President Fu-Manchu (29 page)

“By heaven, Smith,” he said excitedly, “that may be the solution!”

“It’s worth thinking about, but it would require a very careful plan. I am disposed at the moment—without imperiling the lives of Mrs. Adair and her son—to concentrate upon the Stratton Building. Your experience there was definitely illuminating.”

He crossed to the big desk above which the maps were pinned, and looked down at a number of clay fragments which lay there.

“I feel disposed, Hepburn—if necessary with the backing of the Fire Department—to pursue your inquiry into the flaw in the lightning conductors. An examination could be arranged after office workers had left. But I think it would be unwise to give any warning to this Mr. Schmidt whom you have mentioned, of our intention. Do you agree with me?”

“Yes,” Hepburn replied slowly; “that is what I had planned myself. But, Smith…”

Smith turned and regarded him.

“Do you realize how I feel? In the first place you know—I haven’t disguised it—that I am becoming really fond of Moya Adair. That’s bad enough—she’s one of the enemy. In the second place, it seems that I am such a poor weakling that this hellish Chinaman can use me as an instrument to bring about your murder! How can you ever trust me again?”

Nayland Smith stepped up to him, grasped both his shoulders and stared into his eyes.

“I would trust you, Hepburn,” he said slowly, “as I would trust few men. You are human—so am I. Don’t let the hypnotic episode disturb your self-respect. There is no man living immune from this particular power possessed by Dr. Fu-Manchu. There’s only one thing: Should you ever meet him again—avoid his eyes.”

“Thank you,” said Mark Hepburn; “it’s kind of you to take it that way.”

Smith grasped the outstretched hand, dapped Hepburn on the shoulder and resumed his restless promenade.

“In short,” he continued, “we are beginning to make a certain amount of headway. But the campaign, as time goes on, grows more and more hectic. In my opinion our lives, as risks, are uninsurable. And I am seriously worried about the Abbot of Holy Thorn.”

“In what way?”

“His life is not worth—that!”

He snapped his fingers.

“No.” Mark Hepburn nodded, selecting a fresh cigarette and staring rather haggardly out of the window across the roofs of a gray New York. “He is not a man one can gag indefinitely. Dr. Fu-Manchu must know it.”

“Knowing it,” snapped Nayland Smith, “I fear that he will act. If we had a clear case, I should be disposed to act first. The thing is so cunningly devised that our lines of attack are limited. Excluding an unknown inner group surrounding the mandarin, in my opinion not another soul working for the League of Good Americans has the remotest idea of the ultimate object of that League, or of the source of its revenues! All the reports—and I have read hundreds—point in the same direction. Many thousands of previously workless men have been given employment. Glance at the map.” He pointed. “Every red flag means a Fu-Manchu advance! They are working honorably at the tasks allotted to them. But every one, when the hour comes, will cry out with the same voice: every one, north, south, east and west, is a unit in the vast army which, unknowingly; is building up the domination of this country by Dr. Fu-Manchu, through his chosen nominee—”

“Salvaletti!”

“Salvaletti; it seems at last to become apparent. It is clear that this man has been trained for years for his task. I even begin to guess why Lola Dumas is being associated with him. In another fortnight, perhaps in a week, the following of Paul Salvaletti will be greater than that of Harvey Bragg ever was. Nothing can stop him, Hepburn, nothing short of a revelation—not a statement, but a
revelation
, of the real facts…”

“Who can give it? Who would be listened to?”

Nayland Smith paused over by the door, turned, staring at the shadowy figure in the armchair.

“The Abbot of Holy Thorn,” he replied. “But at the risk of his life…”

T
he Memory Man worked industriously on his clay model. Pinned to the base of the wooden frame was a photographic enlargement of the three-cent stamp with the white paper mask. He was engrossed in his task. The clay head was assuming a grotesque semblance of the features of Dr. Fu-Manchu—a vicious caricature of that splendid, evil face.

Incoming messages indicated a feverish change of plan in regard to the New York area. The names of Nayland Smith and Captain Hepburn figured frequently. These two apparently were in charge of counter-operations. Reports from agents in the South, identifiable only by their numbers, spoke of the triumphant progress of the man Salvaletti. Occasional reports from far up in Alaska indicated that the movement there was proceeding smoothly. The only discordant note came from the Middle West, where Abbot Donegal, a mere name to the Memory Man, seemed to be a focus of interest for many agents.

It all meant less than nothing to the prisoner who had memorized every message received since the first hour of his captivity. Sometimes, in the misery of this slavery which had been imposed upon him, he remembered happier days in Germany, remembered how at his club he had been challenged to read a page of the Berlin
Tageblatt
, and then to recite its contents from memory; how, without difficulty, he had succeeded and won his wager. But those were the days before his exile. He knew now how happy they had been. In the interval he had died. He was a living dead man… Busily, with delicate fingers, he modeled the clay. His faith in a just God remained unshaken.

Without warning the door by which he gained access to his private quarters opened. Wearing a dark coat with an astrakhan collar, an astrakhan cap upon his head, a tall man came in. The sculptor ceased to toil and sat motionless—staring at the living face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, which so long he had sought to reproduce in clay!

“Good morning, Professor Morgenstahl.”

