by Otto Penzler
“What the American authorities in Port-au-Prince do to you will not be pleasant, either,” she told Benedetti. “Voodoo is forbidden by law. You have not only aided and abetted voodoo ceremonies, but you have also procured human sacrifices for the ceremonial. There was the little French girl from the Port-au-Prince cabaret, and the girl from Santo Domingo—you should not have boasted. For you murdered them as surely as if you had driven a knife in their hearts, and the law will agree with me.”
“You’ll never live to tell the Americans, even if they believed the tale,” he scoffed.
“Oh, yes I will,” she mocked. Her voice was as dry and keen as a new ground sword. “Within an hour I shall be on my way to Cape Hatien. Hear that,” and she raised an admonitory hand. In the silence the plane could be heard. She threw open the French windows. From where he lay Benedetti could see a Marine plane slanting down toward the comparatively sheltered waters of the little cove.
“In less than ten minutes,” she said, “the plane will have taxied up to the beach and the Marine pilot and his observer will be in this room, asking if we need aid. You see,” and her smile was completely mocking and scornful now, “you yourself brought about your own downfall—planted the idea in my brain when you told me that the plane passed overhead every night at about this time. There was a can of luminous paint in your storeroom. I saw it, and there he is coming to see what it’s all about—and to take you to Cape Hatien—unless…”
“Unless what?” he queried eagerly.
“Unless you sign this memorandum. It deposes that I have purchased this plantation from you—that you have received the purchase price—and that proper legal transfer to it will be made later.”
There was a calculating gleam in the man’s eyes as he made assent. His gaze flickered out through the open door to where the plane had already landed on the surface of the cove.
Vivian had caught that gleam. “Of course,” she went on smoothly, “we will have the Marine officers sign it as witnesses in your presence. Then you can accompany us back to Cape Hatien in the plane, and the lawyers of the Haitian Sugar Central will be glad to see that memorandum is put in proper legal form before I, in turn, resell the plantation to them. I shall not refuse the price they are willing to pay—and it will not matter to the sugar trust whether you or I are the owner.” She gazed at him for a moment. “Well, do you agree?—or do you go to Cape Hatien a prisoner?”
Benedetti shot a glance at the trim, uniformed figure coming cautiously up from the beach. Feverishly he scribbled his name at the bottom of the memorandum.
Villain: Yuan Li
The Copper Bowl
GEORGE FIELDING ELIOT
BEST KNOWN FOR HIS MILITARY WRITINGS, George Fielding Eliot (1894–1971) was born in Brooklyn, New York, but his family moved to Australia when he was eight. He fought in the Australian army at the Dardanelles in 1915, then at the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Arras, and Amiens. He moved back to the United States after the war and joined the U.S. Army Reserves as a lieutenant. He studied military history and, after reading a 1926 pulp magazine, War Stories, decided he could earn extra money by writing and sold War Stories a narrative of a war experience, thereby beginning his life as a full-time writer, albeit only intermittently writing for the pulps. He took a job writing for The Infantry Journal in 1928, and produced the full-length novels The Eagles of Death (1930) and Federal Bullets (1936), a G-Man adventure. The first of his many books about the military, If War Comes (1937), written with Major Richard Ernest Dupuy, was a well-received survey of war zones; his The Ramparts We Watch (1938) was a prescient warning to America that its military needed to be prepared to defend Canada and South America against the combined attacks of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He was a military writer for the New York Herald Tribune from 1939 and worked as a correspondent for CBS during World War II, after which he was a columnist for the New York Post before syndicating his own column in 1950.
The straightforward analysis of Eliot’s highly regarded military books fail to prepare the reader for the extremity, both of language and subject, in his pulp fiction, and this “Yellow Peril” story is infamous among pulp fiction experts as one of the most brutal ever published.
“The Copper Bowl” was originally published in the December 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
THE COPPER BOWL
George Fielding Eliot
YUAN LI, the mandarin, leaned back in his rosewood chair.
