by Sax Rohmer
“I reckon that balances our account, Lou,” she panted.
Captain Beecher raced up to join us, followed by two other police officers, as a ray from Smith’s torch shone fully down upon a man who lay there. He was prone, but in falling had twisted his head sideways, as if at the moment that death came he had looked swiftly behind him. Staring eyes held a question which had been horribly answered.
It was the man of Panama.
His fingers were embedded in the turf on which he lay, and the hilt of a dagger decorated with silver which glittered evilly in the light, protruded squarely from between his shoulder-blades.
Police Captain Beecher glanced from the dead man to the fur-wrapped figure of Flammario, whose tawny eyes regarded him contemptuously.
“So we have you on the books at last!”
“Forget it!” rapped Smith; “she won’t run away. The girl, the girl who was captive here, has been carried off. She must not be smuggled out of Colon. Advise the port. Hold all outgoing shipping till further orders. Spare no efforts.”
But what with frustrated hopes and new fears, such a cloak of misery had descended upon me that I could not think consistently. There was movement all about; the issuing of rapid orders; men hurrying away. And presently, reaching me as if from a distance, came Smith’s words:
“Take care of Flammario. After all, she has done her best for us. Return straight to the hotel.”
A hand touched my arm. I looked into brilliant amber eyes. “Drive me back, please,” said Flammario, “or I shall be late for my show.”
Of what she said to me on the way back, this red-handed murderess, I recollect not one word. I know that her arms were about me. I presume it was a normal gesture employed whenever she found herself alone in a man’s company. I think, just before we reached the side entrance to The Passion Fruit Tree, that she kissed me on the lips, that I started back. She laughed huskily. I would have left her at the door, but:
“You have lost your girl friend,” she said; “you must want a drink.” I think in her half-savage way she was trying to be sympathetic. “Go through there to the bar. If you wait, I have drink with you.”
As she ran towards her dressing-room, I opened the back door to the bar. It was true that suddenly, and only at that moment, did I realize how badly I needed a stiff brandy and soda. The barman turned swiftly, but recognizing me, allowed me to pass.
There was no one in the bar; and he had just placed my drink before me when the lights went out.
Morbid curiosity induced me to walk out on to the balcony. A subdued, excited hum of conversation rose from below: evidently there had been other arrivals. Then, to the muted strains of the unseen band, Flammario entered.
She stood there picked up by the lime and slowly began to dance—her lips set in the eternal, voluptuous smile of the African dancers of all time, the smile which lives for ever upon the painted walls of Ancient Egypt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A GREEN HAND
“Smith!” I said, “he’s not dying.”
“Thank God, no.”
He and I stood looking down at Sir Lionel Barton where he lay livid, his breathing scarcely perceptible. I turned to a man wearing a white jacket who stood at the front of the bed.
“You are sure, doctor?”
Dr. Andrews nodded and his smile was reassuring.
“He’s had an emetic and I’ve washed him out with permanganate of potassium,” he replied. “Also, I’ve poured coffee down his throat—very strong. Fortunately he has a constitution like a bullock. Oh, he’ll be all right. I have given him a shot of atropine. We’ll have him round before long.”
“But how,” I said, looking about from face to face, “did this happen? What of the police officer on duty outside?”
“Went the same way!” replied Dr. Andrews; “but not for the same reason; nor is he responding so well.”
“How do you account for that?”
“You see”—the doctor took up a tumbler from a side-table—“this contains whisky, and also (I have tested it) a big shot of opium. In other words. Sir Lionel Barton has swallowed a narcotic and I have thoroughly washed him out. But the sergeant of police smoked a drugged cigarette.”
“What!”
“Yes,” snapped Smith. “I have the remains of the packet: they are all drugged.”
“But surely he could taste it?”
“No.” The physician shook his head. “Indian hemp was used in this case, and the brand of cigarette was of a character which—” he shrugged his shoulders—“would disguise almost anything.”
“But where could the man have obtained these cigarettes?”
