Sax Rohmer - Fu Manchu 09

by Re-enter Dr Fu Manchu

  From the moment that he entered the Park he hardly noticed where he was going, but evening was drawing in when he found himself passing behind the Museum and pulled up to check the time. He decided to turn back, swung around, and saw that the only other pedestrian in sight, a man walking twenty yards behind him, had done the same.

  He thought nothing of this at the moment. Returning along the same path, he saw the man ahead turn to the left for a gate on Fifth Avenue.

  Brian passed on, nervously considering the night’s programme, wondering why the mere approach of Dr. Fu Manchu had so shattered Nayland Smith’s courage and what it could be that Sir Denis feared. . . . Did he seriously believe the President’s life to be in danger? And did he doubt his own ability to protect him?

  Something—perhaps a subconscious urge—prompted Brian to pause and look behind… .

  The man he supposed to have left the Park was following him again!

  Anger came first; then, an unpleasant chill.

  His follower might be an agent of Dr. Fu Manchu, or he might be one of the F.B.I, men detailed, according to Sir Denis, to keep him under observation. In any case, it was getting dark, the Park seemed deserted, and Brian went out by the 72nd Street gate and hailed a taxi.

  In the main entrance to the Babylon-Lido he looked at his watch.

  Twenty minutes to seven.

  He turned away and walked around the corner. He had noticed a little bar almost directly facing the trade entrance to the hotel and decided that he could pass the time there over a drink and a smoke. It was better than walking about; he was tired of walking, now, and feeling thirsty.

  Taking a corner stool just inside the door, he ordered a drink, lighted a cigarette; settled down to wait for seven o’clock.

  For what possible reason had Nayland Smith banished him from the

  Babylon-Lido until that hour? It was incomprehensible. Unless, which seemed probable, he was followed by a Federal agent wherever he went, why was Sir Denis’s warning “never to go out alone” apparently forgotten?

  Either he had become a mere cipher in the game, or Nayland Smith had thrown his hand in and didn’t care what happened.

  Brian started a fresh cigarette, looked at his watch. Ten minutes to wait.

  With some unknown menace, embodied in the name Dr. Fu Manchu, hanging over the party assembling—a party to include the President tonight—this enforced inertia was almost unendurable. Brian found it nearly impossible to remain still. Although he did his best to retain control, he saw the bartender glancing in his direction suspiciously.

  Brian stared out of the window—and became very still indeed; so still that he might have been suddenly frozen to his seat….

  Lola was standing in the trade entrance to the Babylon-Lido talking to Nayland Smith!

  Her face was in shadow, but she was dressed as he had left her at five o’clock. This time there could be no room for doubt. Nor could he be wrong about the man. It was Sir Denis. The coat, the soft-brimmed hat, his poise—all were unmistakable. He saw them go in.

  In half a minute he had paid for his drink, and dashed recklessly across the street, ignoring traffic lights.

  He had never been in this warren of stores-cellars and kitchens before, but somehow made his way through and at last penetrated to the vast but now familiar lobby. His heart was beating fast; for his world had turned topsy-turvy. What had Lola to do with Nayland Smith? She had told him only that afternoon that she had never met Sir Denis!

  The clock over the reception desk recorded five minutes to seven.

  People buzzed about in a state of perpetual motion. They all appeared to be in a hurry. Smart women in gay evening gowns who couldn’t find their men. Eager-eyed young men rushing around looking for their girl friends. Pages carrying flowers. The scene seemed to swim before Brian like a colour film out of focus. It was a ballet inspired by a mad director.

  But the two figures he was looking for were not to be seen.

  He debated with himself, looking again at the clock. He could endure this suspense no longer. He must know the truth, orders or no orders. To wait to be paged in his present frame of mind was out of the question. He turned and hurried off to the corridor where the express elevators were situated. The man on duty knew him and smiled a greeting as Brian stepped in.

  “Sir Denis has just gone up, sir,” he reported.

