The Queen Bee Strikes!

Constance Everhart didn’t look like a millionaire heiress. At society balls you would never see her in an evening gown like one of those pretty, pampered poor little rich girls people read about in the papers. She preferred to dress like one of the guys in a black tail coat and a starched white wing collar shirt, white marcella waistcoat, white bowtie; black, braided trousers, black socks and shoes. She wore her blonde hair short like a man too but slicked back with pomade which gave her a look of Clark Gable. About the only feminine thing about her would be the white carnation in her lapel. Her unconventional dress sense always raised quite a few eyebrows among the other members of polite society but not half as many as would have been raised if they had seen her in jet black battle dress and black great coat, black leather gloves and her black Adrian helmet with its golden visor and bee insignia; the usual attire of her alter ego, Queen Bee. Sitting in the back of her black and gold plated Stout Scarab mini-van driven by female chauffeur, valet and old school friend , Oxana,its streamlined art-deco body gleaming in bright neon and electric lamp light, she loaded her golden hypodermic dart gun with her trademark bee stings. Her paralysing darts could instantly immobilize even the largest human opponent by overriding their muscle functions, while her truth darts were able to suppress those parts of the cerebral cortex that human beings used for lying and deception and simultaneously stimulate those parts which were responsible for producing the emotion of guilt. It was the preferred choice of weapon for Constance who was, at heart, a person who deplored violence and torture and tried, as often as she could, to avoid using them as a means of extracting information. “Sometimes, I would like to be like dear Mr Ghandi, in India but then Ghandi never had to face the Mafia”, she sighed, also loading and holstering the two snub nosed revolvers, that she wore purely for emergencies. And there was a new kind of evil in America now that she would have to contend with. There were Nazi’s marching along main street openly calling for the removal of Roosevelt and democracy and countless fascist fifth columns cooking up insidious terrorist plots against the American people, probably with the help of rich Nazi sympathisers like those bastards Henry Ford and James D. Mooney. For several weeks now she had been investigating the activities of a Colonel Vadim Vlas and his bronze shirt brigade ever since a news report in the Herald-Tribune caught her eye. It was about a pet rabbit dying of the infectious bacterial disease Tularemia. The owner of that rabbit was identified as a Dr Wilbur Burley whom she knew to be one of Colonel Vlas’s fanatical bronze shirt followers and a qualified specialist in infectious diseases. If Vlas and his fascist cohorts were planning to release Tularemia in New York then thousands of good, decent hard working American people would die and if the police wouldn’t or couldn’t stop them, then it was up to the Queen Bee to do the job. Speaking in Buzz , the secret language that she and her friends had made up as little girls back in prep school she asked Oxana to take her to Yorkville, East 86th street on the upper East side of Manhattan. It was where a lot of German immigrants lived and a popular recruiting ground for Nazi’s like Vlas. It was also where Wilbur Burley lived and she was hoping to have a quiet chat with Mr Burley about his dead rabbit. Unquestioningly, Oxana obeyed her old school friend. Girls at school had often seen Oxana’s obsessive devotion to Constance as a little creepy, even psychotic but Oxana had been an orphan with crippling shyness, Constance had taken Oxana under her wing; made her part of her secret Beehive society and Oxana had been her devoted companion ever since, becoming, thanks to the influence and encouragement of Constance, an expert markswoman and master of “The System”, the ancient martial art of her mother Russia. Burley lived on the fourth floor of a beige brick, low-rise, low-rent apartment building. There was no elevator but Constance and Oxana were both superb athletes and had no problem bounding up four flights of concrete stairs before making their way silently but swiftly along a narrow corridor to the door of Burley’s apartment. There was no time for lock picking and a gun shot or one of the miniature breaching charges, which Constance often carried, would have brought neighbours or police running but fortunately Oxana had become especially adept at the art of kicking open locked wooden doors and, with one well aimed sideways kick, she shattered the wooden lamination which encased the mortise lock of Burleys door and sent it flying open, slamming against a side wall. Startled, Burley turned from where he was sitting, at a small writing desk and, in the next moment lunged towards where he usually kept his first world war Lugar pistol on his bedside table but, before he had a chance to seize hold of the gun, Constance had already shot him with one of her instantly paralysing bee stings. It would have been a simple thing to just torture the information that she needed out of Burley but there was no guaranteeing that he’d tell her the truth. Furthermore, the thought of committing or even witnessing a prolonged act of torture just turned her civilized stomach. Fortunately, the truth dart that she now fired into Burleys arm made such medieval methods unnecessary. “Tell me everything you know about the Tularemia, doctor”, asked Constance, as Burley lay helplessly immobilized upon his bed, “Is Vlas planning to release the disease in the city? How is he going to transmit it and where is the bacteria being stored?”