Dragon in the Snow Read online

  Armbruster’s opponent, Captain Doyle, was also a well-known figure on the campus, although not affiliated with the university. A brilliant officer in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Great War, the red-haired, freckle-faced Doyle had retired after the Armistice to indulge his whims as an inventor. He had more than seventy patents to his name, mostly for whatsits that made the thingamajigs in soda fountains and street lamps work better. But his true passion lay in more exotic devices.

  It was said that Doyle had a warehouse on the outskirts of town filled with wonders to make Edison blush: secret marvels that he would never reveal until the world was ready to receive them, in a more civilized age. This was close to the truth. Having seen the horrors of total war, Doyle was determined that his inventions must never fall into the hands of those who would use them for evil or killing, and so he kept them hidden away. Occasionally something went wrong and the students of Princeton might see him flying across town behind a runaway rocket, or bouncing down the street on motorized springs with failing brakes. But mostly he kept to himself, except for his nightly jousts with Armbruster.

  This night’s battle was being fought over the usefulness of Zeppelin airships as a means of bringing rain to arid lands.

  “My dear Captain,” began Armbruster. He puffed his chest as if about to launch into a prolonged speech, narrowed his eyes, and leaned forward slightly. “You are an ass.” He smiled sweetly.

  Doyle leaned back in his chair, blowing a cloud of pipe smoke across the chessboard. A fine layer of dust and ash coated the top of his king, which had not moved in many months.

  “My dear Professor, why don’t you just admit that you’re incorrect, as usual? Seeding clouds from a Zeppelin would be much more effective than from an aeroplane. A Zeppelin can float, you see, matching speed and altitude, and work with the clouds. Your blundering aeroplanes work against them, blasting holes willy-nilly. A waste of time.” He waved the smoke away to indicate his dismissal of the planes.

  “And your beloved Zeppelins are a disaster just waiting to happen,” snapped Armbruster. I went to see that new German ship, the Hinden-whatsit, last week at Lakehurst. Do you know what it’s filled with? Hydrogen! It’s like a... a...” he searched for a phrase. “A big hydrogen bomb, that’s what. You know they want to park those things on top of the Empire State Building? I shudder to think what would happen if one ever went awry.”

  Doyle was preparing a witty retort about the inadvisability of letting Germans park anywhere when the doorbell rang. The Professor glanced at the cuckoo clock on the wall: it was just past ten.

  “If this is another blasted undergraduate...” Armbruster muttered, padding grumpily across the room. But as he opened the door, he was struck dumb by a silvery dress wrapped around a curvy young woman who could have stepped straight off a movie screen.

  The Professor’s jaw flapped up and down a few times, but no sound came forth. Doyle called out, “I believe our dear Professor is attempting to say hello.”

  “H-huh-hello,” said the Professor, weakly.

  “Hiya, Professor!” piped Sid. Armbruster had been so distracted by the Baroness that he had not registered Sid and Rosie standing right beside her. Now his face grew livid.

  “You!” he shouted. “Feinstein, or Friedberg, or whatever you are! I told you not to bother me again with your inane questions. I am a scientist, not an advisor to writers of fairy tales! And particularly not at this hour. Now go away and read your funny papers.”

  Rosie looked at Sid. “You said this guy gave you all the science stuff for your stories.”

  “Oh he did, did he; he did? He’s a pest, that’s what he is. I left Columbia to get away from idiots like you,” he said, jabbing a finger at Sid’s chest. “Now go away! I’m a busy man.”

  “Very busy!” yelled Doyle, as he refilled his glass of Port.

  The Baroness took a step forward, looking up at the Professor with wide puppy-dog eyes. He fell silent again as he looked at her, and began blinking idly.

  “Please, Professor Armbruster,” she said, “I’m sorry for the late visit, but I think you’ll find this is worth your time. Pretty please?”

  Armbruster was beaten and he knew it. He stepped aside and let the three visitors enter.

