The New Adventures of Jim Anthony, Super-Detective Read online

  He took her in his arms. “Really,” he said. “Is she staying with you?”

  Dolores settled back against him. “Why? Worried that someone will come after her?”

  “Something like that,” Anthony said.

  She twisted around in his arms and looked up at him. “Do you think Sergei is alive?”

  Anthony leaned down and kissed her. “If he is, I’ll find him.”

  5.

  Bayonne, New Jersey

  “I’m a big fan, Mr. Anthony—can I call you Jim?—boy, Jim Anthony, right here in my icebox,” the Bayonne coroner, Lou Dorsey, burbled as he shot to his feet, circled his desk and grabbed Anthony’s hand in order to pump it vigorously.

  Anthony had taken the time to change into what Gentry, with tongue firmly in cheek, referred to as his ‘working outfit’. Tough but loose linen trousers, a heavy gray sweater, frayed at the cuffs and collar, and sandals he’d made himself. The trousers were held up by a peculiar belt, another of his innovations. Composed of woven fibres from a rare South American plant, the belt was rubbery and possessed an amazing tensile strength, capable of supporting Anthony’s weight without snapping. The buckle—a flat wedge of weighted metal—could be split in half with a single twist of his wrists, and the belt converted into a makeshift set of bolos.

  It hadn’t taken them long to get to Bayonne, and when they’d arrived at the coroner’s, Anthony had immediately dispatched Gentry to the local police. Normally Gentry got along with the police about as well as a cat got along with dogs, but Anthony had a feeling time was of the essence, and more hands made quick work. Gentry would get everything the local police had on the case—witness statements, photos, everything—with the mayor’s blessing.

  He couldn’t say what it was about the situation that had pricked him, but as they’d crossed the bridge and entered New Jersey, he’d felt a sudden worry. Anticipation had faded, giving way to a new sense of urgency. He’d experienced such sudden changes of mood more than once. It was part instinct, and part something else… something indefinable. It was as if he had suddenly come upon a twitching tail in the brush. The likelihood of it belonging to a tiger of one sort or another was fairly good.

  Dorsey’s small, cramped office was cluttered with books, and there were tattered pulp magazines scattered across his untidy desk. Anthony picked up a copy of Super-Detective and thumbed through it, noting with some amusement that one of the stories featured himself. In his younger, wilder days, he’d licensed his name to Trojan Publications, thinking the additional exposure might be good for the sort of image he intended to present. Then, he’d also commissioned a bronze statue of himself around the same time. Both, he now thought, had been mistakes borne of youthful indiscretion and lack of experience. The statue had been melted down and remade into something useful, but he’d let the stories continue, and divided the money between various charitable ventures.

  Dorsey was still going. “Boy oh boy, the Super-Detective, right here in Bayonne! You don’t mind me calling you that, right? Super-Detective,” Dorsey said again. He spread his hands for emphasis.

  Anthony tossed the magazine down. “You can call me what you like, Mr. Dorsey, as long as you’re willing to let me examine the body my assistant rang you about,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, yeah of course, back this way. I had him brought out special. Boy, Jim Anthony! Looking at one of my corpses! Wait until I tell my wife!” Dorsey said cheerfully. As he led Anthony into the examination room, he continued, “When I called the Mayor—Mayor Donovan?—to see if it was okay, he said I was to give you whatever you needed. He said Jim Anthony was welcome to whatever Bayonne could provide, ain’t that something?”

  “It’s something all right,” Anthony said, bemused. “Luckily, all I need is a look at that body.”

  “Right, right, sure,” Dorsey said, nodding. “Say, is it true you put Thunder Jim Wade in a headlock at the Cloud Club back in August? I heard you got into a slugging match with that whole crew.”

  “Gossip ill becomes a public servant, Dr. Dorsey,” Anthony said.

  “Sure, right, only I heard that you, Wade, and Doc Ardan got into it during the Gravity Gun Affair. Whatever happened to that thing, anyway?”

