The Shadow (6 page)

“But this Shadow is really beginning to get under my skin. Tomorrow I’m going to appoint a special task force to investigate this guy. We’re going to find out exactly who he is, and we’re going to put a stop to his interfering with police business.”

Cranston leaned out of the light of the small table lamp, back into shadow. He raised his left hand to his chin, aiming the ruby-red ring at Barth. “You’re not going to appoint a task force,” he said, in the deep voice of his truer self.

Barth’s head twitched. “No, the hell with it,” he said after a moment. “I’m not going to appoint a task force.” He seemed conflicted, embarrassed to have uttered his earlier statements.

Cranston remained in shadow. “You’re not going to pay any attention to these reports.”

“Ignore them entirely,” Barth said, ridiculing the idea.

“There is no Shadow.”

Barth raised his eyes and rolled his tongue in his cheek. “There is no Shadow. He’s some kind of myth. If there were,” he laughed shortly, “I’d be Eleanor Roosevelt.” He screwed his eyes shut and leaned forward, pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked questioningly at Cranston, who was back in the light. “Where was I?”

“You were about to tell me who
she
is,” Cranston said, indicating the ingénue he had noted earlier.

Barth squinted and nodded knowingly. “That’s Margo Lane. Her father’s a scientist, doing work for the War Department. Research and development, I think. Why, what’s your sudden interest in her?”

“Uncle Wainwright, have you had your eyes checked recently? She’s lovely.”

“Maybe. But you better keep away from that one, Lamont. She’s the source of as many rumors as The Shadow. Some say she’s from Chicago and from family money, on her mother’s side. But I’ve heard just the opposite, that she grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Or at least until her father made a name for himself. He apparently couldn’t care less about money, one way or the other.”

“Married?” Cranston asked.

“Twice—if you believe the stories, once to a stock broker named Stevenson, then to a black from New Orleans. What’s more, the word is she’s strange.” He tapped his temple. “Up here.”

“Really?” Cranston said, intrigued. “Exactly my type.”

H
ow many more times was it going to take before this guy got the message? Margo asked herself. All his high-handed talk about tennis and yachting, when what she wanted was a taste of something new and different, something with an element of adventure, even danger, in it. But she couldn’t be angry at Chad for trying. He was all about tennis and yachts; they all were, his whole clique of well-heeled bachelor friends. So she smiled, laughed at his jokes, and thanked her lucky stars when he finally returned to his table.

She tapped her foot to the band, to the clarinet player’s melodic solo. She was accustomed to the flirtations and advances, and well aware of how good she looked that night. The gown had been dying to be worn, and she had refused to allow her father’s last-minute cancellation to ruin the evening. Wild horses couldn’t have stopped her. But to have showed up alone at the Cobalt Club! Lucky for her the maître d’ had even agreed to seat her.

With Chad gone, she reached for the menu. There, too, nothing but the same old dishes when she wanted something with flavor, with spice. She should have gone to Little Italy, she told herself, or better still, to Chinatown. Well, a glass of something would help. She snagged a white-gloved waiter, bearing an open bottle of wine.

“Would you bring me a glass of Mouton—”

“Rothschild, Nineteen Twenty-eight,” he said, showing her the label of the bottle.

“Why, yes,” she said, at once surprised and delighted.

“From the gentleman,” the waiter continued, pouring for her to sample.

“Gentleman?”

“Lamont Cranston,” a voice announced.

He was standing at the table, one hand to the cummerbund of his tux, the handsome man she’d been flirting with earlier. He gestured to the chair opposite hers.

“May I?”

Encouraged by his choice of wines, she smiled, allowing a hint of suspicion. He was tall and impeccably dressed, but he spoke in a mannered way that didn’t quite match the hard aspect of his face, which—while calm and well molded—was somewhat masklike, as if it veiled what lay beneath it. She was reminded of a man she met a year earlier, on a cruise of the Caribbean. He positioned the chair directly to her right, but before he could say anything, Chad was back, leaning between the two of them.

“One thing I neglected to mention, Margo. Some of us are going over to Billy Reed’s place a little later on, and I was wondering if you’d join us.”

“Chad,” she said, “this is Mr. Cranston.”

