by Sax Rohmer
Frobisher didn’t reply, and Dr. Pardoe, who had been looking down at the carpet, now looked suddenly at Frobisher.
His gaze was fixed upward again. He was watching the gallery. He spoke in a whisper.
“Pardoe! Look where I’m looking. Is that a club member?”
Dr. Pardoe did as Frobisher requested. He saw a slight, black-clad figure in the gallery. The man had just replaced a vase on a shelf. Only the back of his head and shoulders could be seen. He moved away, his features still invisible.
“Not a member known to me, personally, Frobisher. But there are always new members, and guest members—”
But Frobisher was up, had bounded from his chair. Already, he was crossing the library.
“That’s some kind of Asiatic. I saw his face!” Regardless of the rule, Silence, he shouted. “And I’m going to have a word with him!”
Dr. Pardoe shook his head, took up a medical journal which he had dropped on the chair, and made his way out.
He was already going down the steps when Michael Frobisher faced the club secretary, who had been sent for.
“May I ask,” he growled, “since when Chinese have been admitted to membership?”
“You surprise me, Mr. Frobisher.”
The secretary, a young-old man with a bald head and a Harvard accent, could be very patriarchal.
“Do I?”
“You do. Your complaint is before me. I have a note here. If you wish it to go before the committee, merely say the word. I can only assure you that not only have we no Asiatic members, honorary or otherwise, but no visitor such as you describe has been in the club. Furthermore, Mr. Frobisher, I am assured by the assistant librarian, who was last in the library gallery, that no one has been up there since.”
Frobisher jumped to his feet.
“Get Dr. Pardoe!” he directed. “He was with me. Get Dr. Pardoe.”
But Dr. Pardoe had left the club.
* * *
The research laboratory of the Huston Electric Corporation was on the thirty-sixth, and top floor of the Huston Building. Dr. Craig’s office adjoined the laboratory proper, which he could enter up three steps leading to a steel door. This door was always kept locked.
Morris Craig, slight, clean-shaven, and very agile, a man in his early thirties, had discarded his coat, and worked in shirt-sleeves before a drawing desk. His dark-brown hair, which he wore rather long, was disposed to be rebellious, a forelock sometimes falling forward, so that brushing it back with his hand had become a mannerism.
He had just paused for this purpose, leaning away as if to get a long perspective of his work and at the same time fumbling for a packet of cigarettes, when the office door was thrown open and someone came in behind him.
So absorbed was Craig that he paid no attention at first, until the heavy breathing of whoever had come in prompted him to turn suddenly.
“Mr. Frobisher!”
Craig, who wore glasses when drawing or reading, but not otherwise, now removed them and jumped from his stool.
“It’s all right, Craig.” Frobisher raised his hand in protest “Sit down.”
“But if I may say so, you look uncommon fishy.”
His way of speech had a quality peculiarly English, and he had a tendency to drawl. Nothing in his manner suggested that Morris Craig was one of the most brilliant physicists Oxford University had ever turned out. He retrieved the elusive cigarettes and lighted one.
Michael Frobisher remained where he had dropped down, on a chair just inside the door. But he was regaining color. Now he pulled a cigar from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket.
“The blasted doctors tell me I eat too much and smoke too much,” he remarked. His voice always reminded Craig of old port. “But I wouldn’t want to live if I couldn’t do as I liked.”
“Come to that in a minute,” growled Frobisher. “First—what news of the big job?”
“Getting hot. I think the end’s in sight.”
“Fine. I want to talk to you about it.” He snipped the end of his cigar. “How’s the new secretary making out?”
“A-I. Knows all the answers. Miss Lewis was a sad loss, but Miss Navarre is a glad find.”
“Well—she’s got a Paris degree, and had two years with Professor Jennings. Suits me if she suits you.”
Craig’s boyishly youthful face lighted up.
“Suits me to nine points of decimals. Works like a pack-mule. She ought to get out of town this week-end.”
“Bring her along up to Falling Waters. Few days of fresh air do her no harm.”
