Saint Intervenes (16 page)

Sir Melvin
Flager passed into a nightmare that was worse
than anything he had
thought of when he first opened his
eyes. The mechanical device which he
was strapped to was
not quite the same as the cars he was used to; and Simon
Templar
himself would have been ready to admit that it
might be more
difficult to drive. Time after time the relent
less leather lashed
across his shouder-blades, and each time it
made contact he let
loose a howl of pain which in itself was a reward to his tormentors.

After a
while he began to master the steering, and long
periods went by when
the red light scarcely showed at all.
As these intervals of immunity
lengthened, Flager shrugged
his aching back and began to pluck up courage.
These
lunatics who had kidnapped him, whoever they were, had
taken a
mean advantage of him at the start. They had fastened
him to an unfamiliar
machine and promptly proceeded to
shoot it through space at forty miles
an hour: naturally he
had made mistakes. But that could not go on
for ever. He
had got the hang of it at last, and the rest of it seemed
more
or less plain sailing. He even had leisure to ponder sadistically
on what
their fate would be when they let him go and the police caught them, as they
undoubtedly would be caught.
He seemed to remember that the
cat-o’-nine-tails was the punishment invariably meted out by the Law for crimes
of
violence. Well, flogging him with that leather strap was a
crime of
violence. He brooded savagely over various tales he
had heard of the
horrors of that punishment… .

Whack!

The red
light had glowed, and the strap had swung home
again. Flager pulled
himself together with a curse. It was no good getting careless now that he had
mastered the machine.
But he was beginning to feel tired. His eyes
were starting to
ache a little with the strain of keeping themselves glued
watchfully
to the cinematograph screen ahead. The intermi
nable unwinding of
that senseless road, the shirr of the un
seen projector, the
physical effort of manipulating the heavy
steering wheel, the
deadly monotony of the task, combined
with the heavy dinner he had eaten and
a long sequence of
other dinners behind it to produce a sensation of
increasing
drowsiness. But the unwinding of the road never slackened
speed, and the leather strap never failed to find its mark
every
 
time
 
his
 
wearying
 
attention
 
caused him to make a
mistake.

“You’re
getting careless about your corners,” the Saint
warned him
tirelessly. “You’ll be in the ditch at the next
one. Look out!”

The
flickering screen swelled up and swam in his vision.
There was nothing else
in the world—nothing but that end
lessly winding road uncoiling out of
the darkness, the lights
of other traffic that leapt up from it, the
red light above the
screen, and the smack of the leather strop across his
shoulders.
His brain seemed to be spinning round like a top inside
his
head when at last, amazingly, the screen went black and the
other bulbs
in the garage lighted up.

“You
can go to sleep now,” said the Saint.

Sir Melvin
Flager was incapable of asking questions. A medieval prisoner would have been
no more capable of ask
ing questions of a man who released him from
the rack.
With a groan he slumped back in his seat and fell asleep.

It seemed
as if he had scarcely closed his eyes when he was
roused again by someone shaking him. He
looked up blearily
and saw the strange chauffeur
leaning over him.

“Wake
up,” said Peter Quentin. “It’s five o’clock on
Saturday
morning, and you’ve got a lot more miles to cover.”

Flager had
no breath to dispute the date. The garage lights
had gone out again,
and the road was starting to wind out
of the cinematograph screen again.

“But
you told me I could sleep!” he moaned.

“You
get thirty-five minutes every night,” Peter told him
pitilessly.
“That averages four hour a week, and that’s as
much as you allowed
Albert Johnson. Look out!”

Twice
again Flager was allowed to sleep, for exactly thirty-
five minutes; four
times he watched his two tormentors
change places, a fresh man taking up
the task while the other
lay down on the very comfortable bed which had
been made
up in
one corner and slept serenely. Every three hours he had
five minutes’ rest and a glass of water, every six hours he
had ten minutes’ rest, a cup of coffee, and a
sandwich. But
the instant that these
timed five or ten minutes had elapsed,
the
projector was started up again, the synchronisation switch
was thrown over, and he had to go on driving.

Time ceased
to have any meaning. When, after his first
sleep, he was told that it was only five
o’clock on Saturday
morning, he could have
believed that he had been driving for
a
week; before his ordeal was over, he felt as if he had been
at the wheel for seven years. By Saturday night he
felt he
was going mad; by Sunday
morning he thought he was
going to
die; by Sunday night he was a quivering wreck.
The strap fell on his shoulders many times during the last
few hours, when the recurrent sting of it was
almost the only
thing that kept his
eyes open; but he was too weary even to
cry out… .

And then,
at the end of what might have been centuries,
Monday morning dawned
outside; and the Saint looked at
his watch and reversed the switches.

“You
can go to sleep again now,” he said for the last time;
but Sir
Melvin Flager was asleep almost before the last word
was out of his mouth.

Sunken in
the coma of utter exhaustion, Flager did not
even feel himself
being unstrapped and unhandcuffed from
his perch; he did not
feel the clothes being replaced on his
inflamed back, nor did
he even rouse as he was carried into
his own car and driven swiftly away.

