Saint's Getaway (14 page)

“I suppose you know what you’re doing,
brother,” said
Monty
Hayward, as quietly as he could, “but it seems pretty
daft to me.”

“You bet I knew,” said the Saint,
and to Monty’s surprise he said it just as quietly. “It was simply a
matter of taking a
chance on the clock. If you hadn’t hit that cop at the K
ö
nigs
hof quite so hard, it wouldn’t have
been so easy; but we had
to hope we were still a length or two in
front of the hue and
cry. There’s no point in jumping your fences
before you come
to them. But, believe me, I had that patrol covered from
my
pocket the whole time, and what might have happened if we’d
been
unlucky is just nobody’s business.”

Monty Hayward readjusted his impressions
slowly and reluc
tantly. And then suddenly he shot one of his
extraordinarily
keen
glances at the sober face of the man beside him—a glance
that was tempered with the ghost of a smile.

“If we kept straight ahead and drove in
relays,” he said, “we
might make the Dutch frontier to-day. But one
gathers that it
wouldn’t be quite so simple as that.”

“Solomon said it first,” assented
the Saint bluntly. “We
shan’t take any more frontiers in our stride,
and I don’t think
we shall enjoy much more friendly flapjaw with the
constabu
lary. That was just our break. But there won’t be a policeman
in Central
Europe who doesn’t know our horrid histories by
lunch-time; and if our
pals among the ungodly can’t raise a
fleet of cars with the legs of this one
you may call me Archi
bald. You were thinking we’d finished—and
we’ve only just
begun!” All at once the Saint laughed. “But
shall I tell you?”

Monty nodded.

“I’ll give you a new angle on the life of
crime,” said the
Saint lavishly. “I’ll hand it you for
nothing, Mont—the angle
that your bunch of footling authors never
get. Every one of
‘em makes the same mistake, just like you made yourself.
Take
this: Any fool can biff a policeman on the jaw. Every other
fool can
swipe a can of assorted
bijouterie
that’s simply
dropped
into his lap. And any amount of mutts can throw a
bluff that’ll get
by—once, for a ten-minute session. Believe it or not. And then you think it’s
all over bar the anthem. But it
isn’t. It’s only just started on its
way.”

Monty accepted the proposition without
comment. After a
moment’s consideration, the uncompromising accuracy of it
was self-evident.

He drove on in silence, squeezing the last
possible kilometer
per hour out of the powerful engine. From time to time he
stole a
glimpse at the driving mirror, momentarily expecting
to see the darkness
of the road behind bleached with the first
fault nimbus of
pursuing headlights. It was strange how the
intoxication of the
chase, following on the turbulent course
of that night’s
unsought adventure, had sapped his better judgment—stranger still, perhaps,
how the foundations of his cautious common sense had been undermined by so
much eventful proximity to a man whom in normal times he had always regarded
as slightly, if quite pleasantly, bugs. The rush of the
wind stroked his face with a
hypnotic gentleness; the hum of the machine and the lifting sense of speed
soothed his con
science like an insidious
drug. For one dizzy moment it seemed
to
him that there must be worse ways of spending a night and
the day after it—that there were more
soul-destroying things
in a
disordered world than biffing policemen on the jaw and
flying from
multiple vengeance on the hundred horses of a
modern
highwayman’s Mercedes Benz. He thought like that
for one moment of
incredible insanity; and then he thought it
again,
and decided that he must be very ill.

But a tincture of that demoralized elation stayed with him
and lent an indefinable zest to the drive, while
the sky paled
for the dawn and the
stolen car slid swiftly down the long
slopes of the Bavarian hills
toward Munich. Beside him, Si
mon Templar
calmly went to sleep.
…

The rim of the sun was just topping the
horizon, and the air
was full of the unforgettable sweet dampness
of the morning, when the first angular suburbs of the city swam towards them
out of the bare plain; and the
Saint roused and stretched him
self and
felt for the inevitable cigarette. As the streets narrowed
and grew
gloomier, he picked up his bearings and began to
direct the edging of their route eastward. It was full daylight
when they pulled up before the Ostbahnhof, and an
early
street car was disgorging its
load of sleepy workmen towards the portals of the station. Simon swung himself
over the side and piled their light luggage out on the pavement. He touched
Monty on the shoulder.

“I think we’re a bit conspicuous as a
trio,” he said. “But if
you hopped that street car it’d take you to the
Hauptbahnhof,
and the Metropole is almost
opposite. We’ll see you there.”

And once again Monty Hayward found himself
alone. He
made his way to the hotel as he had been instructed, and
found
Patricia and the Saint waiting for him. Monty felt a little bit
too tired
to argue. Left to himself, he would have kept moving till he dropped, with the
one idea of setting as many miles as
possible between his own rudder and the wrath to come. And
yet, when he rolled into bed half an hour later,
he had a com
fortable feeling that he
had earned his rest. There is something
about the lethargy of healthy physical fatigue, allied with the
appreciation of dangers faced and survived, a
sense of omnipotence and recklessness, which awakes the springs of an un
fathomable primitive contentment; something that
can stupefy
all present questions
along with all past philosophic doubts;
something that can wipe away the strains of civilized complex
ity from a man’s mind, and give him the peace of
an animal
and the sleep of a child.

