President Fu-Manchu (21 page)

“Give me the latest report,” came a curt, guttural order, “from the Number in charge of Mott Street patrol.”

“To hand at 3.10 p.m. Report as follows: Strength of government agents and police in this area doubled since noon. Access to entrances one and two impossible. A government agent, heavily guarded and so far unidentified, in charge. Indications point to a raid pending. This report from Number 41.”

Amber light prevailed again in the Gothic room, and the sculptor, Egyptian cigarette in mouth, proceeded delicately to accentuate the gibbous brow of his subject…

Dr. Fu-Manchu, who had produced this change of light by the pressure of a button, sat for a while with closed eyes. The first steps in his campaign had been successfully taken. The next step was by far the most difficult. The atmosphere of that strange study must have been unbreathable by an average man. A graying pencil of smoke arose from an incense burner set upon one corner of the table. Dr. Fu-Manchu had his own methods of inducing mental stimulation. Presently he touched a switch, and two points of light appeared. A moment he waited, and then:

“Attend carefully to the orders I am about to give,” he directed: he spoke in Chinese.

“I am listening, Master,” the voice of old Sam Pak replied.

“A plot is brewing to set the dogs upon us, my friend. Listen with great care. No one is to enter or to leave Base 3 until further instructions are received from me. Doors leading to street entrances are to remain locked. Our visitors tonight will enter by the river-gate. Their safety rests with you. All are important; some are distinguished. I shall keep you informed…”

* * *

“That is the reason… Mark (I must get used to calling you Mark while you are here), why I am so helpless.”

Through uncurtained french windows Mark Hepburn looked out from the penthouse apartment on to a roof garden. The vegetation of the rock plants was scanty at this season; a little fountain was frozen over. But he could imagine that in spring and summer this was a very pleasant spot. In the frosty sunlight a small, curly-haired boy was romping with a nurse, a capable-looking woman nearing middle age. Her habitual expression Hepburn assumed to be grim, but now she was laughing gayly as she played with her little charge.

Her gaiety was not forced—that of a dutiful employee; it radiated real happiness. With the aid of a pile of cushions set beside the wall the small boy was making strenuous endeavors to stand on his head. His flushed face, every time that he collapsed and looked up at her, reduced the nurse to helpless laughter. He gave it up after a while and sat there grinning.

“God bless us, bairn, you’ll bring all the blood to your daft little head if you keep on,” she exclaimed, speaking with a marked Scottish accent.

“Is there blood in my head, Goofy?” the boy inquired, wide-eyed. “I fought it only came up to here”—he indicated his throat.

“Where d’you think it comes from when your nose bleeds?”

“Never fought of that, Goofy.”

Mark Hepburn, watching the mop of red-brown curls—ruffled by the breeze, the dear blue eyes, the formation of the child’s mouth, the roundness of his chin, experienced an unfamiliar sensation of weakness compounded of pity and of swift, intense affection. He turned his head slowly, looking at Moya Adair.

Her lips trembled, but her eyes were happy as she smiled up at him and waited.

“There’s no need for me to ask,” he said. His harsh voice seemed to have softened slightly. He was recalling the details of Mrs. Adair’s record which he had been at such pains to secure. “I should have remembered.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “My big son. He’s just four…”

* * *

When, presently, Mark Hepburn met Robbie Adair, the boy registered approval save in regard to Hepburn’s budding beard. He was a healthily frank young ruffian and took no pains to disguise his distastes. He had a disarmingly cheerful grin.

“I like you, Uncle Mark, all ’cept your whiskers,” was his summary.

This dislike of beards, so expressed, produced a shocked protest from Nurse Goff and led to further inquiries by Moya, frowning, although her eyes danced with laughter. Interrogation brought to light the fact that Robbie associated beards and untidy hair with a peculiar form of insanity.

“There’s someone I know, up there,” he explained, pointing vaguely apparently towards heaven; “his hair blows about in the wind all in a mess like yours. And he’s got funny whiskers too. He makes heads. He holds ’em up, and then he smashes ’em. So you see, Uncle Mark, he is mad.”

Robbie grinned.

