by Sax Rohmer
He turned whilst the inspector was still talking on the phone; but I grabbed his arm.
“Smith—did you find any trace—?”
“No.” He spoke over his shoulder, “But Ardatha called me two minutes after Fu Manchu. She was responsible for your finding me where you found me tonight. Jump to it, Kerrigan. This German may have valuable information.”
He had reached the office door, the inspector had hung up the receiver and was staring blankly after him, when again the phone buzzed. The inspector took up the instrument, said, “Yes—speaking,” and then seemed to become suddenly tensed.
“One moment, sir!” he cried after Smith.“One moment!”
Smith turned, tugging at the lobe of his ear.
“Well-what is it?”
“River Police, sir. Excuse me for a second.”
He began to scribble on a pad, then: “Yes—I follow. Nothing on him in the way of evidence? No—I will act at once. Good-bye.”“
He hung up again, staring at Smith.
“They have just hauled Jacob Bohm out of the river off Tilbury,” he said. “A ship’s anchor caught him. He was sewn up in sailcloth. Both hands had been amputated,”
CHAPTER IX
39B FELLING STREET
Of my drive to Felling Street, a short one, I remember not one detail, except that of a searchlight which, as we turned a corner, suddenly clove the dark sky like a scimitar. I had thought that the man’s death rendered the visit unnecessary: Smith had assured me that it rendered it more than ever important.
“He was putting the evidence in writing, Kerrigan. We want his notes . . . . ”
I mused in the dark. It was Ardatha who had saved me! This knowledge was a burning inspiration. In some way she had become a victim of the evil genius of Dr. Fu Manchu; her desertion had not been a voluntary one. Then, as the police driver threaded a way through streets which all looked alike, I found myself considering the fate of Jacob Bohm; the strange mutilation of Dr. Oster; those ghastly exhibits in the glass case somewhere below the old warehouse.
“Note the yellow hands”—I heard that harsh, guttural voice plainly as though it had spoken in my ear—”They were contributed by a blond Bavarian . . . . ” Could I doubt, now, that the blond Bavarian was Jacob Bohm? I should have been Fu Manchu’s next ember thrown to the Moloch of science before whom he immolated fellow men as callously as the Aztec priests offered human sacrifices to Quetzacotl.
Number 39B was identical in every way with its neighbours. All the houses stood flush to the pavement; so much I could make out: all were in darkness. In response to my ring Mrs. Mullins presently opened the door. A very dim light showed (I saw that some sort of black-out curtain hung behind her) but it must have enabled her to discern my uniform.
“Oh good God!” she exclaimed. “Have the Germans landed?”
Her words reminded me of the part I had to play.
“No ma’am,” I replied gruffly. “I am a police inspector—”
“Oh, inspector, I haven’t shown a peep of light! Truly I haven’t. When the sirens started howling I put out every light in the house. Even when I heard the all-clear, I only used candles.”
“There’s no complaint. Are you Mrs. Mullins?”
“That’s my name, sir.”
“It’s about your lodger, Jacob Bohm, that I’m here.”
The portly figure, dimly seen, appeared to droop. “Oh!” she whispered, “I always expected it.”
I went in. Mrs. Mullins closed the door, dropped the curtain, which I recognized for an old counterpane, and turned to face me in a little sitting-room, candle lighted, which was clean, tidy, and furnished in a way commemorated by Punch artists of the Edwardian era. She was a stout, grey-haired woman and no toper, but tonight her abode spoke of gin. She extended her hands appealingly.
“Don’t say Little Jake was a spy, sir!” she exclaimed. “He was like a son to me. Don’t tell me—”
“When did you see him last?”
“Ah, that’s it! He didn’t come home last night and I thought to myself, that’s funny. Then tonight, when the young lady from the firm called and explained it was all right—”
“What young lady—someone you know?”
“Oh, no, sir—I’ve never seen her before. But she was sure he’d be back later and went up to wait for him. Then that air-raid warning came, and—“
“Where is this—“
I ceased speaking. A faint sound had reached my ears, coming from beyond a half-opened door. Someone was stealing downstairs!
