The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

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"Oh!" she panted at that, and stood facing me, leaning back
with her jewel-laden hands clutching the desk edge.

"Give me whatever you have removed from here," I said sternly,
"and then prepare to accompany me."

She took a step forward, her eyes wide with fear, her lips parted.

"I have taken nothing," she said. her breast was heaving tumultuously.
"Oh, let me go! Please, let me go!" And impulsively she threw
herself forward, pressing clasped hands against my shoulder and looking
up into my face with passionate, pleading eyes.

It is with some shame that I confess how her charm enveloped me like a
magic cloud. Unfamiliar with the complex Oriental temperament, I had
laughed at Nayland Smith when he had spoken of this girl's infatuation.
"Love in the East," he had said, "is like the conjurer's mango-tree;
it is born, grows and flowers at the touch of a hand."
Now, in those pleading eyes I read confirmation of his words.
Her clothes or her hair exhaled a faint perfume. Like all
Fu-Manchu's servants, she was perfectly chosen for her peculiar duties.
Her beauty was wholly intoxicating.

But I thrust her away.

"You have no claim to mercy," I said. "Do not count upon any.
What have you taken from here?"

She grasped the lapels of my coat.

"I will tell you all I can--all I dare," she panted eagerly, fearfully.
"I should know how to deal with your friend, but with you I am lost!
If you could only understand you would not be so cruel." Her slight accent
added charm to the musical voice. "I am not free, as your English women are.
What I do I must do, for it is the will of my master, and I am only
a slave. Ah, you are not a man if you can give me to the police.
You have no heart if you can forget that I tried to save you once."

I had feared that plea, for, in her own Oriental fashion, she certainly
had tried to save me from a deadly peril once--at the expense of my friend.
But I had feared the plea, for I did not know how to meet it.
How could I give her up, perhaps to stand her trial for murder?
And now I fell silent, and she saw why I was silent.

"I may deserve no mercy; I may be even as bad as you think;
but what have YOU to do with the police?
It is not your work to hound a woman to death. Could you
ever look another woman in the eyes--one that you loved,
and know that she trusted you--if you had done such a thing?
Ah, I have no friend in all the world, or I should not be here.
Do not be my enemy, my judge, and make me worse than I am;
be my friend, and save me--from HIM." The tremulous
lips were close to mine, her breath fanned my cheek.
"Have mercy on me."

At that moment I honestly would have given half of my worldly
possessions to have been spared the decision which I knew I must
come to. After all, what proof had I that she was a willing
accomplice of Dr. Fu-Manchu? Furthermore, she was an Oriental,
and her code must necessarily be different from mine.
Irreconcilable as the thing may be with Western ideas, Nayland Smith
had really told me that he believed the girl to be a slave.
Then there remained that other reason why I loathed the idea
of becoming her captor. It was almost tantamount to betrayal!
Must I soil my hands with such work?

Thus--I suppose--her seductive beauty argued against my sense of right.
The jeweled fingers grasped my shoulders nervously, and her slim body
quivered against mine as she watched me, with all her soul in her eyes,
in an abandonment of pleading despair. Then I remembered the fate
of the man in whose room we stood.

"You lured Cadby to his death," I said, and shook her off.

"No, no!" she cried wildly, clutching at me. "No, I swear by the holy name
I did not! I did not! I watched him, spied upon him--yes! But, listen:
it was because he would not be warned that he met his death.
I could not save him! Ah, I am not so bad as that. I will tell you.
I have taken his notebook and torn out the, last pages and burnt them.
Look! in the grate. The book was too big to steal away.
I came twice and could not find it. There, will you let me go?"

"If you will tell me where and how to seize Dr. Fu-Manchu--yes."

Her hands dropped and she took a backward step.
A new terror was to be read in her face.

"I dare not! I dare not!"

"Then you would--if you dared?"

She was watching me intently.

"Not if YOU would go to find him," she said.

And, with all that I thought her to be, the stern servant
of justice that I would have had myself, I felt the hot
blood leap to my cheek at all which the words implied.
She grasped my arm.

Could you hide me from him if I came to you, and told you all I know?

"The authorities--"

"Ah!" Her expression changed. "They can put me on the rack if they choose,
but never one word would I speak--never one little word."

She threw up her head scornfully. Then the proud glance softened again.

"But I will speak for you."

Closer she came, and closer, until she could whisper in my ear.

"Hide me from your police, from HIM, from everybody,
and I will no longer be his slave."

