Before I embark on my account, you the reader will wonder how, considering that the first of my chronicles was published in 1912, I am still around to tell the tale. Let me get that out of the way. It is no great secret: we had managed, during one of our encounters with him, to abstract from the evil doctor a small vial of his elixir, which has stood us in good stead up till now, even if its potency might have been somewhat compromised by the admixture of alcoholic stimulant we have imbibed over the several succeeding decades.
I will now proceed with what matters.
I was just planning to turn in for the night when there was a loud clattering at the door through which, upon my opening it, a tall, lean figure with a dark face and square jaw hurled itself into my room.
“Petrie, old man,” rapped out the visitor who, I need hardly tell you, was Nayland Smith. “I must trouble you to attend to my—ah—nether region,” and with that he stripped off his trousers and lowered his drawers to reveal a mark in the shape of a dragon which caused a shudder to crawl up my spine.
“Why, it’s a flesh-wound upon your gluteus, old man!” said I, as I whipped out some gauze and tincture of iodine, but not before I had whipped out the brandy. “How--?”
“He bit me, the yellow devil,” snapped my friend. “I was up Peking way, on MI6 work, disguised as the alluring dancing girl Drooping Exotic Lotus Flower—or Shoo Li Chin Poo—as we say in Mandarin, when the beastly green-eyed swine penetrated my camouflage and gouged me with those gnashers which only the crafty Oriental possesses the secret of honing to quite that degree of indecent sharpness—”
I must have left the front door unfastened because, even as I spoke, it suddenly opened, to admit a sight than which I have never witnessed a more ravishing one.
“You must have aroused his suspicion because of that unshaved patch under your left ear, apart from the fact that courtesans, even if they are called Drooping Exotic Lotus Flower, are seldom over six foot in height. But never mind. Tell me the entire story, from the beginning to now—here are the whisky and siphon.”
I must have left the front door unfastened because, even as I spoke, it suddenly opened, to admit a sight than which I have never witnessed a more ravishing one. At the door was a woman of the most entrancing beauty, dark of hair, almond-y of eyes, exquisitely fine-structured of face, willowy of frame, and exuding some strange and maddening perfume from her person. She made straight for me, grabbed me by the lapels of my coat, and, pressing herself close to me, whispered in the huskiest of voices: “I am Mi Tu Yu Tu (Dripping Scented Silver Moonbeam).You see before you His unhappy slave. Save me! Save me!” Caught as I was in the coils of temptation, I know not what I might have done next as I beheld her upturned face and her parted lips, if Nayland Smith had not interceded in my behalf.
“It’s a cross,” said Smith, “between a gila monster and a cobra. Those are the lengths to which Oriental wickedness will go.
“Watch out, Petrie!” cried he in a strangled voice, even as I observed, with a slowly dawning horror, the creature which the woman in front of me surreptitiously let out of a pocket concealed in the sleeve of her dress. It was a long, pale, transparent, slimy, sinuous creature, with spikes of hair upon its spine, a quivering arrow-pointed tail, and, at the other extremity, the most malevolent dragon-face you could imagine in your worst disordered nightmare, revealing two rows of needle-sharp teeth upon both its lower and upper jaws. I watched in trance-like fascination as the horror suddenly leapt upon the table and turned around to compose itself in a crouch preparatory to springing upon me. Smith grabbed a golf-club lying nearby, and just as it was about to fling itself on me, he rained blow after blow upon the beastly thing till it shuddered its way to its pulpy end. “It’s a cross,” said Smith, “between a gila monster and a cobra. Those are the lengths to which Oriental wickedness will go. And the girl, Petrie? She has taken advantage of the confusion to make good her escape. Sent here, no doubt, to ensure that the secret dies with us.”
“What secret, old man?” I cried in a shaky voice. “We need another shot of brandy.”
Nayland Smith clenched his square jaw tightly. He paced up and down, back and forth. “It’s the secret I uncovered in the Black Sea, and took with me all the way to Peking that I might confront the monster with it. The destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipe-line, Petrie! Consider! Who could have possibly done it? How? And why? A little thought should reveal all. What was that private fishing yacht doing there? Is it not crystal clear? That devil already has a prior history of similar skulduggery in the Thames! A criminal will always repeat the same modus operandi in his crimes. I’m not a betting man but I’ll risk a small fortune that that yacht was manned by thugs and dacoits from India. They were the ones who went down, planted the explosives, came up, and made off again in the yacht. Decompression? Don’t make me laugh, Petrie! Indian dacoits and thugs are barely human: they are not governed by the laws of biology to which white men like you and I are subject. There’s the secret of Oriental cunning, and the reason he employs them in all his nefarious pursuits.
