The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

tobacco smoke from Smith’s pipe. The handbag (its lock smashed) which contained the green mask, and the mask itself, intact, lay on the bed; Fordwich’s black stick lay beside it—the one that had been in the golf bag.
    “I have told you all I have to tell, Smith. But I haven’t the very slightest idea what it adds up to!”
    “This,” Smith rapped. “In the first place, after the medical examiner has made his report, Number 113 must be sealed. No whisper of what lies there has to leak out. So much I have arranged with Raymond Harkness of the FBI, who is co-operating with me. In the second place, poor Selwyn Orson must have known he was spotted. He chose
you
to bring his stick ashore!”
    “But…”
    “He had a duplicate, which he had kept hidden during the crossing. The note you received, asking you to call at the purser’s office, was sent, of course, by Orson—whom you knew as Fordwich. He wanted you out of the cabin long enough to slip the stick into your golf-bag. He must have noted that you carried one.”
    “But why? Why
two
sticks?”
    Nayland Smith began to knock ashes from his fuming pipe.
    “That I hope to find out. The smashed duplicate across in his room suggests that his killer—who, by the way was a professional thug, a Burmese dacoit—had special instructions on this point.”
    “And the green mask?”
    Nayland Smith shook his head.
    “One mystery at a time, Thurston! Suppose we start with the stick.”
    He took it up and examined it closely. He tapped it, and endeavoured to unscrew the crooked handle. It appeared to be solid. Smith clicked his teeth together irritably.
    “Of course, it’s a smuggler’s stick. But how does it open?…
Ah
!”
    He begun to detach the rubber ferule. It was not easy, but at last he had it off. Under the rubber was a brass ferule. Attempts to remove it defied all his efforts, until, with the ferule wedged in the hinge of the bathroom door and while he turned the shank firmly, it began to unscrew.
    There was a cavity in the base of the big stick, from which protruded a roll of paper!
    Nayland Smith pulled it out. It proved to consist of a number of closely typed and very thin pages, wound around a sort of slender jade baton most curiously carved.
    At this he stared with deep curiosity. He examined the delicate carving.
    “What the devil have we here?”
    Then, with care, he turned the baton in his fingers. It opened without difficulty. It unscrewed in the middle. And Smith tapped out into the palm of his left hand a single sheet of parchment on which appeared some lines of writing in heavy, black letters.
    At the foot of the parchment was a small seal.
    He glanced at the seal, rapidly scanned the typescript, and then shot a steely glance at Thurston.
    “I believe you told me that you found Mrs van Roorden dangerously alluring?”
    “I did.”
    “She is! She’s Dr Fu-Manchu’s daughter!”
    Thurston stared almost stupidly.
    “But, Smith—she is quite young.”
    “She has always appeared so,” Nayland Smith snapped, “from the first time I met her up to her last attempt to seduce me!”
    At about which time, Dr Fu-Manchu, wrapped in a fur-lined coat and having an astrakhan cap pulled well down over his massive skull, glanced back at old Huan Tsung, his chief-of-staff, who sat behind him in the plane. Matsukata was the pilot.
    “I seem to hear your teeth chattering, Huan Tsung?”
    “Your hearing does not mislead you, Excellency.”
    “Yet Peko, here in my arms, sleeps peacefully.”
    “Even if men derive from apes, some small differences distinguish us from our remote ancestors. Monkeys may be immune. But at our present height, without aid of oxygen, I confess that my old heart falters.”
    “We could touch the outer atmosphere, encased as we are in the new amalgam. Imagination, Huan Tsung, is a two-edged sword.” Fu-Manchu glanced at the instrument board. “We are far above the commercial air lanes, but we continue to receive absurd signals