The Green Lama: Crimson Circle (7 page)

“I’ve got a long list of a bit more colorful terms I want to call you right now,” Gary muttered under his breath.

“Gary!” Evangl chided, lightly hitting him in the side with the back of her hand.

“Did the Fifthers take a shot at you at Roosevelt’s Rally?” Gary angrily asked.

Jethro nodded. “They did. Though I caught the bullet before it hit. I used the ensuing chaos to duck away and followed the assassins back to their headquarters, which was how I found you. Just in time, it seemed.”

“‘Caught the bullet,’” Gary repeated as he rubbed his neck and tried to process everything. “Jethro Dumont… I think Evangl always suspected, but I guess I never saw it… Never wanted to.”

“He’s right, I always did suspect it,” Evangl said, though Jethro assumed she was only trying to save face.

“All these years, you coulda told me… I mean, hell, for the longest time it was just you n’ me against the world,” Gary said, anger threatening to boil over. “I gave you my trust, my life, the least you could’ve done—” He cut himself short and ran a hand over his face. His lips turned into a sheepish grin. “Look, it’s not that I don’t get why you didn’t tell me—tell us—but it doesn’t mean I ain’t pissed as shit at you right now, you understand?”

Jethro nodded. “Believe me; your reaction is much more preferable than how some of the others have taken the news...”

Evangl raised an eyebrow and a knowing smirk. “Anyone punch you in the face?”

“Caraway,” Jethro replied, a phantom pain emanating from his jaw.

“Ha!” Gary laughed. “Have I told you how much I approve of his methods?”

“The sentiment has been raised before,” Jethro said with a rueful smile.

They stood in silence for several moments, the warbling of the sirens now nothing more than a vague ghost of a sound. Gary shuffled uncomfortably in place before he said, “Well, I guess this explains how you ended up with Jean Farrell.”

“Gary!” Evangl scolded, jabbing him with her elbow.

“What? Well, it does!” he protested, his face visibly red. He hesitated and glanced meekly over to Jethro. “Where does this take us now?”

Jethro smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know…”

“Wherever it takes us,” Evangl said with a somber smile, “I’m sure it’ll be interesting.”

“So, are you gonna explain your mysterious new powers?” Gary asked as he crossed his arms, still visibly flustered by the small torrent of revelations. “Or are we just gonna have to start guessing?”

Jethro chuckled and began to tell the tale of Kamariotissa, Heydrich, and Cthulhu, all the while trying to ignore horrible pain pounding through his veins.

Chapter 3: Guilt

THERE ARE NOT many people who remember Theodor Harrin.

A magician by trade, he was neither great—nor bad—enough to leave any sort of indelible mark on his audience. Often falling between the acts that made headlines, his name was perennially left in small, discrete print after the words: “ALSO APPEARING.” But those days were far behind him, drowned in a bellyful of booze and self-doubt. There was a brief period when he had served as one of the Green Lama’s small army of associates, using his skills to help solve cases, three to be exact. For a short time he even courted Jean Farrell, but those days were also far behind him; so far that there were moments he even doubted they happened. He just took another sip of gin to see how many times he could make it to the bottom of the glass before he hit the table.

He had lost count at twelve.

The pub, a dank spot in the Lower East Side, had never been christened with an official name, but Harrin liked to call it “Mike & Sam’s” after the two bartenders who kept him on his quest. His corner table was littered with playing cards, a little more than four decks worth. He had been struggling with the “Jumping Card” trick for days now, the cards flying from his shaking, liquid hands.

“Mr. Harrin,” someone said above him.

“No one calls me ‘Mister,’” Harrin replied with a dismissive wave, his eyes locked on his cards. “Not even my father was called ‘Mister;’ he went by Benny, and that wasn’t even his real name. Theodor, that’s the name I got, that’s what you can call me.” He took another sip of his gin.

“Theodor, then,” the man said.

