Kitabı oku: «The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu», sayfa 3
name I did not! I did not! I watched him, spied upon him--yes! But,
listen: it was because he would not be warned that he met his death. I
could not save him! Ah, I am not so bad as that. I will tell you. I
have taken his notebook and torn out the last pages and burnt them.
Look! in the grate. The book was too big to steal away. I came twice
and could not find it. There, will you let me go?"
"If you will tell me where and how to seize Dr. Fu-Manchu--yes."
Her hands dropped and she took a backward step. A new terror was to be
read in her face.
"I dare not! I dare not!"
"Then you would--if you dared?"
She was watching me intently.
"Not if YOU would go to find him," she said.
And, with all that I thought her to be, the stern servant of justice
that I would have had myself, I felt the hot blood leap to my cheek at
all which the words implied. She grasped my arm.
"Could you hide me from him if I came to you, and told you all I know?"
"The authorities--"
"Ah!" Her expression changed. "They can put me on the rack if they
choose, but never one word would I speak--never one little word."
She threw up her head scornfully. Then the proud glance softened again.
"But I will speak for you."
Closer she came, and closer, until she could whisper in my ear.
"Hide me from your police, from HIM, from everybody, and I will no
longer be his slave."
My heart was beating with painful rapidity. I had not counted on this
warring with a woman; moreover, it was harder than I could have dreamt
of. For some time I had been aware that by the charm of her
personality and the art of her pleading she had brought me down from my
judgment seat--had made it all but impossible for me to give her up to
justice. Now, I was disarmed--but in a quandary. What should I do?
What COULD I do? I turned away from her and walked to the hearth, in
which some paper ash lay and yet emitted a faint smell.
Not more than ten seconds elapsed, I am confident, from the time that I
stepped across the room until I glanced back. But she had gone!
As I leapt to the door the key turned gently from the outside.
"Ma 'alesh!" came her soft whisper; "but I am afraid to trust you--yet.
Be comforted, for there is one near who would have killed you had I
wished it. Remember, I will come to you whenever you will take me and
hide me."
Light footsteps pattered down the stairs. I heard a stifled cry from
Mrs. Dolan as the mysterious visitor ran past her. The front door
opened and closed.
CHAPTER V
"Shen-Yan's is a dope-shop in one of the burrows off the old Ratcliff
Highway," said Inspector Weymouth.
"'Singapore Charlie's,' they call it. It's a center for some of the
Chinese societies, I believe, but all sorts of opium-smokers use it.
There have never been any complaints that I know of. I don't
understand this."
We stood in his room at New Scotland Yard, bending over a sheet of
foolscap upon which were arranged some burned fragments from poor
Cadby's grate, for so hurriedly had the girl done her work that
combustion had not been complete.
"What do we make of this?" said Smith. "'. . . Hunchback . . . lascar
went up . . . unlike others . . . not return . . . till Shen-Yan'
(there is no doubt about the name, I think) 'turned me out . . . booming
sound . . . lascar in . . . mortuary I could ident . . . not for days,
or suspici . . . Tuesday night in a different make . . . snatch
. . . pigtail . . .'"
"The pigtail again!" rapped Weymouth.
"She evidently burned the torn-out pages all together," continued
Smith. "They lay flat, and this was in the middle. I see the hand of
retributive justice in that, Inspector. Now we have a reference to a
hunchback, and what follows amounts to this: A lascar (amongst several
other persons) went up somewhere--presumably upstairs--at Shen-Yan's,
and did not come down again. Cadby, who was there disguised, noted a
booming sound. Later, he identified the lascar in some mortuary. We
have no means of fixing the date of this visit to Shen-Yan's, but I
feel inclined to put down the 'lascar' as the dacoit who was murdered
by Fu-Manchu! It is sheer supposition, however. But that Cadby meant
to pay another visit to the place in a different 'make-up' or disguise,
is evident, and that the Tuesday night proposed was last night is a
reasonable deduction. The reference to a pigtail is principally
interesting because of what was found on Cadby's body."
Inspector Weymouth nodded affirmatively, and Smith glanced at his watch.
