Saint on Guard (3 page)

“Considering my reputation, the question is not out of order,” Simon said equably. “And the answer is that I shall deal with any facts I can get hold of in whatever way I think they would do the most good.”

“Well,” rasped Ourley, “in that case I’d be seventyseven kinds of a dab dabbed idiot if I told you anything—if I knew anything, that is,” he added hastily.

Simon’s gaze was dispassionately unwavering.

“Would you say the same thing to the police or the FBI?”

“You’re dabbity dab well right I would. My business is still my own business until these dabbity dab New Dealers take what’s left of it away from me.”

Uttershaw stepped up with a gold lighter for the cigarette which the Saint was still holding unlighted between his fingers.

“Do you know anything about this iridium black market, Milton?” he inquired curiously.

Ourley’s mouth opened, and then closed again like a trap before it parted a second time to let out words.

“I have no information to give anyone,” he said; “especially to interfering dab dabs like this. And that’s final.”

“I only wondered,” Uttershaw said suavely, “because naturally I’m interested myself. Of course that iridium shipment of mine was insured, but I couldn’t insure my legitimate profit, which would have been quite reasonable. And after all, we all have to make some kind of living. Besides, I can’t help hating to think that some crooks are making a fantastic profit where I’m really entitled to a fair one. Personally, I wish Mr Templar a lot of luck. And I’m sure the Government would be behind him.”

“Don’t talk to me about the Government!” Ourley blared, his face ripening again. “What I still want to know is what right a meddling son of a dab blab like this Templar has to go around sticking his nose into my business and making passes at my wife and crashing into my house to cross-examine me. And I want him the hell out of here!”

” ‘The eagle suffers little birds to sing’,” Uttershaw remembered soothingly; and Ourley’s eyes bulged with his blood pressure.

“I wish everybody would stop throwing quotations at me,” he howled. “Who said that?”

“Clifton Fadiman—or was it F P A?” said Uttershaw good-humoredly.

Simon Templar emptied his shallow glass and set it down. It seemed rather sadly clear that he was not going to make any substantial progress there and then, and his nibble still left him a secondary line that might be more profitable to play on. He had that in his mind as he bent over Mrs Ourley’s diamond-sprinkled hand with somewhat exaggerated formality.

“It’s been nice to see you again—Tiny,” he said, and added with a malice that saved him from shuddering: “Perhaps we shall dance that immortal rumba one of these days.” He bowed to the spluttering Mr Ourley. “I still hope you’ll think this over, Milton. I do really. Prison life is so slimming,” he said; and shook hands with Uttershaw. “If you hear anything in professional circles, I’m at the Algonquin. We might have lunch one day.”

“I’d love to,” Uttershaw said cordially. “I’d still like to know why you should take so much trouble.”

Simon turned at the door. There were certain little touches and lovely curtains that he could never resist.

” ‘I sing because I must’,” he said softly, and was gone.

They heard his car starting up and crunching away down the drive, and there was a longish silence in the room.

Then Milton Ourley found his voice again.

“Now what the dabbity dab goes on?” he yelped. “He sounded as if he was quoting poetry too. You’ve got everybody doing it. What did he mean?”

Allen Uttershaw held up his glass and turned it meditatively.

” ‘I sing because I must’,” he repeated. For a moment his handsome bony brow was furrowed with thought. Then, just for another moment, it cleared. He went on: ” ‘And pipe but as the linnet sings …’ “

His voice died away, and left only his clear gray eyes drifting over Ourley’s congested face.

3 Mr Gabriel Linnet, according to the Manhattan directory, had a residential address just off Madison Avenue in the Sixties. It proved to be a three-storey whitestone house with an air of solid prosperity which was quite different in style from that of the Ourley palazzo, but which obviously indicated a similar familiarity with spending coupons.

