by Sax Rohmer
If I could trust Li King Su, Nayland Smith was coming here—to this house—where death awaited!
And now I was powerless to stop him!
“Li King Su was a traitor.” Through the beats of a sort of drumming which had started in my brain I heard the bell-like voice. “No doubt he counted on a great reward.”
She ceased speaking and clapped her hands sharply.
That gigantic Negro who had been the doorkeeper in el-Khârga, and who had overpowered me at the meeting of the Seven, came in!
Fah Lo Suee addressed him rapidly. She spoke in a sort of bastard Arabic—the Nubian dialect; and I found time for wonder. I knew North Africa from the inside; but I had never learned that queer lingo of the Nubians. Yet this woman—who was Chinese—used it familiarly!
The Nubian went out. Fah Lo Suee removed the stump of a yellow cigarette from her long holder, selected a fresh one from a cloisonne box, and fitted it into place. She ignited it with an enameled lighter.
A dragging sound came.
I saw the Nubian pulling a heavy trunk through the door and across the carpet. This trunk was vaguely familiar. Then, on the top, I saw white painted initials: L.K.S.
The Negro removed the straps and threw the lid back.
“Look,” said Fah Lo Suee. “He was a traitor.”
Li King Su lay in his own trunk—dead!
Not until I found myself alone could I think my own thoughts, uninfluenced by the promptings of those jade-green eyes. But when the door closed behind Fah Lo Suee, I began desperately to weigh my chances.
Nayland Smith was doomed!
This was the thought which came uppermost in my mind. The clue upon which he was working, and which would lead him that night to this house, was a false clue—a bait!
And that our enemies did not spare those who crossed their path I had learned.
The trunk had been dragged from the room… But I could still see; in imagination, that strangled grin on the dead man’s face.
I tried to reconstruct the details of our interview in Babylon House. Had I detected, or only deluded myself that I had detected, a swift exchange of signs between Li King Su and someone concealed in an inner room? Had I merely imagined the presence of this other?… Or had I been right in supposing someone to be there but wrong in my natural deduction that he was a friend of the Chinese doctor?
Had the hidden man murdered Li King Su and caused his body to be removed in the big trunk?…
“The garden of this house adjoins the Regent Canal,” he had said.
The Regent Canal! A gloomy whispering waterway, now little used, and entering a long tunnel somewhere near this very spot where I found myself a prisoner!
I bent forward to inspect the fastenings which confined my ankles… I was checked.
In the mad fantasies attendant upon my recovering from the effects of hashîsh, and afterwards under the evil thrall of Fah Lo Suee, I had failed to note a significant fact.
A rope was around my waist, binding me to the heavy chair!
True, my hands were free, but I could neither reach my ankles nor the knots fastening the line about my body, which were somewhere under the back of the chair.
A coffee table on which were whiskey and soda and cigarettes stood conveniently near. I was about to take a cigarette… when I hesitated. Reaching to my pocket I took out my own case and with a lighter which lay on the table started a cigarette.
At all costs I must keep my head. Upon me, alone, rested the fate of Nayland Smith—perhaps the fate of a million more!
I smoked awhile, sitting deliberately relaxed, and thinking… thinking. My bonds occasioned me no inconvenience provided I remained inactive. Short of a painful, tortoise-like progress across the room, dragging the heavy chair with me, it became increasingly clear that to move was a physical impossibility.
The house was silent—very silent. Those heavy gold draperies seemed to exclude all sound.
For a long time I sat there, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Then I heard something.
One of the two doors opened.
The huge Nubian came in, carrying a tray upon which were sandwiches and fruit. He set the tray on the table beside me. His girth of shoulder was amazing; and as he stooped he gave me a wicked glance of his small, sunken, bloodshot eyes.
Without a word, he went out again, quietly closing the door.
Was I being watched? Having avoided the cigarettes and the whisky, was this a further attempt to dope me? I considered the facts…
What had they to gain? I was utterly at their mercy. Secret poisoning was unnecessary.