“Whatever are you talking about, Robbie?” Moya, kneeling on a cushion, threw her arm around the boy’s shoulders and glanced up at Mark Hepburn. “Do
you
know what he means?”

Mark shook his head slowly, looking into the beautiful eyes upraised to his, so like, yet so wonderfully different from, the eyes of the boy. He became aware of the fact that he was utterly happy; a kind of happiness he had never known before. And down upon this unlawful joy (for why should
he
be happy in the midst of stress, conflict, murder, black hypocrisy) he clapped the icy hand of a Puritan conscience. Nurse Goff had gone into the apartment, leaving the three together.

Some change in Hepburn’s expression made Moya turn aside. She pressed her cheek against Robbie’s curly head.

“We don’t know what you mean, dear,” she said. “Won’t you tell us?”

“I mean,” said Robbie stoutly, turning and staring into her face from a distance of not more than an inch away, “there’s a man who is mad; he has whiskers; and he lives up there!”

“Where exactly do you mean, Robbie?”

She glanced aside at Mark Hepburn. He was watching her intently.

The boy pointed.

“On the very top of that tall tower.”

Mark Hepburn stared in the direction which Robbie indicated. The building in question was the Stratton Tower, one of New York’s very high buildings, and the same which formed a feature of the landscape as viewed from the apartment he shared with Nayland Smith. He continued to stare in that direction, endeavoring to capture some memory which the sight of the obelisk-like structure topped by a pointed dome sharply outlined against that cold, blue sky, stirred in his mind.

He stood up, and walked to the wall surrounding the roof garden and took his bearings. He realized that he stood at a level much below that of the fortieth floor of the Regal Tower, but in point of distance much nearer to the building the boy indicated.

“He always comes out at night. On’y sometimes I’s asleep and don’t see him.”

It was the word “night,” which gave Hepburn the clue, captured a furtive memory—a memory of three lighted windows at the top of the Stratton Tower which he had seen and speculated about on the night when, with Nayland Smith, he had waited for the coming of Fly Carlo.

He turned and stared at Robbie with new interest.

“You say he makes heads, young fellow?”

“Yes. I seen him up there, making ’em.”

“At night?”

“Not always.”

“And then you say he smashes them?”

“Yes, he always smashes ’em.”

“How does he smash them, dear?” Moya asked, glancing up at the earnest face of Mark Hepburn.

According to the boy’s graphic description, this notable madman hurled them down on to the dome below, where they were shattered into fragments.

Hepburn, conquered again by the picture of the charming mother kneeling with one arm round Robbie’s shoulders, stooped and succumbed to the temptation of once again ruffling the boy’s curly head.

“You seem to have quite a lot of fun up here, Robbie!” he said.

Later in the cosy sitting-room delicately feminine in its every appointment, Mark Hepburn sat looking at Moya Adair. She smiled almost timidly.

“I suppose,” she said, “it’s hard for you to understand, but—”

The door opened, and a curly head was thrust into the room, followed by a grin.

“Don’t go, Uncle Mark,” Robbie cried, “till I say good-bye.”

He disappeared. Mark Hepburn, watching Moya as with mock severity she signaled the boy to run away, wondered if there was anything more beautiful in nature than a young and lovely mother.

“I am glad,” he said, and his monotonous voice in some queer way sounded different, “that you have this great interest in your life.”

“My only interest,” she replied simply. “I go on for him. Otherwise”—she shook her head—“I should not be here now.”

“Still I don’t understand why you serve this man you call the President.”

“Yet the explanation is very simple. Although the guards are not visible, both entrances to this building are watched night and day. Whenever Robbie goes out with his nurse he is covered until they return. He is never allowed to walk on the streets, but is driven to the garden of a house on Long Island. That is his only playground except the one on the roof outside.”

“I suppose I am dense,” said Mark Hepburn, “but even now I don’t understand!”

“This apartment belongs to the President, although he rarely visits it. Mary Goff is my own servant; she has been in my service since the boy was born. Otherwise—I have no one. For two months Robbie disappeared—”

“He was kidnapped?”

“Yes, he was kidnapped. That was before all this began. Then the President sent for me. I was naturally distracted; I think I should very soon have died. He made me an offer which, I think, any mother would have accepted. I accepted without hesitation. I am allowed to come here, even to bring friends, while I carry out the duties allotted to me. If I failed”—she bit her lip—“I should never see Robbie again.”

