Down the center of the room came a girl carrying the only ornamental object which thus far I had seen in the Joy-Shop: a large Oriental brass tray. She was a figure which must have formed a center of interest in any place, trebly so, then, in such a place as this. Her costume consisted in a series of incongruities, whilst the entire effect was barbaric and by no means unpicturesque. She wore high-heeled red slippers, and, as her short gauzy skirt rendered amply evident, black silk stockings. A brilliantly colored Oriental scarf was wound around her waist and knotted in front, its tasseled ends swinging girdle fashion. A sort of chemise—like the ‘anteree of Egyptian women—completed her costume, if I except a number of barbaric ornaments, some of them of silver, with which her hands and arms were bedecked.
But strange as was the girl’s attire, it was to her face that my gaze was drawn irresistibly. Evidently, like most of those around us, she was some kind of half-caste; but, unlike them, she was wickedly handsome. I use the adverb wickedly with deliberation; for the pallidly dusky, oval face, with the full red lips, between which rested a large yellow cigarette, and the half-closed almond-shaped eyes, possessed a beauty which might have appealed to an artist of one of the modern perverted schools, but which filled me less with admiration than horror. For I knew her—I recognized her, from a past, brief meeting; I knew her, beyond all possibility of doubt, to be one of the Si-Fan group!
This strange creature, tossing back her jet-black, frizzy hair, which was entirely innocent of any binding or ornament, advanced along the room towards us, making unhesitatingly for our table, and carrying her lithe body with the grace of a Gházeeyeh.
I glanced at Fletcher across the table.
“Zarmi!” he whispered.
Again I raised my eyes to the face which now was close to mine, and became aware that I was trembling with excitement....
Heavens! why did enlightenment come too late! Either I was the victim of an odd delusion, or Zarmi had been the driver of the cab in which Nayland Smith had left the New Louvre Hotel!
Zarmi placed the brass tray upon the table and bent down, resting her elbows upon it, her hands upturned and her chin nestling in her palms. The smoke from the cigarette, now held in her fingers, mingled with her disheveled hair. She looked fully into my face, a long, searching look; then her lips parted in the slow, voluptuous smile of the Orient. Without moving her head she turned the wonderful eyes (rendered doubly luminous by the kohl with which her lashes and lids were darkened) upon Fletcher.
“What you and your strong friend drinking?” she said softly.
Her voice possessed a faint husky note which betrayed her Eastern parentage, yet it had in it the siren lure which is the ancient heritage of the Eastern woman—a heritage more ancient than the tribe of the Ghâzeeyeh, to one of whom I had mentally likened Zarmi.
“Same thing,” replied Fletcher promptly; and raising his hand, he idly toyed with a huge gold earring which she wore.
Still resting her elbows upon the table and bending down between us, Zarmi turned her slumbering, half-closed black eyes again upon me, then slowly, languishingly, upon Fletcher. She replaced the yellow cigarette between her lips. He continued to toy with the earring.
Suddenly the girl sprang upright, and from its hiding-place within the silken scarf, plucked out a Malay krîs with a richly jeweled hilt. Her eyes now widely opened and blazing, she struck at my companion!
I half rose from my chair, stifling a cry of horror; but Fletcher, regarding her fixedly, never moved ... and Zarmi stayed her hand just as the point of the dagger had reached his throat!
“You see,” she whispered softly but intensely, “how soon I can kill you.”
Ere I had overcome the amazement and horror with which her action had filled me, she had suddenly clutched me by the shoulder, and, turning from Fletcher, had the point of the krîs at my throat!
“You, too!” she whispered, “you too!”
Lower and lower she bent, the needle point of the weapon pricking my skin, until her beautiful, evil face almost touched mine. Then, miraculously, the fire died out of her eyes; they half closed again and became languishing, luresome Ghâzeeyeh eyes. She laughed softly, wickedly, and puffed cigarette smoke into my face.
