Emperor Fu-Manchu Page 13

“I see, Doctor,” came a sibilant voice from the shadowed doorway, “you are studying my new sandflies.”

  “Yes.” The man addressed didn’t even glance aside.

  “Are you satisfied?”

  “Yes. But you won’t be.”

  “Why?”

  “They are not absorbing the virus.”

  “It is fed to them.”

  “It is here, on the filter papers. But they reject it.” He looked up for the first time. Light blue eyes blazed under shaggy eyebrows. “For your own filthy purpose, these new imports are useless.”

  Fu-Manchu walked slowly into the room, stood over the seated man, and smiled his icy smile.

  “Your mulish obstinacy in ignoring my high purpose begins to annoy me.” He spoke softly. “You are well aware of the fact that I do not strike at random. Only the guilty suffer. You persist in confusing my aims with those of the Communist fools who wrecked your mission hospital. You presume to classify my work with that of the ignorant, power-drunk demagogues who have forced their way into the Kremlin.”

  “Your methods are much the same.”

  There was a moment of tense silence, broken only by a rhythmic throbbing in the adjoining room. Fu-Manchu’s clenched hands relaxed.

  “You forget that I saved you from the mob who burned your home.”

  “By arresting me and making me a prisoner here. It was you who inspired the mob—for that purpose alone.”

  Fu-Manchu’s voice was coldly calm when he spoke again. “Dr. Cameron-Gordon, I respect your knowledge. I respect your courage. But I cannot respect your blindness to the fact that our ideals are identical. My methods in achieving them are beyond your understanding. Be good enough to leave your work for an hour. I wish to talk to you.”

  “When I undertake a thing, though I may loathe it, I carry it out. My work here is not finished.”

  “You are dedicated to your studies, Doctor. That is why I admire you. Please come with me.”

  Dr. Cameron-Gordon shrugged his shoulders and stood up. He followed the tall figure to the room at the end of the long, low building which Fu-Manchu used as a rest room, sat down in a comfortable chair. Fu-Manchu opened a closet.

  “May I offer you a Scotch and soda, Doctor?”

  “Thank you, no.” Cameron-Gordon sniffed. “But I have no objection to your smoking a pipe of opium. If you smoke enough the world will soon be rid of you.”

  Dr. Fu-Manchu smiled his mirthless smile. “If I told you for how many years I have used opium, you would not believe me. Opium will not rid the world of me.”

  He closed the closet and sat down on the couch.

  “That’s a pity,” Cameron-Gordon commented dryly.

  Fu-Manchu took a pinch of snuff, then pressed the tips of his fingers together. “I have tried many times, since you have been my guest—” Cameron-Gordon made a snorting sound—“to enlighten you concerning the aims of the Si-Fan. I have told you of the many distinguished men who work for the Order—”

  “You mean who are slaves of the Order.”

  “I mean convinced and enthusiastic members. It is unavoidable, Doctor, if the present so-called civilization is not to perish, that some intellectual group, such as that which I mention, should put an end to the pretensions of the gang of impudent impostors who seek to create a Communist world. This done, the rest is easy. And the Si-Fan can do this.”

  “So you have told me. But your methods of doing it don’t appeal to me. My experience with the Si-Fan isn’t exactly encouraging.”

  Fu-Manchu continued calmly. “I have no desire to use coercion. Without difficulty, and by purely scientific means, I could exact your obedience.”

  “You mean you could drug me?”

  “It would be simple. But it is a method which, in the case of a delicately adjusted brain such as yours, might impair your work. As I wish you to continue your researches during my absence, I have been thinking that your daughter—”

  Cameron-Gordon came to his feet at a bound, fists clenched and fighting mad. In two strides he stood over Dr. Fu-Manchu.

  “By God! speak another word of that threat and I’ll strangle you with my bare hands!”

  Fu-Manchu did not stir. He remained perfectly still, his lids half-towered over his strange eyes.

  “I made no threat,” he said softly. “I was thinking that your daughter would be left unprovided for if any rash behavior on your part should make her an orphan.”

  “In other words, unless I submit to you, I shall be liquidated.”

