by Sax Rohmer
Ardatha drew back from that tall cloaked figure — back and back — until she came to the wall behind her; and there, arms outstretched, she stood. The colour was draining from her cheeks, her expression was one of utter despair.
“Look at me, Ardatha” — Dr. Fu-Manchu spoke softly.
As she raised her eyes to the majestic evil of his face I thought of a hare and a cobra.
“I am satisfied” — his voice was little more than a whisper— “that your motives have been as you say, but I can no longer employ you in my personal service. Mr Kerrigan” — it was a harsh command. He raised the Ericksen tube— “be good enough to look out of your window and to report to me what you see.” Without hesitation I obeyed, stepping forward to the window so that Dr. Fu-Manchu stood behind me.
“Draw the curtain aside.”
I did so. Immediately I recognised the fact that the house was invested by the forces of the Si-Fan!
Two men over by the closed park gate unmistakably were watching the windows. Two others lingered in conversation near the door below. A big car was drawn up on the corner, and another pair were engaged in peering under the bonnet.
“Be good enough, Mr Kerrigan, to raise your hand. The signal will be understood.”
Automatically, I was about to obey… when a number of strange things happened.
A car coming from the direction of Marble Arch swung out sharply against oncoming traffic. It was pulled up by a skilful driver almost directly at my door. Another, approaching from the opposite direction, stopped with a great shrieking of brakes almost at the park gate. A third, which apparently had been following the first, checked dead on the corner of Porchester Terrace.
In a matter of seconds twelve or fifteen men were disgorged into Bayswater Road… Without a moment’s hesitation they hurled themselves upon the loiterers!
My heart leapt madly. It was the flying squad!
One warning came, and one only — a weird, minor, wailing cry — but I knew that it was meant for Dr. Fu-Manchu. Its effect was immediate. From behind me he spoke in a changed voice, harsh, gutteral:
“What has occurred? Answer.”
“The police, I think. Three cars.”
“Stay where you are. Don’t stir. Ardatha — with me.”
I stood still, fists clenched, watching the melee below.
“Bart! Bart!” Ardatha cried my name despairingly.
“Be silent! Precede me.”
I heard them hurrying along the passage. But he had said “Don’t stir,” and I did not stir. I made no move until the opening and closing of the door told me that they were gone. Then I sprang around.
Footsteps were bounding up the stairs. I could hear excited voices — and an amazing, an all but unbelievable fact dawned upon me:
Dr. Fu-Manchu was trapped!
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX. PURSUING A SHADOW
“Kerrigan! Kerrigan!”
Nayland Smith was banging on the door.
I ran to open it. He sprang in, his eyes gleaming excitedly. He had removed the synthetic beard but still wore his shabby suit. Beside him was Inspector Gallaho, head bandaged beneath a soft hat which took the place of his usual tight-fitting bowler. Four or five plainclothes police came crowding up behind.
“Where is he?”
“Gone! He went at the moment that I heard you on the stair!”
“What!”
“That’s not possible,” growled Gallaho, staring at me in a questioning way. “No one passed us, that I’ll swear.”
“Lights on that upper stair!” snapped Smith. “Stay where you are, Gallaho — you men, also.”
He examined me intently.
“I know what you’re thinking, Smith,” I said, “but I am quite myself. Ardatha and Fu-Manchu were here two minutes ago. He held me up with a thing which disintegrates whatever it touches.”
“Ericksen’s Ray?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Good God! But it’s a cumbersome affair!”
“No larger than a fountain pen, Smith! He has perfected it, so he says. But — where is he?”
Nayland Smith tugged at the lobe of his ear.
“You say the girl went with him?”
“Yes.”
“Who lives above?”
“A young musician, Basil Acton — but he’s abroad at present.”
“Sure?”
He began to run upstairs, crying out over his shoulder:
“Gallaho and two men! The others stand by where they are.”
We reached the top landing and paused before my neighbour’s closed door.
Gallaho rang the bell, but there was no response.
“Hello!”
Smith stooped.
I had switched on the landing light, and now I saw what had attracted his attention. Also I became aware of a queer acrid smell.
Where a Yale lock had been there was nothing but a hole, some two inches in diameter, drilled clean through the door!
“It’s bolted inside,” said Gallaho.
“But they are trapped!” I cried excitedly. “There is no other way out!”
“Unfortunately,” growled Gallaho, “there is no other way in. Down to the tool chest, somebody.”
There came a rush of footsteps on the stair, an interval during which Gallaho tried to peer through the hole in the door and Nayland Smith, ear pressed to a panel, listened but evidently heard nothing. To the high landing window which overlooked Bayswater Road rose sounds of excited voices from the street below.
“Seven black beauties roped in there,” said Gallaho grimly, “but it remains to be seen if we’ve got anything on them.”
One of the flying squad men returning with the necessary implements, it was a matter of only a few minutes to break the door down. I had been in my neighbour’s flat on one or two occasions, and when we entered I switched the lights up, for we found it in darkness.
“Is there anyone here?” called Gallaho.
There was no reply.
