shadow on the far wall—that of a hawk-faced man in a cloak and a tall, wide-brimmed hat. Claymore’s right arm came up and the tommy spoke to the sinister silhouette, spewing casings and sending rounds tearing into the paneled wall.
“I’m right here,” The Shadow announced in a voice that parodied Claymore’s.
Claymore twirled, aimed the light at another shadow on the wall and the staccato crackling commenced once more.
“Right here, Claymore,” the voice said from elsewhere.
A third shadow appeared, and the tommy barked.
“Here—all around you!”
A fourth shadow sprung up, then a fifth and a sixth, until Claymore was surrounded by dozens of hawkish silhouettes. Laughing madly, he rotated in place, his finger frozen on the trigger. Rounds ripped into the walls and wooden ceiling, blades of flame shooting from the jerking muzzle of the gun until it had depleted itself.
Claymore let the overheated weapon slip from his grasp, then followed it to the chevron-patterned floor, down on his hands and knees, blubbering in abject terror, The Shadow’s savage laugh assaulting his ears. From the very start, that rising taunt had expressed who was in control.
“Coward,” Claymore mumbled. “Yellow belly. Show yourself and fight like a man.”
Close by, The Shadow cleared his throat.
Claymore whirled to the sound and found himself gazing up at a black tower, slashed with red. Eyes that burned like The Shadow’s shouldn’t have produced a frigid effect, but they did. Gurgling with fear, Claymore felt himself yanked off his feet by his shirtfront and lifted high over head.
“Why, Claymore,” The Shadow said, in a tone of mocking disapproval, “you’re . . . drooling.”
Returned to the floor, the slavering Claymore was too strickened to speak. But not to laugh—insanely—or to act. With sudden strength only fear can muster, he scrambled to his feet and bounded across the room, hurling himself through the double doors that led to the corridor. In the wall opposite was a truncated pyramid of frosted glass, etched with the Monolith’s monogram. Claymore stared at it, shrugging in abject defeat; then, with a desperateness born of madness, he hurled himself through it, plunging to his death in the lobby below.
The Shadow understood that Shiwan Khan would be drawn to the sanctity of high places: mountaintops in his native Mongolia, the tops of tall buildings here in the city.
The entrance to what was to have been the Monolith’s roof-top dance club was accessed by a wide stairway, carpeted in plush, deep blue. The elaborately carved doors at the top of the stairs bore Egyptian figures with upraised swords.
The Shadow didn’t bother to knock.
The carved doors opened on an eight-foot-wide gap in a ring of stately columns, which led directly to the mosaic ostentation of the Moonlight Café’s seemingly sunken, circular dance floor. The rest of the room described a circle as well, its curving walls softened by sweeps of shimmering gold curtains. The lights of New York sparkled behind an arc of floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the north wall.
The Shadow surged through the gap onto the inlaid dance floor. Shiwan Khan, calmly enthroned under a semicircle of canopy, was alone and obviously expecting him. Nearly centered in room, the bomb hung like a silver Christmas tree ornament.
The Shadow lost no time in setting Khan straight on the seriousness of the situation. His sheathed hands disappeared beneath his cloak, only to reappear a split second later crammed full of pearl-handled retribution.
“The luck of criminals never endures for long,” he told Khan.
But if Shiwan Khan was at all troubled by the sight of the guns, his expression didn’t betray it. In fact, the city’s latest czar of crime and mayhem was actually smiling. Simultaneous with the easy squeeze of The Shadow’s trigger fingers, Khan raised his right hand in a twirling gesture, and The Shadow was thrown wildly off balance. The Shadow’s first volley of magnum rounds shattered the papyrus-headed, ormolu torchieres that flanked Khan’s high-backed chair, but not one touched him. Khan twirled his fingers again as The Shadow was righting himself and firing. Chunks of gilded wood were blasted from the arms and legs of the throne, but Khan remained untouched. And—upright in the chair—laughing gleefully, and waving away gun-smoke.
Intent on emptying them into his rival, The Shadow stiff-armed the guns, only to find himself flat on his back an instant later.
