Saint on Guard (7 page)

“They’ll keep for a bit,” he said; and then his eye fell again on the rawhide bag which had damaged his shin.

He pointed to it.

“Were you thinking of going somewhere, or were they moving in?”

She hesitated, fighting another battle with herself before she replied.

“It isn’t mine.”

“Who does it belong to—your new boarders?”

“No. It belongs to—the same person. He left it with me some time ago. He said it was a lot of old books that he’d brought in from the country to give to the USO, but he kept forgetting to do anything about it.” Her eyes went back to him with a weak spark of hope. “Perhaps he just sent those men to fetch it.”

“Perhaps he did,” Simon agreed courteously. “Do you mind if I have a look at these old books?”

She shook her head.

“I suppose I can’t stop you. But the bag’s locked.”

He looked at her humorously.

“I should have known that a bookworm like you would have tried to take a peek before this.”

Her face flamed but she made no retort.

Simon started to pick up the suitcase, and was momentarily taken aback by his own lack of strength. It was a little distressing to discover that old age had caught up with him so quickly—in the space of a mere few minutes, to be exact. For he had handled the two limp gangsters without much difficulty.

He took a fresh grip, and heaved the bag on to the bed. Even for a load of books, it was astonishingly heavy for its size.

It was closed with a three-letter combination lock that surrendered its feeble little secret to the Saint’s sensitive fingers in a few seconds; and he raised the lid and gazed down at two glass jars, about the size of quart milk bottles, solidly embedded in a nest of crumpled newspapers. Each of them was filled to the toj with a greenish powder.

The girl was leaning over to look with him.

“I don’t know whether you know it, darling,” said the Saint; gently, “but you have been taking care of about two hundred’ thousand dollars’ worth of iridium.”

7 If she had had any reactions left he might have sus-pected her again. It would have been too much like an effort to show the right response—however right it was. But now she seemed to have been stunned into a purely mechanical acceptance.

“This is what you were looking for,” she said.

It was a simple statement, almost naive in its tonelessness.

“I imagine it is,” he said. “The shipment that was hijacked in Nashville. Or about two-thirds of it. That would be about right— a third of the shipment must be in black market circulation by this time.”

He squinted down at the suitcase again as he reached for a cigarette, and his eyes settled on the combination of letters at which the lock had opened.

“Do the initials O S M mean anything to you?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

Her face was completely empty. He was watching her. And so much depended on whether he was right, and whether he could see through the beauty of her face and not let it color what he was looking for. “Skip it,” he said. “It was just an idea.”

He lighted his cigarette, while she sat down heavily on the bed and stared at him in that numb kind of bewilderment. Her hands trembled slightly in her lap.

He said: “Your boy friend parked this stuff here with you— safely enough, because this is one of the last places where anybody would look for it. Probably even his best friends don’t know anything about his connection with this place. And even if anybody who knew too much already did know, they’d never expect him to be so dumb as to leave a couple of hundred grand’s worth of boodle lying around in a love-nest. Which is what we call the technique of deception by the obvious… . Yes, it was a good place to cache the swag. But now, apparently, your mysterious meal ticket is getting nervous. Maybe he’s a little afraid of you and what you know. So he sent Humpty and Dumpty here to fetch it away.” The Saint had slipped out of cold cruelty again as impersonally as he had slid into it. He said quietly: “Now what?”

She nodded like a mechanical doll.

“Just give me a chance,” she begged. “If I can only make it right with myself … Can’t you give me just a little time?”

He was sure now, and his decision was made. It was no part of him to look back.

“Not here,” he said decisively. “We don’t know who the next caller may be, and in any case we don’t want Humpty and Dumpty waking up and hearing you. If any of the ungodly got the idea that you were talking to me at all, they might find a whole new interest in your health. And I’d rather not have to hold my next interview with you in a morgue.”

Her eyes widened as she looked at him.

“You mean you think somebody might try to harm me?”

“There have been instances,” said the Saint, with considerable patience, “where persons who knew too much, in this life of sin, have been harmed—some of them quite permanently.”

