PROLOGUE
July 26, 1939
He was tall for a Chinese, slightly over six feet in height. Even seated in the decorative chair set on a dais at the end of a long, narrow room, he seemed to tower over everyone else. He was dressed in the ornate robes of a Mandarin nobleman. A spider monkey sat perched on his left shoulder and he would occasionally reach up to caress its chin or belly with a long fingernail. A small brazier filled with burning incense stood at his right, trickling a thin stream of scented smoke into the air.
His eyes seemed to glow slightly with a perverse mixture of age-old wisdom and age-old evil.
The man approaching him, walking past the quartet of Mongol guards armed with both ancient swords and modern pistols, was also Chinese, though dressed in the suit and tie of a Western businessman. This second man stopped a few feet short of the dais and bowed low. He straightened again, but kept his head down, staring at the marble floor.
"You have news, Chang?" asked the seated man.
"I do, lord," replied Chang. "The madman has been recaptured and returned to the asylum outside Gotham City. His laboratory was destroyed in the battle that preceded his capture."
The seated man frowned. As if sensing his displeasure, the spider monkey began to chatter loudly. The man raised his left hand—the monkey immediately quieted down.
"Was anything salvageable from the remains of the laboratory?"
"I fear not, lord."
The frown deepened. Chang stood quietly, head still bowed, waiting.
After perhaps a minute of silence, the seated man spoke again. "What became of the corpses, Chang? The victims of the madman's recent rampage?"
Chang answered promptly. He knew his master did not punish the bearer of bad tidings. He only punished those who failed him. Chang's job was gathering information and he was always very thorough. He had seen the consequences of failure.
"The asylum guard was buried eight days ago in a Gotham cemetery," he said. "The owner of the flower shop was cremated at his family's request five days ago. Of the two policemen, one was also buried in Gotham City, four days ago. The body of the other has still not been recovered from the river."
The master considered this information carefully. The asylum guard had been strangled, but the remaining victims had been murdered with the madman's bizarre poison. The master briefly considered kidnapping the madman and interrogating him regarding the poison's exact chemical make-up, but he knew it was notoriously hard to extract reliable information from the insane. Since the opportunity to obtain a direct sample of the poison has apparently been lost, that left just one viable option.
"Chang," he said, "we will obtain the body of the slain policeman and transport it immediately to my facility in New York City."
Chang bowed low again. "The will of Fu Manchu shall be done."
Fu Manchu reached up to again stroke his pet's furry belly as he mentally reviewed his latest scheme in its entirety. He lacked but two ingredients to complete an experiment that would endow him with unlimited power. A team of specially trained men were even now at work obtaining one of these ingredients—a sample of the fluid that composed the Lazarus Pit. The second ingredient was a small amount of a unique poison created by a criminal madman who most often resided in Gotham City. Fu Manchu was determined to either acquire this poison or, falling that, to deduce its composition by studying the remains of one of its victims. In either case, he would get what he wanted.