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reporter for The Classic; “Cliff Marsland,” who moved effortlessly among the city’s gangsters and racketeers; Rutledge Mann—the network’s “man”—who headed up The Shadow’s intelligence bureau; Hawkeye, the stoopshouldered panhandler; Jericho Drake, a black of unsurpassed strength; Tapper, Stanley, Yat Soon, Dr. Rupert Sayre . . . the list went on and on.
    Shrevnitz had worked with all of them over the years, and in all kinds of circumstances. Duke Rollins obviously considered himself a tough guy, but he was small potatoes compared to some The Shadow had taken on; archfiends of crookdom, like Mox, Macmurdo, Q, the Green Terror, the Vindicator, and Rodil, who called himself Doctor Mocquino . . . Another list that went on and on.
    Shrevnitz heard the drawer close and glanced at the rearview mirror. The Shadow had moved to the center of the seat and was leaning forward. In the light of the street lamps and the dashboard gauges, he looked fatigued, either from his efforts on the bridge or from the feverish excitation his violent encounters frequently gave rise to. But he was dressed for a different form of nightlife now, in tuxedo, black overcoat, and white scarf. His thick black hair was combed straight back, and the relaxed muscles of his face had assembled themselves into the handsome features of Lamont Cranston. The ring, adjusted to fit his bare finger, shone from his left hand.
    “The usual place, Mr. Cranston, sir?”
    The transformed Shadow nodded.
    The Cobalt Club was near Times Square, in among the theaters, private clubs, swell shops, and fancy restaurants. The Cobalt itself had once been an exclusive men’s club, but those days were gone. Now it was the latest epicenter of the city’s social scene, a place to see and be seen. A fiend known as the Black Tiger had even declared war on the club a couple of years back, but The Shadow had put a quick end to that. Lamont Cranston had been a member in good standing for close to ten years, and he was known by the waiters to be the best tip on the block.
    The round-topped entrance was as elegant as the interior was rumored to be, featuring a square of Modernistic canopy that supported the club’s name done in white neon block letters, and under which stood eager-to-please doormen in top hats, braid, and cobalt-blue jackets.
    As Cranston entered—the doormen tipping their hats and the coat-check girl giving him her best smile—he stowed his pain where it couldn’t get at him. The hand that had made mincemeat of Duke Rollins’s face was feeling better, makeup covering what he hadn’t been able to heal through a tumo summoning, which brought body heat to a wounded area. His mentor Marpa Tulku had been able to stick pins through his tongue, sleep atop the sharpened edges of swords, stride with impunity over hot coals, send messages on the wind, render himself seemingly invisible, subsist on a diet of edible fungi, endure subzero temperatures, walk for endless hours without rest on the Tibetan plateau . . . But only a few of those uncanny abilities had been successfully communicated to his fretful student.
    Cranston paused at the top of a short stairway to survey the club’s main room. Wainwright Barth was seated at his customary table on the far side of the room, far enough from the band so that the waiters could take his order without having to lean over with hands to their ears.
    The room was equal parts Hollywood and Buck Rogers, with square tables arranged on either side of a gleaming dance floor. Behind the raised level where the band sat rose a towering fan of gold lamé, down the center of which ran a stripe of shimmering cobalt-blue fabric that might as well have been made of feathers plucked from some exotic jungle bird. The intense blue was picked up in the glass panels of a stately pillar that stood at the center of a rectangular bar that took up a corner of the room. Elsewhere were embossed wall panels that shone like silver, etched-glass