  Brian experienced a fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  “Was he alone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The elevator began its dizzy ascent. Nayland Smith, Brian reflected, must have gone out to meet Lola. They had evidently parted on entering the hotel. But why had they come in by the trade entrance? He could only conclude that the meeting had been a clandestine one.

  When he arrived at the top floor he stood for a moment to get a grip on himself.

  Then, he walked along to the ‘door of Suite 420B. The “Do Not Disturb” card had gone; and he pulled up, trying further to compose his ruffled nerves.

  At last he quietly slipped the key into the lock and opened the door.

  Dusk had fallen now and he saw that lights were on in the living-room. There was no sound.

  He walked in quietly… . Then gulped, and stood quite still.

  Flat on his back on the floor, his knees drawn up, his fists clenched, Nayland Smith lay. His face was purple, his teeth were bare, and his eyes bulged from his head… .

  He had been strangled!

  Chapter 15

  The horror of his discovery quite literally paralysed Brian. His senses were numbed. He stood speechless, incapable of movement, of thought; aghast.

  A slight sound in the room roused him, bringing swift realization of his own danger. He turned to the big desk, for from there the sound had come, and … his brain reeled. He was gripped by the agonizing certainty that the murder of Nayland Smith had disturbed his reason—had driven him mad.

  Standing beside the tall, painted screen, a finger on his lips, urgent command in his eyes, and beckoning Brian to join him, he saw Nay land Smith!

  Brian clenched his fists, glancing from the dead man to this phantom of the living.

  And the living Sir Denis was beside him in three strides; gripped his arm, speaking softly into his ear:

  “Not a word! Behind the screen, Merrick—for your life— and for mine!”

  There was nothing ghostly in the grip of those sinewy fingers, nothing

  but vital necessity in the whispered orders.

  Brian found himself in shadow behind the screen. One spear of light shone through a hole in the parchment, and still half stupefied in this gruesome and almost incredible situation, he saw Nayland Smith jab his thumb through another panel in the screen and make a second hole.

  “Look!” came a whisper in his ear. “Do nothing. Say nothing… .”

  Silence.

  Peering through the slot in the parchment, Brian’s gaze automatically became focussed on the dead man. For all that agonized expression, swollen features, protruding eyes, he was prepared to take oath and swear that it was Sir Denis who lay there.

  But another Sir Denis—very much alive—stood beside him, and continued to grip his arm!

  He felt suddenly sick, wondered if he was going to make a fool of himself—and then noticed something he hadn’t noticed before …. A door which communicated with the next suite, normally locked, stood partly open. The room beyond was in darkness.

  Muttered words—and two men came in!

  The first was a thickset Oriental whose coarse, brutal features and abnormally long arms were simian rather than human. The second Brian recognized; a slender, elegant man wearing a blue turban—in fact the man whom a waiter had reported to be an Indian prince!

  They lifted the body and carried it out. The communicating door was closed, and Brian heard the click of a lock.

  “Don’t speak!” The words were hissed in his ear. “This room is wired!”

  The new Sir Denis crossed to the re
cently closed door and locked it.

  He turned and beckoned Brian to follow him. In the lobby: “Say nothing,” he whispered, “but take your cue from me.” Brian nodded.

  Nayland Smith opened the outer door;

  shut it again noisily. “Hullo, Merrick! Before your time.” He spoke, now, in a loud tone. “Anything wrong? You look under the weather. Go and lie down. I’ll bring a drink to your room.”

  Brian crossed, rather unsteadily, to his own room and went in. Sir Denis’s extemporized “cue” wasn’t far from the truth. This experience had shaken him severely. Even now he couldn’t get the facts into focus.

  Nayland Smith rejoined him, carrying two drinks on a tray. He quietly closed the bedroom door behind him.

  “I need one, too, Merrick,” he confessed. “That premature entrance nearly resulted in a second murder— yoursi”

  “But——”

  “Wait a minute.” Sir Denis held up his hand. “Let’s get the important thing settled first, because there’s a lot to say and not much time to say it.

