Saint's Getaway (24 page)

“Reporters are born without moral
scruples,” she said can
didly. “You’re on.”

“We’re leaving now,” said the
Saint.

He flung an arm round Patricia’s waist and
turned her to
wards a path which led out of the clearing away from the
em
bankment, a grass-paved ride broad enough for them to walk
abreast;
and if she had been a few pounds lighter his exuberance would have swung her
off her feet. Even after all those
years of adventure in which they had
been together he would
never cease to amaze her: his incredible
resilience could con
ceive nothing more fantastic than the idea of ultimate
fail
ure. In him it had none of the qualities of mere humdrum
doggedness
that it would have had in anyone of a more dull
and commonplace
fibre; it was as swift as a steel blade, a gay
challenge to disaster
that never doubted the abiding favour
of the stars. It if had been anything
less he could never have
set forth in such a vein to find the end of
that chequered
story. Marcovitch was gone. The jewels were gone. Prince
Rudolf had
become an incalculable quantity whose contact
with the current
march of events might weave in anywhere
between Munich and
the North Pole. And three tarnished
brigands plus a magazine-cover
historian, who had been lucky
to escape from the last skirmish with their
lives, were left
high and dry in an area of strange country that would
shortly
be seething with armed hostility. The task in front of them might have
made hunting needles in haystacks seem like an
idle pastime for blind
octogenarians; but the Saint saw it
only as a side road to victory.

“Pat, when this jaunt is over I think we
must go back to England. You’ve no idea how I miss Claud Eustace Teal and
all those
jolly games we used to have with Scotland Yard.”

She knew that he was perfectly serious—as the
Saint understood seriousness. He had never changed. She did not have to look
at him to see the sunny glint in his eyes, the careless faith
in a
joyously spendthrift destiny.

She said: “What about Monty?”

The Saint gazed ahead down the widening lane
of trees.

“I should like to have kept him, but I
suppose he isn’t
ours.”

Westwards as they walked the trees were
thinning out, open
ing tall windows into a landscape of green fields and
homely
cottages. The golden daylight broke through the laced boughs
overhead
and dappled their shady path with pools of lumin
ance. A lark dived
out of the clear infinity of blue and drifted
earthwards like an
autumn leaf. Way over on a distant slope
the midget silhouettes
of a ploughing team moved placidly
against the sky, the tinkle of bells
and the crack of the ploughman’s whip coming vividly through the still air. It
seemed
almost unbelievable that that peaceful scene could be overrun with grey-clad
men combing inexorably through the
hedgerows and hollows for a scent of
the irreverent corsair
who had tweaked their illustrious beards; but
the Saint
stopped suddenly at a turn of the path, halting Patricia
with
him, and she also had seen the road and heard the voices.

“Wait here while I take a look,” he
murmured.

He flitted in among the trees like a shadow,
and the girl
stood motionless in the shelter of a clump of bushes with
her heart beating a little faster. Monty Hayward and the
Evening
Gazette
were closing up in an interrogative silence; and
Patricia
had a numbing sense of the magnitude of the feat which Simon Templar had set
himself to perform. Escape
would have seemed difficult enough for one
man alone—a
mere modest getaway that was satisfied with a whole skin
for
its reward—but the Saint was cheerfully booking passengers for the tour
and announcing his unalterable intention of col
lecting a quarter of
a million pounds’ worth of expenses
en
route.
That was
the measure of his genius, the squandered
greatness that
created its own worlds to conquer.

He came back in a few moments; and he was smiling.

“Down there,” he said, “there’s
a covered wagon. And the
crew are having an early tea. I ordered them
specially to meet
us here, and they look good enough to me. Let’s take
‘em.”

He turned back with a swing of lean, venturous
limbs; and
Monty Hayward followed him in a mood of unwonted light-
headedness.
Something inside Monty Hayward was reacting
vengefully against the
continued impact of circumstance. He felt that he had taken as much dragooning
from circumstance
as he could stand, and his capacity for meek
long-suffering was
wearing out. A malicious freak of fate had thrown up an un
ceremonious
slip of a girl to let the Saint acclaim him hilari
ously as a
full-fledged buccaneer, and that was the last straw. Buccaneer he would be—and
let the blood flow in buckets.

They reached a narrow gap in the undergrowth,
and there
the Saint touched Monty’s shoulder, pointing down to the
road.
A six-wheeled lorry was drawn up close to the side, and just
below
where they had paused two weatherbeaten men in
overalls were
reclining against the low bank. Each of them held a massive sandwich of bread
and sausage in one hand
and a steaming cup in the other; and Monty’s
eyes fastened on one of those cups fascinatedly. It occurred to him that a twentieth-century
buccaneer might not necessarily be at such a
disadvantage as he
had once thought… .

“Make it snappy,” said the Saint.

He went over the bank in a flying dive, and
Monty was
only a second behind him. Patricia heard one muffled howl,
an eddy of whirling effort, and the smack of bone against
bone; then
she also came over the bank and saw Simon already
starting to strip the
overalls from his victim. Monty was dusting his trousers, and in his right
hand he held like a captured
banner the unspilt cup which he would always
estimate as one
of the outstanding achievements of his life. He raised it
dra
matically to Nina Walden as she came through the trees.