“No.” Craig seemed to be hesitating. He returned to his desk. “But I shouldn’t quit this job until it’s finished.”
He resumed his glasses and studied the remarkable diagram pinned to the drawing board. He seemed to be checking certain details with a mass of symbols and figures on a large ruled sheet beside the board.
“Of course,” he murmured abstractedly, “I might easily finish at any time now.”
The wonder of the thing he was doing, a sort of awe that he, the humble student of nature’s secrets, should have been granted power to do it, claimed his mind. Here were mighty forces, hitherto no more than suspected, which controlled the world. Here, written in the indelible ink of mathematics, lay a description of the means whereby those forces might be harnessed.
He forgot Frobisher.
And Frobisher, lighting his cigar, began to pace the office floor, often glancing at the absorbed figure. Suddenly Craig turned, removing his glasses.
“Are you bothered about the cost of these experiments, Mr. Frobisher?”
Frobisher pulled up, staring.
“Cost? To hell with the cost! That’s not worrying me. I don’t know a lot about the scientific side, but I know a commercial proposition when I see one.” He dropped down into an armchair. “What I don’t know is this.” He leaned forward, his heavy brows lowered: “Why is somebody tracking me around?”
“Tracking you around?”
“That’s what I said. I’m being tailed around. I was followed to my club today. Followed here. There’s somebody watching my home up in Connecticut. Who is he? What does he want?”
Morris Craig stood up and leaned back against the desk.
Behind him a deep violet sky made a back-cloth for silhouettes of buildings higher than the Huston. Some of the windows were coming to life, forming a glittering regalia, like jewels laid on velvet.
Dusk was falling over Manhattan.
“Astoundin’ state of affairs,” Craig declared—but his smile was quite disarming. “Tell me more. Anyone you suspect?”
Frobisher shook his head. “There’s plenty to suspect if news of what’s going on up here has leaked out. Suppose you’re dead right—and I’m backing you to be—what’ll this thing mean to Huston Electric?”
“Grateful thanks of the scientific world.”
“Damn the scientific world! I’m thinking of Huston’s.”
Morris Craig, his mind wandering in immeasurable space, his spirit climbing the ladder of the stars toward higher and more remote secrets of a mysterious universe, answered vaguely.
“No idea. Can’t see at the moment how it could be usefully applied.”
“What are you talking about?” Michael Frobisher was quite his old roaring self again. “This job has cost half of a million dollars already. Are you telling me we get nothing back? Are we all bughouse around here?”
A door across the office opened, and a man came in, a short, thickset man, slightly bandy, who walked with a rolling gait as if on the deck of a ship in dirty weather. He wore overalls, spectacles, and an eye-shade. He came in without any ceremony and approached Craig. The forbidding figure of Michael Frobisher disturbed him not at all.
“Say—have you got a bit of string?” he inquired.
“I have not got a bit of string. I have a small piece of gum, or two one-cent stamps. Would they do?”
The intruder chewed thoughtfully. “Guess not. Miss Navarre’s
typewriter’s jammed up in there. But I got it figured a bit of string about so long”—he illustrated—“would fix things.”
“Sorry, Sam, but l am devoid of string.”
Sam chewed awhile, and then turned away.
“Guess I’ll have to go look some other place.”
As he went out:
“Listen,” Frobisher said. “What does that moron do for his wages?”
“Sam?” Craig answered, smiling. “Oh, sort of handyman. Mostly helps Regan and Shaw in the laboratory.”
“Be a big help to anybody, I’d say. What I’m driving at is this: We have to be mighty careful about who gets in here. There’s been a bad leak. Somebody knows more than he ought to know.”
Morris Craig, slowly, was getting back to that prosaic earth on which normal, flat-footed men spend their lives. It was beginning to dawn upon him that Michael Frobisher was badly frightened.
“I can’t account for it. Shaw and Regan are beyond suspicion. So, I hope, am I. Miss Navarre came to us with the highest credentials. In any case, she could do little harm. But, of course, it’s absurd to suspect her.”
