Dope

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"All are complete. With those dollars for which I care not, a man
might buy the world--if he had but enough of the dollars. You are well
known in Poplar as 'Mrs. Jacobs,' and your identity is easily
established--as 'Mrs. Jacobs.' You join the Mahratta at the Albert
Dock. I have bought you a post as stewardess."

Mrs. Sin tossed her head. "And Juan?"

"What can they prove against your Juan if you are missing?"

Mrs. Sin nodded towards the bed.

With slow and shuffling steps Sin Sin Wa approached. He continued to
smile, but his glittering eye held even less of mirth than usual.
Tucking his hands into his sleeves, he stood and looked down--at Rita
Irvin.

Her face had acquired a waxen quality, but some of her delicate
coloring still lingered, lending her a ghastly and mask-like aspect.
Her nostrils and lips were blanched, however, and possessed a
curiously pinched appearance. It was impossible to detect the fact
that she breathed, and her long lashes lay motionless upon her cheeks.

Sin Sin Wa studied her silently for some time, then:

"Yes," he murmured, "she is beautiful. But women are like adder's
eggs. He is a fool who warms them in his bosom." He turned his slow
regard upon Mrs. Sin. "You have stained your hair to look even as
hers. It was discreet, my wife. But one is beautiful and many-shadowed
like a copper vase, and the other is like a winter sunset on the
poppy-fields. You remind me of the angry red policeman, and I
tremble."

"Tremble as much as you like," said Mrs. Sin scornfully, "but do
something, think; don't leave everything to me. She screamed tonight--
and someone heard her. They are searching the river bank from door to
door."

"Lo!" murmured Sin Sin Wa, "even this I had learned, nor failed to
heed the beating of a distant drum. And why did she scream?"

"I was--keeping her asleep; and the prick of the needle woke her."

"Tchee, tchee," crooned Sin Sin Wa, his voice sinking lower and lower
and his eye nearly closing. "But still she lives--and is beautiful."

"Beautiful!" mocked Mrs. Sin. "A doll-woman, bloodless and nerveless!"

"So--so. Yet she, so bloodless and nerveless, unmasked the secret of
Kazmah, and she, so bloodless and nerveless, struck down--"

Mrs. Sin ground her teeth together audibly.

"Yes, yes!" she said in sibilant Chinese. "She is a robber, a thief, a
murderess." She bent over the unconscious woman, her jewel-laden
fingers crooked and menacing. "With my bare hands I would strangle
her, but--"

"There must be no marks of violence when she is found in the river.
Tchee, chee--it is a pity."

"Number one p'lice chop, lo!" croaked the raven, following this remark
with the police-whistle imitation.

Mrs. Sin turned and stared fiercely at the one-eyed bird.

"Why do you bring that evil, croaking thing here?" she demanded. "Have
we not enough risks?"

Sin Sin Wa smiled patiently.

"Too many," he murmured. "For failure is nothing but the taking of
seven risks when six were enough. Come--let us settle our affairs. The
'Jacobs' account is closed, but it is only a question of hours or days
before the police learn that the wharf as well as the house belongs to
someone of that name. We have drawn our last dollar from the traffic,
my wife. Our stock we are resigned to lose. So let us settle our
affairs."

"Smartest--smartest," croaked Tling-a-Ling, and rattled ghostly
castanets.

CHAPTER XXXIV

ABOVE AND BELOW

"Thank the guid God I see ye alive, Dan," said Mary Kerry.

Having her husband's dressing-gown over her night attire, and her
usually neat hair in great disorder, she stood just within the doorway
of the little dining-room at Spenser Road, her face haggard and the
fey light in her eyes. Kerry, seated in the armchair dressed as he had
come in from the street, a parody of his neat self with mud on his
shoes and streaks of green slime on his overall, raised his face from
his hands and stared at her wearily.

"I awakened wi' a cry at some hour afore the dawn," she whispered
stretching out her hands and looking like a wild-eyed prophetess of
old. "My hairt beat sair fast and then grew caud. I droppit on my
knees and prayed as I ha' ne'er prayed afore. Dan, Dan, I thought ye
were gene from me."

"I nearly was," said Kerry, a faint spark of his old truculency
lighting up the weary eyes. "The man from Whitehall only missed me by
a miracle."

