The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
is evident, and that the Tuesday night proposed was last night is a
reasonable deduction. The reference to a pigtail is principally
interesting because of what was found on Cadby's body."
Inspector Weymouth nodded affirmatively, and Smith glanced at his watch.
"Exactly ten-twenty-three," he said. "I will trouble you, Inspector,
for the freedom of your fancy wardrobe. There is time to spend an hour
in the company of Shen-Yan's opium friends."
Weymouth raised his eyebrows.
"It might be risky. What about an official visit?"
Nayland Smith laughed.
"Worse than useless! By your own showing, the place is open to
inspection. No; guile against guile! We are dealing with a Chinaman,
with the incarnate essence of Eastern subtlety, with the most
stupendous genius that the modern Orient has produced."
"I don't believe in disguises," said Weymouth, with a certain
truculence. "It's mostly played out, that game, and generally leads to
failure. Still, if you're determined, sir, there's an end of it.
Foster will make your face up. What disguise do you propose to adopt?"
"A sort of Dago seaman, I think; something like poor Cadby. I can rely
on my knowledge of the brutes, if I am sure of my disguise."
"You are forgetting me, Smith," I said.
He turned to me quickly.
"Petrie," he replied, "it is MY business, unfortunately, but it is no
sort of hobby."
"You mean that you can no longer rely upon me?" I said angrily.
Smith grasped my hand, and met my rather frigid stare with a look of
real concern on his gaunt, bronzed face.
"My dear old chap," he answered, "that was really unkind. You know
that I meant something totally different."
"It's all right, Smith;" I said, immediately ashamed of my choler, and
wrung his hand heartily. "I can pretend to smoke opium as well as
another. I shall be going, too, Inspector."
As a result of this little passage of words, some twenty minutes later
two dangerous-looking seafaring ruffians entered a waiting cab,
accompanied by Inspector Weymouth, and were driven off into the
wilderness of London's night. In this theatrical business there was,
to my mind, something ridiculous--almost childish--and I could have
laughed heartily had it not been that grim tragedy lurked so near to
farce.
The mere recollection that somewhere at our journey's end Fu-Manchu
awaited us was sufficient to sober my reflections--Fu-Manchu, who, with
all the powers represented by Nayland Smith pitted against him, pursued
his dark schemes triumphantly, and lurked in hiding within this very
area which was so sedulously patrolled--Fu-Manchu, whom I had never
seen, but whose name stood for horrors indefinable! Perhaps I was
destined to meet the terrible Chinese doctor to-night.
I ceased to pursue a train of thought which promised to lead to morbid
depths, and directed my attention to what Smith was saying.
"We will drop down from Wapping and reconnoiter, as you say the place
is close to the riverside. Then you can put us ashore somewhere below.
Ryman can keep the launch close to the back of the premises, and your
fellows will be hanging about near the front, near enough to hear the
whistle."
"Yes," assented Weymouth; "I've arranged for that. If you are
suspected, you shall give the alarm?"
"I don't know," said Smith thoughtfully. "Even in that event I might
wait awhile."
"Don't wait too long," advised the Inspector. "We shouldn't be much
wiser if your next appearance was on the end of a grapnel, somewhere
down Greenwich Reach, with half your fingers missing."
The cab pulled up outside the river police depot, and Smith and I
entered without delay, four shabby-looking fellows who had been seated
in the office springing up to salute the Inspector, who followed us in.
"Guthrie and Lisle," he said briskly, "get along and find a dark corner
which commands the door of Singapore Charlie's off the old Highway.
You look the dirtiest of the troupe, Guthrie; you might drop asleep on
the pavement, and Lisle can argue with you about getting home. Don't
move till you hear the whistle inside or have my orders, and note
everybody that goes in and comes out. You other two belong to this
division?"
The C.I.D. men having departed, the remaining pair saluted again.
"Well, you're on special duty to-night. You've been prompt, but don't
stick your chests out so much. Do you know of a back way to
Shen-Yan's?"
The men looked at one another, and both shook their heads.
"There's an empty shop nearly opposite, sir," replied one of them. "I
know a broken window at the back where we could climb in. Then we
could get through to the front and watch from there."
"Good!" cried the Inspector. "See you are not spotted, though; and if
you hear the whistle, don't mind doing a bit of damage, but be inside
Shen-Yan's like lightning. Otherwise, wait for orders."