. Burley started to cry, his heart gripped by sudden uncontrollable feelings of guilt, an emotion that the hard hearted fanatic had never experienced so strongly before and then he told Constance everything that she wanted to know about the Tularemia; about the warehouse in the Bronx where the bacteria was being kept in hermetically sealed barrels and about Vlas’s plan to spread the disease using a squadron of autogyro’s fitted with crop dusting sprays but then he also told her something about Vlas himself,something that made Constance shiver. “He’s a Romanian, you know, from a place called Oradea”, said Burley, his face growing solemn and his eyes, distant, “As a soldier in the Romanian army he told me he’d taken part in bloody pogroms against the jews. Someone like you might think that that alone would be enough reason to call him a monster but I also thought that there was something strange; something genuinely non-human or, perhaps, supernatural about him and it often terrified me. It’s all in my notebooks on my writing table”. Constance and Oxana turned the paralysed man onto his front and, pinning his wrists behind his back, snapped a pair of titanium handcuffs round them. “These should keep you occupied for a while, once your conscience starts to wear off and hopefully keep you from contacting your goose-stepping buddies”. Then, snatching up Burleys small, leather bound journal from off of his writing desk, she and Oxana made their way, quickly, back out of the building and into her black and gold car where she then switched on the miniature in car two way radio specially designed for her by that brilliant Bengali polymath J.C. Bose contacting another old prep-school chum and Beehive member Wanda Gershowitz. Wanda was a professor of history and archaeology at Columbia University and a general know it all about anything to do with world history, myth or folklore. “Wanda, darling”, said Constance, switching from English to their secret language of Buzz, “Are you free? I need some help with one of my crime fighting cases. I need you to tell me everything that you know about Romania, particularly about things that go bump in the night”. From the window of his first floor office, Colonel Vlas could look down onto the busy warehouse floor, the maze of stacked crates and pallets, fork-lifts loading and unloading trucks and trucks constantly entering and leaving the loading docks and it made Vlas chuckle knowing that each of those large crates were empty and that the whole thing was a charade; a cover for his base of operations; that each of the workers in his warehouse was actually a trained guerrilla soldier or auto-gyro pilot in his bronze shirt brigade and that parked upon the flat roof of his 30000 sq. ft. warehouse, hidden under camouflage netting, were ten autogyro’s fitted with crop dusting sprays, ready to fly, upon his command, over Manhattan and deliver their payload of terror. “Soon”, thought the Colonel, dressed in the black uniform of an SS officer, “This silly charade shall be over, when I have unleashed, like the god of Moses, my plague upon the people of New York”. But, suddenly, over by bay door number one, Vlas saw a group of noisy, young African-american men appear. They were no ordinary African-american men however but committed anti-fascists who had fought in the second Italo-Abyssinian war and the Spanish Civil War, trained in hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla fighting who Constance had informed about Vlas’s plans and how they would involve the killing of every African-american in Manhattan. “What do those negroes want?”, he wondered, “Probably thinking of stealing something from the warehouse. Well, we’ll show them”. It was just the kind of distraction that Constance had hoped it would be . Vlas picked up his megaphone and shouted to his fanatical henchmen, “Go my bronze shirts! Show these impudent apes the power of the white Aryan race” and, while Vlas’s bronze shirts were trying to prove their racial superiority and their manhood against the men outside, Constance took her chance to slip out from behind a packing crate and up the metal steps leading to Vlas’s first floor office then, kicking open the office door she pointed one of her snub nosed revolvers at Vlas’s head. “And who are you, young lady?”, he said, smirking with over-confidence, “Or, judging by your attire, should I say young man?” “I’m a close friend of New York’s police commissioner”, Constance replied, “That’s who I am and soon New Yorks finest will be encircling this warehouse armed with Tommy guns. So it looks like your plans have been thwarted, Colonel. However, the real question is not who I am but WHAT you are. Judging from the private notebook that I took from the apartment of your colleague Burley, he seemed to believe you were some kind of Vampire but, as far as I know, Vampires don’t walk around in the daytime so either Burley was crazy or maybe your some other kind of creature”. Suddenly, Constance felt a strange sort of deep throbbing in her head, almost as if she’d been whacked with a billy club and looking at Vlas she thought his face almost seemed transparent, like an illusory human mask covering some face that was more horrifying, repugnant and alien and then, as she looked into his eyes they started to become darker like deep shadowy pits or the empty eye sockets of a skull. Constance shook her head, trying to snap out of whatever strange hypnotic power Vlas was using against her, then she continued to speak, “Thankfully. I have a good friend at Columbia University who also had a look at Burley’s notebook and feels convinced that you are a Fext; a vampire like creature of Slavic folklore who, according to legend, suddenly appeared during the Thirty Years War. Also, according to legend, you can only be killed by being shot with glass bullets”. “And what do you think?”, asked Vlas, still with that unshakable smirk. “I thought I’d take a fifty- fifty chance”, replied Constance, drawing the other of her snub nosed colts from a holster beneath her coat, “One of these guns is filled with glass bullets and the other is filled with good, old fashioned lead”. The Fext then revealed its true hideous, decomposing, undead form, lunging towards her with skeleton hands and screeching like an enraged, cornered animal and Constance felt like she wanted to scream but she held her nerve and stood her ground, firing both guns into the creatures rotting heart. “Mary, Jesus and St. Joseph!”, exclaimed a police Seargent entering the office and seeing the vile, decaying body of Vlas fall dead upon the floor with a large round hole in his middle, “What happened to that poor bugger?”. “That’s what all that hate does to you, Sargent”, replied Constance, smiling, “It eats away at you”. Downstairs, the few bronze shirts that hadn’t been laid low by the fists of the young African-american men were now being booked and cuffed by armed police officers and Constance grinned to see how easily these prime specimens of “The Master Race” had been brought to their knees and knew then that if America ever entered the war against Hitler he too wouldn’t stand a chance.