Saint's Getaway (4 page)

A gentle knock sounded from the outer door of
the suite;
and the Saint peeped at his watch as he unrolled himself
from
his chair and sauntered across the room. It was five minutes to
three—just thirty-five clocked
minutes since they had detached
themselves
from the Brein
ö
ssl and set out to
ventilate their
lungs before turning
in, on that idle stroll beside the river
which was to lead them into such strange and perilous paths. The night
had wasted no time. And yet, if Simon Templar had
had any inkling of the landslide of skylarking and
song that
was destined to be poured
into his young life before that
night’s
work had been fully accounted for, even he might have
hesitated.

But he did not know. He opened the door three
inches,
checked up the pleasantly familiar features that surrounded
Monty
Hayward’s small and sanitary moustache, and pulled
him through. Then he
slid the bolts cautiously into their
sockets and filtered back into the
sitting room with his ciga
rette tilting buoyantly up between his lips.

“What-ho, troops!” he murmured
breezily. “And how do we all feel after our
culture physique?”

“I
don’t think I want to talk to
you,” said Monty. “You’re
not nice to know.”

The Saint’s eyebrows slanted at him
mockingly.

“Scarface Al Hayward will now tell us
about his collection of early Woolworth porcelain,” he drawled. ” ‘I
never wanted
a drag in politics or any other racket,’ says Scarface Al.
‘Art is
the only thing that counts a damn with me. Why can’t you
guys ever
leave me alone?’ “

Monty laughed, operating the Saint’s
cigarette case with
one hand and a siphon with the other.

“Surely. But still—this sort of thing’s
all very well for you,
old sportsman, seeing as how you’ve chosen to
make it your
job; but why d’you want to boot me into it?”

“My dear chap, I thought it would be
good for your liver.
Besides, you can run awfully fast.”

Monty plugged a cushion at him and went over
and sat on
the arm of the chair which Patricia had taken.

“Do you allow him to do this sort of
thing, Pat?” he asked.

“What sort of thing?” inquired the
girl blandly.

“Why—inveigling respectable editors into
free fights and
kidnappings and what not Haven’t you noticed what he’s
been
doing all night? He goes around throwing people into rivers—
he grabs
people off the streets and runs away with them—he
lets his pals be
chased all over Europe by hordes of heathen
policemen, while he
goes and hides—and then he stands around
here as happy as a dog
with a new flea and can’t see anything
to apologize for. Is that the way you let
him behave?”

“Yes,” said Patricia imperturbably.

The Saint picked up a glass and hitched
himself onto the
table. He blew Patricia a kiss and looked at Monty
Hayward
thoughtfully.

“Seriously, old lad,” he said,
“we owe you no small hand.
You drew the fire like a blinkin’ hero—just
as if you’d been
trained to it from the kindergarten. But I’m damned sorry
if
you feel you’ve been landed in a place where you ought not
to be.
There’s no one I’d rather have with me in a spot of good
clean fun,
but if you really hear the call of the old hymn book
and hassock——
”

Monty flicked ash into the fireplace.

“It’s not the hymn book and hassock, you
fathead—it’s the
Consolidated Press. As I told you at dinner, I’ve done a
week’s job
in a couple of days, so I reckon I’ve earned five
days’ holiday. But
that’s not going to help me a lot if at the end
of those five days
I’m just beginning a fifteen-year stretch in
some beastly German
clink… . Anyway, what’s happened to
Stanislaus?”

Simon jerked a thumb towards the bedroom door.

“I dumped him out of the way. When he
comes to, he’s go
ing to throw a heap of light on some dark subjects. I was
wait
ing for you to arrive before I did anything to speed up his
awakening,
so that you could join the interested audience.”
He stood up and
crushed his cigarette end into an ash tray.
“And in the
circumstances, Monty, that seems to be the very
next item on the
programme. We’ll get together and hear
Stanislaus give
tongue, and then we’ll have a little more idea of the scheme of events and
prizes in this here rodeo.”

Monty nodded.

“That seems a fairly sound notion,”
he said.

The Saint went over and opened the
communicating door.
He had taken two steps into the room when he felt a
distinct
draught of cold air fanning his face; and then his eyes
had
attuned themselves to the darkness, and he saw the rectangle of
starlight
where the window was. He stepped back without a
sound, and his hand
caught Monty’s fingers on the electric
light switch.

“Not for just a moment, old dear,”
he said quietly. “That
was the mistake Pat made.”

He vanished into the gloom; and in a little
while Monty
heard a faint metallic rattle and saw the Saint’s figure
silhouetted against the oblong of dim light. Simon was dosing the
window
carefully—and Simon knew quite well that that win
dow had already been
closed when he dropped Stanislaus on
the bed and handcuffed him there. But
the Saint was per
fectly calm about it. He drew the curtains across the
window,
and turned; and his voice spoke evenly out of the dark.

“The notion was very sound, Monty—very
sound indeed,”
he said. “Only it was a little late. You can put the
light on
now.”