  “It sank to the bottom of San Francisco Bay,” Anthony said. Along with its wielder, Hanoi Xan, and most of his World Crime League, thanks to a timely crash of Wade’s ‘Thunderbug’, right into the centre of their airborne base of operations. He wondered whether Wade had recovered his flying machine yet. “And, for the record, I have no problems with either Doctors Ardan or Wade. We simply have different methodologies.”

  Dorsey kept up a steady flow of chatter as he led Anthony into the back room where the corpse of the would-be kidnapper was waiting. A steel basket, containing the dead man’s clothes and shoes, sat beside the wheeled examination table.

  Anthony decided to look at the body first. He’d brought a deer hide bundle in with him. It was expertly tanned and treated. He unrolled the bundle beside the body, revealing a wide leather strap, holding a number of forensic tools in place. The bundle had been a gift from his grandfather upon his acquisition of a medical degree—the first of many degrees he’d earned in the years following his return from Europe after the War. Mephito didn’t see much difference between the tools of a detective and those of a shaman; neither did Anthony, come to that. The tools of divining truth came in many forms.

  “And what truth do you hold?” he murmured, looking down at the body. The dead man hadn’t been handsome, though he wasn’t ugly enough to attract undue attention. Dark haired, pale, big and muscular, with tattoos, the dead man had been built not like a laborer or fighter, but like a soldier. But in whose army had he served?

  “Say—ah—you aren’t expecting him to talk back are you?” Dorsey said.

  Anthony blinked and looked around at the little coroner. “Not in so many words, no. Don’t let me keep you from your duties, Doctor.”

  “Oh you’re not, don’t worry,” Dorsey said. He rubbed his hands together. “I cleared my schedule just for this. Chances to watch the Super-Detective at work don’t come along every day, right? I wouldn’t want to miss this.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, would you?” Anthony said. If Dorsey caught the sarcastic edge to Anthony’s words, he gave no sign of it. Anthony sighed and bent to his task. With the brisk efficiency of a trained surgeon, he commenced his examination. Dorsey had fallen silent, but he shifted occasionally, like a student waiting for a grade. He’d performed a cursory autopsy, but the cause of death was fairly obvious. A blade had pierced the dead man’s belly, and opened him up like a fish. It had been a quick, brutal blow. A professional blow, made by someone who knew what they were doing. He had expected as much, given Magda Sirko’s story. In any event, he wasn’t interested in the cause of death so much as what the body could tell him about who the man had been while alive.

  Calluses on the cadaver’s hands spoke to pugilistic inclinations—previously broken fingers, ridges of hard flesh on the knuckles and palms. Old, puckered wounds marked the pale, beefy chest. Bullet wounds, stab wounds, and what Anthony recognized as the marks of barbed wire. He had similar marks aplenty on his own frame. He pried open the cadaver’s mouth and peered at the teeth. “Steel,” he muttered.

  “What?” Dorsey asked. He peered down at the body in interest.

  “He’s had several teeth replaced,” Anthony said. “His gums show signs of malnutrition, probably during the Great War, though he’d have been a boy during it. Then, the Russians were throwing children into the trenches by the end, before the Revolution.” He paused. He’d been little more than a boy himself, though big enough for his age to fool the recruiter. But he’d gone willingly into the fire. He couldn’t imagine being forced into the army, and sent into the madness of war.

  He moved to the corpse’s hands and examined the tattoos there. Anthony had made a study of body art, especially as it related to criminal societies. Tattoos were prevalent in any number of un
lawful organizations he’d had the misfortune to run across in his career to date. The Si-Fan, the Brotherhood of the Golden Chrysanthemum, the Vampires of Paris, and the Order of the Cosmic Ram all used tattoos to designate membership. “Hmm,” Anthony muttered.

  “What? What is it?” Dorsey asked.

  “What do you make of these tattoos, Dr. Dorsey?”

  “They look like a code of some kind. Say—you don’t think he belongs to a secret society, do you? I bet he’s a Rosicrucian!”

  “They’re Cyrillic,” Anthony said. “Russian alphabet,” he added, seeing the blank look on Dorsey’s face. The latter snapped his fingers.

  “The guy who got snatched, he was a Russian too, right? Maybe it’s a grudge?”

