Читать книгу President Fu Manchu - Arthur Henry Ward - Страница 11

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James Richet, known to the organization of which he was a member as Number 38, stepped through a doorway—the fifth he had counted—and knew he must be below sea level. This door immediately closed behind him.

He found himself in a lobby with stone-faced walls. A silk-shaded lantern hung from an iron bracket. Immediately facing him was another arched doorway, curtained. Above the curtain-rod glowed a dim semicircle of light. This place smelled like a joss house. The only other item of furniture was a narrow cushioned divan, and upon this a very old Chinaman was squatting. He wore a garment resembling a blue smock; he crouched forward on the divan, his veinous, clawlike hands resting upon his knees. He was a man of incalculable age: an intricate network of wrinkles mapped the whole of his face. His eyes were mere slits in the yellow skin. He might have been a chryselephantine statue, wrought by the cunning hand of a Chinese master.

A movement ever so slight of the bowed head indicated to Richet that the man on the divan was looking at him. He raised the left lapel of his topcoat. A small badge, apparently made of gold and ivory, not unlike one of the chips used at the Monte Carlo gaming tables, was revealed. It bore the number 38.

“James Richet,” he said.

One of the talon hands moved back to the wall—and in some place beyond a bell rang, dimly. A clawish finger indicated the curtained doorway. James Richet crossed the lobby, drew the curtain aside and entered.

The night out of which he had come was wet and icily cold, but the moisture which he wiped now from his forehead was not entirely due to the rain. He had removed his hat and stood looking about him. This was a rectangular apartment, also stone-faced; the floor was of polished stone upon which several rugs were spread. There were seven doors, two in each of the long walls, two in that ahead of him, and the one by which he had entered. Above each of them, on an iron bracket, a lantern was hung, shaded with amber silk. All the openings were draped, and the drapery of each was of a different color. There were cushioned seats all around the walls, set between the seven openings.

There was no other furniture except a huge square block of black granite, set in the center of the stone floor and supporting a grotesque figure which only an ultra-modern sculptor could have produced: a goddess possessing seven green eyes, so that one of her eyes watched each of the openings. There was the same perfume in the place as of stale incense, but nevertheless unlike the more characteristic odor of Chinatown. The place was silent, very silent. In contrast to the bitter weather prevailing up above, it seemed to be tropically hot. There was no one visible.

Richet looked about him uneasily. Then, as if the proximity even of the mummy-like Chinaman in the lobby afforded some sense of human companionship, he sat down just right of the opening by which he had entered, placing his black hat upon the cushions beside him.

He tried to think. This place was a miracle of cunning—Chinese cunning. As one descended from the secret street door (and this, alone, was difficult to find) a second, masked door gave access to a considerable room. There was no other visible exit from this room. He realized that a police raid would almost certainly end there. Yet there were three more hidden doors—probably steel—and three short flights of stone steps before one reached this temple of the seven-eyed goddess. These doors had been opened from beyond as he had descended.

No sound came from the lobby. Richet slightly changed his position. A green eye seemed to be watching him. But it proved to be impossible to escape the regard of one of those seven eyes; and, viewed from any point, the grotesque idol displayed some feminine line, some strange semblance of distorted womanhood....

James Richet was a qualified attorney, and had practiced for several years in Los Angeles. The yellow streak in his pedigree—his maternal grandmother had been a Kanaka—formed a check to his social ambition. Perhaps it was an operative factor in his selection of an easier and more direct path to wealth than the legitimate practice of his profession had offered him. He had become the legal adviser of one of the big beer barons. Later the underworlds of Chicago and New York held no secrets from him....

The silence of this strange stone cellar was very oppressive; he avoided looking at the evil figure which dominated it....

His former chiefs, one after another, had been piled up on the rocks of the new administration. Then a fresh tide had come in his affairs, at a time when he began seriously to wonder if federal inquiries would become focused upon himself. Some new control had seized upon the broken group of which he was a surviving unit. A highly paid post was found for him as legal adviser and secretary to Abbot Donegal. He was notified that special duties would be allotted from time to time. But in spite of all his cunning—for he was more cunning than clever—he had not up to the present moment succeeded in learning the political aims of the person or persons who, as he had realized for a long time, now controlled the vast underworld network which extended from coast to coast of the United States.

Of his former associates he had seen nothing during the time that he was attached to Abbot Donegal’s staff at the Shrine of the Holy Thorn. Copies of the abbot’s colossal mailing list he had supplied to an address in New York City; advance drafts of all sermons and lectures; and a précis of a certain class of correspondence.

Personal contact between himself and his real employer was made through the medium of Lola Dumas. His last urgent instructions, which had led to the breakdown of Abbot Donegal during a broadcast lecture, had been given to him by Lola ... that provocative study in slender curves, creamy skin and ebony-black hair; somber almond-shaped eyes (deep, dark lakes in which a man’s soul was drowned); petulant, scornful lips ... Lola.

Lola! She was supremely desirable, but maddeningly elusive. Together, what could they not do? She knew so many things that he burned to learn; but all that he had gathered from her was that they belonged to an organization governed by a board of seven....

Hot though the place was, he shuddered. Seven! This hell-inspired figure which always watched him had seven eyes!

From time to time Lola would appear in the near-by town without warning, occupying the best suite in the best hotel, and would summon him to meet her. It was Lola Dumas, on the first day that he had taken up his duties, who had brought him his badge. He had smiled. Later he had ceased to smile. Up to the time that he had fled from the Shrine of the Holy Thorn he had never learned how many other agents of the “Seven” were attached to the staff of the abbot. Two only he had met: Mrs. Adair, and a man who acted as night watchman. Now, shepherded from point to point in accordance with typed instructions headed: “In the event of failure” and received by him on the morning before the fateful broadcast, he was in New York; at last in the headquarters of his mysterious chief!

Something in the atmosphere of this place seemed to shake him. He wondered—and became conscious of nervous perspiration—if his slight deviation from the route laid down in his instructions had escaped notice....

One of the colored curtains was swept aside, and he saw Lola Dumas facing him from the end of the temple of the seven-eyed goddess.