Monty Hayward would have slept like a child
if it had not been for the endless stream of street cars, which thundered
beneath his
window, rattling in every joint, clanging enor
mous bells, blowing
hooters, torturing their brakes, crashing,
colliding, spraying
their spare parts onto large sheets of tin,
and generally
straining every bolt to uphold the standard of
nerve-shattering din of which, the
continent of Europe is so
justly proud.

He surrendered the unequal contest towards
midday and
went in search of a bathroom. Shaved and dressed, and
feeling
a little better, he descended on the dining room in the hope of
finding
some relics of breakfast with which to complete the restoration of his tissues;
and his apologetic order had scarcely
been executed when the Saint
sauntered in and joined him,
looking so intolerably fresh and fit that Monty
could have as
saulted him.

“Get those
Spiegeleier
inside
you quickly, old lad,” he said, “and we’ll be on our way again.”

“Have you pinched another car?”
asked Monty resignedly.
“And if so, what was wrong with the last
one?”

Simon laughed.

“Nothing. Only stolen cars are notified,
and that never
makes things easier. Besides which, it isn’t every day
that you
knock off a car complete with its tryptique and general
documents of identity, and if you hadn’t pulled off that fluke yes
terday we should have had a
long walk from the frontier. No
—I’ve been
over to the station and unearthed a pretty good
train, and I don’t see why we should turn it down.”

Monty carved an egg.

“Where’s Pat?”

“Having breakfast in bed. She was
asleep when I went out.”

“She must be stone deaf,” said
Monty, glumly. “No one who
wasn’t could sleep here in the daytime. There
were four thousand trams outside my room, and they took every one of them
to pieces.
I think they used several large hammers and a buzz-
saw. Then they threw
all the bits through the window of a china-shop and laughed like hell.”
Monty Hayward sliced a
rasher of bacon with meditative brutality and
finished the dish
in silence. “Where do we go to-day?” he
inquired.

“Cologne,” said the Saint.
“Where they make the
Eau.”
He was lighting a cigarette and
gazing into the mirror on the wall
above Monty’s head, watching the two
men who had just en
tered the room. They were, in their way, a brace of the
most
flabbergasting phenomena that he had seen for a long while;
and yet
they oiled into the inexorable scheme of things with a
smoothness that was
almost wicked. And the Saint’s face was
utterly sterile of
emotion as he tacked onto his opening an
nouncement the one
sweeping qualification that the arrival of
those two men implied. “If we get
away at all,” he said.

2

With the cigarette slanting between bis lips
and a slow drift of smoke sinking thoughtfully down into his lungs, Simon
Templar
lounged back in his chair and watched the two detec
tives coming up
behind him.

The convex surface of the ornamental glass
condensed their imposing figures into the vague semblance of two trousered
sausages
seen through the wrong end of a telescope; but even
so, the grisly secret
of their calling was blazoned across their
bosoms in letters that
the Saint could read five hundred yards
away with his eyes closed. That was the
one disastrous certainty
which emerged
unchallenged from the chaotic fact of their
arrival. Not once since the first instant when they had bulked
ponderously through the doors of the deserted
Speisezimmer
had the Saint allowed himself to
luxuriate in any sedative de
lusions
about that. When one has played ducks and drakes
with the Law for ten hectic years, and, moreover, when one
has been fully occupied for the last three of those
years with
the business of being the
most coveted fox in the whole
western
hemisphere, one’s nose becomes almost tediously fa
miliar with the scent of hounds. And if ever the
Saint had
sniffed that piquant odour,
he could smell it then—one breast-
high
wave of it, which spumed aromatically past his nostrils
with enough pungency to make a salamander sneeze.

How those detectives had got there was still
an inch or two
beyond him. Granted that in the last twelve hours the
purlieus of Innsbruck had been the location of no small excitement, in
the course
of which a quite unnecessary little man had been
violently shoved on out of this world of
woe, and an unfortu
nate misunderstanding
had caused the three policemen who should have arrested him to be dumped
painfully into the cold waters of the Inn—granted, even, that the estimable
Monty Hayward was most unjustly suspected of having personally shoved on the
aforesaid little man, and was most accurately known to have taken part in the
assault and bathing of the po
lice,
to have subsequently assaulted one of them a second time,
to have appropriated his uniform, and to have
stolen a large
car—well, a few minor disturbances like these were a
small
price to pay for the quarter of a
million pounds’ worth of gen
uine
crown jewels. And the Saint had most emphatically done
his best to avoid
any superfluous unpleasantness. His mind
flashed
back over the details of the getaway; and at the end of
the flash he had to admit that the Law was
playing a fast ball.
Their passing
had been reported from the frontier, of course,
as soon as the alarm was raised: that was inevitable; but after that
the trail should have petered out—for several hours, any
way. A police
organization which, in the short time that had
been at its disposal, could discover an abandoned car, and
then, by an essentially wearisome system of
exhaustive inquir
ies, could trace its
fugitive passengers through the separate
and devious routes which they had taken to the hotel, argued
that somewhere in Munich there were a few devoted
souls
with no little energy left over from the more important busi
ness of assimilating large quantities of L
ö
wenbr
ä
u.
It argued
a strenuous efficiency that was as upsetting as anything the
Saint had seen for many years.