Thrusting her dagger into her waist-belt, and snatching up the brass tray, she swayed down the room, chanting some barbaric song in her husky Eastern voice.
I inhaled deeply and glanced across at my companion. Beneath the make-up with which I had stained my skin, I knew that I had grown more than a little pale.
“Fletcher!” I whispered, “we are on the eve of a great discovery—that girl ...”
I broke off, and clutching the table with both hands, sat listening intently. From the room behind me, the opium-room, whose entrance was less than two paces from where we sat, came a sound of dragging and tapping! Slowly, cautiously, I began to turn my head; when a sudden outburst of simian chattering from the fan-tan players drowned that other sinister sound.
“You heard it, Doctor!” hissed Fletcher.
“The man with the limp!” I said hoarsely; “he is in there! Fletcher! I am utterly confused. I believe this place to hold the key to the whole mystery, I believe ...”
Fletcher gave me a warning glance—and, turning anew, I saw Zarmi approaching with her sinuous gait, carrying two glasses and jug upon the ornate tray. These she set down upon the table; then stood spinning the salver cleverly upon the point of her index finger and watching us through half-closed eyes.
My companion took out some loose coins, but the girl thrust the proffered payment aside with her disengaged hand, the salver still whirling upon the upraised finger of the other.
“Presently you pay for drink,” she said. “You do something for me—eh?”
“Yep,” replied Fletcher nonchalantly, watering the rum in the tumblers. “What time?”
“Presently I tell you. You stay here. This one a strong feller?”—indicating myself.
“Sure,” drawled Fletcher; “strong as a mule he is.”
“All right. I give him one little kiss if he good boy!”
Tossing the tray in the air she caught it, rested its edge upon her hip, turned, and walked away down the room, puffing her cigarette.
“Listen,” I said, bending across the table, “it was Zarmi who drove the cab that came for Nayland Smith today!”
“My God!” whispered Fletcher, “then it was nothing less than the hand of Providence that brought us here tonight. Yes! I know how you feel, Doctor!—but we must play our cards as they’re dealt to us. We must wait—wait.”
Out from the den of the opium-smokers came Zarmi, one hand resting upon her hip and the other uplifted, a smoldering yellow cigarette held between the first and second fingers. With a movement of her eyes she summoned us to join her, then turned and disappeared again through the low doorway.
The time for action was arrived—we were to see behind the scenes of the Joy-Shop! Our chance to revenge poor Smith even if we could not save him. I became conscious of an inward and suppressed excitement; surreptitiously I felt the hilt of the Browning pistol in my pocket. The shadow of the dead Fu-Manchu seemed to be upon me. God! how I loathed and feared that memory!
“We can make no plans,” I whispered to Fletcher, as together we rose from the table; “we must be guided by circumstance.”
In order to enter the little room laden with those sickly opium fumes we had to lower our heads. Two steps led down into the place, which was so dark that I hesitated, momentarily, peering about me.
Apparently some four or five persons squatted and lay in the darkness about me. Some were couched upon rough wooden shelves ranged around the walls, others sprawled upon the floor, in the center whereof, upon a small tea-chest, stood a smoky brass lamp. The room and its occupants alike were indeterminate, sketchy; its deadly atmosphere seemed to be suffocating me. A sort of choking sound came from one of the bunks; a vague, obscene murmuring filled the whole place revoltingly.
Zarmi stood at the further end, her lithe figure silhouetted against the vague light coming through an open doorway. I saw her raise her hand, beckoning to us.
Circling around the chest supporting the lamp we crossed the foul den and found ourselves in a narrow, dim passageway, but in cleaner air.
“Come,” said Zarmi, extending her long, slim hand to me.
I took it, solely for guidance in the gloom, and she immediately drew my arm about her waist, leant back against my shoulder and, raising her pouted red lips, blew a cloud of tobacco smoke fully into my eyes!
Momentarily blinded, I drew back with a muttered exclamation. Suspecting what I did of this tigerish half-caste, I could almost have found it in my heart to return her savage pleasantries with interest.
