Posted by The Hooded Hood continues the story that time forgot on June 03, 2001 at 11:36:49:
Part the Second: The Egyptian Assassin and the Heathen Chinee
“Of course you’ll
help,” Miss Canterbury had told Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “I’m a damsel in distress.
You’re a gentleman.” Hong Kong was wet, crowded, and frightened. It was wet because the typhoon
season was just blowing to a stormy end. It was crowded because thousands of
Chinese refugees had poured into the cluttered streets and muddled boat village
as the Japanese army had marched across China. It was frightened because even
now that army was camped on the Kowloon peninsula waiting for the typhoons to
pass before marching in and taking the city. Almost a minute passed before the Expiditer dragged the unconscious
Englishwoman out of the shadows and dropped her unceremoniously beside the
time-stopped Cobra. “Well well, that interferer is just full of surprises, isn’t
he?” he mused. In our next exciting instalment: Mumphrey calls upon an old friend
and learns a few truths about his past that he would have preferred not to know,
and the Devil Doctor’s Si Fan make a house call.
“But I also have important war work, Miss Canterbury. I
can hardly gad off across the world on a personal adventure when our countrymen
are fighting in the trenches to liberate the world from the Hun.”
“This is
important war work. Whatever secrets are in the Blanchford Diary are sufficient
for Adolf himself to take an interest in, to send his gruesome Herr Wertham to
find out. Wertham’s hired Expediter killed my father to gain those secrets, and
I am going to solve the mystery that my father was investigating and decode the
encrypted pages of Blanchford Bertram’s journal before those Nazis find
whatever-it-is and use it against us. And I’m doing it whether you’re coming or
not.”
“Hmph. Well, I’ll escort you as far as the airstrip at least, Miss
Canterbury.”
“Perhaps I’d better go in
first?” Sir Mumphrey suggested, as he and Miss Canterbury stood in the warm
tropical downpour and watched a waxed paper lantern sway in the wind outside an
old candlemaker’s shop. “After all, if this fellow was supposed to meet your
father Reverend Canterbury in Marrakesh and never turned up he might have run
into a bit of trouble.”
“I don’t think you should leave me alone out here,
Sir Mumphrey,” the maiden answered. In a short time she had learned to push all
the right buttons.
“Hmph. Point. Very well then, stay close and scream if
there’s any trouble.”
Miss Canterbury bit her tongue and followed the
eccentric Englishman into the shop. A set of wind-chimes clanged as the entered.
Half a dozen scented candles half-lit the shop. A demure girl in a silk kimono
emerged and bowed at them. “How may I help you?” she asked in good English,
noting the cut of Mumph’s Saville Row suit and waistcoat, and the lady’s trim
two-piece and pillbox hat and correctly discerning her customers’ point of
origin.
“We’re looking for Dr Lee?” Miss Canterbury replied.
The girl’s
eyes flickered a little. “What is the nature of your business with Lee San So?”
she demanded.
“He’s one of the few people in the world who speaks Vesalian,”
the Englishwoman answered. “He promised to translate something for me.”
“Ah,”
the oriental girl understood, her eyes still looking downwards. “He is through
here.” She pulled back a curtain and gestured for the visitors to precede her
into a gloomy chamber beyond.
Dr Lee was indeed there; or at least his gory
mortal remains.
Miss Canterbury stifled a gasp. Mumphrey turned round to
demand what the devil was going on.
The nine black-clad warriors with
gleaming silver blades had already surrounded them.
“What the deuce is the
meanin’ of this?” Mumph demanded anyway. “Why did you kill Dr Lee?”
The girl
from the shop now glared at the Englishmen with cold, hard eyes. “That is what
we wish to ask you. Dr Lee has been a friend to our… association, and we take
his murder very seriously.”
Mumphrey examined the old man who was laid out on
a pallet. “This man has been dead for… four days, three hours and twenty-three
minutes, er, approximately,” he noted. “And he seems to have died of some very
unusual wounds.”
“It was a very unusual assassin,” one of the warriors
commented. “We wish to know why you sent her.”