No lights showed from the windows as Simon stopped his car outside, but it was impossible to tell at a glance whether that might only be the effect of blackout curtains. There was another kind of light, though, that the Saint saw as he stepped out—a spark like a durable firefly hovering over a vague grayish shape in the darkness of the entrance porch. As he came to the steps, the shape developed into an ermine wrap encasing a girl who was perched on the stone balustrade beside the front door, and the firefly was a cigarette in her hand. The faintest subtlest fragrance, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as the stupefying reek of Mrs Ourley, crept into his nostrils as he came closer and touched his mind with a quite fanciful excitement.

He took a pencil flashlight from his pocket with a pretense of searching for the doorbell, but he was careful to turn it clumsily enough so that the beam passed over her face.

At least, it was meant to pass over; but when he saw her clearly his hand stopped, and he could no more have kept it moving for a moment than a conscientious bee could have kept flying past a freshly opened flower.

She had long-bobbed blue-black hair that shone like burnished metal, and long-lashed eyes that looked the same color. Her face was a perfect oval of softly-modeled olive, ripening into moist lips that were in themselves a justification for at least half the poems that have been written on such subjects. She was the kind of thing that a castaway on a desert island would dream about just before the seagulls started talking back to him.

The Saint should have had his mind on nothing but the job in hand; but he was still a long way from such dizzy depths of asceticism. She was so much more what a woman out of the wide world should have been, so completely everything that Titania Ourley was not, that he didn’t even realize how long he looked at her before she gave him a hint of it.

“Are you quite through?” she said icily; and yet even then her voice matched the picture of her so much better than the mood that the rebuke was warmer than most other women’s welcomes.

The Saint turned his light downwards so that it wasn’t directly in her eyes, and she could see him equally by the reflected glow; but he didn’t turn away himself.

He said, in a low reckless breath:

“Barbara the Beautiful

Had praise of lute and pen;

Her hair was like a summer night,

Dark, and desired of men …”

She sat utterly still for a few seconds.

Then she said: “How did you know my name was Barbara?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just came from a Quiz Kids reunion, and I’ve got a bad attack of the quotes. I’m sorry. Is your name Barbara?”

“Barbara Sinclair.”

“It’s a nice name.”

“Now that that’s settled,” she said, “why don’t you run along? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“So am I,” said the Saint. “Don’t go away now. I shan’t be long.”

He turned his light back on the front door, searching for the bell again.

“You’re wasting your time,” she said. “There’s nobody in.”

He took his fingers from the bell without touching it, and sat on the stone railing beside her.

“For some reason,” he murmured, “that begins to seem strikingly unimportant.”

“I’ve been here for half an hour,” she said.

“I suppose life is like that. I wouldn’t keep you waiting on my doorstep for half an hour.”

“You don’t really have to keep me waiting on anyone’s doorstep for half an hour.”

After an instant, he brought out a cigarette of his own and lighted it and took his time over the job.

“I suppose,” he said carelessly, “you wouldn’t be hinting that we might go and get a drink and maybe gnaw a bone somewhere.”

“No,” she said. “But a man with a car is an awful temptation these days. How’s your gas ration?”

“Very healthy,” he said. “How is your conscience?”

She stood up, and sent her firefly spinning on one last incandescent trajectory out into the street.

“Starving.”

He turned the car south on Madison, considering places where this shining hour might be best improved, and she sat just close enough beside him so that he was always aware of her with his shoulder, and the faint insidious sweetness of her was always in the air he breathed.

Then they were in a rooftop restaurant, in a corner booth with the lights of Manhattan spread out below them, and there were shaded candles on the tables and soft music, and there were oysters and green turtle soup and much fascinatingly inconsequential chatter, and the ermine wrap was over the back of her chair and she was wearing a dress that left no questions about whether her figure would match her face; and then there was coq au vin and a bottle of burgundy, and more talk that went very quickly and meant nothing at all; and then the Saint lighted a cigarette and stretched his legs contentedly and said: “Of all the possible things that I might have run into this evening, you are the last thing I was expecting—and incidentally I’m afraid you’re much more fun. Why were you waiting on Comrade Linnet’s doorstep?”