Inspector Ryman came in, glancing at the clock.
"Launch is waiting," he said.
"Right," replied Smith thoughtfully. "I am half afraid, though, that
the recent alarms may have scared our quarry--your man, Mason, and then
Cadby. Against which we have that, so far as he is likely to know,
there has been no clew pointing to this opium den. Remember, he thinks
Cadby's notes are destroyed."
"The whole business is an utter mystery to me," confessed Ryman. "I'm
told that there's some dangerous Chinese devil hiding somewhere in
London, and that you expect to find him at Shen-Yan's. Supposing he
uses that place, which is possible, how do you know he's there
to-night?"
"I don't," said Smith; "but it is the first clew we have had pointing
to one of his haunts, and time means precious lives where Dr. Fu-Manchu
is concerned."
"Who is he, sir, exactly, this Dr. Fu-Manchu?"
"I have only the vaguest idea, Inspector; but he is no ordinary
criminal. He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put
on earth for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose
wealth is enormous, and his mission in Europe is to PAVE THE WAY! Do
you follow me? He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making
that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has
ever dreamed of it."
Ryman stared, but made no reply, and we went out, passing down to the
breakwater and boarding the waiting launch. With her crew of three,
the party numbered seven that swung out into the Pool, and, clearing
the pier, drew in again and hugged the murky shore.
The night had been clear enough hitherto, but now came scudding
rainbanks to curtain the crescent moon, and anon to unveil her again
and show the muddy swirls about us. The view was not extensive from
the launch. Sometimes a deepening of the near shadows would tell of a
moored barge, or lights high above our heads mark the deck of a large
vessel. In the floods of moonlight gaunt shapes towered above; in the
ensuing darkness only the oily glitter of the tide occupied the
foreground of the night-piece.
The Surrey shore was a broken wall of blackness, patched with lights
about which moved hazy suggestions of human activity. The bank we were
following offered a prospect even more gloomy--a dense, dark mass, amid
which, sometimes, mysterious half-tones told of a dock gate, or sudden
high lights leapt flaring to the eye.
Then, out of the mystery ahead, a green light grew and crept down upon
us. A giant shape loomed up, and frowned crushingly upon the little
craft. A blaze of light, the jangle of a bell, and it was past. We
were dancing in the wash of one of the Scotch steamers, and the murk
had fallen again.
Discords of remote activity rose above the more intimate throbbing of
our screw, and we seemed a pigmy company floating past the workshops of
Brobdingnagian toilers. The chill of the near water communicated
itself to me, and I felt the protection of my shabby garments
inadequate against it.
Far over on the Surrey shore a blue light--vaporous,
mysterious--flicked translucent tongues against the night's curtain.
It was a weird, elusive flame, leaping, wavering, magically changing
from blue to a yellowed violet, rising, falling.
"Only a gasworks," came Smith's voice, and I knew that he, too, had
been watching those elfin fires. "But it always reminds me of a
Mexican teocalli, and the altar of sacrifice."
The simile was apt, but gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the
severed fingers, and could not repress a shudder.
"On your left, past the wooden pier! Not where the lamp is--beyond
that; next to the dark, square building--Shen-Yan's."
It was Inspector Ryman speaking.
"Drop us somewhere handy, then," replied Smith, "and lie close in, with
your ears wide open. We may have to run for it, so don't go far away."
From the tone of his voice I knew that the night mystery of the Thames
had claimed at least one other victim.
"Dead slow," came Ryman's order. "We'll put in to the Stone Stairs."
CHAPTER VI
A SEEMINGLY drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as
Smith lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above
which, crudely painted, were the words:
"SHEN-YAN, Barber."
I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs,
German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the
window ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden
steps, and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.
We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship
with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown
across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of
some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in
what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a
curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed
in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and,
advancing, shook his head vigorously.
"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from
one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. "Too late! Shuttee
shop!"
"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's
nose. "Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee
pipe, you yellow scum--savvy?"
My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a
vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of
gentle persuasion.
"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down,
Charlie. You can lay to it."
"No hab got pipee--" began the other.
Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.
"Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see."
He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a
dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was
literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with
opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it. Every
breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the
floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which
ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied. Most of the
occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their
bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes. These had not yet
attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.
"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing Smith's
shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.
Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.
"Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--or plenty
heap trouble."