The Jade Queen Read online

  THE JADE QUEEN

  by Jack Conner

  Published by Thrilling Tales

  Copyright Jack Conner 2012

  Cover by Chris Valentine

  PART ONE

  THE SOCIETY

  Chapter 1

  Blood and death chased Lynchmort from opium dreams, and he was still shaking off their wispy threads when the Chinese woman sat him down and said, “There’s been a killing.”

  Lynch smiled sleepily. “Could I bother you for some tea?”

  Madam Wan was a hard-faced woman in a silken turquoise robe, and her face grew harder at his tone. The bare flickering bulb in what passed for her office, a dingy room in back of the opium den, cast strange shadows on her blunt face, and Lynch studied them uneasily, feeling himself lured back into his dreams.

  She banged the desk with her fist. “Tea! Strong!”

  Servants jumped. In moments a steaming cup was thrust at Lynch. Gingerly, he accepted, taking only the cup, for to take both cup and saucer would have required two hands.

  “Ah,” he said, savoring the aroma. “From Szechuan Province. Plucked in autumn.” He sipped. The heat jolted him, and the flavor roused him. “Grown in the high country. Excellent.”

  Madam Wan visibly restrained herself. “There has been another killing.” With her accent it came out ki-ring.

  Lynch raised his eyebrows, though he only had one eye, feeling a trace of concern, even interest. “Another? There’s been more?”

  “You better see.” She snapped her fingers, and a servant stepped forward, bowing. “Show him.”

  The servant nodded and stood expectantly, waiting.

  Lynch supposed he was supposed to follow. Well, why not? The world wheeled around him as he mounted to his feet.

  “May I?” He lifted the tea.

  Madam Wan frowned but made no protest as he took it with him.

  The servant ushered him outside. Lynch hadn’t realized it was daytime yet, and he relished the sunlight as it warmed his skin and seduced beads of sweat from his pores. The stench of death hovered up ahead. He allowed something to slip away from him, and he stood straighter, opened his eye wider. He tossed down the tea with a grimace and hurled the cup aside to shatter with a satisfying crash.

  “Lead on,” he said, amused at his own pettiness. That will show her.

  The servant showed him through the network of alleys, down increasingly narrow and filthy corridors. Cats slunk in the shadows and feral dogs fought over a bone. More than one drunk slouched against a crumbling wall.

  As he went, Lynch caught a glimpse of himself in a shattered window and suppressed a shudder. He was tall and ragged, dressed in his black leather coat, his wavy black hair unkempt, his lean face stubbled, lips in need of a cigarette, his eye dark and brooding, its white now mostly red after God knew how long in Madam Wan’s. Then, of course, there was his eye patch and the scars that radiated out from it, almost in a star-like pattern, and the gleaming hook that ended his left arm. Like a second-rate pirate, he thought, killed by Errol Flynn in the first reel. No. A wolf, crippled and driven into exile. That was better. And a damned handsome wolf, he added to himself.

  “Almost there,” said Madam Wan’s servant. As if being away from his mistress freed his tongue, he said, “Can you believe the bombing last night? I didn’t think we would make it.”

  Lynch only vaguely recalled the bombs. They’d merely been great throbbing explosions in the oblivion of his dreams.

  He shrugged. “The city’s still here.”

  “Not for much longer. The Nazis will roll in soon, mark my words -- just like the rest of the Continent. You think a few mountains can protect us forever? No. Madam Wan’s already trying to secure passage to the States.”

  “I admire her cowardice.”

  “Ah! Here we are.”

  They rounded a corner and almost tripped over the body. Lynch’s initial reaction was to be intrigued at the amount of blood that had splashed the walls and ground. The poor dead fellow was naked and face-down, and the only wounds Lynch could see at first were along his back -- neat, strange holes dotting his spine. Not bullet holes. Almost as if something had drilled into him. The dead man’s face and upper torso lay in a red-black blood, and flies buzzed all around.

  A wizened Chinaman squatted nearby, shooing away the dogs. Clearly he had been waiting for them, minding the body. Lynch supposed him to be a member of Madam Wan’s staff.