“Don’t ask me, Kerrigan,” said Smith wearily. “As well ask why Barton, alone in these apartments, permitted someone to drug his whisky.”
“But was he alone here when you returned?”
“He was found alone. I was recalled from police headquarters, and from there I phoned you. They had discovered the police sergeant unconscious in the corridor. Naturally the management came in here, and found Barton.”
“Where was he?”
“In an armchair in the sitting-room, completely unconscious, with that glass beside him.”
“And?”
“Yes! We have lost our hostage, Kerrigan. The marmoset has gone.”
“But, Smith!” I cried, desperately, “it doesn’t seem humanly possible!”
“Anything is possible when one is dealing with Dr. Fu-Manchu. The fact which we have to face is that it has happened. Two men, fully capable of taking care of themselves, fully on the alert, are drugged. Someone, unseen by anybody in the hotel, gains access to these rooms, removes the cage containing the marmoset and lowers it out of the sitting-room window, which I found open, to someone else waiting in the garden below. At that late hour the garden would be deserted. In short, the rest of the matter is simple.”
“Thank God, old Barton has survived,” I said. “But heaven help us all—we are fighting a phantom… Ardatha!”
Smith leaned across the bed on which the unconscious man lay and grasped my shoulder.
“Fu-Manchu has recovered her. It may be an odd thing to say, when speaking of the greatest power for evil living in the world today, but for my part I would rather think of her with the Doctor than with—”
“Lou Cabot? Yes, I agree.”
“In taking no part in your conversation, gentlemen,” said Dr. Andrews, “I am actuated by a very simple motive. I don’t know what you are talking about. That there is or was someone called Dr. Fu-Manchu I seem to have heard, certainly. In what way he is associated with my two patients I do not know. But regarding Lou Cabot—I presume you refer to the proprietor of The Passion Fruit Tree—you touch upon familiar territory. I have had the doubtful honour of attending this man on more than one occasion.”
“You will attend him no more,” said Smith.
“What is that?”
“He’s dead,” I began.
Smith flashed a silent, urgent message to me, and:
“He died tonight, doctor, up at Santurce,” he explained, “under mysterious circumstances.”
“Good riddance!” murmured Dr. Andrews. “A more cunning villain never contrived to plant himself in the Canal Zone. The fellow was an agent for some foreign political. Doctors must not tell, but I heard strange things when he was delirious on one occasion.”
“Foreign government,” murmured Smith, staring shrewdly at the speaker. “Perhaps a foreign power, doctor, but not a government—yet.”
* * *
Several hours elapsed before Barton became capable of coherent speech. The man drugged with hashish cigarettes was causing Dr. Andrews some anxiety. Lying back in an armchair, visibly pale in spite of a sun-tan on a naturally florid skin, Barton stared at us. It was dawn, and to me a wretched one.
No clue, not even the most slender, as to the whereabouts of Ardatha had been picked up. Flammario had forced a confession from the hunchback Paulo. The agents of the
Si-Fan had intercepted him as he had returned with the news for which she was seeking. In this way, by less then twenty minutes, the Si-Fan had anticipated our visit to the villa occupied by Lou Cabot, the circumstances of whose death the authorities had agreed to hush up in the interest of the vastly more important inquiry being carried out by Nayland Smith.
“I must be getting old,” said Barton weakly. “At any rate, I feel damned sick. Definitely, I refuse to drink any more coffee.”
“Very well,” said Smith, “but whisky is taboo until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow! It’s tomorrow already,” growled Barton. His blue eyes were rapidly regaining their normal fire. “Naturally you want to know how I came to make such an infernal ass of myself. Well, I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell us?”
“I mean I don’t know. I had just mixed myself a final and was going out to make sure that the police officer you were kind enough to allot to me (whose presence I had discovered earlier) was awake, when I thought I heard that damned padding sound.”
“You mean the soft footsteps we have heard before?”