"Exactly ten-twenty-three," he said. "I will trouble you, Inspector,
for the freedom of your fancy wardrobe. There is time to spend an hour
in the company of Shen-Yan's opium friends."
Weymouth raised his eyebrows.
"It might be risky. What about an official visit?"
Nayland Smith laughed.
"Worse than useless! By your own showing, the place is open to
inspection. No; guile against guile! We are dealing with a Chinaman,
with the incarnate essence of Eastern subtlety, with the most
stupendous genius that the modern Orient has produced."
"I don't believe in disguises," said Weymouth, with a certain
truculence. "It's mostly played out, that game, and generally leads to
failure. Still, if you're determined, sir, there's an end of it.
Foster will make your face up. What disguise do you propose to adopt?"
"A sort of Dago seaman, I think; something like poor Cadby. I can rely
on my knowledge of the brutes, if I am sure of my disguise."
"You are forgetting me, Smith," I said.
He turned to me quickly.
"Petrie," he replied, "it is MY business, unfortunately, but it is no
sort of hobby."
"You mean that you can no longer rely upon me?" I said angrily.
Smith grasped my hand, and met my rather frigid stare with a look of
real concern on his gaunt, bronzed face.
"My dear old chap," he answered, "that was really unkind. You know
that I meant something totally different."
"It's all right, Smith;" I said, immediately ashamed of my choler, and
wrung his hand heartily. "I can pretend to smoke opium as well as
another. I shall be going, too, Inspector."
As a result of this little passage of words, some twenty minutes later
two dangerous-looking seafaring ruffians entered a waiting cab,
accompanied by Inspector Weymouth, and were driven off into the
wilderness of London's night. In this theatrical business there was,
to my mind, something ridiculous--almost childish--and I could have
laughed heartily had it not been that grim tragedy lurked so near to
farce.
The mere recollection that somewhere at our journey's end Fu-Manchu
awaited us was sufficient to sober my reflections--Fu-Manchu, who, with
all the powers represented by Nayland Smith pitted against him, pursued
his dark schemes triumphantly, and lurked in hiding within this very
area which was so sedulously patrolled--Fu-Manchu, whom I had never
seen, but whose name stood for horrors indefinable! Perhaps I was
destined to meet the terrible Chinese doctor to-night.
I ceased to pursue a train of thought which promised to lead to morbid
depths, and directed my attention to what Smith was saying.
"We will drop down from Wapping and reconnoiter, as you say the place
is close to the riverside. Then you can put us ashore somewhere below.
Ryman can keep the launch close to the back of the premises, and your
fellows will be hanging about near the front, near enough to hear the
whistle."
"Yes," assented Weymouth; "I've arranged for that. If you are
suspected, you shall give the alarm?"
"I don't know," said Smith thoughtfully. "Even in that event I might
wait awhile."
"Don't wait too long," advised the Inspector. "We shouldn't be much
wiser if your next appearance was on the end of a grapnel, somewhere
down Greenwich Reach, with half your fingers missing."
The cab pulled up outside the river police depot, and Smith and I
entered without delay, four shabby-looking fellows who had been seated
in the office springing up to salute the Inspector, who followed us in.
"Guthrie and Lisle," he said briskly, "get along and find a dark corner
which commands the door of Singapore Charlie's off the old Highway.
You look the dirtiest of the troupe, Guthrie; you might drop asleep on
the pavement, and Lisle can argue with you about getting home. Don't
move till you hear the whistle inside or have my orders, and note
everybody that goes in and comes out. You other two belong to this
division?"
The C.I.D. men having departed, the remaining pair saluted again.
"Well, you're on special duty to-night. You've been prompt, but don't
stick your chests out so much. Do you know of a back way to
Shen-Yan's?"
The men looked at one another, and both shook their heads.
"There's an empty shop nearly opposite, sir," replied one of them. "I
know a broken window at the back where we could climb in. Then we
could get through to the front and watch from there."
"Good!" cried the Inspector. "See you are not spotted, though; and if
you hear the whistle, don't mind doing a bit of damage, but be inside
Shen-Yan's like lightning. Otherwise, wait for orders."
