The Island of Fu-Manchu (10 page)

“Please listen. Time is so short for me. Hassan told me what happened. I knew your name and found your number in the book. It was my only chance to know if you were alive. I thank the good God that you are, because, you see, I am so alone and unhappy, and you—I like to believe that I have forgotten, now, because otherwise I should be ashamed to think about you so much!”

“Ardatha!”

“We shall be in New York on Thursday. I know that Nayland Smith is following us. If I am still there when you arrive I will try to speak to you again. There is one thing that might save me—you understand?—a queer, a silly little thing, but—”

“Yes, yes, Ardatha! What is it? Tell me!”

“I risked capture by the police to try to catch Peko—Dr. Fu-Manchu’s marmoset. That was when… we met. This strange pet, he is very old, is more dear to his master than any living thing. Try to find out…”

Silence: I was disconnected!

Frantically I called the exchange; but all the consolation I received from the night operator was:

“Zennor’s rung off, sir.”

“Smith!” I shouted and burst into the dining-room.

Nayland Smith was standing staring out of the window. He turned and faced me.

“Yes,” he said coolly; “it was Ardatha. Where is she and what had she to say?”

Rapidly, perhaps feverishly, I told him; and then:

“The marmoset!” I cried. “Barton caught it! What did he do with it?”

“Do with it!” came Sir Lionel’s great voice, and appeared at the other end of the room, his mane of hair dishevelled. “What did it do with
me
? After the blasted thing—it’s all of a thousand years old, and I know livestock—had bitten me twice last night, I locked it in the wardrobe. This morning—”

He raised a bloodstained finger, there was a shrill angry whistle, and a tiny monkey, a silver grey thing no larger than a starling, shot through the doorway behind him, paused, chattered wickedly, and sprang from the buffet onto a high cornice!

“There’s your marmoset,” cried Barton. “I should have strangled him if I hadn’t known Chinese character! I said, Kerrigan, there might be a way. This is the way—there’s your hostage!”

“
T
he unaccountable absence of Kennard Wood,” said Nayland Smith, staring out of the window, “is most disturbing. These apartments, Kerrigan, have been the scene of strange happenings. It was from here that I opposed Dr. Fu-Manchu when he tried—and nearly succeeded—in his plan to force a puppet President upon the United States.”

I stood beside him looking out over the roofs of New York from this eagle’s nest on the fortieth floor of the Regal Athenian Hotel.

A pearly moon regarded us from a cloudless sky, a moon set amidst a million stars which twinkled above a Walt Disney city. One tall tower dominated the foreground of the composition. It rose, jewelled with lights, from the frosty line of an intervening roof up to the pharos which crowned it. The river showed as a smudge of silver far below: an approaching train was a fiery dragon winding in and out of mysterious gullies.

In that diamond-clear air I could hear the sound of the locomotive; I could hear a motor horn, the hoarse whistle of some big ship heading out for the open sea. Lights glittered everywhere, from starry heavens down to frostily-sparkling buildings and the moving headlamps of restless traffic.

“Bit of a contrast to London,” I said.

“Yes.” Smith pronounced the word with unusual slowness. “The fog of war has not dimmed the light of New York. But you and I know who is responsible for those rumours, and those missing men in the Caribbean; and although, according to your account, the Doctor is a sick man, we dare not under-estimate potentialities. Even now—he may be here.”

As always, the mere suspicion that the dreadful Chinese scientist might be near induced a sense, purely nervous, no doubt, of sudden chill. We had been delayed unexpectedly at Lisbon and again later; it was possible that Fu-Manchu was approaching New York. If Ardatha’s words had been true, he was already here.

Ardatha! She had promised to try to see me again. I continued to stare out at the myriad twinkling points. From any one of that constellation of windows Ardatha might be looking as I looked from this.

“I am getting seriously worried about Keanard Wood,” said Smith suddenly. “According to his last message from Havana, he and his assistant, Longton, were leaving by air. They are long overdue: I don’t understand it.”

Colonel Kennard Wood, of the United States Secret Service, had been left in charge of the Caribbean inquiry when Smith had hurriedly returned to England. We had been expecting him all day. In fact, Barton had been compelled to go to Washington that morning in Smith’s stead owing to the importance of the anticipated interview.

