Saint's Getaway (20 page)

He took out his cigarette case and canted a
cigarette gently into his mouth, facing the others soberly, while they searched
for the meaning of
his terseness.

“Did you have trouble with that ticket
inspector?” hazarded
Patricia.

“Not one little bit.” The Saint
looked at her straightly.
“There wasn’t any cause for it. You see,
Josef figured he had a bill to pay. He told the inspector he wanted to go to
sleep, and
tipped him like a prince not to be disturbed till we get
to
Cologne.”

Slowly the other two built up in their minds
the full signifi
cance of that curt explanation, while the only sound in
the
compartment was the harsh rattle and jar of their race over the metals.
It was a silence which paid its inevitable tribute to the
code by
which the man in the corner had ordered his grim
passing.

“Did Josef make that hole?” queried
Monty Hayward
presently.

“No. Marcovitch did that—the boy friend
who tailed you
on board. Josef walked in on him, and lost the draw. The
last
I saw of Marcovitch, he was busting all records down towards the brake
van. And I guess he’s my next stop.”

The Saint pushed his hands into his trouser
pockets and walked past, out into the corridor. Patricia and Monty followed
him. They lined up outside; and the Saint drew at his
cigarette and gazed
through a window into the unrolling land
scape.

“Not the three of us,” he said.
“We aren’t muscling in. Pat
—I think it’s your turn for a show. There
may be trouble; and
the
ungodly are liable to be smooth guys before the Lord. I’d
like to have you a carriage length behind me. Keep
out of
sight—and watch your corners.
If the party looks tough, beat it
quietly
back and flag Monty.”

“O. K., Chief.”

“Monty, you stay around here till you’re sent for. Get talk
ing to someone—
and keep talking.
Then
you’ll be in balk. You’re the reserve line. If we aren’t back in twenty
minutes,
try and find out what’s
wrong. And see your gun’s working!”

“Right you are, old sportsman.”

“And remember your wife and
children,” said the Saint
piously.

He turned on his heel and went roaming down
the train,
humming
an operatic aria under his breath. The decks were clearing for action in fresh
earnest, and that suited him down
to the
ground. And yet a little bug of vague perplexity was starting to nose around in
the dark backgrounds of his brain,
nibbling
about in the impenetrable hinterlands of intuition
like the fret of a tiny whetstone. It blurred
fitfully on the tenu
ous outfringings
of a deep-buried nerve, sending dim flitters
of irritation telegraphing up into the obscure recesses of his
consciousness; and every one of those messages
feathered up a
replica of the same ragged little question mark into the
sleek
line of his serenity. Ten tunes in a
minute he glossed the line down again, and ten times in a minute the identical
finicky in
terrogation smudged
through it like a wisp of fabric trailed
across an edge of wet paint.

Still humming the same imperturbable tune,
he came to the
end of a coach and eased himself cautiously round into
the con
nection tunnel. With equal caution he stepped across the swaying
platforms and emerged circumspectly into the foyer of the next car. Down the
length of the alleyway ahead he saw only a
small female infant
with platinum blonde pigtails, and con
tinued on his way with unruffled watchfulness.

The dying words of Josef Krauss were ticking
over in his
mind as a kind of monotonous accompaniment to the melody
that carolled contentedly along with him as he walked. They repeated themselves
in a dozen different languages, word by
word and letter by
letter, wheeling and countermarching and
forming fours in an
infinite variety of restless patterns with all
the aimless
efficiency of a demonstration platoon of trained soldiers—and with precisely as
much intelligence. They went
through their repertoire of evolutions like a
clockwork ma
chine; and it just didn’t mean a thing. They ended up
exactly
where they started: two simple sentences spoken in a voice
that had
been so weak as to be incapable of expression, quali
fied by nothing but
the enigmatical derision in the doomed
man’s eyes. Simon
could still see those eyes as vividly as if they
had been photographed
on the air a yard beyond his nose, and
the bland, flat gibe
in them was the most baffling riddle he had encountered since he began
wondering why the female corset
should almost invariably be made in the same
grisly shade of pink.

Hands still resting loosely in his pockets,
Simon Templar con
tinued on his gentle promenade. Nearly every compartment
he peered
into yielded its quota of specimens for observation, but Marcovitch was not
among them. Apart from that serious omission, any philanthropist in the widest
sense would have found ample material on which to test the stamina of his ec
centric
virtue. All along the panorama which unfolded to the
Saint’s roving eye,
other excrescences upon the cosmos roosted
at regular intervals
in their upholstered pens, each tending his
own little candle of
witness to God’s patronage of the almost
human race. Simon
looked at them all, and felt his share of
the milk of human
kindness curdling under the strain. But
the second most
important question in his mind remained
unanswered. It was
still probable that Marcovitch was not
alone. And if he was
not alone, the amount of support he
had with him was still an entirely
nebulous quantity. The Saint
had received no clue by which he could pick
out the proble
matical units of that support from the array of smug
bipeds
which had passed under his eyes. They might have been there
in dozens;
or he mightn’t have seen one of them yet There was
no evidence. It was a
gamble on blind odds, and the Lord
would have to provide.

Thus the Saint came through to the end of the
last carriage, and still he had not seen Marcovitch. He stopped there for a
moment,
drawing the last puff from his cigarette and flatten
ing the butt under his
toe. One episode in his last adventure
in England was still
far from fading out of his memory, and the remembrance of it sent a sudden
ripple of anticipation
pulsing through his muscles. He knew that he
had not lost Marcovitch. On the contrary—he was just going to meet him.
And most
assuredly there would be trouble… .

