“Is that you?” asked a nervous voice.
I suppose my eyes told Smith; he withdrew and quietly closed the door.
“Ardatha! My dear, my dear! This is too wonderful! Where are you?”
“I am in Cornwall. I have risked ever so much to speak to you before we go; and we are going in an hour—“
“But Ardatha!”
“Please listen. Time is so short for me. Hassan told me what happened. I knew your name and found your number in the book. It was my only chance to know if you were alive. I thank the good God that you are, because, you see, I am so alone and unhappy, and you—I like to believe that I have forgotten, now, because otherwise I should be ashamed to think about you so much!”
“Ardatha!”
“We shall be in New York on Thursday. I know that Nayland Smith is following us. If I am still there when you arrive I will try to speak to you again. There is one thing that might save me—you understand?—a queer, a silly little thing, but—“
“Yes, yes, Ardatha! What is it? Tell me!”
“I risked capture by the police to try to catch Peko—Dr. Fu Manchu’s marmoset. That was when . . . we met. This strange pet, he is very old, is more dear to his master than any living thing. Try to find out . . . . ”
Silence: I was disconnected!
Frantically I called the exchange; but all the consolation I received from the night operator was: “Zennor’s rung off, sir.”
“Smith!” I shouted and burst into the dining-room.
Nayland Smith was standing staring out of the window. He turned and faced me.
“Yes,” he said coolly; “it was Ardatha. Where is she and what had she to say?”
Rapidly, perhaps feverishly, I told him; and then: “The marmoset!” I cried. “Barton caught it! What did he do with it?”
“Do with it!” came Sir Lionel’s great voice, and appeared at the other end of the room, his mane of hair dishevelled. “What did it do with me” After the blasted thing—it’s all of a thousand years old, and I know livestock ~ had bitten me twice last night, I locked it in the wardrobe. This morning—“
He raised a bloodstained finger, there was a shrill angry whistle, and a tiny monkey, a silver grey thing no larger than a starling, shot through the doorway behind him, paused, chattered wickedly, and sprang from the buffet onto a high cornice!
“There’s your marmoset,” cried Barton. “I should have strangled him if I hadn’t known Chinese character! I said, Kerrigan, there might be a way. This is the way—there’s your hostage!”
CHAPTER XII
THE SNAPPING FINGERS
“The unaccountable absence of Kennard Wood,” said Nayland Smith, staring out of the window, “is most disturbing. These apartments, Kerrigan, have been the scene of strange happenings. It was from here that I opposed Dr. Fu Manchu when he tried ~ and nearly succeeded—in his plan to force a puppet President upon the United States.”
I stood beside him looking out over the roofs of New York from this eagle’s nest on the fortieth floor of the Regal Athenian Hotel.
A pearly moon regarded us from a cloudless sky, a moon set amidst a million stars which twinkled above a Walt Disney city. One tall tower dominated the foreground of the composition. It rose, jewelled with lights, from the frosty line of an intervening roof up to the pharos which crowned it. The river showed as a smudge of silver far below: an approaching train was a fiery dragon winding in and out of mysterious gullies.
In that diamond-clear air I could hear the sound of the locomotive; I could hear a motor horn, the hoarse whistle of some big ship heading out for the open sea. Lights glittered everywhere, from starry heavens down to frostily-sparkling buildings and the moving headlamps of restless traffic.
“Bit of a contrast to London,” I said.
“Yes.” Smith pronounced the word with unusual slowness. “The fog of war has not dimmed the light of New York. But you and I know who is reponsible for those rumours, and those missing men in the Caribbean; and although, according to your account, the Doctor is a sick man, we dare not under-estimate potentialities. Even now—he may be here.”
As always, the mere suspicion that the dreadful Chinese scientist might be near induced a sense, purely nervous, no doubt, of sudden chill. We had been delayed unexpectedly at Lisbon and again later; it was possible that Fu Manchu was approaching New York. If Ardatha’s words had been true, he was already here.
Ardatha! She had promised to try to see me again. I continued to stare out at the myriad twinkling points. From any one of that constellation of windows Ardatha might be looking as I looked from this.
“I am getting seriously worried about Kennard Wood,” said Smith suddenly. “According to his last message from Havana, he and his assistant, Longton, were leaving by air. They are long overdue: I don’t understand it.”
Colonel Kennard Wood, of the United States Secret Service, bad been left in charge of the Caribbean inquiry when Smith had hurriedly returned to England. We had been expecting him all day. In fact. Barton had been compelled to go to Washington that morning in Smith’s stead owing to the importance of the anticipated interview.
There were times when I felt as one who dreams, when, seeing a double newspaper headline, “British capture Benghazi,” I asked myself what I was doing here at an hour when England and her allies grappled with a world menace. It was Smith who always supplied the answer: “An even greater menace, one which threatens the entire white race, is closing around the American continent.”
The phone buzzed.
Smith turned quickly and crossed to the instrument.
“Yes—speaking . . . . What?”
The tone in which he rapped out the last word brought me about. His eyes glittered metallically and I saw—those prominent jaw muscles betrayed the fact—that his teeth were clenched.
“Good God! You are sure? Yes . . . at once.”
He banged the receiver back and stared at me, suddenly haggard.
“Smith! what has happened?”
“Longton—poor Longton has gone!”
“What!”
“They have just brought his body in from the river. Inspector Hawk of the Homicide Bureau recognized him, in spite of—“
“In spite of what?”
“Of his condition, Kerrigan!” He dashed a fist wildly into his other palm. *Tu Manchu is here—of that we may be sure; for no one but Fu Manchu could have brought the horror of the Snapping Fingers to New York.”
“The Snapping Fingers?”
But he was already running towards the door.
“Explain on the way. Come on!”
Seated in a chair in the lobby, the chair tipped back so that he could rest his feet on the ledge above a radiator, was a short, thick-set man whose clean-shaven red face, close-cropped dark hair, and bright eyes had at first sight reminded me of my old friend Chief Inspector Gallaho of Scotland Yard. As Smith came charging out the man righted his chair, sprang up, and began spluttering. Following Smith’s example, I hurriedly put on my topcoat. An unpleasant regurgitating sound drew my attention to the man on guard.
“Say, mister,” he said, “what’s the big hurry?” He began to chew, for in this respect, also, he resembled Gallaho, except that Gallaho’s chewing was imaginary. “Nearly made me swallow my gum—”
“Listen,” Smith broke in: “I’m going out. There may easily be an attempt to get into this apartment tonight—“
“Say—I’m here.”
“I want to make sure,” said Smith, “that you don’t stay here. These are your instructions. Having made sure that all the ‘windows are secure—“
“What, on the fortieth?”