Chapter 16 - A Masked Woman

“I AM not prepared to believe,” said Sir Lionel, walking up and down the big room reserved for him at Shepheard’s, “that even Dr. Fu Manchu could have had a stock of dead men waiting on the road from Heliopolis.”

“Neither am I,” said Nayland Smith. “We may have avoided earlier traps. Those three old fellows, Petrie—” turning to the Doctor—“who seemed so reluctant to get out of your way, you remember, and the cart laden with fodder. I don’t suggest for a moment, Barton, that that poor old beggar was killed to serve the purpose; but Petrie here is of opinion that he died either from enteritis or poisoning, and the employment of a body in that way was probably a local inspiration on the part of the agents planted at that particular stage of our journey. He was pushed out, to the best of my recollection, from a shadowy patch of waste ground close beside the café. Where he actually died, I don’t suppose we shall ever know, but—” tugging at the lobe of his left ear—“it’s the most extraordinary trick I have ever met with, even in my dealings with . . .”

He paused, and Ramin finished the sentence: “Dr. Fu Manchu.”

There came an interval. The shutters of the window which overlooked the garden were closed. Muted voices, laughter, and a sound of many footsteps upon sanded paths rose to us dimly. But that group in the room was silent, until:

“Only he could devise such a thing,” said the chief slowly, “and only you and I, Smith, could go one better.”

He pointed to a battered leather suitcase lying on a chair and began to laugh in his own boisterous fashion.

“I travel light, Smith!” he cried, “but my baggage is valuable!”

None of us responded to his mood, and Sir Denis stared at him very coldly.

“When is Ali Mahmoud due in Cairo?” he asked.

That queer question was so unexpected that I turned and stared at the speaker. The chief appeared to be quite taken aback; and:

“He’ll do well if he’s here with the heavy kit in four days,” he replied. “But why do you ask, Smith?”

Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably and began to walk up and down again.

“I should have thought, Barton,” he snapped, “that we knew one another well enough to have shared confidences.”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply what I say. If it conveys nothing—forget it!”

“I shan’t forget it,” said the chief loweringly, his tufted brows drawn together. “But I shall continue to conduct my own affairs in my own way.”

“Good enough. I’m not going to quarrel with you. But I should like to make a perfectly amiable suggestion.”

“One moment,” Petrie interrupted. “We’re all old friends here. We’ve gone through queer times together, and after all—there’s a common enemy. It’s useless to pretend we don’t know who that common enemy is. You agree with me, Smith? For God’s sake, let’s stand four square. I don’t know all the facts. But I strongly suspect—” turning to Sir Denis—“that you do. You’re the stumbling block, Barton. You’re keeping something up your sleeve. Lay all the cards on the table.”

The chief gnawed his mustache, locked his hands behind him, and stood very upright, looking from face to face. He was in his most truculent mood. But at last, glancing aside from Petrie:

“I await your amiable suggestion, Smith,” he growled.

“I’ll put it forward,” said the latter. “It is this: A Bibby liner is leaving Port Said for Southampton to-morrow. I suggest that Ramin secures a berth.”

Ramin jumped up at his words, but I saw Petrie grasp his hand as if to emphasize his agreement with them.

“Why should I be sent home, Sir Denis?” he demanded. “What have I done? If you’re thinking of my safety, I’ve been living for months in remote camps in Khorassan and Persia, and you see—” he laughed and glanced aside at me—“I’m still alive.”

“You have done nothing,” Sir Denis returned, and smiled in that delightful way which, for all his seniority, sometimes made me wonder why any youth could spare me a thought while he was present. “Nor,” he added, “do I doubt your courage. But while your uncle maintains his present attitude, I don’t merely fear—I know—that all of us, yourself included, stand in peril of our lives.”

There was an unpleasant sense of tension in the atmosphere. The chief was in one of his most awkward moods—which I knew well. He had some dramatic trick up his sleeve. Of this I was fully aware. And he was afraid that Sir Denis was going to spoil his big effect.

Sir Lionel, for all his genius, and despite his really profound learning, at times was actuated by the motives which prompt a mischievous schoolboy to release a mouse at a party.

Incongruously, at this moment, at least from our point of view, a military band struck up somewhere beneath; for this was a special occasion of some kind, and the famous garden was en fête. None of us, however, were in gala humour; but:

“Let’s go down and see what’s going on, Shan,” said Ramin. He glanced at Sir Lionel. “Can you spare him?”

“Glad to get rid of him,” growled the chief. “He’s hand and hoof with Smith, here, and one of ’em’s enough. . . .”

And so presently Ramin and I found ourselves crossing the lobby below and watching a throng entering the ballroom from which strains of a dance band came floating out.

“What a swindle, Shan!” he said.”

We were indeed out of place in that well dressed gathering, in our tired-looking traveling kit. For practically the whole of our worldly possessions had been left behind with the heavy gear in charge of Ali Mahmoud.

After several months more or less in the wilderness, all these excited voices and the throb and drone of jazz music provided almost an overdose of modern civilization.

“I feel like Robinson Crusoe,” Ramin declared, “on his first day home. Do you feel like Man Friday?”

“Not a bit!”

“I’m glad, because you look more like a Red Indian.”

Exposure to sun and wind, as a matter of fact, had beyond doubt reduced my complexion to the tinge of a very new brick, and I was wearing an old tweed suit which for shabbiness could only be compared with that of gray flannel worn by Sir Denis.

Nevertheless, I thought, as I looked at Ramin, that he was the smartest figure I had seen that night.

“As we’re totally unfit for the ballroom,” I said, “do you think we might venture in the garden?”

