Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 313 - Room 1313

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ROOM 1313

Maxwell Grant

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

CHAPTER I

SNAPPED from his deep concentration over an involved table of precedency, Lamont Cranston for the

first time in over an hour looked out of the window of the plane. Darkness split by an occasional flicker

of stabbing light from the airport were the only signs that this was not a trip through the stratosphere.

Those travellers who are always prepared to leave hours in advance were leaning forward eagerly as

they had been from the time the stewardess called out, "Croydon, on time"; the others, the habitual

leave-it-to-the-last- minuters, like Cranston, didn't even give it a thought till the wheels spun on dry

ground.

Cranston threw the copy of Burke's Peerage he'd been reading into his suitcase and snapped it shut. His

only baggage, besides that, was his brief case.

A polyglot murmur of tongues around him said, in as many languages as there were passengers, the same

trite things that are always said after a safe and quiet trip - be it on bicycle, train or plane.

That attitude was shared by most of the people whom Cranston could see without being rude. The girls,

the few in sight, were proof of the superstition that the wet climate was good for the complexion. But he

could not help wondering if it was the fault of that same climate that the women were one and all so

dowdy-looking.

Perhaps, he thought, it's the fault of their dressmakers. It just didn't seem possible with the pictures of the

New York women so fresh in his mind, that a sex could be so dissimilar.

As for the men, the myth of the English tailors was just that, as far as he could see. If this was the famous

drape that all tailors would give their arms for, he just didn't care for it. The men's jackets were bulky and

to his American eye, unsightly.

The underground went on its way with a lot more speed than he had given it credit for. It rattled along at

the rate a regular train would.

As usual in any air flight, there was a dissimilar amount of time wasted in getting from the plane to the real

point of the trip. Perhaps, Cranston thought, the helicopter would be the answer to that as yet unsolved

problem.

By an obvious mnemonic, that got him to worrying about the problem that faced him. An unsavory one it

was too... However, the underground was pulling into... He squinted out the window to see the name of

the station.

From the airport at Croydon to the underground was of short duration and Cranston, eyes wide,

absorbing all there was to see, went towards what would be the beginning and not the end of his mission.

As he seated himself in the underground train, he smiled at the sight of a pompous looking electric

locomotive which was determinedly pulling a string of what in New York would have been called subway

cars. The ads in the train that held Cranston were colorful, almost as gaudy as the ones in the town

Cranston had flown from, but the products advertised were strange to him.

Ministry of Food posters clamored for attention next to ads for braces. The people, a little shabby, but

completely unconscious of it, in a society where clothes were dependent, still, this long after the war, on

coupons, were sitting each in his own aura of insulated privacy.

Knowing as much as Cranston did of the English, it was still hard for him to remember what staunch,

kind, and exceedingly brave hearts were hidden behind those imposing, frozen facades.

One face in particular intrigued him. The man's face was built on the lines of an isosceles triangle. The

point of the long lines of the triangle was the most awe inspiring nose that Cranston had ever seen outside

of the stage versions of Cyrano's noble proboscis. The rest of the face, as though frightened by the size of

the impossibly huge nose, wavered and vanished away from the peak of the nose. His chin was weak, a

vague thing that vanished into a high, almost varnished white collar. The man looked with his watery blue

eyes, past the tip of his nose. His eyes were focused on nothingness with an intensity of effort that was

worthy of a better cause. Cranston could almost see the man praying that no one, no upstart, would have

the effrontery to speak to him and break in on his sacred quiet.

Engraved on Cranston's memory were the directions he had been given. So, as though a Londoner of

long standing, he had no trouble in remembering that he was to get off the Underground at Marble Arch.

He followed the man with the nose which would have shamed Durante out of the cellar they were in and

up a long flight of stairs. Out in the open the man walked away with a brisk, almost penguin-like waddle

and, while Cranston looked about for his bearings, vanished into the fog.

The fog, Cranston felt, was overdoing it a bit. It was so apposite as to be corny. Here he was fresh in

from America on a mission of startling importance, and now, just like the hero of any thud and blunder,

here he was near Hyde Park corner in the middle of a pea soup night.