"'Twas the miracle o' prayer, Dan," declared his wife in a low, awe-
stricken voice. "For as I prayed, a great comfort came to me an' a
great peace. The second sight was wi' me, Dan, and I saw, no' yersel'
--whereby I seemed to ken that ye were safe--but a puir dying soul
stretched on a bed o' sorrow. At the fuit o' the bed was standing a
fearsome figure o' a man--yellow and wicked, wi' his hands tuckit in
his sleeves. I thought 'twas a veesion that was opening up tee me and
that a' was about to be made clear, when as though a curtain had been
droppit before my een, it went awe' an' I kenned it nae more; but
plain--plain, I heerd the howling o' a dog."

Kerry started and clutched the arms of the chair.

"A dog!" he said. "A dog!"

"The howling o' a sma' dog," declared his wife; "and I thought 'twas a
portent, an' the great fear came o'er me again. But as I prayed 'twas
unfolder to me that the portent was no' for yersel' but for her--the
puir weak hairt ye ha' tee save."

She ceased speaking and the strange fey light left her eyes. She
dropped upon her knees beside Kerry, bending her head and throwing her
arms about him. He glanced down at her tenderly and laid his hands
upon her shoulders; but he was preoccupied, and the next moment, his
jaws moving mechanically, he was staring straight before him.

"A dog," he muttered, "a dog!"

Mary Kerry did not move; until, a light of understanding coming into
Kerry's fierce eyes, he slowly raised her and stood upright himself.

"I have it!" he said. "Mary, the case is won! Twenty men have spent
the night and early morning beating the river bank so that the very
rats have been driven from their holes. Twenty men have failed where a
dog would have succeeded. Mary, I must be off."

"Ye're no goin' out again, Dan. Ye're weary tee death."

"I must, my dear, and it's you who send me."

"But, Dan, where are ye goin'?"

Kerry grabbed his hat and cane from the sideboard upon which they lay,
and:

"I'm going for the dog!" he rapped.

Weary as he was and travel-stained, for once neglectful of that
neatness upon which he prided himself, he set out, hope reborn in his
heart. His assertion that the very rats had been driven from their
holes was scarce an exaggeration. A search-party of twenty men,
hastily mustered and conducted by Kerry and Seton Pasha, had explored
every house, every shop, every wharf, and, as Kerry believed, every
cellar adjoining the bank, between Limehouse Basin and the dock gates.
Where access had been denied them or where no one had resided they had
never hesitated to force an entrance. But no trace had they found of
those whom they sought.

For the first time within Kerry's memory, or, indeed, within the
memory of any member of the Criminal Investigation Department,
Detective-Sergeant Coombes had ceased to smile when the appalling
truth was revealed to him that Sin Sin Wa had vanished--that Sin Sin
Wa had mysteriously joined that invisible company which included
Kazmah, Mrs. Sin and Mrs. Monte Irvin. Not a word of reprimand did the
Chief Inspector utter, but his eyes seemed to emit sparks. Hands
plunged deeply in his pockets he had turned away, and not even Seton
Pasha had dared to speak to him for fully five minutes.

Kerry began to regard the one-eyed Chinaman with a superstitious fear
which he strove in vain to stifle. That any man could have succeeded
in converting a chandu-khan such as that described by Mollie Gretna
into a filthy deserted dwelling such as that visited by Kerry, within
the space of some thirty-six hours, was well nigh incredible. But the
Chief Inspector had deduced (correctly) that the exotic appointments
depicted by Mollie were all of a detachable nature--merely masking the
filthiness beneath; so that at the shortest notice the House of a
Hundred Raptures could be dismantled. The communicating door was a
larger proposition, but that it was one within the compass of Sin Sin
Wa its effectual disappearance sufficiently demonstrated.

Doubtless (Kerry mused savagely) the appointments of the opium-house
had been smuggled into that magically hidden cache which now concealed
the conjurer Sin Sin Wa as well as the other members of the Kazmah
company. How any man of flesh and blood could have escaped from a
six-roomed house surrounded by detectives surpassed Kerry's powers of
imagination. How any apartment large enough to contain a mouse, much
less half a dozen human beings, could exist anywhere within the area
covered by the search-party he failed to understand, nor was he
prepared to admit it humanly possible.

Kerry chartered a taxicab by Brixton Town Hall and directed the man to
drive to Prince's Gate. To the curious glances of certain of his
neighbors who had never before seen the Chief Inspector otherwise than
a model of cleanliness and spruceness he was indifferent. But the
manner in which the taxi-driver looked him up and down penetrated
through the veil of abstraction which hitherto had rendered Kerry
impervious to all external impressions, and:

"Give me another look like that, my lad," he snapped furiously, "and
I'll bash your head through your blasted wind-screen."

