Prelude for War (19 page)

Fairweather gobbled.

“Really, Luker,”
he spluttered indignantly, “I—I——
”

“Oh, go away,”
said Luker. “I’ve got work to do.”

He spoke without
impatience; if his voice carried any
particular inflection, it was one of
good-humoured tolerance.
But there was no
further argument. Fairweather went.

Luker remained sitting at
the great carved desk after
he had gone. Fairweather’s emotional antics had
made no
impression on him at all. He had no
illusions about his
associates. He had
long been familiar with the partiality
that politicians, generals and captains
of industry have for
squirming out of
uncomfortable situations, with an air of
being profoundly shocked by what has happened, and leav
ing somebody else to face the music. But that
failing had
its own compensation for him. Once started, the more dras
tic the measures he had to take, the stronger
became his hold on them and the more blindly they would have to
support him in whatever he did, as his safety
became the more necessary to their own safety. The problems that he
was considering were purely practical. He sat
there, idly
turning his fountain pen between his strong square fingers,
until he had thought enough; and then he picked up
the
telephone and began to issue
terse, incisive orders.

3

“Did you have a nice
dinner?” asked Patricia Holm.
“And how was
the new candidate for your harem?”

Simon Templar peeled off
his coat, unbuttoned his shirt
to the waist and deposited
himself at a restful angle on the chesterfield under the open windows. Through
the curtains came the ceaseless grind of Piccadilly traffic and a stir of
sultry air tainted with petrol fumes and grime, too thick
and listless to be properly termed a breeze; but in spite
of that the spacious apartment in Cornwall House which
was the Saint’s London headquarters attained an atmosphere of comparative
peace and freshness.

“There are mugs of all
kinds, but there are very special
and superlative mugs
who do their mugging in London; and
we are it,” he
said gloomily. “I had a beautiful dinner, thanks. The
truites au bleu
were
magnificent, and the
pigeons truff
é
s
in
aspic were a dream. The candidate was
looking her best,
which is pretty good. She went home early. Since then I’ve been drowning my
sorrows at the Cafe Royal.”

Patricia contemplated him
discerningly.

“The dinner was
beautiful, and the candidate was look
ing her best, and
she went home early,” she repeated.
“What
was the matter with her?”

“She wanted her
beauty sleep,” said the Saint. “After you with that barley water,
Hoppy.”

He stretched out a long
arm and retrieved the bottle
of scotch from Mr Uniatz’
jealous grasp.

“What Hoppy needs is
compressed whiskey, so he could
get a bottle into a
wineglass,” he commented.

“Was it your
scintillating conversation that made her
yawn?”
inquired Peter Quentin. “Or did she have the
wrong
kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?”

Simon splashed soda into
his glass and drank medi
tatively.

“She’s an attractive
wench,” he said. “I like her. She’s
so
innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry
shark.
The trouble is that if she’s not careful she’s going to wake up one day and
find herself left in a dark alley
with her throat cut,
and that will be a great pity for anyone with a face and figure like
hers.”

“Say, where do ya get
dat stuff?” demanded Mr Uniatz
loudly.

He sat forward on the edge
of his chair, his hamlike
hands practically
obliterating his half-empty glass, with a
deep
frown corrugating the negligible clearance between
his
eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically roughcast face chopped into
masses of fearsome challenge.

Simon raised his head to
stare at him. A criticism like
that coming from Mr Uniatz,
a man to whom any form
of mental exercise was such
excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint’s
godlike ability to think, had something awe-inspiring about it that
numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning
round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like
a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he
didn’t stop strutting around and get wise to himself. For
one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been
made that night, and the whiskey which had for years been
flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy’s asbestos
throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden
sensitive section of his entrails.

Mr Uniatz reddened
bashfully under the stares that
impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being
the focus
of so much attention. But he clung
valiantly to his point.

“It sounds like a
pipe dream to me, boss,” he said.

“Let me get this
straight,” said the Saint carefully. “I gather that you don’t think
that Valerie Woodchester runs
any risk of getting her
throat cut. Is that the idea ?”

Mr Uniatz looked about him
in dazed perplexity. He
seemed to think that
everyone had gone mad.

“I dunno, boss,”
he said, refusing to be sidetracked.
“What I wanna
know is where do ya get dat stuff ?”

“What stuff?”
asked Peter faintly.

“De compressed
whiskey,” said Mr Uniatz.

There was a pregnant
silence.

The Saint laid his head
slowly back on the cushions and
closed his eyes.

