Saint's Getaway (11 page)

Patricia took a cigarette from her case and
lighted it with a
steady
hand.

“If that bloke’s uniform is too tight for
him,” she remarked evenly, “it should just about fit you.”

Monty raised one eyebrow.

After a moment’s silence he bent a calculating
eye on the
unconscious policeman. When he looked up again there was
a twinkle in his gaze.

“Is that what the Saint would do?” he asked quizzically.

She nodded.

“I can’t see any other way out.”

“Then I expect I could manage it.”

He knelt down and began to strip off the
policeman’s uni
form and accoutrements. The trousers went on over his
own,
with his
coattails inside—he foresaw possible difficulties in the
way of parting permanently with his own
garments—and then
Patricia was ready
for him with the tunic. Tailored for the
more generous figure of a Teutonic gendarme, it fitted him
perfectly
over his own clothes. Monty was transformed.

He was buckling on the cumbersome sword belt
when the
telephone began to ring.

“If that’s the Saint,” he said,
“tell him I never want to speak
to him again.”

Patricia threw herself at the instrument.

“Hullo… . Simon—where have you been?
… Oh, don’t
play the fool, boy. We must know quickly… . Well, the
police are here… . The police—the men you and Monty
threw in
the river. Keep quiet and let me tell you.”

V.
    
HOW
 
SIMON
 
TEMPLAR CHASED
 
HIMSELF,

AND
 
MONTY HAYWARD
DID
 
HIS
 
STUFF

SIMON TEMPLAR deposited himself neatly on the roof of
the car as
it flashed underneath him and settled himself down
to wallow in the side-splitting aspects of
the ride.
The humour of the situation struck
him as being definitely
rich. To have
first induced a wily old veteran like Prince Ru
dolph to transport you personally to his secret lair, and then, after you
have butted violently into an up-and-coming con
versazione, plugged his gentleman’s gentleman in the lower
abdomen, pulled His Elegant Elevation’s leg, shot a
hole in
the air an inch from his
elevated ear, snaffled a large can of
boodle,
and made yourself generally unpopular in divers simi
lar ways, to be taking precisely the same route
back to the
long grass was an
achievement of which any man might have
been justly proud. And yet that was exactly what the Saint
was doing.

The inspiration had come to Simon while he
was listening
to Patricia’s story on the telephone, and he had put it
into ef
fect without a second’s hesitation. Sprawling tenaciously on
his
unstable perch, he reviewed the dazzling casualness with
which he
had scattered all the necessary bait—the mythical
car which he had
waiting for him, and the rendezvous on the road to Jenbach—and marvelled at his
own astounding brilliance. And after that had been done the elopement of
Prince
Rudolf mattered not at all. In fact, it saved a certain amount
of trouble.
The Saint had scarcely reached his point of vantage
over the archway of
the castle when he saw the prince’s car
pulling out for the
pursuit; and one minute later he was be
ing bowled along on
the most hilarious getaway of his event
ful life.

It was the very first time in his tempestuous
career that he
had ever tacked himself to the lid of an unfriendly
limousine and helped enthusiastically to chase himself; and the over
powering Saintliness of the
idea made him so weak with laugh
ter that he
was barely able to save himself from being
bucked off into the surrounding panorama when the car jolted over the
ridge that placed it on the mountain road.

If the voyage to the castle had been hectic,
the return jour
ney was the most delirious peregrination in which the
Saint
ever wanted to take part. How the car itself managed to hold
the road
at all was more than the Saint could account for by
any natural laws. The
only conclusion he could come to was
that it had been born and bred in a
circus and had subse
quently been fitted with tires manufactured from a
hitherto unknown form of everlasting glue. Half the time, it seemed to be
running with two of its wheels skating about on the loose
scree and
the other two gyrating airily over the unfathom
able abyss. The fact
that it would probably have done the very
same thing if the
Saint had been driving it himself was a con
solation that could be
ignored. The difference between one’s
own masterly manoeuvres at the wheel
and the hare-brained
antics of a total stranger is one which no
practical motorist
has ever been able to misunderstand. Besides which, a comfortably
upholstered seat inside a vehicle, however suicidally
driven, is not and
never can be quite so awe-inspiring as a
smooth and slippery
roof on which you have to maintain your
crucified posture
largely by the adhesive qualities of your eye
lids. For Simon
Templar there ensued an interval of fifteen
or twenty minutes in
which he had no further leisure to enjoy
the gorgonzolan ripeness of the jest.

The only merit he could see in that breakneck
pace was that
it approximately halved the duration of the agony. And by
some
miracle he found himself still breathing and alive when
the
precipitous track began to level itself out for the run
down to
Schwaz.

With a wry grin of triumph, the Saint
moistened his dry
lips and eased the tension on his crippled thews.

The car was slowing up doubtfully. Simon
squeezed his ear
against the roof, and heard the prince speaking
impatiently.

“Go on further, blockhead! He drives like
the devil, but we
must be close behind him. The road to Jenbach——
”

Simon crooked his toes and fingers and clung
on, and the
car lurched round a corner and raced on towards the east.