Not that the fog was any worse than lots that Cranston had experienced in America, for, down past Los

Angeles, towards Laguna Beach are manufactured the granddaddies of all fogs. But, and Cranston

looked around for a bobby, the fog could have held up till he got to Eton Chambers.

Beside him a sound that was right out of the early nineteen hundreds in the States, rasped in his ears. It

was a horn. A Klaxon. Cranston was sure they hadn't been made for twenty years. A glance at the

decrepit cab that sported the horn was proof that he was right.

"Can you take me to Eton Chambers?" Cranston called.

The London counterpart of Cranston's friend the taxi driver, Shrevvie, looked out at Cranston and

snapped, "Yup."

Cranston stepped forward to get into the cab but was restrained by a gesture from the cabbie. "I could

take ye there, but I won't."

"What?" Cranston was really startled.

"I'm no crook."

Wondering what there was in the nature of driving a cab that made a driver so argumentative, Cranston

resigned his soul in patience and asked, "What's your being an honest man got to do with it?"

The cabbie leaned a bulky forearm out the window of his ancient vehicle and pointed across the street.

"Yonder's the Underground. This is Marble Arch, right?"

Cranston nodded.

"See..." The pointing arm, ending in a long forefinger, pointed at a modern looking apartment house that

was directly across the street. "If I was a crook I could 'ave driven yer all around Robin Hood's barn and

then dumped ye there, couldn't I?"

"I get it." Cranston smiled. How often in New York had an out-of-towner, fresh from Pennsylvania

Station asked for the Pennsylvania Hotel that was across the street and been driven to it by way of the

Bronx. Evidently this was what he had been saved from. He thanked the cabbie who grinned after him as

he made his way toward the Eton Chambers.

The fog prevented Cranston from seeing what surrounded the lovely house till he was almost on top of it.

Here in the heart of London, more than two years after the cessation of the European war, was a grim

reminder to all beholders of what had been. For the house, which could only have been designed by

Courboisier, was an island in the middle of bomb craters. What freak of fate had protected this one

house when all around it perished was more than mortal can know. Cranston, his spirits damped, walked

by the commissionaire into the building.

"Ruddy fog, what?" that functionary asked.

Nodding, Cranston went into the lobby and realized that it was as though he had been transported on a

magic carpet by a geni. For decor, everything, was exactly like any expensive smart apartment hotel right

in the center of the New York which Cranston had quitted so little time before.

Still following his directions, Cranston asked the little elevator operator with a discharge button on his

uniform jacket, to take him to the thirteenth floor.

Out of the elevator and down a lush carpeted hallway he walked. He pressed a button that had on it a

neatly lettered sign, Louis Yorke.

In that split second before the door opened, with that lightning speed that thoughts have, Cranston

reviewed what little he knew of the case that had brought him flying here post haste.

In New York, rumors that gained in the re-telling as a snowball plummeting down the side of a

snow-covered mountain, had brought whispers to Cranston's man Friday, Burbank, that something huge

and unsavory was stewing in London. That a member of the House of Lords was implicated in one of

those huge gem robberies that have followed the dislocations of war. Worse than that, the rumor said,

this same august member of the ruling body of fair Britannia was set for the gallows, for there had been

murder most foul!

Burbank, sensitive to the ebb and flow of rumor real and fictitious, had known from the ragbag of odds

and ends that was his brain that this would make for an international stink of no mean dimensions, for not

in two centuries had a member of the nobility been in jeopardy. The case would make front pages all

over the world, for it was part of the prerogative of the gentry that they only can be tried by a jury of their

peers.

And then the door opened wide and a good looking man in his early forties stood behind the door.

"Come in, come in," he smiled. In the room proper, sitting with all his muscles slack, his head forward at

a despondent angle was another man.

Cranston said to the man at the door. "Mr. Yorke?"

"Right. And you can only be Lamont Cranston."

Entering the room, Cranston realized that the man who slumped in the chair was not even aware of his

presence. Yorke said, "Buck up, Jackie, I want you to meet your potential savior."

There was a pause, a long pause, and finally the young man looked up. He was startling. He was so good

looking that he missed the adjective pretty only by a jaw that was a trifle too broad and firm.

He said, "How do you do." His face didn't break in its lines of set misery.

