by Sax Rohmer
Thurston stared blankly.
“Never.”
“It’s the most powerful secret society in the world today. It is directed by a man who is probably the supreme genius of all time. He has more scientific knowledge in that one phenomenal brain than any ten men alive. He is called Dr Fu-Manchu. You have heard the name?”
“As a name, yes.” Thurston was awed. “No more!”
Nayland Smith replaced his pouch and lighted his pipe.
“I sincerely hope you may never have occasion to learn more! We are uncertain of the details of the scheme. But we think some kind of guided missile is involved — probably with an atomic warhead, or something even more destructive!”
“But where could such a thing be assembled?”
“Several thousand men are engaged, at this very moment, trying to find out! One man, a brilliant FBI operative, has actually succeeded in becoming a member of the Si-Fan!”
“Is he an Oriental?” Thurston gasped.
Nayland Smith smoked feverishly.
“Not a bit of it. Don’t run away with the idea that the Si-Fan is a Far Eastern group. It’s international. That’s the danger. It’s true that Selwyn Orson — the FBI man — joined it somewhere in the East. He’s a wonderful linguist. He’s just back, with vital information.”
“Where is he?”
“That’s his room over there. And, although he called me only half an hour ago, I can get no reply. Hasn’t gone out. Checked that.”
He grabbed up the ‘phone. Thurston stared.
“Put me through to Mr Wylie. This is Sir Denis Nayland Smith.”
He glanced aside at Thurston.
“When do you think this horror is timed to happen?” Thurston asked in a hushed voice.
Nayland Smith shook his head, and then:
“Hullo — Mr Wylie?” he asked. “Nayland Smith here. I’m in Number 114, Mr Thurston’s apartment. Be good enough to send a boy up with a key to Number 113. Yes, at once, please.”
He hung up.
“I don’t know the exact time, Thurston. But all my information suggests that it may happen at almost any hour now!”
The speed with which the key was delivered by the management indicated the authority vested in Nayland Smith, and when the boy had gone away, they crossed the corridor, and Nayland Smith unlocked the door of Number 113.
On the threshold he stood still, barring Thurston’s entrance.
“What is it, Smith?”
“You don’t have to come in, Thurston.” He spoke without turning. “If you do, prepare for a dreadful sight!”
Nayland Smith went in, and Thurston followed him. The warning had been timely; for even now Thurston pulled up, uttered a smothered cry.
Face downward in the lobby, and so near the door that it was only just possible to open it, lay a blue-clad stocky figure. The man’s outstretched hands were still plunged into an open suitcase, from which a variety of articles had been thrown out on to the floor.
“Good God!” Thurston muttered. He felt deathly sick. “What does this mean?”
“Murder!” snapped Nayland Smith. “He’s been shot through the head — from behind.”
“There’s blood — a trail of it — leading into the room.”
Nayland Smith nodded and went in. Thurston, trying to avoid wet patches on the carpet, followed. Inside, he clutched Smith’s arm.
“Smith! This is horrible! The place is a morgue!”
Another dead man was seated beside the table on which the ‘phone stood!
His arms were stretched out on either side of a Manhattan Directory, and he had slumped forward so that his head rested slantwise on the book. The effect was grotesque. He seemed to be leering up at the intruders.
“Merciful God! It’s Fordwich!”
The whisper came from Thurston’s pale lips.
Nayland Smith hardly glanced at him. He sprang to the dead man’s side, touched cold fingers, and stooping, peered into sightless eyes. He stood upright.
“Too late! And you’re mistaken. This was Selwyn Orson — the finest investigator who ever worked with the FBI!”
Thurston said nothing. Words were failing him. He had been swept into a world of mystery, of horror, for which his orderly life had not equipped him.
