The Drums of Fu Manchu f-9

by Sax Rohmer

  “Here’s your next patient, Kerrigan,” Nayland Smith spoke thickly . . . he was swaying!

  I ran to him.

  “This way sir.”

  Lopez remained imperturbable. As I clutched Smith’s arm and the steward led us along the deck, I cannot even attempt to depict my frame of mind . . .

  What ailed Nayland Smith?

  Lightning flickered far away over the sea; thunder sounded like rolling drums . . . The police cutter was already out of sight. Silver Heels swung slowly about.

  As Smith reeled along the deserted deck:

  “Take your cue from me!” he whispered in my ear. “When I lie on the bed drop down beside me in a chair—anywhere—but as near as you can! Begin to stagger . . .”

  The steward opened a door and illuminated a commodious cabin, similar to that occupied- by Brownlow Wilton.

  “In here, sir.”

  “Always . . . poor sailor, I fear,” Smith muttered thickly. “Lie down awhile . . .”

  I assisted him on to one of the two beds, while Lopez removed the coverlet. He lay there with closed eyes, seeming to be trying to speak. An armchair stood near by, and distrusting my acting I slumped suddenly into it. I had ceased trying to think, but trusted Nayland Smith, for he could see where I was blind.

  As the steward solicitously removed the coverlet from the neighboring bed and spread it over me:

  “Sorry . . . whacked!” I muttered and closed my eyes.

  The steward went out and shut the cabin door.

  “Don’t speak—don’t move!” It was a mere murmur. “Roll over so that you face me, and wait.”

  I rolled over on my side and lay still. Now I could see Smith clearly. His eyes, though half closed, were questing about the cabin, particularly watching the door and the two ports which gave upon the deck. Over the creaking and groaning of the ship I heard those distant drums. Something told me to lie still—that we were being watched.

  “Speak softly” said Nayland Smith; “the man Lopez has gone to report. Do you realize what has happened?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “We have fallen into a trap!”

  “What!”

  “Lie still. Someone else is probably watching us . . . I foresaw the danger but still walked into it. I suppose I had no right to bring you with me.”

  “I don’t even know what you mean.”

  The maneuver of turning the ship about had been clumsily accomplished, and I realized that we were now headed back for Venice. There was less creaking and groaning and the sound of thunder drums grew fainter.

  “I suspect Fu Manchu’s plan to be that we shall never return.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “Ssh! Quiet! Someone at the porthole.”

  I lay perfectly still; so did Nayland Smith. Only by the prompting of that extra sense which comes to us in hours of danger did I realize that someone was indeed peering into the cabin. My brain, tired by a whirl of grotesque experiences, obstinately refused to deal with this new problem. Why should we both be overcome? And what were we waiting for?”

  “All clear again,” Smith reported in a low voice. “Even if the door is locked, which I doubt, those deck ports are wide enough to enable us to get out.”

  “But Smith, what do you suspect?”

  “It isn’t a suspicion, Kerrigan; it’s a fact. This yacht is in the hands of servants of Doctor Fu Manchu from the commander downwards.”

  “Good God! Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “But Wilton . . .”

  “In Europe our concern is concentrated upon kings and dictators, but Wilton in the United States wields almost as much power as, shall we say, Goebbels in Germany. His political sympathies are well known, his interests widespread.”

  “But Wilton is a dying man.”

  “I think you would be nearer the mark, Kerrigan, if you said ‘Wilton is a dead man’!”

  * * *

  Only the sound of the propellers broke the silence now. I knew instinctively that Nayland Smith was thinking hard, and presently:

  “Can you hear me, Kerrigan?” he asked in a low voice. “I dare not speak louder.”

  “Yes.”

  Those words “Wilton is a dead man” haunted me. I wondered what he meant.

  “We should probably be well-advised to make a dash for it; grab those life belts and jump over the side. But there’s a fairly heavy swell and I don’t entirely fancy the prospect.”

  “I don’t fancy it at all!”

  “Perhaps we can afford to wait until we are rather nearer land. Our great risk at the moment is that they discover we are not insensible.”

