by Sax Rohmer
“I am glad you think so,” she said rather tremulously.
He was holding her hands now. “Camille—would you think me a really fearful cad if I told you you are completely lovely?”
His heart seemed to falter when he saw that tiny curl of Camille’s lip—like the stirring of a rose petal, he thought of it—heralding a smile. It was a new smile, a smile he had never seen before. She raised her lashes and looked into his eyes . . .
When he released her: “Camille,” he whispered, “How very lovely you are!”
“Morris!”
He kissed her again.
“You darling! I suppose I have been waiting for this moment ever since you first walked into the office.”
“Have you?”
This was a different woman he held in his arms—a woman who had disguised herself; this was the hidden, the secret Camille, seductive, wildly desirable—and his!
“Yes. Did you know?”
“Perhaps I did,” she whispered.
Presently she disengaged herself and stood back, smiling provocatively.
“Camille—”
“Shall I take the message to Mr. Regan?”
Morris Craig inhaled deeply, and turned away. He was delirious with happiness, knew it, yet (such is the scientific mind) resented it. Camille had swept solid earth from beneath his feet. He was in the grip of a power which he couldn’t analyze, a power not reducible to equations, inexpressible in a diagram. He had, perhaps, probed the secret of perpetual motion, exalting himself to a throne not far below the knees of the gods—but he had met a goddess in whose slender hands he was a thing of clay.
“D’you know,” he said, glancing aside at her, “I think it might be a good idea if you did.”
She detached the top copy of the note and walked across to the laboratory steps.
“Will you open the door for me?”
Craig pulled out the bunch of keys and went to join her where she stood—one foot on the first step, her frock defining the lines of her slim body, reflected light touching rich waves of her hair to an incredible glory. Over her shoulder she watched him.
The keys rattled as he dropped the chain . . .
“Morris—please!”
He took the paper from her hand and tore it up.
“Never mind. Work is out of the question, now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry!”
“You adorable little witch, you’re not sorry at all! I thought I was a hard-boiled scientific egg until I met you.”
“I’m afraid,” said Camille, demurely, and her soft voice reminded him again of the notes of a harp, “I have spoiled your plans for the evening.”
“To the devil with plans! This is a night of nights. Let’s follow it through.”
He put his arm around her waist and dragged her from the steps.
“Very well, Morris. Whatever you say.”
“I say we’re young only once.” He pulled her close. “At least, so far as we know. So I say let’s be young together.”
He gave her a kiss which lasted almost too long . . .
“Morris!”
“I could positively eat you alive!”
“But—your work—”
“Work is for slaves. Love is for free men. Where shall we go?”
“Anywhere you like, if you really mean it. But—”
“It doesn’t matter. There are lots of spots. I feel that I want somewhere different, some place where I can get used to the idea that you—that there is a you, and that I have found you . . . I’m talkin’ rot! Better let Regan know he’s in sole charge again.”
His keys still hung down on the chain as he had dropped them. He swung the bunch into his hand and crossed toward the steel door. At the foot of the steps, he hesitated. No need to go in. It would be difficult to prevent Regan from drawing inferences. Shrewd fellow, Regan. Craig returned to his desk and called the laboratory.
As if from far away a reply came:
“Regan here.”
Craig cleared his throat guiltily.
“Listen, Regan. I shan’t be staying late tonight after all.” (He felt like a criminal.) “Pushing off. Anything I should attend to before Shaw comes on duty?”
There was a silent interval. Camille was standing behind Craig, clutching her head, staring at him in a dazed way . . .
“Can you hear, Regan? I say, do you want to see me before I leave?”
Then came the halting words. “No . . . Doctor . . . there’s nothing. . . to see you about . . .”
Craig thought the sentence was punctured by a stifled cough.
A moment later he had Camille in his arms again.
“Camille—I realize that I have never been really alive before.”