  “Took too long’,” the man said, rising with an audible creak. “Cops pro’ly almost hea’.” Each word sounded forced, bitten off. He cast a glare at the younger servant as if it were all his fault.

  Lynch stepped forward, taking the blame. “I’m afraid they had to rouse me. I was not . . . cooperative.”

  The old man peered at him skeptically. “Madam Wan, she say she send expert. She say she end this mess.” On the last word he spat out an arcing viscous gob of black tobacco.

  Lynch knelt over the body -- his head flared at the movement -- and studied the holes along the corpse’s back. “I suppose if there’s one thing I’m an expert on, it’s death, all right.” He sniffed. “Dead about twelve hours, I’d say.”

  With his hook, he turned the body over, careful not to leave a mark. The tacky, dried blood ripped audibly as it peeled off the face and chest hairs like glue. Lynch frowned down at the corpse. The dead man looked familiar, and after a moment Lynch placed him. Franklin, he thought his name was. Another opium bum, another junkie, just like him. Said he’d served in the Thirteenth Regiment. Lynch had served in the Ninth. Both had killed their share of Germans.

  A dirty beard sprouted from Franklin’s gaunt, skull-like face, and his sunken eyes stared at nothing. A far cry from the soldier he must have been.

  Lynch saw the source of the blood immediately. Franklin had been slashed across the throat with a very sharp blade -- probably, considering the tight space of the alley, a knife or straight-razor. Slashed, then left to bleed out against the wall while the killer -- what? -- stripped him -- the bloody clothes along the wall testified to that -- then what? Lynch turned Franklin back over.

  The holes . . .

  The highest one was at the base of the skull and three more, identical in size -- about a half-Crown in width -- dotted his spine, descending at regular intervals almost to the pelvis. Lynch leaned over and sniffed the wounds. There was the faint trace of metal, maybe oil. Some machine had done this, some instrument had performed the grisly procedure. But for what purpose?

  A whistle blew. Lynch scowled to see blue-coated policemen file down the alley, moving carefully so as not to get their uniforms dirty. Cats fled before them.

  “Get away from there!” cried the lead policeman. He waved Lynch and the others back as if they were carrion animals. Then, as he arrived over the body, flushed and out of breath, his eyes locked with Lynch’s. “You.”

  “I,” Lynch agreed. “And how are you doing . . . Lieutenant now, isn’t it?” How much did that promotion cost you, I wonder?

  Lt. Omsky’s eyes narrowed, hearing the unspoken words. He was not an unhandsome sort, a fellow roughly Lynch’s age, with thick red side-burns and a bushy mustache.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. Then, as his wit caught up to his breath: “Come for breakfast?”

  Lynch wiped his hook off against his already dirty corduroy pants, and rose. The Chinese had backed off a few steps. To them the police were the enemy.

  “I was told there were others,” Lynch said.

  Omsky’s face was flat, unreadable. “Others?”

  “Don’t be dense. Other bodies. Murders.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lt. Omsky made a whirling motion to his subordinates, and they stepped forward carrying a stretcher. The
y set it down beside Franklin and began to move him onto it casually.

  “You’re not going to investigate?” Lynch asked. “Study the crime scene?”

  “Who says we haven’t already? Besides, that’s our affair, not yours.”

  “The condition of the body doesn’t surprise you -- naked, repeatedly impaled with a strange instrument after death?”

  Omsky shrugged.

  “You expected it,” Lynch realized.

  “Keep asking questions and you’ll expect a bad end, too.”

  Then, almost as soon as they had arrived, the policemen gathered Franklin and carried him back down the alley as if they had never been. Flies settled in the feast of pooled blood. Lynch scratched his cheek with a fingernail, watching Omsky and the others disappear around a bend.

  Hesitantly, the Chinese approached.

  Lynch spun to them. “Take me to Madam Wan.”

