hour after I left: a request from Hepburn that under no circumstances should we look for evidence at the apartment he had visited, as someone lay there critically ill. No hint regarding his own movement, but the cryptic statement: ‘Keep in touch with Fey and have no fear about my personal safety.
“Fey is sure it was Hepburn who called him,” said Johnson. . . .
“But that was early last night,” snapped Smith; “it is now 3.15 in the morning! And except for the fact that our latest reports enabled us to draw a ring on the map of Manhattan, where are we? Dr. Fu Manchu is almost certainly inside that ring. But since we cannot possibly barricade the most fashionable area of New York, how are we to find him?”
“It’s deadlock sure enough,” Johnson agreed. “One thing’s certain: Hepburn hasn’t come out since he went in! A mouse couldn’t have got out of that building. There are lights in the top apartment. . . .”
And even as these words were being spoken, Mark Hepburn, in a darkened room, was watching the greatest menace to social order the world has^ known since Attila the Hun overran Europe, and wondering if Nayland Smith would respect his request.
He had witnessed a feat of surgery unique in his experience. Those long yellow fingers seemed to hold magic in their tips. Smith’s assurance became superfluous. Dr. Fu Manchu, the supreme physician, was also the master surgeon. He was, as Hepburn believed (for Nayland Smith’s computation he found himself unable to accept), a man of over seventy years of age. Yet with unfailing touch, exquisite dexterity, he had carried out an operation in a way which Hepburn’s training told him to be wrong. It had proved to be right. Dr. Fu Manchu had performed a surgical miracle —under hypnosis!
But it had left the little patient in a dangerously weak condition.
The night wore on, and with every hour of anxiety, Moya came nearer and nearer to collapse. Except for the ceaseless, hoarse voice of New York the sick room was silent.
That strange, supercilious gesture of Fu Manchu before he began the operation was one Hepburn could never forget; it had a sort of ironic grandeur.
“Call your headquarters,” the Chinese Doctor had directed, “at the Regal Tower. Ensure us against interference. Allay any doubts respecting your own safety: I shall require you here. Conceal the fact that I am present, but accept responsibility for handing me over to the law. I give you—personally— my parole. Instruct the exchange that no calls are to be put through to-night. . . .”
Nurse Goff was on duty again, although it was amazing how the weary woman kept awake. She sat by the open window, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed not upon the deathly face of Robbie, but on the gaunt profile of the man who bent over him. Moya was past tears; she stood just inside the open door, supported by Hepburn.
For five hours Dr. Fu Manchu had sat beside the bed. Some of the restorative measures which he had adopted were those that any surgeon would have used; others were unfamiliar to Hepburn, who could not even guess what was contained in the phials which he opened. Once, in the first crisis, Fu Manchu had harshly directed him to charge a hypodermic syringe. Then, bending over the boy and resting his hands upon his head, he had waved him aside. Now, as Hepburn’s training told him, the second, grand crisis, was approaching.
Moya had not spoken for more than an hour. Her lips were parched, her eyes burning: she quivered as he held her against him.
A new day drew near, and Hepburn, watching saw (and read the portent) beads of moisture appearing upon the high yellow brow of Dr. Fu Manchu. At four o’clock, that zero hour at which so many frightened souls have crossed the threshold to take their first hesitant steps upon the path beyond, Robbie opened his eyes, tried to grin at the intent face so near to his own, then closed them again.
It came to Mark Hepburn as a conviction that that lonely little spirit had wandered beyond recall even by the greatest physician in the world, who sat motionless at his bedside. . . .
Chapter 38
WESTWARD
Dim grey light was touching the most lofty buildings, so that they seemed to emerge from sleeping New York like phantoms of lost Nineveh; later would come the high-flung spears of those temples of Mammon. As Bliicher might have remarked, “What a city to loot!”
Nayland Smith rang a bell beside a glazed door with iron scrollwork. Park Avenue is never wholly deserted day or night, but at this hour its fashionable life was at lowest ebb, and every possible precaution had been taken to avoid attracting the attention of belated passers-by. It was necessary to ring the bell more than once before the door was opened.
A sleepy night porter, his hair tousled, confronted them. Nayland Smith stepped forward, but the man, an angry gleam coming into his eyes, barred the way. He was big and powerfully built.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded. “Top floor,” rapped Nayland Smith. “Don’t argue.” The man had a glimpse of a gold badge, and over the speaker’s shoulder saw that he was covered by an automatic held by Lieutenant Johnson.
“What’s the fuss?” he growled. “I’m not arguing.” But actually, although he was only a very small cog in the wheel, he knew that the occupants of the penthouse apartment at the top of the building were closely protected. He had secured his appointment through the League of Good Americans, and he had had orders from the officers of the league, identifiable by their badges, scrupulously to note and report anyone who visited the apartment.
In silence he operated the elevator. At the top:
“Go down again,” Nayland Smith ordered, “and report to the officer in charge in the vestibule.”
As the elevator disappeared he looked about him: they were a party of four. Anxiety for Hepburn’s safety had driven him to make this move. Belatedly he had remembered a letter once received from Orwin Prescott—and in Prescott’s handwriting. He remembered that Hepburn quite recently had succumbed to that uncanny control which Dr. Fu Manchu possessed the power to exercise. . . . Hepburn’s message to Fey might be no more than an emanation from that powerful, evil will!
“Be ready for anything,” he warned sternly, “but make no move without orders from me.”
He pressed the bell.