  * * *

  The mood in the room changed as soon as the globe and cylinder were laid on the Professor’s coffee table. Armbruster stared at the glowing greenish-black artifact as if it contained all the secrets of the universe. On the other side of the table, Doyle was conflicted. He looked at the assassin’s exotic weapon as if it might bite him, but also with an irrepressible desire to know all about its construction and function.

  Armbruster spoke first. “You say your father, the Baron, found this object in Asia?”

  “Apparently. He had it shipped to himself shortly before he disappeared. He must have gone on to the Himalayas directly afterwards... or back to the Himalayas. Could that be where this came from?”

  The Professor leaned in closer, and grunted quietly.

  “I can’t say. I’ve never seen a mineral like it. Possibly a silicate, but a most unusual one. I’ve seen many fluorescent stones, of course, but this... most unorthodox indeed...” his voice trailed off.

  “What about those carvings? They must be a clue,” suggested Sid.

  “Yes, but I daresay the Baroness here may be more of an expert than I in that regard,” said the Professor. “Your father was quite renowned in the field of archaeology, was he not?”

  “Yes, but I’m stumped,” replied the Baroness. “The figures look a little like things you might see in parts of India or Indochina, but not much. And see these symbols?” She ran a finger around one of the bands of markings. “That’s a total mystery. It isn’t Chinese or Sanskrit or Tibetan. I’m not even sure it’s a language at all.”

  “How about you, Cap?” Rosie was indicating Doyle. “What do you make of this dingus? It’s the craziest gun I ever saw.”

  The Captain appeared to reach a decision, then spoke.

  “It’s no gun, I’ll tell you that much,” he said. “A disintegrating ray? Impossible. My guess is the whole thing was some sort of parlor trick. This object was probably filled with simple flash powder. Any stage magician can manufacture it. The powder makes the flash, the flash makes the smoke, and the so-called victim slips away in the confusion. Perfectly harmless. You’ve all been had.”

  Doyle pointed the globe at the chessboard and pressed a small knob he’d located at the top. A roaring arc of blinding white flame erupted from it, sending Doyle toppling backwards off his chair. The Professor’s table and chessboard vanished instantly in a swirl of dark smoke, as pawns and bishops flew like shrapnel in all directions. A stack of books that had been piled on the table dropped to the floor with a loud thud.

  That was the last sound for some seconds. Armbruster surveyed the wreckage of his parlor with mouth agape, his face turning first white, and then bright red.

  “My dear Captain,” he said, “You are an ass!”

  * * *

  The Professor’s laboratory perfectly matched Sid’s mental picture of Doc Savage’s workshop, only rather less tidy and without the view. Glass tubes wound from Bunsen burners to great hanging globes full of multi-hued liquids. Electrical apparatus of all descriptions hulked near the walls, ready to throw sparks between their thrusting terminals at the flip of a switch. Notebooks and papers were strewn willy-nilly between microscopes and centrifuges, and a percolator of strong coffee bubbled over an open flame on a side table, next to a row of ancient skulls.

  Sid watched eagerly over Armbruster’s shoulder as the scientist tested the chemical reactions of the strange stone and metal. Pushing his glasses down his nose in order to assume a more academic air, Sid offered helpful suggestions recalled from the pages of Startling Scientifiction magazine. But after an hour or so, the Professor simply stopped working and stared daggers at Sid until the writer slunk away, joining Rosie and the Baroness in the laboratory’s f
oyer.

  It was nearly daybreak when the Professor and the Captain emerged from the lab and trod wearily over to the three friends.

  “Nothing,” said the Professor, running a hand through his thinning hair. “I found residue on the cylinder which I can match to dirt samples from Western China. It was probably shipped here from Shanghai, just like your mysterious courier said. But the rock itself? It might as well be from Mars. I can find no parallel to it in any regard. It is a crystal, I’m sure of that. I see vague similarities to jade, radium, even diamond, but it is none of those. And I cannot fathom how the carvings were made. I wrecked half my equipment just trying to chip a sample from it.”

  The Captain looked resigned, brooding into his unlit pipe.

