Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 176 - Terror Wears No Shoes

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Terror Wears No Shoes
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine June 1948
“Our job is to find Long Tom Roberts”—and that's the beginning of a weird, wonderful adventure that
involved characters like The Honest Pole and a glamour-puss named Canto, who was a legend before
she was twenty-five.
Here it is—Doc Savage and his aides at their best!
Chapter I
HE met her finally. He arranged it through the aid of a man called but obviously not named the Honest
Pole. The Honest Pole was short, near-sighted, and he over-filled a Ceylon silk suit. He was only half
Polish, and the other half was anybody's guess as long as the guess was amber skin and slant eyes. He
was called the Honest Pole for the same reason that fat men are called Slim.
He paid the Honest Pole some money—half the price of the job, but it looked like a lot in Chungking
dollars—and he explained to the Honest Pole what he wished. Where, when and how.
“Four men,” he said. “Don't you think four men will be enough? I don't want it to look fishy.”
“Four men. Excellent,” said the Honest Pole in his English that would have been superb if he hadn't
spoken it through his nose.
“It will be done, then?”
The Honest Pole examined him thoughtfully. “More than four men, if you wish. You are very big. Very
powerful, obviously.”
“But I walk with a cane.”
“True also. Maybe four will be enough.”
“My leg is not reliable. If it should collapse during the proceedings, it would be embarrassing.”
“I will warn the four men about your leg. Not to kick or strike it. But I would like more than this as a
down payment.”
“It's enough. I'm no fool.”
“She is quite a woman. Such a one as few have ever known. To tinker with her is worth more money in
advance.”
“That's the bottom cent now.”
“I would like more advance money.”
“You won't get it.”
“All right, you are plainly a fine man, and I will trust you more than my custom,” said the Honest Pole, at
the same time wondering in the back of his head who this big man had killed, robbed or swindled in the
past and how profitable it had been.
She was called Canta. If she had another name it was not public property.
The Honest Pole went to her at once. He told her about it.
“A great bumbling fool,” he said. “He paid me ten times what was needed, and half that in advance.”
“He sounds like a fool.”
“He is.”
“And you are going to take what he paid you, deliver no services, and be seen by him no more?”
“That will be as you say,” said the Honest Pole, grinning.
He'd had some trouble getting to see her. He was surprised he had. She was rather legendary, and he'd
wanted to meet her for a long time, and better still, do her a service. He'd like to be one of those who
worked for her. She was generous. She was always finding the means that enabled her to be generous.
She was clever. Not yet twenty-five, certainly, the Honest Pole thought, looking at her but not staring,
and already a legend.
She had sat at a teak desk while listening to him. The desk was a masterpiece of femininity, inlaid with
ivory and tufted with pastel silk. Some of the stuff on the desk was gold and her cigarette holder was
platinum.
She arose now and went to the window, the great expanse of window, a whole wall of glass, that
overlooked the packed matted thickness of the city. From this height and magnificence, the city seemed
colorful and beautiful and the sampans on the river and the steamers lying in the stream or at the docks
made an intriguing combination of the stuff that looks well on travel folders. It was the height and the
magnificence that did it.
The Honest Pole thought: I wish I had for income what she pays for this hotel penthouse. That I do wish.
She said, “Do what he wishes.”
The Honest Pole jumped a little, not having expected this.
“Indeed?” he gasped.
She nodded. “Things are a little dull with me. This is simple-minded diversion, and if it isn't entertaining, I
can do something about that.”
“You wish me to proceed as agreed with him?”
“Yes. . . . With slight alterations.”
“Alterations?”
“Yes. Have the four men you hired rough him up a little.”
The Honest Pole hesitated. He thought of the things he had heard of this unusual woman. He preferred to
do his murdering with a little more discretion. “How much do you wish him roughed?” he asked.
“Enough so he'll earn it.”
“That would be very rough indeed, to pay for the privilege of meeting you,” said the Pole gallantly.
“Don't overdo it. Not a hospital case. Just teach him a little lesson.”
“I see. A payment for folly?”
“A payment,” she said, “for thinking up an asinine, childish, soft-headed gag like the one he's trying to
pull.”
So he was roughed. It took place that evening, while she walked alone in the Crown Regal garden, one
of the few places in the city where it was ten percent safe for a woman to walk alone at that time of night.
