Prelude for War (22 page)

“Ah!” he said,
with a deep satisfaction that was exag
gerated
by his slightly foreign handling of words. “The ticket. That is
excellent!”

As a matter of fact, it was
a ticket in an impromptu
sweepstake organized over
the week end in Peter Quentin’s
favourite pub on the
outskirts of Anford; but the Saint had
known
that it was there, and had left it there with the
deliberate
object of leading the comedy on as far as it would
go
in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be
the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.

He waited to see how far
his hope would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester’s eyes were like saucers: they
looked
at first as if they couldn’t believe what they were
seeing;
and then a veiled half-comprehending, half-perplexed expres
sion passed over them which Simon hoped nobody
would
see. Bravache folded the ticket
carefully and put it in his
own
wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the
limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.

“We are very grateful,
my dear lady,” he said. “You
have
done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons
of
France do not forget services. In future you will be
under
our protection.” He paused, smiling, and there was
something
wolfish about his smile. “Should anything happen
to you—should you, for instance, be murdered by one of
our enemies—you will be immediately avenged.”

An arpeggio of spooky
fingers stroked up the Saint’s
back into the roots of his
hair. In spite of Bravache’s
stilted phrasing, the
almost farcical old-fashioned melo
drama in which his
tongue rolled itself gloatingly around
every
word, there was something in his harsh voice that
was
by no means farcical, something which in combination
with
that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by
the
unreality of its enunciation. Simon realized for the first
time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that
it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in
grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature
of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after
all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a cer
tain type of man—a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical
in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse
with
the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose
vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose
total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possi
ble for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight
face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In
that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the men
talities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty
tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.

He said lightly:
“That’ll be fun for you, won’t it,
Valerie?”

Bravache looked back at
him, and again his eyes were
cold and fishy.

“You have been
attempting to discover the secrets of the
Sons
of France in order to betray them to our enemies,”
he said. “The penalty for that, as you know, is death.”

“You must have been
reading a book,” said the Saint
admiringly. “Or
was that Luker’s idea ?”

The vulpine twist that was
meant to be a smile remained
on the other man’s thin
lips.

“I am acquainted with
Mr Luker only as a sympathizer
and supporter of our ideals
to whom I have the honour to
be attached as personal
aide,” he replied. “Your crime has
been
committed against an organization of patriots known as the Sons of France, of
which I am an officer. You are now the prisoner of the Sons of France. We have
been
informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary
employed
by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon
and betray our
organization. Of that I have sufficient
proof.” He tapped
the pocket where he had
replaced his wallet with the sweep
stake ticket in it.
“It also appears that you have threatened
Lady
Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore
if
you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her.”

Simon’s arms were beginning
to ache and stiffen from
being held
up so
long. But inside he felt timelessly relaxed, and his mind was a cold pattern of
crystalline understanding.

“You mean,” he
said unemotionally, “that the idea is to
kill
both of us, and arrange it so that you can try to spread
the story that I murdered Lady Valerie and that the Sons
of France killed me to avenge her.”

“I am sure that the
theory will find wide acceptance,”
answered
Bravache complacently. “Lady Valerie is young
and
beautiful, whereas you are a notorious criminal. I think
that a great many people will applaud our action, and that
even the British police themselves will feel a secret relief
which will tend to handicap their inquiries.”

The Saint glanced at Lady
Valerie. Her face had been
blank with stupefaction;
now it was drawn and frightened.
Her big brown eyes were
fixed on him in mute and hypno
tized entreaty.

“I told you you had
charming friends, darling,” Simon
remarked.

He studied Bravache with
cold-blooded interest. He felt
that in the space of a few
minutes he had come to know the man intimately, that he could take his soul
apart and
lay out all its components. How much of
what Bravache
had said was genuine fanaticism, or genuine self-deception,
however wilful, he could not judge; in that
kind of neurotic,
the blend of
idealism and conscienceless rationalization became so homogeneous that it was practically
impossible
to draw a sharp cleavage.
But he was not so much inter
ested in
the man individually as in the type, the matrix in
which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He
had
known it in Red Russia, in
Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany,
and
had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life
under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself
lay at the
caprice of men from that
mould. Now he was finding the imprint of the same die on a Frenchman, the
chilling pro
totypical hallmark of the
breed from which secret police
and
authorized persecutors are recruited; and it gave him
a grimmer measure of the thing he had set out to
fight
than anything else hitherto had
done. If the Sons of
France had
progressed far enough to develop officers like
Major Bravache, the wheels must be turning with night
mare speed… .