“It is written,” he said softly, “that a good servant is a gift of the gods, whilst a bad one—”
The tall, powerfully built man standing humbly before the robed figure in the chair bowed thrice, hastily, submissively.
Fear glinted in his eye, though he was armed, and moreover was accounted a brave soldier. He could have broken the little smooth-faced mandarin across his knee, and yet…
“Ten thousand pardons, beneficent one,” he said. “I have done all—having regard to your honourable order to slay the man not nor do him permanent injury—I have done all that I can. But—”
“But he speaks not!” murmured the mandarin. “And you come to me with a tale of failure? I do not like failures, Captain Wang!”
The mandarin toyed with a little paper knife on the low table beside him. Wang shuddered.
“Well, no matter for this time,” the mandarin said after a moment. Wang breathed a sigh of most heartfelt relief, and the mandarin smiled softly, fleetingly. “Still,” he went on, “our task is yet to be accomplished. We have the man—he has the information we require; surely some way may be found. The servant has failed; now the master must try his hand. Bring the man to me.”
Wang bowed low and departed with considerable haste.
The mandarin sat silent for a moment, looking across the wide, sunlit room at a pair of singing birds in a wicker cage hanging in the farther window. Presently he nodded—one short, satisfied nod—and struck a little silver bell which stood on his beautifully inlaid table.
Instantly a white-robed, silent-footed servant entered, and stood with bowed head awaiting his master’s pleasure. To him Yuan Li gave certain swift, incisive orders.
The white-robed one had scarcely departed when Wang, captain of the mandarin’s guard, reentered the spacious apartment.
“The prisoner, Benevolent!” he announced.
The mandarin made a slight motion with his slender hand; Wang barked an order, and there entered, between two heavily muscled, half-naked guardsmen, a short, sturdily built man, barefooted, clad only in a tattered shirt and khaki trousers, but with fearless blue eyes looking straight at Yuan Li under the tousled masses of his blonde hair.
A white man!
“Ah!” said Yuan Li, in his calm way, speaking faultless French. “The excellent Lieutenant Fournet! Still obstinate?”
Fournet cursed him earnestly, in French and three different Chinese dialects.
“You’ll pay for this, Yuan Li!” he wound up. “Don’t think your filthy brutes can try the knuckle torture and their other devil’s tricks on a French officer and get away with it!”
Yuan Li toyed with his paper knife, smiling.
“You threaten me, Lieutenant Fournet,” he answered, “yet your threats are but as rose petals wafted away on the morning breeze—unless you return to your post to make your report.”
“Why, damn you!” answered the prisoner. “You needn’t try that sort of thing—you know better than to kill me! My commandant is perfectly aware of my movements—he’ll be knocking on your door with a company of the Legion at his back if I don’t show up by tomorrow at reveille!”
Yuan Li smiled again.
“Doubtless—and yet we still have the better part of the day before us,” he said. “Much may be accomplished in an afternoon and evening.”
Fournet swore again.
“You can torture me and be damned,” he answered. “I know and you know that you don’t dare to kill me or to injure me so that I can’t get back to Fort Deschamps. For the rest, do you
r worst, you yellow-skinned brute!”
“A challenge!” the mandarin exclaimed. “And I, Lieutenant Fournet, pick up your glove! Look you—what I require from you is the strength and location of your outpost on the Mephong River. So—”
“So that your cursed bandits, whose murders and lootings keep you here in luxury, can rush the outpost some dark night and open the river route for their boats,” Fournet cut in. “I know you, Yuan Li, and I know your trade—mandarin of thieves! The military governor of Tonkin sent a battalion of the Foreign Legion here to deal with such as you, and to restore peace and order on the frontier, not to yield to childish threats! That is not the Legion’s way, and you should know it. The best thing you can do is to send in your submission, or I can assure you that within a fortnight your head will be rotting over the North Gate of Hanoi, as a warning to others who might follow your bad example.”