Yorke said, "Cranston, this is the right honorable, the Earl of Bostick, possessed of so many given names

and odds and ends of titles that they are of interest only to a snob or a genealogist. Call him Jackie and

let's carry on."

Bustling around the room, Yorke made Cranston comfortable and once he was set in a low chair with a

scotch and soda in one hand and his back to a lovely fireplace, said, "Now let's buck up and see how

Mr. Cranston can help."

"Oh, Louis, what's the use of carrying this pretense any further? You know I argued against bothering to

get this man all the way from the States when it's so completely a dead-and-gone thing. You know as

well as I do that they're going through all the old forms down at the Yard just to be sure they don't make

any error in arresting the sacred person of a belted Earl! If I were some ordinary bloke I'd have been in

the pokey days ago.

"It's just that they don't want to slip up on any of the interminable forms and ancient and musty laws that

they have delayed!"

"Defeatism is hardly the order of the day, old dear. Now pull yourself together and regale us once more

with the horrid and..."

The dispirited young nobleman interjected before his friend could go on, "Horrid and completely

incredible story that I have been telling, why don't you say it? Everyone is thinking it! You see," he turned

to Cranston, "none of my friends will believe me, but neither will they do me the credit of having at least

enough brains to have cooked up a lucid lie if I were going to lie! That's what defeats me. No one can

believe my story. I don't... not really... not deep down inside of me. It couldn't have happened. And yet...

it did. And because it did, I am going to be tried by a jury of my peers and then taken out and hanged by

the neck until dead!" The boy's face was livid as he glared at Cranston, daring him to believe his story.

Cranston said, "Take it easy, son, I'm like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Every morning

before I get out of bed, I try believing something just a little more impossible than I believed the day

before. Relax and say your say. Let me be the arbiter of what is true and what is not."

As the young man opened his mouth, cleared his throat and quite obviously tried to get his thoughts in

order so that he could tell his story lucidly, out in the rain and fog across the street from the expensive

apartment, a man stood and stared off into space with an expression of almost unbelievable effort. He

was quite obviously staring at nothing at all and just as obviously was hoping no one would come up to

him and break in on the sanctity of his thoughts. His nose, which was so long it projected out past the

brim of his hat, had a single rain drop running down its length. His eyes crossed as he looked down at it

as it roller-coasted from the bridge of his nose all the way down to its tip.

He sighed. He shook his head a trifle, but the drop lingered. There was nothing else to do, so relaxing his

grip on the gun in his pocket, he took his hand out and flicked the drop away. Then he again stared off

into space seemingly lost in his thoughts.

They weren't very complicated thoughts, for he wasn't a very complicated man. All he was thinking was,

"If that blighter doesn't come down soon so I can shoot him, I'm going to catch my death of cold."

He had a mental image of the "blighter." It was an easily recognizable face.

Strong, sharp, with wide set eyes, it was the face of the man known as Lamont Cranston.

CHAPTER II

WARM, feeling as though caught in some eddy of quiet, Cranston relaxed and gave his whole attention

to the young Earl's story. It caught him up and carried him along with it, for the Earl was a good story

teller, and somehow in the telling, because of the very bizarreness of what he had to tell, he recovered

some of his equanimity.

"Louis knows this," he said, "and will just have to bear with me again. You see," he looked at Cranston

for understanding, "I was young enough so as to be a little disgusted with my elders in that period that

followed the first world war. I remember the way they whined and carried on about how they were the

lost generation.

"I want you to understand that I don't want to be included in a new generation of whiners... but..."

Yorke broke in, "Jackie had it pretty rough in this war. He was at El Alamein and had almost all of his

company killed... He broods about it on occasion."

"Brood? Not that... but after that scruffy show in the desert, I got a bellyful of the European war." He

paused.

"I see," Cranston said, and he did.

"I'm not asking for understanding and I don't want you to think I'm psycho on the subject, but every once

in a while it gets a bit too much for me; it gags me. I have to wipe the taste out and I know of only one

way to do that."

"What Jackie's trying to say is that he tied one on the night that all this happened. He was stinko."

"Precisely... so you will have to bear in mind that the whole affair had that soft, woolly feeling that you get

sometimes when you've had one over the nine. I had meandered around London going from pub to pub

as they closed. I finally wound up at a bottle club that I save as a last resort when everything else is

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