A ready retort trembled upon the cabman's tongue, but a glance into
the savage blue eyes reduced him to fearful silence. Kerry entered the
cab and banged the door; and the man drove off positively trembling
with indignation.

Deep in reflection the Chief Inspector was driven westward through the
early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets
presented that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can
present in all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought
for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and
tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; but to all of them
Kerry was blind as he was deaf to the din of workaday Babylon. In
spirit he was roaming the bank of old Father Thames where the river
sweeps eastward below Limehouse Causeway--wonder-stricken before the
magic of the one-eyed wizard who could at will efface himself as an
artist rubs out a drawing, who could camouflage a drug warehouse so
successfully that human skill, however closely addressed to the task,
failed utterly to detect its whereabouts. Above the discord of the
busy streets he heard again and again that cry in the night which had
come from a hapless prisoner whom they were powerless to succor. He
beat his cane upon the floor of the cab and swore savagely and loudly.
The intimidated cabman, believing these demonstrations designed to
urge him to a greater speed, performed feats of driving calculated to
jeopardize his license. But still the savage passenger stamped and
cursed, so that the cabby began to believe that a madman was seated
behind him.

At the corner of Kennington Oval Kerry was effectually aroused to the
realities. A little runabout car passed his cab, coming from a
southerly direction. Proceeding at a rapid speed it was lost in the
traffic ahead. Unconsciously Kerry had glanced at the occupants and
had recognized Margaret Halley and Seton Pasha. The old spirit of
rivalry between himself and the man from Whitehall leapt up hotly
within Kerry's breast.

"Now where the hell has he been!" he muttered.

As a matter of fact, Seton Pasha, acting upon a suggestion of
Margaret's had been to Brixton Prison to interview Juan Mareno who lay
there under arrest. Contents bills announcing this arrest as the
latest public development in the Bond Street murder case were to be
seen upon every newstand; yet the problem of that which had brought
Seton to the south of London was one with which Kerry grappled in
vain. He had parted from the Home office agent in the early hours of
the morning, and their parting had been one of mutual despair which
neither had sought to disguise.

It was a coincidence which a student of human nature might have
regarded as significant, that whereas Kerry had taken his troubles
home to his wife, Seton Pasha had sought inspiration from Margaret
Halley; and whereas the guidance of Mary Kerry had led the Chief
Inspector to hurry in quest of Rita Irvin's spaniel, the result of
Seton's interview with Margaret had been an equally hurried journey to
the big jail.

Unhappily Seton had failed to elicit the slightest information from
the saturnine Mareno. Unmoved alike by promises or threats, he had
coolly adhered to his original evidence.

So, while the authorities worked feverishly and all England reading of
the arrest of Mareno inquired indignantly, "But who is Kazmah, and
where is Mrs. Monte Irvin?" Sin Sin Wa placidly pursued his
arrangements for immediate departure to the paddyfields of Ho-Nan, and
sometimes in the weird crooning voice with which he addressed the
raven he would sing a monotonous chant dealing with the valley of the
Yellow River where the opium-poppy grows. Hidden in the cunning vault,
the search had passed above him; and watchful on a quay on the Surrey
shore whereto his dinghy was fastened, George Martin awaited the
signal which should tell him that Kazmah and Company were ready to
leave. Any time after dark he expected to see the waving lantern and
to collect his last payment from the traffic.

At the very hour that Kerry was hastening to Prince's Gate, Sin Sin Wa
sat before the stove in the drug cache, the green-eyed joss upon his
knee. With a fragment of chamois leather he lovingly polished the
leering idol, crooning softly to himself and smiling his mirthless
smile. Perched upon his shoulder the raven studied this operation with
apparent interest, his solitary eye glittering bead-like. Upon the
opposite side of the stove sat the ancient Sam Tuk and at intervals of
five minutes or more he would slowly nod his hairless head.

The sliding door which concealed the inner room was partly open, and
from the opening there shone forth a dim red light, cast by the paper-
shaded lamp which illuminated the place. The coarse voice of the
Cuban-Jewess rose and fell in a ceaseless half-muttered soliloquy,
indescribably unpleasant but to which Sin Sin Wa was evidently
indifferent.

Propped up amid cushions on the divan which once had formed part of
the furniture of the House of a Hundred Raptures, Mrs. Sin was smoking
opium. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers, and
her dark eyes were partly glazed. Buddha-like immobility was claiming
her, but it had not yet effaced that expression of murderous malice
with which the smoker contemplated the unconscious woman who lay upon
the bed at the other end of the room.

