by Sax Rohmer
At the corner of Kennington Oval Kerry was effectually aroused to the realities. A little runabout car passed his cab, coming from a southerly direction. Proceeding at a rapid speed it was lost in the traffic ahead. Unconsciously Kerry had glanced at the occupants and had recognized Margaret Halley and Seton Pasha. The old spirit of rivalry between himself and the man from Whitehall leapt up hotly within Kerry’s breast.
“Now where the hell has he been!” he muttered.
As a matter of fact, Seton Pasha, acting upon a suggestion of Margaret’s had been to Brixton Prison to interview Juan Mareno who lay there under arrest. Contents bills announcing this arrest as the latest public development in the Bond Street murder case were to be seen upon every newstand; yet the problem of that which had brought Seton to the south of London was one with which Kerry grappled in vain. He had parted from the Home office agent in the early hours of the morning, and their parting had been one of mutual despair which neither had sought to disguise.
It was a coincidence which a student of human nature might have regarded as significant, that whereas Kerry had taken his troubles home to his wife, Seton Pasha had sought inspiration from Margaret Halley; and whereas the guidance of Mary Kerry had led the Chief Inspector to hurry in quest of Rita Irvin’s spaniel, the result of Seton’s interview with Margaret had been an equally hurried journey to the big jail.
Unhappily Seton had failed to elicit the slightest information from the saturnine Mareno. Unmoved alike by promises or threats, he had coolly adhered to his original evidence.
So, while the authorities worked feverishly and all England reading of the arrest of Mareno inquired indignantly, “But who is Kazmah, and where is Mrs. Monte Irvin?” Sin Sin Wa placidly pursued his arrangements for immediate departure to the paddyfields of Ho-Nan, and sometimes in the weird crooning voice with which he addressed the raven he would sing a monotonous chant dealing with the valley of the Yellow River where the opium-poppy grows. Hidden in the cunning vault, the search had passed above him; and watchful on a quay on the Surrey shore whereto his dinghy was fastened, George Martin awaited the signal which should tell him that Kazmah and Company were ready to leave. Any time after dark he expected to see the waving lantern and to collect his last payment from the traffic.
At the very hour that Kerry was hastening to Prince’s Gate, Sin Sin Wa sat before the stove in the drug cache, the green-eyed joss upon his knee. With a fragment of chamois leather he lovingly polished the leering idol, crooning softly to himself and smiling his mirthless smile. Perched upon his shoulder the raven studied this operation with apparent interest, his solitary eye glittering bead-like. Upon the opposite side of the stove sat the ancient Sam Tuk and at intervals of five minutes or more he would slowly nod his hairless head.
The sliding door which concealed the inner room was partly open, and from the opening there shone forth a dim red light, cast by the paper-shaded lamp which illuminated the place. The coarse voice of the Cuban-Jewess rose and fell in a ceaseless half-muttered soliloquy, indescribably unpleasant but to which Sin Sin Wa was evidently indifferent.
Propped up amid cushions on the divan which once had formed part of the furniture of the House of a Hundred Raptures, Mrs. Sin was smoking opium. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers, and her dark eyes were partly glazed. Buddha-like immobility was claiming her, but it had not yet effaced that expression of murderous malice with which the smoker contemplated the unconscious woman who lay upon the bed at the other end of the room.
As the moments passed the eyes of Mrs. Sin grew more and more glazed. Her harsh voice became softened, and presently: “Ah!” she whispered; “so you wait to smoke with me?”
Immobile she sat propped up amid the cushions, and only her full lips moved.
“Two pipes are nothing to Cy,” she murmured. “He smokes five. But you are not going to smoke?”
Again she paused, then:
“Ah, my Lucy. You smoke with me?” she whispered coaxingly.
Chandu had opened the poppy gates. Mrs. Sin was conversing with her dead lover.
“Something has changed you,” she sighed. “You are different — lately. You have lots of money now. Your investments have been good. You want to become — respectable, eh?”