  Anthony smiled. “Almost certainly,” he said. “This man was likely a soldier, though probably not until the tail end of the Great War, just before the Bolshevik Revolution.”

  Dorsey grimaced. “He’s a Bolshevik?”

  “No,” Anthony said. He paused. “Perhaps, but I’d say no. These tattoos are crude. They weren’t made by a professional. Cheap ink and an unsteady hand are generally markers of prison tattoos. After the Revolution, a lot of soldiers who refused to switch sides went into labor camps, right alongside criminals and political prisoners of every description. I’d say that’s where our friend here came from.”

  “So how’d he get to New Jersey?”

  “The same way anyone does, I imagine,” Anthony said. He left the body and moved to the basket of clothes, letting his mind work over what he’d learned. The clothes were cheap, but durable. They were stained and grimy, from travel and general lack of care.

  He lifted the shirt to his nose and sniffed. He’d trained his olfactory sense with the same dedication as he’d done for every other sense and muscle he possessed. He could identify a thousand and one unique scents, and hazard a strong guess on a thousand others. The shirt smelled of machine oil, standing water, and Turkish tobacco. The last one threw him for a moment, before he recalled a popular type of hand-rolled cigarettes that had been prevalent in the final months of the war on the Turkish front. ‘Turkish Twists’, they’d been called.

  Anthony took a scalpel out of his bundle and ran it along the sole of one of the shoes, dislodging bits of dried mud onto a sheet of typing paper he’d asked Dorsey to get for him. Then, he reached into a flat pocket in his medicine bag and extracted several sheets of flimsy card, sealed in a thin film of Bakelite to prevent tearing or wrinkles. The cards were covered in grids, each containing a smudge of dried soil and a latitude, longitude, and location of collection.

  “Wow,” Dorsey murmured. “Did it take you long to make that?”

  “Long enough,” Anthony said as he compared the dried mud to each of the smudges on the cards. His keen eyes swept over the cards, gauging the consistency and color of each sample. “A… teacher of mine had similar set-ups, relating to cigar ash, shoeprints and the like. I keep it simple, myself—soil samples from across the country.” He flipped several cards aside without examining them. “In this case, we can already narrow down the location some. We’re in New Jersey, and Bayonne in particular, so I only bothered to bring those samples relating to the Newark Bay area. Granted, they could have gone somewhere else, but—hello, Tom,” Anthony said, without looking up from the cards.

  Dorsey jumped like a startled cat and spun about. Gentry leaned against the doorframe, his arms crossed. He shook his head. “How’d you know it was me, Jimmy?”

  “You have a distinctive squeak in your left heel, probably caused by a faulty repair job. I pay you enough to buy new shoes, Tom,” Anthony said. He looked up. “What did you find out?”

  “I like these shoes. They’re broken in,” Gentry said, looking down at his feet.

  “Tom,” Anthony said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gentry said. He gestured loosely. “It was just like you figured. They stole the car they used to snatch Sirko. The local cops found it near the docks.”

  “That dovetails nicely with this, then,” Anthony said. He held one of the sample cards aloft. “I think I know where they took him.”

  “Where?”

  “Shooter’s Island,” Anthony said.

  6.

  Newark Bay

  “It’s not very big as islands go,” Gentry said, as the motorboat cut across the choppy waters of the bay. True to the Mayor’s word, there’d been a boat waiting for them as soon as they’d mentioned that they might need it. Anthony, perched in the prow, glanced back at him.

  “No, but it’s got its fair share of history. Before they closed down operations, the Townsend-Downey Company built a yacht for the Kaiser there. The Atlantic was built there as well,” Anthony said, referring to the yacht that had set the all-time record for the fastest transatlantic passage during the 1905 Kaiser’s Cup.

  “Yeah, and now look at it,” Gentry said. He gestured loosely toward the decayed remnants of the old piers and the shipyards, which hadn’t seen use in a decade. There were broken hulled hulks slumped in the shallows about the island—a ship’s graveyard, an unsightly blotch on Newark Bay, easily visible from the Bayonne Bridge. Anthony, peering through the gathering evening mist, could see the semi-collapsed ruins of old buildings scattered across the shore amongst the scrubby trees. Shooter’s Island had once been home to a foundry, a pattern shop, and various shipping offices. The major docks and shipways all faced east, and Gentry aimed the motorboat toward them.