“But after all,” Mark Hepburn exclaimed hotly, “there’s a law in the land!”

“You don’t know the President,” Moya replied. “
I
do. No law could save my boy if he determined to spirit him away. You’ve promised, and you will keep your promise? You won’t attempt to do anything about Robbie without my consent?”

Mark Hepburn watched her silently for a while, and then:

“No,” he replied; “but it’s a very unpleasant situation. I have exposed you to a dreadful danger… You mean”—he hesitated—“that my visit here today will be reported to the President?”

“Certainly; but Robbie is allowed visitors if they are old friends. You seem to know enough of my history to pass for an old friend, I think?”

“Yes,” said Mark Hepburn; “you may regard me as an old friend…”

* * *

In the room where the Memory Man worked patiently upon his strange piece of modeling, a distant bell rang and the amber light went out.

“Give me the latest report,” came the hated, dominating voice, “of the Number in charge of party covering Base 3.”

“A report to hand,” came an immediate reply in those terse, Teutonic tones, “timed 5.15. Police have been further reinforced. Chinese approaching the areas one, two and three have been interrogated. Government agent in charge not yet identified. Several detectives and federal agents have been in Wu King’s Bar since noon. Report ends. From Number 41.”

Following a silent interval, during which, in the darkness, the Memory Man lighted a fresh Egyptian cigarette from the stump of the old one:

“The latest report,” the voice directed, “from the Number covering Eileen Breon.”

“Report to hand timed 4.35. A man, bearded, wearing glasses and a driving coat with a fur collar, age estimated at thirty-five, arrived in her company at the apartment at 3.29. He remained for an hour; covered on leaving. He proceeded on foot to Grand Central. Operatives covering lost his track in the crowd. Report ends. This is from Number 39.”

“Most unsatisfactory. Give me the latest report from the Regal-Athenian.”

“Only one to hand, timed 5.10 p.m. Owing to long non-appearance of Federal Agents Hepburn and Smith, Number suggests—”

“Suggestions are not reports,” the guttural voice said harshly. “What is this man’s number?”

Following a further brief silence:

“Make the connection,” the harsh voice directed. “You are free for four hours.”

Amber light prevailed again. The sculptor, brushing back his mane of white hair with a tragic gesture, adjusted the dictaphone attachment which during his hours of rest took the place of his phenomenal memory. No message came through during the time that he gathered up lovingly the implements of his art, sole solace of the prisoner’s life.

Carrying the half-completed clay model, he crossed to the hidden door, opened it, and descended to that untidy apartment which, with the balcony outside, made up his world. He threw wide the french windows and went out.

A setting sun in a cloudless sky fashioned strange red lights and purple shadows upon unimaginable buildings, streaked the distant waters almost reluctantly with a phantom, carmine brush, and painted New York City in aspects new even to the weary eyes of the man who had looked down upon it so often.

Setting the clay upon the table, he returned and took a photographic printing-frame from its place in the window. Removing the print, he immersed it in a glass tray. As its tones grew deeper, it presented itself as an enlargement of that tiny colored head—the model which eternally he sought to reproduce.

* * *

Mark Hepburn, fully alive to the fact that he had been covered from the moment when he had left the apartment where Moya Adair’s small son lived—a prisoner—experienced an almost savage delight in throwing his pursuers off the track in the great railway station.

He had detected them—they were two—by the time that he descended the steps. He knew that Moya’s happiness, perhaps the life of Robbie, depended upon his maintaining the character of a family friend. Whatever happened, he must not be identified as a federal agent.

Furthermore, at any cost he must combat a growing fear, almost superstitious, of the powers of Dr. Fu-Manchu; even a minor triumph over the agents of that sinister, invisible being would help to banish an inferiority complex which threatened to claim him. He succeeded in throwing off his pursuers, very ordinary underworld toughs, without great difficulty.

A covered lorry was waiting at a spot appointed. In it, he donned blue overalls and presently entered a service door of the Regal-Athenian, a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes and carrying a crate upon his shoulder.