Saint's Getaway (27 page)

“Great thoughts, Monty,” said the
Saint.

“I suppose you must think
sometimes,” conceded Monty discouragingly, without any visible eagerness
to probe deeper into the matter. He swilled some N
ü
rnberger round his palate
with great
concentration. “Why can’t they make beer like this
in
England?” he asked, pulling out the best red herring he
could think of.

“Because of your Aunt Emily,” said
the Saint, whose pa
tience could be inexhaustible when once he had made up his
mind. “In America they have total prohibition, and the beer
is lousy.
In England they have semi-prohibition, in the shape
of your Aunt Emily’s
wall-eyed Licensing Laws, and the beer
is mostly muck. This is a free country
where they take a proper
pride in their
beer, and if you tried to put any filthy chemi
cals in it you’d find yourself in the can. The idea of your Aunt
Emily is that beer-drinkers are depraved anyway,
and therefore any poison is good enough to pump into their stomachs
—and the rest is a question of degree. Now let’s
get back to business. I have been thinking.”

Monty sighed.

“Tell me the worst.”

“I’ve been thinking,” said the
Saint, with his mouth full of
sausage, “that we ought to do a job of work.”

He took another draught from his glass and
went on merci
lessly.

“We are disguised as workmen,
Monty,” he said, “and there
fore we ought to work. We can’t stay
here indefinitely, and Nina’ll only just have got started on the pump-handle.
That
police station looked lonely to me, and I’d feel happier if we
were on the
spot”

“But what d’you think you’re going to
do?” protested Monty half-heartedly. “You can’t go to the door and
ask if they’ve got
any chairs to mend.’
^r

The Saint grinned.

“I don’t think I could ever mend a
chair,” he said. “But I
know something else I could do, and
I’ve always wanted to do
it. I noticed a swell site for it right
opposite that police sta
tion. We’ll be moving as soon as you’re ready.”

Monty Hayward finished his beer with rather
less enthusi
asm than he had started it, while Simon clinked money on
the
table and treated himself to another yard of the barmaid’s
teeth. It
was on the tip of Monty’s tongue to spread out a bar
rage of other and
less half-hearted protests—to say that the
jam was tight enough
as they were without giving it any gratui
tous chances—but
something else rose up in his mind and
stopped him. And he
knew at the same time that nothing would
have stopped the
Saint. He caught that smile in the Saint’s
eye again; but now it
was aimed straight at him, with a sprin
kling of banter in it,
cutting clean as a rapier thrust to his in
most thoughts. It
stripped the meaningless habit of lukewarm criticism clear away from him,
taking him back to other mo
ments in those fourteen crowded hours which
he had lately
been remembering with a contentment that he could not
have
explained in words. It brought him face to face with a self
that was
still unfamiliar to him, but which would never be un
familiar again. In
that instant of utter self-knowledge he felt
as if he had broken
out of a bondage of heavy darkness; he
was a free man for the first time in his
life.

“O. K.,” he said.

They went out into the streets again, finding
them softened
by the first shadows of twilight. Monty was still
wondering
what new lunacy had brewed itself in the Saint’s brain,
but he
asked no
more questions.

Men and women passed them on the pavements,
sparing
them no more than a vacant glance which observed nothing.

Monty began to feel the flush of a growing
confidence. After
all, there was nothing about him which could legitimately
induce a sane
population to stand still and gape at him. He
looked again at the
Saint, detachedly, and saw a subtle change
in his leader which
increased that assurance. The Saint was
slouching a little,
putting his weight more ruggedly on his
heels, with his
shoulders rounded and the half-smoked ciga
rette drooping
negligently from one corner of his mouth: he
was just a plain,
unaspiring artisan, with Socialistic opinions
and an immoderate
family. Again the picture was perfect; and
Monty knew that if he
played his own r
ô
le half as well he
would pass muster in any
ordinary crowd.

A miscellaneous junk store showed up on the
other side of the road, with its wares overflowing onto benches set out on
the
sidewalk. Simon crossed the road and invaded the gloom
ily odorous interior.
He emerged with a large and shabby sec
ond-hand bag, with
which they continued their journey. A
hardware store was the next stop, and
there Simon proceeded
to acquire an outfit of tools. The purchase
taxed his German
to the utmost, for the layman’s technical vocabularies
may
be sketchy enough in his own language, without venturing
into the
complexities of a specialized foreign jargon. The Saint, who could carry on any
everyday conversation in half a dozen
different dialects, could no more have
trusted himself to ask
for a centre-bit or a handspike than he could
have knitted
himself a suit of combinations. He explained that his kit
had
been stolen, and bluffed his way through, wandering round
the shop
and collecting likely-looking instruments here and there, while he kept the
proprietor occupied with a flow of
patter that was coarse enough to keep
any laughter-loving
Boche amused for hours. It was finished at last, and they
hit
the footway again while the storekeeper was still wheezing
over the
Saint’s final sally.

“Well—what are we supposed to be?”
inquired Monty Hay-
ward interestedly, as they turned their steps back
towards the
police
station; and the Saint shrugged at him skew-eyed.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea, old lad. But
if we don’t look
impressively
energetic it won’t be my fault.”

