Saint on Guard (6 page)

The Saint took one long step forward, and the impetus of his stride added itself to the impact of a fist that must have made Mr Varetti think for one split second that he had received a direct hit from a block-buster bomb. After that immeasurable instant he did no more thinking at all: he slid down the door frame like sloppy plaster down a wall, and Simon picked the shiny automatic out of his unresisting fingers as he dropped.

Cokey Walsh backed away with a wild attempt to get his own automatic out again, but he was too tangled up with the gar-roting cord which he had been twisting around his hands for a good purchase. Without even bothering to reverse the gun that he had taken from Varetti, Simon bonged him firmly on his already tender brow, and once again Mr Walsh passed into slumber-land… .

The Saint lighted himself another and less stimulating cigarette, and paused for a bare moment’s thought. His mind was still gyrating with questions that he had still had no chance to ask, and which now seemed condemned to further postponement on account of the magnificent lethargy of the potential respondents. On the other hand, after such a promising introduction, Miss Sinclair’s interesting and unusual apartment should be at least worth a little more detailed survey. But there was no telling how soon some other interruption might crop up in such an unconventional menage; and whatever form it might take, it seemed fair to assume that the presence of a pair of unconscious bodies on the living-room floor would do nothing to facilitate coping with it.

In order to dispose of that difficulty first, he took the two bodies by the collar, one in each hand, and dragged them into the bedroom; in which process he nearly tripped headlong over a rawhide suitcase which someone had thoughtfully left out in the middle of the floor. He was still rubbing an anguished shin when he heard the rattle of a key in the front door lock and went back hopefully into the living-room.

“Hullo, Barbara,” he said blandly. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

6 In her street clothes, she looked just as exotic and exciting as she had the night before. Her tailored suit had obviously been conceived by a Scottish sheep, born on a hand loom north of the Tweed, and lovingly reared by a couturier with a proper admiration for the seductive curves of her figure. The inevitable hatbox which is the badge and banner of the New York model dangled from one gloved hand; but you would still have een her as a model without it, if only because such a sheer physical-perfection as hers simply demanded to be pictured. Simon observed, with dispassionate expertness, that even broad daylight could find no flaw in the clear olive smoothness of her skin.

Another and less simple observation was that she seemed at first too surprised and angry to be afraid.

“Well I’m damned,” she said. “How did you get in here?”

“I burgled the joint,” said the Saint candidly.

“You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “On top of what you did to me last night.”

The act looked quite terrific. But the lift of the Saint’s right eyebrow was only mildly impudent.

“Did they make you wash a lot of dishes?” he inquired inter-estedly.

The flare in her eyes was like lightning reflected in pools of jet. She was Certainly wonderful. And it was no help to her at all that anger only cleared her beauty of the magazine-cover sugariness and gave it a more vivid reality.

“So you’re damned smart,” she said in a frozen voice that came like icicles out of a blast furnace. “You make a fool out of me in front of half the waiters in New York. You stick me with a dinner check for about thirty dollars–-“

“But you must admit it was a good dinner.”

“And then you have the gall to break into my apartment and try to be funny about it.” Her voice thawed out on the phrase, as if she was coming out of a momentary trance into the full spoken realisation of what he had actually done; and then it sizzled like oil on hot coals. “Well, we can soon settle that–-“

“Not so fast, darling.”

His arm shot out almost lazily, and he hardly seemed to have moved towards her at all, but her wrist was caught in fingers of steel before she had taken more than one full step towards the telephone.

He stopped her without any apparent effort at all, and calmly disengaged the hatbox and tossed it into the nearest armchair.

“Before you add half the cops in New York to half the waiters, in this audience of yours,” he said, “I think we should talk some more.”

“Let me go!” she blazed.

“After all,” he continued imperturbably, “it is a pretty nice apartment. And you did invite me here originally, if you remember. There must be some handy dough in this modeling racket for you to be able to keep up a pied-d-terre like this. Or, if it isn’t rude question, who else is contributing at the moment?”

Her ineffectual struggle almost ceased for a moment; and then, when it sprang up again, for the first time it had the wild flurry of something close to the delayed panic that should have been there long before.

“You must be crazy! You’re hurting me–-“

“And that,” said the Saint, nodding towards a veneered cabinet against the wall, without any change either in the steel of his grip| or the engaging velvet of his voice, “is presumably the radio whose| dulcet tones were to beguile me last night—while I was being cosily framed into the neatest murder rap that I’ve had to answer for a long time.”

“You crazy lunatic …”

Her voice faded out just like that. And the fight faded out of her in exactly the same way, abruptly and completely, so that she was like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut.

“What do you mean,” she whispered, “murder?”

Simon let go her wrist and put his cigarette to his mouth again, gazing down at her with eyes of inexorable blue ice. His mind was clear and passionless like the mind of a surgeon in an operating room. In the back of his mind he could hear the whirr of wheels in a production line, and again he could remember candlelight and soft music and rich food and wine in a penthouse hideaway, and still behind that in his mind was the rumble of tanks and the drone of airplanes and the numbing thunder of shells and bombs, and men sweating and cursing in the smoke of hell; and the war was there in that room, he could feel it as fierce and vital as the hush in a front-line trench before an attack at dawn, and he knew that even in those incongruous and improbable settings he was fighting not one battle but many battles.

He repeated passionlessly: “I said murder.”

“Who?”

“It’s in the papers. But you wouldn’t need to read about it.”

Her eyes were pleading.

“I don’t understand. Honestly. Who are you talking about?”

“The linnet will sing no more,” Simon said. “And if I hadn’t been a calloused skeptic and walked out on you last night, I’d be doing my own singing in a very minor key and a most undecorative cage.”

She stared at him in utter stupefaction.

“Mr Linnet? You mean he’s been murdered?”