I ate a sandwich and drank a glass of whiskey and soda.
Silence…
The figure of Kâli on the lacquer cabinet engaged my attention. I found myself studying it closely—so closely that I began to imagine it was moving…
Kâli—symbol of this hellish organization, the Si-Fan into whose power I had fallen…
The door opened, and Fah Lo Suee came in.
“I am glad to see that you have called on your philosophy,” she said. “You will need it. Unless you are prepared to face another injection of F. Katalepsis, you must give me your parole for half an hour…”
She stood in the open doorway, one slender hand, its polished nails gleaming like gems, resting on her hip. Her eyes were mercilessly hard.
I can’t say what it was in her bearing that told me; but I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that all was not going smoothly with Madame Ingomar.
“Naturally, I must decline.”
“You mean it?”
“Definitely.”
She smiled. Her passionate lips betrayed a weakness which was not to be read in those jade-green, eyes. She clapped her hands. The big emerald which she wore on an index finger glittered evilly.
The huge Nubian entered. Fah Lo Suee spoke rapidly, and he crossed to me.
“Don’t resist,” she said softly. “It would be merely melodrama. He could strangle you with one hand. Do as I ask. I am being merciful.”
My wrists were firmly knotted behind me. Those lashings which held me to the heavy chair were cast off. Then the black picked me up as one might raise a child and carried me out of the room!
“In half an hour,” said Fah Lo Suee, “I will free you again—and we will talk.”
Clenching my teeth grimly—for curses, execrations, torrents of poisonous, futile words, bubbled up in me—I was borne across an elegantly furnished lobby. Everywhere I detected an ultra-modern note, in spite of the presence of old Oriental pieces.
Upstairs I was carried, and into a dark little room opening off the first floor landing. I was laid down, prone, on a narrow settee. The Nubian went out and locked the door…
Trussed as I found myself, it was no easy matter to regain my feet. But I managed it, and stood staring around me in semi-darkness. The only light, I saw, came through a window which, on the outside, was reinforced with iron bars. And this light was the light of the moon.
The place seemed to be a small writing room. There was a bureau at the end near the window, closed, a square, Cubist-looking chair before it. The black and gold walls were bare. There was a closed bookcase, a low stool of Arab workmanship, and the narrow settee upon which I had been placed.
I contrived to get to the window.
It overlooked a neglected garden… and at the end of the garden I saw the Canal!
Dropping into the chair, I began to taste that most bitter of all draughts which poor humanity knows—despair. I remembered Nayland Smith’s story of the house at el-Khârga:… “A Buddhist-like resignation was threatening me more and more…”
Nayland Smith!
Whilst I sat here, a fiery furnace raging within, but nevertheless useless as any snared rabbit, he was walking into a death trap!
She would have no mercy. I had seen how she dealt with those who crossed her: I had read his sentence in her glittering eyes. This time, there would be no “sporting gesture.” And I… I should awake som
ewhere in China, as a male concubine of this Eastern Circe!
I bent down, resting my throbbing head on the bureau…
Then came sounds.
Somewhere a bell rang. There were voices. I heard movements—I divined that the house door had been opened and that some heavy burden had been carried in.
The sounds died away. Silence fell again.
How long I sat there, in a dreadful apathy, I had no means of judging. But suddenly the door was unlocked, and I started up.
Fah Lo Suee came in, carrying a long-bladed knife.
She stood watching me.
“Well?” I said. “What are you waiting for?”
She smiled, that one-sided voluptuous smile which was never reflected in her eyes; then:
“I am waiting,” she replied—her bell-like voice very soft—“to try to guess what you will do when I release you.”
She came forward, bent so that her small, shapely head almost rested on my shoulder, and cut the lashings which confined my wrists. Her left hand grasped my arm as she stooped. Dropping to her knees, with two strokes of the keen blade she cut away the ropes binding my ankles.