They stopped directly opposite the station,
and Simon laid
his bag down carefully in the road. Gazing about rather
blankly, Monty noticed for the
first time that there was a rec
tangular
metal plate let into the cobbles at his feet. Simon
fished a hooked implement out of his
bag,
inserted it in a sort
of keyhole, and
yanked up the slab. They got their fingers un
der the edge and lifted it out onto the road beside the chasm
which it disclosed. Without batting an eyelid, the
Saint de
liberately spread out an
imposing array of tools all round
him,
sat down in the road with his legs dangling through the
hole, and stared down at the maze of lead tubes and
insulated
wiring which he had uncovered,
with an expression of owlish
sagacity illuminating his face.
 

2

“It’s not so good if you happen to open
up a sewer by mis
take,” Simon remarked solemnly, “but this looks
all right.”

He hauled up a length of wire and inspected
its broken end
with the absorbed concentration of a monkey that has
scratched up a bonanza in its cousin’s scalp. He tapped
Monty on
the shoulder and required him also to examine the frayed strands of copper,
pointing them out one by one in a
dumb-show that registered a Wagnerian
crescendo of distress and disapproval. Monty knelt down beside the hole and
shook
his head in
manifest sympathy. Rousing himself from his grief,
the Saint picked up a hammer and launched a frenzied as
sault on the nearest length of lead pipe. It lasted
for the best
part of a minute; and
then the Saint sat back and surveyed
the
dents he had made with an air of professional satisfac
tion.

“Gimme that file,” he grunted.

Monty pasted it over; and the Saint bowed his
head and
began to saw furiously at the angles of a joint that he
had
spotted lower down in the pit.

If there had been any genuine experts in the
vicinity that performance would never have got by for ten seconds; but no
one seemed
sufficiently inquisitive to make a lengthy study
of the Saint’s
original methods. Hardly anyone gave them a
second glance. Planted
right out there in the
naked expanse
of the highway, they were hidden as
effectively as if they had
buried themselves
under the ground. And the necks of Treuchtlingen
were innocent of the taint of rubber. An occasional
automobile honked round them, and a dray backed up
close
to Monty’s posterior and parked
there while the driver went
into a
good pull-up for carmen. Apart from the infrequent
sounds of plodding boots or grinding machinery
going past
them, they might have been
a couple of ancient lights for all
the
sensation they provoked. So long as he didn’t electrocute
himself or carve into a gas main and blow the
windows out
of the street, the Saint
figured that he was on velvet

And if he had wanted to be near the scene of
action, he
couldn’t have got much closer without walking in and intro
ducing
himself. As he bent down over his improvised program
of free services to
the Treuchtlingen municipality, he could
study the whole
architecture of the police station under his left
arm—a drab,
two-storied building to which not even the kindly
shades of the evening
could lend any mystery. It stood up as
squat and
unimaginative as the laws behind it, a monument
of prosaic modernity
wedged in among the random houses of a more leisurely age. Simon looked up at
the regular squares of window that divided the stark fa
ç
ade in geometric sym
metry, and saw the first of them light
up.

“Six-thirty,” he said to Monty.
“Nina must be getting them
warmed.”

Monty fiddled with a spanner.

“There’s no chance that she left before
we arrived, is there?
She might have got what she wanted quicker
than we
expected.”

“Not here or anywhere else, in a
blockhouse like that. There
isn’t a government official anywhere in the
world who could
get anything done in less than seventy-nine times as long
as
it’d take you or me to do it. They’re all born with moss under
their
feet—it’s one of the qualifications.”

The Saint lugged out another line of cable and
battered it
ferociously
with a chisel. Underneath the triviality of his words
ran
a thin, taut thread of strain. Monty heard it then for the
first time, hardening the edges of Simon’s voice.
There was no
weakness about it, no
trace of fear: it was the strain of a man whose faculties were strung up to a
singing intensity of alert
ness, the
cold expectancy of a boxer waiting to enter the ring.
It showed up something that Monty alone had
overlooked during those fourteen hours of his adventure. The Saint’s own op
timism had made it all seem so easy, even in its
craziest gyra
tions; and yet that
very smoothness had derived itself from nothing but the steel core of
inflexible purpose behind the
whimsical blue eyes that had unconsciously
slitted themselves
down for a moment into two
splinters of the same steel. And
the
story had still to be brought to the only possible end.
…

Simon snapped his cable in the middle, tied
the pieces to
gether again, wrapped a strip of insulating tape round the
connection, and hammered it out flat. His movements had the
gritty
restraint of fettered impatience. Inside that cubist’s bellyache of a fortress
the real work was being done for him
by a girl; and as the time went on he
knew that he would
rather have done it himself—shot up the police station in
per
son and extracted his information at the snout of a Webley.
Anything
would have been better than that period of nerve-
rasping inaction. He
knew that he was thinking like a fool—
that any such course
would have been nothing short of a high
road to suicide—but he
couldn’t help thinking it. The suspense
had started to tug at
the muscles of his stomach in an inter
mittent discharge of
hampered energy. Somehow it shook up
the cool flow of his mind, when he
should have been focusing solely on the task that was coming to him as soon as
the infor
mation was obtained. It was as if he had been trying to
see down into a pool of clear water, and every now and then
something
in the depths stirred up a cloud of silt and swal
lowed up his
objective in a turbid fog. Somewhere in that fog Marcovitch was sneering at
him, capering farther and farther
beyond his reach.
…