Saint's Getaway (17 page)

The Saint smiled.

“I see. While you hang around in the
offing as the righteous citizen what’s been robbed. Well, well, Rudolf,”
said the Saint
tolerantly, “the notion was passably sound, though
I won’t say
I
hadn’t heard of it before. And what would you have done if I’d actually been
collared with the boodle—gone home and
burst
into tears?”

“That possibility had been
considered,” admitted the prince
calmly. “In fact, I had anticipated
it. You may have forgotten
    
that my
name carries some weight in this country. I do not think I should have found my
task difficult.” He shrugged.
“But you were always
enterprising, my dear Mr. Templar.”

“That past tense makes me feel all Tolstoy,”
said the Saint
plaintively.

The prince fingered his moustache.

“You are the unknown quantity which is
always disconcerting,” he said; and Simon blew out two leisured smoke
rings.

“Have you lost your voice, Rudolf?”

“Why?”

“There must be some more policemen in
Munich. From what
I’ve seen I shouldn’t think there was room for many, but
you
might find one
or two. You could try yodelling for ‘em.”

“I doubt whether that would be so
expedient,” said the
prince, tapping a length of ash from his
cigarette—“now that
we know that the jewels are no longer in your possession.”

Simon sat up. That was a new one on
him—straight from the
bandbox and dolled out with ribbons. It
caught him slap in
the middle of his complacency and made him blink.

“Yeah?” he said automatically.
“I haven’t seen any corpses
carried out”

“Would that be a corollary?”

“It would be if any of your birds tried
to go scratching
round my room. There’s not only two guns in it—there’s a
girl
who can shoot the pips out of a razzberry keeping ‘em warm,
and she
doesn’t sleep on her feet. Now think up something
else that’ll cure hiccoughs!”

The prince showed a glimmer of pearly teeth.

“In that case,” he said
imperturbably, “we must feel thank
ful that the porter is
an observant man with a good memory.”

“Meaning exactly?”

“You went out at eleven o’clock this
morning with a parcel,
and you came back without it.”

Simon raked him with crystalline blue eyes.
He had an in
stant recollection of the scene in which he had surprised
the
prince, and in the same flash he understood the significance of it. The
very words that must have been spoken trickled almost
verbatim through his
imagination. His Sublime Eminence’s
dear young friend had promised to
deliver a small package
for him. It was vitally important that it should
be sent off be
fore
midday. Had anything been done about it? The package would be about so big. His
dear young friend was inclined to be forgetful. Could the porter remember if he
had seen the
gentleman leaving the hotel
with such a package as had been described? … The interrogation would have
been simplicity itself to a man of the Crown Prince’s magnetic geniality, once
he had realized that such a contingency was on the cards. And
if it had proved fruitless there would have been
no harm
done. Mentally the Saint
raised his hat to that effort of induc
tive
speculation.

“I won’t deceive you,” said the
Saint. “We have ceased to
hold the baby.”

“Others have also found it
dangerous,” murmured the
prince.

“That’s just how it struck me,”
said the Saint with equanim
ity. “So I got rid of it. I went out and bought three fat
packets
of German cigarettes. I came home
and loaded the swag into ‘em, and jammed it tight with cotton wool. I tied the
boxes up
in brown paper and stuck on
a label. And then I went out
and
shoved the whole works into the post office across the way
—just ordinary parcel post, and no registration or
anything.
It’ll be waiting for me where I want it.” The Saint
pushed his
hands back in his pockets and
stared at the prince seraphically
through
a veil of smoke. “Got any more to say?” he purred.

Up on the wall the clock gathered its
creaking springs and
chimed the quarter. The margin of time was dosing in; and
Simon had learned nearly everything he required to
know.
There was only one thing more
to come—an inkling of the counter attack which must have been spinning its
swift web between the lines of that entertaining little chat. And the Saint
was keyed up for it like a tiger crouching for
the kill.

The Crown Prince leaned forward.

“My friend, we are in danger of cutting
our own throats.
You have disposed of the jewels temporarily, but you will
have
still to recover them. It would be awkward for you if you were
arrested—and
I admit that it would be inconvenient for me.
For the time being
we have your interests in common. And yet
you must acknowledge
that you have not one chance in ten
thousand of making your escape.”

“That sounds depressing,” said the
Saint.

“It is a matter of fact. In England you
have your Scotland Yard, which is the model of the whole world. Perhaps you are
tempted to think that our European police organizations are
inferior. You would be
foolish—very foolish. You have many
hundreds
of miles still to travel, and every frontier will be
watched for you. Every mile, every minute, will see
the dice
loaded more heavily against
you. You have temporarily disposed of the detectives who were sent here; I do
not ask how
you accomplished it, but I
assure you they were only a begin
ning.
Our police do not easily forget being made to look
stupid. Your arrest will be a point of honour with
every de
tective in Germany.”

“Well?”

Simon’s prompting monosyllable rapped into the
prince’s
silence like the crack of an overstrained fiddle string.

