Prelude for War (20 page)

“And she’s the only
link we’ve got with what’s going on?” he said.

“The one and only.
Kennet and Windlay are dead, and
we shouldn’t get anything
out of Luker and Company unless
we beat it out of them,
which mightn’t be so easy as it
sounds. Meanwhile we’re
tied hand and foot. We’re just
sitting tight and twiddling
our thumbs while she’s playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her
for bait
and wait until something happens, with
the risk of finding
her as useful as John Kennet at the end
of it? Or start
again and try to cut in from another
angle?”

“You tell us,”
said Patricia.

There was a pause in the
intermittent glugging which had
punctuated the conversation
from the corner where Mr
Uniatz was marooned with
his consoling bottle in the midst
of the uncharted
wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was
no longer clear
about why his purely sociable contribution
to
the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his
last conscious moment
he had been invited to join in thinking
about
something, and since then he had been submerged
in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like
a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him
and
pulled him up, the anguished
irregularities of his face dis
solved
into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

“I got it, boss!”
he announced ecstatically. “What we
gotta
do wit’ dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before
she
takes off.”

“Before she takes off
what?” asked the Saint foggily.

“Before she takes off
wit’ de compressed whiskey,” said
Mr
Uniatz proudly, “De stuff de temperance outfit she’s woikin’ for t’rows
out of de aeroplanes.” Mr Uniatz raised
his
bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-
ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement.
“Chees, boss, why didden we t’ink of dat before? It’s in de
bag!”

Simon looked at him for a
moment; and then he bowed
his head in speechless
reverence.

And at that instant the
telephone bell rang.

The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill
unexpected
ness that jolted them all into an
unnatural stillness. There
were many
people among the Saint’s large acquaintance
who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet
for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave
him a
queer intuitive tightening in
his stomach. Perhaps it was
the way
his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head
and looked at the faces of the others, but they
were all
expressionless with the same
formless foreboding.

Simon picked up the phone.

“Hullo,” he
said.

“Is that you, Simon
darling?” it answered. “This is
Valerie.”

A feathery tingle passed up
the Saint’s spine and was
gone, and with it the
tightness in his stomach was gone
also. He could not
have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet
there was an indefinable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite
clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and
translucent.

“Hullo, darling,”
he said evenly. “And how are you?”

“I’m all right,
thanks… . Listen, Simon, you remem
ber
that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?”

Simon drew at his
cigarette.

“Of course,” he
said, without hesitation. “It’s quite
safe.”

“That’s good,”
she said. “You see, I’m afraid I’ve got
to
have it back at once. I’m awfully sorry to be such a
nuisance,
but it’s frightfully important. I mean, could you
bring
it round right away? It’s all frightfully thrilling, but
I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. Can you possibly
manage it?”

“Easily,” he
said. “I was just looking for something
useful
to do.”

“You know where I
live, don’t you?”

“I should think so. I
looked it up in the phone book as
soon as I got back
to town, and I’ve just been waiting for
an
invitation.”

“Well, you’ve got one
now. And listen. Nobody must
know you’re coming to see
me. I’ll tell you why afterwards.”

“No one shall even
guess where I’ve gone,” said the
Saint, with his
eyes on Patricia. “I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

“Thanks so much,
darling,” she said. “Do hurry.”

“I will.”

He laid the phone gently
back on its bracket, and stood
up. The dance of his blue
eyes was as if he had been asleep
all the evening and
had just become awake. He had no
more doubts or problems.
All the dammed-up, in-turned
energy with which he had
been straining was crystallized
suddenly into the clean
sharp leap of action.
He
was
smiling.

“Did you get that,
souls?” he said.

“She wants to see
you,” said Patricia. “Am I supposed
to
get excited?”

“She wants more than
that,” he said. “She wants a
cloakroom
ticket which she gave me to keep for her—which
she
never gave me. She wants it at once; and nobody’s to
know
where I’ve gone. And somebody was listening on the
wire
all the time to make sure she said all the right things.
So I don’t see how I can refuse the date.” The Saint’s smile
was dazzlingly seraphic. “I told you something was bound
to happen, and it’s starting now!”

4

“Excuse me a minute
while I get into my shooting
clothes,” he said.

He vanished out of the
nearest door; but the room had
hardly had time to adapt
itself to his disappearance when
he was back again. The
Saint could always make a profes
sional quick-change artist
look like an elderly dowager
dressing for a state ball,
and when he was in a hurry he
could do things with
clothes that bordered on the miracu
lous. He came back
in a gray lounge suit whose sober hue
had no counterpart
in the way he wore it, which was with all the peculiarly rakish elegance that
was subtly infused
into anything he put on. His fresh
shift was buttoned and
his tie was tied, and he
was feeding a fully charged maga
zine into the butt of a
shining Luger.