“Yes. Now let me give you the exact facts. I assure you they are peculiar. I had been to take a look at that blasted marmoset. He was asleep. I opened the door of my own room on to the main corridor, and glanced along to see if the police officer was awake. He was. He sang out, and I wished him good-night; but he is a garrulous fellow and he held me in conversation for some time.”
“Your door remaining open?” suggested Smith.
“Yes—that’s the point.”
“Was the sergeant smoking?”
“He smoked all the time.”
“Was his manner normal?”
“Undoubtedly. Never stopped talking.”
“And you heard no unusual sound?”
“None whatever. I came in, sat down, lighted a pipe and was about to take a drink—when I saw something. I want to make it clear, Smith, that I saw this before I took the drink and I want to add that it was not a delusion and that I was very wide awake.”
“What did you see?”
Barton stared truculently at Smith as he replied:
“I saw a green hand!”
“A green hand!” I echoed.
Smith began to pace up and down restlessly, tugging at the lobe of his left ear.
“I saw a human hand floating in space—no arm, no body. It was sea green in colour. It was visible for no more than a matter of ten seconds; then it vanished. It was over by the door, there—”
“What did you do?” snapped Smith.
“I ran to the spot. I searched everywhere. I began to wonder if there was anything wrong with me. This prompted the idea of a drink, so I sat down and took one. The last thing I remember thinking is that this hotel sells the world’s worst whisky.”
“You mean that you fell asleep?”
“No doubt about it.”
Smith kept up that restless promenade.
“A green hand,” he muttered, “And those padding footsteps! What is it? What in heaven’s name is it?”
“I don’t know what it is,” growled Barton, “but I thank God I’m alive. It’s Fu-Manchu—of that I am certain. But there’s no love lost between us. Why didn’t he finish me?”
“That I think I can answer,” Smith replied. “Several days have yet to elapse before his First Notice or ultimatum expires. The Doctor has a nice sense of decorum.”
“I gather that he has recaptured the girl Ardatha. You have my very sincere sympathy, Kerrigan. I don’t know what to say. I, alone, am responsible and I lost your hostage.”
I bent down and shook his hand, as he lay back in the armchair.
“Not a word. Barton,” I said, “on that subject. Our enemy uses mysterious weapons which neither you nor I know how to counter.”
“Death by The Snapping Fingers,” murmured Smith. “The green hand and the Shadow which comes and goes, but which no one ever sees. How did Fu-Manchu get here? Where did he hide? How does he travel and where has he gone?” He pulled up in front of me. “You have to make a quick decision, Kerrigan. As you know, my plans are fixed. Tomorrow we leave for Port au Prince.”
“I know,” I groaned; “and I know that it would be useless for me to remain behind.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SECOND NOTICE
Only my knowledge that in war-scarred Europe many thousands suffered just as I was suffering held me up during the next few days. Although I know I dreamed of her every night, resolutely in the waking hours I strove to banish all thought of Ardatha from my mind. As I saw the matter, we had lost every trick so far. In a mood of deadly, useless introspection I remained throughout the journey to Haiti. For the time all zest for the battle left me; and then it returned in the form of a cold resolution. If she were alive I would find her again; I would face the dreadful Chinese doctor who held her life in his hands, and accept any price which he exacted from me for her freedom—short of betraying my principles.
Many times I had opened the glass front of the box containing the shrivelled head, and had pressed the red control. It had remained silent. But these notes, actually written some time later, bring me to the occurrence which jolted me sharply back from a sort of fatalistic passivity to active interest in affairs of the moment.
We were quartered in a hotel in Port au Prince; not that in which The Snapping Fingers had appeared. Nayland Smith habitually eschewed official residences, preferring complete freedom of movement. The beauty of Haiti, its flowers and trees and trailing vines; the gay-plumaged birds and painted butterflies; those sunsets passing from shell pink through every colour appreciated by the human eye into deep purple night: all formed but a gaudy background to my sorrow. For those purple nights, throughout which distant drums beat ceaselessly—remorselessly to me seemed to be throbbing her name: Ardatha—Ardatha! Can I ever forget the dark hours in Haiti?
