The Drums of Fu-Manchu (25 page)

“But, please, I don’t understand,” he said. He was Italian, but spoke fair English. “What is this? What has happened?”

In that dimly lighted hall as we stood about him, wind howling at the open door, I could well believe that his bewilderment was not assumed.

“First, who are you?” Smith demanded.

“I am the butler here, sir. My name is Paulo.”

“Mr Wilton is your employer?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where is he?”

“He left tonight, sir.”

“What! Left for where?”

“For his yacht Silver Heels in the lagoon.”

“But what of his guests?”

“They have all gone too.”

“You mean that the house is empty?”

“Except for myself and the staff, sir, yes.”

One of the party said urgently to the chief of police:

“Silver Heels has sailed.”

“Silver Heels must be overtaken!” snapped Smith. “Send someone to make the necessary arrangements. I leave it to you. But I must be one of the party.”

A man, following rapid instructions from Colonel Correnti, went doubling off.

Turning again to the frightened butler:

“How long have you worked here?”

“Only for two weeks, sir. I was engaged by Mr Wilton’s secretary. But I have worked here before for others who have leased the palace.”

“Lead the way to the tapestry room lighted by four iron candelabra.”

The man stared in almost a horrified manner., “That room, sir, is part of what is called the Old Palace. It has long been locked up. I have no key.”

“Nor to the room with the lotus floor?”

Nayland Smith was watching him keenly, his unshaven face very grim.

“The room with the lotus floor!” Paulo’s expression grew even more wild. “I have heard of it, sir, but it is also part of the Old Palace. I have never seen it. Those rooms have a very unpleasant reputation, you understand. No one would lease the palace if they knew of them. The doors have not been unlocked for twenty years.”

“Then one must be broken down. Do you know where they are?”

“I know of two.”

“Go ahead.”

As Paulo turned to obey I heard a sound of distant voices.

“What is that?” snapped Smith.

“Some of the other servants, sir, who have been aroused!”

Smith glanced at Colonel Correnti.

“Have this looked into, Colonel,” he said. “You, Paulo, lead on.”

Our party was broken up again, Smith, myself, the chief of police, Detective Stocco and two Carabinieri following the butler. He led us to a doorway set in an arched recess. A magnificent cabinet—a rare piece of violet lacquer—stood in front of the arch.

“Behind here, sir, is one of the doors, but I have no key to open it.”

“Get this thing out of the way.”

In a few minutes the men had set the cabinet aside. Smith stepped forward and examined an ancient iron lock. He was soon satisfied. He turned and shook his head.

“This is not the door in use. You say you know of another?”

“Yes sir, if you will come this way.”

Aside to me:

“The fellow is honest,” Smith muttered. “This is a very deep plot.” He glanced at his wrist watch as we crossed a deserted dining room. “Our chance of saving Adlon grows less and less, but there is someone else in danger.”

“Who is that?”

“James Brownlow Wilton! He is notorious throughout the United States for his Nazi sympathies. The full extent of this scheme is only just beginning to dawn upon me, Kerrigan.” In a room overluxuriously furnished as a study, Paulo opened a satinwood door inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl to reveal an empty cupboard.

“At the back of this cupboard, sir,” he said, “you see there are very ancient panels. I have always understood it is an entrance to the Old Palace…”

* * *

“This door has been used recently… It has a new lock!” Smith’s eyes glittered feverishly.

“I don’t think so, sir. Mr Wilton used the room, and I am sure he did not know of the door. I have always been careful to avoid mentioning to tenants who came anything about those locked rooms.”

“Carbines!” Smith cried on a high note of excitement. “Those two men forward. Blow the lock out. The fate of a nation hangs on it!”

The sound of muffled shots reverberated insanely in that lavishly
furnished study. I heard cries—racing footsteps. The other police party dashed to join us… The lock was shattered, the door flung open.

“Follow me, Kerrigan!”

Nayland Smith, shining a ray of light ahead, stepped into the dark cavity. I went next, Colonel Correnti close at my heels.

“You see, Kerrigan! You see!”

Descending four stone steps we found ourselves in one of those narrow passages which surrounded the rooms of the Old Palace. I took a rapid bearing.

“This way, Smith, I think!”

“You’re right!” he cried. “Ah! what’s this?”

A door was thrown open, we crowded in, and flashlamps flooded the tapestry room in which I had seen Rudolf Adlon confronting Dr. Fu-Manchu!

The red candles in the candelabra were extinguished, and in the light of our lamps I saw that the tapestry was so decayed as to be in places dropping from the wall. The ebony chair on the dais was there, but save tor the extinguished candles, one of which Smith examined, there was nothing to show that this sinister apartment had been occupied for a generation…

During the next hour we explored some of the strangest rooms I had ever entered. We even penetrated to the cellar below the lotus floor. The place still reeked of hawthorn, but that unknown gas was no longer present in anesthetic quantity. A net was hung below the trap…

We had a glimpse in those evil catacombs of the Venice in which men had disappeared never to be heard of again. But not a soul did we find anywhere!

None of the other police parties had anything to report. Rudolf Adlon, whose slightest words disturbed Europe, had vanished as
completely as in the days of the doges when prominent citizens of Venice had vanished!

It was a fact so amazing that I found it hard to accept. No member of that household had ever entered these locked rooms and cellars. All that I had heard, all that I had seen there, might have been figments of a dream! Saving the presence and the evidence of Nayland Smith I should have been tempted to suppose it so.

Yet again, like an evil cloud out of which lightning strikes destruction, Dr. Fu-Manchu had gone with the breeze, to leave no trace behind!

And Ardatha?

“
A
re you ready, Kerrigan?”

Nayland Smith burst into my room at the hotel. A bath and a badly needed shave had renewed the man. He lived on his nerves. To me he was a constant source of amazement.

