How easily the police would explain the murders.
It was a typical Mansfield plot.
I arose and took stock of the situation.
Ngat T’oy stirred, heaved a troubled sigh, and sat erect.
“I feel rested now,” she said, calmly, sat up, took a compact from her stocking and began calmly powdering her nose, touching up her lips. Her fingers were as steady as those of a graven image. Her eyes contained no expression beyond one of utter and absolute calmness.
“You have reasoned it out, Ed?”
I nodded.
“It is Mansfield?”
Again I nodded.
She closed the compact and slipped it back in her stocking.
“I shall kill him,” she proclaimed with the utmost calmness, “by the method of a million cuts. I shall sharpen a knife, and slice him, a little at a time until there is nothing left but the quivering, red flesh and the white bones,” and in the next breath:
“Tell me, Ed, is my mouth straight?”
I nodded, nor wasted time in argument seeking to dissuade her, nor in mental comment upon the incongruity of her remarks. Some one had made a psychological hybrid out of her. To the base of a pure Oriental character, with its thousands of years of ancestral habit, had been added a veneer of western education, flapper reactions. She embodied both the East and the West. And she would, beyond doubt, kill Captain Mansfield by the method of a million cuts, a choice torture of her native land. That is, she would unless I killed him first.
I stepped back into the workroom of Abe Grue.
We had left the human vulture stretched on the floor, lying amidst jagged glass, completely dead to the world.
Now he was gone. Nor was there any trace of his going. The only door from the room was the one into the chapel.
He had not come through that. It was as though the human buzzard had flapped his awkward wings and whisked himself out into the night, through the open window above the marble slab.
I knew then that time was limited, every second counted.
I went back to the chapel.
“You will have to play the game, old girl,” I told Little Sun. “Grue has gone to warn the others. They will scour the town for us. Now we do know too much, and we may block their plot. Do you feel well enough to stand the gaff?”
She grinned.
“Lead me to it, big boy.”
I led her to it.
The front door was locked. A side door opened into a passageway and in front of this side door was parked the gruesome dead wagon which Abe Grue used to cany off the victims of illegal activities.
I climbed to the driver’s seat, motioned Ngat T’oy to my side, stepped on the starter, and threw in the gear. I had one consolation. Abe Grue had slipped away, but he had escaped on foot, while we had the automobile, such as it was.
I took corners on two wheels, skidded across boulevard stops, violated traffic rules, and made time. Ngat T’oy asked no questions. I removed her poppy hat and threw it away. She crouched at my side, bareheaded, hair streaming in the breeze, her dark eyes fixed on the road ahead, as inscrutable as the eyes of a bronze Buddha.
She saw where I was going.
“Can’t I come, Ed?”
I shook my head.
“There is danger. You can’t help. You’ll go home.”
She made no further comment.
I skidded to a stop before her house.
I had dreaded that moment when she would have to leave the car, when the loitering Chinese would see her costume, the green stockinged legs, the dress with its green collar, the green sleeves made to represent leaves.
But there was no need.
The heavy door swung open and Soo Hoo Duck stepped to the curb. A robe was over his arm, and he threw this over his daughter’s shoulders, helped her from the seat of the car.
It seemed that the old bird had some uncanny way of knowing everything. How he had been advised of my coming was more than I could tell. Yet there he was, a robe over his arm. Perhaps he, too, had been doing some thinking. Certain it was that he had hundreds of points of contact in Chinatown.
He crooked his withered arm about his daughter, and raised a perfectly bland, expressionless face to my own.
“You will have to hurry, my son,” he said in Cantonese, then, inscrutable as ever, turned away from the car.
There was no word of thanks either from himself or from Ngat T’oy. They turned into the darkness of their mysterious hallway with no other word.
I sighed, slammed in the gear and stepped on the throttle.
The ride with Ngat T’oy had been wild. This was worse. I took everything the car had and prayed for more. It was approaching midnight, and I fancied there would be something doing at the policemen’s ball before midnight.
I ran the gruesome dead-wagon up an alley which ran back of the hall where the ball was in progress. There was a police officer on duty at the entrance to the alley. He saluted and stepped to one side. Evidently there had been given strict orders concerning the dead-wagon of Abe Grue, the official buzzard of the underworld.
I parked the car, but did not enter the ballroom at once. I wanted to verify one fact first.
It took me but a few seconds.
A figure crouched in the foggy shadow of a hedge. Another skulked behind a palm tree. A third clung to the shadows cast by the side of the huge building. The street light glimmered redly through the wisps of fog, but failed to show any white blur of faces. They were yellow men, these skulking shadows who waited some word, some signal. The yellow shadows of Chuck Gee, intent upon avenging the death of their leader.
I found a back entrance where refreshments had been unloaded from caterers, and slipped within, rushed through deserted passages, through a kitchen where there was a great clatter of dishes and tableware, up a flight of stairs and into the ballroom.
It was approaching midnight.
I looked about the room. Within ten seconds I saw the waving red mass of a poppy hat across the room. I saw the advantage and disadvantage of that red hat. It could be located without delay towering, as it did, a good eighteen inches above the heads of every masquerader in the place.
I made my way toward that hat, moving through the swirling throngs as fast as I dared. I did not wish to attract attention to myself. My costume looked as though it had been through the mill.
They were serving spiked punch, and the odor of perfume and perspiration mingled with the acid smell of crushed fruit.
A monk worked his way toward me, and then the red poppy turned and saw me.
“Ed!” she breathed softly, a question and a greeting in one.
Loring Kemper’s strong fingers gripped my arm in an agony of silent apprehension.
I nodded slightly.
“All safe so far; but we’ve got to get a change of costumes at once.”
That silenced them. It was a big order, getting three new costumes on a moment’s notice, but it must be done. The red poppy and the monk were marked for death, and any moment Abe Grue might arrive with the warning that would identify the clown as Ed Jenkins, the phantom crook.
“But, Ed, how can we get a change of costume?”
I grinned cheerfully. “Oh, we'll manage somehow.”
The words were brave enough. It wouldn’t do to let her realize how desperate the situation was.