The Mask of Fu-Manchu (10 page)

He paused, steering a careful course through those immemorable thoroughfares where East and West mingle. Our pilot had just tricked sunset, and we drove on amid the swift, violet, ever changing dusk; dodging familiar native groups; a donkey-rider now and then—with villas shrinking right and left into the shadows, and dusty palms beginning to assume an appearance of silhouettes against the sky which is the roof of Egypt.

“It may have reached me earlier than it reached the authorities,” Dr. Petrie went on; “I have many native patients. But that the Veiled Prophet is reborn is common news throughout the native quarter!”

“This is damned serious!” said I.

Petrie swept left to avoid a party of three aged Egyptians trudging along the road to Cairo as though automobiles had not been invented.

“When I realised what lay behind it,” Petrie added, “I could only find one redeeming feature—that my wife, thank God! was in England. The centre of the trouble is farther east, but there’s a big reaction here.”

“The centre of the trouble,” rapped Nayland Smith, evidently having overheard some part of our conversation, “is here, in your car, Petrie!”

“What!”

The doctor’s sudden grip on the wheel jerked us from the right to the centre of the road, until he steadied himself; then:

“I don’t know what you mean. Smith,” he added.

“He means the big suitcase which I have with me!” the chief shouted. “It’s under my feet now!”

We were traversing a dark patch at the moment with a crossways ahead of us and a native café on the left. Petrie, a careful driver, had been trying for some time to pass a cart laden with fodder which jogged along obstinately in the middle of the road. Suddenly it was pulled in, and the doctor shot past.

Even as Sir Lionel spoke, and before Petrie could hope to avert the catastrophe, out from the nearer side of this café, supported by two companions, a man (apparently drunk or full of hashish) came lurching. I had a hazy impression that the two supporters had sprung back; then, although Petrie swerved violently and applied brakes, a sickening thud told me that the bumpers had struck him…

A crowd twenty or thirty strong gathered in a twinkling. They were, I noted, exclusively native. Petrie was out first—I behind him—Nayland Smith came next, and then Rima.

Voices were raised in high excitement. Men were gesticulating and shaking clenched fists at us.

“Carry him in,” said Petrie quietly. “I want to look at him. But I think this man is dead…”

On a wooden seat in the café we laid the victim, an elderly Egyptian, very raggedly dressed, who might have been a mendicant. A shouting mob blocked the doorway and swarmed about us. Their attitude was unpleasant.

Nayland Smith grabbed my arm.

“Give ’em hell in their own language!” he directed. “You’re a past master of the lingo.”

I turned, hands upraised, and practically exhausted my knowledge of Arab invective. I was so far successful as to produce a lull of stupefaction during which the doctor made a brief examination.

Rima throughout had kept close beside me; Nayland Smith stood near the feet of the victim—his face an unreadable mask, but his piercing gray eyes questioning Petrie. And at last:

“Where’s Barton?” said Petrie astonishingly, standing upright and looking about him—from Rima to myself and from me to Nayland Smith.

“Never mind Barton,” said the latter. “Is the man dead?”

“Dead?” Petrie echoed. “He’s been dead for at least three hours! He’s rigid... Where’s Barton?”

S
ir Denis forming the head of the wedge, the four of us fought our way out of the café to the street, Petrie and I acting as Rima’s bodyguard.

The hostility of the crowd was now becoming nasty. The mystery of the thing had literally turned me cold. Then, to crown it all, as we gained the open, I was just in time to see the chief, standing beside Petrie’s car, deliver a formidable drive to the jaw of a big Nubian and to see the Negro sprawl upon his back.

“A
frame-up,
Smith!” came his great voice, as he sighted us. “To me, Cavaliers! We’re in the hands of the Roundheads!”

So strange a plot I could never have imagined, but its significance was all to obvious. The chief’s cry was characteristic of the man’s entire outlook on life. He was a throwback to days when personal combat was a gentleman’s recreation. His book
History and Art of the Rapier
might have been written by a musketeer, so wholly was the spirit of the author steeped in his bloodthirsty subject. This boyish diablerie it was which made him lovable, but perhaps as dangerous a companion as any man ever had.

One thing, however, I could not find it in my heart to forgive him: that he should expose Rima to peril consequent upon his crazy enthusiasms. I had come to want her near me in every waking moment. Yet now, with that threatening crowd about us and with every evidence that a secret enemy had engineered this hold-up, I found myself wishing that she, as well as Mrs. Petrie, had been safe in England.

How we should have fared, and how that singular episode would have ended, I cannot say. It was solved by the appearance of a member of one of the most efficient organisations in the world: a British-Egyptian policeman, his tarbush worn at a jaunty angle, his blue tunic uncreased as though it had left the tailor’s only that morning. His khaki breeches were first class, and his very boots apparently unsoiled by the dust. He elbowed his way into the crowd—aloof, alone, self-contained, all powerful.

I had seen the same calm official intrusion on the part of a New York policeman, and I had witnessed it with admiration in London. But never before had I welcomed it so as at the appearance of this semi-military figure that night on the outskirts of Cairo.

Gesticulating Egyptians sought to enlist his sympathy and hearing. He was deaf. It dawned upon me that the casual onlookers had been deceived as completely as ourselves. We were regarded as the slayers of the poor old mendicant. But the appearance of that stocky figure changed everything.

