The Shadow of Fu-Manchu (28 page)

An empty passage, concrete-floored, extended to left and to right.

“Take a party left, Harkness. I’ll take the right.”

Ten paces brought Smith to a metal door in the wall. He pulled up. Retreating footsteps, the sound of which echoed hollowly, as in a vault, indicated that the other party had found nothing of interest so far.

“Job for a safebreaker,” Sam grumbled. “If this is the way he went, he’ll get a long start.”

“Quiet!” rapped Nayland Smith. “Listen.”

He beat a syncopated tattoo on the metal with his knuckles. Harkness’s party had apparently turned in somewhere. Their footsteps were no more than faintly audible.

Answering knocks came from the other side of the door!

“Regan!” Sam exclaimed.

Smith nodded. “This is what he called the strong room. Quiet again.”

He rapped a message—listened to the reply; then turned.

“This scent is stale,” he said shortly. “Regan states nobody has passed this way tonight.”

“We must get Mr. Regan out, right now.” Sam spoke urgently. “You, back there, O’Leary, report upstairs there’s an iron door to be softened. Poor devil! Guess he’s dumb for life!”

“Not at all,” Nayland Smith assured him. “The effect wears off after a few days—so I was recently informed by my old friend, Dr. Fu-Manchu.”

He spoke bitterly—a note of defeat in the crisp voice. What had he accomplished? He could not even claim credit for saving the blueprints from Soviet hands. Some servant of Fu-Manchu’s had secured them before the dogs attacked Frobisher—

“Sir Denis!” came a distant, excited hail. “This way! I think we have him!”

Nayland Smith led the run back to where Harkness and two men stood before another closed door near the end of a passage which formed an L with that from which they had started.

“I think it’s an old furnace room. And I saw a light in there!”

“Don’t waste time! Down with it!”

Two of the party carried axes. And they went to work with a will. The door was double-bolted on the inside, but it collapsed under their united onslaughts. A cavity yawned in which the rays of Nayland Smith’s lamp picked out an old-fashioned, soot-begrimed boiler, half buried in mounds of coal ash.

“Be careful!” he warned. “We are dealing with no ordinary criminal. Stand by for anything.”

They entered cautiously.

The place proved to have unexpected ramifications. It was merely part of what had been an extensive cellarage system. They groped in its darkness, shedding light into every conceivable spot where a fugitive might lie. But they found nothing. A sense of futility crept down upon all, when a cry came:

“Another door here! I heard someone moving behind it!”

Over the debris and coal dust of years, they ran to join the man who had shouted. He stood in what had evidently been a coal bunker, before a narrow, grimy door.

“It’s locked.”

Keen axes and willing hands soon cleared the obstacle.

A long, sloping passage lay beyond. Up its slope, as the door crashed open, swept a current of cold, damp air. And, halfway down, a retreating figure showed, a grotesque silhouette against reflected light from his dancing flashlamp.

It was the figure of a tall man, wearing a long coat and what looked like a close-fitting cap.

“By God!” Smith shouted, “Dr. Fu-Manchu! This leads to the river—”

He broke off.

Sam had hurled himself into the passage, firing the moment he crossed the threshold of the shattered door! The crash of his heavy revolver created an echo like a thunderstorm. Nayland Smith, following hard behind, saw the figure stumble, pause—run on.

“Cease fire there!” he shouted angrily.

But Sam’s blood was up. He either failed to hear the order, or wilfully ignored it. He fired again—then, rapidly, a third time.

The tall figure stopped suddenly, dropped the flashlamp, and crumpled to the damp floor.

“You fool!” Nayland Smith’s words came as a groan. “This was no end for the greatest brain in the world!”

He forced his way past Sam, stooped, and turned the fur-capped head. As he did so, the fallen man writhed, coughed, and was still.

Nayland Smith looked into a face scarcely human, scarred, a parody of humanity—a face he had never seen before—the face of M’goyna…

He stood up very slowly. The dark, sloping passage behind him seemed to be embossed with staring eyes.

“Outmanoeuvred!” he said. “Fu-Manchu played for time. This poor devil was the last of his rearguards. He has slipped through our fingers!”

T
en days later, Nayland Smith gave a small dinner party at his hotel to celebrate the engagement of Camille Mirabeau (Navarre) to Dr. Morris Craig. When the other guests had left, these three went to Smith’s suite, and having settled down:

“Of course,” said Smith, in reply to a question from Camille, “the newspapers are never permitted to print really important news! It might frighten somebody.”

“Quite a lot has leaked out, though,” Craig amended. “The cops gave it away. Poor old Regan has been pestered since I resigned. But although he can chatter quite acidly again, he won’t chatter to reporters.”

“How’s Frobisher?”

“Rotten. He’ll recover all right, but carry a crop of scars.”

“Does his wife know the truth?”

“Couldn’t say. What do you think, Camille?”

Camille, lovely in her newfound happiness and a Paris frock, shrugged white shoulders.

“Stella Frobisher is like a cork,” she said. “I think she can stay afloat in the heaviest weather. But I don’t know her well enough to tell you if she suspects the truth.”