In one bound I reached the door, threw it open, and looked up. Silhouetted against faint light from above, a woman’s figure turned and dashed back! With springs in my heels I followed, leapt into a room a pace behind her, and stood squarely in the doorway.
She had run towards a curtained window, and I saw her in the light of a fire, sole illumination of the room, and that which had shown down the stair. She wore a dark raincoat and a small close-fitting hat from beneath which the glory of her hair cascaded in iridescent waves. Dancing firelight touched her face, more pale than usual, and struck amethyst glints from her lovely eyes. But my heart had already prepared me to meet “the young lady from the firm.”
“It seems I came just in time, Ardatha,” I said, and succeeded in speaking coolly.
She faced me, standing quite still.
“You!” she whispered. “So you are of the police! I thought so!”
“You are wrong; I am not. But this is no time to explain.” I had formed a theory of my own to account for her apparent ignorance of all that had passed between us, and I spoke gently. “I owe you my life, Ardatha, and it belongs to you with all else I have. You said you would try to understand. You must help me to understand, too. What are you doing here?”
She took a step forward, her eyes half fearful, her lips parted.
“I am obeying orders which I must obey. There are things which you can never understand. I believe you mean all you say, and I want to trust you.” Prompted by some swift impulse, she came up to me and rested her hands upon my shoulders, watching me with eyes in which I read a passionate questioning. “God knows how I want to trust you.”
Almost, I succumbed; her charm intoxicated me. As her accepted lover I had the right to those sweet, tremulous lips. But I had read the riddle in my own way, and clenching my teeth I resisted that maddening temptation.
“You may trust me where you cannot trust yourself, Ardatha,” I said quietly. “I am yours here and hereafter. Shake off this horrible slavery. Come with me now. The laws of England are stronger than the laws of Dr. Fu Manchu. You will be safe, Ardatha, and I will teach you to remember all you have forgotten.”
But I kept my hands tightly clenched at my sides; for, once in my arms, all those sane resolutions regarding her would have been swept away, and I knew it.
“Perhaps I want to do so—very much,” she whispered. Perhaps—“ she glanced swiftly up at me and swiftly down again—”this is remembrance. But if such a thing is ever to be, first I must live. If I came with you now I should die within one month—“
“That is nonsense!” I spoke hotly and regretted my violence in the next breath. “Forgive me! I would see that you were safe—even from him”
Ardatha shook her head. The firelight, which momentarily grew brighter, played wantonly in dancing curls.
“It is only with him that I can be safe,” she replied in a low voice. “He is well served because no one of the Si-Fan dare desert him—“
“Why? Whatever do you mean?”
Her hands clutched me nervously: she hid her face.
“There is an injection. It produces a living death—catalepsy. But there is an antidote too, which must be used once each two weeks. I have enough for one month more of life. Then—I should be buried for dead. Perhaps he would dig up my body: he has done such things before. No one else could save me—only Dr. Fu Manchu. And so, you see, with so many others I am just his helpless slave. Now, do you begin t
o understand?”
Begin to understand? My blood was boiling; yet my heart was cold. I remembered how I had tried to kill the Chinese ghoul, and realized that had I succeeded Ardatha would have been lost to me forever; that she . . . . But sanity forbade my following that train of thought to its dreadful conclusion.
Such a wild yearning overcame me, so mad a desire to hold and protect her from horrors unnameable, that, unwilled, mechanically, my arm went about her shoulders. She trembled slightly, but did not resist.
“You see”—the words were barely audible—”you must let me go. Forget Ardatha. Except by the will of Dr. Fu Manchu I can be nothing to you or to any man: I can only try to prevent him harming you.” She raised her eyes to me. “Please let me go.”
