The Bride of Fu-Manchu (8 page)

“I know. Nevertheless, someone looked in. I heard a faint scuffling—and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of a yellow hand as the man dropped back.”

“Yellow hand?” Sir Denis laughed shortly. “Our cross-eyed friend from the Villa Jasmin, Sterling! He was spying out the land. Shortly after this, I suggest, the
lady
arrived?”

I stared at him in surprise.

“You are quite right. I suppose Sister Therese told you? Mrs. Petrie came a few minutes afterwards.”

“Describe her,” he directed tersely.

Startled by his manner, I did my best to comply, when:

“She has green eyes,” he broke in.

“I couldn’t swear to it. Her veil obscured her eyes.”

“They are green,” he affirmed confidently. “Her skin is the colour of ivory, and she has slender, indolent hands. She is as graceful as a leopardess, the purring of which treacherous creature her voice surely reminded you?”

Sir Denis’s sardonic humour completed my bewilderment. Recalling the almost tender way in which he had spoken the words, “Poor Karâmanèh,” I found it impossible to reconcile those tones with the savagery of his present manner.

“I’m afraid you puzzle me,” I confessed. “I quite understood that you held Mrs. Petrie in the highest esteem.”

“So I do,” he snapped. “But we are not talking about Mrs. Petrie!”

“Not talking about Mrs. Petrie! But—”

“The lady who favoured you with a visit tonight, Sterling, is known as Fah Lo Suee (I don’t know why). She is the daughter of the most dangerous man living today, East or West—Dr. Fu-Manchu!”

“But, Sir Denis!”

He suddenly grasped my shoulders, staring into my eyes.

“No one can blame you if you have been duped, Sterling. You thought you were dealing with Petrie’s wife: it was a stroke of daring genius on the part of the enemy—”

He paused; but his look asked the question.

“I refused to permit her to touch him, nevertheless,” I said.

Sir Denis’s expression changed. His brown, eager face lighted up.

“Good man!” he said in a low voice, and squeezed my shoulders, then dropped his hands. “Good man.”

It was mild enough, as appreciation goes, yet somehow I valued those words more highly than a decoration. “Did she mention my name?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

I thought a while, and then:

“No,” I replied. “I am positive on the point.”

“Good!” he muttered, and began to pace up and down again.

“There’s just a chance—just a chance he has overlooked me. Tell me, omitting no detail that you recall, exactly what took place.”

To the best of my ability, I did as he directed.

He interrupted me once only: when I spoke of that sepulchral warning—

“Where was the woman when you heard it?” he rapped.

“Practically in my arms. I had just dragged her back.”

“The voice was impossible to identify?”

“Quite.”

“And you could not swear to the fact that Petrie’s lips moved?”

“No. It was a fleeting impression, no more.”

“It was after this episode that she subjected you to her hypnotic tricks?”

“Hypnotic tricks!”

“Yes—you have narrowly escaped, Sterling.”

“You refer”—I said with some embarrassment, for I had been perfectly frank—“to my strange impulses?”

He nodded.

“No. It was the voice which broke the spell.”

He twitched his ear for some moments, then:

“Go on!” he rapped.

And when I had come to the end:

“You got off lightly,” he said. “She is as dangerous as a poised cobra! And now, I have another job for you.”

“I’m ready.”

“Hurry back to Villa Jasmin—and call me up here if all’s well there. Have you a gun?”

“No. I lent mine to the chauffeur.”

“Take this.” He drew an automatic from his topcoat pocket. “Drive like hell and shoot if necessary. You are a marked man.”

As I hurried out, Dr. Cartier hurried in. “Ah!” Nayland Smith exclaimed. “I regret troubling you, doctor; but I want you to examine Petrie very carefully.”

“What! There is some change?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

CHAPTER TEN

T
he two-seater which had been placed at Petrie’s disposal was no beauty, but the engine was fairly reliable, and I set out along the Corniche about as fast as it is safe to travel upon such a tortuous road.

I suppose it had taken me a ridiculously long time to grasp the crowning horror which lay behind this black business. As I swung around the dangerous curves of that route, the parapet broken in many places and the mirror of the Mediterranean lying far below on the right, my brain grew very active.

The discovery of a fly-catching plant near the place where a man had been seized by this frightful infection, coupled with our finding later a similar specimen in Petrie’s laboratory, had suggested pretty pointedly that human agency was at work. Yet, somehow, in spite of the apparition of that grinning, yellow face in the kitchen-garden of the villa, I had not been able to realize, or not been able to believe, that human agency was actually
directing
the pestilence.

Sir Denis Nayland Smith had adjusted my perspective. Someone, apparently a shadowy being known as Fu-Manchu, was responsible for these outbreaks!

And the woman who had posed as Petrie’s wife, the woman who had tried, and all but succeeded in her attempt to bewitch me, was of the flesh and blood of this fiend. She was Chinese; and her mission had been—what?

To poison Petrie—as Sir Manston Rorke had been poisoned?

As I swung into the lighted tunnel cut through the rock, I laughed aloud when that seeming absurdity presented itself to my mind.

A new disease had appeared in the world. Yes; of this, I had had painful evidence. It was possibly due, according to Sir Denis, to the presence in France of an unfamiliar fly—what he had called a genus-hybrid.

