The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (9 page)

“Where is he?”

Fah Lo Suee’s face was hidden against Huan Tsung’s shoulder.

“I have induced Excellency, in this great urgency, to rejoin the plane in which we came—a mode of travel unsuited to my advanced years.” He raised twinkling old eyes and spoke in English. “Sir Denis—you have never failed to exhibit towards me the most correct and formal courtesy. In return, I wish to give you some advice, and to make my own position clear.”

“He must go free!” Fah Lo Suee raised her eyes to the parchment face. “I insist,
he
must go, too!”

Huang Tsung stroked her hair. But he was watching Nayland Smith.

“Beyond doubt, Sir Denis, those distinguished men now held at headquarters will be detained until these cellars have been pumped out. I fear, if your body should be found here, our five friends would proceed from prison to the execution shed.”

“I agree,” Smith rapped.

“But, failing such a discovery, it is not clear to me what charge can be preferred against them. You can do us no more harm than you have done already. Even if these men could be identified as members of our Order, they have committed no breach of the penal code with which I am familiar.”

Nayland Smith remained silent. He knew exactly what the master diplomat was going to say.

“And I believe, Sir Denis, you yourself, an officer of the law, would hesitate to identify any one of them?”

It was an evasion, but in the circumstances, an acceptable evasion.

“Since I have not seen their faces, legally it would be improper for me to do so.”

“A prudent decision. I fear they will be marked men. Yet, as no crime has been committed here tonight, I trust they will be released. But we are wasting time. The water already approaches my knees, which, as I am subject to rheumatism, is regrettable.” He turned Fah Lo Suee about so that she faced the stair. “My daughter tells me that she promised to be waiting for you. Members of my family always fulfil their promises. Here she is.”

It was Mai Cha who stood holding the light.

Fah Lo Suee twisted around, looked back.

“You promised…”

“Precede me, Lily Blossom, with Mai Cha. Sir Denis is safe.”

“But…”

“Precede me, child!”

The suave diplomat had become submerged. It was the word of command, spoken by one used to obedience.

Fah Lo Suee looked back once more, but Nayland Smith and old General Huan Tsung Chao were lost in shadows far behind.

It was an incredible maze of passages through which Nayland Smith was led by his aged guide. Once they came out under the stars, in a narrow court, crossed it and entered a house beyond. Here, again, they descended to cellars, finally to climb up to an odorous Chinese grocery store.

Huan Tsung leaned heavily on the counter, breathing hard.

“When I unlock the door,” he said slowly, “you will be free. I must exact one promise. It should not be hard to give. In whatever you may see fit to report concerning your escape, omit any reference to myself and to these premises. This—for Fah Lo Suee’s sake.”

“I promise, General.”

“Good morning, Sir Denis.”

Two minutes later, Nayland Smith stood in a silent, deserted street.

Reflectively, he began to fill his pipe.

“Dr Gregory Allen?” Gregory looked up from the newspaper he was reading in the lobby of his hotel. He recognised that clipped English voice but hadn’t expected to hear it now in Paris.

He saw a tall, lean-faced man, his crisp hair silvered at the temples, a man who looked like a retired Indian Army officer but whose smile was thirty years too young.

“Nayland Smith!” Gregory jumped up, hand stretched out. “What a happy surprise! How did you trail me here?”

“Got your address from the Sorbonne.” Sir Denis Nayland Smith dropped into a chair facing Gregory and began to fill his pipe. “I was one of your admiring audience in the lecture theatre. You speak French better than I do—in spite of your American accent.

“I didn’t join the mob in the lecturer’s room; but I enjoyed the account of your remarkable researches. For a youngster in his early thirties you have gone far.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I have reached an age, Allen—” Nayland Smith gave the boyish grin—”when your theories of extending life far beyond its present span begin to interest me.”

“You don’t look as though you need any of my new chemical discoveries to keep you young.”

“The fact is,” Nayland Smith said seriously, “that I hoped to find a certain person in your audience, a person who illustrates in his own survival the truth of your theories; a man of fabulous age—beyond doubt scientifically prolonged.

“I refer, of course, to Dr Fu-Manchu. He will have followed your career with interest. We know he’s in Paris. But we couldn’t spot him, although the place bristled with detectives.”

Gregory stared at the older man. An ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard and now an agent of the British Secret Service, Nayland Smith couldn’t be romancing.

“Does Fu-Manchu really exist?” Gregory asked incredulously.

“Indeed he does. He is both the greatest scientist and the most dangerous man alive. You must have heard his name.”

“His name, yes! But I thought—”

“You thought Fu-Manchu was a myth. Others have made the same mistake.”

“But a person of such unusual appearance in this country?”

“He has a variety of unusual appearances, Allen. He doesn’t conform to the popular idea of a Chinese and can pose successfully as a European. He speaks several languages fluently. His green, oblique eyes and his hands betray the Asiatic; but in public he wears gloves and tinted glasses.”

“To have escaped prison or the gallows for so long, he surely has a lot of helpers?”

Nayland Smith smiled—but it was a grim smile.

“He has an international organisation, men and women; scientists, politicians, watching eyes everywhere.”

“But what kind of person would work for him?”

“Every kind. He has his own methods of recruiting assistants and seeing that they work. Tell me, where do you go next?”

“To London. I’m invited to repeat my lecture at King’s College. My grant from Columbia University doesn’t allow luxury, so I have reserved accommodation in a small hotel near the Strand.”

“Give me the address. I’ll look you up.”

“Bring our mutual friend, Dr Petrie, if he’s in town. I should love to see him again. I need hardly say how much I’d like to meet Dr Fu-Manchu as well.”