  “Kill the engine. We’ll coast in,” Anthony said. Gentry didn’t argue. They guided the motorboat toward the closest dock with paddles, and Anthony tied it off as soon as the prow of the boat struck the barnacle encrusted wood. Gentry checked his .45 before he clambered out of the boat. Anthony rested his hand on the carved elk-horn handle of his hunting knife as he took in the evening air. He’d trained his senses to a level of keenness that most men could only dream of. And the air of Shooter’s Island stank of death and blood.

  “Why would anyone come out here?” Gentry muttered as they left the docks behind and entered the tangled maze of ruined outbuildings and scrub-trees that grew up through rooftops and between the structures that lined the collapsed and sunken docks and quays of what had once been a thriving shipyard. He followed Anthony closely, and his hand never strayed far from the automatic holstered beneath his arm.

  “Isolation, presumably,” Anthony said, softly. “It’s close enough to the city to make getting back and forth a matter of minutes, depending on the engine in your boat, but it’s far enough away that no one will bother with it. Shooter’s Island has been sitting in a jurisdictional blind spot since Townsend-Downey pulled up stakes. As far as hiding places go, you could do worse—hsst!” Anthony froze, and flung out a hand to stop Gentry.

  As the latter watched, wide-eyed, Anthony unsheathed his knife and swiftly cut a tripwire that had been strung between two shacks at chest height. The wire was connected to a crude alarm system composed of lengths of rusty pipe that had been tied to the edge of the roof. If the wire had been tripped, the pipes would have fallen to the ground, striking the sheets of corrugated metal that lay on the ground covered in loose soil. “Someone is being cautious,” Anthony said. He glanced at Gentry. “Eyes open, Tom,” he said.

  Even as he turned back, however, he heard a bellow of pain. The cry echoed across the island, and birds hurtled into the sky. Anthony pointed, and Gentry nodded. As they moved past the tripwire, they caught sight of several men sitting near one of the shacks, smoking and sharing a bottle around a large fire, made from driftwood and planks torn from some of the shacks. They were dressed in clothing much like the corpse in the Bayonne coroner’s office and, from the brief snatches of their conversation he caught, Anthony could tell they were speaking Russian.

  He signalled Gentry. They had worked together long enough that they had developed a system of communicative gestures, for situations where silence was essential. Gentry flashed a return gesture. Satisfied that Gentry could look after himself, Anthony
began to creep through the outer ring of buildings with the grace of a shadow. The scream had come from one of the nearby shacks that dotted the waterline. Peering around the edge of one, he saw a tall man, wearing a heavy fur coat, standing atop the shack in question. He was standing over a figure who’d been tied spread-eagle to the roof. A pair of golden feathered eagles circled the shack, shrieking occasionally. Even from a distance, Anthony could tell that the birds were exceptionally large.

  He looked around. They’d need a distraction. Something loud and impossible to ignore, preferably. A thin smile crossed Anthony’s features as he caught sight of a stack of fuel drums sitting beneath an outbuilding. As he drew close to them, he could smell the tang of fuel. There were still some dregs left, protected from the elements by an oilcloth pulled lackadaisically over them. He drew his knife and quickly punctured the drums on the bottom row of the stack, as quietly as he could. The metal was old, rusted, and thin. When he’d finished the bottom row, he moved onto the next lowest. Soon, dregs of fuel were spilling into the mud. He stepped back to avoid the spillage and sheathed his knife.

  He caught a whiff of something rancid, and his hand, which was pressed to the shack he was sheltering behind, felt wet. Anthony peered at his hand, and saw that his fingers were stained with something dark. He brought them to his nose and sniffed—it was blood. The blood had run down the corrugated sides of the shack, where it was drying slowly, thanks to the cool weather. Carefully, he boosted himself up onto the edge of the slanted roof, and froze as he came face to face with the ragged, red remnant of what had once been a human being.