Saint on Guard (10 page)

Simon moved the table and made room for her on the banquette beside him. Her circumambient nimbus of perfume moved in with her and pushed away the lunchers on the other side.

“I wish you weren’t so terribly busy,” she said, and went on to develop her theme without waiting for him to confirm or deny. “You ought to find time to cultivate some people who might help you. I mean really help you. Of course, dashing about after criminals must be very exciting, but is it an altogether complete life?”

“I don’t really know,” said the Saint mildly. “You seemed to think it was fairly complete when you came to see me and asked me to dash after Milton.”

She giggled in a thin falsetto.

“I was thoroughly mad with him,” she confessed. “But then I didn’t know you personally like I do now. Now I’m just thinking of you as a friend, and I do so want you to do well for yourself. So I was just wondering why you’d want to work so hard and run such frightening risks, when I imagine there’d be plenty of people who’d pay you, oh, enormous amounts of money just for being yourself.”

Simon looked up at her, and his blue eyes were icily clear.

“You mean there might be somebody who’d bribe me quite lavishly to leave this iridium racket alone?” he asked, and his voice was completely lazy.

Mrs Ourley laughed again, making a noise which probably sounded to her like the tinkling of fairy bells. It sounded exactly like broken glass going down a garbage chute.

“You do say the funniest things! I was only thinking how nice it would be if I could take you to see the new show at the Copa-cabana. And the music is just heavenly. It does the most exciting things to me. Milton told me he’d have to work late tonight, and I was hoping …”

She babbled on, and Simon made vaguely helpful responses. But behind it his mind was far away and running like a machine. The electrification that he had felt a few minutes before, that had spread out and become pervading, was something as firmly with him now as the meal he had just eaten.

He knew that he had almost everything in his hands now. At least, he had as much as he was likely to get. The rest of it lay with his own judgment and perception and choice. He had to read character and motive and physical possibility right. He had to take apart the things people had said, and distinguish the sinister from the stupid, and be a razor edge of separation between the stupid things that looked sinister and the sinister things that looked stupid. He had to eschew all red herrings and perceive only the one true fish.

And he couldn’t sit there for ever while he made up his mind, lie had to move. He had to move swiftly and rightly, before there was another murder to be solved, and another sacrifice to be accounted to the dull golden gods who had declared themselves for the enemy.

And at that perfect point he raised his eyes and saw Milton Ourley standing at the entrance of the dining room.

10 It is a simple fact that the Saint was not even surprised. The appearance of Mr Ourley was merely the natural and inevitable slipping of a link in a chain that had been forming for some time, a chain that must ultimately be so solid and inescapable that the failure of one link to make its appearance would have dissolved every other materialising loop. And this link was so ineluctable that it was uncannily like seeing a revival of some half-remembered play, rather than meeting a new and sudden complication.

He said: “Don’t look now, but I think your husband is joining us.”

Mrs Ourley did look, of course; but she did not come out with the squeak of coy consternation which one might reasonably have expected from her past performance in her own hallway at Oyster Bay. Instead, her carmined nails dug into the tablecloth so hard that they left furrows in the linen, and her complexion paled under its crust of powder until she looked like a fat frostbitten ghost. The sheer coagulation of her face was a distillate of all that unearthly majestic austerity that wins battles in the committee meetings of women’s clubs.

“Let me take care of this,” she said ominously, and stood up.

She moved with surprising swiftness for her bulk, and she met Milton Ourley halfway down the room. Once again she was like a stately galleon ploughing through a cluttered harbor. Milton might have been compared with a squat broad fussy tug, except that it was the galleon which took him in tow. Simon could hear something like a hoarse spluttering “dabbity dab dab”, like a rumble of distant thunder, but it made just as little difference to the general flow of motion. Mr Ourley might actually have made a great physical effort to struggle towards the Saint’s table, but the achievements of his kampf were not readily discernible. Borne like a cockleshell upon his spouse’s regal bow wave, he was washed back into the lobby, still booming like a frustrated foghorn, and disappeared from the scene.

Simon kept his head down while he examined and signed the check that was already on the table, and then he caught the eye of the maitre d’hotel and brought him over with a mere wisp of a gesture.

“Raul,” he said, “how could anyone get out of here without going through the lobby?”

If the maitre d’hotel had his own and incidentally erroneous theories about the Saint’s motives, he was far too polished a diplomat to give them any expression. In addition to which, and for no professional reasons, he had long since taken the Saint under his generous wing.

“There is a back way out,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

“I might even fall in love with it,” said the Saint.

They went down to the other end of the dining room, through well-organised pantries and one end of the clean busy kitchen, and past a row of food lockers to a wire-mesh door where the timekeeper rose from his little table and a plate of roast beef to let them out. Beyond that there was a short narrow passage and another door that opened inconspicuously on to Fortyfourth Street.

Simon stopped and looked back the way they had come. He pointed.

“Is that the service elevator?”

“Yes, sir. Do you want to use it?”

“That would get me upstairs and back again without going through the lobby too, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Saint rubbed his chin.