Dr. Fu-Manchu spoke in German. Except that he overstretched the gutturals, he spoke that language perfectly. Professor Morgenstahl, the mathematical genius who had upset every previous conviction respecting the relative distances of the planets, who had mapped space, who had proved that lunar eclipses were not produced by the shadow of the earth, and who now was subjugated to the dreadful task of a one-man telephone exchange, did not stir. His great brain was a file, the only file, of all messages received at that secret headquarters from the whole of the United States. Motionless, he continued to stare at the man who wore the astrakhan cap.

That hour of which he had dreamed had come at last! He was face to face with his oppressor…

The muscles of his powerful body responded to the urge of his brain. At whatever cost to himself, he was determined to kill this man who stood before him.

Vividly before his eyes those last scenes arose: his expulsion from Germany almost penniless, for his great intellect which had won world-wide recognition had earned him little money; the journey to the United States, where no man had identified him as the famous author of
Interstellar Cycles
, nor had he sought to make himself known. He could even remember his own death—for certainly he had been dead—in a cheap lodging in Brooklyn; his reawakening in the room below (with this man, this devil incarnate, standing over him!); his enslavement, his misery.

Yes, living or dead—for sometimes he thought that he was a discarnate spirit—he must at least perform this one good deed: the dreadful Chinaman must die.

“No doubt you weary of your duties, Professor,” the guttural voice continued. “But better things are to come. A change of plan is necessitated. Other quarters have been found for you, with similar facilities.”

Professor Morgenstahl, sitting behind the heavy table with its complicated mechanism, recognized that he must temporize.

“My books,” he said, “my apparatus—”

“Have been removed. Your new quarters are prepared for you. Be good enough to follow me.”

Slowly, Professor Morgenstahl stood up, watched by unflinching green eyes. He moved around the corner of the table, where the nearly completed model stood. He was estimating the weight of that tall, gaunt figure; and to ounces, his estimate was correct. But in the moment when, clear of the heavy table, he was preparing to strangle with his bare hands this yellow-faced horror who had rescued him from the grave, only to plunge him into a living hell, the watching eyes seemed to grow larger; inch by inch they increased—they merged—they became a green lake; he forgot his murderous intent. He lost identity…

“
L
ay off there,” shouted Inspector Finney.

The roar of the oxy-acetylene blowpipe ceased. They were working on the third door below Wu King’s premises, from a tunneled staircase of the existence of which Wu King blandly denied all knowledge. Turning upwards:

“What’s new?” Finney shouted.

“We’ve got the street door open!”

Leaving the men with the blowpipe, Finney ran up. The air was stifling, laden with acrid fumes. An immensely heavy door, an iron framework to the outer side of which the appearance of a wall had been given by cementing half-bricks into the hollow of the frame, stood open. A group of men sweating from their toils examined it. Outside, on the street, two policemen were moving on the curious sightseers.

“So that was the game,” Finney murmured.

“No wonder we couldn’t find it,” said one of the men, throwing back a clammy lock of hair from his damp forehead. “It looks like a brick wall and it sounds like a brick wall!”

“It would,” Finney commented dryly: “it
is
a brick wall, except it opens. Easy to guess now how they got it fixed. They did their building from the other end, wherever the other end is. Now just where do we stand?”

He stepped out on to the street, looking right and left. The masked door occupied the back of a recess between one end of Wu King’s premises and the beginning of a Chinese cigar merchant’s. Its ostensible reason was to accommodate a manhole in the sidewalk. The manhole was authentic: it communicated with an electric main—Inspector Finney knew the spot well enough. Tilting back his hard black hat, he stared with a strange expression at the gaping opening where he had been accustomed for many years to see a brick wall.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” he muttered.

“This lets Wu out, I guess,” said one of the men. “If
we
didn’t know the darned thing was here, he can claim he didn’t.”

“He’ll do it,” Finney replied. “And he’ll probably get by with it… There must be a bell some place: we traced the cable.”

“We found it. Forced it out blowing through the iron. The brickwork’s made to look kind of old, and there were posters stuck to it. I guess the push was under the posters; that’s how it looks.”

Inspector Finney went inside again, first glancing sharply right and left at the expressionless faces of a number of Chinamen who, from a respectful distance, were watching operations. There was an elaborate lock to this ingenious door, electrically controlled—but where from, remained to be discovered…

Ten minutes later the third door was forced, and Inspector Finney found himself in a rectangular saloon curiously appointed but showing evidence of long neglect. The place, now, smelled like an iron foundry.

“This looks like an old dope joint to me,” said one of the party, “but it’s plain it hasn’t been used for a long while.”

“Strip all the walls,” Finney ordered; “we’re not through yet.”

A scene of whole-hearted wrecking followed upon which the Fire Department could not have improved. Nevertheless, nearly an hour had elapsed before a cunningly hidden fourth door was discovered.

“Go to work, boys,” said Finney.

The sweating workers got busy, bringing down the blowpipe and rigging it for further operations. Finney stared speculatively at a patch of scarred wall. He did not know, indeed never learned, that beyond that very piece of wall upon which his gaze was fixed a spiral staircase led from a point below to the top floor of Wu King’s building; Since only by measurements and never by sounding could the shaft in which it ran be discovered, it was not unnatural that Inspector Finney should concentrate the whole of his attention upon the fourth iron door recently discovered.