There were times when I felt as one who dreams, when, seeing a double newspaper headline, “British capture Benghazi,” I asked myself what I was doing here at an hour when England and her allies grappled with a world menace. It was Smith who always supplied the answer: “An even greater menace, one which threatens the entire white race, is closing around the American continent.”

The phone buzzed.

Smith turned quickly and crossed to the instrument.

“Yes—speaking…
What?’

The tone in which he rapped out the last word brought me about. His eyes glittered metallically and I saw—those prominent jaw muscles betrayed the fact—that his teeth were clenched.

“Good God! You are sure? Yes… at once.”

He banged the receiver back and stared at me, suddenly haggard.

“Smith! what has happened?”

“Longton—poor Longton has gone!”

“What!”

“They have just brought his body in from the river. Inspector Hawk of the Homicide Bureau recognized him, in spite of—”

“In spite of what?”

“Of his condition, Kerrigan!” He dashed a fist wildly into his other palm. “Fu-Manchu is here—of that we may be sure; for no one but Fu-Manchu could have brought the horror of the Snapping Fingers to New York.”

“The Snapping Fingers?”

But he was already running towards the door.

“Explain on the way. Come on!”

Seated in a chair in the lobby, the chair tipped back so that he could rest his feet on the ledge above a radiator, was a short, thick-set man whose clean-shaven red face, close-cropped dark hair, and bright eyes had at first sight reminded me of my old friend Chief Inspector Gallaho of Scotland Yard. As Smith came charging out the man righted his chair, sprang up, and began spluttering. Following Smith’s example, I hurriedly put on my topcoat. An unpleasant regurgitating sound drew my attention to the man on guard.

“Say, mister,” he said, “what’s the big hurry?” He began to chew; for in this respect, also, he resembled Gallaho, except that Gallaho’s chewing was imaginary. “Nearly made me swallow my gum—”

“Listen,” Smith broke in: “I’m going out. There may easily be an attempt to get into this apartment tonight—”

“Say—
I’m
here.”

“I want to make sure,” said Smith, “that you don’t stay here. These are your instructions. Having made sure that all the windows are secure—”

“What, on the fortieth?”

“As you say, on the fortieth. Having made sure of this, patrol every room in the suite, including the bathrooms, at intervals of fifteen minutes. If you find anything alive—except, of course, the monkey in a cage in Sir Lionel’s room—kill it. This applies to a fly or a cockroach. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sure, it’s clear enough, chief—”

“Do it. If in doubt call Headquarters. I count upon you, Sergeant Rorke.”

Throwing the door open, he ran to the elevator and I followed.

* * *

“Smith!” I said, as we were whirled in a police car through kaleidoscopic streets, “what has happened to Longton—and what did you mean by the Snapping Fingers?”

“I meant a signal of death, Kerrigan. Poor Longton—whom you don’t know and will never know, now—may have heard it.”

“I saw how the news affected you. Is it—something very horrible?”

Propped in a corner of the racing car, he began to load his pipe.

“Very horrible, Kerrigan. Some foul things have come out of the East, but this thing belongs to the West Indies. Of course, it may have a Negro origin. But at one time it assumed the size of an epidemic.”

“In what way? I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I. It remains a mystery to the scientists. But it began, as far back as I can make out, in the Canal Zone. A young coloured man, employed on one of the locks, was found in his quarters one morning, bled white.”

“Bled white?”

“Almost literally.” He lighted the charred briar. “He was dead, apparently from exhaustion. There were queerly discoloured areas on his skin; but there was practically no blood in his body—”

“No blood?” I cried over the noise of the motor and the Broadway traffic. “What do you mean?”

“He had been reduced to a sort of human veal. Something had drained all the blood from his veins.”

“Good heavens! But were there no traces—no bloodstains?”

“Nothing. He was the first of many. Then, unaccountably, the terror of the Zone disappeared.”

“Vampire bats?”

“This was suspected; but some of the victims—and they were not all coloured—had been found in rooms to which a bat could not have gained access.”

