Works of Sax Rohmer

by Sax Rohmer

  Apparently the stair was uncarpeted, as likewise was the corridor along which he presently found himself proceeding. The echo of many footsteps rang through the house. It sounded shell-like, empty. Then it seemed to him that not so many were about him. He felt his revolver slide from his hip-pocket. He was pushed gently forward, and a door closed behind him. The sound of footsteps died away with that of whispering voices.

  Came a sudden angry roar, muffled, distant, he thought in the voice of Alden. It was stifled, cut off ere it had come to full crescendo, in a very significant manner. Silence, then, fell about him, the chill silence of an empty house.

  Cautiously he turned and felt for the door, which he knew to be close behind him. He was obsessed by a childish, though not unnatural, fear of falling through some trap.

  He touched the door-knob, turned it. As he had anticipated, the door was locked. He wondered if there were any windows to this strangely dark apartment. With his fingers touching the wall, he crept slowly forward, halting at every other step to listen; but the night gave up no sound.

  The tenth pace brought him to a corner. He turned off at right angles, still pursuing the wall, and came upon shutters, closely barred. He pressed on, came to another corner; proceeded, another; and finally touched the door-knob again.

  This was a square room, apparently, and unfurnished. But what might not yawn for him in the middle of the floor? He remembered that the river ran at the end of the garden.

  Pressing his ear to the door, he listened intently.

  Without, absolutely nothing stirred. He drew a quick, sibilant breath, and turned, planting his back against the door and clenching his fists.

  Suddenly it had been borne in upon his mind that something, someone, was in the room with him!

  Vainly he sought to peer through the darkness. His throat was parched.

  A dim glow was born in the heart of the gloom. Scarce able to draw breath, fearing what he might see, yet more greatly fearing to look away, even for an instant, Mr. Oppner stared and stared. His eyes ached.

  Brighter became the glow, and proclaimed itself a ball of light. It illuminated the face that was but a few inches removed from it. In the midst of that absolute darkness the effect was indescribably weird. Nothing for some moments was visible but just that ball of light and the dark face with the piercing eyes gleaming out from slits in a silk mask.

  Then the ball became fully illuminated, and Oppner saw that it was some unfamiliar kind of lamp, and that it rested in a sort of metal tripod upon a plain deal table, otherwise absolutely bare.

  Save for this table, the lamp, and a chair, the room was entirely innocent of furniture. Upon the chair, with his elbows resting on the table, sat a man in evening dress. He was very dark, very well groomed, and seemingly very handsome; but the black silk half-mask effectually disguised him. His eyes were arresting. Mr. Oppner did not move, and he could not look away.

  For he knew that he stood in the presence of Séverac Bablon.

  The latter pushed something across the table in Oppner’s direction.

  “Your cheque-book,” he said, “and a fountain pen.”

  Mr. Oppner gulped; did not stir, did not speak. Séverac Bablon’s voice was vaguely familiar to him.

  “You are the second richest man in the United States,” he continued, “and the first in parsimony. I shall mulct you in one hundred thousand pounds!”

  “You’ll never get it!” rasped Oppner.

  “No? Well let us weigh the possibilities, one against the other. There have been protests, from rival journals, against the Gleaner’s acceptance of foreign money for British national purposes. This I had anticipated, but such donations have had the effect of stimulating the British public. If the cheques already received, and your own, which you are about to draw, are not directly devoted to the purpose for which they are intended, I can guarantee that you shall not be humiliated by their return!”

  “Ah!” sighed Oppner.

  “The Gleaner newspaper has made all arrangements with an important English firm to construct several air vessels. The materials and the workmanship will be British throughout, and the vessels will be placed at the disposal of the authorities. The source of the Gleaner’s fund thus becomes immaterial. But, in recognition of the subscribers, the vessels will be named ‘Oppner I.,’ ‘Oppner II.,’ ‘Hague I.,’ etc.”

  “Yep?”