The apartment bore every evidence of a frantic search. An automatic fitted with a silencer tube lay beside the table. Only one shell had been used. And then, half under the bed, came a discovery which completed Thurston’s sick bewilderment. This was Fordwich’s black walking stick — snapped in half…
“Poor Orson was stabbed,” Nayland Smith rapped out the words at top speed. “Almost certainly by that brute lying in the lobby. It was a surprise attack. How the man got in we are never likely to know, now. Orson collapsed. The killer went to work. Orson revived, dragged himself out, silently, to where the man was busy on another suitcase in the lobby, and shot him. Then, he dragged himself back to the phone — but died before he got his message through.”
The languor had gone. Nayland Smith was revivified. His grey eyes shone like steel. His reconstruction of the crime had been a matter of minutes. He stood for a moment looking about him, pulling reflectively at the lobe of his ear, then went out to the lobby. Thurston followed, dizzily, trying to conquer his nausea.
Nayland Smith bent over the prone figure.
“We shall find the knife with which Orson was murdered, unless I’m greatly mistaken.”
“But I thought,” Thurston began — and said no more.
Vaguely, he was beginning to grasp the fact that those strict police regulations which prohibit the disturbing of the body of a homicide corpse did not apply to Sir Denis.
“In the other pocket, then.” Smith turned the body over. “Ah! Here it is!”
And, as he drew a bloodstained knife from the blue coat, Thurston had a glimpse of a distorted, pock-marked face.
“Smith!” His voice shook emotionally. “Smith! This is Mrs van Roorden’s Burmese servant!”
* * * *
“There’s no doubt,” said Nayland Smith, “that you have been chosen by Higher Powers to save the United States from disaster!”
Thurston helped himself to a third brandy. Some trace of colour was returning to his face.
They sat now in his apartment, already foggy with tobacco smoke from Smith’s pipe. The handbag (its lock smashed) which contained the green mask, and the mask itself, intact, lay on the bed; Fordwich’s black stick lay beside it — the one that had been in the golf bag.
“I have told you all I have to tell, Smith. But I haven’t the very slightest idea what it adds up to!”
“This,” Smith rapped. “In the first place, after the medical examiner has made his report, Number 113 must be sealed. No whisper of what lies there has to leak out. So much I have arranged with Raymond Harkness of the FBI, who is co-operating with me. In the second place, poor Selwyn Orson must have known he was spotted. He chose you to bring his stick ashore!”
“But…”
“He had a duplicate, which he had kept hidden during the crossing. The note you received, asking you to call at the purser’s office, was sent, of course, by Orson — whom you knew as Fordwich. He wanted you out of the cabin long enough to slip the stick into your golf-bag. He must have noted that you carried one.”
“But why? Why two sticks?”
Nayland Smith began to knock ashes from his fuming pipe.
“That I hope to find out. The smashed duplicate across in his room suggests that his killer — who, by the way was a professional thug, a Burmese dacoit — had special instructions on this point.”
“And the green mask?”
Nayland Smith shook his head.
“One mystery at a time, Thurston! Suppose we start with the stick.”
He took it up and examined it closely. He tapped it, and endeavoured to unscrew the crooked handle. It appeared to be solid. Smith clicked his teeth together irritably.
“Of course, it’s a smuggl
er’s stick. But how does it open?… Ah!”
He begun to detach the rubber ferule. It was not easy, but at last he had it off. Under the rubber was a brass ferule. Attempts to remove it defied all his efforts, until, with the ferule wedged in the hinge of the bathroom door and while he turned the shank firmly, it began to unscrew.
There was a cavity in the base of the big stick, from which protruded a roll of paper!
Nayland Smith pulled it out. It proved to consist of a number of closely typed and very thin pages, wound around a sort of slender jade baton most curiously carved.
At this he stared with deep curiosity. He examined the delicate carving.
“What the devil have we here?”
Then, with care, he turned the baton in his fingers. It opened without difficulty. It unscrewed in the middle. And Smith tapped out into the palm of his left hand a single sheet of parchment on which appeared some lines of writing in heavy, black letters.
At the foot of the parchment was a small seal.
He glanced at the seal, rapidly scanned the typescript, and then shot a steely glance at Thurston.