Slightly — ever so slightly — the red lips curled upwards. No sound of life came from the woman lying white and still in the bed. But through the partly open door crept snatches of Sin Sin Wa’s crooning melody.
“Yet once,” she murmured, “yet once I seemed beautiful to you, Lucy. For La Belle Lola you forgot that English pride.” She laughed softly. “You forgot Sin Sin Wa. If there had been no Lola you would never have escaped from Buenos Ayres with your life, my Lucy. You forgot that English pride, and did not ask me where I got them from — the ten thousand dollars to buy your ‘honor’ back.”
She became silent, as if listening to the dead man’s reply. Finally:
“No — I do not reproach you, my dear,” she whispered. “You have paid me back a thousand fold, and Sin Sin Wa, the old fox, grows rich and fat. Today we hold the traffic in our hands, Lucy. The old fox cares only for his money. Before it is too late let us go — you and I. Do you remember Havana, and the two months of heaven we spent there? Oh, let us go back to Havana, Lucy. Kazmah has made us rich. Let Kazmah die.... You smoke with me?”
Again she became silent, then:
“Very likely,” she murmured; “very likely I know why you don’t smoke. You have promised your pretty little friend that you will stay awake and see that nobody tries to cut her sweet white throat.”
She paused momentarily, then muttered something rapidly in Spanish, followed by a short, guttural phrase in Chinese.
“Why do you bring her to the house?” she whispered hoarsely. “And you brought her to Kazmah’s. Ah! I see. Now everybody says you are changed. Yes. She is a charming friend.”
The Buddha-like face became suddenly contorted, and as suddenly grew placid again.
“I know! I know!” Mrs. Sin muttered harshly. “Do you think I am blind! If she had been like any of the others, do you suppose it would have mattered to me? But you respect her — you respect....” Her voice died away to an almost inaudible whisper: “I don’t believe you. You are telling me lies. But you have always told me lies; one more does not matter, I suppose.... How strong you are. You have hurt my wrists. You will smoke with me now?”
She ceased speaking abruptly, and abruptly resumed again:
“And I do as you wish — I do as you wish. How can I keep her from it except by making the price so high that she cannot afford to buy it? I tell you I do it. I bargain for the pink and white boy, Quentin, because I want her to be indebted to him — because I want her to be so sorry for him that she lets him take her away from you! Why should you respect her—”
Silence fell upon the drugged speaker. Sin Sin Wa could be heard crooning softly about the Yellow River and the mountain gods who sent it sweeping down through the valleys where the opium-poppy grows.
“Go, Juan,” hissed Mrs. Sin. “I say — go!”
Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin lying, a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed, stirred slightly — her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared straightly upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their shadowy depths.
CHAPTER XXXV. BEYOND THE VEIL
Rita Irvin’s awakening was no awakening in the usually accepted sense of the word; it did not even represent a lifting of the veil which cut her off from the world, but no more than a momentary perception of the existence of such a veil and of the existence of something behind it. Upon the veil, in grey smoke, the name “Kazmah” was written in moving characters. Beyond the veil, dimly divined, was life.
As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this woman’s racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless pageant, the i
ncidents of the night which had cut her off from living men and women. She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity from madness. She was learning what Sir Lucien had meant when, once, long long ago, in some remote time when she was young and happy and had belonged to a living world, he had said “a day is sure to come.” It had come, that “day.” It had dawned when she had torn the veil before Kazmah — and that veil had enveloped her ever since. All that had preceded the fatal act was blotted out, blurred and indistinct; all that had succeeded it lived eternally, passing, an endless pageant, before her tortured mind.
The horror of the moment when she had touched the hands of the man seated in the big ebony chair was of such kind that no subsequent terrors had supplanted it. For those long, slim hands of the color of old ivory were cold, rigid, lifeless — the hands of a corpse! Thus the pageant began, and it continued as hereafter, memory and delusion taking the stage in turn.
