The Saint Abroad: The Art Collectors/ the Persistent Patriots (28 page)

“If you’d seen the way he was lying,
even you would have
noticed it yourself, Claud. It was an amateurish job,
done in a hurry. If you’re going to kill yourself you don’t go
through the discomfort of
twisting your arm around and
shooting
yourself from some odd angle behind the ear.”

“You might,” Teal said,
instinctively rejecting anything the
Saint proposed.

“You
might,” Simon said to him, “but Liskard was never
an idiot.”

Teal walked stolidly to the window.

“And there’s this,” he continued.
“Was this window open
when you found him? It’s a cold night. He
wouldn’t have
left it open, would he?”

“Not likely,” Stewart said. “In fact he was very
sensitive
to cold. Most of us are, raised in
a tropical climate.”

“So,” said Teal, “someone may have come in, shot
him,
left the note, and escaped through the
window.”

“Great Scot!” the Saint exclaimed
admiringly. “I think
he’s got it!”

The detective looked at Simon with the face
of a soured
persimmon.

“Is there any reason for Mr Templar to be
here?” he
enquired stiffly.

“He and my husband were working to catch
these blackmailers,” Anne Liskard explained. “Mr Stewart and Mr Todd
will tell you the rest. I must get dressed and go to the
hospital.
There may be something I can do for Tom.”

She went toward the door as Todd came back
from the
hall.

“I’ve phoned our P.R.O.,” he said
to the group in general.
“He’ll do what he can to squelch any stories in the papers
about the letters.”

Simon turned to Teal after Anne Liskard had
gone on
before him into the hall.

“Could I speak to you alone for a
minute, Claud?”

Teal followed him out to the driveway where
they could speak without being overheard. Simon filled the detective in on what
had taken place since they had met in the Mister
Snowball van.

“Now listen, Claud,” he said
firmly. “I know you’d like to
devote yourself exclusively to proving
me wrong, but there’s
more at stake than your reputation and my
self-interest.”

He lowered his voice. “You won’t find
any footprints outside
the window except mine, and the guard on the
gate himself
can testify that I was outside these grounds when the
shot
was fired.”

“So it
was
a suicide
attempt?”

“No. It was attempted murder. By
somebody in the build
ing.”

“Who?” Teal retorted.

“I may be brilliant, but I’m not totally
omniscient. It was
undoubtedly somebody in on the plot with Jeff Peterson.
I’m sure the scheme was
something like this: use the letters
to
give Liskard a motive for suicide, and then commit the
suicide for him since he wouldn’t do it
himself—leaving the
window open as a
false clue to murder if the suicide setup
wasn’t convincing enough. His death was to be the cue for
a revolution of some sort in Nagawiland, probably
in the
name of equality and
democracy, but in fact a power grab.
Peterson
and his father, who’s back in Nagawiland, were in on it, but Peterson’s father
would never be accepted as head
of
state. He’s a notorious alcoholic down there. The top man
still hasn’t blown his horn.”

“So you have it all figured out,”
Teal said slowly. “Except
the small matter of who did it.”

The Saint shrugged.

“I can’t do all your work for you, Claud—I’m only trying
to do most of your thinking. Now if you’ll try to
control
your natural envy of superior
intellects, I’ll let you in on a
brilliant
plan I’ve come up with for catching the leader of
this conspiracy.”

Teal managed a rather theatrical sneer.

“What plan would that be?” he
grumbled. “Torture the
ones we’ve caught until they tell who the boss
is?”

“No, Claud, I’m suggesting we
not
use
standard police
methods this time.” Simon looked warily around.
“If you want
to catch your man before breakfast, don’t waste any more
of my time
here—and don’t try to keep me out of that
hospital. Whatever
other ideas you have about me, you know
me well enough by
now to know that murdering a man like
Liskard isn’t my kind of fun. But if
you’ll cooperate with me
this time, you can have all the glory.”

His tone was no longer mocking, and the
detective had
jousted with him for long years enough to recognize his
sin
cerity.

Teal peered at him torpidly, chomping his gum
like a
shrewd and very thoughtful cow. A cartoonist depicting the
scene
might have drawn a small and almost wattless bulb
glowing feebly above his head.

“You’re thinking of a trap,” he
stated expressionlessly.

“Good for you, Claud, old
tortoise,” Simon congratulated
him. “And it needs you to help
rig the cheese.”

12

Nearly three hours later, on the third floor
of the Edging
ton
Hospital, a doctor appeared at one end of a corridor as
two other doctors came out of a room and walked away
along the corridor in the other direction. Another
door on
the same corridor was flanked
by a uniformed policeman
and a plain-clothes detective. A student nurse
carrying a
covered metal tray came out of
that room and followed the
two
doctors.

No one paid any particular attention to the
doctor who
then walked alone down the corridor. He wore a white
smock
which covered his body from his shoulders to his knees. Over
his mouth
and nose was a white mask, and a white cap
closely covered the
top of his head and his forehead. At the
guarded door he
merely nodded to the detective, opened the
door, and stepped in.
Beyond a small alcove was the pa
tient’s bed. The patient lay still, his own
head thoroughly
bandaged. Only his eyes were not covered by gauze, and
they
were closed.