But she was pressing her hands frantically against him, straining back, wild-eyed, trying to break away from his caresses. He released her. She stared up at the clock then back to Craig.
“My God! Morris! . . . Dr. Craig—”
“What is it, Camille? What is it?”
He stepped forward, but she shrank away.
“I don’t know. I’m frightened. When—when did I come in? What have I been doing?”
His deep concern, the intense sincerity of his manner, seemed to reach her. When, gently, he held her and looked into her eyes, she lowered her head until it lay upon his shoulder, intoxicating him with the fragrance of her hair.
“Camille,” he whispered, tenderly. (He could feel her heart beating.) “Tell me—what is it?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know what has happened. Please— please take care of me.”
“Do you mean you have made a mistake? It was an impulse? You are sorry for it?”
“Sorry for what?” she murmured against his shoulder.
“For letting me make love to you.”
“No—I’m not sorry if—if I did that.”
He kissed her hair, very lightly, just brushing it with his lips.
“Darling! Whatever came over you? What frightened you?”
Camille looked up at him under her long lashes.
“I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes. “How long have I been here?”
“How long? What in heaven’s name d’you mean, Camille? Are you terribly unhappy? I don’t understand at all.”
“No. I am not unhappy—but—everything is so strange.”
“Strange? In what way?”
The phone rang in Camille’s office. She started—stepped back, a sudden, alert look in her eyes.
“Don’t trouble, Camille. I’ll answer.”
“No, no. It’s quite all right.”
Camille crossed to her room, and took up the phone. She knew it to be unavoidable that she should do this, but had no idea why. Some ten seconds later she had returned to the half-world controlled by the voice of Dr. Fu Manchu . . .
When she came out of her room again, she was smiling radiantly.
“It is the message I have waited for so long—to tell me that my
mother, who was desperately ill, is no longer in danger.”
Even as he took her in his arms, Craig was thinking that there seemed to be an epidemic of sick mothers, but he dismissed the thought as cynical and unworthy. And when she gave him her lips he forgot everything else. Her distrait manner was explained. The world was full of roses.
They were ready to set out before he fully came to his senses. Camille had combed her hair in a way which did justice to its beauty. She looked, as she was, an extremely attractive woman.
He stood in the lobby, his arm around her waist, preparing to open the elevator door, when sanity returned. Perhaps it was the sight of his keys which brought this about.
“By gad!” he exclaimed. “I have got it badly! Can you imagine—I was pushing off, and leaving the detail of the transmuter valve pinned to the board on my desk!”
He turned and ran back.
Chapter XIV
Somewhere in Chinatown a girl was singing.
Chinese vocalism is not everyb
ody’s box of candy, but the singer had at least one enthusiastic listener. She sang in an apartment adjoining the shop of Huan Tsung, and the good looking shopman, who called himself Lao Tai, wrote at speed, in a kind of shorthand, all that she sang. From time to time he put a page of this writing into the little cupboard behind him and pressed a button.
The F.B.I, man on duty in a room across the street caught fragments of this wailing as they were carried to him on a slight breeze, and wondered how anyone who had ever heard Bing Crosby could endure such stuff.
But upstairs, in the quiet, silk-lined room, old Huan Tsung scanned page after page, destroying each one in the charcoal fire, and presently the globe beside his couch awoke to life and the face of Dr. Fu Manchu challenged him from its mysterious depths.
“The latest report to hand. Excellency.”
“Repeat it.”
Huan Tsung leaned back against cushions and closed his wrinkled eyelids.
“I have installed the ‘bazaar’ system. My house is watched and my telephone is tapped. Therefore, news is brought to Mat Cha and she sings the news to Lao Tai.”
“Spare me these details. The report.”
“Reprimand noted. Dr. Craig and Camille Navarre left the Huston Building, according to Excellency’s plan, at nine thirty-seven. One of the two detectives posted at the private entrance followed them. The other remains. No report yet to hand as to where Craig and the woman have gone.”