We walked through the lounge with its little Oriental alcoves and out into the garden. It was a perfect night, but unusually hot for the season. Humphreys, our pilot, joined us there, and:

“You know, Greville,” he said grinning, “I don’t know what you’ve been up to in Khorassan, or wherever it is. But somebody in those parts is kicking up no end of a shindy.”

He glanced at me shrewdly. Of the real facts he could know nothing—unless the chief had been characteristically indiscreet. But I realized that he must suspect our flight from Persia to have had some relation to the disturbances in that country.

“I should say you bolted just in time,” he went on. “They claim a sort of new Mahdi up there. When I got to Cairo this evening I found the news everywhere. Honestly, it’s all over the town, particularly the native town. There’s a most curious feeling abroad, and in some way they have got the story of this Veiled bloke mixed up with the peculiar weather. I mean, it’s turned phenomenally hot. There’s evidently a storm brewing.”

“Which they put down to the influence of El Mokanna?”

“Oh, what nonsense!” Ramin laughed.

But Humphreys nodded grimly, and: “Exactly,” he returned. “I’m told that a religious revival is overdue among the Moslems, and this business may fill the bill. You ought to know as well as I do, Greville, that superstition is never very far below the surface in even the most cultured Oriental. And these waves of fanaticism are really incalculable. It’s a kind of mass hypnotism, and we know the creative power of thought.”

I stared at the speaker with a new curiosity. He was revealing a side of his nature which I had not supposed to exist. Ramin, too, had grown thoughtful.

“Someone would have to lead this movement,” she suggested. “How could there be followers of a Veiled Prophet if there were no Veiled Prophet?”

“I’m told that up at El Azhar,” Humphreys replied seriously, “they are proclaiming that there is a Veiled Prophet—or, rather, a Masked Prophet. He’s supposed to be moving down through Persia.”

“But it’s simply preposterous!” Ramin declared.

“It’s likely to be infernally dangerous,” he returned dryly. “However,” brightening up, “I notice you’re devoid of evening kit, Mr. Barton, same as Greville.”

Up under the leaves of the tall palms little colored electric lamps were set, resembling fiery fruit. Japanese lanterns formed lighted festoons from trunk to trunk. In the moonlight, the water of the central fountain looked like an endless cascade of diamonds. The sky above was blue-black, and the stars larger and brighter than I remembered ever to have seen them.

Crunching of numberless feet I heard on the sanded paths; a constant murmur of voices; peals of laughter rising sometimes above it all—and now the music of a military band.

There were few fancy costumes, and those chiefly of the stock order. But there was a profusion of confetti—which seems to be regarded as indispensable on such occasions, but which I personally look upon as a definite irritant. To shed little disks of colored paper from one’s clothing, cigarette case, and tobacco pouch wherever one goes for a week after visiting a fête of this kind is a test of good-humour which the Southern races possibly survive better than I do.

I strolled round towards the left of the garden—that part farthest from the band and the dancers—intending to slip into the hotel for a drink before rejoining Ramin and Humphreys.

Two or three confetti fiends had pot shots at me, but I did not find their attentions stimulating. In fact, I may as well confess that this more or less artificial gaiety, far from assisting me to banish those evil thoughts which claimed my mind, seemed to focus them more sharply.

Sir Denis and the chief, when I had left them, were still pacing up and down in the latter’s room, arguing hotly; and poor Dr. Petrie was trying to keep the peace. That Sir Lionel had smuggled the Mokanna relics out of Persian territory he did not deny, nor was this by any means the first time he had indulged in similar acts of piracy. Nayland Smith was for lodging them in the vault of the Museum: Sir Lionel declined to allow them out of his possession.

He had a queer look in his deep-set eyes which I knew betokened mischief. Sir Denis knew too, and the knowledge taxed him almost to the limit of endurance, that the chief was keeping something back.

A sudden barrage of confetti made me change my mind about going in. Try how I would, I could not force myself into gala humour, and I walked all around the border of the garden, along a path which seemed to be deserted and only imperfectly lighted.

Practically everybody was on the other side, where the band was playing—either dancing or watching the dancing. The greater number of the guests were in the ballroom, however, preferring a polished floor to military brass and al fresco discomfort. I had lost my last cigarette under the confetti bombardment, and now, taking out my pipe, I stood still and began to fill it.

Dr. Fu Manchu!

Nayland Smith believed that agents of Dr. Fu Manchu had been responsible for the death of Van Berg and for the theft of the green box. This, I reflected, could mean only one thing.

Dr. Fu Manchu was responsible for the wave of fanaticism sweeping throughout the East, for that singular rumour that a prophet was reborn, which, if Humphreys and Petrie were to be believed, El Azhar already proclaimed.

My pipe filled, I put my hand in my pocket in search of matches, when—a tall, slender figure crossed the path a few yards ahead of me.

My hand came out of my pocket, I took the unlighted pipe from between my teeth, and stared . . . stared!

The woman, who wore a green, sheath-like dress and gold shoes, had a delicate indolence of carriage, wholly Oriental. About one naked ivory arm, extending from just below the elbow to the wrist, she wore a massive jade bangle in six or seven loops. A golden girdle not unlike a sword belt was about her waist, and a tight green turban on her head.

Her appearance, then, was sufficiently remarkable. But that which crowned the queerness of this slender, graceful figure, was the fact that she wore a small half-mask; and this half-mask was apparently of gold!

That the costume was designed to represent El Mokanna there could be no doubt. This in itself was extraordinary, but might have been explained by that queer wave of native opinion which was being talked about everywhere. It was such an ill-considered jest as would commend itself to a crazy member of the younger set.

But there was something else. . . .

Either I had become the victim of an optical delusion, traceable to events of the past few days, or the woman in the gold mask was Fu Manchu’s daughter!