  “Insensible! But why should we be insensible?”

  Of all the strange and horrible memories which I have of this battle to prevent Dr Fu Manchu from readjusting the balance of world power, there is none more strange, I think than this muttered interlude, lying there in the cabin of Silver Heels.

  “For the simple reason,” the quiet, low voice continued, “that the drinks we shared with Wilton were drugged. Bourbon whisky was insisted upon for that reason: its marked flavor evidently conceals whatever drug was in it.”

  “But, Smith—”

  “I switched them, Kerrigan, having created a brief distraction! My own, if you remember, I apparently drained at a draught. It went into the washbowl at my elbow.”

  “But mine?”

  “There was no alternative in the time at my disposal. Wilton had yours—you had Wilton’s.”

  “Good God! Do you mean you think he is lying dead there in his cabin?”

  “Ssh! Remember we are through if they once suspect us. I mean that he is dead, yes—but not lying in his cabin . . .”

  He lay silent for a while, and I divined the fact that he was listening. I listened also, puzzling my brain at the same time for a clue to the meaning of his words. Then:

  “I am wondering why the two police have not—”

  My sentence was cut short. I heard a sudden scuffling of feet, a wild cry—and then came silence again, except that very far away I detected a dull rumbling of thunder.

  “Smith! Good God, can we do nothing!”

  “The murderous swine! It’s too late! I was playing for time—trying to make a plan”—there was an agony of remorse in his low-pitched voice. “Hello!”

  The lights went out!

  “Now we can move,” snapped Smith, and as he spoke the engines ceased to move. Silver Heels lay rolling idly on the swell.

  “This is where we jump to it! Quick, Kerrigan! Have your gun handy!”

  I rolled off the bed and made for the door. I was nearer to it than Smith.

  “Damnation!” I exclaimed.

  The door was locked!

  “I didn’t note them do it.”

  Dimly I could see Smith trying one of the big rectangular ports which opened onto the starboard deck.

  “Hullo! This is more serious than I thought! These are locked, too!”

  We stood there for a moment listening to increasing sounds about us.

  “They’re getting the launch away,” I muttered, for I had noted that the yacht carried a motor launch. “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re going to sink Silver Heels—with ourselves on board!”

  Silver Heels (Concluded)

  “Listen, Kerrigan, listen!”

  To the sound of voices, running feet, creaking of davits and wheezy turning of chocks, a suggestive silence had succeeded, broken only by the cracking and groaning of the ship’s fabric. If Nayland Smith’s conclusions were true, and he was rarely wrong, we were trapped like rats, and like rats must drown.

  I listened intently.

  “You hear it, Kerrigan?”

  “Yes. It’s in some adjoining cabin.”

  It was a moaning sound; but unlike that which had horrified me in the cellars of Palazzo Brioni, this certainly was human. Even as I listened and wondered what I heard, Nayland Smith had a wardrobe door open.
The wardrobe was empty, but in the dim light I saw that he had his ear pressed to the woodwork.

  “It’s behind here!” he said. “We daren’t use a torch yet. Noise we must risk. The ship’s noises may drown it, but this boarding has to be stripped. Hello!”

  As I joined him I saw that there was a ventilator at the back of the wardrobe.

  “No time and no means to unscrew it,” he muttered, and I saw that he had succeeded in wedging his fingers between two of the bars. “Let’s hope it doesn’t make too much row!”

  He wrenched it bodily from the light wood in which it was set. Speaking very close to the gap thus created:

  “Anyone there?” he called softly.

  A stifled muttering responded.

  “Come on, Kerrigan! This is our only chance!”

  So far as I could make out, every living soul on board, other than ourselves or whoever might be in the next cabin, had joined the launch. We attacked that job like demons, stripping three-ply woodwork from the back of the wardrobe. Every crack of the shattered fragments sounded in my ears like the shot of a pistol. We made a considerable gap—and no one hindered us.

  “If anybody comes in,” snapped Smith, “shoot him down.”