“We didn’t have Lee killed,”
Mumphrey protested. “We needed him alive to help us with an encrypted text coded
in a rare language.”
“Don’t trust him, master,” the shopgirl urged. “The Sect
have agents everywhere.”
“Enough, Sukie,” the man in black chided. He turned
back to Mumphrey. “I am Akiko Sunamate. Lee San So was one of my people, and I
take his murder very seriously.”
“You said his assassin was unusual,” Miss
Canterbury interrupted. Akiko and the others seemed shocked that she would
speak, but she ignored that. “What was unusual about the death?”
Akiko
decided to answer. “He was killed in a manner consistent with the sacred weapons
of the Sect of Buto. Note the puncture wounds of high-pressure fruit, and the
distinctive sucker marks of the sink-plunger. This was the work of
the…”
“Don’t say it,” Sukie warned. “The Sect has ears and eyes
everywhere.”
“Well I can assure you that none of my appendages at all are in
this Sect’s service,” Miss Canterbury said. “And so we shall be on our
way.”
The Triad leader shook his head. “I’m afraid not. You are about to
become another nameless casualty of war in these turbulent times. It is nothing
personal, and we will make it brief and painless.”
“One thing puzzles me,”
Mumphrey frowned, ignoring Akiko Sunamate’s threats. “Wertham and the Expediter
murdered Miss Canterbury’s father to keep him from discovering the meaning of
the diary entry, but only because they wanted to discover it for themselves.
They had no motive to kill Lee, since he was their ticket to finding the
truth.”
“That’s true,” his companion agreed. “is there some third force at
work here, which wants to prevent either of us from discerning the
meaning?”
“The Sect of Buto keeps many secrets,” Akiko noted. “They would not
hesitate to kill to preserve their holy silence.”
“But they’d also want to
know if anybody else knew anything,” Mumphrey reasoned. “Perhaps get their hands
on the Bertram journal. Probably leave an agent in place to watch and see if
anybody like us came calling, what?”
“There is nobody watching but us,” the
Tong man insisted; but there was an edge of nervousness in his
voice.
“Exactly,” Mumph reasoned. “I believe you referred to the assassin in
the feminine?” And he turned his eyes on the shopgirl Sukie.
The dagger flew
towards the Englishman’s throat faster than the eye could see. Mumphrey caught
it. Sukie swung her hands back and two of the black-clad ninjas crumpled to the
floor. “Very good, infidel,” she congratulated Sir Mumphrey. “The Cobra lurks
where she chooses, and few uncover her guise.”
“Sukie?” Akiko gasped
wide-eyed.
“Not any more,” the Cobra told him, crippling two more of the
warriors with a casual ease.
Mumphrey grabbed Miss Canterbury’s hand and
dragged her out of the room as the Cobra cut a swathe through the remaining
Yakusa. “Get out of the door and run,” he shouted. “I’ll deal with this
assassin.”
“You’ve seen her!” Miss Canterbury warned. “You’ll be
killed.”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeve – or in my waistcoat,” the
eccentric Englishman promised her. “Now please, go. After all, you have the
journal.”
The young woman considered for a moment, then fled up the wet
narrow backstreet.
“Very noble, infidel,” the Cobra admitted, hurling aside
Akiko’s corpse and springing towards Mumphrey, “Perhaps there will be a place
for you in the Other Kingdom after you are dead.”
“Church of England,
meself,” Mumphrey admitted, fiddling with his pocketwatch (which, for the
uninitiated, is a time-manipulation device known as the Chronometer of Infinity)
and stopping time around the assassin. “Hmm. Ten minutes. That should be enough.
Good day, madam.” And he tipped his hat and hurried off to follow Miss
Canterbury.
He occupied himself by securely handcuffing Miss Canterbury
and flicking through the diary he had taken from her until he judged the
time-stop was coming to an end. As it finished he drew a knife cleanly across
the Cobra’s throat, slicing from windpipe to jugular. “That should deter further
Sect involvement in my business,” he noted.
He pocketed the Blanchford diary.
“And so to the prize,” he told himself.