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know that you understand the rules of boxing. Your objectives are the heart and the point of the jaw: you strike to paralyse brain and blood supply. That is how
I
fight. I strike at those who cause, at those who direct, at those who aid war—atthe brain and at the heart, not at the arms, the shoulders—the deluded masses who suffer and die in order that arrogant fools may be gratified, that profiteers may grow fat. Consider my words…”
    Dr. Fu-Manchu’s eyes now were opened widely. They beckoned, they called to me…
    “Steady, Kerrigan.”
    Darkness. The screen was blank.
    A long time seemed to elapse before Nayland Smith spoke, before he stirred, then:
    “I have seen that man being swept to the verge of Niagara Falls!” he said, speaking hoarsely out of the darkness. “I prayed that he had met a just fate. The body of his companion—a maddened slave of his will—was found.”
    “But not Fu-Manchu! How could he have escaped?” Smith moved—switched up the light. I saw how the incident had affected him, and it gave me courage; for the magnetism of those eyes, of that voice, had made me feel a weakling.
    “One day, Kerrigan, perhaps I shall know.”
    He pressed a bell. Fey came in.
    “This television apparatus is not to be used, not to be touched by anyone, Fey.”
    Fey went out.
    I took up my glass, which remained half filled.
    “This has staggered me,” I confessed. “The man is more than human. But one thing I
must
know: what did he mean when he spoke of someone—I can guess to whom he referred—who died recently but who, since his death, has been at work in Fu-Manchu’s laboratories?”
    Smith turned on his way to the buffet; his eyes glittered like steel.
    “Were you ever in Haiti?”
    “No.”
    “Then possibly you have never come across the ghastly tradition of the
zombie
?”
    “Never.”
    “A human corpse, Kerrigan, taken from the grave and by means of sorcery set to work in the cane fields. Perhaps a Negro superstition, but Doctor Fu-Manchu has put it into practice.”
    “What!”
    “I have seen men long dead and buried labouring in his workshops!”
    He squirted soda water into a tumbler.
    “You were moved, naturally, by the words and by the manner of, intellectually, the greatest man alive. But forget his sophistry, forget his voice—above all, forget his eyes. Doctor Fu-Manchu is Satan incarnate.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“INSPECTOR GALLAHO REPORTS”
    I n the days that followed I thought many times about those words, and one night I dreamed of beating drums and woke in a nameless panic. The morning that followed was lowering and gloomy. A fine drizzling rain made London wretched.
    When I stood up and looked out of the window across Hyde Park I found the prospect in keeping with my reflections. I had been working on the extraordinary facts in connection with the death of General Quinto and trying to make credible reading of the occurrence in Nayland Smith’s apartment later the same night. All that I had ever heard or imagined about Dr. Fu-Manchu had been brought into sharp focus. I had sometimes laughed at the Germanic idea of a superman; now I knew that such a demigod, and a demigod of evil, actually lived.
    I read over what I had written. It appeared to me as a critic that I had laid undue stress upon the haunting figure of the girl with the amethyst eyes. But whenever my thoughts turned, and they turned often enough, to the episodes of that night those wonderful eyes somehow came to the front of the picture.
    London and the Home Counties were being combed by the police for the mysterious broadcasting station controlled by Dr. Fu-Manchu. A post-mortem examination of the general’s body had added little to our knowledge of the cause of death. Inquiries had failed also to establish the identity of the general’s woman friend who had called upon him on the preceding day.
    The figure of this unknown woman tortured my imagination. Could it be, could it possibly be the girl to whom I had