“I believe you told me that you found Mrs van Roorden dangerously alluring?”
“I did.”
“She is! She’s Dr Fu-Manchu’s daughter!”
Thurston stared almost stupidly.
“But, Smith — she is quite young.”
“She has always appeared so,” Nayland Smith snapped, “from the first time I met her up to her last attempt to seduce me!”
At about which time, Dr Fu-Manchu, wrapped in a fur-lined coat and having an astrakhan cap pulled well down over his massive skull, glanced back at old Huan Tsung, his chief-of-staff, who sat behind him in the plane. Matsukata was the pilot.
“I seem to hear your teeth chattering, Huan Tsung?”
“Your hearing does not mislead you, Excellency.”
“Yet Peko, here in my arms, sleeps peacefully.”
“Even if men derive from apes, some small differences distinguish us from our remote ancestors. Monkeys may be immune. But at our present height, without aid of oxygen, I confess that my old heart falters.”
“We could touch the outer atmosphere, encased as we are in the new amalgam. Imagination, Huan Tsung, is a two-edged sword.” Fu-Manchu glanced at the instrument board. “We are far above the commercial air lanes, but we continue to receive absurd signals from military bases. I anticipate that we shall be reported once more as a ‘flying saucer’.”
“Excellency, surely life is a flying saucer, a saucer in which we are whirled out of eternity into eternity…”
* * * *
“It’s now quite evident,” Nayland Smith was saying, “that Orson must have been responsible for searching the stateroom of the woman you knew as Mrs van Roorden while she was at the purser’s cocktail party. No doubt it was Orson, too, who put her Burmese bodyguard to sleep. These typed notes wrapped around the jade baton make it clear that he had risen high in the Si-Fan organisation.”
“What an amazing man!” Thurston exclaimed.
“Amazing indeed. It’s to Selwyn Orson that we owed the first news of the Fort Knox conspiracy. At that time he was in Egypt, where he had been called to a personal interview with the president of the Si-Fan. Steps were taken here. And an attempt was made to find the Cairo headquarters of the society.” Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably. “Next to impossible to get action under the present Egyptian government.”
He was pacing up and down the room like a caged tiger, smoking almost ceaselessly.
“Do you mean,” Thurston asked, “that these people have agents in Egypt?”
“All over the world! The Si-Fan has expanded enormously since I first came in touch with it. Orson seems to have posed as a Frenchman, which he could do very easily, as he had lived for many years in Paris. He was one of the deputies selected by the Si-Fan to attend a secret conference here in New York!”
“But how do you suppose he discovered the real identity of Mrs van Roorden?”
“I don’t think he had discovered it, until the night he burgled her cabin. He makes it quite plain in these notes, and in his earlier despatch from Cairo (which I have seen), that no officer of the Si-Fan knows another by sight. But he knows all the lesser members under his immediate control. He was evidently sent from Egypt to Java. The Si-Fan has been very busy there, rubbing out some of the leading Communists!”
“What! The Si-Fan is anti-Communist?”
“Somewhat!” snapped Nayland Smith grimly. “Orson, I believe, met Mrs van Roorden in Java, and then, later, on the Lauretania. He doesn’t state, here, what aroused his suspicion, but he does say that he was waiting for a chance to search her cabin.” He pointed to the jade baton. “This is what he found.”
Thurston picked up and stared again at the sheet of thin parchment which the baton had contained. It was half covered with heavy, square writing.
The message, in English, was in cramped script resembling old Black Letter. It authorised the bearer, referred to as “my daughter,” to preside at the conference in the unavoidable absence of “the President.”
“I don’t understand,” Thurston said, “how such a conference could take place, if it’s true that no officer of this society knows another by sight.”
Nayland Smith paused in his restless promenade, picked up the green mask and dropped it back in the bag.
“Clearly, they all wear these things — not to frighten one another, but simply to conceal their identity. It’s not a new trick. It was used, in the form of hoods, by Inquisitors of the Holy Office in Spain and is still popular with the Ku Klux Klan.”