“The most astounding thing which the newspapers haven’t reported,” Nayland Smith remarked after an interval, “concerns the body of that ape man—almost certainly the creature of which I had a glimpse at Falling Waters. He’s been examined by all the big doctors. And they are unanimous on one point.”

“What is that?” Camille asked.

“They say the revolver bullets didn’t kill him.”

“What?” Craig exclaimed.

“They state, positively, that he had been dead
many years
before the shooting!”

And Camille (such was the strange power of Dr. Fu-Manchu) simply shook her red head and murmured, “But that is impossible.”

Yes—that was impossible. It was also impossible, no doubt, that Dr. Fu-Manchu had visited New York, and perhaps, as a result of his visit, given a few more years of uneasy peace to a world coquetting with war. And so, Manhattan danced on…

“Our two Russian acquaintances”—Nayland Smith rapped out the words venomously—“have been quietly deported. But what I really wanted to show you was this.”

From the pocket of his dinner jacket he took a long, narrow envelope. It had come by air mail and was stamped “Cairo.” It was addressed to him at his New York hotel. He passed it to Camille.

“Read it together. There was an enclosure.”

And so, Craig bending over Camille’s shoulder, his cheek against her glowing hair, they read the letter, handwritten in copperplate script:

Sir Denis
—

It was a serious disappointment to be compelled to leave New York without seeing you again. I regret, too, that M’goyna, one of my finer products, had to be sacrificed to my safety. But a little time was necessary to enable me to reach the boat which awaited me. I left by another exit. I greet Dr. Craig. He is a genius and a brave man. But his keen sense of honor is my loss. Will you, on my behalf, advise him to devote his great talents to non-destructive purposes? His future experiments will be watched with interest. I enclose a wedding present for his bride.

There was no signature.

Camille and Morris Craig raised their eyes, together.

On his extended palm Nayland Smith was holding out a large emerald. And as Camille, uttering a long, wondering sigh, took the gem between her fingers, Nayland Smith reached for his dilapidated pouch and began, reflectively, to load his blackened briar.

T
he “yellow peril”—that stereotypical threat of Asian conquest—seized the public imagination in the late nineteenth century, in political diatribes and in fiction. While several authors exploited this fear, the work of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, stood out.

Dr. Fu-Manchu was born in Rohmer’s short story “The Zayat Kiss,” which first appeared in a British magazine in 1912. Nine more stories quickly appeared and, in 1913, the tales were collected as
The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu
(
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
in America). The Doctor appeared in two more series before the end of the Great War, collected as
The Devil Doctor
(
The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu
) and
The Si-Fan Mysteries
(
The Hand of Fu-Manchu
).

After a fourteen-year absence, the Doctor reappeared in 1931, in
The Daughter of Fu-Manchu
. There were nine more novels, continuing until Rohmer’s death in 1959, when
Emperor Fu-Manchu
was published. Four stories, which had previously appeared only in magazines, were published in 1973 as
The Wrath of Fu-Manchu
.

The Fu-Manchu stories also have been the basis of numerous motion pictures, most famously the 1932 MGM film
The Mask of Fu-Manchu
, featuring Boris Karloff as the Doctor.

In the early stories, Fu-Manchu and his cohorts are the “yellow menace,” whose aim is to establish domination of the Asian races. In the 1930s Fu-Manchu foments political dissension among the working classes. By the 1940s, as the wars in Europe and Asia threaten terrible destruction, Fu-Manchu works to depose other world leaders and defeat the Communists in Russia and China.

Rohmer undoubtedly read the works of Conan Doyle, and there is a strong resemblance between Nayland Smith and Holmes. There are also marked parallels between the four doctors, Petrie and Watson as the narrator-comrades, and Dr. Fu-Manchu and Professor Moriarty as the arch-villains.

The emphasis is on fast-paced action set in exotic locations, evocatively described in luxuriant detail, with countless thrills occurring to the unrelenting ticking of a tightly wound clock. Strong romantic elements and sensually described, sexually attractive women appear throughout the tales, but ultimately it is the
fantastic
nature of the adventures that appeal.

This is the continuing appeal of Dr. Fu-Manchu, for despite his occasional tactic of alliance with the West, he unrelentingly pursued his own agenda of world domination. In the long run, Rohmer’s depiction of Fu-Manchu rose above the fears and prejudices that may have created him to become a picture of a timeless and implacable creature of menace.

* * *

A complete version of this essay can be found in
The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu
, also available from Titan Books.

Sax Rohmer

Available now:

THE MYSTERY OF DR. FU-MANCHU

THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU

THE HAND OF DR. FU-MANCHU

DAUGHTER OF FU-MANCHU

THE MASK OF FU-MANCHU

PRESIDENT FU-MANCHU

THE DRUMS OF FU-MANCHU

THE ISLAND OF FU-MANCHU

Coming soon:

RE-ENTER FU-MANCHU

EMPEROR FU-MANCHU

THE WRATH OF FU-MANCHU AND OTHER STORIES

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