“Yes, Smith, I’m ready. Is there any more news?”

He dropped down on the side of my bed and began to fill his pipe. Wind howled through the shutters, and this was the darkest hour of the night.

“Silver Heels has answered the radio and is waiting for us.”

“What do you think it all means, Smith? To me it still seems like a dream that you and I were confined there in that vile place. Granting Paulo’s statement to be true, that Brownlow Wilton and his guests had left before my arrival, it’s still incredible. That scene between Fu-Manchu and Rudolf Adlon… Now at this moment I cannot believe it ever happened!”

“Think,” snapped Smith. “The Palazzo Brioni was leased on behalf of Brownlow Wilton by his secretary and a staff assembled. Neither the secretary, one assumes, nor Brownlow Wilton, had
the remotest idea of the history of the place. It contained a series of rooms belonging to what is known apparently as the Old Palace which, for good reasons, were shut off—never entered.”

“So far, I agree.”

His pipe satisfactorily filled, Nayland Smith struck a match. While he lighted the tobacco, he continued:

“Only one member of the household, Paulo, the butler who has served there before, knows anything about those hidden rooms. Very well. A genius of evil who
does
know about them, seizes this opportunity. Wilton, who has upheld to his peril the Nazi banner in the United States, is in a position to entertain Rudolf Adlon. Fu-Manchu knows that Rudolf Adlon is coming incognito to Venice. An invitation to a luncheon party on the millionaire’s yacht is arranged. There are servants of Fu-Manchu on board.”

He paused, pushed down the smouldering tobacco with his thumb and lighted a second match.

“At that party, Rudolf Adlon meets the woman known as Korêani. He is attracted. She makes it her business to see that he
shall
be attracted; and of this art, Kerrigan, she is a past mistress. She promises him an appointment, but stresses the danger and difficulty in order to prepare Adlon for the journey through those filthy passages. No doubt she posed as an unhappily married woman.”

“It’s logical enough.”

“Adlon, now enslaved, slips away from the Palazzo da Rosa and goes to the spot at which she has promised to confirm their meeting. In the interval she has consulted Doctor Fu-Manchu and the nature of Adlon’s reception has been arranged. Luckily, you saw the message delivered. Adlon keeps the appointment… We know what happened.”

His pipe now well alight, he began to walk across and across the floor.

“But, Smith,” I said, watching him fascinatedly, for his succinct summing up of the facts revealed again the clarity of his mind, “you mean that Brownlow Wilton has been ignorant of this from first to last?”

He paused for a moment, surrounding himself with clouds of smoke, and then:

“Hard to believe, I agree,” he snapped, “but at the moment there is no other solution. Wilton, as you probably know, is an eccentric and a chronic invalid—in fact a dying man. Although he entertains lavishly, he often secludes himself from his guests. We have found out that his decision to leave for Villefranche was made suddenly, but the party was a small one. Two, I think, we have identified.”

I nodded.

There was little doubt that Ardatha had been one of Brownlow Wilton’s guests, according to the account of a police officer who had been on board. His description of the only other female member of the party made it clear that this was Korêani. Paulo’s account of the women tallied.

“It had been most cunningly arranged,” Smith went on, speaking rapidly and resuming his restless promenade. “No doubt Brownlow Wilton met them under circumstances which prompted the invitation. After all, they are both charming women!”

“You think they flew from Paris and joined the yacht party?”

“Undoubtedly. They were under Si-Fan orders, but Brownlow Wilton did not know it. Where he met them no doubt we shall learn. But the facts are obvious, I think.”

“They cannot possibly have sailed in Silver Heels?”

“No—evidently Doctor Fu-Manchu had other plans for them and for himself. But I know, in my very bones I know, that Wilton is in danger. He may even be running away from that danger now…”

* * *

The Adriatic was behaving badly from the point of view of a naval cutter, when presently we cleared the land and set out to overtake Silver Heels. I thought that the chief of police was not easy as our small craft rolled and pitched in a moderately heavy sea.

However, the storm was subsiding, and a coy moon began to peek through breaking clouds. For my own part I welcomed the storm, for neither the flashes of lightning nor rumbling of distant thunder were out of keeping with my mood.

Unknown to most of its inhabitants, Venice tonight was being combed for one of Europe’s outstanding figures. Reserves of police had been called in from neighbouring towns. No representative of a great power was in his bed.

Rudolf Adlon had been smuggled out of life.

I think that high-speed dash through angry seas in some way calmed my spirit. Lightning flashed again, and:

“There she is!” came the hail of a lookout.

But from where we sat in the cabin, all of us, I suppose, had seen Silver Heels, bathed in that sudden radiance, a fairy ship, riding a sea bewitched, a white and beautiful thing.

A ladder was down when we drew alongside, but it was no easy matter to get aboard. At last, however, our party assembled on deck. We were received by Brownlow Wilton and the captain of the yacht.

My first glimpse of Brownlow Wilton provoked a vague memory to which I found myself unable to give definite shape.

He wore a beret and a blue rainproof overcoat with the collar turned up, a wizened little man as I saw him in the deck lights, with the sallow complexion of a southerner, peering at us through black-rimmed spectacles.

The captain, whose name was Farazan, had all the appearance of a Portuguese. He, too, was a sallow type; he wore oilskins. The astonishment of the American owner was manifest in his manner and in his eyes, magnified by the lenses of his spectacles.

“Although it is a very great pleasure to have you gentlemen aboard,” he said in a weak, piping voice, “it is also a great surprise. I don’t pretend that I have got the hang of it, but you are very welcome. Let’s all step down to the saloon.”

We descended to a spacious saloon to find a lighted table and a black-browed steward in attendance. I saw a cold buffet, the necks of wine bottles peeping from an ice bucket.