  You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder which of us is the real Nayland Smith. I had a fair chance to study my double—and I felt like a man looking in a mirror. Hark back to the time I stayed in Washington.

  Ask me something about your home life that nobody could know who hadn’t lived with you.”

  Brian tried to force his bewildered brain to think clearly, and presently an idea came.

  “Do you remember Father’s dog?” he asked.

  “Do I remember Rufus!” Nayland Smith smiled—and it was the smile Brian had known, the boyish smile which lifted a curtain of years. “Good reason to remember him, Merrrick.” He pulled up his left trouser leg.

  “There’s the souvenir Rufus left me when I tried to break up a scrap he was having with a Boston terrier. Rufus thought my interference unsporting! It was you yourself who phoned the doctor, and damn it! He wanted to give me Pasteur injections!”

  And, in that moment, all doubt was washed out. Brian knew that this was the real Nayland Smith, that the man he had been employed to work with was an impostor—and a miraculous double!

  He held out his hand. “Thank God it’s you that’s alive!”

  “I have done so already, Merrick, devoutly. I have passed through the unique experience of witnessing my own execution. I was desperately tempted to rush to the aid of my second self. But to do so could only have meant that the super-criminal, the most dangerous man in the world today, would have slipped again through my fingers. So I clenched my teeth when the thug sprang out on him and said to myself, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Nayland Smith’!”

  “Who is—who was—the man impersonating you? It was a star performance. Even the British Embassy in Cairo fell for him! So did my father.”

  Nayland Smith pulled out the familiar pipe and began to load it.

  “So would my own mother, if she had been alive… . You’re staring at my pipe? Fortunately I had a spare one with me. The poor devil who was strangled probably has the other in his pocket. I don’t know who he was, Merrick. But he must have been a talented actor, with a nerve of iron.”

  “His nerve began to fail.”

  “I don’t wonder. They had news of my escape. There wasn’t room in New York for two Nayland Smiths!”

  He rapped out the words like so many drum-taps, and at a speed which Brian realized that his impersonator had never acquired.

  “He had every intonation of your voice, Sir Denis! All your gestures, every mannerism. Even that trick of twitching at the lobe of your ear! And I believe he smoked more than you do.”

  Nayland Smith smiled. “Sounds like overacting! Poor devil. He

  probably played for big stakes. He had several weeks to study me, Merrick, while I was a prisoner in that damned house in Cairo.”

  “In Cairo! Then it must have been you, yourself, I saw in a room with barred windows—the house of the Sherif Mohammed!”

  Sir Denis stared for a moment, and then: “This is news,” he admitted, “but probably right. You can tell me later. We have little time, and you’re entitled to know the truth.”

  He lighted his pipe, stood up and began to walk about.

  “I had been on a mission behind the Bamboo Curtain. We had information that Dr. Fu Manchu was operating with the Red Chinese.

  Knowing the Doctor intimately, I doubted this. He controls a world-wide organization of his own, the Si-Fan. And if anyone succeeds in taking over China it won’t be the Communists!”

  This was so like what the false Nayland Smith had told him, that Brian listened in growing wonder …

  “On my way back, by sea (secretly, as I thought) I walked into a trap in Suez which I should have expected an intelligent schoolboy to avoid, and a few hours later found myself a prisoner in the house of the Sherif Mohammed. The Si-Fan had traced me. I was in the hands of Dr. Fu Manchu!”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Roughly, two months. I had secured evidence that Fu Manchu had recently been in China, for his chief-of-staff, a brilliant old strategist, General Huan Tsung, was operating under cover right in Peiping. Some highly important scheme was brewing, and I scented that it would be carried out, not in the East, but in the West. I was right!

  “It became clear from the beginning of my imprisonment that Fu Manchu hadn’t planned to kill me. For some reason, he wanted me alive! My ancient enemy was there in person, in the house of the Sherif Mohammed; and at first I had easy treatment. I was well fed and allowed to exercise in a walled courtyard. But for several hours every day I was brought to a room, two windows of which were barred, as you state, and put through a sort of brain-washing by Dr. Fu Manchu. He spoke to me from behind an iron grille high up in one wall——”

  “I have seen it!”

