Re-enter Fu-Manchu (18 page)

Either he had become a mere cipher in the game, or Nayland Smith had thrown his hand in and didn’t care what happened.

Brian started a fresh cigarette, looked at his watch. Ten minutes to wait.

With some unknown menace embodied in the name Dr. Fu Manchu hanging over the party assembly tonight—a party to include the President—this enforced inaction was almost unendurable. Brian found it nearly impossible to remain still.

He stared out of the window—and became very still indeed; so still that he might have been suddenly frozen to his seat.

Lola was standing in the trade entrance to the Babylon-Lido talking to Nayland Smith.

Her face was in shadow, but she was dressed as he had left her at five o’clock. This time there could be no room for doubt. Nor could he be wrong about the man. It was Sir Denis. The coat, the soft-brimmed hat, his stance—all were unmistakable. He saw them go in.

In half a minute he had paid for his drink and dashed recklessly across the street, ignoring the traffic lights.

He had never been in this warren of storerooms, cellars, and kitchens before, but somehow he made his way through and at last penetrated to the vast but now familiar lobby. His heart was beating fast. What had Lola to do with Nayland Smith? She had told him only that afternoon that she had never met Sir Denis.

The clock over the reception desk recorded five minutes to seven.

People buzzed about in a state of perpetual motion. They all appeared to be in a hurry. Smart women in mink stoles who couldn’t find their men, eager-eyed young men rushing around looking for their girls, businessmen dashing for telephones… the scene seemed to swim before Brian like a color film out of focus. It was a ballet inspired by a mad director.

But the two figures he was looking for were not to be seen.

He debated with himself, looking again at the clock. He could endure this suspense no longer. He must know the truth, orders or no orders. To wait to be paged in his present frame of mind was out of the question. He turned and hurried off to the corridor where the express elevators were located. The man on duty knew him and smiled a greeting as Brian stepped in.

“Sir Denis has just gone up, sir,” he reported.

Brian experienced a fluttering sensation, in the pit of his stomach.

“Was he alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

The elevator began its ascent. Nayland Smith, Brian reflected, must have gone out to meet Lola. They had evidently parted on entering the hotel. But why had they come in by the trade entrance? He could only conclude that the meeting had been a clandestine one.

When he arrived at the top floor he stood for a moment to get a grip on himself. Then he walked along to the door of Suite 2610. The “Do Not Disturb” card had gone. He quietly slipped the key into the lock and opened the door.

Dusk had fallen now and he saw that lights were on in the living room. There was no sound.

He walked in quietly… then gulped, and stood quite still.

Flat on his back on the floor, his knees dawn up, his fists clenched, lay Nayland Smith. His face was purple, his teeth were bared, and his eyes bulged from his head.

He had been strangled.

T
he horror of his discovery quite literally paralyzed Brian. His senses were numbed. He stood speechless, incapable of movement, of thought.

A slight sound from the direction of the desk roused him, bringing swift realization of his own danger. He turned toward the desk, and his brain reeled. He was gripped by the agonizing certainty that the murder of Nayland Smith had disturbed his reason.

Standing beside the tall, painted screen, a finger on his lips, urgent command in his eyes, and beckoning Brian to join him, was
Nayland Smith.

Brian clenched his fists, glanced from the dead man to this phantom of the living.

The living Sir Denis was beside him in three strides. He gripped Brian’s arm, speaking softly into his ear: “Not a word! Behind the screen, Merrick—for your life—and for mine!”

There was nothing ghostly in the grip of those sinewy fingers, nothing but vital urgency in the whispered orders.

Brian found himself in shadow behind the screen. One spear of light shone through a hole in the parchment, and, still half stupefied at this incredible situation, he saw Nayland Smith jab his thumb through another panel in the screen and make a second hole.

“Look!” came a whisper in his ear. “Do nothing. Say nothing.”

Silence.

Peering through the slot in the parchment, Brian focused on the dead man. For all that agonized expression, the swollen features, the protruding eyes, he was prepared to take oath and swear that it was Sir Denis who lay there. But another Sir Denis, very much alive, stood beside him, and continued to grip his arm!

Then he noticed something he hadn’t noticed before.

A door that communicated with the next suite, normally locked, stood partly open. The room beyond was in darkness.

Two men came through the door. The first was a thickset Oriental whose coarse, brutal features and abnormally long arms were more simian than human. The second Brian recognized; it was the slender, elegant man the waiter had reported to be an Indian prince.

They lifted the body and carried it out. The communicating door was closed.

“Don’t speak!” The words were whispered in his ear. “This room is wired.”

The new Sir Denis crossed to the recently closed door and locked it. He turned and beckoned to Brian to follow him. In the foyer he whispered, “Say nothing, but take your cue from me.” Brian nodded. Nayland Smith opened the outer door then shut it again noisily. “Hello, Merrick. You’re a little early,” He spoke now in a loud tone. “Anything wrong? You look under the weather. Go and lie down. I’ll bring a drink to your room.”

Brian crossed, rather unsteadily, to his own room and went in. Sir Denis’ extemporized “cue” wasn’t far from the truth. This experience had shaken him severely. Even now he couldn’t get the facts into focus.

Nayland Smith rejoined him, carrying two drinks. He quietly closed the bedroom door behind him.

“I need one, too, Merrick,” he confessed. “That premature entrance nearly resulted in a second murder—yours!”

“But—”

“Wait a minute.” Sir Denis held up his hand. “Let’s get the important thing settled first, because there’s a lot to say and not much time to say it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t wonder which of us is the real Nayland Smith. I had a fair chance to study my double, and I felt like a man looking in a mirror. Hark back to the time I stayed in Washington. Ask me something about your home life that nobody could know who hadn’t lived with you.”