Not, however, that she wasn't an exception and could have gone alone and untouched, unspoken to, in
any part of the city at any hour, excepting the rare chance that she might meet some dunce who hadn't
heard of her. Somebody who wouldn't have heard of Stalin, or Chiang, or Truman or Clark Gable.
The four men came at her. He was soon to the rescue. He bounded from the spot where he had been
waiting, a great figure of a man who hop-skipped favoring his right leg and who waved his cane. That
was the idea.
Not a new idea. Just about as new with mankind as the act of breathing. He had hired them to molest
her, and he was going to save her from them. Be a hero. Lady in distress; gallantry to the rescue.
Whiskers down to here.
He didn't know, of course, that the four men had orders to whale the tar out of him. But his ignorance
didn't long persist. They tied into him. The Honest Pole had been choosy, and he had hired men who
knew how to hurt a man. Scum who had been strained through the sieves of Hongkong, Canton,
Shanghai, men whom the Shanghai Municipal Police, said to be the toughest in the world, would have
gone at with care. They had orders to take him apart, but leave the pieces hanging together, and that was
also soon evident.
She watched. She instantly saw how bad they were going to be. She was shocked. She knew violence,
and she could see, and she didn't want it that nasty. Not nasty enough that she would be bothered with
anything like pity.
She spoke shrilly, angrily, in Kwangtungese. A branch of the Chinese language full of snake-tongues. A
small automatic pistol, gold and jewels where it didn't need to be excellent steel, was in her hand.
They didn't hear her. They didn't see the gun. They were busy. The air, about eighty cubic feet of it, was
full of manpower. The general effect was that of a dark ball out of which came barks, yelps, grunts,
hisses, and in the course of a few moments, men in various degrees of injury. Those who could, ran. The
other two crawled away into the bushes.
He picked up his cane. His hat. He didn't have any shirt and his trousers had one leg more or less intact.
He leaned on the cane and looked at her.
“How long did it take?” he asked.
She wanted to giggle. She had an overwhelming impulse to do so. She had wondered what speech he
planned to make when he had established himself as Galahad, the hero, the savior. She wondered if it
was this one. If so, he might be somewhat original after all.
His next statement was a bit more in form: He said, “You shouldn't walk alone around here at night.”
She gave him a bromide herself. “You saved my life!” she said. She got proper drama into it.
He grinned slightly. “I didn't know it was going to be that rough.”
You probably didn't, she thought. But you did all right. In fact, you did about as good as I've seen done.
“You were wonderful!” she exclaimed.
“You think so?” he said. “I do best with odd numbers, really. Fives, sevens, nines.”
“You needn't joke.”
“I'm not.”
She said, a little more thoughtfully than she intended, “I can almost believe that.”
He was indeed a big man, and his features were not bad, not bad at all, and his eyes had a cast of
copper in them that caught the small lights from the lanterns on the hsiao lu. She detested handsome
men, and they always reminded her of two things, either throat-slitting weasels or knives with brown
bone handles. This one wasn't too handsome. And he was remarkably big for one without any fat at all.
He said, “If you will care to walk to the safety of the fan-dien, I will walk well behind you to see that you
get there.”
“Why well behind?”
“Obvious reasons. No shirt, for one thing.”
She said, “Don't be silly. I'll get you a shirt. I owe you that much, surely.” She was thinking that he'd
taken a big chance, offering to step out of the picture that way. Or maybe he hadn't—because wasn't she
inviting him along?
She was equally uncertain about him an hour later, when he left her. It had taken that long to have him
brought a shirt, a finer one than he'd had torn off him, undoubtedly. Because he wasn't expensively
dressed. Not at all.
He'd used the interval waiting for the shirt to show her his obvious traits, which he seemed to think, or
gave the impression that he thought, were good ones. He was a braggart. He made bum jokes. Not dirty
ones; just naïve and not clever. He boasted incessantly without bragging of specific deeds, but giving the
impression that he was a killer-diller.
It didn't soak into her until later, but the only specific things she learned about him was that he was using
the name of Jonas and he lived at the Shan Loo Hotel.
Adding it up, watching him hitch-step his way down the hotel corridor, she didn't get it. He hadn't made a
pass. He hadn't asked for a job. He hadn't offered to let her in on any big deal. Why, then, all this
finagling?