We entered the big, untidy apartment which, sometimes to my sorrow, I knew that Acton used as a music room. It had something of the appearance of a studio. Bundles of music were littered on chairs and settees. The grand piano was open. An atmosphere stale as that inside a pyramid told of closed windows. Knowing his careless ways, I doubted if Acton had made arrangements to have his flat cleaned or aired during his absence. There was no one there.
“How many rooms, Kerrigan?” Smith snapped.
“Four, and a kitchenette.”
“Three men stay on the landing!” shouted Gallaho.
We explored every foot of the place, and the only evidence we found to show that Dr. Fu-Manchu and Ardatha had entered was the hole drilled through the front door, until:
“What’s this?” cried one of the searchers.
We hurried into the kitchenette which bore traces of a meal prepared at some time but not cleared up. The man had opened a big cupboard in which I saw an ascending ladder.
“The cisterns are up there,” I explained. “This is an old house converted.”
“At last!” Smith’s eyes glinted. “That’s where he is hiding!”
Before I could restrain him he had darted up the ladder, shining the light of a flashlamp ahead. Gallaho followed and I came next.
We found ourselves under the sloping roof in an attic containing several large tanks, unventilated, and oppressively stuffy.
There was no one there.
“Doctor Fu-Manchu is a man of genius,” said Smith, “but not a spirit. He must be somewhere in this building.”
“Not so certain, sir!” came a cry.
One of the Scotland Yard men was directing light upon lath and plaster at that side of the attic furthest from the door. It revealed a ragged hole — and now we all detected a smell of charred wood.
“What’s beyond there?” Gallaho demanded.
“The adjoining house, at the moment in the hands of renovators. It is being converted into modern flats.”
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But already Smith, stooping, was making his way through the aperture — and we all followed.
We found ourselves in an attic similar to that which we had quitted. We crossed it and climbed down a ladder. At the bottom was a room smelling strongly of fresh paint, cluttered up with decorators’ materials, in fact almost impassable. We forced a way through onto the landing, to discover planks stretched across a staircase, scaffolding, buckets of whitewash…
Nayland Smith ran down the stairs like a man demented, and even now in memory I can recapture the thud of our hammering feet as we followed him. It drummed around that empty, echoing house; the lights of our lamps danced weirdly on stripped walls, bare boards and half-painted woodwork. We came to the lobby. Smith flung open the front door.
It opened not on Bayswater Road as in the case of the adjoining house, but upon a side street, Porchester Terrace. He raced down three steps and stood there looking to right and to left.
Dr. Fu-Manchu had escaped…
* * * *
“The biggest failure of my life, Kerrigan.”
Nayland Smith was pacing up and down my study; he had even forgotten to light his pipe. His face was wan — lined.
“I don’t think I follow, Smith. It’s amazing that you arrived here in the nick of time. His escape is something no one could have anticipated. He has supernormal equipment. This disintegrating ray which he carried defeats locks, bolts and bars. How could any man have foreseen it?”’
“Yet I should have foreseen it,” he snapped angrily. “My arrival in the nick of time had been planned.”
“What!”
“Oh, I didn’t know Ardatha was coming. For this I had not provided. But my visit to you earlier in the evening, my leaving here, or pretending to leave, the most vital piece of evidence on which I have ever laid my hands, was a leaf torn from Doctor Fu-Manchu’s own book!”
“What do you mean?”
“I was laying a trail. I was doing what he has done so often. He knew that I had those incriminating signatures; he knew that failing their recovery, the break-up of the Council of Seven was at least in sight. You are aware of how closely I was covered, how narrowly I escaped death. What I didn’t tell you at the time was this: In spite of my disguise, I had been followed from Sloane Street right to the door of your flat.”
“Are you sure?”
“I made sure. I intended to be followed.”
“Good heavens!”
“I had not hoped, I confess, for so big a fish as the doctor in person, but that you would be raided by important members of the Si-Fan shortly after my departure was moderately certain. They were watching. I saw them as I left in the Yard car. I gave them every opportunity to note that although I had arrived with a bulky portfolio, I was leaving without it!”
“But, Smith, you might have given me your confidence!”
Anger, mortification, both were in my tones, but instantly Nayland Smith had his hands on my shoulders. His steady eyes sobered me.
“Remember the Green Death, Kerrigan. Oh, I’m not reproaching you! But Doctor Fu-Manchu can read a man’s soul as you and I read a newspaper. I had men posted in the park (closed at that time), and I had a key of your front door—”
“Smith!”
“You were well protected. The arrival of Ardatha presented a new problem. I had not counted on Ardatha—”
“Nor had I!”
“But when no fewer than seven suspicious characters were massed in front of the house, and a tall thin man wearing a cloak was reported as having entered — (your front door, apparently being open) — I gave the signal. You know what followed.”
“I understand now, Smith, how crushing the disappointment must be.”’
“Crushing indeed! I had King Shark in my net — and he bit his way out of it!”
“But the Ericksen Ray?”
“He has held the secret of the Ericksen Ray for many years. Doctor Ericksen, its inventor, died or is reported to have died in 1914. As a matter of fact, he (with God knows how many other men of genius) has been working in Doctor Fu-Manchu’s laboratories probably up to the present moment!”
