“The Living Shadow” (part two)

Let's get another chapter or three read today! The Shadow has forcibly rescued near-suicide victim Harry Vincent and sent him to an upscale hotel with orders to spy on the man in the room next to his. Let's see what happens next.

3. The Man In the Next Room​

It's been five hours since Harry was woken up for breakfast, new clothes, and a phone call with a coded message, and he's been watching the hallway outside his neighbor's room with increasing boredom ever since. He did get a pleasant diversion at noon though, when the bellhop came back with an actual gold watch like the one the "jeweler" on the phone described. Seems like the Shadow is front-loading his payments, which Harry appreciates.

Still, he's starting to really crawl up the walls by the time he finally notices any activity. Multiple footsteps coming up to the nearby corner, and then one set of them dethatching and coming nearer still. Harry sneaks up to the door and peeks out to see his neighbor - a paunchy, world-weary looking middle aged man - tiptoe up to his own door and look around as if hoping to not get caught before producing the key and opening it. Fortunately, Harry passes his stealth check and doesn't get spotted watching from his own slightly-open door. The man was acting so shady with the creeping up to his door and looking around before going in that Harry wonders if this might be a burglar rather than the actual renter. However, the man stays in the suite for a full hour, which is not something a burglar would do. When the man leaves again, Harry inconspicuously follows him down to the hotel lobby, from which the man exits and hails a cab. Harry manages to get close enough to hear his destination - Pennsylvania Station - before he closes the door behind him and the taxi drives off.

Of course, if I were doing secret criminal or spy stuff and had to call a cab from a crowded hotel entrance, I'd initially give the driver the wrong destination at first and then "correct his mix-up, sorry about that Mr. Driver" a minute after departing. This guy may or may not have been smart enough to do the same.

He was, it turns out! Harry calls another cab to Pennsylvania Station, and upon arrival sees no sign of the other vehicle that left literally just less than a minute ahead of him, or of the man who took it. Then, after searching fruitlessly for a while, he returns to the hotel to find the man sitting around in one of the lobby chairs reading a newspaper.

Nice try, Harry Vincent. But hey, you're new at this, and you didn't exactly have time to think ahead of your target, so I can't really judge you for not doing so.

Harry is pretty dang hungry by now, and he suspects that the target may be on to him at this point anyway, so rather than stay in the lobby and keep watching him Harry heads to the hotel restaurant and orders dinner. It's a good dinner, at least. Easily the best that the broke failed businessman has had in months. But he's a little too anxious about failing the Shadow and being cut off from his new source of income (at best; at worst, the Shadow might decide that dead men tell no tales and take him back to the bridge) to really enjoy it. By the time he's finished, the man is no longer in the lobby.

Speaking of "the Shadow," it's as he's thinking to himself over dinner that Harry decides to name him that. He never referred to himself as the Shadow, or any other pseudonym for that matter, so it's really just Harry's name for him.

Harry does work toward making up for his earlier flub, though, when he approaches the reception desk and asks if any mail has arrived for room 417 (the one his target is staying in), and sure enough the clerk doesn't check his identity before looking. Luckily for Harry, the target does have mail that evening, and while Harry doesn't want to incriminate himself by opening it he does catch the name on the envelope. R. J. Scanlon. Even if it's a pseudonym, it's a pseudonym you can track his mail by for the time being! Harry apologizes for mixing his room up with the one next to his, and hands back the envelope before retiring to room 417. Later that evening, he hears Scanlon return to the room, and notes the fact that he latches his door behind him as well as locking it. No further activity until Harry falls asleep around midnight.

The next morning, Harry sneaks out after Scanlon at around ten thirty, and spends the day following him around the city. Scanlon goes into a small office building that Harry can't easily follow him into, leaves an hour later, goes to a restaurant, goes to a movie, makes a brief stop back at the hotel, and then just jogs around aimlessly. Scanlon's nondescript appearance makes this challenging at first, but Harry quickly learns to spot him by his extremely nervous demeanor and jumpy body language. He seems to not be much more experienced in criminal shenaniganry than Harry himself is, and seemingly nervous about someone coming after him. This observation gives Harry the idea of looking to see if someone else really is coming after him, and it turns out that there is! A short, stocky man with a strikingly black mustache and hair is also tailing Scanlon. Harry avoids notice by either Scanlon or the other observer for some ways before following them into a restaurant, where he manages to find a table near Scanlon's but hidden from his line of sight by a coatrack. A minute later, Moustache Man sits down at Scanlon's table, startling the latter badly. He seems to have not been expecting a meeting, then. Curious.

Harry listens in as the two begin a quiet conversation:

““You don’t seem to remember me,” continued the dark−haired man.

”I don’t,” replied Scanlon, somewhat gruffly. It was the first time Vincent had heard his voice, and it sounded harsh and grating.

”You’re Bob Scanlon, aren’t you?” asked the dark, haired man pleasantly. “Shoe salesman from Frisco?”

”That’s right.”

”You don’t remember me, then?”

”No.”

”Steve Cronin, from Boston,” said the dark−haired man glibly. “Used to sell shoes myself. Met you at the convention in Chicago, five years ago. Out of the game now. Been here in New York four years. Remember you, though. Good time we had out there.” He held out his hand, which Scanlon shook rather reluctantly.”

I'm guessing these shoes had an impressive street price.

The rest of the conversation is all shoe related, with Cronin doing most of the talking and Scanlon just nervously answering a question here and there. Finally, Cronin leaves, and Scanlon seems jumpier than ever before. Though not jumpy enough to spot Harry when he keeps tailing him from the restaurant, apparently.