“There’s really only one pursuit in the end, is there not? The destruction of the white race, the undoing of the civilization of the West, the eventual complete levelling of the Anglo-Saxon…The desire for utter and comprehensive world-dominion…The devil is well-versed in many arts and sciences, both arcane and modern…He smiles evilly to himself when he hears an American Vice-President, a white man to his core, make the innocent mistake of suggesting that a potato is a potatoe. He does not smile, he sniggers, when he hears an American President—the one who heroically killed a million Iraquis only because of the minor error of assuming weapons of mass destruction when there were none—say: ‘I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best.’ He is puffed up with the pride of Lucifer, because he does not, unlike another American President, shake hands with people who are not there…
“There’s really only one pursuit in the end, is there not? The destruction of the white race, the undoing of the civilization of the West, the eventual complete levelling of the Anglo-Saxon…
“Witness his train of villainies. He and his minions wipe out poverty in his country and make it the second largest economy in the world in a matter of forty years. He has the most extensive trading relations with other countries of the world. He has exported enough goods to America to trap it in debt. He plots to displace the white American dollar as the reserve currency of the world with his filthy yellow yuan. He dumps US Treasury bonds on the market. He brokers peace between warring countries to spite us in our time-honoured practice of arranging wars between peaceful countries. He builds infrastructure in other nations where we destroy it. He sets the black and brown and yellow races against the white by making them believe his occasional truths and mistrust our ceaseless lies. Worst of all, he floats balloons in the air in order to spy upon the white man.
“And he destroys the Nord Stream pipeline even as he deflects suspicion upon us. That is why I went to Peking—to confront him with his guilty secret. He now calls himself Xi Jinping. The American Speaker had just visited Formosa with the signal intent of cocking a snook at him (the cowering natives call her Bu Xi Wu Xi—Mandarin for Venerable Tipsy Senior Tigress). It is no wonder I found him in a particularly furious rage. It was all I could do to get away with my life, even though he managed to gouge me down there, damn his evil heart. And here I am, to ask you, old man, to broadcast the truth to the world before that sinful heartless monster spreads his tentacles to capture us and cast us in his den of slithering venomous snakes even as he watches us die with not an expression upon his inscrutable face.”
“I shall waste no time,” said I, “in setting down your account upon paper and sending it to the Press. But tell me—am I right in believing that the man who now calls himself Xi Jinping is in actuality--?”
“The same, Petrie, the same!” rapped out Sir Denis Nayland Smith. I poured out another shot of brandy. I laid out the whisky and siphon once more. Smith paced up and down the room. He brought down his right fist upon his left palm. He clenched his square jaw until it became rectangular. He tickled his left ear-lobe as was his wont when he was in a state of choleric excitability, which was all the time. “It is the same cold and ruthless master-villain that we know from the days of old. It was the Yellow Peril then, as it is today. One can grow hair upon a hairless pate; one can cut off one’s drooping moustaches; one can conceal the hideous green of one’s eyes behind some ocular artefact. But can one ever hide a devilish heart? No. No. The man who calls himself Xi Jinping is none other—yes, you are right, Petrie, old man!—none other than the insidious Doctor Fu-Manchu of evil memory!”
*
A word of explanation on the above material:
As the reader will have noted, the true story of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022 is finally out. The suspicion that the USA might have had anything to do with the outrage has been finally laid to rest. This is owing to some brilliant investigative work done by the New Dark Crimes and the Washington Posterior, both of which have published the account (reproduced above) tendered to them by Dr Petrie—an account that has passed every conceivable test of accuracy, as reflected in the fact that it has since been vetted, corroborated in every detail, and confirmed to be the unvarnished truth. (You only have to apply to the Office of Authentications to obtain a duly certified copy of DoS Document # ***** which carries the testimonials supplied by the CIA, the FBI, CNN, MSNBC, the Secretary of State, Liz Truss, and Oprah Winfrey). The President has authorized the Pulitzer Prize Board to award the Prize to the NDC and the WP, after withdrawing it from Seymour Hersh.
*
Afterword
Sceptical readers of this piece—those that may be disinclined to find its contents entirely plausible—are advised to do the following things: listen to official US foreign policy statements and official pronouncements on the war in Ukraine; take a look at the reporting and op-eds in America’s and Britain’s leading ‘liberal’ newspapers and magazines; watch mainstream US and British television channels; read the novels of Sax Rohmer; and see You Tube trailers of Fu-Manchu films from Boris Karloff to Christopher Lee.
The author is a lapsed academic who lives and (sometimes) works in Chennai.