Following such a spell of restless drum-haunted insomnia, I came downstairs one morning, a morning destined to be memorable.
One side of the dining-room opened upon a pleasant tropical garden in which palms mingled with star apple trees and flowering creepers which formed festoons from branch to branch and trellised the pillars against one of which our table was set. At this season, we had learned from the proprietor, business normally was slack; but as in Cristobal, the hotel was full. In fact, failing instructions sent to the American consul, I doubt if we should have secured accommodation. Even so, our party had been split up; and looking around, whilst making my way across to my friends, I recognized the fact that of the twelve or fifteen people present in the dining-room, there were at least four whom I had seen in Colon!
Taking my place at the table: “Are these spies following Mr. Smith?” I asked, wearily shaking out my napkin, “or are we following them?”
“The very thing, Kerrigan,” said Barton in a whisper audible a hundred yards away, “which I have been asking Smith.”
“Neither,” Smith replied shortly. “But the position of the Allied forces in Europe is so critical that if action is to come from this side of the Atlantic, it must come soon. I don’t suggest that the British Empire is in danger; I mean that any other Power wishing to take a hand in the game must act now or never. The United States is not impregnable on the Caribbean front. At least one belligerent is watching, and possibly a ‘neutral’. Dr. Fu-Manchu is watching all of them.” He pushed his plate aside and lighted a cigarette. “Had a good night, Kerrigan?”
“Not too good. Did you?”
“No. Those infernal drums.”
“Exactly.”
“I thought I was back in Africa,” growled Barton. “Felt that way the first time I landed here.”
“It is Africa,” said Smith shortly. “An African island in the Caribbean. Those drums which beat all through the night, near, and far, on hills and in the valleys—since we arrived, do you know what they have been saying?”
I stared at him perhaps a little vacantl
y.
“No,” I replied; “the language of African drums is a closed book to me.”
“It used to be to me.” He ceased speaking as a Haitian waiter placed grape fruit before me and withdrew. “But they use drums in Burma, you know—in fact, all over India. In my then capacity—Gad! It seems many years ago—I went out of my way to learn how messages were flashed quicker than the telegraph could work, quick as radio, from one end of the country to another. I picked up the elements, but I can’t claim to be an expert. When you and I were together”—he turned to Barton—“in Egypt, and afterwards on the business of the Mask of the Veiled Prophet, I tried to bring my information up to date, but the language of these negro drums is a different language. Nevertheless, I know what the drums are saying,”
“What?” I exclaimed.
“They are notifying someone, somewhere, that we are here. Every move we make, Kerrigan, is being signalled.”
“To Fu-Manchu?” asked Barton.
Smith hesitated for a moment, puffing at his cigarette as though it had been a pipe; then:
“I am not sure,” he returned slowly. “I have been here before, remember; my only other visit was a short one. But during the night I used to note the drum beats. And working upon what I knew of drum language I ultimately identified, or think I did, the note which meant myself.”
“Amazing!” exclaimed Barton. “I have a bundle of notes some three hundred pages long on drum language, but I don’t believe I could identify my own name in any of them.”
“I say,” said Smith, still speaking very slowly, “that I am not sure. But I formed the impression at that time, and later events have strengthened it, that the drummers were not speaking to Dr. Fu-Manchu. We can roughly identify the Doctor by his deeds. We know, for example, that The Snapping Fingers is operated by Dr. Fu-Manchu. We know that the padding footsteps, the Shadow which comes and goes, is controlled by him. It was this Shadow which penetrated to our quarters in Colon and put opium in your whisky. The same Shadow which, unseen by the police officer, substituted a packet of drugged cigarettes for those which temporarily lay upon a ledge beside him. To these phenomena we must add now the Green Hand. But more and more, I find myself thinking about the woman called Queen Mamaloi—”