Then she stood upright, very near to me, and met my stare challengingly.
“Well?” she said in mockery.
My first impulse—for I had been thinking about Nayland Smith almost continuously—was to be read in my glance.
“It can never happen twice to me, Shan,” said Fah Lo Suee.
She called a name.
The door opened—and I saw the giant Nubian looking in.
Fah Lo Suee gave a brief order. The Negro retired, closing the door.
“Does no more subtle method occur to you?” she asked, her voice softer than ever. “I am as ready to be lied to as any other woman, Shan—by the right man—if he only tells his lies sweetly.”
And, face to face with this evilly beautiful woman, knowing, as I knew too well, that my own life was at stake, that possibly I could even bargain for that of Nayland Smith, I asked myself—why not? With her own lips she had reminded me of that old adage, “all’s fair in love and war.” With her it was love—or the only sort of love she knew; with me it was war. Perhaps, on a scruple, hung the fate of nations!
She drew a step nearer. The perfumed aura of her personality began to envelop me. Choice was being filched from the bargain. Those mad urgings which I had known in the green-gold room in Limehouse began to beat upon my brain.
I clenched my fists. I could possibly buy the safety of the Western world with a kiss! Tensed fingers relaxed. In another instant my arms would have been around that slender, yielding body; when:
“Greville!” came a distant cry. “Greville!”
And I knew the voice!
I sprang back from Fah Lo Suee as from a poised cobra. Her face changed. It was as though a mask had been dropped. I saw Kâli— the patronne of assassins…
She snapped her fingers.
Before I could move further, collect my scattered thoughts, the Nubian was on me!
I got in one straight right, perfectly timed. It didn’t even check him…
As his Herculean grip deprived me of all power of movement, Fah Lo Suee turned and went out. She hissed an order.
The Nubian threw me face downward on the settee. Never, in the whole of my experience of rough-houses, had I been so handled. I was helpless as a rat in the grip of a bull terrier. My knowledge of boxing as well as a smattering of jiu-jitsu were about as useful as botany!
I honestly believe he could have broken any normally strong man across his knee.
One of the ghastly Burmans, with the mark of Kâli on his forehead, came to assist. I was trussed up like a chicken, tossed onto the Negro’s mighty shoulder, and carried from the room.
This was the end.
I had played my hand badly. On me the ultimate issue had rested… and I had failed. That swift revulsion, at sound of my name—that sudden, irrational reversion to type—had sealed the doom of… how many?
Helpless, a mere inanimate bundle, I was carried down to the room where the image of Kâli sat on a lacquer cabinet.
The Nubian threw me roughly on the divan, so that I had no view beyond that of the lacquer cabinet and the wall against which it stood. He withdrew. I heard the closing of a door.
I turned…
In the big, carved chair which formerly I had occupied, Nayland Smith was firmly lashed! There were bloodstains on his collar.
“Sir Denis! How did you know I was here?”
He glanced down at the coffee table.
“You left your cigarette case!” he replied. “I shouted for you— but, a Dacoit”—he indicated the bloodstains—“silenced me.”
I stared at him. No words came.
“Weymouth and Yale,” he went on, and the tone of his voice struck the death-knell of lingering hope, “are watching the wrong house. I have made my last mistake, Greville.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
LORO OF THE SI-FAN
“I thought I had found a secret base of operations,” said Nayland Smith. “It’s one I have used before—the house of Dr. Murray who bought Petrie’s practice years ago. Evidently it’s been known for some time past that I employed it in this way. I discovered— too late—that a parlormaid in Murray’s service is a spy. She doesn’t know the real identity of her employers, but she has been none the less useful to them…
As he spoke, he was studying every detail of the room in which we lay trapped. Apparently he had accepted his fastenings as immovable; and evidently divining my thoughts:
“These lashings are the work of a Sea-Dyak,” he explained— “palpably a specialist. Though seemingly simple, no one except the late Houdini could hope to escape from them.”
