Robbie dealt with bread and jam for some time, and then:
“Will Uncle Mark be there?” he inquired.
“I don’t think so, dear.”
“Why not? I like Uncle Mark—all ‘cept his whiskers. I like Yellow Uncle, too, but he never comes.”
Nurse Goff suppressed a shudder. The man whom the boy had christened “Yellow Uncle” terrified her as her dour Scottish nature had never been terrified before. His existence in the life of Mrs. Adair, whom she respected as well as liked, was a mystery beyond her understanding. Rare, though his visits were, that he was Mrs. Adair’s protector she took for granted. But how Mrs. Adair, beautiful and delicately nurtured, ever could have begun this association with the dreadful Chinaman was something which Mary Goff simply could not understand. The affection of Robbie for this sinister being was to her mind even a greater problem.
“Give me an auto on my birfday,” Robbie added reminis-cently; ‘Yellow Uncle did.”
“Gave you an auto, Robbie. God bless the boy! I don’t know where you get these words. . . .”
When, an hour later, his “auto” packed behind in the big Rolls driven by Joe, the cheerful Negro chauffeur, lonely little Robbie accompanied by Nurse Goff set out for his Long Island playground, a “protection” party in a Z-car was following.
Far in the rear, keeping the Z-car in sight, a government car in charge of Lietenant Johnson brought up the rear of the queer procession.
Chapter 27
THE STRATTON BUILDING
Mark Hepburn, in blue overalls and wearing a peaked cap, crept out from a window on to a dizzy parapet. Two men similarly attired followed him. One was an operative of Midtown Electric, the firm which had installed the lighting conductors;
the other was a federal agent. They were on the forty-seventh floor of the Stratton Building. The leaded dome swept up above them; below the New York hive buzzed ceaselessly.
“This way,” said Hepburn, and headed along the parapet.
He constantly looked down into a deep gutter which formed their path until at a point commanding an oblique view of the gulley which was Park Avenue, he pulled up sharply.
Storm clouds were gathering and sweeping over the city. To look upward was to derive an impression that the towering building swayed like a ship. Mark Hepburn was looking downward. He expressed an exclamation of satisfaction.
Fragments of clay littered the gutter; on some of the larger pieces might be seen the imprint of a modeller’s work. The madman of the Stratton Building was no myth, but an actuality!
Hepburn glanced up for a moment. The effect of the racing clouds above the tower of the building was to make him dizzy. He felt himself lurching and closed his eyes quickly; but he had seen what he wanted to see.
Above the slope of the leaded dome was an iron gallery upon which two windows opened. . . . .
“Steady-oh, Captain!” said the government man, seeing him sway. “It’s taken a long time to get up, but it wouldn’t take long to fall down.”
Hepburn, the moment of nausea past, stared again at the fragments at his feet.
“All right,” he replied; “I was never a mountaineer.”
He knelt down and examined the pieces of hard clay with keen curiosity. They surely formed part of a modelled head, possibly of more than one modelled head; but no one of them was big enough to give any indication of the character of the finished work. Over the shoulder:
“Gather all these pieces together,” he directed, “and bring them away.”
The man from the electric firm watched the two agents in respectful silence.
“Ha! What’s this?” Hepburn exclaimed.
He had come upon a wired frame to which portions of crumbling clay still adhered. But what had provoked his words when he picked the thing up had been the presence upon the wooden frame, fixed by two drawing pins, of what resembled a tiny coloured miniature of a human face, framed around with white paper.
He detached this curious object from the wood and examined it more closely. Raising the mount he stared for a long time at that which lay beneath.
It was a three-cent Daniel Webster stamp, dated 1932, gummed upside down upon a piece of cardboard, then framed by the paper in which a pear-shaped opening had been cut. The effect, when the frame was dropped over the stamp, was singular to a degree. It produced a hideous Chinese face!
Mark Hepburn took out his notecase and carefully placed this queer discovery in it. As he returned the case to his pocket a memory came of hypnotic green eyes staring into his own—a memory of the unforgettable features of Dr. Fu Manchu as he had seen them through the broken window on the night of the Chinatown raid. . . .
Yes, the fact was unmistakable: inverted and framed in this way, the Daniel Webster stamp presented a caricature, but a recognizable caricature, of Dr. Fu Manchu!
A problem for Nayland Smith’s consideration: no more false moves must be made. But here was a building occupied, so far as he knew, entirely by persons associated directly, or indirectly, with the activities of the League of Good Americans. At the top it seemed a madman resided; a madman who modelled clay heads, and who apparently had possessed and thrown away this queer miniature. Definitely there was a link here which must be tested, but tested cautiously.
Thus far he had every reason to believe that his investigation had been carried out without arousing suspicion. He had penetrated to a number of offices on many floors, craning out of windows in his quest of the supposed flaw in the lightning conductors. He had observed nothing abnormal anywhere, and had been civilly treated by a Mr. Schmidt in the office on the street floor, to whom, with his two companions, he had first applied. It remained to be seen if any obstruction would be offered to his penetrating the mysterious apartment which crowned the dome.
Five minutes later he climbed through the window into a room used apparently as a store by the firm leasing this suite of offices on the forty-seventh. He could not restrain a sigh of relief, as, quitting the swaying parapet, he reached the security of a rubber laid floor. Mr. Schmidt, representing the owners of the building, waited there as Hepburn’s companions in turn climbed in through the low window.
“Everything seems to be in order up to this floor,” said Hepburn. “How do we get to the top of the dome? The fault must be there.”
Mr. Schmidt stared hard for a moment.
There’s no way up,” he replied curtly. The elevators don’t go beyond this floor. There’s a staircase to the flagstaff, but the door’s been boarded up. Orders of the Fire Department, I guess. There’s nothing up there; it’s just ornamental.”
“Then how do I carry out the inspection? It will cost plenty to rig ladders. Cheaper to break through to the staircase, wouldn’t it be?”
“That doesn’t rest with me,” Mr. Schmidt replied hastily; “I shall have to ask you to give me time to consult directors on the point.”
Mark Hepburn surreptitiously nudged the representative of Midtown Electric, and:
“When can you let us know, Mr. Schmidt?” the electrician inquired. “We have to make a report.”
“I’ll call you in the morning,” Mr Schmidt replied.
Mark Hepburn experienced an inward glow of satisfaction. Apart from the testimony of Robbie Adair, he himself had seen lighted windows above the dome of the Stratton Building—and to-day they had found conclusive evidence to show that the rooms were occupied!
Chapter 28
PAUL SALVALETTI
Lola Dumas, concealed behind a partly-drawn curtain, looked down upon the crowded terraces. Palm trees were silhouetted against an evening sky; there was a distant prospect of steel-blue sea. The crowds below were so dense that she thought of a pot of caviare. Here was humanity, seemingly redundant, but pulsing with life so vigorous that its vibrations reached her on that high balcony.
They were cheering and shouting, and through all the excited uproar, like an oboe motif in an orchestral score, rose the name of Salvaletti.