Complete darkness came.
Rita uttered a wild cry of horror and loathing, shrinking back from the thing which sat in the ebony chair. She felt that consciousness was slipping from her; felt herself falling, and shrieked to know herself helpless and alone with Kazmah. She groped for support, but found none; and, moaning, she sank down, and was unconscious of her fall.
A voice awakened her. Someone knelt beside her in the darkness, supporting her; someone who spoke wildly, despairingly, but with a strange, emotional reverence curbing the passion in his voice.
“Rita — my Rita! What have they done to you? Speak to me.... Oh God! Spare her to me.... Let her hate me for ever, but spare her — spare her. Rita, speak to me! I tried, heaven hear me, to save you little girl. I only want you to be happy!”
She felt herself being lifted gently, tenderly. And as though the man’s passionate entreaty had called her back from the dead, she reentered into life and strove to realize what had happened.
Sir Lucien was supporting her, and she found it hard to credit the fact that it was he, the hard, nonchalant man of the world she knew, who had spoken. She clutched his arm with both hands.
“Oh, Lucy!” she whispered. “I am so frightened — and so ill.”
“Thank God,” he said huskily, “she is alive. Lean against me and try to stand up. We must get away from here.”
Rita managed to stand upright, clinging wildly to Sir Lucien. A square, vaguely luminous opening became visible to her. Against it, silhouetted, she could discern part of the outline of Kazmah’s chair. She drew back, uttering a low, sobbing cry. Sir Lucien supported her, and:
“Don’t be afraid, dear,” he said reassuringly. “Nothing shall hurt you.”
He pushed open a door, and through it shone the same vague light which she had seen in the opening behind the chair. Sir Lucien spoke rapidly in a language which sounded like Spanish. He was answered by a perfect torrent of words in the same tongue.
Fiercely he cried something back at the hidden speaker.
A shriek of rage, of frenzy, came out of the darkness. Rita felt that consciousness was about to leave her again. She swayed forward dizzily, and a figure which seemed to belong to delirium — a lithe shadow out of which gleamed a pair of wild eyes — leapt upon her. A knife glittered....
In order to have repelled the attack, Sir Lucien would have had to release Rita, who was clinging to him, weak and terror-stricken. Instead he threw himself before her.... She saw the knife enter his shoulder....
Through absolute darkness she sank down into a land of chaotic nightmare horrors. Great bells clanged maddeningly. Impish hands plucked at her garments, dragged her hair. She was hurried this way and that, bruised, torn, and tossed helpless upon a sea of liquid brass. Through vast avenues lined with yellow, immobile Chinese faces she was borne upon a bier. Oblique eyes looked into hers. Knives which glittered greenly in the light of lamps globular and suspended in immeasurable space, were hurled at her in showers....
Sir Lucien stood before her, supporting her; and all the knives buried themselves in his body. She tried to cry out, but no sound could she utter. Darkness fell again....
A Chinaman was bending over her. His hands were tucked in his loose sleeves. He smiled, and his smile was hideous but friendly. He was strangely like Sin Sin Wa, save that he did not lack an eye.
Rita found herself lying in an untidy bed in a room laden with opium fumes and dimly lighted. On a table beside her were the remains of a meal. She strove to recall having partaken of food, but was unsuccessful....
There came a blank — then a sharp, stabbing pain in her right arm. She thought it was the knife, and shrieked wildly again and again....
Years seemingly elapsed, years of agony spent amid oblique eyes which floated in space unattached to any visible body, amid reeking fumes and sounds of ceaseless conflict. Once she heard the cry of some bird, and thought it must be the parakeet which eternally sat on a branch of a lonely palm in the heart of the Great Sahara.... Then, one night, when she lay shrinking from the plucking yellow hands which reached out of the darkness:
“Tell me your dream,” boomed a deep, mocking voice; “and I will read its portent!”