As the moments passed the eyes of Mrs. Sin grew more and more glazed.
Her harsh voice became softened, and presently: "Ah!" she whispered;
"so you wait to smoke with me?"

Immobile she sat propped up amid the cushions, and only her full lips
moved.

"Two pipes are nothing to Cy," she murmured. "He smokes five. But you
are not going to smoke?"

Again she paused, then:

"Ah, my Lucy. You smoke with me?" she whispered coaxingly.

Chandu had opened the poppy gates. Mrs. Sin was conversing with her
dead lover.

"Something has changed you," she sighed. "You are different--lately.
You have lots of money now. Your investments have been good. You want
to become--respectable, eh?"

Slightly--ever so slightly--the red lips curled upwards. No sound of
life came from the woman lying white and still in the bed. But through
the partly open door crept snatches of Sin Sin Wa's crooning melody.

"Yet once," she murmured, "yet once I seemed beautiful to you, Lucy.
For La Belle Lola you forgot that English pride." She laughed softly.
"You forgot Sin Sin Wa. If there had been no Lola you would never have
escaped from Buenos Ayres with your life, my Lucy. You forgot that
English pride, and did not ask me where I got them from--the ten
thousand dollars to buy your 'honor' back."

She became silent, as if listening to the dead man's reply. Finally:

"No--I do not reproach you, my dear," she whispered. "You have paid me
back a thousand fold, and Sin Sin Wa, the old fox, grows rich and fat.
Today we hold the traffic in our hands, Lucy. The old fox cares only
for his money. Before it is too late let us go--you and I. Do you
remember Havana, and the two months of heaven we spent there? Oh, let
us go back to Havana, Lucy. Kazmah has made us rich. Let Kazmah
die. . . . You smoke with me?"

Again she became silent, then:

"Very likely," she murmured; "very likely I know why you don't smoke.
You have promised your pretty little friend that you will stay awake
and see that nobody tries to cut her sweet white throat."

She paused momentarily, then muttered something rapidly in Spanish,
followed by a short, guttural phrase in Chinese.

"Why do you bring her to the house?" she whispered hoarsely. "And you
brought her to Kazmah's. Ah! I see. Now everybody says you are
changed. Yes. She is a charming friend."

The Buddha-like face became suddenly contorted, and as suddenly grew
placid again.

"I know! I know!" Mrs. Sin muttered harshly. "Do you think I am blind!
If she had been like any of the others, do you suppose it would have
mattered to me? But you respect her--you respect. . . ." Her voice
died away to an almost inaudible whisper: "I don't believe you. You
are telling me lies. But you have always told me lies; one more does
not matter, I suppose. . . . How strong you are. You have hurt my
wrists. You will smoke with me now?"

She ceased speaking abruptly, and abruptly resumed again:

"And I do as you wish--I do as you wish. How can I keep her from it
except by making the price so high that she cannot afford to buy it? I
tell you I do it. I bargain for the pink and white boy, Quentin,
because I want her to be indebted to him--because I want her to be so
sorry for him that she lets him take her away from you! Why should you
respect her--"

Silence fell upon the drugged speaker. Sin Sin Wa could be heard
crooning softly about the Yellow River and the mountain gods who sent
it sweeping down through the valleys where the opium-poppy grows.

"Go, Juan," hissed Mrs. Sin. "I say--go!"

Her voice changed eerily to a deep, mocking bass; and Rita Irvin
lying, a pallid wraith of her once lovely self, upon the untidy bed,
stirred slightly--her lashes quivering. Her eyes opened and stared
straightly upward at the low, dirty ceiling, horror growing in their
shadowy depths.

CHAPTER XXXV

BEYOND THE VEIL

Rita Irvin's awakening was no awakening in the usually accepted sense
of the word; it did not even represent a lifting of the veil which cut
her off from the world, but no more than a momentary perception of the
existence of such a veil and of the existence of something behind it.
Upon the veil, in grey smoke, the name "Kazmah" was written in moving
characters. Beyond the veil, dimly divined, was life.

As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld
ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this
woman's racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless
pageant, the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living
men and women. She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity
from madness. She was learning what Sir Lucien had meant when, once,
long long ago, in some remote time when she was young and happy and
had belonged to a living world, he had said "a day is sure to come."
It had come, that "day." It had dawned when she had torn the veil
before Kazmah--and that veil had enveloped her ever since. All that
had preceded the fatal act was blotted out, blurred and indistinct;
all that had succeeded it lived eternally, passing, an endless
pageant, before her tortured mind.