Inspector Ryman came in, glancing at the clock.
"Launch is waiting," he said.
"Right," replied Smith thoughtfully. "I am half afraid, though, that
the recent alarms may have scared our quarry--your man, Mason, and then
Cadby. Against which we have that, so far as he is likely to know,
there has been no clew pointing to this opium den. Remember, he thinks
Cadby's notes are destroyed."
"The whole business is an utter mystery to me," confessed Ryman. "I'm
told that there's some dangerous Chinese devil hiding somewhere in
London, and that you expect to find him at Shen-Yan's. Supposing he
uses that place, which is possible, how do you know he's there
to-night?"
"I don't," said Smith; "but it is the first clew we have had pointing
to one of his haunts, and time means precious lives where Dr. Fu-Manchu
is concerned."
"Who is he, sir, exactly, this Dr. Fu-Manchu?"
"I have only the vaguest idea, Inspector; but he is no ordinary
criminal. He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put
on earth for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose
wealth is enormous, and his mission in Europe is to PAVE THE WAY! Do
you follow me? He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making
that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has
ever dreamed of it."
Ryman stared, but made no reply, and we went out, passing down to the
breakwater and boarding the waiting launch. With her crew of three,
the party numbered seven that swung out into the Pool, and, clearing
the pier, drew in again and hugged the murky shore.
The night had been clear enough hitherto, but now came scudding
rainbanks to curtain the crescent moon, and anon to unveil her again
and show the muddy swirls about us. The view was not extensive from
the launch. Sometimes a deepening of the near shadows would tell of a
moored barge, or lights high above our heads mark the deck of a large
vessel. In the floods of moonlight gaunt shapes towered above; in the
ensuing darkness only the oily glitter of the tide occupied the
foreground of the night-piece.
The Surrey shore was a broken wall of blackness, patched with lights
about which moved hazy suggestions of human activity. The bank we were
following offered a prospect even more gloomy--a dense, dark mass, amid
which, sometimes, mysterious half-tones told of a dock gate, or sudden
high lights leapt flaring to the eye.
Then, out of the mystery ahead, a green light grew and crept down upon
us. A giant shape loomed up, and frowned crushingly upon the little
craft. A blaze of light, the jangle of a bell, and it was past. We
were dancing in the wash of one of the Scotch steamers, and the murk
had fallen again.
Discords of remote activity rose above the more intimate throbbing of
our screw, and we seemed a pigmy company floating past the workshops of
Brobdingnagian toilers. The chill of the near water communicated
itself to me, and I felt the protection of my shabby garments
inadequate against it.
Far over on the Surrey shore a blue light--vaporous,
mysterious--flicked translucent tongues against the night's curtain.
It was a weird, elusive flame, leaping, wavering, magically changing
from blue to a yellowed violet, rising, falling.
"Only a gasworks," came Smith's voice, and I knew that he, too, had
been watching those elfin fires. "But it always reminds me of a
Mexican teocalli, and the altar of sacrifice."
The simile was apt, but gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the
severed fingers, and could not repress a shudder.
"On your left, past the wooden pier! Not where the lamp is--beyond
that; next to the dark, square building--Shen-Yan's."
It was Inspector Ryman speaking.
"Drop us somewhere handy, then," replied Smith, "and lie close in, with
your ears wide open. We may have to run for it, so don't go far away."
From the tone of his voice I knew that the night mystery of the Thames
had claimed at least one other victim.
"Dead slow," came Ryman's order. "We'll put in to the Stone Stairs."
CHAPTER VI
A SEEMINGLY drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as
Smith lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above
which, crudely painted, were the words:
"SHEN-YAN, Barber."
I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs,
German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the
window ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden
steps, and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.
We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship
with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown
across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of
some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in
what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a
curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed
in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and,
advancing, shook his head vigorously.
"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from
one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. "Too late! Shuttee
shop!"
"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's
nose. "Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee
pipe, you yellow scum--savvy?"
My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a
vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of
gentle persuasion.
"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down,
Charlie. You can lay to it."
"No hab got pipee--" began the other.
Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.
"Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see."