“Madam,” he said, “your
tea.”

It was a moment which atoned to him for
everything that
had gone before; and the girl stepped down smiling into
the
road and accepted his triumph in the same way as Queen
Elizabeth
might have accepted the Armada.

“You boys certainly know how to
work,” she said; and
Monty shrugged.

“We do this sort of thing every
day,” he stated aggressively.

The Saint laughed.

“You’re getting the spirit of the
business, Monty,” he said.
“Now if you can hustle into those jeans
before anyone else comes along we might call the boat pushed out. Pat, you take
a peep under the tarpaulins and find out what the cargo is.
They might
be carrying some more crown jewels!”

“They’re carrying engine castings,”
Patricia reported.

“O. K., lass. There ought to be room for
you girls to pack between them. I’m sorry it wasn’t eiderdowns, but, after all,
it’s
a warm
day.”

The Saint was completing one of those
lightning changes
which had always been the envious wonder of bis select
audiences. The immaculate draperies of Savile Row and St. James’s
had
disappeared under a soiled blue boiler suit as if he had
never worn
them; the shoes of Lobb were stuffed into his
pockets and replaced
by the dusty boots of toil; the patent-
leather hair was
tousled into negligent curls. Those who
knew him best had
asserted that Simon Templar could parade
more miracles in the
way of disguise with a dab of treacle
and a length of string than most men
could have accomplished
with the largest make-up box in Hollywood. To
him the out
ward
paraphernalia of costume was merely the show case for a
perfect cameo of character study—an inimitable transforma
tion of personality in which no living man could
equal him.

“What you boys and girls have got to
remember, now and
for evermore,” he said, “is that the bushiest
false whiskers
on earth won’t help you unless you can put on the
authentic
pride of whiskeredness. The hair has got to enter into
your
soul.”

He was working in front of the open bonnet of
the lorry
while he talked, rubbing a judicious blend of grease and
grime into
his hands and finger-nails and smearing artistic
stains of it across
his face. It seems a simple thing to write,
and yet the bare truth
of it is that when he turned round
again he had literally annihilated
Simon Templar—he
was
a
German truckdriver, with a past and a present
and a future and an aged aunt in Frankfort to whom he faithfully sent a
card
every Christmas.

Monty Hayward was just securing the last
button of his
own overalls, and the Saint lugged him boisterously over
and
smudged his immaculate face and hands with half a dozen
similarly
rapid master-strokes.

“Sit quiet and blow your nose on your
sleeve occasionally,”
he said, “and we can’t go wrong.”

He ran a hawk-like eye over the details of
his prot
é
g
é
‘s
attire; and then he grinned boyishly and smote Monty a deto
nating
blow between the shoulder blades.

“C’mon! Let’s push these birds out of
the way.”

They carried the two unconscious men into the
wood and hid them in a thicket, after the Saint had bound and gagged
them with strips of their own
clothing. Simon’s departing flour
ish was to
pin a hundred-mark note to each of their shirt-
fronts—the assault on their persons had been a regrettable ne
cessity,
but it was one of those little debts which the Saint never
forgot. And in the corner of each note he sketched
the quaint little haloed figure which had been the signature of more rol
licking
outrages than Scotland Yard could discuss in polite lan
guage. It was a long time since the Saint had last used that flippant
symbol, and the chance appealed to him as an omen
that could not be
passed by.

He returned jauntily to the road, and saw that
Patricia and
the
Evening Gazette
had already taken up their
positions. Si
mon pulled up the starting handle and vaulted into the
driv
ing seat.

As they lumbered clangorously round the next
bend a car
that was speeding towards them swerved peremptorily
across
their path and stopped broadside on. An officer in field grey climbed
out and marched authoritatively over to the Saint’s
side. The stamp of
his commission was branded all over him,
and the flap of his
revolver holster was unstrapped and turned
back into his belt.

“Woher kommen Sie, bitte?”
he
demanded curtly; and the
Saint drew a grubby hand across an even
grubbier forehead.

“Aus Ingolstadt, Herr Hauptmann.”

“So. Haben Sie auf diesem Wege nicht
zwei M
ä
nner und
eine Frau
gesehen? Der gr
ö
ssere Mann tr
ä
gt einen hellgrauen
Anzug, die
Frau ist ganz h
ü
bsch und gut gekleidet——
”

“Doch!”

“Kolossal!”
The officer
whipped out a notebook and sig
nalled vehemently to his men.
“Welche
Richtung haben sie
eingeschlagen?”

Simon took one hand from the wheel and pointed
back over
the fields.

“Sie sind soeben dort
ü
ber die Wiesen gegangen. Ich be
greife es
jetzt noch immer nicht, doss ich das M
ä
dchen
nicht
ü
berfahren habe, denn sie ist mir
gerade aus der Hecke unter
die Vorderr
ä
der gelaufen
——
”