Maybe he was a slow and cunning worker.
He walked a few hundred feet through the grimy winding and slightly dangerous tunnels of the native
streets, then hailed a mache pulled by a knock-kneed horse, giving the address of his hotel, the Shan
Loo.
The Shan Loo was no dump. The Nip officers had favored it with their patronage during the occupation,
but it had been refurbished, was back under old management, and full of the better-heeled foreigners and
more successful local black-marketeers. There were a few Generals of the type that used to be called
War Lords, a scattering of diplomats, and quite a foundation of American businessmen out to squeeze a
dollar.
He was well into the lobby when he met one of these businessmen, a Mr. Wesley T. Goltinger. Mr.
Goltinger traveled on an expense account of a hundred dollars a day. Oil.
The meeting with Goltinger was a loud encounter.
“Doc Savage!” Goltinger yelped. “Good God! Imagine meeting you here!”
He stopped—he had to; Goltinger was in front of him like an autograph hound that had just discovered
Jimmy Stewart—and looked through and beyond Goltinger.
“Some mistake,” he said.
“Mistake nothing!” howled Goltinger. “I'd know Doc Savage anywhere. Why, I met you at an oil
chemist's meeting, remember? You gave a technical talk for thirty minutes, and I didn't understand one
word.”
“Mistaken,” he said.
He stepped around Goltinger and went on and vanished somewhere.
“That's a hell of a way to treat a fellow American citizen!” Goltinger complained.
Chapter II
THE thing that now occurred to Goltinger shouldn't have happened to a dog. He said so himself just
before he received a punch in the stomach.
Goltinger headed for the bar. He felt that he'd been insulted, and that the condition would be abetted by a
drink, which would also be company for several he'd had already.
A strange voice at his elbow suggested, “Let's have a little detour, pal.”
Goltinger looked down at a short, wide, homely man who wore a considerable crop of shingle-nail hair
of rusted color. The stranger was so homely that he seemed a little ridiculous.
“Go away, beautiful,” said Goltinger.
“Never mind my looks,” said the other. “You and me are going into conference.”
“Go find a baby to frighten,” suggested Goltinger.
The short one laid a hand on Goltinger's arm and said, “Let's not debate it here in public.”
“Debate hell!” said Goltinger. “I been insulted. I been ignored by Doc Savage, a fellow American. By
God, the first good New York face I've seen in days, and he snotted me. It shouldn't happen to a dog,
the way he—”
The fist made some sound, but not much. Not enough for anyone to notice. Goltinger's mouth opened,
stayed open, and his knees buckled as his legs turned to spaghetti. But he stayed on his feet, held there
by the stocky man who was wearing the same amiable grin he'd worn all along. Goltinger was in fact
walked outdoors with his feet skating along the floor, and he was heaved into a waiting car. The homely
man got in also, forced Goltinger's mouth open, and popped a capsule into his mouth. Then he whacked
Goltinger's Adam's apple smartly so that Goltinger had to swallow.
Twelve hours and an odd number of minutes later, when Goltinger awakened, he made the
difficult-to-explain discovery that he was on a plane. A clipper. He looked out of a window. He saw
more water than he liked.
“Where the hell am I?” he blurted at his seat-mate.
The seat-mate, a slender young man with the air of a professional diplomat—dignity, a ready smile that
wasn't to be too much believed—touched Goltinger's arm and suggested, “Sit down and take it easy,
Mr. Goltinger. I'm your escort.”
“Escort! What the hell is this?” Goltinger gasped.
“A quick voyage home for you, Mr. Goltinger.”
“By God, nobody can do this to me!” said Goltinger feelingly. “I'll talk to our diplomats about this!”
“Then you can spill it to me,” said the seat-mate. “I'm one of your diplomats.”
Two hotel servants had been near enough to hear Goltinger hail the big man as Doc Savage. One of
these was from Yu San, and by now he was home in Yu San, not a little confused. He'd received a
month's vacation with pay, something that had never before happened to a servant in that hotel. The other
lackey was in jail in Canton, which was also quite a few miles from the hotel lobby where Goltinger had
hailed the big man. He could have had a paid vacation as well, except that it happened he was wanted by
the Canton police for a little matter of skull-thumping an Englishman a few months previously.