“Nayland Smith?”
“Nothing later than former report. Raymond Harkness still acting as liaison officer in this area.”
The widely opened green eyes were not focussed upon Huan Tsung. A physician might have suspected the pinpoint pupils to indicate that Dr. Fu Manchu had been seeking inspiration in the black smoke. But presently he spoke, incisive, masterful as ever.
“Mount a diversion at four minutes to ten o’clock. Note the time. My entrance must be masked. Whoever is on duty—remove. But no assassinations. I may be there for an hour or more. Cover my retirement. My security is your charge. Proceed.”
Light in the crystal died.
* * *
At a few minutes before ten o’clock, a man was standing at a bus stop twenty paces from the private entrance to the Huston laboratory. No bus that had pulled up there during the past hour had seemed to be the bus he was waiting for; and now he waited alone. An uncanny quietude descends upon these office areas after dusk. During the day they remind one of some vast anthill. Big-business ants, conscious of their fat dividends, neat little secretary ants, conscious of their slim ankles, run to and fro, to and fro, in the restless, formless, meaningless dance of Manhattan.
Smart cabs and dowdy cabs, gay young cabs and sad old cabs, trucks, cars, busses, bicycles, pile themselves up in tidal waves behind that impassable barrier, the red light. And over in front of the suspended torrent scurry the big ants and the little ants. But at night, red and green lights become formalities. The ants have retired from the stage, but the lights shine on. Perhaps to guide phantom ants, shades of former Manhattan dancers now resting.
So that when a boy peddling a delivery bike came out of a street beside the Huston Building, it is possible that the driver of a covered truck proceeding at speed along the avenue failed to note the light.
However this may have been, he collided with the boy, who was hurled from his bicycle. The truckman pulled up with an ear-torturing screech of brakes. The boy—apparently unhurt—jumped to his feet and put up a barrage of abuse embellished with some of the most staggering invective which the man waiting for a bus had ever heard.
The truckman, a tough-looking bruiser, jumped from his seat, lifted the blasphemous but justly indignant youth by the collar of his jacket, and proceeded to punish him brutally.
This was too much for the man waiting for a bus. He ran to the rescue. The boy, now, was howling curses in a voice audible for several blocks. Spectators appeared—as they do—from nowhere. In a matter of seconds the rescuer, the rescued, and the attacker were hemmed in by an excited group.
And at just this moment, two figures alighted from the rear of the temporarily deserted truck, walked quietly to the private door of the Huston Building, opened it, and went in. Later, Raymond Harkness would have something to say to the man waiting for a bus—whose name was Detective Officer Beaker.
Huan Tsung had mounted a diversion . . .
The telephone in Camille’s room was buzzing persistently—had been buzzing for a long time.
Craig had left the desk light burning; but most of the office lay in shadow, so that when someone switched on a flashlamp in the lobby, a widening, fading blade of light swept across the parquet floor. Then the door was fully opened.
Koenig stepped in, looking cautiously about him. He carried a heavy leather case, which he set down by the safe.
And, as he stood upright again, a tall figure, draped in a black topcoat, the fur collar turned up, came in silently and joined him. Dr. Fu Manchu wore the tinted Hoffmeyer glasses, gloves, and carried a black hat. He looked in the direction of that persistent buzzing.
“Miss Navarre’s office,” said Koenig uneasily.
Dr. Fu Manchu indicated the safe, merely extending a gloved hand. Koenig nodded, knelt, and opened the leather case. Taking out a bunch of keys, he busied himself with the lock, working by the light of his flashlamp. Presently he paused. He turned.
“Combination has been changed!”
The tall figure standing behind him remained motionless. The buzzing in Camille’s room ceased.
“You came prepared for such a possibility?”
“Yes—but it may take a long time now.”
“You have nearly two hours. But no more.”
The clock over Craig’s desk struck its single note . . . ten o’clock.