“It all sounds very
neat and jolly, my dear Major
Cochon,” he admitted.
“Do we start right away?”

“I think we had
better do so,” said Bravache, still smiling
with
a face of marble. “We have already wasted enough
time.”
He turned his head. “Dumaire, you know what to do. We will leave you to do
it.” He looked at the Saint
again, with his lips drawn
back from his white even teeth.
“You, Mr Templar, will
accompany Pietri and myself. If
you resist or try to
obstruct us you will be shot at once. I
advise
you to come quietly. I am hoping that as a reason
able
man you will agree that the prospect of death in a
number
of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately. Besides”—the
gleam of the white teeth was
feline—“as a
gentleman, you will not wish to deprive me of the opportunity to answer some of
your remarks which
I have not had time to deal with
here.”

The Saint smiled.

“By no manner of
means,” he said. “Only I should
rather
like to take charge of the interview myself at this
point—if
you don’t mind.”

He
 
stepped
 
aside
 
and backwards,
 
and took hold
 
of Pietri by the ear. The movement was so improbable and
unexpected that it was completed before either Bravache
or Dumaire
could reorient their wits sufficiently to do any
thing about it. And by fhat time Pietri was securely held,
like a writhing urchin in the grip of an
old-fashioned school-
marm, so that his body was between the Saint and
Bravache,
who was still trying to make up
his mind whether to grab
for the
automatic which he had confidently left lying on the
table a yard away.

Bravache’s poise broke for
a moment.

“Use your gun, you
fool!” he thundered.

“He can’t,” said
the Saint. “You tell them why, Sam.”

An extra turn on the piece
of gristle he was holding made
his victim squeak like a
mouse.

“There’s nothing in
it,” wailed Pietri, with the revolver
quivering
futilely in his grasp. “They caught me outside
—him
and two other fellows——
”

Bravache started to move
then, and Simon’s voice ripped
out like a lash.

“I wouldn’t,” he
said. “Really I wouldn’t. It’s danger
ous.”

And as he spoke Peter and
Hoppy came through the
doorway.

Bravache stood very still. His face was cold
and unmoved,
but the veins on the backs of
his clenched hands stood out
in
knotty blue cords. Dumaire, caught with one hand at the
edge of his coat pocket, prudently let it fall
back to his side.
He flattened
himself against the wall like a cornered rat,
with his shoulders hunched up to the jaw level of his small
ebony-capped head.

Simon released Pietri and
strolled over to pick up Bravache’s automatic and retrieve his cigarette case
and lighter
from among his strewn belongings on the
table. With a
cigarette between his lips and the lighter wick burning
steadily, he looked at Bravache with cerulean mockery in his eyes.

“I’m hoping that as a
reasonable man you will agree that
the prospect of
death in a number of hours is preferable
to.
the certainty of death immediately,” he said in a voice of satin. “Go
on, Major, I don’t want anything to interrupt
our
little chat.”

2

The chat appeared to have
been interrupted already so
far as Major Bravache was
concerned. At any rate, he
seemed disinclined to accept the Saint’s
invitation to proceed
with his discourse. Or
else the founts of eloquence had dried
up
within him. His lips closed down over his teeth until
there was only a straight line to show where his
mouth
had been.

The Saint left him with a
quizzically regretful shrug and turned to untie Lady Valerie. She stood up and
stretched
herself, rather like a cat by the fire,
and rubbed her chafed
wrists. Then she went over
to the table where her bag was, in
search of the
ineluctable restoratives of feminine sangfroid.

“You gave me some bad
moments,” she said, with an
attempted nonchalance in
which he could still see the signs
of strain like
carefully darned edges on a poor man’s cuffs.
“For
a long time I was thinking you’d let me down, but
of
course I ought to have remembered that you never let
anyone
down.”

“What happened?”
he asked.

She appeared from behind a
card-sized mirror to point
with the scarlet tip of a
lipstick.

“He
rang the bell and said you’d sent him round with something special to
give me. I thought it was a bit funny,
since
we’d only said good-bye a little while ago, and he was
a
rather funny-looking person, but after all I thought a lot of funny things must
go on in this life of crime, and
I was quite intrigued. I
mean, I just didn’t think enough
about how funny it was. So
I started to let him in, and
then these other two
followed him in very quickly and there
wasn’t
anything I could do. They tied me up and searched
everywhere.
This one was very nasty—he thought I might
have
the ticket on me, and he didn’t miss anything.”