He looked over his shoulder at the man he was practically elbowing in the face. “Sorry to cut in like this, old chap, but it simply can’t wait.”

Cranston smiled without showing his teeth and touched his fingertips to his chin.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Chad went on. “You’ll hear some great jazz, and it’ll give us a chance to talk and get better acquainted. Or are you more the jive and boogie-woogie type?”

For reasons unexplained, Chad had picked up the bottle of wine and was holding it at waist level. Margo watched him, hardly hearing a word of what he was saying.

“We never seem to be able to hook up, you and I, and I—”

Chad had tipped the bottle to his cummerbund and was suddenly pouring the wine down the inside of his trousers. Margo’s hand flew to her mouth, but not fast enough to stifle a laugh. “Chad, what are you doing?”

He looked down, then up at her in alarmed confusion. “Oh, my god,” he sputtered. “Excuse me, excuse me.”

He hurried away, leaving Margo to stare at Cranston in disbelief.

“People,” he said, with exaggerated nonchalance. “It’s interesting to note, however, that all three of us seem to favor the Twenty-eight.”

Margo laughed out loud.

Cranston had a silver dollar in his hand, and was rolling it across his knuckles and making it disappear into his palm. “You know, it’s the strangest thing,” he said suddenly. “I have an irresistible craving for Peking duck.”

The comment unnerved her. “That’s so odd,” she managed. “I was thinking earlier about Chinese food.”

“Imagine the coincidence.” His grin was roguish. “But, listen, since we’re both craving the same thing, perhaps you’d join me for dinner?”

He stood up and offered her his arm.

Which she impetuously accepted.

“That was Chinese, wasn’t it?” Margo asked after Cranston finished ordering and the waiter had hurried off to the kitchen.

“Mandarin, actually,” he told her in false modesty.

Margo eyed him dubiously. “Is that right.” She gestured with her chin to an Asian couple seated nearby, who couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other and were whispering intimately. “What are those two saying?”

Cranston smiled. “A test, is that the idea?” When she nodded, he leaned slightly in the direction of the couple and listened for a moment, his grin widening.

The decor of the restaurant was understated: Chinese silk screens on the walls, candlesticks and black enamel vases with sprigs of dried flowers on the tables. The tablecloths were salmon-colored and matched the window valences, and the china was emblazoned with hand-painted Oriental dragons.

“They’d like to sneak away for the weekend, but they’re undecided on the excuse he should give his wife.”

He studied Margo while she studied the couple. She was more petite than she looked from a distance. She had prominent cheekbones and her big blue eyes were widely spaced. Her nails were short and lacquered red, and her scent was Hermes No. 1. Her wavy hair was swept behind her left ear, revealing a dangling pearl teardrop. Rhinestone cuffs adorned both her wrists; a diamond-cluster cocktail ring, her right hand.

Margo forced an exhale. “Well, whatever he’s saying, I wouldn’t trust a word of it. He already has guilt written all over him.”

Cranston’s brows arched. “Does he? I hadn’t noticed. But tell me, what exactly does guilt look like? Can you read it on a face?”

“I can certainly read it on yours.” Margo’s eyes went from Cranston’s to the table.

He followed her gaze to where his hand rested atop hers. But instead of shrugging it off, she took hold of it, turning it over to study the palm.

“A very peculiar life line,” she announced after a moment. “It splits in two, see?”

Cranston peered at the uppermost, slopping crease in his palm, which did indeed bifurcate.

“That usually suggests secrets, or at least a secret life. Do you have guilty secrets, Mr. Cranston?”

He acted unfazed. “One or two, perhaps. But doesn’t everyone? Don’t you?”

She laughed lightly—evasively. “None that are very exciting, I’m afraid. You, on the other hand—”

“So to speak.”

Her smile tightened. “You strike me as someone with a dark past.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “There’s your affiliation with certain political groups, for example, and your reputation with women . . .”

“Greatly exaggerated. It’s just that I’m very sociable.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now—‘sociability’?”

He rested his chin in his hand and gazed at her. “You have something against being sociable, Miss Lane?”

“Not necessarily.”

“I’d love for us to be sociable together.” His eyes probed.

“I’ll just bet you would,” she said knowingly. Then her hand went to her head, as if pained.