Thurston was studying a sort of crest which served as letterhead:
“What does this thing mean?” he asked.
Nayland Smith glanced aside and then continued his pacing.
“I have come across it only once before. Out of context, it really means nothing. But it could be construed to mean ‘The higher’ or ‘The one above’. it is evidently the sign of the Si-Fan.”
The message bore no name; only the imprint of a seal on green wax:
“And this seal?”
“Is the seal of Dr Fu-Manchu…”
The door-bell buzzed.
“That will be Harkness.”
Smith crossed the lobby and threw the door open. Raymond Harkness, of the FBI, came in, a slight man with gentle, hazel eyes and the manner of a family doctor.
“Have you made all arrangements?” Smith rapped.
“Yes.” Harkness spoke softly. “Poor old Orson. Our star man, Sir Denis.”
“He didn’t sacrifice himself for nothing,” said Nayland Smith grimly. “Thanks to him, we hold most of the threads in our hands. We owe this to Mr Thurston here. He became unavoidably mixed up in the thing.”
Harkness turned his quiet regard on Thurston.
“Take my advice,” he said. “Step out of this affair just as soon as you can — and stay out. Also keep your mouth shut as tightly as if the air was poisoned.”
Thurston was not one of those “great adventurers who put self last” referred to by Mrs van Roorden. He was a plain man of business. Fate had made him an unconscious messenger, had plunged him into deep, dark mysteries. He sighed, for sometimes he had longed for such adventure. But he decided that Raymond Harkness’ advice was good…
* * * *
Mrs van Roorden stepped out of the shower and critically considered her gleaming ivory body in a long pier glass. She could detect no sign of age’s encroachments. Her cool flesh was firm; the contours remained perfect.
She wrapped herself in a woolly robe and returned to the bedroom.
A contrast to other rooms in the apartment, this was equipped in the Parisian manner; a fragrant nest for loveliness. She lingered over creams and perfumes in crystal bottles ranged on a cedarwood dressing-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, took up a hand mirror, the back delicately enamelled on gold, and studied her profile.
She was satisfied; sh
e was still beautiful.
But she was ill at ease.
The frock which she had decided to wear lay draped over a chair, with appropriate shoes and stockings beside it. Mai Cha was perfect in her attentions, as should be expected from the daughter of a Chinese aristocrat. But Mrs van Roorden had never met this youngest child of the aged but prolific Mandarin Huan Tsung before. She had been received as a princess, but all the members of the household were strangers.
If only Huan Tsung had been there! Old Huan Tsung who used to smuggle sweetmeats to her in baby days, who had given her that pet name of Fah Lo Suee, because, he said, she was like a budding lily blossom.
She stood up restlessly and went out into an adjoining room equipped in purely Chinese fashion. There were panels of ivory and jade, rare and beautiful rugs, rose porcelain. The furniture might have, and possibly had, come from an Emperor’s palace. There was a faint perfume, blended of musk and sandalwood, and the lamps were hidden in frames of painted silk.
Mrs van Roorden crossed to windows screened by ebony fretwork, and opened a screen. A warm breeze met her as she stepped out on to the balcony and stood there looking down at Fifth Avenue far below and then across the Park to where tall buildings on Central Park West loomed up, monstrous, against the evening sky.
What, she asked herself for the hundredth time, had become of Sha Mu?
Had he failed altogether — been arrested? She was not prepared to believe this. His stealthy cunning had never failed before. It was barely possible that he might still be waiting for an opportunity. Even the uncanny skill with which he could make himself almost invisible would not have enabled him to hide in the hotel so long without being challenged.
Who was the man who called himself Fordwich?
Only by a fleeting glance in a mirror had Sha Mu been able to identify his attacker. And it had proved hopeless to attempt anything on the ship. Something was seriously wrong. But she dare not call the hotel.
Mrs van Roorden returned to the softly lighted room. A Chinese girl stood there. She wore native dress, and her eyes were modestly downcast. She had a shy grace of movement which remained one of a gazelle.
