THE SONG OF SIN SIN WA
Mrs. Sin, aroused by her husband from the deep opium sleep, came out
into the fume-laden vault. Her dyed hair was disarranged, and her dark
eyes stared glassily before her; but even in this half-drugged state
she bore herself with the lithe carriage of a dancer, swinging her hips
lazily and pointing the toes of her high-heeled slippers.
“Awake, my wife,” crooned Sin Sin Wa. “Only a fool seeks the black
smoke when the jackals sit in a ring.”
Mrs. Sin gave him a glance of smiling contempt—a glance which, passing
him, rested finally upon the prone body of Chief Inspector Kerry lying
stretched upon the floor before the stove. Her pupils contracted to
mere pin-points and then dilated blackly. She recoiled a step, fighting
with the stupor which her ill-timed indulgence had left behind.
At this moment Kerry groaned loudly, tossed his arm out with a
convulsive movement, and rolled over on to his side, drawing up his
knees.
The eye of Sin Sin Wa gleamed strangely, but he did not move, and Sam
Tûk who sat huddled in his chair where his feet almost touched the
fallen man, stirred never a muscle. But Mrs. Sin, who still moved in a
semi-phantasmagoric world, swiftly raised the hem of her kimona,
affording a glimpse of a shapely silk-clad limb. From a sheath attached
to her garter she drew a thin stilletto. Curiously feline, she
crouched, as if about to spring.
Sin Sin Wa extended his hand, grasping his wife’s wrist.
“No, woman of indifferent intelligence,” he said in his queer sibilant
language, “since when has murder gone unpunished in these British
dominions?”
Mrs. Sin snatched her wrist from his grasp, falling back wild-eyed.
“Yellow ape! yellow ape!” she said hoarsely. “One more does not
matter—now.”
“One more?” crooned Sin Sin Wa, glancing curiously at Kerry.
“They are here! We are trapped!”
“No, no,” said Sin Sin Wa. “He is a brave man; he comes alone.”
He paused, and then suddenly resumed in pidgin English:
“You likee killa him, eh?”
Perhaps unconscious that she did so, Mrs. Sin replied also in English:
“No, I am mad. Let me think, old fool!”
She dropped the stiletto and raised her hand dazedly to her brow.
“You gotchee tired of knifee chop, eh?” murmured Sin Sin Wa.
Mrs. Sin clenched her hands, holding them rigidly against her hips;
and, nostrils dilated, she stared at the smiling Chinaman.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
Sin Sin Wa performed his curious oriental shrug.
“You putta topside pidgin on Sir Lucy alla lightee,” he murmured.
“Givee him hell alla velly proper.”
The pupils of the woman’s eyes contracted again, and remained so. She
laughed hoarsely and tossed her head.
“Who told you that?” she asked contemptuously. “It was the doll-woman
who killed him—I have said so.”
“_You_ tella me so—_hoi, hoi!_ But old Sin Sin Wa catchee wonder.
Lo!”—he extended a yellow forefinger, pointing at his wife—“Mrs. Sin
make him catchee die! No bhobbery, no palaber. Sin Sin Wa gotchee you
sized up allee timee.”
Mrs. Sin snapped her fingers under his nose then stooped, picked up the
stiletto, and swiftly restored it to its sheath. Her hands resting upon
her hips, she came forward, until her dark evil face almost touched the
yellow, smiling face of Sin Sin Wa.
“Listen, old fool,” she said in a low, husky voice; “I have done with
you, ape-man, for good! Yes! _I_ killed Lucy, _I_ killed him! He
belonged to _me_—until that pink and white thing took him away. I am
glad I killed him. If I cannot have him neither can she. But I was mad
all the same.”
She glanced down at Kerry, and:
“Tie him up,” she directed, “and send him to sleep. And understand,
Sin, we’ve shared out for the last time—You go your way and I go mine.
No stinking Yellow River for me. New York is good enough until it’s
safe to go to Buenos Ayres.”
“Smartest leg in Buenos Ayres,” croaked the raven from his wicker cage,
which was set upon the counter.
Sin Sin Wa regarded him smilingly.
“Yes, yes, my little friend,” he crooned in Chinese, while Tling-a-Ling
rattled ghostly castanets. “In Ho-Nan they will say that you are a
devil and I am a wizard. That which is unknown is always thought to be
magical, my Tling-a-Ling.”
Mrs. Sin, who was rapidly throwing off the effects of opium and
recovering her normal self-confident personality, glanced at her
husband scornfully.