“What about the half-wit who just went out?”
“Knows nothing about the work. Apart from which, his refs are first-class, including one from the Fire Department.”
“Looks like he’d been in a fire.” Frobisher dropped a cone of cigar ash. “But facts are facts. Let me bring you up to date—but not a word to Mrs. F. You know how nervous she is. Some guy got into Falling Waters last Tuesday night and went through my papers with a fine-tooth comb!”
“You mean it?”
Craig’s drawl had vanished. His eyes were very keen.
“I mean it. Nothing was taken—not a thing. But that’s not all. I’d had more than a suspicion for quite a while someone was snooping around. So I laid for him, without saying a word to Mrs. F., and one night I saw him—”
“What did he look like?”
“Yellow.”
“Indian?”
“No, sir. Some kind of Oriental. Then, only today, right in my own club, I caught another Asiatic watching me! It’s a fact. Dr. Pardoe can confirm it. Now—what I’m asking is this: If it’s what we’re doing in the laboratory there that somebody’s after, why am I followed around, and not you?”
The answer is a discreet silence.
“Also I’d be glad to learn who this somebody is. I could think up plenty who’d like to know. But no one of ’em would be an Asiatic.”
Morris Craig brushed his hair back with his hand.
“You’re getting me jumpy, too,” he declared, although his eager, juvenile smile belied the words. “This thing wants looking into.”
“It’s going to be looked into,” Frobisher grimly assured him. “When you come up to Falling Waters you’ll see I’m standing for no more monkey tricks around there, anyway.” He stood up, glancing at the big clock over Craig’s desk. “I’m picking up Mrs. F. at the Ritz. Don’t want to be late. Expect you and Miss Navarre, lunch on Saturday.”
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs. F., as it happened, was thoroughly enjoying herself. She lay naked, face downward, on a padded couch, whilst a white-clad nurse ran an apparatus which buzzed like a giant hornet from the back of her fluffy skull right down her spine and up again. This treatment made her purr like a contented kitten. It had been preceded by a terrific mauling at the hands of another, muscular attendant, in the course of which Mrs. F. had been all but hanged, drawn, quartered, and, finally, stood on her head.
An aromatic bath completed the treatment. Mrs. F. was wrapped in a loose fleecy garment, stretched upon a couch in a small apartment decorated with Pompeian frescoes, and given an Egyptian cigarette and a cup of orange-scented China tea.
She lay there in delicious languor, when the draperies were drawn aside and Professor Hoffmeyer, the celebrated Viennese psychiatrist who conducted the establishment, entered gravely. She turned her head and smiled up at him.
“How do you do, Professor?”
He did not reply at once, but stood there looking at her. Even through the dark glasses he always wore, his regard never failed to make her shudder. But it was a pleasurable shudder.
Professor Hoffmeyer presented an impressive figure. His sufferings in Nazi prison camps had left indelible marks. The dark glasses protected eyes seared by merciless lights. The silk gloves which he never removed concealed hands from which the fingernails had been extracted. He stooped much, leaning upon a heavy ebony cane.
Now he advanced almost noiselessly and took Mrs. Frobisher’s left wrist between a delicate thumb and forefinger, slightly inclining his head.
“It is not how do I do, dear lady,” he said in Germanic gutturals, “but how do you do.”
Mrs. Frobisher looked up at the massive brow bent over her, and tried, not for the first time, to puzzle out the true color of the scanty hair which crowned it She almost decided that it was colorless; entirely neutral.
Professor Hoffmeyer stood upright or as nearly upright as she had ever seen him stand, and nodded.
“You shall come to see me on Wednesday, at three o’clock. Not for the treatment, no, but for the consultation. If some other engagement you have, cancel it. At three o’clock on Wednesday.”
He bowed slightly and went out.
Professor Hoffmeyer ruled his wealthy clientele with a rod of iron. His reputation was enormous. His fees were phenomenal.