  ***

  “There have been four other murders,” Madam Wan said, sounding somewhat gratified that she had Lynch’s interest at last. She ate white, stale-looking scones off a tarnished silver tray that sat between moldering piles of books and papers on her desk. A great brass gong stood behind her, and the air smelled of the incense that burned on either end of her desk, their stalks emitting thin whipping streams of smoke from the mouths of jade dragons. “That I know of,” she added, chewing.

  Lynch resisted her offer of a scone. The incense teased his nose, reminding him of opium. “And all with the . . . holes?” He tapped the base of his skull.

  She nodded, wiping her mouth of crumbs. “All the same. Bad business.”

  “And the cops, they’ve done nothing.”

  She grunted. “Less than nothing. They crooked. I pay them regular, leave me alone, but this . . .”

  Lynch wasn’t sure if Omsky and his men were involved in what was going on or simply bought off by whoever was committing the murders to look the other way, but either way they were obviously not interested in solving the crimes.

  “What exactly do you want me to do?” Lynch said. “I’m no investigator.”

  She raised a padded mallet. “Take a wild dog to bring down a wild dog. This killer, he takes my customers, makes my place of business unsafe, scares others off. He need go. You -- owe me money.”

  “He’s not just a lone killer, not if the police are in on it -- some of them, anyway. And if the cops are actively disposing of the bodies, then there’s more power behind this than makes any sort of sense. There’s some system at work.”

  “System?”

  “Another thing occurs to me -- if the murders aren’t being reported here, maybe other murders are going unreported elsewhere. And those holes along the spine, almost like a procedure of some sort. If all those murdered are that way . . . all victims of some strange procedure . . . one has to wonder what the procedure is for.”

  She pounded the mallet against the gong, and a reverberating peel rang Lynch’s ears and the back of his teeth. Two pretty Chinese women in fanciful robes entered and flanked Madam Wan as she rose and tottered from the room, pausing at the door to peer critically at Lynch. “You owe me money.”

  He let a thin smile slip his lips. “So I do. But that is not why I will help.”

  “No? Why?”

  “I’m a wild dog, remember. I haven’t tasted blood in a while, and I’m hungry.”

  She huffed again, unimpressed, and left, apparently to make a grand entrance at one of her various sundry establishments. Lynch knew she owned a couple of brothels and a gambling house, at least, in addition to the opium den.

  He straightened his leather jacket and departed by way of the huge main room, his home away from home. This place had once been a factory, but a bomb early in the war had destabilized it, and Madam Wan had bought the building cheap. Now pallets heaped with unwashed sheets and bodies littered the concrete floor. Incense burned between rearing golden idols, strange gods like dragons and tigers, one with many arms. Stars painted on the ceiling far overhead seemed to glow, and musicians played some odd stringed instruments, lyres and harps and more, in a corner: quiet, otherworldly. It was like passing through a dream. Lynch looked on the sleeping faces of the dreamers -- mostly white, despite the atmosphere -- enviously. Soon, he thought. He would end this business and slip back into his sheets, back into his dreams. There she would be waiting for him. Eliza . . .

  He blinked in the bright daylight as he stepped outside. Where to next? He would have appreciated another examination of the body. At Franklin. His name was Franklin. Those holes -- Franklin had been killed in order to inflict them, yet their purpose remained a mystery. Lt. Omsky and his cronies had the body, however, and they obviously weren’t about to let Lynch take a peek.

  He asked around, talking to the bums, toughs and working girls of the area, not neglecting the Chinese. The sun grew brighter overhead, and he was getting nowhere. Finally, as dusk fell, he interviewed a working girl he knew, but whom Franklin had known better.

  “And you never saw him with these other two men . . . ” Lynch flipped back through the notes he’d taken. “Edgar Metzlinger or Gareth Billings?” Both, he’d learned, were other victims of the killer, and they’d had holes similar to Franklin’s.

  Tracy shook her head. She would have been a pretty girl, but a nasty case of some social disease had left fever blisters ringing her mouth. “Naw. Far as I know, Frankie never knew ‘em. Lousy bums! He was worth twice what they were. Three times.”

  “You liked him.”