“But this is incredible! You have hinted at it before, but I have never been able to follow your meaning.”
Automatically Nayland Smith’s hand went to the pocket of his dilapidated coat and out came the briar and the big pouch.
“He can induce synthetic catalepsy, Kerrigan. I was afraid when I found you in Whitehall the other day that for some reason he had practised this art upon you. Except in cases where I have been notified, these wretched victims have been buried alive.”
“Good God!”
“Later, at leisure, his experts disinter them, and they are smuggled away to work for the Si-Fan!”
“And to where are they smuggled?”
“I have no idea. Once his base was in Honan. It is no longer there. He has had others, some as near home as the French Riviera. His present headquarters are unknown to me. His genius lies not only in his own phenomenal brain, but in his astonishing plan of accumulating great intellects and making them his slaves. This is the source of his power. He wastes nothing. You see already, as General Diesler’s death proves, he is employing the Jasper vacuum charger. I think we both know the name of the man who invented the television apparatus which you have seen in action. But probably we don’t want to talk about it…”
Up and down the carpet he paced, up and down, restless, overtensed, and stared out of the window.
“There lies London,” he said, “in darkness, unsuspecting the presence in its midst of a man more than humanly equipped, a man who is almost a phantom — who is served by phantoms!”
A second later I sprang madly to his side.
Heralded by no other sound there came a staccato crash of glass… then I was drenched in fragments of plaster!
A bullet had come through the window and had buried itself in the wall…
“Smith! Smith!”
He had not moved, but he turned now and looked at me. I saw blood and was overcome by a sudden, dreadful nausea. I suppose I grew pale, for he shook his head and grasped my shoulder.
“No, Kerrigan. It was the tip of my ear. Good shooting. The whizz of the bullet was deafening.”
“But there was no sound of a shot!”
He moved away from the window.
“Diesler was killed at a range of three thousand odd yards,” he said. “You remember we were talking about the Jasper vacuum charger?”
* * * *
“I am disposed to believe that what Ardatha told you was true,” said Nayland Smith.
He was standing staring down reflectively at something resting in his extended palm: the bullet which had made a hole in my wall. The cut in his ear had bled furiously, but now had succumbed to treatment and was decorated with a strip of surgical plaster.
“This attempt, for instance” — he held up the bullet— “somehow does not seem to be in the doctor’s handwriting. In spite of its success I doubt if the ‘silencing’ of General Diesler was directed by Fu-Manchu. If there is really trouble in the Council of Seven it may mean salvation. Assuming that I live to see it, I think I shall know, without other evidence, when Doctor Fu-Manchu is deposed.”
“In what way?” I asked curiously.
“Remind me to tell you if it occurs, Kerrigan. Ah! may I put the light out?”
“Certainly.”
He did so, then glanced from my study window.
“Here are our escorting cars, I think. Yes! I can see Gallaho below.”
He turned and began, to reload his pipe.
“Tonight’s near-triumph, Kerrigan, was made possible by the remarkable efficiency of Chief Detective Inspector Gallaho. Gallaho will go far. He obtained evidence to show that none other than Lord Weimer, the international banker, is a member of the Si-Fan…”
“What!”
I cried the word incredulously.
“Yes — astounding, I admit. In fact, it almost appears th
at his house in Surrey is the temporary headquarters of Si-Fan representatives at present in England. I obtained a search warrant, paid a surprise visit during Weimer’s absence in the city, and went over the place with a microscope. I experienced little difficulty — such a violent procedure had not been foreseen. Nevertheless, although the staff was kept under observation, news of the raid reached Weimer… He has disappeared.”
“But, Lord Weimer — a member of the Si-Fan!”
“He is. And a document involving even greater names was there as well. Even as I held it in my hand (I had time for no more than a glance) I wondered if I should ever get through alive with such evidence in my possession. I was not there in my proper person. You know what I looked like when I returned. The proceedings, officially, were in charge of Gallaho, but I adopted a precautionary measure.”
His pipe filled, he now lighted it with care. I saw a grim smile upon his face:
“I sent Detective Sergeant Cromer back to Scotland Yard. He travelled in a Green Line bus, accompanied by one other police officer — and between them they carried evidence to upset the chancelleries of Europe! One idea led to another. I took it for granted that I should be followed, that attempts would be made to intercept me. I led the trail to your door, hoping for a big haul. I had one. But there was a hole in the net.”
“What do we do now?”
“We are going to Number 10 Downing Street.”
“What!”
“This discovery means an international situation. The Prime Minister has returned from Chequers and is meeting us there. The commissioner is bringing the documents from Scotland Yard, in person. Here is something for your notes, Kerrigan. I promised you a bigger story than any you had ever had. Come on!”
Indeed I had never expected to be one of such a gathering. There were three cars, one leading, then that in which I travelled with Nayland Smith, and a third bringing up the rear.
The leading car, belonging to the flying squad, was driven at terrific speed through the streets. Under the circumstances I confess I was not surprised that we arrived at our destination without any attempt being made upon us. So vast were the issues at stake that even my fear for Ardatha was numbed. Despairingly, I had come to the conclusion that I should never see her again…