know if any of them belonged to the gang. Only one, Mrs. Nadia Narovska, has disappeared like the ‘prince’ and left her luggage behind: Number 421. Said to be a very good-looker.”
“But she may be coming back,” Brian pointed out.
“The management report she came in only a few minutes before the elevator was stopped and the sergeant went on duty at the stair door. How did she get out?”
“But it would be impossible for her to have overpowered a big fellow like that!”
“If she belonged to Fu Manchu,” Nayland Smith said bitterly, “and she sounds like one of his women, nothing is impossible! I haven’t settled down yet to the fact that that cunning fiend has escaped me again. In my crazy over-confidence I missed my chance. It was my duty to the world when I stood before him to shoot him dead.”
He banged his fist into the palm of his left hand.
“They all slipped away in whatever time they had from the attack on Ruppert until Merrick and I came upstairs,” Sir Denis went on. “Once on street level, Manhattan was open to them. Our hush-hush policy has defeated its own ends.”
“It’s not so black as you paint it,” Harkness insisted. “We may have lost the secret of this wonderful air- cover, but if the price Uncle Sam had to pay for it was putting our defences in the hands of Dr. Fu Manchu, we gain more than we lose.”
Nayland Smith forced a smile.
“You may be right. Dr. Fu Manchu has still to get out of the country. . . . Oh, Merrick, Miss Erskine has passed through a frightful ordeal. I suggest you take her along for a champagne cocktail and a good dinner. Dine downstairs. I’ll page you when your father arrives. . . . We shall all have many things to talk about. . . . And I can see that you have a lot of things to say to Lola. . . .”