But I stood there, stricken motionless, gripped by anguish such as I had never known. My very faith in a just God was shaken by this revelation, by recognition of the fact that a fiend could use this perfect casket of a human soul as a laboratory experiment, reduce a beautiful woman, meant for love and happiness, to the level of a beast of burden—and escape the wrath of Heaven. I wondered if any lover since the world began had suffered such a moment.
Yet, Fu Manchu was mortal. There must be a way.
“I shall let you go, my dearest. But don’t accept the idea that it is for good. What has been done by one man can be undone by another.” I continued to speak quietly, and as I would have spoken to a frightened child. “Tell me first, why you came here?”
“For Jacob Bohm’s notes that he was making to give to the police,” she answered simply. “I have burned everything. Look—you can see the ashes on the fire.”
As she spoke, I understood why the fire had burned up so brightly. A glance was sufficient to convince me that not a fragment could be recovered.
“And when you leave here, where are you going?”
“It is impossible for me to tell you that. But there are servants of the Si-Fan watching this house.” (I thought of the yellow-faced man whom we had nearly run down.) “Even if you were cruel enough to try, you could not get me away. I think”—she hesitated, glanced swiftly up—”that tonight or in the early morning we leave for America.”
“America!”
“Yes.” She slipped free—for I had kept my arm about her shoulders. “I just could not bear to . . . say good-bye. Please, look away for only a moment—if you really care for my happiness: I beg of you!”
There was abandonment, despair, in her pleading voice. No man could have refused; and after all I was not a police officer.
I looked long and hungrily into those eyes which tonight were like twin amethysts, and walked across to the fire.
“I will try, I will try to see you again—to speak to you.” Only the faintest sound, a light tread on the stair, told me that Ardatha was gone . . . .
CHAPTER X
BARTON’S SECRET
“I don’t blame you, Kerrigan,” said Nayland Smith; “in fact I cannot see what else you could have done.”
“Damn it, nor can I!” growled Barton.
We were back in my flat, after a night of frustration for which, in part, I held myself responsible. Barton had admitted us. He had returned an hour earlier, having borrowed my key. The police had forced a way into the old warehouse; they were still searching it when I rejoined the party. The room, the very bench on which Dr. Oster’s corpse had lain, fragments of twine, they had found, but nothing else. The River was being dragged for the body.
That laboratory which smelt like the Morgue was below water level: it had been flooded. Only by means of elaborate pumping operations could we hope to learn what evidence still remained there of the nature of the Doctor’s mysterious, and merciless, experiments.
“Infernally narrow escape for both of us, Kerrigan,” said Sir Lionel; and crossing to the buffet he replenished his glass. “Good shot, that of yours.” He squirted soda water from a syphon. “I owe my life to you: you owe yours to Ardatha. Gad! there’s a girl! But what an impossible situation!”
Smith stood up, and passing, grasped my shoulder.
“Even worse situations have been dealt with,” he said.“I am wondering, Kerrigan, if you have recognized the clue to Ardatha’s loss of memory?”
As he began to pace to and fro across my dining-room: “I think so!” I replied. “That yellow devil decided to reclaim her, and it was he who destroyed her memory!”
“Exactly—as he has done before, with others. I said to you some time ago, Fu Manchu once had a daughter—s”
“Smith!” I interrupted excitedly, “it was not until I saw Ardatha in Felling Street that the meaning of those words came to me. If he did not hesitate in the case of his own flesh and blood to efface all memories of identity, why should he hesitate in the case of Ardatha?”
“He didn’t! Ardatha remembers only that she is called Ardatha. Fu Manchu’s daughter, whom once I knew by her childish name of Fah-lo-Suee, became Koreani. You can bear me out, Kerrigan: you have met her.”
“Yes, but—“
“Ardathas and Koreanis are rare. Fu Manchu has always employed beauty as one of his most potent weapons. His own daughter he regarded merely as a useful instrument when he saw that she was beautiful. He found Ardatha difficult to replace; therefore, he recalled her. Oh! she had no choice. But she has the proud spirit of her race—and so he bound her to him by this damnable living death from which there is no escape!”