“Is something the matter,” he asked in mild alarm.

She shook her head. “A headache, but different. It feels like—”

“Static?”

She glanced at him. The shadow of a passing waiter fell across her face. “Yes. But why would you say that?”

Cranston broke eye contact, suddenly angry with himself for toying with her. He hadn’t figured her for the sensitive type, but she was, and she’d somehow sensed his gentle invasion of her thoughts. All to uphold his reputation as womanizer and thoughtless rake, a part he sometimes despised having to play, even if those manipulations did nurture his cruel streak.

“You’re a very unusual man, Mr. Cranston,” Margo was saying. “You knew my favorite wine, you guessed that I’d be in the mood for Peking duck. Now you seem to know what it feels like to be inside my head.” She paused. “Not to mention that you speak
Mandarin
.”

Cranston made light of it. “Perhaps it’s just that we’re compatible—sociably, of course.”

She considered it. “Possibly. But I feel as though you’re manipulating me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I suspect that you’re trying to seduce me.”

“You think so?”

“Call it a sixth sense. And while I suppose I should be flattered, I’m not entirely sure I trust you.”

Cranston reached for the wine bottle. “More wine?”

The smile she returned was ambiguous. “You tell me.”

Her apartment was in a brownstone on East Forty-second Street, number 67, on a tree-lined block with low hedges separating one staircase and stoop from the next. Shrevnitz drove them. Cranston held the door for her, then followed her to the foot of the granite stairs. The street and sidewalk were puddled with rain.

“Thank you. I had a wonderful time,” Margo told him.

She wore a white, long-haired fox stole, with an elaborately beaded lining. It was tucked up under her chin and draped over her shoulders in a way that kept winter from touching her.

“I can’t recall a more stimulating evening,” he said, in the same counterfeit tone.

Dinner had gone smoothly if quietly. He had spent the time in his mind rather than hers. But the fact that she had responded to his earlier tricks was intriguing. In Tibet, he’d met adepts who could receive but not send; others who could only send; and still others with the ability to cloud the most balanced of minds. But because of her perhaps innate telepathic ability, Margo Lane was a potential threat to him.

“We should do it again sometime,” she said now.

Cranston took too long to respond. “By all means. Let’s.”

Their handshake was nothing more than polite. But when he turned to head for the cab, something brought him back around. Margo, too, had turned on the stairs and was staring at him. Quickly, they covered the distance between them and slipped into each other’s arms, kissing deeply, despite all that had been said, all that he’d been telling himself. But he wasn’t alone in feeling bewildered. The kiss left Margo as breathless as it did him.

“Good night, Mr. Cranston.”

“Good night, Miss Lane,” he said, climbing into the Cord’s backseat.

Shrevnitz let out a low, appreciative whistle while he was shifting from first to second gear. “I like her, boss. She seems different than most dames.”

Cranston had his head angled to the rear window. Margo was still on the steps, gazing at the cab. “More than even she knows.”

All the cavalier nonchalance had left his voice.

Shrevnitz cut his eyes to the rearview mirror. “I don’t get it.”

“I think she’s completely unaware of her abilities.”

“No kidding. That mean you’re gonna see her again?”

“No, it’s much too dangerous.”

“Dangerous for who?”

“For me, Shrevvy.”

The Cranston manse was only a few blocks north, on East Fifty-third, in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay section. The huge house had a touch of French
pierre de taille
and was set back from the street by a semicircle of driveway that coursed through tall wrought-iron gates embellished with the letter
C
on a blue background. The Cranston fortune had been made in railroads and manufacturing, among other things, and had survived Black Friday by dint of the late Theodore Cranston’s uncanny knack for the market. Cranston was one of few New Yorkers who hadn’t sold his property to a developer because of the servant problem, or the escalating costs of maintaining fifty rooms in the heart of a thriving city.

The interior was lavishly appointed with brocaded drapes and couches, massive examples of hardwood furniture, and family heirlooms handed down by several generations of Cranstons. One entire wing had been given over to the treasures and trophy heads of game animals Lamont Cranston had collected in a decade of traveling to remote corners of the world. The house had the look and feel of permanence, as if the Cranstons were only the latest in a long and continuing line of distinguished occupants.