And then
again he was being shaken by the shoulder,
woken up. Whimpering,
he groped for the steering wheel—
and did not find it. The shaking at
his shoulder went on.

“All
right,” he blubbered. “All right. I’m trying to do it.
Can’t you
let me sleep a little—just once… .”

“Sir
Melvin! Sir Melvin!”

Flager
forced open his bloodshot eyes. His hands were
free. He was sitting
in his own car, which was standing out
side his own house.
It was his valet who was shaking him.

“Sir
Melvin! Try to wake up, sir. Where have you been?
Are you ill,
sir?”

Flager
found strength to move his head from one side to
the other.

“No,”
he said. “I just want to sleep.”

And with a
deep groan he let his swollen eyelids droop
again, and sank back
into soothing abysses of delicious rest.

When he
woke up again he was in his own bed, in his
own bedroom. For a
long time he lay without moving, wal
lowing in the heavenly comfort of the
soft mattress and cool linen, savouring the last second of sensual pleasure
that could
be squeezed out of the most beautiful awakening that he
could
remember.

“He’s
coming round,” said a low voice at last; and with a
sigh
Flager opened his eyes.

His bed
seemed to be surrounded with an audience such as a seventeenth-century monarch
might have beheld at a
levee. There was his valet, his secretary, his doctor, a nurse,
and a heavy and stolid man of authoritative appearance who
held an unmistakable bowler hat. The doctor had a
hand on
his pulse, and the others
stood by expectantly.

“All
right, Sir Melvin,” said the physician. “You may
talk for a
little while now, if you want to, but you mustn’t
excite yourself.
This gentleman here is a detective who wants
to ask you a few
questions.”

The man
with the bowler hat came nearer.

“What
happened to you, Sir Melvin?” he asked.

Flager
stared at him for several seconds. Words rose to his
lips, but somehow he
did not utter them.

“Nothing,”
he said at length. “I’ve been away for the
week-end, that’s all.
What the devil’s all this fuss about?”

“But
your back, Sir Melvin!” protested the doctor. “You
look as if you’d had a terrible
beating——”

“I had
a slight accident,” snapped Flager. “And what the devil has it got to
do with you, sir, anyway? Who the devil
sent for all of
you?”

His valet swallowed.

“I
did, Sir Melvin,” he stammered. “When I couldn’t
wake you
up all day yesterday—and you disappeared from
the theatre without a
word to anybody, and didn’t come back for two days ——
”

“And
why the devil shouldn’t I disappear for two days?”
barked
Flager weakly. “I’ll disappear for a month if I feel like it. Do I pay you
to pry into my movements? And can’t
I sleep all day if I want to without
waking up to find a lot
of quacks and policemen infesting my room
like vultures?
Get
out of my house, the whole damned lot of you! Get out,
d’you hear?”

Somebody
opened the door, and the congregation drifted
out, shaking its
heads and muttering, to the accompaniment
of continued
exhortations in Flager’s rasping voice.

His
secretary was the last to go, and Flager called him
back.

“Get
Nyson on the telephone,” he ordered. “I’ll speak to
him
myself.”

The
secretary hesitated for a moment, and then picked up
the bedside telephone
and dialled the number dubiously.

Flager
took the instrument as soon as his manager an
swered.

“Nyson?”
he said. “Get in touch with all our branch de
pots immediately. From
now on, all our drivers will be on a
five-hour day, and they get a twenty
per cent rise as from the
date we took them on. Engage as many more men
as you
need to make up the schedules.”

He heard
Nyson’s incredulous gasp over the line.

“I beg
your pardon, Sir Melvin—did you say ——
”

“Yes,
I did!” snarled Flager. “You heard me all right.
And after
that, you can find out if that cyclist Johnson killed
left any dependents. I
want to do something for them… .”

His voice
faded away, and the microphone slipped through
his fingers. His
secretary looked at him quickly, and saw that
his eyes were closed
and the hemispherical mound of his
abdomen was rising and falling
rhythmically.

Sir Melvin
Flager was asleep again.

VII

The
Uncritical Publisher

Even the
strongest men have their weak moments.

Peter
Quentin once wrote a book. Many young men do,
but usually with more
disastrous results. Moreover he did it
without saying a word
to anyone, which is perhaps even
more uncommon; and even the Saint did not hear
about it
until after the crime had been committed.

“Next
time you’re thinking of being rude to me,” said
Peter Quentin, on that
night of revelation, “please remember
that you’re talking
to a budding novelist whose work has
been compared to Dumas, Tolstoy, Conan
Doyle, and others.”

Simon
Templar choked over his beer.

“Only
pansies bud,” he said severely. “Novelists fester. Of course, it’s
possible to be both.”

“I
mean it,”
 
insisted Peter
seriously.
 
“I was keeping it
quiet
until I heard the verdict, and I had a letter from the publishers this
morning.”