Saint Overboard (10 page)

Murdoch was staring at her half
incredulously.

“Orders?” he repeated.

“That’s right, Steve. At present I’m
running this end of it.
Until Martin Ingerbeck takes me off the
assignment, you do
what
I tell you.”

“I think you’re crazy.”

She didn’t answer. She took a cigarette from
a bos on the
table and walked to the window, standing there with her
arms
lifted and her hands on either side of the frame. The silver
dragon
lifted on her waist.

Murdoch’s lips flattened the butt of his
cigar. His hands
clutched the arms of his chair, and he started to get up
slowly.
With a sudden burst of vicious energy he grabbed for his hat and
thumped it
on his head.

“If you put it that way, I can’t
argue,” he growled. “But
you’re going to wish I had!” He
transferred his glare from her
unconscious back to the Saint’s face.
“As for you—if anything
happens to Loretta through my not being here
——”

“We’ll be sure to let you know about it,” said the
Saint, and
opened the door for him.

Murdoch stumped through with his fists
clenched;
 
and the
Saint half closed it as Loretta
turned from the window and came
across the
room. He took her hands.

“I shall be gone while you’re seeing
Steve off,” he said. “I
can’t risk the foyer again, but I spotted a fire
escape.”

“Must you?” The faint irony of her voice was baffled by
the
enigma of her smiling mouth.

He nodded.

“Not because I want to. But they ought to
see me going back
to the
Corsair
before there’s too much excitement
about my shadow having lost me. You’re still sure you mean to go to-
night?”

“Quite sure.”

“Did I dream the rest of it, after you’d
gone last night?”

“I don’t know, dear. What did you have for dinner?”

“Lobster mayonnaise. I dreamt that you
came back from the
Falkenberg.
Safe. And always
beautiful. To me.”

“And then the danger really started.”

“I dreamt that you didn’t think it was too dangerous.”

Her eyes searched his face, with the laughter
stilled in them
for a moment. The tip of the dragon’s tongue stirred on
her
shoulder as she drew breath. One hand released itself to trace the
half-mocking line of his mouth.

“But I am afraid,” she said.

Suddenly he felt her lips crushed and melting against his, and
her body pressed against him, for one soundless
instant; and
then, before he could
move, she had brushed past him and gone.

Orace was waiting for him anxiously when he
got back.

“Yer bin a long time,” Orace
remarked shatteringly.

“Thousands of years,” said the
Saint.

He sat out on deck again after he had taken
his last daylight
swim, and sipped a glass of sherry, and dined on one of
Orace’s
superlative meals. The speed tender had set out again from the
Falkenberg
and returned about half-past
seven with Vogel, in
evening dress, sitting
beside Loretta. Through the binoculars,
from one of the saloon portholes, he had seen Vogel smiling and
talking, his great nose profiled against the
water.

He sat out, with a cigarette clipped and
half-forgotten between
his lips and his eyes creased against the
smoke, as motionless as
a bronze Indian, while the water turned to
dark glass and then to
burnished steel. There was no fog that
night. The river ran blue-
black under the wooded rocks of the Vicomt
é
and the ramparts
and granite headland of St Malo. Lights
sprang up, multiplying, on the island, and were mirrored in St Servan and
Dinard, and
spread luminous rapiers across
the river. The hulls of the craft
anchored
in the Ranee sank back into the gloom until the night swallowed them, and only
their winking lights remained on the
water.
The lighthouses of the inlet were awake, green and red
flashes stabbing irregularly across the bay and
twinkling down from Grand Larron. A drift of music from one of the Casinos
lingered
across the estuary; and the anchorage where the
Falkenberg
should
be was a constellation of lights.

Loretta was there; but Simon saw no need for
her to be alone.

The idea grew with him as the dark deepened
and his imagina
tion
worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient
with his enforced helplessness… . Presently he
sent another
cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness,
and
went below to take off his clothes. He
tested the working of his
automatic,
brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and
fastened the gun to the belt of his trunks.
The dark water received him without a sound.

Curiously enough, it was during that stealthy
swim that he
had a sudden electric remembrance of a news photographer
who
had been so unusually blind to the presence of all celebrities save
one.
Perhaps it was because his mind had been unconsciously
revolving the subject
of Vogel’s amazing thoroughness. But he
had a startlingly
vivid picture of a camera aiming towards him—
fully as much towards
him as towards Professor Yule—and a
sudden reckless smile moved his lips
as he slid through the water.

If that news photographer was not a real news
photographer,
and the picture had been developed and printed and rushed
across to England by air that evening, a correspondent could
show it
around in certain circles in London with the virtual cer
tainty of
having it identified within forty-eight hours … And
if the
result of that investigation was cabled to Kurt Vogel at St Peter Port, a good
many interrogation marks might be wiped out
with deadly speed.

III.
      