Scanlon makes a lengthy, circling detour before returning to the hotel, and constantly looks over his shoulder while doing so. Harry concludes that he wants to make sure Cronin isn't following him before he returns to the hotel, but if so he's a little too late, because Cronin was already tracking him when he stopped back briefly at the hotel earlier that afternoon. Still, Harry decides, if Cronin is going to do anything, it'll probably be back at the hotel tonight, if he went through the trouble of scoping it out. So, rather than track Scanlon as he slowly, painfully circles around the hotel's neighborhood, the tired Harry takes a cab back to wait for the two men.

I have a hunch that Harry's going to regret cutting corners there. Especially given the title of the next chapter.


Speaking of which, next chapter!

4. A Bold Murder

Scarcely five minutes after Harry situates himself back in his room with the door open a crack and his eyes and ears open, he hears footsteps coming up to his and Scanlon's end of the hall. It's not Scanlon though, but Cronin! Scanlonprobablyisn't back yet, so Cronin is either going to ransack his room for something or set up an ambush. I say "or," but the chapter title kinda gives it away lol. When Cronin finds the room locked and its renter seemingly not yet present, he does this malicious grin whose description in the prose is probably meant to be chilling but just makes me think of trollface. Harry's inner monologue responds to it thusly:

““A fine specimen of humanity,” thought Vincent. “Looks like a wolf − and probably acts like one. But at heart he’s yellow; I can tell that.””

Erm...based on what, exactly? Granted, given Harry's apparent skill at avoiding notice it's probably fair to assume that he's good at reading people and knows it, so I guess I can roll with it. Still seems like way too bold a statement for this early on in his observation of Cronin, though.

After poking at the locked door for a bit, Cronin turns the corner and hides (his footsteps stop the second after he rounds the corner, so Harry can tell he's still lurking there). When Scanlon does return, Cronin accosts him in the hall outside the room and starts pressuring him to talk about shoes some more. Scanlon is very resistant, but Cronin ends up half-wheedling and half-forcing his way into Scanlon's room. After a moment, Harry nervously sneaks into the hall and puts his ear to the door, where he's able to eavesdrops on part of the conversation.

““All right, Cronin − if that’s your name − tell me what you want.”

”You know what I want, Scanlon. I want the disk.”

”What disk? Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

”The Chinese disk. The coin. You have it.”

”I don’t understand you, Cronin.”

”You know what I’m asking for. Be reasonable. I’ll buy it. Name your price.”

Scanlon’s reply was a mumble. The voices lessened, and Vincent could hear nothing.”

Not drugs or human trafficking, then. Stolen historical artifacts.

The conversation stays quiet, and Harry eventually decides to return to his own room before someone sees him. Nothing. Then, suddenly, a thud. Followed by Cronin hastily exiting the room and taking pains not to be seen (although, not too many pains; he doesn't notice Harry watching through his cracked-open door) as he flees the scene of the crime.

Already knowing what he's going to see, but not quite wanting to believe it yet, Harry waits for Cronin to be out of earshot and then enters room 417. Scanlon is dead, of course. There's a pillow next to him, so I guess Cronin smothered him...or...wait, what?

Okay, so, apparently Scanlon was shot, and Cronin used the pillowcase to muffle the bang.

...

People who know more about guns than me: can you actually do that? Guns are pretty fucking loud, even from behind earplugs and purpose-made suppressors. Is the author showing their ignorance here, or am I?

...

After getting over the sight of death, Harry thinks about what to do next. His first instinct is to return to his room and wait for the Shadow to contact him, but he also has a contravening impulse that sort of surprises me in light of his characterization up until now.

“He must get back to his own room at all cost − yet he must, prodded by his sense of duty as an American citizen, give some signal of Scanlon’s murder..”

The guy signed on to work for a...crime lord? vampire? whatever the Shadow is, it definitely isn't something law-abiding...gathering intel on people for unknown purposes with pretty minimal convincing. He was desperate, sure, but this still seems awfully civic-minded for someone who's otherwise come across as pretty mercenary.

Then, he randomly steps on a small, disc-shaped object that had been wedged into a crack in the floor and which Cronin somehow managed to miss despite being determined to find it. That's not contrived or anything. Vincent collects the disc, and then pushes the telephone off of the room's table. This makes more noise than a handgun muffled by a pillowcase does, apparently, and Harry scrambles back to his room confident that he'll have alerted someone to the murder.

But...tampering with the crime scene isn't going to make the case harder to solve, in his mind. Even removing a key piece of evidence.

This man is very indecisive. Though I guess with what he's been through the last couple of days he might not be at the height of his rational faculties.

He goes back to his room and pretends to be asleep while the police arrive and search the room next door. When a detective knocks on his door, Harry pretends to have just woken up, and when asked if he heard anything he acts as if he slept through the gunshot and falling phone. Fortunately for him, the people in room 415 also slept through it, so the detective isn't suspicious (or at least he's pretending not to be; on second thoughts, it's kinda suspicious that the detective is telling this random bystander details about his investigation like that. He may be trying to lure him into a false sense of security). When offered to be moved to a different room further away from what may be a noisy crime scene investigation, Harry thinks it would make him seem less suspicious if he accepted. Hopefully the Shadow won't be too annoyed.

After settling into his new room, Harry inspects the disc he picked up. It's a coin made of a metal he can't identify on sight, with a Mandarin character molded into it. Surprise, surprise. End chapter.


This is still just kind of meh in general. Unremarkable prose that spends too much time describing Harry being bored, bland main character who you can infer might be an interesting depiction of someone reacting to trauma but it's a big "might," and just a general sort of naivete in the way its world seems to be written. Very amateurish feel in general, and not quite in the charming way (though it comes close at times).

I was planning to do three chapters today, but this next one is somewhat longer one than the first four, so I'll go ahead and call this a post.