  “At some future time we may understand one another better, Mr. Oppner. For the present I shall make no overtures. I have no desire unduly to mystify you, however. The men whom Mr. Martin of Pinkerton’s, found surrounding this house were not the men from Sullivan’s Agency, but friends of my own. Sullivans were informed at the last moment that the raid had been abandoned. The car, again, which you observed, is my own. I caused it to be driven to and fro between here and Richmond Bridge for your especial amusement, altering the number on each occasion. Finally, any outcry you may care to raise will pass unnoticed, as The Cedars has been leased for the purpose of a private establishment for the care of mental cases.”

  “You’re holding me to ransom?”

  “In a sense. But you would not remain here. I should remove you to a safer place. My car is waiting.”

  “You can’t hold me for ever.” Mr. Oppner was gathering courage. This interview was so very businesslike, so dissimilar from the methods of American brigandage, that his keen, commercial instincts were coming to the surface. “Any time I get out I can tell the truth and demand my money back.”

  “It is so. But on the day that you act in that manner, within an hour from the time, your New York mansion will be burned to a shell, without loss of life, but with destruction of property considerably exceeding in value the amount of your donation to the Gleaner fund. I may add that I shall continue to force your expenditures in this way, Mr. Oppner, until such time as I bring you to see the falsity of your views. On that day we shall become friends.”

  “Ah!”

  “You may wonder why I have gone to the trouble to make a captive of you, here, when by means of such a menace alone I might have achieved my object; I reply that you possess that stubborn type of disposition which only succumbs to force majeure. Your letter to the Gleaner explaining your views respecting the Dominion, and proposing that an air-vessel be christened ‘The Canada,’ is here, typed; you have only to sign it. The future, immediate, and distant is entirely in your own hands, Mr. Oppner. You will remain my guest until I have your cheque and your signature to this letter. You will always be open to sudden demands upon your capital, from me, so long as you continue, by your wrongful employment of the power of wealth, to blacken the Jewish name. For it is because you are a Jew that I require these things of you.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE DAMASCUS CURTAIN

  The British public poured contributions into the air-fleet fund with a lavishness that has never been equalled in history. For, after the stupendous sums, each one a big fortune in itself, which the Jewish financiers had subscribed, every man who called himself a Britisher (and who thought that Britain really needed airships) came forward with his dole.

  There was a special service held at the Great Synagogue in Aldgate, and Juda was exalted in public estimation to a dizzy pinnacle.

  One morning, whilst the enthusiasm was at its height, Mr. Oppner rose from the breakfast table upon hearing the ‘phone bell ring.

  “Zoe,” he said, “if that’s a reporter, tell him I’m ill in bed.”

  He shuffled from the room. Since the night of the abortive raid upon The Cedars he had showed a marked aversion from the society of newspaper men. Regarding the facts of his donation to the fund he had vouchsafed no word to Zoe. Closely had the story of his doings at Richmond been hushed up; as closely as a bottomless purse can achieve such silencing, but, nevertheless, Zoe knew the truth.

  Sheard was shown in.

  “Excuse me,” he said hastily, “but I wanted to ask Mr. Oppner if there is anything in this article” — he held out a pro
of slip— “that he would like altered. It’s for the Magazine of Empire. They’re having full-page photographs of all the Aero Millionaires, that’s what they call them now!”

  “Can you leave it?” asked Zoe. “He is dressing — and not in a very good temper.”

  “Right!” said Sheard promptly, and laid the slip on the table. “‘Phone me if there is anything to come out. Good-bye.”

  Zoe was reading the proof when her father came in again.

  “Newspaper men been here?” he drawled. “Thought so. What a poor old addle-pated martyr I am.”

  “Listen,” began Zoe, “this is an article all about you! It quotes Dr. Herman Hertz, that is to say, it represents you as quoting him! It says: —

  “‘The true Jew is an integral part of the life and spiritual endeavour of every nation where Providence has allotted his home. And as for the Jews of this Empire, which is earth’s nearest realisation hitherto of justice coupled with humanity, finely has a noble Anglo-Jewish soldier, Colonel Goldschmidt, expressed it: “Loyalty to the flag for which the sun once stood still can only deepen our devotion to the flag on which the sun never sets.”’ Is that all right?”