HOW
  
KURT
 
VOGEL
 
WAS
  
NOT
  
SO
  
CALM,
 
AND

OTTO ARNHEIM
 
ACQUIRED
 
A
 
 
HEADACHE

A CEILING of cloud had formed over the sky,
curtaining off
the moon and leaving no natural light to relieve the
blackness. Out in the river it was practically pitch dark, except where the
riding
lights of anchored craft sprang their small fragments of
scattered
luminance out of the gloom.

The Saint slid through the water without sound, without leav
ing so much as a ripple behind him. All of the
rhythmic swing of
his arms and legs
was beneath the surface, and only his head broke the oily film of the still
water; so that not even as much as the pit-pat of two drops of water could have
betrayed his
passing to anyone a
yard away. He was as inconspicuous and
unassertive
as a clump of sea-weed drifting up swiftly and si
lently with the tide.

He was concentrating so much on silence that
he nearly al
lowed himself to be run down by some nocturnal sportsman
who
came skimming by in a canoe when he was only a stone’s throw
from the
Falkenberg.
The boat leapt at him out of the darkness
so unexpectedly that
he almost shouted the warning that came
instinctively to his lips; the prow
brushed his hair, and he sub
merged himself a
fraction of a second before the paddle speared
down at him. When he came up again the canoe had vanished as
silently as it had come. He caught a glimpse of it
again as it
arrowed across the reflected lights of the Casino de la
Vicomt
é
, and sent a string of inaudible
profanities sizzling across the wa
ter at
the unknown pilot, apparently without causing him to drop
dead by remote control.

Then the hull of the
Falkenberg
loomed
up for undivided at
tention. At the very edge of the circle of visibility shed
by its
lights, he paused to draw a deep breath; and then even his head
disappeared
under the water, and his hands touched the side
before he let himself
float gently up again and open his lungs.

He rose under the stern, and trod water while
he listened for any sound that would betray the presence of a watcher on the
deck. Above the undertones of
the harbour he heard the murmur
of voices
coming through open portholes in two different direc
tions, the dull creak of metal and the seep of the
tide making
under the hull; but there was no trace of the sharper sound
that
would have been made by a man out in the
open, the rustle of
cloth or the
incautious easing of a cramped limb. For a full three
minutes the Saint
stayed there, waiting for the least faint dis
turbance
of the ether that would indicate the wakefulness of a
reception committee prepared to welcome any such
unauthor
ised prowler as himself. And
he didn’t hear any such thing.

The Saint dipped a hand to his belt and
brought it carefully
out of the water with a mask which he had
tucked in there be
fore he left the
Corsair.
It was made of black
rubber, as thin and
supple as the material of a toy balloon; and when he
pulled it on
over his head it covered every inch of his face from the
end of
his nose upwards, and held itself in place by its own gentle elas
ticity.
If by any miscalculation he was to be seen by any member
of the
crew, there was no need for him to be recognised.

Then he set off again to work himself round
the boat. There were three lighted portholes aft, and he stopped by the first
of
them to find a finger-hold. When he had got it he hauled himself
up out of the water, inch by
inch, till he could bend one modest
eye
over the rim.

He looked into a large cabin running the whole width of the
vessel. A treble tier of bunks lined two of the
three sides which
he could see, and
seemed to be repeated on the side from which
he was looking in. On two of them half-dressed men were
stretched out, reading and smoking. At a table in
the centre four
others, miscellaneously attired in shirtsleeves,
jerseys, and singlets, were playing a game of cards, while a fifth was trying
to
poach enough space out of one side to
write a letter. Simon ab
sorbed their
faces in a travelling glance that dwelt on each one in
turn, and mentally ranked them for as tough a
harvest of hard-
case sea stiffs as anyone could hope to glean from the
scourings
of the seven seas. They came up to
his expectations in every
single
respect, and two thin fighting lines creased themselves into
the corners of his mouth as he lowered himself
back into the
river as stealthily as
he had pulled himself out of it.

The third porthole lighted a separate smaller
cabin with only
four bunks, and when he looked in he had to peer between
the
legs of a man who was reclining on the upper berth across the
porthole.
By the light brick-red hosiery at the ends of the legs he
identified
the sleuth who had trailed him that afternoon; and on
the opposite side of
the cabin the man who had been busily
doing nothing in the foyer of the Hotel de la Mer, with one
shoe
off and the other unlaced, was intent
on filling his pipe.

He couldn’t look into any of the principal rooms without ac
tually climbing out on to the deck, but from the
scraps of con
versation that floated out through the windows he gathered
that
was where the entertainment of Loretta
Page was still pro
ceeding. Professor
Yule appeared to be concluding some anec
dote about his submarine experiences.

“… and when he squashed his nose
against the glass, he just
stayed there and stared. I never imagined a
fish could get so
much indignation into its face.”

There was a general laugh, out of which rose
Vogel’s smooth
toneless suavity: “Wouldn’t even that tempt you to go
down,
Otto?”