As I raised my hands to my burning eyes, Fletcher uttered a sharp cry of pain. I turned in time to see the girl touch him lightly on the neck with the burning tip of her cigarette.
“You jealous, eh, Charlie?” she said. “But I love you, too—see! Come along, you strong fellers....”
And away she went along the passage, swaying her hips lithely and glancing back over her shoulders in smiling coquetry.
Tears were still streaming from my eyes when I found myself standing in a sort of rough shed, stone-paved, and containing a variety of nondescript rubbish. A lantern stood upon the floor; and beside it ...
The place seemed to be swimming around me, the stone floor to be heaving beneath my feet....
Beside the lantern stood a wooden chest, some six feet long, and having strong rope handles at either end. Evidently the chest had but recently been nailed up. As Zarmi touched it lightly with the pointed toe of her little red slipper I clutched at Fletcher for support.
Fletcher grasped my arm in a vice-like grip. To him, too, had come the ghastly conviction—the gruesome thought that neither of us dared to name.
It was Nayland Smith’s coffin that we were to carry!
“Through here,” came dimly to my ears, “and then I tell you what to do....”
Coolness returned to me, suddenly, unaccountably. I doubted not for an instant that the best friend I had in the world lay dead there at the feet of the hellish girl who called herself Zarmi, and I knew since it was she, disguised, who had driven him to his doom, that she must have been actively concerned in his murder.
But, I argued, although the damp night air was pouring in through the door which Zarmi now held open, although sound of Thames-side activity came stealing to my ears, we were yet within the walls of the Joy-Shop, with a score or more Asiatic ruffians at the woman’s beck and call....
With perfect truth I can state that I retain not even a shadowy recollection of aiding Fletcher to move the chest out on to the brink of the cutting—for it was upon this that the door directly opened. The mist had grown denser, and except a glimpse of slowly moving water beneath me, I could discern little of our surroundings.
So much I saw by the light of a lantern which stood in the stern of a boat. In the bows of this boat I was vaguely aware of the presence of a crouched figure enveloped in rugs—vaguely aware that two filmy eyes regarded me out of the darkness. A man who looked like a lascar stood upright in the stern.
I must have been acting like a man in a stupor; for I was aroused to the realities by the contact of a burning cigarette with the lobe of my right ear!
“Hurry, quick, strong feller!” said Zarmi softly.
At that it seemed as though some fine nerve of my brain, already strained to utmost tension, snapped. I turned, with a wild, inarticulate cry, my fists raised frenziedly above my head.
“You fiend!” I shrieked at the mocking Eurasian, “you yellow fiend of hell!”
I was beside myself, insane. Zarmi fell back a step, flashing a glance from my own contorted face to that, now pale even beneath its artificial tan, of Fletcher.
I snatched the pistol from my pocket, and for one fateful moment the lust of slaying claimed my mind.... Then I turned towards the river, and, raising the Browning, fired shot after shot in the air.
“Weymouth!” I cried. “Weymouth!”
A sharp hissing sound came from behind me; a short, muffled cry ... and something descended, crushing, upon my skull. Like a wild cat Zarmi hurled herself past me and leapt into the boat. One glimpse I had of her pallidly dusky face, of her blazing black eyes, and the boat was thrust off into the waterway ... was swallowed up in the mist.
I turned, dizzily, to see Fletcher sinking to his knees, one hand clutching his breast.
“She got me ... with the knife,” he whispered. “But ... don’t worry ... look to yourself, and ... him....”
He pointed, weakly—then collapsed at my feet. I threw myself upon the wooden chest with a fierce, sobbing cry.
“Smith, Smith!” I babbled, and knew myself no better, in my sorrow, than an hysterical woman. “Smith, dear old man! speak to me! speak to me! ...”
Outraged emotion overcame me utterly, and with my arms thrown across the box, I slipped into unconsciousness.