Brian tried to force his bewildered brain to think clearly, and presently an idea came.

“Do you remember my father’s dog?” he asked.

“Do I remember Rufus!” Nayland Smith smiled—and it was the smile Brian had known, the boyish smile that lifted a curtain of years. “Good reason to remember him, Merrick.” He pulled up his left trouser leg. “There’s the souvenir left me when I tried to break up a scrap he was having with a Boston terrier. Rufus thought my interference unsporting. It was you yourself who phoned the doctor, and damn it, he wanted to give me rabies shots!”

In that moment, all doubt was washed away. Brian knew that this was the real Nayland Smith, that the man he had been employed to work with was an impostor—and a miraculous double.

He held out his hand. “Thank God it’s
you
that’s alive!”

“I have done so already, Merrick, devoutly. I have passed through the unique experience of witnessing my own execution. I was desperately tempted to rush to the aid of my second self. But to do so could only have meant that the supercriminal, the most dangerous man in the world today, would have slipped again through my fingers. So I clenched my teeth when the thug sprang out on him and said to myself, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Nayland Smith.’”

“Who is—who was—the man impersonating you? It was a star performance. Even the British Embassy in Cairo fell for him. So did my father.”

Nayland Smith pulled out the familiar pipe and began to load it.

“So would my own mother, if she had been alive. You’re staring at my pipe? Fortunately I had a spare one with me. The poor devil who was strangled probably has the other in his pocket. I don’t know who he was, Merrick. But he must have been a talented actor, with a nerve of iron.”

“His nerve began to fail.”

“I don’t wonder. They had news of my escape. There wasn’t room in New York for two Nayland Smiths!”

He rapped out the words like so many drum taps, and at a speed that Brian realized his impersonator had never acquired.

“He had every intonation of your voice, Sir Denis. All your gestures, every mannerism. Even that trick of pulling at your ear. And I believe he smoked even more than you do.”

Nayland Smith smiled. “Sounds like overacting. Poor devil, he was probably playing for big stakes. He had several weeks to study me while I was a prisoner, in that damned house in Cairo.”

“In Cairo! Then it must have been you yourself I saw in the house of the Sherîf Mohammed!”

Sir Denis stared for a moment, and then said, “This is news, but probably right. You can tell me later. We have little time, and you’re entitled to know the truth.”

He lighted his pipe, stood up, and began to walk about.

“I had been on a mission behind the Bamboo Curtain. We had information that Dr. Fu Manchu was operating with the Red Chinese. Knowing the Doctor intimately, I doubted this. He controls a worldwide organization of his own, the Si-Fan. And if anyone succeeds in taking over China permanently, it won’t be the Communists!”

This was so like what the false Nayland Smith had told him that Brian listened in growing wonder.

“On my way back, by sea—secretly, as I thought—I walked into a trap in Suez that I should have expected an intelligent schoolboy to avoid, and a few hours later found myself a prisoner in the house of the Sherîf Mohammed. The Si-Fan had traced me. I was in the hands of Dr. Fu Manchu.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Roughly, two months. I had secured evidence that Fu Manchu had recently been in China, for his chief of staff, a brilliant old strategist, General Huan Tsung-chao, was operating under cover right in Peiping. Some highly important scheme was brewing, and I scented that it would be carried out, not in the East, but in the West. I was right.

“It became clear from the beginning of my imprisonment that Fu Manchu hadn’t planned to kill me. For some reason, he wanted me alive. My ancient enemy was there in person, in the house of the Sherîf Mohammed, and at first I had easy treatment. I was well fed and allowed to exercise in a walled courtyard. But for several hours every day I was brought to a room with barred windows and put through a sort of brain-washing by Dr. Fu Manchu. He spoke to me from behind an iron grille high up in one wall.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Remarkable. Details later. He argued on ideological grounds, tried to convert me to the theories of the Si-Fan. Sometimes he taunted me. He worked over me like a skilled performer playing on a stringed instrument. And not for a long time did the fact dawn on me that every move I made, every word I spoke was being studied by some other person hidden behind the grille.

“He betrayed himself once only, but from that moment I knew he was always there, and a hazy idea of the plot began to appear. Someone was being trained to impersonate me! The scheme wasn’t a new one. I believe Fu Manchu had had it in mind for several years; probably searched the world for my near-double. I suspect, though I may be wrong, that tape recordings of these conversations were made on a hidden microphone, to help my understudy to perfect his impersonation at leisure.”

“It beats everything I ever heard! Of course you tried to make a getaway?”

Nayland Smith checked his restless steps and stared grimly at Brian.

“During the day relays of Fu Manchu’s professional stranglers had me covered. You saw two of them just now. At night there was a hidden microphone in my room. It not only recorded my slightest movement, but could also be used to transmit a note inaudible to human ears. Its production is Fu Manchu’s secret, as he was good enough to tell me. Its effect would be to kill me instantly by inducing hemorrhage of the brain.”

“But that’s Dr. Hessian’s invention!” Brian broke in.

Nayland Smith relighted his pipe. It had gone out while he was talking.

“Unless my deductions are wide of the mark, Merrick, the man you know as Otto Hessian is Dr. Fu Manchu!”

A faint buzzing reached them from the living room.

“That’s the penthouse!” Brian spoke breathlessly.

“Then I had better answer.”

“But what are you going to do!”

Nayland Smith turned in the act of opening the door. “Whatever the late Nayland Smith the Second was expected to do.”

As the door was left open, Brian could overhear Nayland Smith when he spoke on the penthouse line. The conversation was a short one. He came back, his expression grim, and reclosed the door.

“Tell me, Merrick—is there anything, any trifle, about my appearance that strikes you as different from—his?”