My heart was beating with painful rapidity. I had not counted on this
warring with a woman; moreover, it was harder than I could have dreamt of.
For some time I had been aware that by the charm of her personality
and the art of her pleading she bad brought me down from my judgment seat--
had made it all but impossible for me to give her up to justice.
Now, I was disarmed--but in a quandary. What should I do?
What COULD I do? I turned away from her and walked to the hearth,
in which some paper ash lay and yet emitted a faint smell.

Not more than ten seconds elapsed, I am confident, from the time
that I stepped across the room until I glanced back.
But she had gone!

As I leapt to the door the key turned gently from the outside.

"Ma 'alesh!" came her soft whisper; "but I am afraid to
trust you--yet. Be comforted, for there is one near who would
have killed you had I wished it. Remember, I will come to you
whenever you will take me and hide me."

Light footsteps pattered down the stairs. I heard a stifled
cry from Mrs. Dolan as the mysterious visitor ran past her.
The front door opened and closed.

CHAPTER V

"Shen-Yan's is a dope-shop in one of the burrows off the old Ratcliff Highway,"
said Inspector Weymouth.

"`Singapore Charlie's,' they call it. It's a center for some of
the Chinese societies, I believe, but all sorts of opium-smokers
use it. There have never been any complaints that I know of.
I don't understand this."

We stood in his room at New Scotland Yard, bending over a sheet
of foolscap upon which were arranged some burned fragments
from poor Cadby's grate, for so hurriedly had the girl done
her work that combustion had not been complete.

"What do we make of this?" said Smith. "`. . .Hunchback. . .lascar
went up. . .unlike others. . .not return. . .till Shen-Yan'
(there is no doubt about the name, I think) `turned me out. . .
booming sound. . .lascar in. . .mortuary I could ident. . .
not for days, or suspici. . .Tuesday night in a different make
. . .snatch. . .pigtail. . .'"

"The pigtail again!" rapped Weymouth.

"She evidently burned the torn-out pages all together,"
continued Smith. "They lay flat, and this was in the middle.
I see the band of retributive justice in that, Inspector. Now we
have a reference to a hunchback, and what follows amounts to this:
A lascar (amongst several other persons) went up somewhere--
presumably upstairs--at Shen-Yan's, and did not come down again.
Cadby, who was there disguised, noted a booming sound.
Later, he identified the lascar in some mortuary.
We have no means of fixing the date of this visit to Shen-Yan's,
but I feel inclined to put down the `lascar' as the dacoit
who was murdered by Fu-Manchu! It is sheer supposition, however.
But that Cadby meant to pay another visit to the place in a
different `make-up' or disguise, is evident, and that the Tuesday
night proposed was last night is a reasonable deduction.
The reference to a pigtail is principally interesting because
of what was found on Cadby's body."

Inspector Weymouth nodded affirmatively, and Smith glanced at his watch.

"Exactly ten-twenty-three," he said. "I will trouble you, Inspector,
for the freedom of your fancy wardrobe. There is time to spend an hour
in the company of Shen-Yan's opium friends."

Weymouth raised his eyebrows.

"It might be risky. What about an official visit?"

Nayland Smith laughed.

"Worse than useless! By your own showing, the place is open to inspection.
No; guile against guile! We are dealing with a Chinaman, with the incarnate
essence of Eastern subtlety, with the most stupendous genius that the modern
Orient has produced."

"I don't believe in disguises," said Weymouth, with a certain truculence.
"It's mostly played out, that game, and generally leads to failure.
Still, if you're determined, sir, there's an end of it. Foster will make
your face up. What disguise do you propose to adopt?"

"A sort of Dago seaman, I think; something like poor Cadby.
I can rely on my knowledge of the brutes, if I am sure
of my disguise."

"You are forgetting me, Smith," I said.

He turned to me quickly.

"Petrie," he replied, "it is MY business, unfortunately, but it
is no sort of hobby."

"You mean that you can no longer rely upon me?"
I said angrily.

Smith grasped my hand, and met my rather frigid stare with a look
of real concern on his gaunt, bronzed face.

"My dear old chap," he answered, "that was really unkind.
You know that I meant something totally different."

"It's all right, Smith;" I said, immediately ashamed of my choler, and wrung
his hand heartily. "I can pretend to smoke opium as well as another.
I shall be going, too, Inspector."

As a result of this little passage of words, some twenty minutes
later two dangerous-looking seafaring ruffians entered a waiting cab,
accompanied by Inspector Weymouth, and were driven off into
the wilderness of London's night. In this theatrical business
there was, to my mind, something ridiculous--almost childish--
and I could have laughed heartily had it not been that grim
tragedy lurked so near to farce.