He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a
dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was
literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with
opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it. Every
breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the
floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which
ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied. Most of the
occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their
bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes. These had not yet
attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.
"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing Smith's
shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.
Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.
"Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--or plenty
heap trouble."
A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:
"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver."
Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of the
shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp. Holding
a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old cocoa
tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end. Slowly
roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl of the metal
pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a spirituous blue flame.
"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the
assumed eagerness of a slave to the drug.
Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips, and
prepared another for me.
"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.
It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to
smoke. Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to
sink lower and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways
on the floor, Smith lying close beside me.
"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks. "Look at
the rats."
Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense of
isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world. My
throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached. The vicious
atmosphere seemed contaminating. I was as one dropped--
Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, And there
ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.
Smith began to whisper softly.
"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said. "I don't
know if you have observed it, but there is a stair just behind you,
half concealed by a ragged curtain. We are near that, and well in the
dark. I have seen nothing suspicious so far--or nothing much. But if
there was anything going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we
new arrivals were well doped. S-SH!"
He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning. Through my half-closed
eyes I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had
referred. I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.
The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room with
a curiously lithe movement.
The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded scant illumination,
serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--here an extended hand, brown
or yellow, there a sketchy, corpse-like face; whilst from all about
rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny,
animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some
Chinese Dante. But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able
to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a
misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight,
hunched body. There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that
masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.
Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements; but
an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--that
this was one of the doctor's servants. How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.
He was watching us.
Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed
opium-smokers had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.
Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness, I,
too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending lower and
lower, until it came within a few inches of my own. I completely
closed my eyes.
Delicate fingers touched my right eyelid. Divining what was coming, I
rolled my eyes up, as the lid was adroitly lifted and lowered again.
The man moved away.
I had saved the situation! And noting anew the hush about me--a hush
in which I fancied many pairs of ears listened--I was glad. For just a
moment I realized fully how, with the place watched back and front, we
yet were cut off, were in the hands of Far Easterns, to some extent in
the power of members of that most inscrutably mysterious race, the
Chinese.
"Good," whispered Smith at my side. "I don't think I could have done
it. He took me on trust after that. My God! what an awful face.
Petrie, it's the hunchback of Cadby's notes. Ah, I thought so. Do you
see that?"
I turned my eyes round as far as was possible. A man had scrambled
down from one of the bunks and was following the bent figure across the
room.
They passed around us quietly, the little yellow man leading, with his
curious, lithe gait, and the other, an impassive Chinaman, following.
The curtain was raised, and I heard footsteps receding on the stairs.
"Don't stir," whispered Smith.
An intense excitement was clearly upon him, and he communicated it to
me. Who was the occupant of the room above?
Footsteps on the stair, and the Chinaman reappeared, recrossed the
floor, and went out. The little, bent man went over to another bunk,
this time leading up the stair one who looked like a lascar.
"Did you see his right hand?" whispered Smith. "A dacoit! They come
here to report and to take orders. Petrie, Dr. Fu-Manchu is up there."
"What shall we do?"--softly.
"Wait. Then we must try to rush the stairs. It would be futile to
bring in the police first. He is sure to have some other exit. I will
give the word while the little yellow devil is down here. You are
nearer and will have to go first, but if the hunchback follows, I can
then deal with him."
Our whispered colloquy was interrupted by the return of the dacoit, who
recrossed the room as the Chinaman had done, and immediately took his
departure. A third man, whom Smith identified as a Malay, ascended the
mysterious stairs, descended, and went out; and a fourth, whose
nationality it was impossible to determine, followed. Then, as the
softly moving usher crossed to a bunk on the right of the outer door--
"Up you go, Petrie," cried Smith, for further delay was dangerous and
further dissimulation useless.
I leaped to my feet. Snatching my revolver from the pocket of the
rough jacket I wore, I bounded to the stair and went blundering up in
complete darkness. A chorus of brutish cries clamored from behind,
with a muffled scream rising above them all. But Nayland Smith was
close behind as I raced along a covered gangway, in a purer air, and at
my heels when I crashed open a door at the end and almost fell into the
room beyond.