As we reached Barton:

“Is the case safe?” snapped Nayland Smith, glancing down at the Negro, now rapidly getting to his feet.

“It is,” the chief replied grimly. “That’s what they were after.” Sir Denis nodded shortly and turned to the police officer.

“Your
car, sir?” asked the latter. “What’s the trouble?”

“Remains to be investigated! You turned up at the right moment. My name is Nayland Smith. Have you been advised?”

The man started—stared hard, and then:

“Yes, sir.” He saluted. “Two days ago. Carry on, sir. I’ll deal with all this.”

“Good. You’re a smart officer. What’s your name?”

“John Banks, sir, on special duty here tonight.” “I’ll mention you at headquarters…”

“I
am not prepared to believe,” said Sir Lionel, walking up and down the big room reserved for him at Shepheard’s, “that even Dr. Fu-Manchu could have had a stock of dead men waiting on the road from Heliopolis.”

“Neither am I,” said Nayland Smith. “We may have avoided earlier traps. Those three old fellows, Petrie—” turning to the Doctor— “who seemed so reluctant to get out of your way, you remember, and the cart laden with fodder. I don’t suggest for a moment, Barton, that that poor old beggar was killed to serve the purpose; but Petrie here is of opinion that he died either from enteritis or poisoning, and the employment of a body in that way was probably a local inspiration on the part of the agents planted at that particular stage of our journey. He was pushed out, to the best of my recollection, from a shadowy patch of waste ground close beside the café. Where he actually died, I don’t suppose we shall ever know, but—” tugging at the lobe of his left ear—“it’s the most extraordinary trick I have ever met with, even in my dealings with…”

He paused, and Rima finished the sentence:

“Dr. Fu-Manchu.”

There came an interval. The shutters of the window which overlooked the garden were closed. Muted voices, laughter, and a sound of many footsteps upon sanded paths rose to us dimly. But that group in the room was silent, until:

“Only
he
could devise such a thing,” said the chief slowly, “and only you and I, Smith, could go one better.”

He pointed to a battered leather suitcase lying on a chair and began to laugh in his own boisterous fashion.

“I travel light, Smith!” he cried, “but my baggage is valuable!”

None of us responded to his mood, and Sir Denis stared at him very coldly.

“When is Ali Mahmoud due in Cairo?” he asked.

That queer question was so unexpected that I turned and stared at the speaker. The chief appeared to be quite taken aback; and:

“He’ll do well if he’s here with the heavy kit in four days,” he replied. “But why do you ask, Smith?”

Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably and began to walk up and down again.

“I should have thought, Barton,” he snapped, “that we knew one another well enough to have shared confidences.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply what I say. If it conveys nothing—forget it!”

“I shan’t forget it,” said the chief gloweringly, his tufted brows drawn together. “But I shall continue to conduct my own affairs in my own way.”

“Good enough. I’m not going to quarrel with you. But I should like to make a perfectly amiable suggestion.”

“One moment,” Petrie interrupted. “We’re all old friends here. We’ve gone through queer times together, and after all—there’s a common enemy. It’s useless to pretend we don’t know who that common enemy is. You agree with me, Smith? For God’s sake, let’s stand four square. I don’t know all the facts. But I strongly suspect—” turning to Sir Denis—“that
you
do. You’re the stumbling block, Barton. You’re keeping something up your sleeve. Lay all the cards on the table.”

The chief gnawed his moustache, locked his hands behind him, and stood very upright, looking from face to face. He was in his most truculent mood. But at last, glancing aside from Petrie:

“I await your amiable suggestion, Smith,” he growled.

“I’ll put it forward,” said the latter. “It is this: A Bibby liner is leaving Port Said for Southampton tomorrow. I suggest that Rima secures a berth.”

Rima jumped up at his words, but I saw Petrie grasp her hand as if to emphasise his agreement with them.

“Why should I be sent home, Sir Denis?” she demanded. “What have I done? If you’re thinking of my safety, I’ve been living for months in remote camps in Khorassan and Persia, and you see—” she laughed and glanced aside at me—“I’m still alive.”

“You have done nothing, my dear,” Sir Denis returned, and smiled in that delightful way which, for all his seniority, sometimes made me wonder why any woman could spare me a thought while he was present. “Nor,” he added, “do I doubt your courage. But while your uncle maintains his present attitude, I don’t merely fear—I know— that all of us, yourself included, stand in peril of our lives.”

There was an unpleasant sense of tension in the atmosphere. The chief was in one of his most awkward moods—which I knew well. He had some dramatic trick up his sleeve. Of this I was fully aware. And he was afraid that Sir Denis was going to spoil his big effect.

Sir Lionel, for all his genius, and despite his really profound learning, at times was actuated by the motives which prompt a mischievous schoolboy to release a mouse at a girl’s party.

Incongruously, at this moment, at least from our point of view, a military band struck up somewhere beneath; for this was a special occasion of some kind, and the famous garden was en fete. None of us, however, were in gala humour; but:

“Let’s go down and see what’s going on, Shan,” said Rima. She glanced at Sir Lionel. “Can you spare him?”

“Glad to get rid of him,” growled the chief. “He’s hand and hoof with Smith, here, and one of ’em’s enough…”

And so presently Rima and I found ourselves crossing the lobby below and watching a throng entering the ballroom from which strains of a dance band came floating out.