The horror of the moment when she had touched the hands of the man
seated in the big ebony chair was of such kind that no subsequent
terrors had supplanted it. For those long, slim hands of the color of
old ivory were cold, rigid, lifeless--the hands of a corpse! Thus the
pageant began, and it continued as hereafter, memory and delusion
taking the stage in turn.

* * * * *

Complete darkness came.

Rita uttered a wild cry of horror and loathing, shrinking back from
the thing which sat in the ebony chair. She felt that consciousness
was slipping from her; felt herself falling, and shrieked to know
herself helpless and alone with Kazmah. She groped for support, but
found none; and, moaning, she sank down, and was unconscious of her
fall.

A voice awakened her. Someone knelt beside her in the darkness,
supporting her; someone who spoke wildly, despairingly, but with a
strange, emotional reverence curbing the passion in his voice.

"Rita--my Rita! What have they done to you? Speak to me. . . . Oh God!
Spare her to me. . . . Let her hate me for ever, but spare her--spare
her. Rita, speak to me! I tried, heaven hear me, to save you little
girl. I only want you to be happy!"

She felt herself being lifted gently, tenderly. And as though the
man's passionate entreaty had called her back from the dead, she
reentered into life and strove to realize what had happened.

Sir Lucien was supporting her, and she found it hard to credit the
fact that it was he, the hard, nonchalant man of the world she knew,
who had spoken. She clutched his arm with both hands.

"Oh, Lucy!" she whispered. "I am so frightened--and so ill."

"Thank God," he said huskily, "she is alive. Lean against me and try
to stand up. We must get away from here."

Rita managed to stand upright, clinging wildly to Sir Lucien. A
square, vaguely luminous opening became visible to her. Against it,
silhouetted, she could discern part of the outline of Kazmah's chair.
She drew back, uttering a low, sobbing cry. Sir Lucien supported her,
and:

"Don't be afraid, dear," he said reassuringly. "Nothing shall hurt
you."

He pushed open a door, and through it shone the same vague light which
she had seen in the opening behind the chair. Sir Lucien spoke rapidly
in a language which sounded like Spanish. He was answered by a perfect
torrent of words in the same tongue.

Fiercely he cried something back at the hidden speaker.

A shriek of rage, of frenzy, came out of the darkness. Rita felt that
consciousness was about to leave her again. She swayed forward
dizzily, and a figure which seemed to belong to delirium--a lithe
shadow out of which gleamed a pair of wild eyes--leapt upon her. A
knife glittered. . . .

In order to have repelled the attack, Sir Lucien would have had to
release Rita, who was clinging to him, weak and terror-stricken.
Instead he threw himself before her. . . . She saw the knife enter his
shoulder. . . .

Through absolute darkness she sank down into a land of chaotic
nightmare horrors. Great bells clanged maddeningly. Impish hands
plucked at her garments, dragged her hair. She was hurried this way
and that, bruised, torn, and tossed helpless upon a sea of liquid
brass. Through vast avenues lined with yellow, immobile Chinese faces
she was borne upon a bier. Oblique eyes looked into hers. Knives which
glittered greenly in the light of lamps globular and suspended in
immeasurable space, were hurled at her in showers. . . .

Sir Lucien stood before her, supporting her; and all the knives buried
themselves in his body. She tried to cry out, but no sound could she
utter. Darkness fell again. . . .

A Chinaman was bending over her. His hands were tucked in his loose
sleeves. He smiled, and his smile was hideous but friendly. He was
strangely like Sin Sin Wa, save that he did not lack an eye.

Rita found herself lying in an untidy bed in a room laden with opium
fumes and dimly lighted. On a table beside her were the remains of a
meal. She strove to recall having partaken of food, but was
unsuccessful. . . .

There came a blank--then a sharp, stabbing pain in her right arm. She
thought it was the knife, and shrieked wildly again and again. . . .

Years seemingly elapsed, years of agony spent amid oblique eyes which
floated in space unattached to any visible body, amid reeking fumes
and sounds of ceaseless conflict. Once she heard the cry of some bird,
and thought it must be the parakeet which eternally sat on a branch of
a lonely palm in the heart of the Great Sahara. . . . Then, one night,
when she lay shrinking from the plucking yellow hands which reached
out of the darkness:

"Tell me your dream," boomed a deep, mocking voice; "and I will read
its portent!"

She opened her eyes. She lay in the untidy bed in the room which was
laden with the fumes of opium. She stared upward at the low, dirty
ceiling.

"Why do you come to me with your stories of desperation?" continued
the mocking voice. "You have insisted upon seeing me. I am here."

Rita managed to move her head so that she could see more of the room.

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