“But he—I mean, this man wouldn’t hurt me. You see, he’s in love with me.”

“I don’t altogether blame him,” said the Saint agreeably. “And I’m sure he would weep bitterly while he cut your throat.”

He closed the valise quickly, hefted it again, and took her arm with his other hand.

“Let’s go,” he said.

She raised herself slowly from the bed.

“Where?”

“Some place with room service, where you don’t have to be seen and where it would take weeks to locate you.”

He herded her briskly out of the apartment, and stabbed at the button of the self-service elevator. The car was still on that floor, and he followed her in as the door rolled back.

“And there, my love,” he continued, as the antique apparatus began its glubbering descent, “you will sit in your ivory tower with the night chain on the door, refusing all phone calls and| unbarring the portals only to admit slaves bearing food which you are damn sure you ordered, or when you hear my rich and resonant voice announcing that I have a COD package for you from Saks Fifth Avenue. All characters who demand entrance with telegrams, special deliveries, flowers, plumbing tools, or dancing hears will be ignored. In that way I hope I shall save the expense of having to pay for cleaning a lot of your red corpuscles off the carpet,”

Then he kissed her, because she was still very beautiful looking at him, and other things that were rooted in neither of them as people had forced him into a part that he would never have chosen, and he knew it even while it would never shake the lucid distances of his mind.

It was like kissing an orchid; and the seismic grounding of the elevator was only just in time to save him from the disturbance of discovering what it might mean to kiss an orchid that became alive.

He glanced up and down the street as he followed her to the cab which was fortunately waiting at the stand outside. There was nobody he recognised among the few people within range, but nowhere in Simon Templar’s professional habits was there an acceptance of even temporary immunity without precautions.

“Penn Station,” he told the driver. The girl looked at him questioningly, but before she could speak he said quickly: “We’ll just catch the twelve-thirty, and that’ll get us to Washington in plenty of time.”

He chattered blithely on about non-existent matters, giving her no chance to make any mistakes, and glancing back from time to time through the rear window. But the traffic was thick enough all the way to make it almost impossible to be certain of identifying any following vehicle. He could only be secure by taking no chances.

He had the fare and tip ready in his hand as the taxi swooped down the ramp and wedged itself into the jam at the unloading platform. Without waiting for the cab to creep any closer, he hauled out the heavy bag, shook his head at a hopeful redcap, grasped Barbara Sinclair by the elbow, and propelled her dextrously and without a pause through the crowded rotunda of the station to the escalators with a nimbleness of dodging and threading that would have brought tears to the eyes of a football coach. In a mere matter of seconds they were out on Seventh Avenue opposite the Pennsylvania Hotel.

“Not that one,” said the Saint. “It’s too obvious. I’ve got another place in mind. Let’s joy-ride some more.”

“But why–-“

“Darling, that is a one-hack stand in front of your building. Anyone who was trailing us wouldn’t have much trouble finding our last driver.”

“Do you think he’d remember? He must have so many passen-gers–-“

The Saint sighed.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why taxi drivers always haul out a pad at the first red light and start scribbling in it? Did you think they were putting in a quick paragraph on the Great American Novel? Well, they weren’t. That’s a record that the Law makes them keep. Where from and to. So our driver doesn’t need such a memory. With that note to goose him, he’ll probably even remember that we were talking about going to Washington. Now if your glamor boy has any respect for my genius, which he may or may not have, he probably won’t believe we went to Washington. But he won’t be sure. If he’s very bright, he will immediately begin to think of what I was talking about just now —the technique of deception by the obvious. And he will begin to feel quite ill. Uncertainty will breed in his mind. And uncertainty breeds fear; and fear often leads clever men to do quite unclever things. Anyway, this will all help to make him miserable, and since he never set me up in a fancy apartment I don’t owe him anything. Taxi!”

He signed her into a small residential hotel off Lexington Avenue as the wife of an entirely fictitious Mr Tombs whose sar-cophagal personality had given him much private entertainment for many years, and left her there after he had made sure that she remembered his password seriously.