He proceeded, now, across a luxurious central salon where other patients waited, well-preserved women, some of them apparently out of the deep-freeze. He nodded to a chosen few as he passed, and entered an office marked “Private.” Closing the door, he pulled out a drawer in the businesslike desk—and a bookcase filled with advanced medical works, largely German, swung open bodily.
The professor went into the opening. As the bookcase swung back into place, the drawer in the desk closed again.
Professor Hoffmeyer would see no more patients today.
The room in which the professor found himself was a study. But its appointments were far from conventional. It contained some very valuable old lacquer and was richly carpeted. The lighting (it had no visible windows) was subdued, and the peculiar characteristic of the place was its silence.
Open bookcases were filled with volumes, some of them bound manuscripts, many of great age and all of great rarity. They were in many languages, including Greek, Chinese, and Arabic.
Beside a cushioned divan stood an inlaid stool equipped with several opium pipes in a rack, gum, lamp, and bodkins.
A long, carved table of time-blackened oak served as a desk. A high-backed chair was set behind it. A faded volume lay open on the table, as well as a closely written manuscript. There were several other books there, and a number of curious objects difficult to identify in the dim light.
The professor approached a painted screen placed before a recess and disappeared behind it. Not a sound broke the silence of the room until he returned.
He had removed the gloves and dark glasses, and for the black coat worn by Professor Hoffmeyer had substituted a yellow house robe. The eyes which the glasses had concealed were long, narrow, and emerald-green. The uncovered hands had pointed fingernails. This gaunt, upright, Chinese ascetic was taller by inches than Professor Hoffmeyer.
And his face might have inspired a painter seeking a model for the Fallen Angel.
This not because it was so evil but because of a majestic and remorseless power which it possessed—a power which resided in the eyes. They were not the eyes of a normal man, moved by the desires, the impulses shared in some part by us all. They were the eyes of one who has shaken off those inhibitions common to humanity, who is undisturbed by either love or hate, untouched by fear, unmoved by compassion.
Few such men occur in the long history of civilization, and none who has not helped to change it.
The impassive figure crossed, with a silent, catlike step, to the long table, and became seated there.
One of th
e curious objects on the table sprang to life, as if touched by sudden moonlight. It was a crystal globe resting on a metal base. Dimly at first, the outlines of a face materialized in the crystal, and then grew clear. They became the features of an old Chinese, white-moustached, wrinkled, benign.
“You called me, Doctor?”
The voice, though distant, was clear. A crinkled smile played over the parchment face in the crystal.
“You have all the reports?”
The second voice was harsh, at points sibilant, but charged with imperious authority. It bore no resemblance to that of Professor Hoffmeyer.
“The last is timed six-fifteen. Shall I give you a summary?”
“Proceed, Huan Tsung. I am listening.”
And Huan Tsung, speaking in his quiet room above a shop in Pell Street, a room in which messages were received mysteriously, by day and by night, from all over Manhattan, closed his wise old eyes and opened the pages of an infallible memory.
This man whose ancestors had been cultured noblemen when most of ours were living in caves, spoke calmly across a system of communication as yet unheard of by Western science…
“Excellency will wish to know that our Burmese agent was recognized by Nayland Smith in the grillroom and followed by two F.B.I. operatives. I gave instructions that he be transferred elsewhere. He reports that he has arrived safely. His notes of the conversation at the next table are before me. They contain nothing new. Shall I relate them?”
“No. I shall interview the woman personally. Proceed.”
“Nayland Smith visited the deputy commissioner and has been alone with him more than two hours. Nature of conversation unknown. The Greek covering his movements was intercepted and questioned, but had nothing to disclose. He is clumsy, and I have had him removed.”
“You did well, Huan Tsung. Such bunglers breed danger.”
“Mai Cha, delivering Chinese vase sent by club secretary for repair, attired herself in the black garment she carries and gained a gallery above the library where Michael Frobisher talked with a medical friend. She reports that Frobisher has had sight of our agent at Falling Waters. Therefore I have transferred this agent. Mai Cha retired, successfully, with price of repairs.”