He was pacing the carpet at an ever-increasing speed, his pipe bubbling furiously; and something which emanated from that vital personality gave me new courage. I was not alone in my fight to save Ardatha from the devil doctor.
“Smith,” said Sir Lionel, leaning back against the buffet—for even his tough constitution had suffered in the night’s work and he was comparatively subdued—”this infernal thing means that if I saw Fu Manchu before me, now, I couldn’t shoot him!”
“It does,” Smith replied. “He was prepared to hold Kerrigan as a hostage. He overlooked the fact that whilst Kerrigan lived, Ardatha served the same purpose.”
Barton plunged his hands in his trouser pockets and became lost in reflection. His deep-set blue eyes danced queerly.
“We both know the Chinese,” he murmured. “I don’t think I should give up hope, Kerrigan. There may be a way.”
“I’m sure there is—there must be!” I broke in. “Dr. Fu Manchu is subject, after all, to human laws. He is supernormal, but not immortal. We all have our weaknesses. Mine, perhaps, is my love for Ardatha. He must have his. Smith, we must find Koreani!”
“I found her two months ago.”
“What!”
“She was then in Cuba. Where she is now I cannot say. But if you suppose that Fu Manchu would turn a hair’s breadth from his path to save his daughter, you are backing the wrong horse. Assuming that we could capture her, well—as an exchange for Ardatha (freed from the living death; for I have known others who have suffered it but who live today) she would be a worthless hostage. He would sacrifice Korean! without a moment’s hesitation!”
I was silent.
“Buck up, Kerrigan;’ said Sir Lionel. “I said there might be a way, and I stick to it.”
Smith stared at him curiously, and then: “As for you,” he remarked, “as usual you are an infernal nuisance.”
“Don’t mention it!”
“I must. Your inquiries in Haiti last year, followed by your studies in Norfolk and, finally, your conversations with the War Office, attracted the attention of Dr. Fu Manchu.”
“Very likely.”
“It was these conversations, reported to me whilst I was in the West Indies, that brought me back, post haste—“
“Fu Manchu got here first,” Barton interrupted. “There were two attempts to burgle my house. Queer-looking people were watching Abbots Hold. Finally, I received a notice signed “President of the Seven’, informing me that I had twenty-four hours in which to hand over certain documents.”
“You have this notice?” Smith ask
ed eagerly. “I had: it was in the stolen bag.” Smith snapped his fingers irritably. “And when you received it what did you do?”
“Bolted. I was followed all the way to London. That was why I phoned Kerrigan and came here. I didn’t want to be alone.”
“You were right,” said Smith. “But you came to your senses too late. I am prepared to hear that the fact of Fu Manchu’s interest in your affairs did not dawn upon you until you got this notice?”
“Suspected it before that. These reports from the Caribbean suggested that something very queer was afoot there. It occurred to me that bigger things than a mere treasure hunt were involved, so I offered my services to the War Office—“
“And behaved so badly that you were practically thrown out! Let me explain what happened. Your earlier correspondence with the War Office, although obscure, was considered to be of sufficient importance to be transmitted in code to me. I was then in Kingston, Jamaica. I dashed home. I went first to Norfolk, learned you had left for London, and followed. That was yesterday morning. I was dashing about Town trying to pick you up. I practically followed you into the War Office, and what you had said there convinced me that at all costs I must find you.’“
“The War Office can go to the devil,” growled Barton, refilling his glass.
“I say,” Smith went on patiently, “that I tried to tail you in London. I still have facilities, you know!” He smiled suddenly. “I gathered that you had gone to the British Museum
“Yes—I had.”
“I failed to find you there.”
“Didn’t look in the right room.”
“Possibly not. But I looked into one room which offered certain information.” He paused to relight his pipe. “You have been working for years hunting down the few clues which remain to the hiding-place of the vast treasure accumulated by Christophe of Haiti. You know your business. Barton; you haven’t your equal in Europe or America when it comes to archaeological research.”