“Very thoroughly.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Nobody seems to believe anything these days,” Simon re-marked sadly. “But it’s still no thanks to you that a lot of large and unfriendly policemen aren’t showing me their incredulity right now with a piece of rubber hose.”

Half of her mind still seemed to be unreached by his meaning.

“Who did it?”

“I think one of the gentlemen in your bedroom might be able to tell you.”

“The what?”

“One of the men in your bedroom. I ran into him at the scene of the crime last night; but he got away. However, it’s all right now. It was quite a jolly reunion.”

“Are you still raving?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

He took her arm and pushed her into the bedroom, kicking the door open with his foot. She stopped with a faint gasp on the threshold, her mouth open and one hand going to her throat.

“Who are they?” she begged.

“Friends of yours, I take it. Anyway, they were here when I arrived, and they seemed to feel very much at home.”

“You’re joking!”

“I am not joking, darling. Neither were they. In fact, they were proposing to do some very serious and unpleasant things to me. It’s rather lucky I was able to discourage them. But I must say I take a poor view of your choice of playmates.”

She fought his cynical remoteness with wild and desperate black eyes.

“I’ve never seen them before in my life. I swear I haven’t You must believe me!”

“Then how did they get in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose they just broke in,” Simon suggested, ignoring the fact that that was exactly what he had done himself.

“They might have.”

“Or did they have a key?”

“I tell you, I don’t know them.”

“Who else has your key?”

It was as if he had hit her under the ribs. All the blood drained out of her face and turned the warm golden glow to a sick yellow. The strength seemed to go out of her with it, so that he felt her weight grow on the arm he was holding. He released her again, and she sank on to the bed as if her knees had turned to water.

“Well?” he said ruthlessly.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Meaning you won’t.”

She shook her head so that her long hair swirled like a dancer’s skirt.

“No …” Her gaze was imploring, frantic, yet trying ineffectually to draw back and harden. “What are you trying to do anyhow, and what right have you got–-“

“You know about me. I’m trying to break the iridium black market. And there was robbery and murder tied up with it even before I started. You may have heard that there’s a small war in progress. Iridium happens to be a ridiculously vital material. Gabriel Linnet had had dealings with the black market, and I was going to talk to him last night. You were planted there to keep me away while he was having his voice amputated–and incidentally to make sure I wouldn’t have an alibi so I could be hung for it.”

“No,” she said.

“If you aren’t anything worse, you’re just another butterfly trying to throw curves God didn’t give her to toss around. Maybe you thought it was all good clean fun—great sport for a pretty girl to play Mata Hari and dip her little fingers into international intrigue–-“

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Then how was it?”

She twisted her hands together between her knees.

“I was planted there last night. That’s true.” Her voice was light and strained. “But that isn’t what I was told. I was told it was just business. That Mr Linnet had hired you to try and spoil a business deal that—that this person I was doing it for was interested in. He said I just had to keep you away from Mr Linnet lor a certain time and everything would be all right. I never dreamed it meant any more than that. I still can’t believe it.”

“Who is this person?” he asked again.

“How can I tell you? I’d be betraying a trust.”

“I suppose betraying your country and helping to hide a mur-derer seems much more noble.”

Her clenched hands beat at her temples.

“Please don’t—please! I’ve got to think… .”

“That might be a great beginning.”

He was as pitiless and implacable as he could be. There was nothing in this that he could afford to be sentimental about. He was deliberately using his voice and personality like a whip.

She turned her face up to him with the mascara making dark smudges under her eyes, and the same pleading held in her voice.

“I’m so mixed up. This is somebody who’s been very good to me… . But everything I’ve told you is the truth. I swear it is. You must believe me. You must.”

He knew that at that time he was as unemotional as a lie detector; and yet unsureness tightened the muscles of his jaw. He took a long inhalation from his cigarette while he assessed the feeling.

He had his own extra sense of truth that was like the ear of a musician with perfect pitch. He knew also that even that intuition could be deceived, because he himself had more than once deceived some of the most uncooperative critics. But if Barbara Sinclair was doing that, she had to be the most sensational actress that ever walked, on or off a stage. It simply became easier and more rational to believe that he had met at least some of the truth than that he had met the supreme acting of all time.

His main objectives were unchanged. He had to convict a murderer, track down the stolen iridium that had been diverted into the black market, and uncover, erase, liquidate, or otherwise dispose of the upper case brain that controlled the whole traitor-ous racket. He had to do that no matter who got hurt, including himself.

But there was the slightest change in his tone of voice as he said: “All right. What about these two creeps?”

“I don’t know who they are. Honestly. I can’t even think how they got in here.”

“Let’s find out.”

He made a rapid search of the two sleepers, and found no burglarious implements. But separate from the bunch of keys on Varetti’s gold trouser chain, he found a single key in one waistcoat pocket. He took it to the front door and tried it. It worked.

He came back, showed it to the girl, and put it in his own pocket.

“They had a key,” he said. “So by your own count, they must be pals of your boy friend. Does that help?”

She didn’t answer.

“I might ask them some questions,” he said. “How would you like that?”

“I’d like that,” she said almost intensely.

He looked at Varetti and Walsh again; but they showed no signs of life whatever, and he regretted a little that he had dealt with them quite so vigorously. But the real motive of his question had been to get her reaction. The two men themselves were obviously dyed-in-the-wool mobsters of an older school, who would endure great persuasion before they opened up their souls and became confidential. And that would take time—quite probably, too much time.

Simon located a closet full of feminine fripperies, and gave it a quick inspection. A suit of masculine pajamas hanging just inside interested him quite a little—even if Barbara Sinclair had a weakness for masculine modes, they would obviously have been too big for her. But he made no remarks about them. He heaved the two mobsters in, one after the other, and locked the door.