“I’d like to do that first. But will George here let me out when I come down again?”

“Of course.” Raul turned to the timekeeper. “Please let Mr Templar out whenever he’s ready.” He turned back to the Saint with a flourish. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Simon grinned as he strolled back towards the service lift.

“You’ve done plenty already, Raul,” he said. “As it is, I expect you’ve broken all the regulations in the joint, and Mr Case will probably fire you.”

The maitre d’hotel shrugged cheerfully.

“Regulations are for everybody else, but not for the Saint.” He said to the elevator operator: “Take Mr Templar upstairs and bring him down again any time he wants to come.” He smiled at the Saint with the happy magnificence of a mayor who has just bestowed the keys of his city, and said with charming impersonality: “Do you wish to leave any message?”

Simon shook his head.

“Just stay out of trouble and pretend you didn’t see me go.”

“But I won’t have seen you go, Mr Templar,” said Raul. “I won’t look.”

He turned his back, and Simon stepped into the car and was wafted upwards at a suitable pace for a sedate hotel.

He glanced at his wrist watch automatically as he stepped out on the third floor, but it was almost a reflex movement and the position of the hands scarcely impressed itself on him at all. The real timing was all in his head—it was a matter of how long it would have taken to discuss this and decide that and then to do something about it. He was working to almost psychically close tolerances, and an error of even a few minutes in his mental clocking might have catastrophic results. And even then he was trying to timetable something so nebulous that his own intuition was practically the only guarantee that it would work out that way at all.

He slid the key into his door with millimetric stealth, and went into his suite with weightless feet and one hand on the gun which he had borrowed from Mr Varetti before lunch. He had beer caught once that day, and he was not going to make the same mistake again.

But apparently he was still within his margin of time—if it had any real existence at all. There was no one in his living room, or behind the portieres that shut off the bedroom, or in the bathroom or the closet or under the bed. He took each hazard separately and methodically, making no sound to betray his presence until he had covered all of them.

Even then he was very quiet, and denied himself a cigarette that he would have enjoyed because he didn’t want to leave fresh smoke in the air.

The suitcase which he had sent up stood beside the sofa in the living room. He didn’t touch it.

The iron structure of the fire escape ran outside the bedroom window. Simon had chosen his suite for that reason; but it could work two ways. The front door of the suite could be penetrated in one way or another, but it would present difficulties. Simon thought it would be the fire escape.

The hallway from the front door met the living room at an angle so that there was a corner from which he could cover any entrance from equal concealment. He flattened himself into it and waited, as patient and motionless as a statue in a niche.

Somebody in the adjoining suite turned on a radio at full volume, and it blared away for two or three minutes before it was turned down. Even then, it was too loud.

Of course, it might be the front door. Either Varctti or Walsh might be good with locks, or might be clever enough to con a master key out of somewhere. Or they might even be tough enough to try it with a frontal assault, on a simple smash-grab-and-run basis.

It was curious how he had always assumed that it would be Varetti and Walsh. Even when he spoke to Fernack on the telephone. He had left them locked up in Barbara Sinclair’s closet intending to have been back there by that time and busy with the job of advancing their acquaintance on his own terms; but all that had been changed for quite a while. He wasn’t quite sure how long ago he had been sure that they were no longer waiting where he had left them, but it seemed now that he had always been sure that they wouldn’t be there. It was one of those fourth-dimensional elisions that saw an end before it could pin down all the steps and stages through which the end would come about.

He knew that Varetti and Walsh were out again, because only since they were out again could certain other things have happened. Or, conversely, because other things had happened, they must be out again.

And the rawhide suitcase was standing beside the sofa and someone would come to get it.

It wouldn’t take much shopping around to settle on one of the suites directly above the one he was in. And from any such starting point a fire escape that ran down through a gloomy inside courtyard that nobody would ever want to look out at anyway would present virtually no problems at all… .

He could really have enjoyed that cigarette.

But how long could he afford to wait, backing his hunch, while he might always be wrong, and the fox might be away in another spinney?

The radio next door was blatting forth some emetic commercial about the perils of fungoid feet or some such attractive ailmen He could hear every word as if he were in the room with it. wondered if it would be loud enough to drown one of the sounds he was listening for.

But it wasn’t.

He heard it.

It was the slow cautious rasp of a window-sash being eased quietly upwards. And, after that, the subdued rattle of the slats of the Venetian blind being lifted from below.

So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window; and he had not waited in vain.

There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.

The Saint’s ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse “For Christ’s sake, hurry up!” There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.

In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.

Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.

“Here it is,” he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.

“If only that sonofabitch Templar was here too,” said Mr Walsh, “I’d like to …”

He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.

Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet’s prettier fancies in the bud.

““Why don’t you shut your trap?”

He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.

“We’ll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front,” he said.

“Suppose he’s in the lobby,” Cokey suggested.

“You go ahead and make sure he isn’t.”

“I wanna see that sonofabitch again.”

“You’ll have plenty of time.”

Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremor less at his waist and blue lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.