  There was a second partition behind, and now that stifled cry reached us more urgently.

  “Stand behind me,” said Smith.

  He flashed a momentary beam upon this new obstacle.

  “Matchboarding,” I muttered. “These rooms once communicated.”

  Not awaiting his reply, I hurled myself against it.

  I crashed through into a small cabin, as fitful moonlight from a porthole told me. On the floor the two men of the Carabinieri day bound—bandages tied over their mouths! One was struggling furiously; the other lay still.

  “This one first.”

  Quickly we released the struggling man. He spoke a little English and the situation was soon explained. He had been struck down from behind as he patrolled the deck, and had recovered consciousness to find himself bound in the cabin. His opposite number, when we released him in turn, proved to be insensible, but alive.

  “Now,” snapped Smith. “Yes or no . . .”

  The cabin was locked.

  “This is awful!” I groaned. “But we could blow the lock out.”

  “Yes—fortunately we’re armed, for these men’s carbines have gone. But wait—”

  He sprang to the porthole, worked feverishly for a few seconds and then:

  “A different fitting,” he gasped. “I have it open!”

  I climbed through onto the deck . . . and the key was in the cabin door. We were on the starboard side of Silver Heels; the launch lay at the port ladder. And from the ladder-head at this moment sounds of disturbance arose. Facing us a small lifeboat hung at the davits; forward, just abaft the bridge, an alleyway connected the two decks.

  “Do you know anything about boats?” Smith snapped.

  “Not much.”

  “Do you?” to the police officer.

  “Yes sir. I was at sea before I joined the Carabinieri.”

  “Right! Kerrigan, steal through that alleyway and watch what is going on. You”—to the ex-seaman—”lend a hand with your friend.”

  They began to haul the insensible man across the deck. I turned and crept along the alleyway. Soon I had a view of the ladder-head. The portside was in shadow, relieved only by the light of a solitary hurricane lantern.

  One man stood there. He was tapping his foot impatiently upon the deck and watching a door which I thought led to the engine room. It was Lopez. Heralded by a rattling of feet on iron rungs, a man wearing dungarees burst into view.

  “You have set it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Down quickly!—not a moment to waste!”

  “But Doctor Chang! Where is the doctor? I have not seen him.”

  “His orders were to join the launch immediately she was swung out.”

  “Doctor Chang is not on board,” came a voice from the foot of the ladder.

  “How long have we?”

  “Three minutes.”

  Silver Heels, her wheel abandoned, creaked and groaned: it became difficult to hear the speakers.

  “I shall not sacrifice myself for the doctor!” Lopez spoke furiously. “Already he has taxed my patience . . . Hoy!”—he hailed—”Doctor!”

  “Doctor Chang!”

  Other voices joined in the cry.

  But Dr Chang—whoever Dr Chang may have been—did not appear.

  At the head of the ladder the man in dungarees hesitated, looking back over his shoulder, whereupon:

  “Down, I say!” cried Lopez, a note of cold authority in his voice. “Who is in charge here? Always the doctor was mad. If he wishes to be destroyed who cares? There is not a moment to spare! Everyone for himself!”

  * * *

  Nayland Smith and the police officer had succeeded in lowering away the ship’s boat with the insensible Carabinieri on board, for when I got back to the starboard rail it was already riding an oil swell, fended off by the man in uniform. Smith, bathed in perspiration as I could see, was watching for my return.

  “Well?”

  “They’ve gone. The ship will blow up in two minutes! But Wilton—”

  “Come on! The ladder is down.”

  “But—”

  “There are no ‘buts.’ Come on!”

  Although I have said that the swell was subsiding, boarding that boat was no easy matter. We accomplished it, however, so that I am in a position to testify to the fact that some prayers are answered.

  As dimly we heard the launch racing away from Silver Heels, we began furiously to pull around the stern of the vessel. We rowed as though our lives depended upon our efforts.

  And this indeed was the case.

  I was too excited at the time, too exhausted, to be competent to say now how far from Silver Heels we lay when it happened . . . but the effect was as though a volcano had belched up from the sea.