A gay glimmer of the Saintly fighting smile touched his lips.
The pain which had afflicted him during his patient
survey of
so much unbeautiful
humanity was gone altogether. He had
forgotten
the very existence of those anonymous boils on the
universe. Just one more stage south of him was the
brake van,
and Simon Templar went
towards it with a new unlighted
cigarette
in his mouth and his hands transferred to his coat pockets. He could have
reached out and touched the handle
when
he saw it jerk and twist under his eyes, and leapt back round the corner. He
had one glimpse of the man who came
stumbling
out—a
man in the railroad uniform, capless, with a gash over his temple
and his face straining to a shout of
terror.
It didn’t require any genius to reconstruct the whole
inside history of that frantic apparition: Simon
had no time to think about it anyway, but he guessed enough without think
ing. The thud of a silenced gun was one of the
diverse inci
dents that tumbled
hectically into one crowded second of light
ning action in which there was positively no time for medita
tion. In the same second Simon caught the brakeman
by the
arm as he flung past.

“Verweile doch
—
du hist
zu schnell,”
said the Saint gently.
They were face to
face for an instant of time; and Simon saw
the man’s eyes wide
and staring. “Let’s take a walk,” said the
Saint.

He screwed the wrist he was holding up into
the nape of the b
rakeman’s neck, and pushed him back into the van. There
was
another shot as they came through, and the man flopped for
ward like a
dead weight. Simon let go and let him fall side
ways. Then he kicked
the door shut behind him and stood with
his shoulders lined
up square against it, with his feet spaced
apart and three
quarters of his weight balancing on his toes.

The cigarette slanted up into a filibustering
angle as he smiled.

“Hullo, Uglyvitch,” he said.

Marcovitch showed his teeth over the barrel
of an automatic.
There
were four other men round him; and the blithe Saintly
gaze swept over them in an arc of affectionate greeting.

“Feelin’ happy, boys?” drawled the
Saint. “It’s a grand day
for fireworks.” He looked past them at
the piles of litter on
the floor of the van. Every mailbag had been
ripped open, and
the contents were strewn across the scenery like the
landmark
of a megalomaniac’s paper-chase. Letters had been torn
through and parcels slit across
and discarded in a search that
had winnowed
that vanload of mail through a fine-meshed
sieve. “Somebody getting married?” asked the Saint interest
edly. “Or is the confetti for me?”

There was a tantalizing invitation in the
slow lift of his eye
brows that matched the interrogative inflexion of his voice. Quite
coolly he sized up the strength of the men before him,
and just as coolly he posed himself in the limelight for them
to return the compliment. And he saw them
hesitate. If he had
been blindfolded
he could have deduced that hesitation
equally
well from the one vital fact that he was still alive. The
wide smiling
insolence of his unblinking candour, the bare
faced
effrontery of his very artlessness, walled them into that
standstill in
a way that no other approach could have done.
While
it lasted, it held them up as effectively as a regiment of
Thomson guns. They couldn’t bring themselves to
believe that
there was no more in it
than met the eye. It dangled them on
red-hot
tenterhooks of uncertainty, peeling their eyes sore with suspicion of the trap
they couldn’t see.

“Well?”

Marcovitch forced the monosyllable out of
his throat in a
hoarse challenge that indexed his embarrassment to the
last decimal point; and the Saint smiled again.

“This is an auspicious occasion,
brother,” he remarked ami
ably. “I’ve always wanted to know just what it feels like to
be
a slab-faced little squirt of dill-water
with a dirty neck and no
birth
certificate; and here you are—the very man to tell me.
Could you unbosom for us, little flower?”

Marcovitch licked his lips. He was still casting around for
the one necessary hint that would give him
confidence to
tighten up on the
trigger of his gun and send an ounce of swift
and unanswerable death snarling into the easy target in front
of
him. His knuckle was white for the pull-off, the automatic
trembling ever so slightly in the suppressed
tension of his hand.

“What else have you got to say,
Templar?”

“Lots. Have you
heard the one about the old farmer named
Giles, who suffered
acutely——
”

“Perhaps you were looking for
something?”

The question came in a vicious monotone that
dared a di
rect reply. And the Saint knew that his margin of time
for stall
ing was wearing thin as a wafer under the impatient rasp
of
the Russian’s
overstressed nerves.

“Sure—I was taking a look round.”

He flaunted Marcovitch eye to eye, with that
heedless little
smile playing up uncloudedly to the tilt of his
cigarette, and his
fingers curling evenly round the grip of his own gun. The
twitch of a
muscle would have roared finis for Marcovitch in
the middle of any one
of those sentences; but Simon Templar
knew when he was deadlocked. He knew
he was deadlocked then, and he had known it ever since he stepped into the van.
He could have dropped Marcovitch at his pleasure, but the re
maining
four men represented just so many odds against any
human chance of
surviving to boast about it. And the Saint
was not yet tired of
life. He bluffed the deadlock without turning a hair—smiled calmly at it and
asked it to play ball—be
cause that was the only thing to do. Any
other line would
have sung his requiem without further debate. But he knew
that his only way out was along the precarious alleyways of
peace with
honour—with black italics for the peace, if any
thing. It was
unfortunate, admittedlly, but it was one of the
immutable verities of
the situation. He had breezed in to take
a peek at the odds,
and there they were in all their mathemati
cal scaliness. A
tactful and strategic withdrawal announced it
self as the order of the day.