  “H’m!” said Oppner. “Have Rohscheimer and Jesson seen this article?”

  “Don’t know!” answered Zoe.

  “Because,” explained Oppner, “they’ve showed their blame devotion to the flag on which the sun don’t set, same as me, and if they can stand it, my hide’s as tough as theirs, I reckon.”

  It was whilst Mr. Oppner was thus expressing himself that Sheard, who, having left the proof at the Astoria, had raced back to the club to keep an appointment, quitted the club again (his man had disappointed him), and walked down the court to Fleet Street.

  Mr. Aloys. X. Alden, arrayed in his capacious tweed suit, a Stetson felt hat, and a pair of brogues with eloquent Broadway welts, liquidated the business that had detained him in the “Cheshire Cheese” and drifted idly in the same direction.

  A taxi-driver questioned Sheard with his eyebrows, but the pressman, after a moment’s hesitancy, shook his head, and, suddenly running out into the stream of traffic, swung himself on a westward bound bus. Pausing in the act of lighting a Havana cigarette, Alden hailed the disappointed taxi-driver and gave him rapid instructions. The broad-brimmed Stetson disappeared within the cab, and the cab darted off in the wake of the westward bound bus.

  Such was the price that Mr. Thomas Sheard must pay for the reputation won by his inspired articles upon Séverac Bablon. For what he had learnt of him during their brief association had enabled that clever journalist to invest his copy with an atmosphere of “exclusiveness” which had attracted universal attention.

  As a less pleasant result, the staff of the Gleaner — and Sheard in particular — were being kept under strict surveillance.

  Sheard occupied an outside seat, and as the bus travelled rapidly westward, Fleet Street and the Strand offered to his gratified gaze one long vista of placards:

  “M. DUQUESNE IN LONDON.”

  That item was exclusive to the Gleaner, and had been communicated to Sheard upon a plain correspondence card, such as he had learnt to associate with Séverac Bablon. The Gleaner, amongst all London’s news-sheets, alone could inform a public, strung to a tense pitch of excitement, that M. Duquesne, of the Paris police, was staying at the Hotel Astoria, in connection with the Séverac Bablon case.

  As the bus stopped outside Charing Cross Station, Sheard took a quick and anxious look back down the Strand. A taxi standing near the gates attracted his attention, for, although he could not see the Stetson inside, he noted that the cab was engaged, and, therefore, possibly occupied. It was sufficient, in these days of constant surveillance, to arouse his suspicion; it was more than sufficient to-day to set his brain working upon a plan to elude the hypothetical pursuer. He had become, latterly, an expert in detecting detectives, and now his wits must be taxed to the utmost.

  For he had a correspondence card in his pocket which differed from those he was used to, in that it bore the address, 70A Finchley Road, and invited him to lunch with Séverac Bablon that day!

  With the detectives of New York and London busy, and, now, with the famous Duquesne in town, Sheard well might survey the Strand behind, carefully, anxiously, distrustfully.

  Séverac Bablon, so far as he was aware, no longer had any actual hold upon him. There was no substantial reason why he should not hand the invitation — bearing that address which one man, alone, in London at that hour cheerfully would have given a thousand pounds to know — to the proper authorities. But Séverac Bablon had appealed strongly, irresistibly, to something within Sheard that had responded with warmth and friendship. Despite his reckless, lawless deeds, the pressman no more would have thought of betraying him than of betraying the most sacred charge. In fact, as has appeared, he did not hesitate to aid and abet him in his most outrageous projects. But yet he wondered at the great, the incredible audacity of this super-audacious man who now had entrusted to him the secret of his residence.

  Hastily descending from the bus, he walked quickly forward to the nearest tobacconist’s and turned in the entrance to note if the man who might be in the taxi would betray his presence.

  He did.

  The Stetson appeared from the window, and a pair of keen grey eyes fixed themselves upon the door wherein Sheard was lurking.