Light came, drenching down in a sudden blazing
flood from
the central panel in the ceiling and the alabaster-shaded
brackets along the walls. It quenched itself in the deep green
curtains
and the priceless carpet that had been fitted to a
queen’s bedchamber,
and lay whitely over the spotless linen of
the carved oak bed.
In the middle of that snowy expanse, the
little man looked
queerly black and twisted.

The ivory hilt of a stiletto stood out starkly
from the stained
cloth of his shirt, and his upturned eyes were wide and
staring.
Even as they looked at him, his right hand sagged lower
over
the side of the bed, and the attach
é
case that dangled from his
wrist settled on the floor with a dull thud.

II.
    
HOW
 
SIMON TEMPLAR WAS
 
UNREPENTANT,

AND
 
THE
 
PARTY WAS
 
CONSIDERABLY

PEPPED UP

SIMON unlocked the handcuffs and dropped them
into his
pocket. He was far too accustomed to the sight of sudden
and
violent death to be disturbed in any conventional way by what
had
happened; but even so, a parade of ghostly icicles was
crawling down his
spine. Death that struck so swiftly and mer
cilessly was just a
little more than he had expected to
encounter so early in the festivities.
It was a threat and a challenge that could not be misunderstood.

“How did it happen?” Patricia asked,
breaking the silence
in its sixth second; and the Saint smiled.

“In the simplest possible way,” he
said. “A member of the ungodly trailed us home, and let himself in here
while we were
gargling in the next room. Whoever he was, his sleuthing
form
is alpha
plus
—I was keeping one ear pricked for him all the way,
and I never heard a thing. But if you ask me the reason
why
Stanislaus was bumped, that’ll want a bit more thinking
over.”

The actual physical demise of the little man
left him un
moved. They had not known each other long enough to
become
devoted comrades; and it was doubtful, in any case, whether
the little
man would ever have been inclined to permit such
an affection to
burgeon in his breast. The Saint, whose assess
ment of character was
intuitive and instantaneous, judged him
to be a bloke whose
passing would leave the world singularly unbereaved.

And yet that same unimportant murder wrote a
sentence
into the story which the Saint could read in any
language.

Across the bed, his clear blue gaze levelled
into the eyes of
Monty Hayward with a glimmer of new mockery, and that
reckless
half smile still rested on his lips. Onto his last speech
he tacked
one crackling question:

“Anyone say I wasn’t right?”

“Right about what?” Monty snapped.

“About abducting Stanislaus,” came
the Saint’s crisp reply.
“You both thought I was crazy—thought I
was jumping to
conclusions, and jumping a damned sight too far. But
since
there was nothing else you could do, you gave the jump a trial. Now tell
me I haven’t given you the goods!”

Monty shrugged.

“The goods are there all right,” he
said. “But what are we
supposed to do with them?”

“Get on with what’s left of our sound
notion,” said the Saint.
“Carry on finding out as much as we can
about Stanislaus—
then we may have some more to talk about.”

Already he was examining the little man’s
attach
é
case. His first glance showed him
that the leather had been half
ripped away, doubtless by some other sharp
instrument in the hands of the recent visitor; and then he saw what was inside,
and grasped the reason for the bag’s extraordinary weight. The
little
attach
é
case was nothing but a flimsy
camouflage: inside
it was a blued steel box, and it was to this box itself
that the
chain was riveted through a neat circular hole cut in the
leather
covering. A couple of shrewd slits with a penknife
fetched the covering
away altogether, and the metal box was
comprehensively revealed—one of the
compactest and solidest
little portable safes
that the Saint had ever seen.

Simon ran over its smooth surface with an
expertly pessi
mistic eye. The lid fitted down so perfectly that it
required the
perspicacity of a lynx to spot the join at all. The edge
of a razor couldn’t have sidled into that emaciated fissure—much less the
claw of the
finest jemmy ever made. The only notable break
that occurred anywhere
in that gleaming case-hardened rhomboid was the small square panel in one side
where the com
bination lock showed narrow segments of its four milled
and
lettered
chrome-steel wheels—and even those were matched and
balanced into their aperture so infrangibly that a bacillus on
hunger strike would have felt cramped between
them.

“Can you open it?” asked Monty; and
the Saint shook his
head.

“Not with anything in my outfit. The
bloke who made this
sardine can knew his job.”

He snapped open one of his valises, and
produced a bulging canvas tool-kit which he spread out on the bed. He slid out
a
small knife-bladed file, tested it speculatively on his thumb,
and discarded it. In its place
he selected a black vulcanized
rubber flask.
With a short rod of the same material he care
fully deposited a drop of straw-coloured liquid on one of the
links of the chain, while Monty watched him
curiously.

“Quieter and easier,” explained the
Saint, replacing the
flask in his holdall. “Hydrofluoric
acid—the hungriest liquor
known to chemistry. Eats practically
anything.”

Monty raised his eyebrows.

“Wouldn’t it eat through the sardine
can?”

“Not in twenty years. They’ve got the
measure of these gravies now, where they build their strong-boxes. But the
chain
didn’t come from the same factory. Which is just as well
for us. I
can’t help feeling it would have been darned em
barrassing to have to
wade through life with a strong-box per
manently attached to
the bargain basement of a morgue. It’s
not hygienic.”