Having made these arrangements, the short homely man who had all the rusty hair got around to tapping
on the door of the big man who had given the woman Canta the name of Jonas.
“Who is it?”
“It's me.”
The man using the name of Jonas opened the door, and said clearly in a pleasant voice, “Thank you for
returning the suit so well-mended, Mr. Wang. Thank you very much. I shall call at your shop and take
care of the bill.”
The homely man, who hadn't brought a suit, and couldn't have mended one either, said, “Thank you, Sir.”
He winked elaborately. “It is a pleasure to have your business.” Then he went away.
He went to a rather expensive room in a hotel patronized by many foreigners, Americans plentiful among
them, and which had the not inconsiderable virtue of exits opening on four different streets.
There was another man in the room, a slender and very dapper one who wore afternoon clothes because
it was afternoon, and who carried a slim cane of dark wood. The homely one addressed the
overly-dressed one as Ham, and was in turn addressed as Monk. That was the extent of their civility.
They began quarrelling, not as men who really had a deep-seated grudge, but more as a matter of habit.
They spent the next forty minutes thinking up insults, and the dapper one unjointed his cane, which
proved to be a sword cane, and while continuing the squabble, freshened an application of some sticky
drug which was applied to the tip of the sword blade. He made no comment about the cane, and Monk
did not seem to think it was extraordinary, hardly noted the operation.
Jonas came finally.
Monk looked at him. “Doc, you think your place may be wired?”
“No point in taking a chance,” Doc Savage said. “How about Goltinger and the two hotel employees?”
Monk, rather pleased with himself, explained about that. “No fuss. No feathers. They're gone with the
wind and won't be missed.”
“The two servants—they have a chance to spill anything where it might not be good?”
“Nope. And I don't think they even overheard Goltinger call you Doc Savage.”
“We can't take a chance.”
“We didn't.”
Doc Savage swung to the window. The hot morning sunlight came through the panes in long pale blades
and out before him the city was coated with groundfog that the sun would soon burn away. He stood
straight, with no suggestion of stoop nor limp, and the absence of either gave him a completely different
appearance.
Presently he moved a little, shaping up his reflection in the windowglass, and frowned at it, comparing it
with his normal appearance, which was quite a bit different yet. He ended that by shaking his head.
“Disguises,” he said, “are always uncertain. . . . But not that uncertain.” He swung around suddenly.
“Take a look at me! What's wrong?”
Ham Brooks jointed the cane together with a soft whisper and flash of steel. “Nothing is wrong, Doc.
You don't look any more like yourself than Pike's Peak looks like the Empire State. Less.”
“But Goltinger, half-drunk, recognized me at a glance.”
“He was eleven-twelfths drunk,” Monk said.
“Shut up, dopey,” Ham told Monk. Then he told Doc Savage, “That puzzled me, and I did some
checking on this Goltinger. The guy is a face-remembering freak. You've heard of those mental oddities
who can glance at a newspaper page and a year later tell you everything that was on the page? Well,
Goltinger does it with people. I got on the trans-Pacific telephone and dug up that information. So it's
nothing to worry about. It was just one of those unfortunate things that happen.”
“It's covered up now?” Doc asked.
“Thoroughly.”
“Good enough.”
Monk scratched an ear. “How did your pick-up with the tiger lady come out?”
Doc Savage frowned. “That rascal, the Honest Pole, doublecrossed me. He told the four men to beat me
up. To stop it, I'm almost afraid I had to appear a little too good in a brawl.”
Monk grinned. “I'd like to have seen that.”
“See if you can't arrange for something mildly unpleasant to happen to the Honest Pole,” Doc directed.
Monk nodded. “Can do.”
Doc eyed him doubtfully. “Better let Ham handle it. The last time you arranged a mild unpleasantness for
me, the victim came near never leaving the hospital.”
Monk wasn't hurt. He said, “But you and the tiger lady got along all right?”
“It went as planned.”
“I'd like to make some plans with that babe,” Monk said longingly. “Couldn't we arrange that? After all, I
might be a handy gadget to have around.”
Ham Brooks snorted.
Doc Savage frowned at Monk, and said quietly, “Our job here is to find Long Tom Roberts, if he is
alive, or learn what happened to him if he is dead.”
Chapter III
“I HADN'T intended to,” said Canta when he called her about four. “But I will.”