  “I did not say so. You can join the Si-Fan whenever you wish. You will enjoy complete freedom. You can practice any form of religion which may appeal to you. Your place of residence will be of your own choosing. Your daughter can live with you. All that I shall call upon you to do will be to carry out certain experiments. Their purpose will not concern you. My object is to crush Communism. You can help me to attain that goal.”

  Cameron-Gordon’s clenched hands relaxed. Dr. Fu-Manchu’s sophistry had not deceived him, but it had made him reflect.

  “Thanks for the explanation,” he said dourly. “I’ll be thinking it over. Perhaps I can get back to my work, now?”

  “By all means, Doctor.” Fu-Manchu raised drooping lids and gave him a brief, piercing, green-eyed glance. “Return to your experiment.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was early next morning when Nayland Smith and Tony joined the stream of workers, many of them silk weavers, pouring through the narrow streets. Tony wore thick-rimmed glasses, a sufficient disguise. Shun-Hi hurried along ahead, and they kept her in sight.

  On the outskirts of the town she was joined by two companions, evidently fellow servants. After, passing a large factory into which the crowd of workers was finally absorbed, they came to the country road leading to the summer villa of Huan Tsung-Chao. Sir Denis, Tony, and the three girls ahead of them were now all that remained of the former throng.

  “Drop back a bit,” Nayland Smith cautioned. “Those other girls might think we’re following them from amorous motives.” He grabbed Tony’s arm. “In here!”

  They stepped through an opening in a cactus hedge and found a path parallel to the road which bordered a large field of poppies.

  “God!” Tony exclaimed. “What a crop!”

  “The Reds have certainly stepped up the opium trade,” Nayland Smith remarked.

  They went ahead, guided by the girls’ voices, and when these grew faint, they came out again onto the road. Shun-Hi and her friends had turned into a side path. Tony caught a glimpse of the three figures just before they were lost in the shadows of a cypress grove.

  “We must chance it,” Nayland Smith muttered. “Have to keep them in sight. I want a glimpse of this staff entrance Shun-Hi and Jeanie mentioned.”

  They had gone all of another mile before they saw the roof of a large house gleaming in the morning sun. It stood in the middle of what was evidently a considerable estate, and the narrow lane along which the girls were now hurrying was bordered by a high wall.

  They had drawn up closer to the three.

  “There’s the entrance,” Tony exclaimed suddenly. “They’re just going in.”

  “So I see,” Nayland Smith spoke quietly. “We must wait awhile, in case there are others to come. We might venture a little further and then take cover. That banyan twenty yards ahead will be good cover.”

  Three minutes later, having forced a way through tangled undergrowth, they stood in the shade of the huge tree. The gate in the wall was clearly in view. It was a metal-studded teak door, evidently of great strength. At the moment it remained open.

  “Someone else is expected,” Sir Denis muttered. They waited. And Tony, watching the open door in the wall, realized for the first time that the high wall alone separated two implacable enemies. The thought appalled him. He and Nayland Smith were alone; on the other side of the wall, in the person of the governor, all the strength of the Red regime was entrenched.

  “Hullo! What’s thi
s?”

  Nayland Smith grabbed his arm.

  Four bearers appeared from somewhere along the lane, carrying the Chinese equivalent of a sedan chair. They stopped before the open door; set the chair down.

  A tall man wearing a mandarin robe and a black cap with a coral bead came out and stepped into the chair. The bearers took it up and passed so close to the banyan that Sir Denis dragged Tony down onto his knees. The chair went by. Nayland Smith, still grasping his arm, stared into Tony’s eyes.

  “Dr. Fu-Manchu.”

  Neither spoke for a long minute. Then Tony said, “It’s too optimistic to hope that he’s leaving Szechuan.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Nayland Smith agreed. “But, with a revolver in my pocket, I’m wondering if I should have missed such an opportunity.”

  Oddly enough, this aspect of the situation had never occurred to Tony. Only as Sir Denis spoke did he realize how deep an impression the personality of Fu-Manchu had made upon him. The regal dignity and consciousness of power which surrounded the Chinese doctor like a halo seemed to set him so far above common men.

