Saint Overboard (34 page)

He was looking at her sidelong; and she knew
with a horrible
despair that all his excuses were lies. Perhaps she had
always
known it. There was only one way in which the Saint could cease
to be a
danger, by Vogel’s standards, and that was the way which
Vogel
would inevitably dictate in the end. But first he would
play with
them while it pleased him: he would let the Saint live
—so long as in that
way she might be made easier to enjoy.

“I suppose you must,” she said; and
she was too weary to
argue.
  

“You will not be sorry.”

He was coming closer to her. His hands
touched her shoulders,
slipped round behind her back; and she felt as
if a snake had
crawled over her flesh. He was drawing her up to him, and
she
half closed her eyes. It was a nightmare not to struggle, not to
hit madly
out at him and feel the clean shock of her young
hands striking into
his face; but it would have been like hitting a
corpse. And what was
the use? Even though she knew that he
was mocking her with his promises and
excuses, she must submit,
she must be acquiescent, just as a man obeys
the command of a
gun
even though he knows that it is only taking him to his death
—because until the last dreadful instant there is
always the delu
sion of life.

His lips were an inch from hers; his black stony
eyes burned
into her. She could see the waxen glaze of his skin,
flawless and
tight-drawn as if it had been stretched over a skull,
filling her
vision. Something seemed to break inside her head—it
might
have been the grip of the fever—and for a moment her mind ran clear as
a mountain stream. And then her head fell back and she
went limp in his
arms.

Vogel held her for a second, staring at her;
and then he put
her down in a chair. She lay there with her head lolling
sideways
and her red lips open, all the warm golden life of her
tempting
and
unconscious; and he gazed at her in hungry triumph for a
moment longer before he rang the bell again for
the steward.

“We will dine at eight,” he said;
and the man nodded woodenly
. “There will be smoked salmon,
langoustine Grand Duc,
Supr
ê
me de
volatile Bergerette, fraises Mimosa.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And let us have some of that Ch
â
teau Lafitte 1906.”

He dismissed the man with a wave of his
hand, and carefully
pierced the end of a cigar. On his way out on to the deck
he
stopped by Loretta’s chair and stroked her cheek …

All the late afternoon Simon Templar heard
the occasional
drone of the winch, the heavy tramp of feet on the deck
over his
head and the mutter of hoarse voices, the thuds and
gratings of
the incredible cargo coming aboard and being manhandled
into
place; and he also thought of Peter and Roger and Orace and
the
Corsair,
back in St Peter Port, as Loretta had done. But
most of all he was
thinking of her, and tormenting himself with
unanswerable
questions. It was nearly eight o’clock when at last
all the noises
ceased, and the low-pitched thrum of the engines
quivered again under
his feet. He looked out of the port-hole,
over the sheen of the
oily seas streaming by, and saw that they
were heading directly
away from the purple wall of cloud
rimmed with scarlet where the sun was
dipping to its rest. A
seaman guarded by two others who carried
revolvers brought him a tray of food and a glass of wine; and half an hour
later
the same cortege came back for the tray and removed it without
speaking. Simon lighted a cigarette and heard the key turn in the
lock after
them. For the best part of another hour he sat on the
bunk with his knees
propped up, leaning against the bulkhead,
smoking and thinking,
while the shadows spread through the
cabin and deepened towards darkness,
before he ventured to take
out the instrument which Fortune had placed
in his hands so
strangely while he was opening the strong-room of the
Chalfont
Castle
in the green depths of the sea.

VIII
.
   
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR
USED HIS KNIFE,

AND
KURT VOGEL
WENT DOWN TO HIS TREASURE

THE lock surrendered after only five minutes of the Saint’s silent
and
scientific attack.

Not that it had ever had much chance to put
up a fight. It was
quite a good reliable lock by ordinary domestic standards,
a
sound and solid piece of mechanism that would have been more
than
adequate for any conventional purpose, but it had never
been
constructed to resist an expert probing with the sort of tool
which Simon
Templar was using.

Simon kissed the shining steel implement
ecstatically before he
put it away again in his pocket. It was much
more than a scrap
of cunningly fashioned metal. At that moment it
represented the
consummation of Vogel’s first and only and most
staggering mis
take—a mistake that might yet change the places of
victory and
defeat. By sending him down to open the strong-room,
Vogel had
given him the chance to select the instrument from the
burglar’s
kit with which he had been provided, and to
slip it
under the
rubber wristbands into the sleeve of his diving dress; by
letting
him come up alive, Vogel had given him the chance to use it; by
giving
him the chance to use it, Vogel had violated the first canon
of the
jungle in which they both lived—that the only enemy from whom you have nothing
to fear is a dead enemy
…
It
was all perfectly
coherent and logical, as coherent and logical as
any of Vogel’s own
tactical exercises, lacking only the first cause
which set the rest in
motion. For two hours Simon had been
trying to discover that first cause,
and even then he had only a
fantastic theory to which he trembled to give credence. But he
would find out …