She opened her eyes. She lay in the untidy bed in the room which was laden with the fumes of opium. She stared upward at the low, dirty ceiling.
“Why do you come to me with your stories of desperation?” continued the mocking voice. “You have insisted upon seeing me. I am here.”
Rita managed to move her head so that she could see more of the room.
On a divan at the other end of the place, propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture, like that characterizing the features of some Chinese Buddhas....
In the other corner of the divan, contemplating her from under heavy brows, sat Kazmah....
CHAPTER XXXVI. SAM TUK MOVES
Chinatown was being watched as Chinatown had never been watched before, even during the most stringent enforcement of the Defence of the Realm Act. K Division was on its mettle, and Scotland Yard had sent to aid Chief Inspector Kerry every man that could be spared to the task. The River Police, too, were aflame with zeal; for every officer in the service whose work lay east of London Bridge had appropriated to himself the stigma implied by the creation of Lord Wrexborough’s commission.
“Corners” in foodstuffs, metals, and other indispensable commodities are appreciated by every man, because every man knows such things to exist; but a corner in drugs was something which the East End police authorities found very difficult to grasp. They could not free their minds of the traditional idea that every second Chinaman in the Causeway was a small importer. They were seeking a hundred lesser stores instead of one greater one. Not all Seton’s quiet explanations nor Kerry’s savage language could wean the higher local officials from their ancient beliefs. They failed to conceive the idea of a wealthy syndicate conducted by an educated Chinaman and backed, covered, and protected by a crooked gentleman and accomplished man of affairs.
Perhaps they knew and perhaps they knew not, that during the period ruled by D.O.R.A. as much as L25 was paid by habitues for one pipe of chandu. The power of gold is often badly estimated by an official whose horizon is marked by a pension. This is mere lack of imagination, and no more reflects discredit upon a man than lack of hair on his crown or of color in his cheeks. Nevertheless, it may prove very annoying.
Towards the close of an afternoon which symbolized the worst that London’s particular climate can do in the matter of drizzling rain and gloom, Chief Inspector Kerry, carrying an irritable toy spaniel, came out of a turning which forms a V with Limehouse Canal, into a narrow street which runs parallel with the Thames. He had arrived at the conclusion that the neighborhood was sown so thickly with detectives that one could not throw a stone without hitting one. Yet Sin Sin Wa had quietly left his abode and had disappeared from official ken.
Three times within the past ten minutes the spaniel had tri
ed to bite Kerry, nor was Kerry blind to the amusement which his burden had occasioned among the men of K Division whom he had met on his travels. Finally, as he came out into the riverside lane, the ill-tempered little animal essayed a fourth, and successful, attempt, burying his wicked white teeth in the Chief Inspector’s wrist.
Kerry hooked his finger into the dog’s collar, swung the yapping animal above his head, and hurled it from him into the gloom and rain mist.
“Hell take the blasted thing!” he shouted. “I’m done with it!”
He tenderly sucked his wounded wrist, and picking up his cane, which he had dropped, he looked about him and swore savagely. Of Seton Pasha he had had news several times during the day, and he was aware that the Home office agent was not idle. But to that old rivalry which had leapt up anew when he had seen Seton near Kennington oval had succeeded a sort of despair; so that now he would have welcomed the information that Seton had triumphed where he had failed. A furious hatred of the one-eyed Chinaman around whom he was convinced the mystery centred had grown up within his mind. At that hour he would gladly have resigned his post and sacrificed his pension to know that Sin Sin Wa was under lock and key. His outlook was official, and accordingly peculiar. He regarded the murder of Sir Lucien Pyne and the flight or abduction of Mrs. Monte Irvin as mere minor incidents in a case wherein Sin Sin Wa figured as the chief culprit. Nothing had acted so powerfully to bring about this conviction in the mind of the Chief Inspector as the inexplicable disappearance of the Chinaman under circumstances which had apparently precluded such a possibility.