The prince, tapped his cigarette holder
thoughtfully on a
pink-tinted thumbnail. He met the Saint’s eyes with a
survey
of deliberate appraisal.

“I offer you an alliance. I offer you
protection, hiding, influence, a practical certainty of escape. I have told
you that in
this country I am a person of some importance. Mr.
Templar,
we have been enemies too long. I offer you friendship and
security—at the price of a
division of the spoils.”

The Saint’s eyes never moved; but his lips smiled.

“And how would this partnership
begin?” he queried.

“My car is outside. It is at your
disposal. I promise you safe conduct out of Munich—for yourself and your
friends.”

For two seconds the Saint gazed at the red
tip of his cigar
ette, with that tentative half-smile playing round his
mouth.

And then he screwed the cigarette into an ash
tray and stood
up.

“I think I should like to use your
car,” he said.

He drifted towards the street doors with his
quick, swinging
stride, and the prince went beside him. As they stepped
out
into the blazing sunshine of the Bayerstrasse the Saint’s hard
ened
vigilance scanned the street, left and right, expertly dis
secting
the appearance of every loiterer within sight. He elimi
nated them
all. There was a man selling newspapers, another
sweeping the street,
a one-armed beggar with a tray of toys, a weedy specimen idling in front of a
shop window—no one who
could by any stretch of imagination be
invested with the aura
of bull-necked innocence which to the
initiated observer
fizzles like a mantle of damp squibs around the
elaborately plain-clothed man in every civilized corner of the globe. It was
just a little more than the Saint had seriously hoped for: it
showed
that the full measure of his iniquity had not yet been
fully revealed to the phlegmatic myrmidons
of the German
police, and in any other
circumstances he would have felt that
the
fact paid him no compliments. He had been ready for
further opposition—squads of it—and his right hand
had never
left the gun in his
pocket. The risk had to be taken.

“You are very wise,” said the
prince suavely.

Simon nodded curtly, without turning his
head.

His eyes swept the car that was drawn up by
the curb with
its engine pulsing almost inaudibly—an open, cream-coloured
Rolls, upholstered in crimson leather, with the Crown Prince’s
coat of
arms displayed prominently on the coach work. A
liveried chauffeur
held the door open—Simon recognized him
as the man who had done his best to
strangle him in the dark
hours of that
morning, and favoured him with a ray of that
slight, sweet smile.

“Let me drive,” said the Saint.

He twitched the door from the man’s hand and slammed it
shut. In one more smooth movement he whipped open
another
door and dropped into the
driving seat.

As he flicked the lever into gear, the man’s
hand clutched
his shoulder. For an instant Simon let go the steering
wheel.
With the
faintest widening of that Saintly smile, the Saint’s
steely
fingers bracketed themselves lovingly round the man’s
prominent nose and
flung him squealing back into the prince’s
arms. A second later the car was skimming
down the street
under the flanks of the most
startled tram in Munich.

2

The journey which Monty Hayward made from the
hotel to
the
station was one which he ranked ever afterwards as an
entirely typical incident in the system of unpleasantness which had
enmeshed him in its toils.

It would have made his scalp crawl uneasily
even if nothing
had
happened to disturb his breakfast; but now the certain
knowledge that his description had been circulated far and
wide, and that it was graphic enough for him to
have been
identified from it three
times already, made any excursion into
the
great outdoors seem tantamount to a lingering mortification of the flesh. He
was certain to be hanged anyway, he felt,
and it seemed painfully
unnecessary to have to keep pushing
his head
into a series of experimental nooses just to get the
feel of the operation.

Patricia laughed at him quietly. She produced
one of the
Saint’s razors.

“You’ll look quite different without your moustache,”
she
said, “and horn-rimmed glasses are
a wonderful disguise.”

Monty scraped off his manhood resignedly. He
went out into
the brightness of the afternoon with many of the sensations
of a man who dreams that he is rushing through a crowded
street
with no trousers on. Every eye seemed to ferret out his
guilt and glare ominously after
him; every voice that rang out
a semitone
above normal pitch seemed like a yell of denunciation. His shirt clung to him
damply.

If there were no detectives posted anywhere
along the short
route they had to take, there were two at the platform
barrier.
They stood beside the ticket inspector and made no attempt
to conceal themselves. Monty surrendered the suitcases he car
ried into the keeping of a
persistent porter and looked hope
lessly at
the girl. With their hands free, they might stand a
chance if they cut and run… . But the girl was
stone blind
to his mute entreaty. She dumped her bag on the porter’s bar
row and strode on. A touch of black on her
eyebrows, and an
adroit use of lipstick, had created a complete new
character.
She walked right up to the ticket
inspector and the two detectives, and stood in front of them with one arm
akimbo and her
legs astraddle,
brazening them through tortoise-shell spectacles larger even than Monty’s.

“Say, you, does this train go to
Heidelberg?”

“In Mainz umsteigen.”

“Whaddas that mean, Hiram?”