“You’re not really
going, are you?” asked Patricia hope
lessly.

She knew when she said it
that it was a waste of words,
and the scapegrace slant of
his brows was sufficient answer.

“Of course not,
darling,” he said. “These are my new
pajamas.”

“But you’re doing just
what they want you to do!”

“Maybe. But do they
know that I know it? I don’t think
so. That phone call
was as straightforward as a baby’s
prayer—to the guy
who was checking up on it. Only Valerie
knows
that she never gave me a cloakroom ticket, and she
knows
I know it. She’s on the spot in her own flat, and
that
was the only way she could tip me off and call for help.
Do you want me to stay home and knit?”

Patricia stood up. She
kissed him.

“Be careful,
boy,” she said. “You know I look terrible
in
black.”

Peter Quentin finished his
drink and rose. He buttoned
his coat with a deep sigh.

“I suppose this is
the end of our chance of a night’s
rest,” he said
pessimistically. “I ought to have stayed in
Anford.”
He saluted Patricia. “Will you excuse Hoppy and me if we trot along to
take care of the dragons while your problem child is striking attitudes in
front of the heroine? We don’t want anything to happen to him—it would make
life so horribly quiet and peaceful.”

Simon stopped at the door.

“Just a minute,”
he said. “There may be policemen and other emissaries of the ungodly
prowling around outside. We’d better not take chances. Will you call down to
Sam
Outrell, Pat, and tell him to meet me in the
garage?”

As they rode down in the
elevator he felt the springy
elation of the moment
spreading its intoxication through his
muscles.
The lucid swiftness of his mind ran on, constructing
a
clear objective framework of action in which he moved
with
unhurried precision with each step unerringly laid out
a
fraction of time before he reached it.

Down in the basement garage
Sam Outrell, the janitor,
was waiting for him when
the elevator doors opened, with
a look of placid expectancy
on his pleasant bucolic face. He fell in at the Saint’s side as Simon walked
across to
where the Hirondel stood waiting in its
private bay.

“Goin’ out on
business again, sir?” he queried, with the
imperturbation
of many years of experience of the Saint’s
unlawful occasions.

“I hope so, Sam.”
The Saint cocked his legs over the
side while Peter and
Hoppy climbed into their own seats.
“I don’t want
to stage a big demonstration, but you might
just
do a quiet job of obstructing if anyone’s waiting for us.
Take your own heap and follow me up the ramp, and see
that you stick tight on my tail. When I wave my hand,
swing across the road and stall your engine. I’ll only want
two or three minutes.”

The exhaust purred as he
touched the starter. He pulled the Hirondel out to the foot of the ramp and
held it there,
warming the engine, until he saw
Outrell’s car behind him.
Then he let in the clutch
and roared up the slope, with the
other car following
as if it were nailed to his rear fenders.

At the top he whipped round
in a screaming turn out
into the narrow street that
ran by the back of Cornwall
House. There was a taxi
parked close by the garage
entrance and a small sports
car with a man reading a news
paper in it standing just
behind; both of them might have
been innocent, but if they
were it would do them no harm
to be obstructed for a few
minutes.

The Saint raised one hand
just above his head and made
a slight movement.

He heard the squeal of
Sam Outrell’s brakes behind him,
and grinned gently to
himself as he locked the wheel for
another split-arch
turn into Half Moon Street. The snarl
of the engine rose
briefly, lulled, and then settled into a
steady
drone as they nosed into Piccadilly, shot across the
front
of a belated bus and went humming down the west-
ward
slope towards Hyde Park Corner.

Peter Quentin settled deep
into his seat and turned to
Hoppy.

“I hope your
insurance policies are all paid up, Hoppy,”
he
said.

“I ain’t never had
none,” said Mr Uniatz seriously.
“I seen guys
what try to sell me insurance, but I t’ought
dey
was all chisellers.” He brooded anxiously over the idea.
“Do ya t’ink I oughta get me some, boss?”

“I’m afraid it’s too
late now,” said Peter encouragingly.
“But
perhaps it doesn’t matter. You haven’t got a lot of
wives
and things lying around, have you?”

Mr Uniatz scratched his
head with a row of worried
fingers.

“I dunno, boss,”
he said shyly. “Every time I get married
I
am not t’inking about it very much. So I never know
if
I have got married or not,” he said, summarizing his
problem with
a conciseness that could scarcely have been
improved
upon.

Peter pondered over the
exposition until he felt himself getting slightly giddy, when he decided that
it would probably
be safer to leave it alone. And the
Saint spun the wheel
again and sent the Hirondel
thundering down Grosvenor
Place.

“When you two
trollops have finished gloating over your
sex
life,” he said, “you’d better try to remember what happens
when we get to Marsham Street.”