“A fellow with the mark on his forehead? He tied me up! I mistook him for Burmese!”
Nayland Smith shook his head irritably.
“A member of the murder group—yes. But no Burman. He belongs to Borneo… The story of my stupidity, Greville, for which so many may be called upon to pay a ghastly price, is a short one. Yale brought me a clue today. Its history doesn’t matter—now. It was a fake. But it consisted of fragments of torn-up correspondence written in Chinese and a few cipher notes in another hand. I grappled with it: no easy task. But by about four o’clock I saw daylight. I phoned Weymouth to stand by between six and seven.”
“He told me so.”
“Yale also was in touch. At six o’clock I had got all the facts— including an address in Finchley Road; and at six-thirty I called Weymouth at the Park Avenue giving him full instructions. I arranged to meet him outside Lord’s at half-past nine tonight.
“By a sheer accident, ten minutes later, I caught Palmer, the parlormaid, at the telephone. Murray was in his consulting room, and there was nothing in itself remarkable about the girl’s presence at the phone. She makes appointments and receives patients.
“But I heard my own name mentioned!
“I taxed her—and she got muddled. She was clever enough to wriggle out of the difficulty, verbally; but I had become gravely suspicious. Bearing this in mind, Greville, it’s all the less excusable that I should have fallen into the trap planted for me.
“Murray’s house overlooks a common, and it’s usually safe to trust to picking up a taxi on the main road, although sometimes one has to wait. During dinner I said nothing about Palmer, being still in two minds as to her complicity. But when I left, I made a blunder for which I should certainly condemn the rawest recruit.
“The door of Murray’s house opens on a side turning—and as I came out a taxi, proceeding slowly in the direction of the common, passed me. The man looked out as I came down the steps, and slowed up. I counted it a stroke of luck, said ‘Lord’s cricket ground—main entrance’—and jumped in.”
Nayland Smith smiled. It was not the genial, revealing smile that I knew.
“End of story!” he added. “The windows were unopenable. As I closed the door, which locked automatically, a charge
of gas was puffed into the interior. That taxi, Greville, had been waiting for me!”
“Then Weymouth and Yale—”
“Weymouth and Yale, with a Flying Squad party, are covering the house of some perfectly harmless citizen in Finchley Road! What they’ll do when I fail to turn up, I can’t say. But they haven’t a ghost of a clue to this place—wherever it is!”
“It’s beside the Regent Canal,” I replied slowly. “That’s all I know about it.”
“Quite sufficient,” he rapped. “In your amazing interview with Li King Su I detect our only ray of hope…”
An interruption came. Dimly, for sounds were muffled in this room, I heard the ringing of a bell. I saw Nayland Smith start. We both listened. We had not long to wait for the next development.
Into the room the huge Nubian came running—followed by the man whom I knew now to be a Dyak. They swept down upon Nayland Smith!
I became tongue-tied. Horror had robbed me of speech.
The man with the mark of Kâli on his brow bent swiftly. I tugged at my bonds. Nayland Smith caught my glance.
“Don’t worry, Greville,” he said. “A hasty removal of prisoners is evidently—”
The Nubian clapped a huge black hand over the speaker’s mouth!
I saw Nayland Smith, released from the chair, but rebound by the Dyak expert, lifted in the grasp of the giant Negro. He carried Sir Denis as he might have carried a toy dog under one arm—but he kept his free hand pressed to the captive’s mouth.
There came a breathless interval. That dim ringing was renewed. The devotee of Kâli considered me, his eyes lascivious with murder. Then, as the ringing persisted, he grasped my bound ankles, jerked me to the carpet, and dragged me out of the room!
Where, formerly, I had been carried up, now I was hauled down and down, until I knew I was in the cellars of the house.
That I arrived there without sprained wrists or a cracked skull was something of a miracle. Arms fastened behind me, I had nevertheless done all I could to protect my head as I was dragged down many steps to the basement.