  A shattering explosion came—and the graceful yacht seemed to split in the middle. Minor explosions followed. Flames roared up as if to lick the clouds.

  Her end, I think, was a matter of minutes . . .

  I can hear myself now as that deafening explosion came, and Silver Heels disappeared below the waves, creating a maelstrom which wildly rocked the boat:

  “Smith! I don’t understand! . . . Why did we desert Brownlow Wilton? He died a terrible death, and we—”

  “He deserved it. God knows how or when the real Wilton died! The staff engaged in Venice had never seen Wilton. It was a plot to trap Adion. The man who died on Silver Heels was a double, a servant of Doctor Fu Manchu!”

  “Good heavens, Smith! A memory has come back!”

  “Dictators have no monopoly of doubles. Doctor Fu Manchu employs them with notable success.”

  “Those fellows were crying out for someone called Doctor Chang, who was missing—”

  “Wilton’s impersonator, no doubt! I suspected a Mongolian streak. He lay drugged—by his own hand! I saw it all in the mirror, Kerrigan, hence my remarkable behavior! The man, Lopez, was directing; he is senior to the other in the Si-Fan. But ‘doctor’ is significant. Probably Doctor Chang, apart from his resemblance to Brownlow Wilton, is a poison specialist—”

  “I know he is, Smith—I know it! He is the man who came to your rooms and fixed the Green Death to the telephone!”

  “Poor devil! You mean he was the man . . .”

  The Man In The Park

  The wheels seemed to turn very swiftly in those strange days and nights during which I found myself beside Nayland Smith in his battle to hold the world safe from Dr Fu Manchu.

  Throughout the week that followed our escape from Silver Heels so many things happened that I find it difficult to select a point from which to carry on my story since I realize that this story, almost against my will, from the first has wound itself insidiously about the figure of Ardatha.

  First had come what Smith c
alled “the great hush-up.”

  Since Rudolf Adion’s double had been reviewing troops at the time when the real Adion had been at Palazzo da Rosa it was impossible for his government to divulge the fact that he had died (or disappeared) in Venice. When it became necessary to admit his death to a public which had looked up to him as to a god, they were told that he had died in his bed. The double, Rudolf Adion No. I, ceased to exist. It was done adroitly: the newspapers were muzzled. Patriotic physicians issued fictitious bulletins, then the final news for which a breathless Europe waited.

  Mourning millions filed past a guarded dummy lying in state . . .

  Next came the retirement from public life of the ruler of Turkey, “a bloodless victory for Fu Manchu” was Nayland Smith’s comment. (Pietro Monaghani, I should mention had failed to keep the appointment with Adion in Venice. He had accepted the orders of the Si-Fan.)

  When an astonishing fact became undeniable—the fact that Fu Manchu with all his people, including Ardatha, had vanished from Venice as though they had never entered the City of the Lagoons, I remember that I advocated a secret departure to some base unsuspected by the Chinese doctor. “Will you never realize, Kerrigan,” Nayland Smith had said, “that from the point of view of the organization controlled by Fu Manchu, there is no such thing as a secret base. He knew that Adion was going to be in Venice before the combined intelligence services of Europe knew it. He brought a crew of highly trained criminal specialists to deal with the situation and dispersed them into thin air when their work was done, as a conjurer vanishes a bowl of goldfish. And think of the pack of cutthroats who left Silver Heels in the murder launch. The explosion was heard for miles—we were picked up ten minutes later; but what of the launch? It hasn’t been traced to this day, nor anybody on board!”

  And so on one never-to-be-forgotten evening I found myself back at my flat in Bayswater Road.

  I stared from my window across the park as dusk gathered and pedestrians moved in the direction of the gates. I had not seen Nayland Smith since the forenoon. At this time, frankly, I was terrified whenever he was out of my sight. That he continued to live while the awful hand of Fu Manchu was extended against him became every hour a miracle more worshipful.

  Presently the behavior of a man who had just reached the gate nearly opposite my window began to intrigue me.