A mood of grim and terrible exhilaration
settled on him as he
grasped the handle of the door and turned it
slowly and without
sound. At least, whatever the first cause, he had his
chance; and
it was
unlikely that he would have another. Within the next hour
or so, however long he could remain at large, his
duel with Kurt Vogel must be settled one way or the other, and with it all the
questions that were involved. Against him he had all Vogel’s
generalship,
the unknown intellectual quantity of Otto Arnheim,
and a crew of at least ten of the toughest twentieth-century
pirates who ever sailed the sea; for him he had
only his own
strength of arm and
speed of wit and eye, and the advantage of
surprise. The odds were
enough to set his mouth in a hard fighting line, and yet there was a glimmer
of reckless laughter in his
eyes that would
have flung defiance at ten times the odds. He had spent his life going up
against impossible hazards, and he
had
the knowledge that he could have nothing worse to face than
he had faced already.

The latch turned back to its limit, and he
drew the door stealth
ily towards him. It came back without a creak;
and he peered
out into the alleyway through the widening aperture.
Opposite
him were
other doors, all of them closed. He put his head cau
tiously out and looked left and right. Nothing. The crew must have been
eating, or recuperating from the day’s work in their
own quarters: the
alleyway was an empty shaft of white paint
gleaming
in the dim lights which studded it at intervals. And in
another second the Saint had closed the door of his
prison silently behind him and flitted up the after companion on to the
deck.

The cool air struck refreshingly on his face after the stuffiness
of the cabin. Overhead, the sky was growing dark,
and the first
pale stars were coming
out; down towards the western horizon,
where
the greyness of the sky merged indistinguishably into the
greyness of the sea, they were becoming brighter,
and among
them he saw the mast-head
lights of some small ship running up
from
the south-west, many miles astern. The creamy wake
stretched away into the darkness like a straight
white road.

He stood there for a little while in the
shadow of the deck
house and absorbed the scene. The only sounds he could
hear
there were the churning rush of the water and the dull drone of
the engines
driving them to the east. Above him, the longboom
of the grab jutted
out at a slight angle, with the claw gear dan
gling loosely lashed to the taffrail; and
all around him the wet
wooden cases of the
bullion from the
Chalfont Castle
were
stacked up against the bulkheads. He screwed an eye round the corner
and inspected the port deck. It was deserted; but the air-
pump and telephone apparatus were still out there,
and he saw
four diving suits on their
stretchers laid out in a row like steam
rollered dummies with the helmets gathered like a group of de
capitated
heads close by. Further forward he could see the lights
of the wheelhouse windows cutting the deck into strips of light
and darkness: he could have walked calmly along to
them, but
the risk of being
prematurely discovered by some member of the
crew coming out for a breather was more than he cared to take.
Remembering the former occasion on which he had
prowled over
the ship, he climbed up over the conveniently arranged
stairway
of about half a million pounds on
to the deckhouse roof, and
went
forward on all fours.

A minute or so later he was lying flat on his
tummy on the
roof
of the streamlined wheelhouse, with the full wind of their
twenty knots blowing through his hair, wondering
if he could risk a cigarette.

Straight ahead, the scattered lights of the
French coast were
creeping
up out of the dark, below the strip of tarnishing silver
which was all that was left of the daylight. He
could just see an
outline of the
black battlements of a rocky coast; there was
nothing by which he could identify it, but from what he knew of
their course he judged it to be somewhere south of
Cap de la
Hague. Down on the starboard
beam he picked up a pair of
winking
lights, one of them flashing red and the other red and
white, which
might have belonged to Port de Di
é
lette…

“Some more coffee, Loretta?”

Vogel’s bland toneless voice suddenly came to
him through one
of the open windows; and the Saint drew a deep breath and
lowered his head
over the edge of the roof to peep in. He only
looked
for a couple of seconds, but in that time the scene was
photographed on his brain to the last detail.

They were all there—Vogel, Arnheim, Loretta. She had put on
a backless white satin dress, perfectly plain, and
yet cut with
that exquisite art which
can make ornament seem garish and
vulgar.
It set off the golden curve of her arms and shoulders with
an intoxicating suggestion of the other curves
which it concealed,
and clung to the
slender sculpture of her waist in sheer perfec
tion: beside her, the squat paunchy bulk of Otto Arnheim with his broad
bulging shirtfront looked as if it belonged to some
obscene and bloated toad. But for the set cold
pallor of her face
she might have
been a princess graciously receiving two favoured
ministers: the smooth hawk-like arrogance of Kurt
Vogel, in a
blue velvet
smoking-jacket, pouring out coffee on a pewter tray
at a side table,
fitted in completely with the illusion. The man
standing at the wheel, gazing straight ahead, motionless except
for the occasional slight movements of his hands,
intruded his
presence no more than a
waiting footman would have done. They
were
all there—and what was going to be done about it?