  “I wonder, too.”

  “Don’t fall for the spell he casts, McKay. I admit he’s a genius. But…”

  Tony looked hard at Nayland Smith. “Could you do it?”

  “Once I could have done it. Now that I have learned to assess the phenomenal brilliance of that great brain, I doubt myself. My hand would falter. But we can at least carry out our investigations without meeting Fu-Manchu. He, alone, would know me. You have no one to fear but the big Nubian.”

  They came out of their cover. The chair with its bearers had disappeared in the direction of the town. They walked to the door in the wall. Nayland Smith examined it carefully, turned away. “Pretty hopeless,” he said.

  The lane was deserted, and they followed the high wall for a quarter of a mile without finding another entrance. Nayland Smith scanned it yard by yard and at a point where the pink blossom of a peach tree evidently trained against the wall peeped over the top, he paused.

  “Apparently an orchard. Do you think you could find the spot at night, McKay?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Good.”

  Tony asked no questions as they passed on. Another twenty yards and they came to a corner. The wall was continued at a right angle along an even narrower lane, a mere footpath choked with weeds. They forced a way through. Nayland Smith studied the wall with eager concentration. It ended where they had a prospect of a river, and turned right again on a wider road spanned by a graceful bridge from the grounds of the big house.

  Tony saw a landing stage to which a motor cruiser was tied.

  “That river will be the Tung Ho, I suppose,” Nayland Smith muttered, staring up at the bridge, “and this will be the governor’s watergate.”

  “He must be a wealthy man.”

  Sir Denis grinned. “Huan Tsung-Chao is a fabulously wealthy man. He’s a survivor of imperial days, and God alone knows his age. How he came to hold his present position under the Peiping regime is a mystery.”

  “Why?”

  “He is Dr. Fu-Manchu’s chief of staff. I met him once and whatever else he may be, he is a gentleman, however misguided.”

  Tony then saw, several hundred yards up the road, what was evidently a main entrance. A man in military uniform stood outside.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “Turn back. I don’t want that fellow to see us. Come on.”

  They retreated around the corner and made their way back along the wall.

  * * *

  Before a gate in a barbed-wire fence, Dr. Fu-Manchu stepped out of his chair. A soldier on duty there saluted the Master as he went in. There were flowering trees and shrubs in the enclosure surrounding a group of buildings of obviously recent construction. A path bordered by a cactus hedge led to the door of the largest of these.

  The door was thrown open as Fu-Manchu appeared, and the Burmese doorman bowed low. Fu-Manchu ignored him and went on his way, walking slowly with his strange, catlike step. The place was unmistakably a hospital, with clean, white-walled corridors. Before a door at the end of one of these corridors, Fu-Manchu paused and pressed a button.

  A trap masking a grille in the door slid aside and someone looked out. At almost the same moment, the door was opened. Matsukata, the Japanese physician, stood inside.

  “Your report,” Fu-Manchu demanded tersely.

  “There is no change, Master.”

  “Show me the chart.”

  They went into a small dressing room. Fu-Manchu removed his robe and cap and put on a white jacket similar to the one worn by the Japanese. Matsukata turned away as Fu-Manchu completed his change of dress.

  “Here is the chart, Master.”

  It was snatched from his hand. Dr. Fu-Manchu scanned it rapidly.

  “You have checked everything—the temperature inside, the oxygen supply?”

  “Everything.”

  Fu-Manchu walked out of the room and into a larger one equipped as an operating room. In addition to the operating table and other customary equipment, there were several quite unusual pieces here and one feature which would have arrested the attention of any modem surgeon.

  This was a glass case, like those in which Egyptian mummies are exhibited, and the resemblance was heightened by the fact that it contained a lean, nude, motionless body. But here the resemblance ended.

  The heavy case rested upon what were, apparently, finely adjusted scales. A dial with millesimal measurements recorded the weight of the case and its contents. A stethoscopic attachment to the body was wired to a kind of clock. There was an intake from a cylinder standing beside the case, a mechanism which showed the quality of the air inside, and two thermometers. An instrument for checking blood pressure was strapped to an arm of the inert gray figure and connected with a mercury manometer outside the case. There were also a number of electric wires in contact with the body.