“Hoppy,” he said
solemnly, “I love you. When I die, the
word
‘Uniatz’ will be found written on my heart.”

“How about if de goil
is selling it, boss?” ventured Mr
Uniatz,
tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. “Maybe
she’s
in de racket, too, woikin’ for de chemical factory
where
dey make it.”

Simon passed him the
whiskey bottle.

“Maybe she is,
Hoppy,” he said. “It’s an idea, anyway.
Give
yourself some more nourishment while we think it over.”

“Didn’t you get
anything useful out of her?” asked
Patricia.

“She held out on
me,” said the Saint ruefully. “I did my
best,
but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing
as
it may seem, she wouldn’t confide in me. The secrets
of
her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart
so far as I’m concerned.”

Peter clicked his tongue.

“You’ve met her four
times now, and she hasn’t confided
in you,” he
said in accents of distress. “You must be losing
your
touch. They don’t usually hold out so long.”

“What do you mean by
‘they’?” demanded the Saint
unblushingly.

“He means your harem
candidates,” said Patricia. “The
wild
flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as
you
pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn’t
given way to your manly charms.”

Simon reached for a
cigarette and flicked his thumbnail
thoughtfully over a
match.

“She’s tough, all
right,” he said. “But I don’t know how
tough.
She’ll need all she’s got to sit in on this game. She’s sitting in, and I’m
still wondering whether she really knows
what
the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I
thought
we were going to get somewhere, but she closed
up
again and went home.”

“You started to get
somewhere, then,” said Peter.

The Saint nodded.

“Oh yes, I started.
But I didn’t finish, so we might just
as well forget about
it. She knows something, though—I
found that out,
even if she didn’t admit it. But she’s going
to
play her own hand; and so she’ll probably get her throat
cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult.”

He sat up in an access of
unruly energy, and his blue
eyes went over them with
an almost angry light.

“God damn it,”
he said quietly, “it’s a complete and
perfect
setup—with only the foundation missing. I’ve
worked
it all out a dozen times since we talked it over
at
Anford, and I expect you have, too. We’ll run over it
again
if you like, and get it all in one piece.”

“All right,”
said Peter. “You run over it. We like hear
ing
you listen to yourself.”

“Here it is, then.
We’ve got our friend Luker, the arms
wangler. He’s on a job. In this case
he’s in on it with a couple
of his stooges
named Sangore and Fairweather—two highly
esteemed gentlemen with
complete faith in their own respec
tability
but completely under his thumb for any dirty work
he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady
Valerie,
a sort of spare-time
entra
î
neuse
for Fairweather. Okay. On
the other side you have well-meaning but not very
agile
professional pacifists Kennet
and Windlay. Somehow or
other they
dig up inside information about the job Luker
is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They
threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay.
Luker has
no intention of dropping
it. The first move is through Fair
weather,
to sic Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she
can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady
Valerie is therefore used for the last time to
lure Kennet
down to Whiteways for a
conference, where he meets with
a
fortunate accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the
aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was
caught
in a drunken stupor, and keeps
the inquest nicely ham
strung to save
scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and
meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently
by some prowling thug. Okay again.”

“And so
soothing,” said Peter. “Especially for the
corpses.”

“Unfortunately this
isn’t quite the end of it. The ungodly haven’t found Kennet’s incriminating
evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least
enough to give her a little information about this evidence
—either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now
come to Lady Valerie’s psychology.”

“I thought we should
come to that eventually,” said
Patricia.

Simon threw a cushion at
her.

“She’s not a bad kid,
really,” he said. “But she likes
having
a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability
to
rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to
her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to
make out. When Ken
net meets with a highly suspicious
accident and Windlay
is just obviously murdered,
it wakes her up a bit—possibly
with a certain amount of
help from my own blundering
bluntness. And maybe she
even feels a genuine remorse.
From the symptoms, I
should say she did. She’s absent-
mindedly gone just a
little further than she’d ever have gone
if she knew exactly
what she was doing, and done something
really
nasty. She also realizes that it’s given her some sort
of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she
still
doesn’t want to confide in me. She’s paddling her own canoe.
And as far as I can see there are only two ways
she can
be heading. Either she’s got
some crazy idea of making
amends by
carrying on Kennet’s work on her own, and
taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for
a cat’s-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail
them.
And I may be daft, but it seems
to me that her scheme
might very well
combine the two.”

Peter Quentin got up and
refilled his glass. He sat down
again and looked at the
Saint seriously.