What I saw were merely a dirty table, with some odds and ends upon it
of which I was too excited to take note, an oil-lamp swung by a brass
chain above, and a man sitting behind the table. But from the moment
that my gaze rested upon the one who sat there, I think if the place
had been an Aladdin's palace I should have had no eyes for any of its
wonders.
He wore a plain yellow robe, of a hue almost identical with that of his
smooth, hairless countenance. His hands were large, long and bony, and
he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their
thinness. He had a great, high brow, crowned with sparse,
neutral-colored hair.
Of his face, as it looked out at me over the dirty table, I despair of
writing convincingly. It was that of an archangel of evil, and it was
wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human
soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a
brilliant green. But their unique horror lay in a certain filminess
(it made me think of the membrana nictitans in a bird) which, obscuring
them as I threw wide the door, seemed to lift as I actually passed the
threshold, revealing the eyes in all their brilliant iridescence.
I know that I stopped dead, one foot within the room, for the malignant
force of the man was something surpassing my experience. He was
surprised by this sudden intrusion--yes, but no trace of fear showed
upon that wonderful face, only a sort of pitying contempt. And, as I
paused, he rose slowly to his feet, never removing his gaze from mine.
"IT'S FU-MANCHU!" cried Smith over my shoulder, in a voice that was
almost a scream. "IT'S FU-MANCHU! Cover him! Shoot him dead if--"
The conclusion of that sentence I never heard.
Dr. Fu-Manchu reached down beside the table, and the floor slipped from
under me.
One last glimpse I had of the fixed green eyes, and with a scream I was
unable to repress I dropped, dropped, dropped, and plunged into icy
water, which closed over my head.
Vaguely I had seen a spurt of flame, had heard another cry following my
own, a booming sound (the trap), the flat note of a police whistle.
But when I rose to the surface impenetrable darkness enveloped me; I
was spitting filthy, oily liquid from my mouth, and fighting down the
black terror that had me by the throat--terror of the darkness about
me, of the unknown depths beneath me, of the pit into which I was cast
amid stifling stenches and the lapping of tidal water.
"Smith!" I cried. . . . "Help! Help!"
My voice seemed to beat back upon me, yet I was about to cry out again,
when, mustering all my presence of mind and all my failing courage, I
recognized that I had better employment of my energies, and began to
swim straight ahead, desperately determined to face all the horrors of
this place--to die hard if die I must.
A drop of liquid fire fell through the darkness and hissed into the
water beside me!
I felt that, despite my resolution, I was going mad.
Another fiery drop--and another!
I touched a rotting wooden post and slimy timbers. I had reached one
bound of my watery prison. More fire fell from above, and the scream
of hysteria quivered, unuttered, in my throat.
Keeping myself afloat with increasing difficulty in my heavy garments,
I threw my head back and raised my eyes.
No more drops fell, and no more drops would fall; but it was merely a
question of time for the floor to collapse. For it was beginning to
emit a dull, red glow.
The room above me was in flames!
It was drops of burning oil from the lamp, finding passage through the
cracks in the crazy flooring, which had fallen about me--for the death
trap had reclosed, I suppose, mechanically.
My saturated garments were dragging me down, and now I could hear the
flames hungrily eating into the ancient rottenness overhead. Shortly
that cauldron would be loosed upon my head. The glow of the flames
grew brighter . . . and showed me the half-rotten piles upholding the
building, showed me the tidal mark upon the slime-coated walls--showed
me that there was no escape!
By some subterranean duct the foul place was fed from the Thames. By
that duct, with the outgoing tide, my body would pass, in the wake of
Mason, Cadby, and many another victim!
Rusty iron rungs were affixed to one of the walls communicating with a
trap--but the bottom three were missing!
Brighter and brighter grew the awesome light the light of what should
be my funeral pyre--reddening the oily water and adding a new dread to
the whispering, clammy horror of the pit. But something it showed
me . . . a projecting beam a few feet above the water . . . and directly
below the iron ladder!
"Merciful Heaven!" I breathed. "Have I the strength?"
A desire for laughter claimed me with sudden, all but irresistible