  Dr. Fu-Manchu checked everything with care, comparing what he saw with what appeared on the chart.

  He began to pace the floor.

  “Are you sure, Master,” Matsukata ventured, “that in repairing the spinal fracture you did not injure the cord?”

  Fu-Manchu halted as suddenly as if he had walked into a brick wall. Then he turned, and his eyes blazed murderously, madly.

  “Are you presuming to question my surgery?” he shouted. “Am I, now, to return to Heidelberg, to the Sorbonne, to Edinburgh, and beg to be re-enrolled as a student—I who took highest honors at all of them?”

  He was in the grip of one of those outbursts of maniacal frenzy which, years before, had led Nayland Smith and others to doubt his sanity.

  Matsukata seemed to shrink physically. He became speechless.

  Fu-Manchu raised clenched hands above his head. “God of China!” he cried, “give me strength to conquer myself or I shall kill this man!”

  He dropped down onto a chair, sank his head in his hands. Matsukata began to steal away.

  “Stand still!” Fu-Manchu commanded.

  Matsukata stood still.

  There was complete silence for several minutes. Then Dr. Fu-Manchu stood up. He was calm; the frenzy had passed.

  “Prepare the cold room,” he ordered. “I must re-examine the patient.”

  * * *

  On his return from the early morning investigation, Nayland Smith’s behavior was peculiar. After a hasty meal, he appeared dressed as a workingman. He grinned at Tony and Moon Flower.

  “I’m off again,” he announced. “All I want you two to do is to stay indoors until I come back. Can you bear it?”

  Tony and Moon Flower exchanged glances. Tony’s inclinations and his sense of duty were at war. “Can’t I be of any use, Sir Denis?” he asked.

  “There’s not a thing you could do, McKay, that I can’t do better alone.”

  And off he went.

  “Chi Foh.” Moon Flower spoke almost in a whisper. “It’s wonderful for us to be
together again. I know that Sir Denis is working to rescue Father. But you must feel, as I do, that to stay inactive is dreadful.”

  Tony threw his arms around her. “You weren’t inactive, Moon Flower, in finding Shun-Hi and I don’t think it will be long before we are active again. I’m learning a lot about Sir Denis. When he tells me to stay put, I stay put. He’s a grand man, and I’m glad to take his orders.”

  The interval of waiting, to these affianced lovers, was rapturous. But even with Moon Flower’s arms around him, Tony had pangs of conscience. Nayland Smith was on the big job, and he was dallying.

  As the day wore on and Sir Denis didn’t return, this uneasiness became alarm.

  Where had he gone? What was he doing?

  With the coming of dusk, both were wildly uneasy. Tony’s glimpse of Dr. Fu-Manchu that morning had sharpened his dread of the Master. He was painfully aware of the fact that if anything happened to Nayland Smith they would be helpless; two wanderers lost behind the second Bamboo Curtain.

  Tony paced the room. Moon Flower rarely stirred from the window.

  “If only I had some idea of where he went,” Tony said desperately.

  He heard a crisp step on the landing. Nayland Smith walked in.

  “Thank God!” Tony said with relief.

  Moon Flower turned in a flash. “I didn’t see you on the street.”

  “No, Jeanie. I came another way and entered by the back door. I had an uneasy feeling I was being followed.”

  “I hope you were wrong,” Tony said.

  “So do I,” Sir Denis admitted, opening the closet where they kept a scanty supply of liquor. “A stiff Scotch and soda is clearly indicated.”

  “I had hoped to hear from Shun-Hi,” Moon Flower began.

  “No luck today,” Nayland Smith rapped. “I have seen her. She’ll try again tomorrow. By that time we’ll be ready to go into action.”

  Sir Denis grinned in his impish way. “I had to clear the course,” he stated cryptically, and began to fill his pipe.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tony woke early on the following morning. Looking across the room which he shared with Nayland Smith, he saw that the bed was empty. He thought little about it, for Sir Denis’s hours of rising were unpredictable. He took a shower, went into the living room, and lighted a cigarette.