The mandarin’s smile never altered, though well he knew that this was no idle threat. With Tonkinese tirailleurs, even with Colonial infantry, he could make some sort of headway, but these thrice-accursed Legionnaires were devils from the very pit itself. He—Yuan Li, who had ruled as king in the valley of the Mephong, to whom half a Chinese province and many a square mile of French Tonkin had paid tribute humbly—felt his throne of power tottering beneath him. But one hope remained: down the river, beyond the French outposts, were boats filled with men and with the loot of a dozen villages—the most successful raiding party he had ever sent out. Let these boats come through, let him have back his men (and they were his best), get his hands on the loot, and perhaps something might be done. Gold, jewels, jade—and though the soldiers of France were terrible, there were in Hanoi certain civilian officials not wholly indifferent to these things. But on the banks of the Mephong, as though they knew his hopes, the Foreign Legion had established an outpost—he must know exactly where, he must know exactly how strong; for till this river post was gone, the boats could never reach him.
And now Lieutenant Fournet, staff officer to the commandant, had fallen into his hands. All night his torturers had reasoned with the stubborn young Norman, and all morning they had never left him for a minute. They had marked him in no way, nor broken bones, nor so much as cut or bruised the skin—yet there are ways! Fournet shuddered all over at the thought of what he had gone through, that age-long night and morning.
To Fournet, his duty came first; to Yuan Li, it was life or death that Fournet should speak. And he had taken measures which now marched to their fulfilment.
He dared not go to extremes with Fournet; nor yet could French justice connect the mandarin Yuan Li with the bandits of the Mephong.
They might suspect, but they could not prove; and an outrage such as the killing or maiming of a French officer in his own palace was more than Yuan Li dared essay. He walked on thin ice indeed those summer days, and walked warily.
Yet—he had taken measures.
“My head is still securely on my shoulders,” he replied to Fournet. “I do not think it will decorate your gate spikes. So you will not speak?”
“Certainly not!”
Lieutenant Fournet’s words were as firm as his jaw.
“Ah, but you will. Wang!”
“Magnanimous!”
“Four more guards. Make the prisoner secure.”
Wang clapped his hands.
Instantly four additional half-naked men sprang into the room: two, falling on their knees, seized Fournet round the legs; another threw his corded arms round the lieutenant’s waist; another stood by, club in hand, as a reserve in case of—what?
The two original guards still retained their grip on Fournet’s arms.
Now, in the grip of those sinewy hands, he was held immobile, utterly helpless, a living statue.
Yuan Li, the mandarin, smiled again. One who did not know him would have thought his smile held an infinite tenderness, a divine compassion.
He touched the bell at his side.
Instantly, in the farther doorway, appeared two servants, conducting a veiled figure—a woman, shrouded in a dark drapery.
A word from Yuan Li—rough hands tore the veil aside, and there stood drooping between the impassive servants a vision of loveliness, a girl scarce out of her teens, dark-haired, slender, with the great appealing brown eyes of a fawn: eyes which widened suddenly as they rested on Lieutenant Fournet.
“Lily!” exclaimed Fournet, and his five guards had their hands full to hold him as he struggled to be free.
“You fiend!” he spat at Yuan Li. “If a hair of this girl’s head is touched, by the Holy Virgin of Yvetot I will roast you alive in the flames of your own palace! My God, Lily, how—”
“Quite simply, my dear Lieutenant,” the mandarin’s silky voice interrupted. “We knew, of course—every house-servant in North Tonkin is a spy of mine—that you had conceived an affection for this woman; and when I heard you were proving obdurate under the little attentions of my men, I thought it well to send for her. Her father’s bungalow is far from the post—indeed, it is in Chinese and not French territory, as you know—and the task was not a difficult one. And now—”
“André! André!” the girl was crying, struggling in her turn with the servants. “Save me, André—these beasts—”
“Have no fear, Lily,” André Fournet replied. “They dare not harm you, any more than they dare to kill me. They are bluffing—”
“But have you considered well, Lieutenant?” asked the mandarin gently. “You, of course, are a French officer. The arm of France—and it is a long and unforgiving arm—will be stretched out to seize your murderers. The gods forbid I should set that arm reaching for me and mine. But this girl—ah, that is different!”