“That,” she said, “is my affair.”

He sighed.

“I might have known it. You were obviously too beautiful to be lying around loose.”

“Are you going to disappoint me now?” she said mockingly. “I thought the Saint was a buccaneer—a man who took what he wanted, and damn the torpedoes.”

Simon had the last glass of wine in his hand, moving it under the candlelight to enjoy the rich purity of its color. He put it down with the liquid in it as smooth and unrippled as if it had been frozen.

“How did you know my name?”

“After that picture of you in the paper yesterday,” she said casually, “who wouldn’t?”

“You’ve known all the time?”

“Of course.” She gave him a quick smile with the slightest troublement in it. “Please—did I say anything wrong? I’m not a celebrity hunter. That isn’t why I came with you. I just wanted to.”

“I was just a little surprised,” he said.

She looked out of the window at the sparsely scattered stars that the dimout had left below; and then she said, without her eyes meeting his directly: “Couldn’t we get out of here? Haven’t you got an apartment somewhere? Or I have. And a radio. I’ll buy you a drink and we can get sweet music on WQXR and talk about Life.”

He drew slowly at his cigarette.

“That could be swell,” he said; and her eyes turned to his face again.

“I’ll have to make a phone call and break another date,” she said with a smile. “But it doesn’t seem to matter a bit.”

He stood up while she left the table, and then he sat down again and propped his cigarette arm on one elbow for about as long as it took to absorb three more long and contemplative drags.

Then he got up and strolled unhurriedly out of the restaurant.

He strolled past the bar, past the men’s room, past the hat-check girl. There was an elevator engorging a flock of satisfied diners. Almost accidentally, it might have seemed, the Saint drifted in on the heels of the last passenger, and was dropped with ear-numbing swiftness to the street.

Ten minutes later he was on the steps of Gabriel Linnet’s house again.

This time he rang the bell.

He rang it two or three times, but there was no response.

He felt so still inside that he could hear his own pulses drumming. There might be some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that the house seemed empty. Yet Linnet had dined with the Ourleys the night before; and if he had been planning to close up his house and go away somewhere, Mrs Ourley would almost certainly have mentioned it. And unless Mr Linnet was an eccentric who preferred to sweep his own floors and wash his own dishes, there should have been some servant on duty at that hour in a place that size.

And of course Barbara Sinclair had always been too good to be true… .

The Saint wondered if he deserved to be shot. But he was going to find out.

He took a pin from his coat lapel and used it to jam the doorbell on a steady ring, and stepped back. It could have been a major operation to force that entrance, and a street front was not the ideal place for such operations at any time, but he had already noted a narrow alley that ran between the Chateau Linnet and its next-door neighbor, and if such an alley didn’t lead to a side entrance he couldn’t think of any other reason for it to be there.

There was a side entrance, and like most side entrances it looked much less of a problem than the front door.

The Saint cupped his pencil flashlight vinder his hands for a preliminary diagnosis of the lock.

And as he looked at it, it receded slowly before him.

The movement was so gradual and stealthy that it didn’t register instantaneously. At first it could have been only an insignificant hallucination, an effect of the movement of the light in his hands. He had to become at first unthinkingly aware that the continuous pealing of the doorbell which could be heard somewhere inside the building was growing clearer and louder; and at the same time his brain had to consent to recognise the improbable report of his eyes; and then he had to put the two things together; and then the door had unquestionably opened more than an inch, and a gossamer commando of intangible cockroaches raced up from between his snoulder-bladcs into the roots of his hair.

Somebody was opening the door from within.

It was too late then to switch out the torch and duck—even if there had been anywhere to duck to. The glow of light must have already been distinctively perceptible from inside the opening door. And for final proof of that, the door started to close again.

Simon’s shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.

The door traveled some six inches back, and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.