On another furlong of straight road he
convoluted himself
round again to peep in at the prince, and what he saw
made
him flop limply down in a renewed paroxysm of mirth.

The prince was sitting tensely forward in his
seat, staring fixedly along the road ahead. One hand was clutching some
thing in
his pocket, while the other beat a monotonous tattoo
on his left knee.
Apart from that regular tapping of his fingers he was as motionless as a
painted statue, and his pale, finely modelled face was as expressionless as
ever; and yet the contrast between him as he was sitting then, and the
inscrutable exquisite whom the Saint knew so well, was as inconsistent a
transfiguration
as the Saint had ever seen. It was not really
funny—it was perhaps
the most ominous possible reminder of
the dour realities that had been
glossed over so smoothly
with the sheen of airy badinage—but it was
only the fantastic bathos of the whole performance which appealed to him.

“Oh, go down, Moses!” he hallooed. “That’s the
stuff to give
‘em. Stamp on the gas,
Adolphus—don’t let him get away!
Yoicks!”

He restrained himself with difficulty from
thumping the
roof in
his
excitement, and turned his mind to the
amazing
awakening of Monty Hayward.

Monty had acquitted himself like an old
stager, but the
breaks had been against him. In spite of everything he had
done, a malicious fluke had dented the polish of their alibi.
Their
reputations were tarnished beyond repair. The thwarted
spleen of the entire
Austrian police force would be thrown into the international ill will that
trailed behind them. The
righteous wrath of one more country would be
thirsting for
their blood… . And strangely enough the Saint laughed
again.

He took the time from his watch and made a
rapid mental
calculation. If Monty had wasted no unnecessary minutes,
he
should be less than a quarter of an hour behind them—so long
as the car
he had chosen hadn’t elected to break down. Given
luck and a warm
engine, he might be even closer than that;
and it was essential
for the Saint to be waiting for him when
he caught up. Simon
looked at the road on either side hurtling beneath him at sixty miles an hour,
and decided against any
attempt to step quietly off and send the
prince his compli
ments by post. But he glimpsed a milestone skimming by
which indicated only two kilometers more to Jenbach; and
he realized
that, much as he was still enjoying his little joke,
the time had come to
share its beauties with the prince.

He drew the gun from his pocket, wriggled to
the edge of
the roof, and took leisurely aim at the centre of the
near-side rear mudguard. The rap of his gun was drowned in the explo
sive
flattening of the tire, and the car listed over and lost speed
bumpily.

Simon dropped lightly off behind it just
before it stopped.
He coiled himself down in the shadow of the hedge two
yards
away, and watched the chauffeur run round and peer at the
pancaked
wheel. The chauffeur felt it and prodded it, and
went back to describe
its devastating flatness to the prince.
The prince climbed
out. He also peered at the wheel and
prodded it. It was indubitably flat.

“It must have been a nail in the road,
Hoheit,”
said the
chauffeur.

The prince stood absolutely still, looking
down the road along the bright beam of the headlights. For a time he made
no answer.
It was in that time that a lesser man would have
been fuming and
cursing impotently, but the prince might
have been a man carved
in stone. There was something terrifying in his inhuman immobility.

When he spoke, his voice was perfectly
level—as level and
measured
a flow of molten lava.

“Change the wheel.”

The words fell through the air like
glistening globules of
acid; and then the Saint judged that a few
lines of cheery chat
ter might relieve the tenseness of the
dialogue.

He stepped out into the dim glow of the tail
light, with his
automatic ostentatiously displayed, and cleared his
throat.

The two men by the car whirled round as if
they had been
stabbed with electric needles. And the Saint smiled his
most
winning
smile.

“Dear me!” he murmured. “Isn’t
it odd how we keep run
ning up against each other? You know, if we
go on like this,
you’ll begin to think I’m following you about.”

Slowly the prince relaxed. For the moment even
his tem
pered nerves must have been shaken by the uncanny prompt
ness of the
Saint’s return. But even while he relaxed, his face
remained set in a
stony mask in which only the eyes seemed
alive.

“I cannot think how we missed you, my
dear Mr. Templar,”
he said quietly. “Has your car also met
with an accident?”

“My car is yours,” said the Saint
lavishly. He grinned gently
at the prince’s moveless puzzlement. “To
tell you the truth, old dear, it always was. And while we’re on the subject, in
case you should be thinking of giving me a lift some other
time, I
wish you’d have something done about that roof. A
couple of good strong coffin-handles would
make a heap of
difference; and if you had
enough money left after that to
stand me an air-cushion——”

“So!” There was a gleam like the
lustre of white-hot metal
in the prince’s narrowed eyes, and the same
lustrous malig
nity in his soft utterance of that trenchant syllable.
“Do I un
derstand that you have been with us all the time?”

Simon nodded.

“Sweetheart, I hope you do.” He
smiled again, with capti
vating sweetness. “Well, well, well—we
none of us grow
younger, do we? But how the old Borstal boys will chortle
over
this! Turn
round, Rudolf, and let me have your gun—there’s a
nasty look in your eye which makes me think you might do something
foolish at any moment.”