Brian walked about for some time in an unhappy frame of mind; smoked countless cigarettes. Once, hearing faint footsteps in the corridor, which seemed to pause at the far end, he crossed the lobby and quietly opened the door; looked out.
He was just in time to see the door to the penthouse stair closing!
“Damn!” he muttered—for he had caught not even a glimpse of the person who had gone in.
Listening intently, he detected the unmistakable click of a key being turned in a lock.
This irritated him unreasonably. His job, so far as he could see, remained that of an attendant; a sort of paid companion for Nayland Smith. Plots and counter-plots involving the security of the United States seethed around him, but he had no part to play.
Never once had he entered the penthouse since Dr. Hessian had taken up residence there; nor once set eyes upon him from the time of their arrival to the present moment.
It was a humiliating position—or so it seemed to him, now.
The phone on the big desk buzzed.
“Hullo!” he called.
“Oh, Brian, I’m so glad I caught you!” . . .
“Where are you now, Lola?”
“At Michel’s. But for mercy’s sake don’t call me back, here! I’ll wait downstairs until seven, Brian. Do try!”
And she hung up.
Brian glanced at his watch. Five o’clock. Then he stood quite still, listening. French windows opened on a balcony were partly open. . . . and he could hear voices from above. Someone was talking on the terrace of the penthouse.
He opened the windows fully, but silently, and stepped out.
A strange voice, alternately guttural and sibilant, spoke slowly, with impressive pauses. Something in this voice touched a chord of memory, but so faintly that no idea of the speaker’s identity was conjured up. It bore a vague resemblance to the rarely-heard speech of Dr. Hessian. But the language was neither German nor English. It was a language which Brian knew he had never heard before.
There were occasional replies; monosyllables in the same tongue.
Once, Brian was almost sure, the name “Nayland Smith” was introduced into the otherwise unintelligible jargon. But he knew he might be mistaken, for if it had in fact been that name, it was so mispronounced as to be barely recognizable.
The conversation ended abruptly. He heard a shuffle of footsteps, and knew that the speakers had gone in. ...
* * *
“You made it, Brian!” Lola stood up to greet him as he hurried into the Paris Bar. “I nearly gave up hope. This is my second cocktail! Did the Big Chief have a heart, after all?”
Brian dropped into a chair facing her. He longed to have her in his arms; but this was not the time. And he felt oddly dispirited.
“When at last he came in, I told him about one or two queer things that had happened, and he said boredom was getting on my nerves and ordered me to forget the job and play a while.”
He looked up at a waiter who had just appeared and ordered two more cocktails.
Lola checked him. “Not another for me, Brian. I’ll finish on this one.”
Brian didn’t argue. He knew Lola. And when the waiter went off:
“Surely you’re through for the day, Lola?” he asked.
“Yes.” She was watching him, smiling. “But I like to stay sober all the same. What were these queer things that happened, Brian?”
“Oh!” He lighted a cigarette. Lola already was smoking. “We seem to have some curious neighbours up above us in the penthouse. I overheard somebody talking in a queer sort of jargon and mentioned it to Sir Denis.”
“He probably said that representatives of United Nations lived there?”
“No. He didn’t say that.” Brian tried to draw a cloak of secrecy about himself, but wasn’t quite successful. “For a man on a dangerous mission—or so I understand—he brushed it off very lightly. Between ourselves, there are times when I wonder if Sir Denis is really up to his old form.”
“Please, Brian!” Lola smiled her one-sided smile. “Don’t talk Oxford. After all, you’re still an American.”
Brian grinned almost happily. Lola’s impudent criticism of his occasional traces of English idiom and speech, far from annoying, delighted him. It proved her interest, or so he argued. His cocktail arrived; he sampled it.
“Maybe I mean he’s getting too old for his job.”
Lola frowned thoughtfully, twirling her glass between sensitive fingers.
“As I haven’t met him I can’t judge, Brian. But there’s just one thing I’d like to know. The first time you saw him in Cairo did you think he had changed?”
Brian considered the question; decided that no harm could be done by telling Lola the facts.
“That makes me think, Lola. The first time I saw him in Cairo was under very peculiar circumstances. It’s quite a story.”
And he outlined the incident which had led him to take refuge on the roof of a house overlooking that of Shertf Mohammed, and told her what he had seen from there. . . .
“There was no mistake about it, dear. The way he gripped his pipe, the trick of twitching the lobe of his ear. I knew I was looking at Nayland Smith.
“How excited you must have been! And after that?”
Now well in his stride, and delighted to have Lola for an audience, Brian related how he had demanded an interview with the Sherif and what had happened there.
“So you didn’t see him,” Lola murmured. “When
Brian gave her an account of Sir Denis’s secret entrance to his hotel apartment, and equally secret exit.
“Was it then, Brian, when you actually talked to him, that you began to wonder if he had outlived what you call ‘his old form’?”
“Not exactly right then, Lola——”
Brian paused, finished his cocktail. He had thought of something; and the thing, though perhaps trivial, had staggered him, chiefly because he had never thought of it before.
“Then when, dear?”
“Later, I guess. But—when Sir Denis came to see me he had a strip of surgical plaster on the bridge of his nose.”
“Had he been in a fight?”
Lola asked the question jokingly. But her grey eyes weren’t smiling.
“He’d had one hell of a time getting out of the hands of the Reds. But that’s not the point. Something which he didn’t tell me must have happened right there in Cairo. Because, when I saw him pacing around that room, and I saw him clearly, there was no plaster on his nose!”
* * *
One of the hourly reports ordered by Dr. Fu Manchu was just coming in. That solitary spark of green light glowed in the darkness. . . .
“Brian Merrick’s complete ignorance of Operation Zero confirmed.”
“He has served his purpose, and could be dispensed with. Henceforward he becomes a possible source of danger. . . . Where is he now?”
“In the Sunset Room.”
“He is covered?”
“Closely, Excellency”
“What Federal operatives are on duty there?”
“Two F.B.I, agents.”
The green light disappeared. And, invisible in the darkness, Dr. Fu Manchu laughed. . . .