  “Same here,” he said. “I can’t take this weapon apart, and there’s no telling what might happen if I did. I can find no mechanism aside from the trigger knob. There’s no firing chamber, just a hollowed-out crater at one end. The base metal is some sort of alloy I can’t even identify, and it’s completely seamless.”

  The two men flopped into chairs and made dejected faces at each other.

  “Looks like we’re at a dead end,” said Rosie.

  “Not at all,” replied the Baroness. “It all points in one direction. If we want to know what’s going on, we have to go to Shanghai.”

  Chapter V

  CAT AND MOUSE

  —

  THE BLUE-ON-BLUE DELAHAYE left Princeton just after dawn. Armbruster and Doyle, their curiosity aroused to the boiling point, had volunteered to join the growing band of adventurers on their return to New York. Neither Sid nor Rosie had eaten since lunch the previous day, so the Baroness parked at a roadside diner and treated the whole gang to an enormous breakfast. The meal perked up everyone’s spirits, and Sid even snuck a small piece of bacon from Rosie’s plate while she was preoccupied with something in her handbag.

  Armbruster and Doyle reached simultaneously for a jelly doughnut, and their brief tussle led to an argument over whether a “sinker” was best dunked in a cup of black coffee or one with milk. The Professor argued that only pure black coffee had the proper rate of absorption, while milk tended to retard the process. The Captain parried that Armbruster’s doughnuts were as soggy as his brains, and that the creamier taste of coffee with milk made a perfect counterpart to the sweetness of the dough. The Baroness thought dunking a jelly doughnut in anything was a terrible idea, but she wisely stayed out of it.

  The conversation continued in the car. Armbruster and Doyle wedged themselves into the back seat on either side of Sid, lobbing insults across the no-man’s-land of his thin frame with ever-rising vigor. Rosie, sitting in the front passenger seat, soon discovered another of the car’s many amenities — a dashboard radio — and dialed in a station playing the latest swing records, cranking the volume up to full. The music successfully insulated Rosie and the Baroness from the chatter, but poor Sid found now himself assaulted by noise on three fronts. By the time the car reached New Brunswick, he had a splitting headache.

  The Delahaye cruised along sleepy, semi-rural roads until it reached the edges of urban sprawl somewhere south of Newark. The adventurers turned eastward and soon reached the Hudson River, with the spires of New York beckoning from across the water. At the Holland Tunnel, the toll attendant wolf-whistled at the gleaming blue vehicle pulling up to his gate, and he almost pinched himself when he saw the driver in her slinky silver dress. He accepted the Baroness’s coins as if they were a personal gift, his gaze lingering on the slender hand that held them. He was still smiling as the Delahaye disappeared from view.

  * * *

  The public transportation network of New York City is famous the world over, comprising subways, elevated trains, motorbuses, trolleys and ferries. But automobiles by the hundreds of thousands still teem in the streets of Manhattan, especially on a Wednesday morning. To spot a single vehicle amidst the daily tumult of trucks and taxicabs would seem an impossible task. It takes a great many eyes, watching from a great many places. And it helps if the vehicle is distinctive.

  Few vehicles were more distinctive than that belonging to the Baroness Angelica de Rothburg. And so, as the car pulled out of the tunnel and merged onto Canal Street, nearing the outskirts of Chinatown, it came to the notice of a man who had been told to keep an eye out for just such an appearance. The fellow watched as the Delahaye passed him at the corner of Canal and Sixth Avenue, puffing idly on a cigarette as he noted its direction, and walked into a drugstore to place a telephone call.

  * * *

  The young man on the corner had been lucky. A certain black sedan was parked not half a mile away on Houston Street, and its driver easily picked out the Delahaye as it cruised past a few minutes later.

  Block by block, the sedan wormed its way through traffic, edging ever closer to the sleek roadster and its unsuspecting occupants. The Delahaye almost slipped away by making an unexpected turn at Fourteenth Street, but the driver of the sedan was a professional. He recovered easily and came up behind them as they reached Union Square, then sped up and maneuvered deftly around the Baroness as she turned onto Park Avenue South. By the next red light, the sedan was directly in front of the roadster, effectively blocking its way.