Khan slapped his knees, then positioned his hands as if they were holding a small steering wheel. A counterclockwise turn of the imaginary wheel sent the floor tilting and The Shadow sprawling, the twin automatics sliding out of reach on the acute incline Khan had summoned. When he could manage a glance, The Shadow saw Khan weeping with mirth, extending his hands, as if to be shackled, in a false gesture of surrender.
“Welcome to my funhouse, Ying Ko,” Khan told him. “The floor was built to entertain the hotel’s late-night revelers. But I seem to have found a better use for it.”
The Shadow got up on one knee, preparing to launch himself across the room. But, again, Khan anticipated him. Somber suddenly, Khan gestured sharply to something off to the right of the throne. The Shadow followed Khan’s finger to a low table, on top of which rested Marpa Tulku’s
phurba.
Khan’s hand made a beckoning motion, and the
phurba
began to stir.
The Shadow watched as the dagger with a mind of its own levitated from its stand and rocketed toward him.
T
he triple bladed knife interrupted its flight momentarily to hover in midair, inches from his head; then the
phurba
folded itself into an L, so that the face carved into its knobby handle could show The Shadow a look of loathsome recognition.
The Shadow’s gloved hand flew for the hilt, but the knife quickly leapt from his grip and began bucking and feinting, aiming first for his arms, then his thighs, then jabbing for his face. The Shadow ducked and the knife spiraled past him, glancing off a column and turning end over end before positioning itself for another run.
The Shadow threw himself to one side as it swooped down on him, catching and tearing a piece from the cloak. Toppled by a sudden tilting of the floor, The Shadow was a second too late in fending off the dagger’s follow-up attack on his face. Snarling viciously, it dove for him while he was still tumbling, slicing open his left cheek. The Shadow crab-walked sideways as the blade struck at his hands and feet, then speared for his groin.
The Shadow dropped himself into a sitting posture and spread his legs wide. The knife hit the floor between his legs and tore another piece from the cloak. It skidded backward on its tip, then propelled itself into the air, rotating and twisting, and nosedived for its target, slicing The Shadow’s right cheek.
The Shadow saw it drawing a bead on his groin once more, only this time he was ready for it: no sooner did it strike the floor than he had both hands wrapped around the hilt, the upper hand crushed on the head itself, clamping its jaws shut. Bringing all the strength of his powerful arms to bear, he managed to reangle the dagger so that it was pointing more or less at its still enthroned master.
But for all his effort, The Shadow only succeeded in further angering the possessed knife. Now when it rocketed across the room, it took him along for the ride, slamming him into a column, launching him toward the ceiling, stripping him of his signature hat . . .
Shiwan Khan was at the edge of his seat, observing the contest with mounting disillusionment. When he spoke, his disgust was evident. “Look at you,” he told The Shadow. “You’re not even capable of controlling yourself, much less the
phurba
.”
The knife had him backed to the wall, its tip pressed an eighth-inch into the flesh of his neck. The ebbing strength of The Shadow’s hands was all that prevented it from fully slitting his throat. Blood running from the wounds in his cheeks and the slowly elongating wound the dagger was etching into his neck, The Shadow was practically eye to eye with the dagger’s scowling face.
Forcing an exhale of disappointment, Khan shrugged off his beaded robe, rose, and stepped down onto the slowly revolving dance floor.
Hearing him approach, The Shadow closed his eyes and took himself back to Tibet—not to the palace of Ying Ko, the poppy fields over which he had presided, the bloody wars with rival chieftains—but to the Temple of the Cobras and to the apprenticeship he had served there.
Khan was wrong: Ying Ko
had
learned to control the
phurba.
But the passive, yin state in which control was achieved had become a stranger to him. Magic and sorcery had little place in the two-fisted, gun-blazing world of vengeful derring-do, where physical prowess mattered above all. That didn’t mean, though, that The Shadow couldn’t find his way to that calm center again.
Across the room, Khan halted, seeming to sense in The Shadow’s sudden composure what was occurring. “What are you up to now, Ying Ko?” he started to say, as The Shadow’s hands loosened their hold on the dagger.
And by then it was too late. The
phurba
hung suspended for a moment; then it moved away from The Shadow’s neck, gathering speed as it flew, tumbling across the room, and thrust itself deep into the left side of Shiwan Khan’s abdomen.