The mere recollection that somewhere at our journey's end Fu-Manchu
awaited us was sufficient to sober my reflections--Fu-Manchu, who,
with all the powers represented by Nayland Smith pitted against him,
pursued his dark schemes triumphantly, and lurked in hiding within
this very area which was so sedulously patrolled--Fu-Manchu, whom
I had never seen, but whose name stood for horrors indefinable!
Perhaps I was destined to meet the terrible Chinese doctor to-night.

I ceased to pursue a train of thought which promised to lead to morbid depths,
and directed my attention to what Smith was saying.

"We will drop down from Wapping and reconnoiter, as you say the place
is close to the riverside. Then you can put us ashore somewhere below.
Ryman can keep the launch close to the back of the premises, and your fellows
will be hanging about near the front, near enough to hear the whistle."

"Yes," assented Weymouth; "I've arranged for that.
If you are suspected, you shall give the alarm?"

"I don't know," said Smith thoughtfully. "Even in that event
I might wait awhile."

"Don't wait too long," advised the Inspector. "We shouldn't be
much wiser if your next appearance was on the end of a grapnel,
somewhere down Greenwich Reach, with half your fingers missing."

The cab pulled up outside the river police depot, and Smith and I
entered without delay, four shabby-looking fellows who had been
seated in the office springing up to salute the Inspector,
who followed us in.

"Guthrie and Lisle," he said briskly, "get along and find a dark corner
which commands the door of Singapore Charlie's off the old Highway.
You look the dirtiest of the troupe, Guthrie; you might drop asleep
on the pavement, and Lisle can argue with you about getting home.
Don't move till you hear the whistle inside or have my orders,
and note everybody that goes in and comes out. You other two belong
to this division?"

The C.I.D. men having departed, the remaining pair saluted again.

"Well, you're on special duty to-night. You've been prompt,
but don't stick your chests out so much. Do you know of a back
way to Shen-Yan's?"

The men looked at one another, and both shook their heads.

"There's an empty shop nearly opposite, sir," replied one of them.
"I know a broken window at the back where we could climb in.
Then we could get through to the front and watch from there."

"Good!" cried the Inspector. "See you are not spotted, though; and if you
hear the whistle, don't mind doing a bit of damage, but be inside Shen-Yan's
like lightning. Otherwise, wait for orders."

Inspector Ryman came in, glancing at the clock.

"Launch is waiting," he said.

"Right," replied Smith thoughtfully. "I am half afraid, though, that the
recent alarms may have scared our quarry--your man, Mason, and then Cadby.
Against which we have that, so far as he is likely to know, there has
been no clew pointing to this opium den. Remember, he thinks Cadby's
notes are destroyed."

"The whole business is an utter mystery to me," confessed Ryman.
"I'm told that there's some dangerous Chinese devil hiding
somewhere in London, and that you expect to find him at
Shen-Yan's. Supposing he uses that place, which is possible,
how do you know he's there to-night?"

"I don't," said Smith; "but it is the first clew we have had
pointing to one of his haunts, and time means precious lives
where Dr. Fu-Manchu is concerned."

"Who is he, sir, exactly, this Dr. Fu-Manchu?"

"I have only the vaguest idea, Inspector; but he is no ordinary criminal.
He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on earth
for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose wealth is
enormous, and his mission in Europe is to PAVE THE WAY! Do you follow me?
He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Britisher,
and not one American, in fifty thousand has ever dreamed of it."

Ryman stared, but made no reply, and we went out,
passing down to the breakwater and boarding the waiting launch.
With her crew of three, the party numbered seven that swung
out into the Pool, and, clearing the pier, drew in again
and hugged the murky shore.

The night had been clear enough hitherto, but now came scudding rainbanks
to curtain the crescent moon, and anon to unveil her again and show
the muddy swirls about us. The view was not extensive from the launch.
Sometimes a deepening of the near shadows would tell of a moored barge,
or lights high above our heads mark the deck of a large vessel.
In the floods of moonlight gaunt shapes towered above; in the ensuing
darkness only the oily glitter of the tide occupied the foreground
of the night-piece.

The Surrey shore was a broken wall of blackness, patched with
lights about which moved hazy suggestions of human activity.
The bank we were following offered a prospect even more gloomy--
a dense, dark mass, amid which, sometimes, mysterious half-tones
told of a dock gate, or sudden high lights leapt flaring
to the eye.

Then, out of the mystery ahead, a green light grew and crept down upon us.
A giant shape loomed up, and frowned crushingly upon the little craft.
A blaze of light, the jangle of a bell, and it was past. We were dancing
in the wash of one of the Scotch steamers, and the murk had fallen again.

Discords of remote activity rose above the more intimate
throbbing of our screw, and we seemed a pigmy company
floating past the workshops of Brobdingnagian toilers.
The chill of the near water communicated itself to me, and I
felt the protection of my shabby garments inadequate against it.

