Алистер Маклин: Hostage Tower

And they were. With the sole exception of the wine bottles – which she left on the floor out of sheer devilment – Sabrina had stowed everything carefully away in the crates, and repaired the end panels. With luck, they would pass scrutiny.

‘So where, then,’ the policeman inquired icily, ‘did the guy in black spring from? Hey? And where did these bloody bottles come from? Huh?’

For once, the agent had no ready answer.

Enter the Black Spider-man.

There are times, even at night, when New York City – and particularly the canyons of the great avenues – seems to be made of glass.

Curtain walls of opaque smoothness, rising hundreds of feet into the air, suddenly, from different angles, come on like Christmas Trees, and reflect the whole exotic panorama of skyscraper and strip-bar, cathedral and cat-house.

Generally speaking, the bigger buildings are where the bigger people live, or work, or occasionally love, when they are not too preoccupied with living and working.

The big people like to have the trophies, the spoils, of their rich and rewarding lives around them, if only to remind them how richly rewarded they are. Then they pay other, more talented, people to arrange the trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing ways, and invite yet more people, who are less richly rewarded than they are, to come to their palaces and admire both them and their gewgaws.

The process serves two useful purposes: it teaches the visitors that the deadly sin of envy is a magnificent driving force; and it provides the means for the Pollocks, the Ming jars and the Mayan masks to get the occasional dusting.

There is, though, one drawback: certain small-minded persons are importunate enough to wish to steal the spoils of the moguls. Thus, the trophies have to be guarded with such fanatical zeal that the pretty penthouse palaces become fortresses, or, worse, virtually prisons.

Happily, most of the lairs of the truly rich are well-nigh impregnable, and it must be a source of comfort to the criminal classes that these good citizens can sleep easily in their beds at night. So euphoric do the big people sometimes feel, that they will gladly lend out their treasures for public exhibition so that a great many people may see them, and slaver at the unostentatious plaque that makes it perfectly plain who is doing the lending.

If anything, these public displays are protected with even greater care and devotion than the private gloatings, for while the truly rich may not sincerely appreciate their treasures, they are the very devil when it comes to collecting insurance pay-offs.

When the Black Spider-man gets bored with stealing from the millionaires’ palaces, he will penetrate the public exhibition places with equally contemptuous ease.

In Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue there are many glass mansions, as a latter-day prophet might put it. One stands in the block between 5th and 58th and 59th. A poster tastefully mounted on an easel outside the building says: ‘LOAN EXHIBITION. THE T’ANG TREASURES. 38th FLOOR EXHIBITION HALL’.

Much of the building is in darkness, but the lobby is well-lit, especially the elevators. Two men, both armed and in the livery of security guards, sit and talk and smoke …

Up the steel-beamed glass wall C.W. crept. He was black-clad and black of skin, his bare toes as prehensile as his gloved hands. He did not have far to go. Twenty feet above him sat a window washer’s gondola, attached to the vertical inset steel I-beam by a wheeled device.

C.W. reached it without breaking sweat, and climbed in. Slowly the gondola rose, almost to the peak of the building. C.W. scorned to count the floors: he would know the 38th when he reached it.

He looked down, and from side to side. The avenue, stretching out as far as he could see in one direction, was a ribbon of moving light-specks. The other way lay the dark menace of Central Park.

The 38th floor exhibition suite was not completely darkened. Though the exhibition had closed for the night, the choicest masterpieces of Chinese sculpture and metalwork were permanently illumined; some gaudily, where they needed it, others hardly touched by fingers of light that picked out salient features of wonderful artistry and delicacy.

C.W. peered through the window, and located the centrepiece – a magnificent T’ang Dynasty Flying Horse. The Black Spider-man drew in his breath. The sculpture was almost too exquisite to handle. But it was his target. He had a commission to steal it, and in any case he would own it for a few brief, precious hours.

C.W. also noted the other form of illumination in the exhibition suite’s main hall. Light-beams, laser-powered, criss-crossed each other like searchlights, seeking out and protecting the exhibits with a sureness that no human guard could match.

An intruder had merely to touch one of the glowing rays, and alarm bells rang out – not just in the exhibition suite and the lobby, and in the apartment of the building’s security chief, but also at Manhattan Central and two other police precincts. The Flying Horse sat there, graceful and elegant, but dramatically charged with the suggestion of enormous, coiled power.

C.W. conceived the loony notion that all he had to do was whistle, and the horse would leap out of its prison into his arms. He tried it, and his warm breath blew back into his face from the window. He thought the horse winked, but he wasn’t sure.

He sighed, and picked up from the floor of the gondola a large rubber suction cup. He clamped the cup to the window, and fixed the cord running from it to the stanchion of the I-beam. Then he took from his belt a diamond-tipped scalpel, and patiently traced a perfect circle around the perimeter of the cup.

He completed the manoeuvre several times, and replaced the scalpel. With the knuckles of both hands, he rapped the area of glass surrounding the suction cup, which was sitting on the skin of the window like a black carbuncle.

The ring of glass broke free, and C.W. carefully caught the suction cup and allowed it and its new glass cap to hang by the cord against the side of the building. He crawled through the circular hole, carefully avoiding a low, slanting light-beam, and stood in the exhibition hall getting his bearings and adjusting his eyes and body to the changed lighting and temperature. He breathed in deeply and evenly, and tensed his muscles for what, at best, could be only a ten-second sprint to the horse, and back out to freedom.

For the Black Spider-man knew that he had not even the remotest chance of stealing the horse and escaping undetected. That might be achieved by an army of electronic experts and technicians, but C.W., as always, was one man, alone. For him, it had to be the hard way.

His sole aids were his pantherish strength, his astonishing nerve, his natural ferocity, and his boundless contempt for danger.

He had one other (for his chosen trade) admirable quality: he was always self-contained, and rarely dealt in violence. Violence against things, or obstacles – yes. Against locks, doors, safes, security devices; but hardly ever against people. C.W. valued people – even the truly rich – almost as much as he valued the beautiful creations they owned.

Drawing breath again, he let it out explosively, and launched himself towards the centre of the room.

When you are baptized Clarence Wilkins Whitlock and your schoolfriends ask you which name you want them to call you by and you say ‘Neither’, then you might have to fight to protect your nominal integrity. Clarence Wilkins Whitlock reached this small crisis early on in life, and established his right to be known simply as ‘C.W.’ over a bloody, but gratifyingly brief, period in one of the less favoured districts of Tallahassee, Florida.