They went to the Chung Restaurant—the proprietor was not named Chung; the place was called after the
Chinese word chung, which meant any insect—and had a private dining room with a little stage all of its
own on which a succession of performers appeared with their acts. She ordered an exquisite seng-tsai,
and gao-yang ruh specially killed for them and served with a gidi-moh sauce, topped by a particular
rose petal coffee and a nui-nai bing of rare species from Sze Chwan province.
“I can see this is going to cost me,” he said.
“I hope so,” she said.
“Why did you change your mind?” he asked.
“When was that?”
“About not going out with me.”
“Oh, that was before you called,” she said.
“Really?”
She nodded. “It was when I heard that our friend the Honest Pole had met with an accident.”
“Accident?” His face was as enigmatic as hers, but he was wondering what Ham Brooks had done to the
Honest Pole, and whether it wouldn't have been just as pleasant for the Pole to have let Monk do it.
“Accident,” she said, “spelled b-l-a-c-k-j-a-c-k. According to my information, the Pole will not look the
same again.”
“Let's hope not.”
She frowned sharply. “You're cold-blooded.”
“Me?” He feigned astonishment. “Matter of fact, I don't even know the gentleman, do I?”
She smiled at that. Deliberately, and with intent to stir him, one way or another. He had no intention of
really being stirred, but he wanted to act as if he was, and he put on a show of being so. Such a good
show that it was too good, and he wondered which was acting and which was actuality.
She was lovely. No question about that. Her smile was an electric light or a warm bath, whichever you
wished. And just looking at her was about the same thing. He made the latter discovery, and promptly
unhooked from the business at hand, stared into space, and gave himself six or seven warnings in quick
succession.
A waiter brought rare Burmese wine in which the candied eyes of larks floated and glistened, together
with an array of early dynasty crockery that made him have visions of what it would cost him if she
dropped a cup. Museum stuff, strictly.
“Do you like hamburgers?” he asked.
“You've been to the States?”
“On and off.”
“What do you mean?”
“On the lam, and off again when it got warmish.”
She laughed a sound of bells tinkling, and he began telling her a whale of a lie about an episode in San
Francisco of which he was the hero. He followed that with another adventure in Cairo of which he was
an even greater hero. She was not impressed.
“I don't understand you,” she said.
“That's what I'm taking care of now. I'm explaining myself. I'm quite a guy, in case you're missing the
point.”
She shook her head. “I had a check run on you by some friends of mine,” she said. “You're a cheap
crook.”
He blinked at her. “Is that nice?”
“You're not even a good crook, either,” she continued. “You smuggled in two Java political refugees, and
they both got caught by the police, so you won't get any more business from that source. You hi-jacked
a shipment of opium from a ring, and the police got it away from you and nearly got you, and you're in
bad all around. The hi-jack victims love you not, and neither do the police, who strongly suspect you.
You've been rushing around organizing a gang of crooks. If you're going to organize, that's no way to do
it—by rushing around. You're a big sap with tinhorn ideas.”
“By God!” he said. “Is that any way to talk to the saviour of your life?”
“That's a point,” she agreed, “that I intend to mention.”
He tasted the gao-yang ruh. “So you know about it?” he asked ruefully.
“Did you think for a minute I wouldn't?”
“Well, they shoot people for hoping, I hear. But I thought I'd take the chance.”
She looked at him disagreeably. “I think it was dumb. I think it was typical of a stumblebum, and quite in
character.”
“I figured the dumbness made it good,” he said. “You used to read about that gag in books years ago so
it must have had something.”
“The Honest Pole told me about your little trick.”
He grinned at his plate. “He who serves two masters is bound to get a leg caught.”
“Is that why you had him hospitalized?”
“Frankly,” he said, “it was because he let you talk him into having his four hired boys give me a
walloping. That shows a weakness of character.”
“So you had his character reenforced with a blackjack?”
“That sometimes helps.”
She put down her fork and told him again that he was a cheap crook, a scamp, a small-time chiseler and
not half smart. She had more than that, and the words to deliver it with, and she did so. He listened
approvingly.
“That's exactly the opinion a young lady should have of a guy like me,” he said. “Very commendable.
Why are you sitting here delivering it, though?”
“I don't know,” she said angrily.
摘要：

TerrorWearsNoShoesADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXIIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineJune1948   “Ourjobistofind...

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