CHAPTER SIXTEENTH
A MASKED WOMAN
“I am not prepared to believe,” said Sir Lionel, walking up and down the big room reserved for him at Shepheard’s “that even Dr. Fu Manchu could have had a stock of dead men waiting on the road from Heliopolis.”
“Neither am I,” said Nayland Smith. “We may have avoided earlier traps. Those three old fellows, Petrie—” turning to the Doctor—”who seemed so reluctant to get out of your way, you remember, and the cart laden with fodder. I don’t suggest for a moment, Barton, that that poor old beggar was killed to serve the purpose; but Petrie here is of opinion that he died either from enteritis or poisoning, and the employment of a body in that way was probably a local inspiration on the part of the agents planted at that particular stage of our journey. He was pushed out, to the best of my recollection, from a shadowy patch of waste ground close beside the cafe. Where he actually died, I don’t suppose we shall ever know, but—” tugging at the lobe of his left ear—”it’s the most extraordinary trick I have ever met with, even in my dealings with...”
He paused, and Rima finished the sentence:
“Dr. Fu Manchu.”
There came an interval. The shutters of the window which overlooked the garden were closed. Muted voices, laughter, and a sound of many footsteps upon sanded paths rose to us dimly. But that group in the room was silent, until:
“Only
He pointed to a battered leather suitcase lying on a chair and began to laugh in his own boisterous fashion.
“I travel light, Smith!” he cried, “but my baggage is valuable!”
None of us responded to his mood, and Sir Denis stared at him very coldly.
“When is Alt Mahmoud due in Cairo?” he asked.
That queer question was so unexpected that I turned and stared at the speaker. The chief appeared to be quite taken aback; and:
“Hell do well if he’s here with the heavy kit in four days,” he replied. “But why do you ask, Smith?”
Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably and began to walk up and down again.
“I should have thought. Barton,” he snapped, “that we knew one another well enough to have shared confidences.”
“What do you mean?”
“Simply what I say. If it conveys nothing—forget it!”
“I shan’t forget it,” said the chief loweringly, his tufted brows drawn together. “But I shall continue to conduct my own affairs in my own way.”
“Good enough. I’m not going to quarrel with you. But I should like to make a perfectly amiable suggestion.”
“One moment,” Petrie interrupted. “We’re all old friends here. We’ve gone through queer times together, and after all—there’s a common enemy. It’s useless to pretend we don’t know who that common enemy is. You agree with me, Smith? For God’s sake, let’s stand four square. I don’t know all the facts. But I strongly suspect—” turning to Sir Denis—”that
The chief gnawed his moustache, locked his hands behind him, and stood very upright, looking from face to face. He was in his most truculent mood. But at last, glancing aside from Petrie:
“I await your amiable suggestion. Smith,” he growled.
“I’ll put it forward,” said the latter. “It is this: A Bibby liner is leaving Port Said for Southampton tomorrow. I suggest that Rima secures a berth.”
Rima jumped up at his words, but I saw Petrie grasp her hand as if to emphasise his agreement with them.
“Why should I be sent home. Sir Denis?” she demanded. “What have I done? If you’re thinking of my safety, I’ve been living for months in remote camps in Khorassan and Persia, and you see—” she laughed and glanced aside at me—”I’m still alive.”
“You have done nothing, my dear,” Sir Denis returned, and smiled in that delightful way which, for all his seniority, sometimes made me wonder why any woman could spare me a thought while he was present. “Nor,” he added, “do I doubt your .courage. But while your uncle maintains his present attitude, I don’t merely fear—I know —that all of us, yourself included, stand in peril of our lives.”
There was an unpleasant sense of tension in the atmosphere. The chief was in one of his most awkward moods— which I knew well. He had some dramatic trick up his sleeve. Of this I was fully aware. And he was afraid that Sir Denis was going to spoil his big effect.
Sir Lionel, for all his genius, and despite his really profound learning, at times was actuated by the motives which prompt a mischievous school-boy to release a mouse at a girl’s party.
Incongruously, at this moment, at least from our point of view, a military band struck up somewhere beneath; for this was a special occasion of some kind, and the famous garden was en fete. None of us, however, were in gala humour; but:
“Let’s go down and see what’s going on, Shan,” said Rima. She glanced at Sir Lionel. “Can you spare him?”
“Glad to get rid of him,” growled the chief. “He’s hand and hoof with Smith, here, and one of’em’s enough...”
And so presently Rima and I found ourselves crossing the lobby below and watching a throng entering the ballroom from which strains of a dance band came floating out.
“What a swindle, Shan!” she said, pouting in a childish fashion I loved. “I’m simply dying for a dance. And I haven’t even the ghost of a frock with me.”
We were indeed out of place in that well dressed gathering, in our tired-looking travelling kit. For practically the whole of our worldly possessions had been left behind with the heavy gear in charge of Alt Mahmoud.
After several months more or less in the wilderness, all these excited voices and the throb and drone of jazz music provided an overdose of modern civilisation.
“I feel like Robinson Crusoe,” Rima declared, “on his first day home. Do you feel like Man Friday?”
“Not a bit!”
“I’m glad, because you look more like a Red Indian.”
Exposure to sun and wind, as a matter of fact, had beyond doubt reduced my complexion to the tinge of a very new brick, and I was wearing an old tweed suit which for shabbiness could only be compared with that of gray flannel worn by Sir Denis.
Nevertheless, I thought, as I looked at Rima, from her trim glossy head to the tips of her small gray shoes, that she was the daintiest figure I had seen that night.
“As we’re totally unfit for the ballroom,” I said, “do you think we might venture in the garden?”
We walked through the lounge with its little Oriental alcoves and out into the garden. It was a perfect night, but unusually hot for the season. Humphreys, our pilot, joined us there, and:
“You know, Greville,” he said grinning, “I don’t know what you’ve been up to in Khorassan, or wherever it is. But somebody in those parts is kicking up no end of a shindy.”
He glanced at me shrewdly. Of the real facts he could know nothing—unless the chief had been characteristically indiscreet. But I realised that he must suspect our flight from Persia to have had some relation to the disturbances in that country.
“I should say you bolted just in time,” he went on. “They claim a sort of new Mahdi up there. When I got to Cairo this evening I found the news everywhere. Honestly, it’s all over the town, particularly the native town. There’s a most curious feeling abroad, and in some way they have got the story of this Veiled bloke mixed up with the peculiar weather. I mean, it’s turned phenomenally hot. There’s evidently a storm brewing.”