“I hope you never do!” Nayland Smith replied…

It was crowded next day on the cross-Channel steamer. As the ship cleared Calais, Gregory found a quiet spot at the port-side rail, well forward. There were many things he wanted to think about, but the shadowy Dr Fu-Manchu kept returning to his thoughts. He found himself inspecting the passengers in search of a man wearing tinted glasses and gloves.

He hadn’t seen one. But he had seen a very pretty girl coming on board alone, carrying a large artist’s portfolio, and had imagined that she stared at him.

As she was passing him the ship suddenly rolled to port. She stumbled against him, and dropped the portfolio in the scuppers.

Gregory steadied himself against the rail, grabbed up the portfolio and turned. She was even prettier than he had thought in the first glimpse as she came on board.

The ship rolled to starboard and he grasped a slim shoulder to support her.

“I’m so sorry,” he spoke awkwardly. “Are you feeling unwell?”

Her delicate colouring seemed to make the question absurd. “Oh, no,” she assured him. “It was the so sudden lurch that nearly upset me.” She had a delightful accent. “It made me feel a little—swimmy.” She laughed. “Thank you very much.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for. Are you travelling alone?”

“Yes. I go to meet friends in London.”

Rather reluctantly, Gregory relaxed his grip bf her shoulder. She had remarkable blue eyes which possessed the strange quality, even when her lips smiled, of retaining a look of sadness that he found haunting.

“I have a splendid prescription for that swimmy feeling,” he told her in French, tucking her portfolio under his arm. “As a fellow artist, of sorts, please take my advice.”

She hesitated for a moment. The blue eyes considered him. Then she nodded and they went off along the deck together. The swell was increasing. Presently they faced each other across a table in the nearly deserted dining room. Gregory ordered dry champagne.

Her name, he learned, was just “Mignon”. She made her living by drawing caricatures for French weekly journals, and had already exhibited two paintings at the Salon.

“Your card says you are a doctor. I never heard of a doctor of painting.”

Gregory laughed, and told her how during his two years at the Sorbonne, where he had completed his studies, he had found time also to study art, which had been his first choice as a profession.

“I, too, am a bred-in-the-bone Bohemian, Mignon.”

“Oh, I know you are.” Across her face a shadow of compassion passed. “What a pity you changed your mind. Don’t you think science is going too far? Isn’t it upsetting the balance of nature? Science creates horrible things, and art creates beauty.”

“You have something there.”

She watched him wistfully. “You must often think of those Paris days, of the carefree life of the students at the
atelier
. You lived in two different worlds. Do you ever regret the one you gave up?”

He refilled Mignon’s glass. Those compassionate blue eyes were oddly disturbing. “I sometimes wonder…”

* * *

Gregory couldn’t make out how he managed to miss Mignon at the customs shed, but, somehow, in the crowd at Dover he lost sight of her. He walked from one end of the boat train to the other, but couldn’t see her anywhere, until, looking farther afield, he caught a glimpse of a Jaguar gliding away from the dock. Mignon was in the passenger’s seat.

He concluded that black and white art paid better than science research and said goodbye to a dream…

It was raining by the time the train reached London. From his hotel suite, Gregory called King’s College, but could find nobody there from whom to get particulars about arrangements for his lecture. He ordered whisky to be sent up and wondered how he was going to kill time until the rain stopped.

He wondered, too, if he would ever see Mignon again. Evidently the friends she had come to meet moved in a financial circle in which he would be a misfit. Mignon? She had given him no other name. But Mignon was exactly the right one for her.

She seemed completely a part of the Bohemian Paris that he loved. Gregory took out a sketching block and a soft pencil. He began to draw a figure. His knowledge of anatomy had helped him in the life class, and he drew sweeping, confident lines, blocked in the features with bold touches of light and shade. At last, he held the drawing away for a critical look—and saw a rough but recognisable sketch of Mignon.

One thing was wrong. He had captured her pose, the slim lines of her figure, the oval face and smiling lips. But her eyes had defeated his pencil.

He had been subconsciously aware for some time of a sound which resembled muffled footsteps, but had ignored it. And at this moment he became aware of the footsteps again.

They were soft but continuous. There was something furtive in this caseless padding, something eerie. At one moment he thought it came from a room above; at another from the passage outside his own room—a sort of phantom patrol. Once, when the footfalls seemed to be passing his door, he ran and opened it, and saw no one.

Gregory took a look out of the window. He felt nervous and decided that a brisk walk would be good for him. The rain had stopped.

His mood was an odd one, an unhappy one. He had succeeded in his chosen profession, had earned the respect of older scientists, whose accomplishments he revered. His researches had won him wide recognition. Yet tonight he wished he had chosen to be a painter; he longed to escape from his accepted self, to be his natural self. He was still young, and there was a world outside the world of science, a world in which there remained room for romance, for beauty.

In the lobby he paused to light a cigarette. A wave of self-contempt swept over him. Had he, a trained scientist, fallen for that romantic myth, love at first sight? He left a message at the desk that he would be back in half an hour, swung the door open and stepped out into the street.

He was greeted by a flash of lightning which changed the gloomy night into a sort of blue-white day. Then came a volley of thunder so awesome that it might have heralded the end of the world. It prefaced a fresh deluge.

Gregory retired inside the porch. Left and right the street was deserted, until a figure came running through the downpour, a girl caught in the storm.

She dashed into the shelter of the porch, and Gregory found himself looking down at the piquant face, wet with rain, into the blue eyes of Mignon.

They stood for a moment watching the rain and then went to Gregory’s small suite.

She sat in the only comfortable chair which the living room offered. The expression in her eyes was almost tragic, but she forced a smile.