Brian concluded that many American gentlemen who visited Cairo must be wealthy gentlemen. Achmed, indicating those shops which were in sight, told him where amber goods, silk robes, authentic antique pieces, might be bought cheaply. Brian thanked him and stood up to go.
Glancing once more into the shadows, he saw that the girl’s remarkable eyes—they were amber eyes— seemed to be fixed upon him ...
He looked in briefly to some of the shops Achmed had recommended, but bought nothing. Coming out of the last one (which stocked scimitars, Saracen daggers and other queer Oriental weapons) he found himself staring into a shady alley nearly opposite.
He had caught a glimpse of lustrous amber eyes!
The girl from Achmed’s had followed him! Why? Was she a Lady-of-the-Town, or had she some other purpose? Perhaps she was a member of Achmed’s household, instructed to find out if he did any business upon which Achmed could claim a commission.
He strode off at a pace which gave many of the leisurely natives a jolt and called down on him dreadful curses which, fortunately, he didn’t understand. He recovered his good humour in a street which seemed to lead to a city gate, turned right, into another, now hopelessly lost, and saw the minaret of a mosque right ahead. He glanced back quickly. There was no sign of the Arab girl.
But from behind came shouts and a sound of many running feet. This sound drew nearer. Brian wondered if he had started a riot. The word
He put on a spurt, passed the mosque, and looking back saw the head of what was evidently an excited mob pouring around the corner.
Just as he was clear of the mosque, out from its courtyard spurted a party of Egyptian police. He noticed an open doorway almost beside him, darted in and found it led to nowhere but a rickety staircase. Outside, came a clash. Wild shouting—fighting. Then a shot.
Brian started upstairs, as the tumult suggested that the police were being pushed back. On the first dark landing he nearly knocked over a water jar which stood near the stairhead. But the house seemed to be inhabited only by a variety of stenches. He mounted higher. The battle, now, was raging immediately outside the door below. Went up another flight— and found himself on the flat roof!
He saw all sorts of pans, jars and indescribable litter lying about, but nobody was up there. Brian crouched and looked over the low parapet down into the street.
The rioters had been rounded up by the armed police. They were all young, wild-eyed, typical tinder for the rabble-rouser. They were falling back, three of them carrying a wounded comrade. Brian could see a second police party extended in line before the mosque. The rioters were trapped.
He sighed with relief. Slightly raising his head, he looked across the street to find out if he had been observed from there. He saw something which staggered him.
A heavy iron gate in a high wall which he remembered having noticed as he ran into the doorway below opened on the tree-shaded courtyard of a fine old Arab house.
And in this room, pacing restlessly about, he saw a tall, lean man who smoked a pipe, and who seemed to be talking angrily to someone else who wasn’t visible from Brian’s viewpoint.
For some time he lay there on the dirty roof, enthralled, unwilling to credit what he saw, but anxious to make sure that he wasn’t suffering from a strange delusion. The shouts below had merged into sullen murmurs as the young rowdies were taken in charge by the police and marched off.
Brian scarcely noticed them, now. He was watching— watching.
And at last he was sure.
The man in the barred room was
* * *
Dr. Fu Manchu sat on a divan in the saloon of the old house near the Mosque of El-Ashraf. Beside him on an ivory and mother-o’-pearl coffee table a long-stemmed pipe with a tiny jade bowl lay beside the other equipment of an opium smoker. Before him a girl was kneeling on a rug, her long, lustrous amber eyes raised anxiously to the wonderful but evil face. She wore native dress, but no longer concealed her features with a veil.
“It was the disturbance made by the students from El-Azhar, Master. I lost sight of him and could not get through.”
“I heard the young fools. Shouting phrases coined by aliens who are planning their destruction. Such half- moulded brains are fertile soil for the seeds of violence. All the same, you have failed me. The point at which he disappeared is one dangerously near us.”
“Master, I——”
“You shall have one more opportunity. Change into European dress. Go to Brian Merrick’s hotel and make his acquaintance. He will be lonely. Attach yourself to him . . .”
He said no more, but watched her go out, then stood up slowly and walked along the saloon to a door, opened it, and went into another lofty room furnished as a studio.
No one was at work there.
On a wooden pedestal was a life-sized head of a man modelled in clay—the most conspicuous object in the studio. A number of sketches and photographs of the same subject were pinned to the walls. It would appear that the sculptor had worked from these and not from the living model.
It was a fine, virile portrait of a masterful character; but Dr. Fu Manchu appeared to be particularly interested in the shape of the moulded nose. He surveyed it from every side, the all-seeing gaze of green eyes absorbed in the finer lines of the nostrils, the straight bridge. He compared the clay model with the photographs, and at last seemed to be satisfied.
He passed on. He went down a short stair and entered a fully-equipped surgery filled with a nauseating odour of anaesthetics.
A patient lay on an operating table, two surgeons bending over him. They sprang upright as Fu Manchu appeared. He ignored them, stooped, studied the face of the man who lay there, and then turned blazing eyes upon the surgeons, one of whom was Matsukata.
“Who operated?” he demanded.
The taller surgeon turned a white, nervous face to Dr. Fu Manchu.
“I operated, Master.” He spoke in French and used the word
“I thought better of Paris surgery,” Fu Manchu told him, speaking the same language sibilantly, “There will be a scar!”
“I assure you——”
“There will be a scar were my words—and no time to rectify the error. The consequences of this may be grave, for me—and also for you. . . .”
Chapter
4
The moment the narrow street was cleared of police and rioters, Brian crept downstairs, unobserved, looked cautiously left and right and then started out to try to retrace his route. At the courtyard gate of the old house in which he had seen Nayland Smith he hesitated for a moment, but then hurried on. He considered it a stroke of luck that the inhabitants of the ramshackle tenement in which he had sheltered were apparently otherwise engaged.
More by luck than good navigation he presently found himself once more in the street leading to the Khan Khalil. He looked around for a stray cab, for he was wildly impatient to solve the mystery of Sir Denis’s presence in Cairo, and in a house in the heart of the native quarter. What in the name of sanity did it mean?
He could not very well be wrong about the identity of the man in the room with barred windows. Nayland Smith’s personality was unmistakable, although Brian hadn’t seen him for two years. He had recognized some of his curious mannerisms: the way he held his briar pipe clenched between his teeth; a trick of twitching at the lobe of his ear as he talked.
