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 . . . .
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 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?”
“As you say, on the fortieth. Having made sure of this, patrol every room in the suite, including the bathrooms, at intervals of fifteen minutes. If you find anything alive—except, of course, the monkey in a cage in Sir Lionel’s room—kill it. This applies to a fly or a cockroach.Do I make myself clear?”
“Sure, it’s clear enough, chief—”
“Do it. If in doubt call Headquarters. I count upon you, Sergeant Rorke.”
Throwing the door open, he ran to the elevator and I followed.
* * *
“Smith!” I said, as we were whirled in a police car through kaleidoscopic streets, “what has happened to Longton—and what did you mean by the Snapping Fingers?”
“I meant a signal of death, Kerrigan. Poor Longton—whom you don’t know and will never know, now— may have heard it.”
“I saw how the news affected you.Is it—something very horrible?”
Propped in a comer of the racing car, he began to load his pipe. “Very horrible, Kerrigan. Some foul things have come out of the East, but this thing belongs to the West Indies. Of course, it may have a Negro origin. But at one time it assumed the size of an epidemic.”
“In what way? I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I. It remains a mystery to me scientists. But it began, as far back as I can make out, in the Canal Zone. A young coloured man, employed on one of the locks, was found in his quarters one morning, bled white.”
“Bled white?”
“Almost literally.” He lighted the charred briar. “He was dead, apparently from exhaustion. There were queerly discoloured areas on his skin; but there was practically no blood in his body—“
“No blood?” I cried over the noise of the motor and the Broadway traffic. “What do you mean?”
“He had been reduced to a sort of human veal,, Something had drained all the blood from his veins.”
“Good heavens! But were there no traces—no bloodstains?”
“Nothing. He was the first of many. Then, unaccountably, the terror of the Zone disappeared.”