Wide-eyed and gasping in agony, Khan staggered backward.
For almost an hour, Margo and Shrevnitz had been standing in teeming rain, waiting for something to happen. They were under the awning of a luncheonette across the street from the vacant lot but had their umbrellas open just the same. Shrevnitz was holding a book entitled
How to Improve Your Psychic Ability,
a sequel to the one he figured he had already mastered.
“You know what I love about this job, Miss Lane?” he said. “The excitement.”
Margo nodded without taking her eyes from the lot. That Shiwan Khan had hypnotized the entire city into believing that the Hotel Monolith had been torn down was one thing, but it was quite another that the raindrops themselves seemed to be ignoring the building. Shouldn’t it look like someone had opened a huge, invisible umbrella above the lot? Magic operated by different rules, she decided.
“Shrevvy, we’re staring at a vacant lot,” she said, heaving a sigh of sodden bafflement. She turned her head to look at him. “We’re standing here in the rain, staring at a vacant lot.”
Shrevnitz shrugged, as if to say that it was all part of the job.
And all at once their patience was rewarded.
Concurrent with Khan’s stabbing, the citywide spell began to lift, revealing the Hotel Monolith in all its glory. White, with vertical stripes of blue-glaze tiling, a shimmering example of what had been termed “Industrial Moderne,” it soared twelve stories to a tall, cylindrical crown, which itself was capped by a 360-degree frieze of naturalistic arabesque. Any sense of squatness was mitigated by symmetrical setbacks at three-story intervals; and central to the façade stood a two-story-tall mythological figure with outstretched wings.
Margo’s mouth had dropped open. “That’s what he saw! It’s unbelievable!”
For blocks in every direction, pedestrians braving the storm were voicing similar exclamations, gesturing in arrant disbelief to the structure that had suddenly sprang up in their midst. Taxicabs and other vehicles slid out of control on the wet streets, slamming into light poles, mailboxes, and one another. With the city under a threat of imminent death by an Asian madman, was the building’s appearance a sign of the end—a kind of precatastrophe mass hallucination?
Margo and Shrevnitz hurried into the street, weaving their way through a jumble of cars and their stunned occupants. The hackie made a quick side trip to the Cord for a crowbar, which he used to snap the lock from the fence gate. Then he and Margo dashed across a mud-slicked marble apron for the hotel’s triple set of front doors.
In the throne room, struggling to rally from their wounds, Shiwan Khan and The Shadow eyed each other across the tottering, counterclockwising floor. Khan was certainly the worse off, and yet he managed to yank the
phurba
from his body and release a roar that blew out all the glass in the curving north wall. The sky fulminated. Rain and wind whipped at potted palms and ferns that sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The bloody dagger in hand, Khan staggered across the dance floor and up the few stairs to one of the columns. Supporting himself there for a moment, he angled for a section of the east wall, where gold silk curtained the entrance to his meditation chamber.
The Shadow got to his feet and followed, nourishing one of the retrieved magnums with a fresh clip. He raised the weapon and ripped the curtains to one side. But instead of finding his adversary or some secret exit, there was only a towering, upright coffin—the silver coffin of Temüjin, which Khan’s henchmen had stolen from the Museum of Art and Antiquity a day earlier.
The Shadow dropped what was left of his cloak and undid the five dragon’s-foot latches that secured the coffin’s sculpted doors. Throwing them open, he shoved the automatic forward. But the coffin, too, was empty.
Cautiously, he began to run his hand over the moiré inner lining. Then, finding nothing peculiar, he stepped inside, ultimately allowing the doors to close behind him. Something clicked in the dark, and the bottom panel of the coffin gave way.
Wounded, Khan had lost his hold on Reinhardt Lane as well.
The professor came to his senses in what he quickly recognized was an expensive hotel room—though he couldn’t for the life of him recall how he had gotten there. The lamps on either side of the double bed were on, and he was standing fully dressed, opposite a wall mirror centered over the couch. Gazing out the window, he determined that he was at least ten stories above the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
He went to the door and peeked into a lighted hallway, elegantly decorated, with gray carpeting, and antique chairs, canopies, and commodes. The odd thing was, he seemed to be the floor’s sole guest.