The Shadow of Fu-Manchu Read Free Page B

you talking about?” Michael Frobisher was quite his old roaring self again. “This job has cost half of a million dollars already. Are you telling me we get nothing back? Are we all bughouse around here?”
    A door across the office opened, and a man came in, a short, thickset man, slightly bandy, who walked with a rolling gait as if on the deck of a ship in dirty weather. He wore overalls, spectacles, and an eye-shade. He came in without any ceremony and approached Craig. The forbidding figure of Michael Frobisher disturbed him not at all.
    “Say—have you got a bit of string?” he inquired.
    “I have not got a bit of string. I have a small piece of gum, or two one-cent stamps. Would they do?”
    The intruder chewed thoughtfully. “Guess not. Miss Navarre’s typewriter’s jammed up in there. But I got it figured a bit of string about so long”—he illustrated—“would fix things.”
    “Sorry, Sam, but l am devoid of string.”
    Sam chewed awhile, and then turned away.
    “Guess I’ll have to go look some other place.”
    As he went out:
    “Listen,” Frobisher said. “What does that moron do for his wages?”
    “Sam?” Craig answered, smiling. “Oh, sort of handyman. Mostly helps Regan and Shaw in the laboratory.”
    “Be a big help to anybody, I’d say. What I’m driving at is this: We have to be mighty careful about who gets in here. There’s been a bad leak. Somebody knows more than he ought to know.”
    Morris Craig, slowly, was getting back to that prosaic earth on which normal, flat-footed men spend their lives. It was beginning to dawn upon him that Michael Frobisher was badly frightened.
    “I can’t account for it. Shaw and Regan are beyond suspicion. So, I hope, am I. Miss Navarre came to us with the highest credentials. In any case, she could do little harm. But, of course, it’s absurd to suspect her.”
    “What about the half-wit who just went out?”
    “Knows nothing about the work. Apart from which, his refs are first-class, including one from the Fire Department.”
    “Looks like he’d been in a fire.” Frobisher dropped a cone of cigar ash. “But facts are facts. Let me bring you up to date—but not a word to Mrs. F. You know how nervous she is. Some guy got into Falling Waters last Tuesday night and went through my papers with a fine-tooth comb!”
    “You mean it?”
    Craig’s drawl had vanished. His eyes were very keen.
    “I mean it. Nothing was taken—not a thing. But that’s not all. I’d had more than a suspicion for quite a while someone was snooping around. So I laid for him, without saying a word to Mrs. F., and one night I saw him—”
    “What did he look like?”
    “Yellow.”
    “Indian?”
    “No, sir. Some kind of Oriental. Then, only today, right in my own club, I caught another Asiatic watching me! It’s a fact. Dr. Pardoe can confirm it. Now—what I’m asking is this: If it’s what we’re doing in the laboratory there that somebody’s after, why am
I
followed around, and not you?”
    The answer is a discreet silence.
    “Also I’d be glad to learn who this somebody is. I could think up plenty who’d like to know. But no one of ’em would be an Asiatic.”
    Morris Craig brushed his hair back with his hand.
    “You’re getting
me
jumpy, too,” he declared, although his eager, juvenile smile belied the words. “This thing wants looking into.”
    “It’s going to be looked into,” Frobisher grimly assured him. “When you come up to Falling Waters you’ll see I’m standing for no more monkey tricks around there, anyway.” He stood up, glancing at the big clock over Craig’s desk. “I’m picking up Mrs. F. at the Ritz. Don’t want to be late. Expect you and Miss Navarre, lunch on Saturday.”

CHAPTER TWO

    M rs. F., as it happened, was thoroughly enjoying herself. She lay naked, face downward, on a padded couch, whilst a white-clad nurse ran an apparatus which buzzed like a giant hornet from the back of her fluffy skull right down