Harrin leaned back and peered in the shadows. The man was tall, thin, and bald; his head backlit, his face obscured by shadows of the pub. His suit was clean, the kind you saw tumbling from big skyscrapers when the stock market crashed. “That’s a nice trick you got there,” Harrin commented, pointing to the man’s hidden features.

“Trick?” the man asked and cocked his head to the side.

“Keeping yourself in the shadows like that; your face always hidden,” Harrin replied, waving a hand over his own face. “I used to do that back in the day with a buddy of mine when we’d ‘bring the dead back to life.’ Used to scare the pants off the hoity-toities uptown.”

“Is that so? Should I be impressed?”

Harrin narrowed his eyes at the man with a mixture of suspicion and derision. “Do I owe you money? I owe you money, don’t I? How much money are you due? I’ve got…” He reached into his pockets and brought out three bills and a small pile of coins. “Five dollars, but four of it’s for the drinks, so I’ve got one dollar.”

“No, no,” the man chuckled and gave Harrin a small, congenial wave. “You don’t owe me any money, Theodor.”

“Excellent!” Harrin said with a broad, drunken smile. He pushed out the chair across the table with his foot. “Let’s have a drink.”

“It’ll be on me. I brought the bottle,” the man replied, placing a full bottle of gin on the table.

“And quickly becoming my favorite person ever,” Harrin laughed with open arms. He collected his cards and methodically shuffled them together. “Here. Let me show you this. Magic
isn’t
about impressing people. Impressing people is
easy
. I can throw my voice half a yard away. I can pull a card out of thin air. Hell, if you want I can make it look like Jesus himself decided to make his second coming. Baby stuff. The kinda shit boys do to show off to girls. No. Magic is about amazing people,” he rattled on as he shuffled the cards with bravado, flipping them between his hands with a soft
prrt
! Then with a turn he flipped over three cards and held them out to his new friend. “Three face cards. King, Queen, Jack. Three different faces. Now, we do this.” He turned the cards over, then inverted them. “This. Then, you say the magic word, doesn’t matter which. I’m partial to ‘Shazam,’ but it’s the audience’s choice,” he said with a shrug.

“Abra cadabra,” the man said with amusement.

“A classic. An oldie but a goodie,” Harrin smiled. “Works every time. And…” He turned the cards over and over, shuffled them together, then apart. “Presto! One face.” He flipped them over toward his new friend and showed him a rough sketch of his face drawn across the three cards.

“Impressive,” the man said with genuine surprise, rewarding Harrin with light applause. “Very impressive.”

“The nose is a little off, but it’ll do,” Harrin said critiquing his work as he poured himself another glass. He took a sip of the gin and hissed as it lanced down his throat. “Thank you for the drinks… Hm, I didn’t get your name, did I?”

“I didn’t give it,” the man growled in reply.

“Hm,” Harrin frowned and took another gulp of gin. “Either way, I know more than
anyone
nothing comes for free, so tell me, what can I do for you, my good man?”

The man crossed his legs, brushing out the wrinkles in his pants leg. “Theodor, about two years ago you were involved in the events surrounding the death of the magician known as the Great Gadini.”

Harrin eyed his new companion suspiciously. “Only tangentially.”

“Several months later,” the man continued, “there was the murder the press liked to call ‘the Case of the Crooked Cane.’ Do you remember that?”

“Vaguely,” Harrin said as he delicately placed his glass back on the table and pushed it away.

“Most recently, you were involved in the affairs surrounding the faked death of the German consul von Kultz.”

“Yeah, but then there was that whole mess on the bridge—What’s your name?”

“Unimportant,” the man said dismissively. “Do you remember these events, Theodor?”

“Sam? Mike?” Harrin called out to the bartenders. “Who let this guy in here?”

“Mr. Marcus and Mr. Sapienza are otherwise indisposed at the moment,” the man said and Harrin suddenly realized just how quiet the pub was, as if it was only the two of them. “Answer the question, Theodor.”