  “Remarkable. Details later. He argued on ideological grounds, tried to convert me to the theories of the Si-Fan. Sometimes, he taunted me. He worked over me, Merrick, like a skilled performer playing on a stringed instrument. And not for a long time did the fact dawn that every move I made, every word I spoke, some other person, hidden behind the grille, studied, watched, listened to!

  “He betrayed himself once only, but from that moment I knew he was always there—and a hazy idea of the plot began to appear. Someone was

  being trained to impersonate me! The scheme wasn’t a new one. I believe Fu Manchu had had it in mind for several years; probably searched the world for my near-double. I suspect, but may be wrong, that tape recordings of these conversations were made on a hidden microphone, to help my understudy to perfect his impersonation at leisure.”

  “It beats everything I ever heard! Of course you tried to make a getaway?”

  Nayland Smith checked his restless steps and stared grimly at Brian.

  “During the day relays of Fu Manchu’s professional stran-glers had me covered. You saw two of them just now. At night there was a hidden microphone in my room. It not only recorded my slightest movements, but could also be used to transmit a note inaudible to human ears. Its production is Fu Manchu’s secret, as he was good enough to tell me. Its effect would be to kill me instantly by inducing haemorrhage of the brain!”

  “But that’s Dr. Hessian’s invention!” Brian broke in.

  Nayland Smith relighted his pipe. It had gone out while he was talking.

  “Unless my deductions are wide of the mark, Merrick, the man you know as Otto Hessian is Dr. Fu Manchu!”

  A faint buzzing reached them from the living-room.

  “That’s the penthouse!” Brian spoke breathlessly.

  “Then I had better answer.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  Nayland Smith turned in the act of opening the door. “Whatever the late Nayland Smith the Second was expected to do… .”

  *

  As the door was left open, Brian could overhear Nayland Smith when he spoke on the penthouse line. The conversation was a short one. He came back, his expression grim;
reclosed the door.

  “Tell me, Merrick—is there anything, any trifle, about my appearance which strikes you as different from—his?”

  Brian studied the clean-cut features, thinking hard.

  “His skin maybe was artificially sunburned. It didn’t look quite natural.”

  “Nothing to be done about that. What else?”

  “Well, something had happened to the bridge of his nose. He wore plaster the first time I saw him. There was no scar, except when he smiled.

  Then, there was a faint wrinkle where the plaster had been.”

  “That may explain what was found in a sort of studio in the Sherif’s

  house: a wonderful clay model of my head! These people must have got out in a desperate hurry. The studio adjoined a small operating theatre. It seems likely that my double had undergone plastic surgery … H’m! Avoid smiling!”

  “What was the phone message, Sir Denis?”

  “In thirty minutes, I’m bidden to a conference with Dr. Fu Manchu, and probably my life hangs on not arousing his suspicion. The odds are in my favour. But my opponent——”

  “Where are you to meet?”

  “Up in the penthouse.”

  “You mean Fu Manchu really lives there?”

  “It’s his base of operations. I don’t wonder it staggers you. But let me bring you up to date. One day, in Cairo, there was considerable disturbance in the Sherif’s household. I sensed that something unusual was going on. Of course, it was the departure of Fu Manchu and most of his unsavoury crew for the United States. Don’t ask me how he travels, unless he has a magic carpet, or avoids being identified, because I don’t know.”

  “That time, Sir Denis, if I’m not wrong, he travelled with me (and your double), posing as Dr. Hessian, in a plane provided by the British government!”

  Nayland Smith laughed out loud. “You’re not wrong, Merrick. Thanks for the information. You see, I know his impersonation of an eccentric German scientist. He has worked it before. He’s a master of numberless languages and dialects. To the Western idea, he isn’t typically Chinese.

  He’s at least as tall as I am, has fine, ascetic features and a splendid head.