  As the traffic rolled to a stop, the rear doors of the sedan opened and two men stepped out, their hat brims pulled low. Two more silhouettes remained inside. The men strolled calmly but purposefully towards the Delahaye, one on either side of the vehicle. The Baroness and Rosie had spotted them, and the tension in the women’s faces showed. They had driven right into a trap.

  The two men reached the car. The one on the driver’s side tapped the Baroness’s window, but she kept looking straight ahead, willing the light to turn green. The man tapped again, and this time there was a glint of sunlight on metal. Rosie winced, expecting to see another of the mysterious flamethrowers, but was relieved to see it was just a .38 revolver.

  In the back seat, Doyle and Armbruster finally stopped talking. Sid, who had slouched down in a fruitless attempt to duck below their line of verbal fire, looked up. All three men stared in silence, not daring to move a muscle. As the strangers climbed onto the Delahaye’s tiny running boards, the one next to Rosie cocked his pistol and leveled it at her frozen face. His counterpart waved forward in a clear signal: follow the sedan. The Baroness continued to stare straight ahead. Swing music blared from the radio.

  The light turned green.

  The sedan started forward, slowly. But the Baroness remained motionless, and the sedan, now about two-thirds of the way through the intersection, stopped to wait. A rising chorus of horns honked impatiently behind the Delahaye as traffic rushed down the other, unblocked lanes of Park Avenue South. The man on the driver’s side rapped on the window again, hard. And at that moment, Angelica de Rothburg made her move.

  The men balanced on the running boards had underestimated both the Baroness’s nerve and her auto’s phenomenal power. Stomping on the accelerator, the Baroness launched the Delahaye in a suicidal swerve to the right, flying through a narrow gap between onrushing cars and into a side street. With nothing to grip on the car’s streamlined frame, the gunmen were thrown off instantly, their revolvers spinning harmlessly to the curb. The men, falling amidst speeding traffic, were less lucky: one would wake up in a body cast two days later. The other wouldn’t wake up at all. The driver of the sedan had allowed himself to be tricked into an awkward position, but soon got his vehicle turned around and roaring in hot pursuit of the retreating blue streak.

  Heedless of traffic lights, the two vehicles careened back downtown, leaving a trail of frightened pedestrians and bent fenders in their wake. It was a miracle that no bystanders were injured in the chaos. Twice, passing police cruisers attempted to join the chase. The first was stymied by a manure wagon: sideswiped by the speeding sedan, the wagon toppled into the street, spilling its morning load onto the cruiser’s hood and windscreen. The second patrol picked up the chase a few blocks l
ater, but lost track of the vehicles as they plunged into the dense maze of Chinatown.

  The high-speed pursuit slowed to a crawl as the two cars fought their way through the district’s narrow streets, which were clogged with throngs of people and brightly painted carts. Eventually their progress halted completely, and the Professor ventured a glance back through the rear window. He let out a yelp that made everyone turn to look.

  Visible through the crowd, a masked, black-suited figure could be seen climbing out of the sedan and onto its roof. Something round gleamed in his hand, and Sid felt his stomach turn to jelly as the figure stood upright, lifting his arm to deliver the fiery death blow.

  A blazing stream of white flame arced over the crowded street — coming from the Delahaye! Captain Doyle was twisted around in his seat, leaning through the window with an object in his hand. It was the confiscated orb from the mansion: he hadn’t dared let it out of his sight the whole morning. Doyle’s aim was poor from that cramped position, and the flame touched nothing as it seared the morning air. But it was enough. The assassin ducked reflexively, as the startled crowd began to scatter in a panic. A space cleared in front of the Baroness, and she seized it. The blue car slipped away from the congested block, turned onto the Bowery, and so broke free of Chinatown’s constricting grip.

  With the sedan left behind, a little thrill of relief rippled through the vehicle. But it was short lived. Just as the Baroness was about to swing the car back uptown, Sid groaned.

  “We can’t go back to the mansion,” Sid said. “They know that’s our base, so that’s where they’ll go next.”