Harrin leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together on his growing potbelly. He needed to remain calm. No matter how long ago it was, he reminded himself he once ran with the Green Lama. He could handle this. “That was a nice trick. I’m almost impressed.”

The man gave him an exasperated sigh. “Theodor—”

“Mr. Harrin,” he angrily corrected, slamming his hand on the table, tipping over his glass. Gin spilled over his cards.

“Mr. Harrin, you will tell me everything you know about the vigilante known as the Green Lama,” the man said evenly, all the warmth in his voice drained out and pooling on the floor like blood in a butcher shop.

“And if I don’t?” Harrin quietly asked, his hair standing on end.

The man placed his right hand on the table, a silver ring with a golden Ω embossed in a field of black on his middle finger. “Don’t be mistaken, Mr. Harrin; I’m not giving you a choice.”

• • •

IT WAS late, quickly approaching early. The rain had let up and the sun was peeking out from behind the clutter of buildings and kissing the window. He was exhausted, burnt to a crisp, but he couldn’t stop now, not when he was so close to solving the mystery. Hunched over his microscope, Dr. Harrison Valco felt his back begin to sing with pain, a chorus that was both rhythmic and stirring. He was no longer a young man, he silently admitted to himself again; hadn’t been one in a very long time. He cracked his neck with an audible
pop-pop-pop
, leaned back and stretched his muscles. Just another hour or so, he promised himself, knowing full well the sun would be dipping back beneath the horizon before he pried himself free of his work.

There were many ways to describe Dr. Valco. Depending on the day he was either short or tall—he tried not to hunch—fat or thin—he’d put on some weight. The one thing that remained constant was his unblinking, unwavering dedication to his research. It had pushed away both ex-wives and two or three mistresses. There had been a time when he had regretted it, but regret was a youthful emotion, when you still had time to repair the damage; and Valco had no desire to fix anything… except this, the one mistake that had haunted him every day for the past four years.

It had all been an accident, but then what brilliant scientific discovery had ever been intentional? A short circuit in the electrical light of the leaded radium room unleashed a torrent of electricity into the room, causing the three radium rays—alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays
—
to burst out and reflect from wall to wall with fantastic speed and merge together in a new ray of large particles. The particles formed a gaseous cloud before collecting and raining down to the floor. The accident had cost the life of his assistant Davis and had knocked Valco out cold. Valco’s survival had been nothing more than dumb luck.

“Like something out of a bad serial,” Valco murmured to himself.

At first, he thought he had imagined it, some kind of fatigue born hallucination. What had occurred was simply impossible… but there it was. Taking every precaution, he collected the “delta liquid ray” and began testing its properties.

He had placed so much hope, so much faith in the Liquid Ray. It was supposed to have heralded a new age—and in a way, it did—but to see it so horribly corrupted… Valco had always known the Ray’s potential for death and destruction—its gaseous form was instantly lethal—but he also experienced firsthand its more miraculous properties; a brief, accidental exposure to the Ray’s liquid form had cured his advanced case of epithelial cancer within two weeks. He had told Congress that the survivor had been a patient of his, out of vanity, if nothing else.

But then, Pelham… that bastard Pelham…

Valco blinked away the anger, unconsciously rubbing the faint scar on his cheek, and once again tried to focus on the task at hand.

The Delta Liquid Ray’s gaseous form immediately killed or incapacitated everyone it came into contact with, save one: The Green Lama. Valco just needed to find out why. He had collected a sample of the Lama’s blood a year ago during their last adventure—a small droplet sat in the microscope now—but he was still no closer to solving the mystery.

There was a soft knock at the door, a quick
rap-tap-tap
. Valco pulled himself away from the microscope and glanced at the lab entrance with a furrowed brow. He checked his watch, just shy of six in the morning. With a grim frown, he pulled open the top drawer of the desk and checked to see if his pistol was still there. He had never even fired it once, but after Pelham, he always kept it close.