Far over on the Surrey shore a blue light--vaporous, mysterious--
flicked translucent tongues against the night's curtain.
It was a weird, elusive flame, leaping, wavering, magically changing
from blue to a yellowed violet, rising, falling.

"Only a gasworks," came Smith's voice, and I knew that he, too, had been
watching those elfin fires. "But it always reminds me of a Mexican teocalli,> and the altar of sacrifice."

The simile was apt, but gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu
and the severed fingers, and could not repress a shudder.

"On your left, past the wooden pier! Not where the lamp is--
beyond that; next to the dark, square building--Shen-Yan's."

It was Inspector Ryman speaking.

"Drop us somewhere handy, then," replied Smith, "and lie close in,
with your ears wide open. We may have to run for it, so don't
go far away."

From the tone of his voice I knew that the night mystery of the Thames
had claimed at least one other victim.

"Dead slow," came Ryman's order. "We'll put in to the Stone Stairs."

CHAPTER VI

A SEEMINGLY drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as Smith
lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above which,
crudely painted, were the words:

"SHEN-YAN, Barber."

I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs,
German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the window
ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden steps,
and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.

We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only
claim kinship with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of
the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair.
A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one
of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese,
completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded
with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock,
black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing,
shook his head vigorously.

"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion,
squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes.
"Too late! Shuttee shop!"

"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's nose.
"Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee pipe,
you yellow scum--savvy?"

My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a vindictiveness
that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of gentle persuasion.

"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down, Charlie.
You can lay to it."

"No hab got pipee--" began the other.

Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.

"Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see."

He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up
a dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which
was literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded
with opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it.
Every breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle
of the floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls
of which ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied.
Most of the occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were
squatting in their bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes.
These had not yet attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.

"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing
Smith's shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.

Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.

"Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--
or plenty heap trouble."

A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:

"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver."

Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of
the shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp.
Holding a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old
cocoa tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end.
Slowly roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl
of the metal pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a
spirituous blue flame.

"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the assumed
eagerness of a slave to the drug.

Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips,
and prepared another for me.

"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.

It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to smoke.
Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to sink lower
and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways on the floor,
Smith lying close beside me.

"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks.
"Look at the rats."

Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense
of isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world.
My throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached.
The vicious atmosphere seemed contaminating. I was as one dropped--

Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
And there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.

Smith began to whisper softly.

"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said.
"I don't know if you have observed it, but there is a stair
just behind you, half concealed by a ragged curtain.
We are near that, and well in the dark. I have seen nothing
suspicious so far--or nothing much. But if there was anything
going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we new arrivals
were well doped. S-SH!>"

He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning. Through my half-closed eyes
I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had referred.
I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.

The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room
with a curiously lithe movement.

The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded
scant illumination, serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--
here an extended hand, brown or yellow, there a sketchy,
corpse-like face; whilst from all about rose obscene sighings
and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny, animal chorus.
It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some Chinese Dante.
But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able to make out a
ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a misshapen head
crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight, hunched body.
There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that masklike face,
and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.

Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements;
but an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--
that this was one of the doctor's servants. How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.

He was watching us.

Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed opium-smokers
had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.

Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness,
I, too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending
lower and lower, until it came within a few inches of my own.
I completely closed my eyes.

Delicate fingers touched my right eyelid. Divining what was coming,
I rolled my eyes up, as the lid was adroitly lifted and lowered again.
The man moved away.

I had saved the situation! And noting anew the hush about me--
a hush in which I fancied many pairs of ears listened--I was glad.
For just a moment I realized fully how, with the place watched back
and front, we yet were cut off, were in the hands of Far Easterns,
to some extent in the power of members of that most inscrutably
mysterious race, the Chinese.

"Good," whispered Smith at my side. "I don't think I could have done it.
He took me on trust after that. My God! what an awful face.
Petrie, it's the hunchback of Cadby's notes. Ah, I thought so.
Do you see that?"

I turned my eyes round as far as was possible. A man had scrambled down
from one of the bunks and was following the bent figure across the room.

They passed around us quietly, the little yellow man leading, with his
curious, lithe gait, and the other, an impassive Chinaman, following.
The curtain was raised, and I heard footsteps receding on the stairs.

"Don't stir," whispered Smith.

An intense excitement was clearly upon him, and he communicated it to me.
Who was the occupant of the room above?

Footsteps on the stair, and the Chinaman reappeared, recrossed the floor,
and went out. The little, bent man went over to another bunk, this time
leading up the stair one who looked like a lascar.

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