  “He was a war hero. It was him bayoneted that damned Hun, whatsisname, Haggris. Cousin to the Count, you know.”

  Lynch was painfully aware that Count von Ostholstein (an honorary title) was the German personally overseeing the invasion of the country. Some called him the left arm of Hitler himself. In any case, the Count had become Casveigh’s very own boogeyman.

  “Then you have no idea why Mr. Metzlinger or Mr. Billings were killed in the same manner as Franklin, just . . . ” He flipped through his notes again. “ . . . four days after the last one, which was, let’s see . . . three days before the one before -- Mr. Metzlinger.”

  “Naw.” Her tongue played with a fever blister.

  Lynch grimaced. All the murders Madam Wan knew of had taken place in this district, affectionately known by the greater city as the Blight, but no one seemed to have seen anything.

  “Have you seen anyone suspicious?” he asked. “Someone with bloodstains, perhaps, or weapons?”

  “No one who doesn’t normally have ‘em.”

  “Anyone with strange equipment, something that could inflict the holes found on the victims?”

  “No. Now if you don’t quit bothering me, I’m gonna have to start chargin’. You’re scarin’ customers away.”

  Then I’m doing a public service. “He might hide the equipment inside something. Have you seen anyone carrying something large, anything really, every time he visits the area?”

  “No.” She tilted her head. “Not ‘less you mean someone like the artist.”

  “The . . . artist?”

  “My, uh, memory ain’t so good.”

  He forked over a Queen’s Head.

  “He’s a tall bloke, sort of a dandy,” Tracy said, stuffing the money away. “Dresses real fine. No one ever messes with him, though. Anyway, he’s been comin’ round for awhile, don’t know how long, on and off. Always brings his paintin’ supplies in ‘is little bag. Has a coupla servants carry more, the canvas and such. Plops right down on the sidewalk and just starts paintin’ -- sometimes of workin’ girls, sometimes of beggars, or what-have-you, but he makes ‘em look real nice. I’ve seen his pictures, I have. Real . . . fine. Warm. Like it ain’t so bad to be poor. Don’t know what he does with ‘em, though, the paintin’s. What richer’d want a wall-full o’ whores and bums?”

  It would provide the perfect cover for the man to be in the area, though -- to camp out on a street and wait for a victim.

  “What’s his name?” Lynch said
.

  “People just call him the artist.”

  “Where does he normally set up? When?”

  “Could be anywhere. Odd hours. Usually at night.”

  She had nothing more to say, so he thanked her and went on his way.

  A cigarette girl in a pillbox hat and little else sold him a pack of Zfuens a couple of blocks down, and he lit up gratefully. The artist . . .

  He continued to ask around, this time focusing on the so-called artist, who apparently came and went from the Blight always in the presence of two servants. No one had seen him conferring with the police, nor with any of the victims. He had been here last night, though. He had been seen just before Franklin would have been murdered, having paid a local hood to pose for him under a street-lamp but breaking off abruptly when one of his assistants returned and whispered in his ear. That Franklin was passed out in alley, perhaps, and available for whatever the procedure was?

  The artist was the killer. Lynch was certain of it.

  With a spring in his step, he asked a few ruffians that he trusted -- as much as he could -- to alert him if the artist was seen, then installed himself at a local cabaret. It was near midnight. He devoured a corned beef on rye and slaughtered a thick Scottish beer while a raunchy burlesque played out on stage. As he was finishing off his second beer, contemplating either a return to Madam Wan’s or else a visit to a place he hadn’t been to in too long -- home -- when a certain buxom waitress sat herself in his lap.

  “Well, hello darling,” she said, squirming deliciously. “I’ve got the late shift tonight. Maybe later . . . ”

  He had been forced to wrap an arm about her to prevent her from falling off, and her warm, soft weight felt welcome. One of her breasts mashed up against his chest, and her dark eyes, rimmed by unnaturally long lashes and framed by long, curly black hair, lustrous and opulent, flashed appealingly. She leaned in close, her full lips almost brushing his whiskered cheek.

  “What do you say?” Her voice was husky. “My place?”