“Tell me,” she said, “what has happened? How did he come here?”
“Blinga filly doggy,” murmured Sin Sin Wa. “Knockee Ah Fung on him head
and comee down here, lo. Ah Fung allee lightee now—topside. Chasee
filly doggy. Allee velly proper. No bhobbery.”
“Talk less and act more,” said Mrs. Sin. “Tie him up, and if you _must_
talk, talk Chinese. Tie him up.”
She pointed to Kerry. Sin Sin Wa tucked his hands into his sleeves and
shuffled towards the masked door communicating with the inner room.
“Only by intelligent speech are we distinguished from the other
animals,” he murmured in Chinese.
Entering the inner room, he began to extricate a long piece of thin
rope from amid a tangle of other materials with which it was
complicated. Mrs. Sin stood looking down at the fallen man. Neither
Kerry nor Sam Tûk gave the slightest evidence of life. And as Sin Sin
Wa disentangled yard upon yard of rope from the bundle on the floor by
the bed where Rita Irvin lay in her long troubled sleep, he crooned a
queer song. It was in the Ho-Nan dialect and intelligible to himself
alone.
“Shöa, the evil woman (_he chanted_), the woman of many strange
loves....
Shöa, the ghoul....
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain
god....
Shöa, the betrayer of men....
Blood is on her brow.
Lo, the betrayer is betrayed. Death sits at her elbow.
See, the Yellow River bears a corpse upon its tide...
Dead men hear her secret.
Shöa, the ghoul....
Shöa, the evil woman. Death sits at her elbow.
Black, the vultures flock about her....
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain
god.”
Meanwhile Kerry, lying motionless at the feet of Sam Tûk was doing some
hard and rapid thinking. He had recovered consciousness a few moments
before Mrs. Sin had come into the vault from the inner room. There were
those, Seton Pasha among them, who would have regarded the groan and
the convulsive movements of Kerry’s body with keen suspicion. And
because the Chief Inspector suffered from no illusions respecting the
genius of Sin Sin Wa, the apparent failure of the one-eyed Chinaman to
recognize these preparations for attack nonplussed the Chief Inspector.
His outstanding vice as an investigator was the directness of his own
methods and of his mental outlook, so that he frequently experienced
great difficulty in penetrating to the motives of a tortuous brain such
as that of Sin Sin Wa.
That Sin Sin Wa thought him to be still unconscious he did not believe.
He was confident that his tactics had deceived the Jewess, but he
entertained an almost superstitious respect for the cleverness of the
Chinaman. The trick with the ball of leaf opium was painfully fresh in
his memory.
Kerry, in common with many members of the Criminal Investigation
Department, rarely carried firearms. He was a man with a profound
belief in his bare hands—aided when necessary by his agile feet. At the
moment that Sin Sin Wa had checked the woman’s murderous and half
insane outburst Kerry had been contemplating attack. The sudden change
of language on the part of the Chinaman had arrested him in the act;
and, realizing that he was listening to a confession which placed the
hangman’s rope about the neck of Mrs. Sin, he lay still and wondered.
Why had Sin Sin Wa forced his wife to betray herself? To clear Mareno?
To clear Mrs. Irvin—or to save his own skin?
It was a frightful puzzle for Kerry. Then—where was Kazmah? That Mrs.
Irvin, probably in a drugged condition, lay somewhere in that
mysterious inner room Kerry felt fairly sure. His maltreated skull was
humming like a bee-hive and aching intensely, but the man was tough as
men are made, and he could not only think clearly, but was capable of
swift and dangerous action.
He believed that he could tackle the Chinaman with fair prospects of
success; and women, however murderous, he habitually disregarded as
adversaries. But the mummy-like, deceptive Sam Tûk was not negligible,
and Kazmah remained an unknown quantity.
From under that protective arm, cast across his face, Kerry’s fierce
eyes peered out across the dirty floor. Then quickly he shut his eyes
again.
Sin Sin Wa, crooning his strange song, came in carrying a coil of
rope—and a Mauser pistol!
“P’licemanee gotchee catchee sleepee,” he murmured, “or maybe he
catchee die!”
He tossed the rope to his wife, who stood silent tapping the floor with
one slim restless foot.
“Number one top-side tie up,” he crooned. “Sin Sin Wa watchee withum
gun!”
Kerry lay like a dead man; for in the Chinaman’s voice were menace and
warning.