Dr. Fu Manchu crossed and walked up the three steps. He beat upon the steel door.
“M’goyna!”
The door swung open. M’goyna’s huge frame showed silhouetted against a quivering green background. Dr. Fu Manchu entered the laboratory.
* * *
At half-past eleven, the man waiting for a bus was relieved by another detective. The avenue, now, was as completely deserted as any Manhattan avenue ever can be.
“Hello, Holland,” he said. “You’re welcome to this job! Like being the doorman of a vacant night club.”
“What are we supposed to be doing. Beaker, anyway?”
“Search me! Stop anybody going in, I suppose. We had orders to tail Dr. Craig if ever he came out, and Stoddart went after him two hours ago when he took his secretary off to make whoopee. A redhead straight from heaven.”
“Nothing else happened?”
“Bit of a scrap about ten o’clock. Big heel driving a truck knocked a boy off his bike. Nothing else . . . Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Holland lighted a cigarette, looking left and right along the avenue and wondering what had originally attracted him to police work. Beaker was making for a subway station and Holland followed the retreating figure with his eyes for several blocks. He settled down to a monotony broken only by an occasional bus halting at the nearby stop. The night was unseasonably warm.
At a quarter to twelve, a remarkable incident occurred.
It had been preceded by another curious occurrence, invisible to Holland, however. A red light had been flashed several times from the high parapet of the Huston Building, immediately outside Craig’s office . . .
Bearing down upon Holland at speed from the other end of the block, he saw a hatless young man in evening dress, who screamed as he ran!
“You won’t get me! You devils! You won’t get me!”
In spite of the emptiness of the streets, these outcries had had some effect. Two men were following, but maintaining a discreet distance from the screaming man. Keeping up that extraordinary pace, he drew nearer and nearer to Holland.
“Out of my way! They’re after me!”
Holland sized up the situation. The ru
nner was of medium build, dark, and not bad-looking in a Latin fashion. Clearly Holland decided, he’s drunk, and a guy in that state is doubly strong. But I guess I’ll have to hold him. He may do damage.
An experienced manhandler, Holland stepped forward. But the runner kept on running.
“Out of my way!” he screamed. “I’ll kill you if you try to stop me!”
Holland stooped for a tackle, saw the gleam of a weapon, and side-stepped in a flash.
“They won’t get me!” yelled the demented man, and went racing around the comer.
Had the missing Sam been present, he would have recognized the lunatic as that Jed Laurillard who had once talked to him in a bar. In fact, this disciple had been given a particularly difficult assignment, one certain to land him in jail, as a chance to redeem his former mistake. He had, furthermore, been given a shot of hashish to lend color to the performance.
Holland clapped a whistle to his lips, and blew a shrill blast. Drawing his own automatic, he went tearing around the comer after the still screaming madman . . .
During a general mix-up which took place there, a big sedan drew in before the private door of the Huston Building, and three men came out and entered it. One of them carried a heavy roll of office carpet on his shoulder.
Huan Tsung had successfully covered the retirement of Dr. Fu Manchu.
When Martin Shaw stepped from a taxi, paid the driver, and saw the yellow cab driven away, he unbuttoned his topcoat to find his key. Someone was walking rapidly towards him; the only figure in sight. It was midnight.
Holland, whilst still some distance away, recognized the chief technician, and moderated his pace. The screaming alcoholic had just been removed in charge of two patrolmen, and would, no doubt, receive his appropriate medicine in the morning. By the time Holland reached the door, Shaw had already gone in, and was on his way up.
Shaw half expected that Dr. Craig would be still at work, and even when he didn’t see him at his desk, was prepared to find him in the laboratory. Then he noted that the drawing board was missing and the safe unlocked. Evidently, Craig had gone.
Whoever took the next (four-to-eight) duty usually slept on a couch in the office. But Regan seemed to have made no preparations.
Shaw went up the three steps and unlocked the steel door.