“Different? How is it different? The girl is a French citizen—”
“I think not, my good Lieutenant Fournet. She is three-quarters French in blood, true; but her father is half Chinese, and is a Chinese subject; she is a resident of China—I think you will find that French justice will not be prepared to avenge her death quite so readily as your own. At any rate, it is a chance I am prepared to take.”
Fournet’s blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins. The smiling devil was right! Lily—his lovely white Lily, whose only mark of Oriental blood was the rather piquant slant of her great eyes—was not entitled to the protection of the tricolour.
God! What a position! Either betray his flag, his regiment, betray his comrades to their deaths—or see his Lily butchered before his eyes!
“So now, Lieutenant Fournet, we understand each other,” Yuan Li continued after a brief pause to let the full horror of the situation grip the other’s soul. “I think you will be able to remember the location and strength of that outpost for me—now?”
Fournet stared at the man in bitter silence, but the words had given the quick-minded Lily a key to the situation, which she had hardly understood at first.
“No, no, André!” she cried. “Do not tell him. Better that I should die than that you should be a traitor! See—I am ready.”
Fournet threw back his head, his wavering resolution reincarnate.
“The girl shames me!” he said. “Slay her if you must, Yuan Li—and if France will not avenge her, I will! But traitor I will not be!”
“I do not think that is your last word, Lieutenant,” the mandarin purred. “Were I to strangle the girl, yes—perhaps. But first she must cry to you for help, and when you hear her screaming in agony, the woman you love, perhaps then you will forget these noble heroics!”
Again he clapped his hands; and again silent servants glided into the room. One bore a small brazier of glowing charcoal; a second had a little cage of thick wire mesh, inside of which something moved horribly; a third bore a copper bowl with handles on each side, to which was attached a steel band that glittered in the sunlight.
The hair rose on the back of Fournet’s neck. What horror impended now? Deep within him some instinct warned that what was now to follow would be fiendish beyond the mind of
mortal man to conceive. The mandarin’s eyes seemed suddenly to glow with infernal fires. Was he in truth man—or demon?
A sharp word in some Yunnan dialect unknown to Fournet—and the servants had flung the girl upon her back on the floor, spreadeagled in pitiful helplessness, upon a magnificent peacock rug.
Another word from the mandarin’s thin lips—and roughly they tore the clothing from the upper half of the girl’s body. White and silent she lay upon that splendid rug, her eyes still on Fournet’s: silent, lest words of hers should impair the resolution of the man she loved.
Fournet struggled furiously with his guards, but they were five strong men, and they held him fast.
“Remember, Yuan Li!” he panted. “You’ll pay! Damn your yellow soul—”
The mandarin ignored the threat.
“Proceed,” he said to the servants. “Note carefully, Monsieur le Lieutenant Fournet, what we are doing. First, you will note, the girl’s wrists and ankles are lashed to posts and to heavy articles of furniture, suitably placed so that she cannot move. You wonder at the strength of the rope, the number of turns we take to hold so frail a girl? I assure you, they will be required. Under the copper bowl, I have seen a feeble old man tear his wrist free from an iron chain.”
The mandarin paused; the girl was now bound so tightly that she could scarce move a muscle of her body.
Yuan Li regarded the arrangements.
“Well done,” he approved. “Yet if she tears any limb free, the man who bound that limb shall have an hour under the bamboo rods. Now—the bowl! Let me see it.”
He held out a slender hand. Respectfully a servant handed him the bowl, with its dangling band of flexible steel. Fournet, watching with eyes full of dread, saw that the band was fitted with a lock, adjustable to various positions. It was like a belt, a girdle.
“Very well.” The mandarin nodded, turning the thing over and over in fingers that almost seemed to caress it. “But I anticipate—perhaps the lieutenant and the young lady are not familiar with this little device. Let me explain, or rather, demonstrate. Put the bowl in place, Kan-su. No, no—just the bowl, this time.”