“You can do your thinking here, in pleasant surroundings,” he said. “Search your soul to the core and make your decision. I’m sorry I can’t stay to help you, but I have things to do while you wrestle with your private confusions.”

Her eyes wandered around the apartment, and then back to him, in a lost sort of way.

“Do you really have to go now?”

She didn’t have to ask that, and he wished that he didn’t have to make an answer.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated with a smile. “But this little war is still going on, and maybe the enemy isn’t waiting.”

The same bellboy who had just carried the rawhide suitcase in and out of the elevator met him in the small lobby with a somewhat unresolved blend of eagerness and suspicion. The contents of the bag alone weighed a full hundred pounds, and the Saint swung it in one hand as if it had been empty.

“The lining in this damn thing is all coming unstuck,” he said casually. “Is there any place near here where I could get it fixed?”

The boy’s dilemma resolved itself visibly in his slightly bovine eyes.

“There’s a luggage store a couple of blocks down on Lexington,” he said; and the Saint gave him another quarter and sauntered out, still airily swinging the bag.

Not being Superman, he was wielding it a little less jauntily when he turned into the store; but apart from a mild feeling of dislocation in his left shoulder he was able to amuse himself a little with the business of making the purchases which he had in mind—one of which was somewhat eccentric, to say the least, and fairly baffling to the proprietor of the adjoining sporting goods emporium.

His next stop was at the Fiftyfirst Street police station, where he had a weighty message to leave for Inspector Fernack. Then he took another cab to the Algonquin, and walked into the lobby just as the gray handsome figure of Allen Uttershaw turned away from the desk and caught sight of him.

” ‘The ass will carry his load’,” Uttershaw observed cheerily, raising his eyebrows at the Saint’s burden. “I was just asking for you.”

Simon surrendered his bag to a bellboy to be taken to his room, and shook hands.

“With all the doormen in the Army, the ass has to,” he said. “Do you carry a pocket edition of Familiar Quotations?”

“A weakness of mine, I’m afraid,” Uttershaw admitted. “But at least it’s a little more distinctive than the usual conversational cliches.” He sighed deprecatingly. “I was thinking of taking you up on that invitation to lunch.”

Simon realised that he was hungry himself, for the prisoner’s breakfast with which he had been regaled at some unholy hour had not been planned to induce the vigorous vibrations to which his constitution was accustomed.

“Why don’t you?” he said.

They went into the bright paneled dining room and ordered Little Necks and sole veronique, with sherry for a preface. Simon sipped his glass of pale gold Cedro and remarked: “This is a little more restful than the love-nest we met in.”

” ‘Domestic happiness, thou only bliss of Paradise that has survived the Fall’,” said Uttershaw ironically. “I very seldom let my business connections lure me into their private lives, but sometimes one just can’t avoid it. I was sorry for you. If you’ll forgive my saying it, your method of getting to see him was clever enough in theory, but if you’d known more about Milton Ourley you’d never have tried it that way.”

The Saint passed over the assumption that he had engineered his introduction from the start, and appreciated Uttershaw’s tacit and friendly elimination of a number of unnecessary pretenses.

“Do you think he could have talked if he’d wanted to?”

“If he’d wanted to. Yes. I don’t doubt it. He seems to be getting the iridium he needs, and he certainly isn’t getting it from me. And I’m not trying to sound like a great king of commerce, but the fact remains that there just isn’t any other legitimate way of getting it that I wouldn’t know about.”

Simon considered the statement for a few moments while he watched a waiter threading his way through the tables towards them, brandishing platters of clams with the legerdemain of some phenomenal cymbalist. He gazed down at them appreciatively as they settled in front of him—seven beautiful bivalves, glistening with their own juicy freshness. The Saint felt very pleased about clams, in a generous and cosmic way. He was glad he had invented them.

He did careful things with horseradish, tabasco, and lemon.

“By the way,” he inquired casually, “has your insurance company offered any reward for the recovery of your iridium?”