“Was human agency at work?”

“No. Conditions, in certain cases, ruled it out.”

“But the Snapping Fingers?”

“This clue came later. It was first reported when the epidemic struck Haiti; that is, just before I arrived there. A young American, whose name escapes me—but he had been sent from Washington in connection with the reports of unknown submarines in the Caribbean—died in just the same way.”

“Significant!”

“Very! But there were singular features in this case. It occurred at an hotel in Port au Prince. One odd fact was that a heavy Service pistol, fully charged, was found beside him.”

“Where was—the body?”

“In bed. But the mosquito net was raised as though he had been on the point of getting up. Here occurred the first reference to Snapping Fingers. It seems that he opened the door at about eleven o’clock at night and asked another resident who happened to be passing if he had snapped his fingers.”

“Snapped his fingers?”

“Yes, it’s queer, isn’t it? However—he was found dead in the morning.”

“And no trace?”

“None. But I have a hazy suspicion that those in charge of the investigation didn’t know where to look. However, the next victim was a German—undoubtedly a German agent. He died in exactly that way.”

“At that same place?”

“The same hotel, but not in the same room. But the case of the German differed in one respect:
someone else
heard the Snapping Fingers!”

Inside the speeding car was a fog of tobacco smoke; outside, the lights of New York flashed by like a flaming ribbon.

“Who
heard it?”

“Kennard Wood! He occupied the next room. I had just reached Port au Prince at the time, although I was putting up elsewhere; so that I know more about the case of Schonberg—that was the German’s name. After Schonberg had retired that night, it appears that Kennard Wood became curious about what he was doing. From the end of one balcony to another was not a difficult climb; and with the exercise of a little ingenuity it is easy to peep through a slatted shutter. He crept along. The German’s room was in darkness. He was about to climb back, when he heard a sound like that of someone snapping his fingers!”

“From inside the room?”

“Yes. It was repeated several times, but no light was switched on. Kennard Wood returned. Schonberg was found dead in the morning. His door was locked; his shutters were still closed.”

“What did you do when you heard of this?”

“I went along at once. I have a pretty strong stomach, but the sight of that heavy Teutonic frame quite drained of blood—ugh! Fortunately for the hotel a number of cases occurred elsewhere, not only in Port au Prince but as far north as Cap Haitien. A story got about amongst the coloured population that it was Voodoo, that someone they call the Queen Mamaloi (a fabulous woman supposed to live in the interior) was impatient for sacrifices. A perfect state of panic developed; no one dared to sleep. My God! to think that the fiend, Fu-Manchu, has brought
that
horror to New York!”

“But what
is
it, Smith? What
can
it be?”

“Just another agent of death, Kerrigan. Some unclean thing bred in a tropical swamp—”

“
I
t is more than I can bear, Smith,” I whispered, and turned away, “Although I didn’t know Longton, it is more than I can bear.”

“Probably painless, Mr. Kerrigan,” said Inspector Hawk. “Cheer up, sir.”

But there was nothing cheerful in his manner, his appearance, or his voice. He was a tall, angular, gloomy person, depressingly taciturn; and he gave to each of his rare remarks the value of a biblical quotation. Under the harsh light of suspended lamps Longton lay on a stone slab. In life he had been slightly built; had had scanty fair hair and a small blond moustache. There was a sound of dripping water.

“What have you got to say, doctor?” asked Smith, addressing a stout, red-faced man who beamed amiably through green-rimmed spectacles.

“A very unusual case.” the police doctor replied breezily. “Very unusual. Observe the irregular rose-coloured spots, the evidences of pernicious, or aplastic, anaemia. A malarial subject, beyond doubt; but the actual cause of death remains obscure.”

“Quite,” snapped Smith; “most obscure. I am sorry to seem to check your diagnosis, doctor, but James Longton had not suffered from malaria; and a month ago he was freshly-coloured as yourself. Have you heard, by chance, of the minor epidemic which recently appeared in the Canal Zone and later in Haiti?”

“Some short account was published in the newspapers, but I don’t believe medical circles paid much attention to it. In any case, there can be no parallel here.”