A nurse who was sitting near the bed stood up
and looked
at the doctor in surprise.

“I thought he was supposed to
sleep,” she said.

“He is,” the doctor whispered.
“But his reaction in the
next hour may be critical. Please get
everything prepared for
a transfusion if necessary. And while you’re
at it, you’d
better also ask for an oxygen tent.”

The nurse peered at his eyes.

“I’m sorry, doctor, but I don’t recognize
…”

“Bronson,” he said impatiently. “I’m on the Prime
Min
ister’s personal staff—from Nagawiland.
Now, if you please …”

The nurse, accustomed to obeying doctors
without ques
tion, thinned her lips, nodded, and left the room.

Instantly the doctor hurried to the bed. The
patient lay
still, his breathing slow and shallow, only his closed
eyes
showing through the bands of gauze and adhesive that
swathed
his head. With a swift glance over his shoulder at
the door, the doctor
pulled something that looked like a thin
pointed stick from
beneath his white smock. He bent over the bed, bringing the long slender shaft
down toward the
throat of the man in the bed.

The patient suddenly came to life. He rolled
violently
toward
the doctor, catching him low in the stomach with a foot that shot out from
between the sheets and sent him
tumbling
back across the room. The doctor’s eyes were wide
with surprise and
panic. The patient flung back the covers
and
sprang out on his feet. The doctor reeled back toward
the door, wildly
swinging the stick to cover his retreat; but
the
patient now had an automatic in his hand, pointing
accurately at the center of the doctor’s chest

“If I were in the movies,” came Simon Templar’s voice
from behind the patient’s mask, “I’d say,
Sorry to interrupt
your operation,
doctor, but this time I’m afraid you’re the one who gets stuck.”

The doctor froze, his back to the alcove
which led into the
main corridor.

“Now drop that Magic wand—which looks
to me like a
souvenir Nagawi arrow, probably dipped in some jolly
native
poison,” Simon said, pulling off his own bandages.

The other man seemed about to obey, but then
he drew
back his arm and flicked his wrist, and the arrow flashed
through
the air toward the Saint. Simon ducked aside, and the
sharp stained point
whipped past his ear and clattered against
the wall beyond the
bed in which he had been lying.

He could easily have shot his opponent dead in
that
single second, even while he was dodging the arrow, which
might actually have been what
the other was hoping for, if
his last
desperate throw failed to inflict a scratch which could
likely have been lethal. But the Saint wanted him
alive. So when the man followed the arrow with a wild suicidal lunge
at him, Simon once more held his fire, but
sidestepped and
deflected the blow
with a numbing karate cut into the forearm. His own right hand jabbed the gun
muzzle cruelly into
the
“doctor’s” belly. His left caught him flat on the side of
his head, and then snatched away the white mask.

“Foreign Minister Todd,” Simon
said pleasantly. “I sup
pose this is a sample of how your followers
would have gone
back to nature if your little revolution had come
off?”

Todd tried another futile swing even though
he was dazed and against the wall. He succeeded only in knocking over a table
lamp. Simon swung him around and locked him in a
comparatively painless if undignified judo
hold.

“One thing you’re not,” the Saint
said regretfully, “and that’s a fighter. I suppose those diplomatic
cocktail parties
aren’t the best exercise in the world. All right,
everybody—
the show’s over.”

The door of the communicating lavatory burst
open, and
half a dozen people came through it in fairly rapid
succession.
Among them were two police officers and Chief Inspector
Claud
Eustace Teal.

Simon released Todd with a motion that swung
him
directly into Teal’s arms.

“Liskard’s dead?” Todd asked as he
was put in handcuffs.

“Don’t sound so hopeful,” Simon
answered. “You’re as
bad a shot as you are a brawler. You fractured his jaw, but
that should only increase any politician’s
popularity.”

Anne Liskard had also come into the room.
She stared at
Todd with shock and horror.

“Why?” was all she could say.

“He’s a tyrant!” Todd screamed
hysterically.

“And you wanted to take his place—which
is both more
truthful and to the point,” Simon put in.
“Obviously you
didn’t have any hope of getting all the way to the top on
your own merits, so you thought it easily might be worth a
couple of
thousand lives to get there through a coup.”

“It’s a revolution!” Todd raved
defiantly. “It can go on
without me.”

“There is no revolution,” Anne
Liskard said to him icily.
“And I don’t know how even somebody as
low as you could
have
the nerve to use that word for the bloody little game
you’re playing.”

She and Todd glared at one another. Teal took
the
prisoner’s arm and pulled him toward the door.

“Coming, Templar?” he asked.

“No, thanks, Claud. I’ll let you bask in
whatever limelight
you can scrape together at this hour of the morning. The
one
thing I want in the world at this point is some sleep.”

Teal and his troops left with Todd. As Simon
followed, Anne Liskard touched his arm. Her whole manner had
changed
since he had first met her.

“I don’t know what I can do to…”