Inspector McGrew shook his head blankly, staring in a fascinated way at the speaker.
“Yet the card-holder,” Nayland Smith continued, “is the solution of the mystery of Blondie Hahn’s death.” He turned abruptly—he seemed to move on springs—the man’s nervous tension was electrical. “I want all these exhibits to go with me in the car.”
He rested his hand on Mark Hepburn’s shoulder. Hepburn looked very pale in the grey light.
“Note the two thousand dollars in the card case,” he said in a low voice. “There was something else in there as well. Dr. Fu Manchu always settles his debts . . . sometimes with interest. . . .”
Chapter 16
“BLUEBEARD”
Moya Adair closed her eyes as those green eyes opened. The man behind the table spoke, in that imperious, high-pitched voice.
“I accept your explanation,” he said. “None of us is infallible.”
Mrs. Adair raised her lashes and tried to sustain the speaker’s regard, but failed, turning her glance aside.
The face of Dr. Fu Manchu sometimes reminded her of a devil mask which hung upon the wall of her father’s study in Ireland.
“You serve me admirably. I regret that your service is one of fear. I prefer enthusiasm. You are a beautiful woman; for this reason I have employed you. Men are creatures of wax which white fingers can mould to their will—to my will. For always, Moya Adair, your will must be my will—or, we shall part. . . .”
The blue eyes were turned swiftly in his direction, and then swiftly away again. Mrs. Adair was perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed and apparently perfectly composed. This awful Chinaman who had taken command of her life held in his grasp all that made life dear to her. Her gloved hand rested motionless upon the chair-arm, but she turned her head aside and bit her lip.
The air of the small, quiet room was heavy with a smell of stale incense.
“I am an old man,” the compelling voice continued; “older than your imagination would permit you to believe.” Those jade-green eyes were closed again—the speaker seemed to be thinking aloud. “I have been worshipped, I have been scorned;
I have been flattered, mocked, betrayed, treated as a charlatan—as a criminal. There are warrants for my arrest in three European countries. Yet, always I have been selfless.” He paused. He was so still, so seemingly impassive, that he might have been a carven image. . . .
“My crimes, so termed, have been merely the removal from my path of those who obstructed me. Always I have dreamed of a sane world, yet men have called me mad; of a world in which war should be impossible, disease eliminated, overpopulation checked, labour found for all willing hands—a world of peace. Save only three, I have found no human soul, of my own race or another, to work wholly for that goal. And now my most implacable enemy is upon me. . . .”
Suddenly the green eyes opened. Long, slender yellow hands with incredibly pointed nails were torn from the sleeves of the yellow robe. Dr. Fu Manchu stood upright, raising those evilly beautiful hands above him. A note of exaltation came into his voice. Mrs. Adair clutched the arms of the chair in which she sat. Never before had her eventful life brought her in touch with inspired fanaticism.
“Gods of my fathers”—pitched so high that strange voice laid a queer stress on sibilants—”masters of the world! Are all my dreams to end in a prison cell, in the death of a common felon?”
For a while he stood upright, arms upraised, then dropped back again into his chair and concealed his hands in the sleeves of his robe.
Moya Adair strove for composure. This man terrified her as no man in her experience ever had had power to do. Instinctively she had realized the dreadful crimes that marked his life. He was coldly remorseless. Now, shaken emotionally by this glimpse of the hidden Fu Manchu, she wondered if she had become subjected to an inspired madman. Or had this eerie master of her destiny achieved a philosophy beyond the reach of her intellectual powers?
When the chinaman spoke again his harsh voice was perfectly cool.
“In the United States I have found a crude, but efficient, organization ready to my hand. Prohibition attracted to this country the trained law-breakers of the world. They had no purpose but that of personal gain. The sanity of President Roosevelt has terminated some of these promising careers. Many spiders are missing, but the webs can be mended. You see, Moya Adair”—the green eyes were fixed upon her, glittering, hypnotically—”although women can never under stand, were not meant to understand—it is to women that men always look for understanding.”
Now she was unable to withdraw her gaze. He had taken control other—she knew herself helpless. There was magic in those long green eyes; their power was terrible. But something there was also—something she had not looked for— which reconciled her to this control.
“I do not trust you—no woman is to be trusted in a world of men. Yet because I am a man too, and very lonely in this my last battle to crush what the West calls civilization . . . I will admit you one step further into my plans—I have means of watching those who profess to serve me. I know where I can place my trust. . . .”
Mrs. Adair experienced a sensation as though the speaker’s eyes had usurped the whole of the small room. She was submerged in a green lake, magnetic, thrilling, absorbing. The strange voice reached her from far away: she was resigned to the thraldom.
“There is no crime except the crime of disobedience to my will. My conception of life transcends the laws of all men living to-day. When I achieve my ambition, those who stand beside me will share my mastery of the world. Of the demagogues battling for power in this troubled country I have selected one as my own. . . .”
Moya Adair emerged from the green lake. Dr. Fu Manchu had closed his eyes. He sat like a craven image of a dead god behind the lacquered table.
“I am sending you,” the guttural, imperious voice continued, “to Harvey Bragg.” You will act in accordance with instructions.”
In the large Park Avenue apartment of Emmanuel Dumas, Harvey Bragg was holding one of those receptions which at once scandalized and fascinated his millions of followers when they read about them in the daily newspapers. These orgiastic entertainments which sometimes resembled a burlesque of a Neronian banquet and sometimes a parody of a Hollywood cabaret scene, had marked his triumphal progress from the state which he represented right up to New York.
“Bluebeard of the Backwoods”—as some political writer had dubbed him—Bragg had interested, amused, scandalized and horrified the inhabitants of the South and of the Middle West, and now was preparing to show himself a second Cyrus, master of modern Babylon. New York was the bright orange upon which the greedy eyes were set. New York he would squeeze dry.
Lola Dumas’ somewhat equivocal place in his affairs merely served to add glamour to the man’s strange reputation. Now, entertaining in her father’s home, he demonstrated himself to be that which he believed himself to be—an up-to-date emperor whose wishes transcended all laws.
Lola had been twice married and twice divorced. After each of these divorces she had reverted to her family name, of which she was inordinately proud. Emmanuel Dumas, who had made a colossal fortune in the boom and lost most of it in the slump, claimed, without warranty which any man could recognize, to be descended from the brilliant quadroon who created the Three Musketeers. If a picturesque personality and a shock of frizzy white hair had been acceptable as evidence, then any jury must have granted his claim.
A moral laxity, notable even during the regime of Prohibition, had characterized his scandalous life. In later years, when most of his Wall Street contemporaries had been washed up, the continued prosperity of Emmanuel Dumas became a mystery insoluble. The prurient ascribed it to the association between his beautiful daughter and the flamboyant but eccentric politician who threatened to become the Mussolini of the United States.