  A rapid calculation showed the pressman where lay his best chance. Darting across the road, he dived, rabbit-like, into the burrow of the Tube, got his ticket smartly, and ran to the stairway. With his head on a level with the floor of the booking-offices he paused.

  An instant later the canoe-shaped brogues came clattering down from above. The American took in the people in the hall with one comprehensive glance, got a ticket without a moment’s delay, and jumped into a lift that was about to descend.

  Two minutes afterwards Sheard was in a cab bound for the house of Séverac Bablon. The New Journalism is an exciting vocation.

  He discharged the cabman at the corner of Finchley Road, and walked along to No. 70A.

  Opening the monastic looking gate, he passed around a trim lawn and stood in the porch of one of those small and picturesque houses which survive in some parts of red-brick London.

  A man who wore conventional black, but who looked like an Ababdeh Arab, opened the door before he had time to ring. He confirmed Sheard’s guess at his Eastern nationality by the manner of his silent salutation. Without a word of inquiry he conducted the visitor to a small room on the left of the hall and retired in the same noiseless fashion.

  The journalist had anticipated a curious taste in decoration, and he was not disappointed. For this apartment could not well be termed a room; it was a mere cell.

  The floor was composed of blocks — or perhaps only faced with layers of red granite; the walls showed a surface of smooth plaster. An unglazed window which opened on a garden afforded ample light, and, presumably for illumination at night, an odd-looking antique lamp stood in a niche. A littered table, black with great age and heavily carved, and a chair to match, stood upon a rough fibre mat. There was no fireplace. The only luxurious touch in the strange place was afforded by a richly Damascened curtain, draped before a recess at the farther end.

  From the table arose Séverac Bablon, wearing a novel garment strangely like a bernouse.

  “My dear Sheard,” he said warmly and familiarly, “I am really delighted to see you again.”

  Sheard shook his hand heartily. Séverac Bablon was as irresistible as ever.

  “Take the arm-chair,” he continued, “and try to overlook the peculiarities of my study. Believe me, they are not intended for mere effect. Every item of my arrangements has its peculiar note of inspiration, I assure you.”

  Sheard turned, and found that a deep-seated, heavily-cushioned chair, also antique, and which he had overlooked, stood close behind him. An odd perfume hung in the air.

  “Ah,” said Séverac Bablon, in his softly musical vo
ice, “you have detected my vice.”

  He passed an ebony box to his visitor, containing cigarettes of a dark yellow colour. Sheard lighted one, and discovered it possessed a peculiar aromatic flavour, which he found very fascinating. Séverac Bablon watched him with a quizzical smile upon his wonderfully handsome face.

  “I am afraid there is opium in them,” he said.

  Sheard started.

  “Do not fear,” laughed the other. “You cannot develop the vice, for these cigarettes are unobtainable in London. Their history serves to disprove the popular theory that the use of tobacco was introduced from Mexico in the sixteenth century. These were known in the East generations earlier.”

  And so, with the mere melody of his voice, he re-established his sovereignty over Sheard’s mind. His extraordinary knowledge of extraordinary matters occasioned the pressman’s constant amazement. From the preparations made for the reception of the Queen of Sheba at Solomon’s court in 980 B.C. he passed to the internal organisation of the Criminal Investigation Department.

  “I should mention,” said Sheard at this point, “that an attempt was made to follow me here.”

  Séverac Bablon waved a long white hand carelessly.

  “Never mind,” he replied soothingly. “It is annoying for you, but I give you my word that you shall not be compromised by me — come, luncheon is waiting. I will show you the only three men in Europe and America who might associate the bandit, the incendiary, with him who calls himself Séverac Bablon.”

  He stood up and gazed abstractedly in the direction of the garden. In silence he stood looking, not at the garden, but beyond it, into some vaster garden of his fancy. Sheard studied him with earnest curiosity.

  “Will you never tell me,” he began abruptly, “who you are really, what is the source of your influence, and what is your aim in all this wild business?”

  Séverac Bablon turned and regarded him fixedly.

  “I will,” he said, “when the day comes — if ever it does come.” A shadow crept over his mobile features.