So much I was prepared to admit.

But how could any man be responsible for the appearance of such an insect, anywhere and at any time; much less in such widely separated places as those which had been visited by the epidemic?

The Purple Shadow...

I had nearly reached the end of the rock cutting. There was a dangerous corner just ahead; and I had allowed my thoughts to wander rather wide of the job in hand. A big car, a Rolls-Royce, appeared suddenly. The driver—some kind of African, as I saw— was taking so much of the road on the bend that no room was left for me.

Jamming on the brakes, I pulled close in against the wall of the tunnel... and I acted only just in time.

The driver of the Rolls checked slightly and swept right—missing me by six inches or less!

I had a clear, momentary view of the occupants of the car which had so nearly terminated my immediate interest in affairs...

How long I stayed there after the beautiful black-and-silver thing had purred away into the darkness, I don’t know. But I remember turning round and staring over the folded, dusty hood in a vain attempt to read the number.

The car had two occupants.

In regard to one of those occupants I wondered if the wild driving of the Negro chauffeur and my preoccupation with the other had led me to form a false impression. Because, when the Rolls had swept on its lordly way, I realized that my memory retained an image of something not entirely human.

A yellow face buried in the wings of an upturned fur collar I had certainly seen: a keen wind from the Alps made the night bitingly cold. The man wore a fur cap pulled down nearly to his brows, creating a curious mediaeval effect. But this face had a placid, almost god-like immobility, gaunt, dreadful, yet sealed with power like the features of a dead Pharoah.

Some chance trick of the lighting might have produced the illusion (its reality I could not admit); but about the second traveller I had no doubts whatever.

Her charming head framed—as that other skull-like head was framed—in the upturned collar of a fur coat... I saw Fleurette!

And I thought of a moss-rose...

I turned to the wheel again.

Fleurette!

She had not seen me, had not suspected that I was there.

Probably, I reflected, it would not have interested her to know.

But her companion? I tested the starter, wondering if it would function after the shock. I was relieved to find that it did. The Rolls was miles away, now, unless the furious driving of the African chauffeur had led to disaster... That yellow face and those glittering green eyes—I asked myself the question: Could this be Mahdi Bey?

Somehow I could not believe the man with Fleurette to be an Egyptian. Yet, I reflected, driving on, there had been that about him which had conjured an image to my mind... the image of Seti the First—that King of Egypt whose majesty had survived three thousand years...

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
he car in which Nayland Smith had come from Cannes was standing just where the steep descent to the little garage made a hairpin bend. I supposed that the man had decided to park there for the night. But I was compelled to pull in behind, as it was impossible to pass.

I walked on beyond the bend to the back of the bungalow. A path to the left led around the building to the little verandah; one to the right fell away in stepped terraces, skirting the garden and terminating at the laboratory.

My mind, from the time of that near crash with the Rolls up to this present moment, had been preoccupied. The mystery of Fleurette had usurped my thoughts. Fleurette—her charming little bronzed face enveloped in fur; a wave of her hair gleaming like polished mahogany. Now, as I started down the slope, a warning instinct spoke to me. I found myself snatched back to dangerous reality.

I pulled up, listening; but I could not detect the Kohler engine.

Some nocturnal flying thing hovered near me; I could hear the humming of its wings. Vividly, horribly, I visualized that hairy insect with its glossy back, and almost involuntarily, victim of a swift, overmastering and sickly terror, I began striking out right and left in the darkness...

Self-contempt came to my aid. I stood still again.

The insect, probably some sort of small beetle, was no longer audible. I thought of the fly-haunted swamps I had known, and grew hot with embarrassment. The Purple Shadow was a ghastly death; but Petrie had faced it unflinchingly...

Natural courage returned. A too vivid imagination had betrayed me.

I reached the laboratory and found it dark and silent. This was not unexpected. I supposed that the man had turned in on the couch. He was a tough type who had served in the French mercantile marine; I doubted if he were ever troubled by imagination. He had been given to understand, since this was the story we had told to Mme Dubonnet, that Petrie was suffering from influenza. He had accepted without demur Dr. Cartier’s assurance that there was no danger of infection.

Walking around to the door, I rapped sharply.

There was no reply.

Far below I could see red roofs peeping out of purplish shadow, and, beyond, the sea gleaming under the moon; but by reason of its position the laboratory lay in darkness.

Having rapped several times without result, I began to wish that I had brought a torch, for I thought that then I could have looked in at the window. But even as the idea crossed my mind, I remembered that the iron shutters were drawn.

Thus far, stupidly, I had taken it for granted that the door was locked. But failing to get a response from the man inside, I now tried the handle and found, to my great surprise, that the door was unlocked.

I opened it. The laboratory was pitch black and reeked of the smell of mimosa.

“Hullo, there!” I cried. “Are you asleep?”

There was no reply, but I detected a sound of heavy breathing as I groped for the switch. When I found it, the lamps came up very brightly, dipped, and then settled down.

“My God!” I groaned. The man from Cannes lay face downward on the couch!

I ran across and tried to move him. He was a big, heavy fellow, and one limply down-stretched arm, the fingers touching the floor, told me that this was no natural repose. Indeed, the state of the place had prepared me for this.