“You’re a bit barmy, aren’t you?”
“I’ve seen it too, Sergeant,” came another voice. “Not tonight for the first time, either.”
“What?”
“I first saw it early last week. I was with the four o’clock boat. It sort of dances in the air, high up over the roof.”
“That’s right,” said the other man.
“Something like a gasworks,” the sergeant suggested facetiously.
“That’s it, Sergeant, only not so bright, and it doesn’t stay long. Just comes and goes.”
The tide lapped and sucked and whispered all around them. The deep voice of the liner moaned down- stream. Metal crashed on metal in the dockyard, and the glare of a million lights created the illusion of a tent stretched overhead; for that high pall still floated above London, angrily, as if waiting to settle again at the first opportunity.
A bent figure moved slowly past the lighted window.
“Tell me if you see it again,” said the sergeant.
Silence fell upon the watchers . . .
“Hello!—who’s this?” the sergeant growled.
The creaking of oars proclaimed itself, growing ever nearer. Hidden in shadows, the River Police watched the approach of a small rowboat. The rower had all the appearance of a typical waterman. He had two passengers.
“What’s this?” muttered the sergeant. “I believe he’s making for Sam Pak’s . . .
The crew of six watched eagerly; any break in the monotony of their duty was welcome. The sergeant’s prediction was fulfilled. The boat was pulled in close to rotting piles which at some time had supported a sort of jetty. At the margin of mud and shingle, the two passengers disembarked, making a perilous way along slippery wooden girders until they reached the sloping strand. The crunch of their heavy boots was clearly audible; and as the boatman pulled away, the two mounted a wooden stair and disappeared into a dark opening.
“H’m!” said the sergeant. “Of course, they may not be going to Sam’s. People are often ferried across here. It’s a short cut to the ‘bus route. Hello!”
He stood suddenly upright in the bows of the launch, and might have been seen staring upward at a point high above the roof of Sam Pak’s establishment.
“There you are, Sergeant. . . that’s what I meant!”
A curious, blue light played there against the pall above. At one moment it resembled a serpent’s tongue, or rather, the fiery tongue of a dragon; then it would change and become a number of little, darting tongues; suddenly, it disappeared altogether.
“Well—I’m damned!” said the sergeant. “That’s a very queer thing. Where the devil can it come from?”
CHAPTER 14
AT SAM PAK’S
The exterior of Sam Pak’s presented the appearance of a small and unattractive Chinese restaurant, where also provisions might be purchased and taken away.
As one entered, there was a counter on the left; the air was informed with an odour of Bombay duck and other Chinese delicacies. Tea might be purchased or drunk on the establishment, for there were two or three cane- topped tables on the other side of the shop. Although midnight had come and gone, lights were still burning in this shop, and a very fat woman of incalculable nationality was playing some variety of patience behind the counter, and smoking cigarettes continuously.
A curious, spicy smell, mingling with that of the provisions indicated that joss-sticks might be purchased here; rice, also, and various kinds of cold eatables, suitable for immediate consumption. Excepting the fat lady, there was no one else in the shop at the moment that Nayland Smith and Sterling entered.
They had been well schooled by a detective attached to K Division, and Nayland Smith, taking the lead, leaned on the counter, and:
“Cigarette please, Lucky Strike,” he said, his accent and intonation that of one not very familiar with English.
The lady behind the counter hesitated for a moment, and then put another card in place. Laying down those which she still held in her hand, she reached back, abstracted a packet of the desired cigarettes from a shelf, and tossed it down before the customer, without so much as glancing at him.
He laid a ten shilling note near to her hand.
“Damn thirsty,” he continued; “got a good drink?”
Piercing black eyes were raised instantaneously. Both men recognized that at that moment they were being submitted to a scrutiny as searching as an X ray examination. Those gimlet eyes were lowered again. The woman took the note, dropping it into a wooden bowl, and from the bowl extracted silver change.
“Who says you get a drink here?” she muttered.
“All sailors know Sam Pak keeps good beer,” Nayland Smith replied rapidly, in that Shanghai vernacular which sometimes passes for Chinese.
The woman smiled; her entire expression changed. She looked up, replying in English.
“How you know Chinese?” she asked.
“Live for ten years in Shanghai.”
“You want beer or whisky?”
“Beer.”
The woman pushed a little paper pad forward across the counter, and handed the speaker a pencil.
The paper was headed “Sailors’ Club.”
“Please, your name here,” she said; then, glancing at Sterling, “your friend too.”
Nayland Smith shrugged his shoulders as if helplessly, and then, laboriously traced out some characters to which no expert alive could possibly have attached any significance or meaning.
“Name of ship, please, here.”
A stubby finger, with a very dirty nail, rested upon a dotted line on the form. They had come prepared for this, and Nayland Smith wrote, using block letters in the wrong place “s.s.
“Now you, please.”
The beady eyes were fixed on Sterling. He wrote what looked like “John Lubba” and put two pencil dots under Smith’s inscription—s.s.
“One shilling each,” said the woman, extracting a two shilling piece from the change and dropping the coin into the wooden bowl. “You members now for one week.”
She pressed a bell-button which stood upon the counter near to her hand, and a door at the end of the little shop was opened.
Nayland Smith, carefully counting his change, replaced it in a pocket of his greasy trousers, and turned as a very slender Chinese boy who walked with so marked a stoop as to appear deformed, came into the shop. He wore an ill-fitting suit and a red muffler, but, incongruously, a small, black Chinese cap upon his head. Perhaps, however, the most sin gular item of his make-up, and that which first struck one’s attention, was an eye-patch which obscured his left eye, lending his small, pale yellow features a strangely sinister appearance. To this odd figure the stout receptionist, tearing off the form from the top of the block, passed the credentials of the two new members, saying rapidly in Chinese:
“For the files.”
Sterling did not understand, but Nayland Smith did; and he was satisfied. They were accepted.
The one-eyed Chinese boy signalled that they should follow, and they proceeded along a short, narrow passage to the “club”. This was a fair-sized room, the atmosphere of which was all but suffocating. Ventilation there was none. A velvet-covered divan, indescribably greasy and filthy, ran along the whole of one wall, tables being set before it at intervals. At the farther end of the place was a bar, and, on the left, cheap wicker chairs and tables. The centre of the floor was moderately clear. It was uncarpeted and some pretence had been made, at some time, to polish the deal planks.
The company present was not without interest.
