The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (9 page)

“Just one word”—it whispered invitingly—“just one word out of you, Al, and your life is going to be even shorter than I expected.”

Mr Eisenfeld stood still, with his muscles rigid. He was not a physical coward but the grip which held his head pressed back against the chest of the unknown man behind him had a firm competence which announced that there were adequate sinews behind it to back up its persuasion in any hand-to-hand struggle. Also, the object which prodded into the middle of his spine constituted an argument in itself which he was wise enough to understand.

The clasp on his mouth relaxed tentatively and slid down to rest lightly on his throat. The same gentle voice breathed again on his right eardrum.

“Let us go out into the great open spaces and look at the night,” said the Saint.

Mr Eisenfeld allowed himself to be conducted back down the walk over which he had just returned. He had very little choice in the matter. The gun of the uninvited guest remained glued to his backbone as if it intended to take root there, and he knew that the fingers which rested so caressingly on his windpipe would have detected the first shout he tried to utter before it could reach his vocal cords.

A few yards down the road a car waited with its lights burning. They stopped beside it.

“Open the door and get in.”

Mr Eisenfeld obeyed. The gun slipped round from his back to his left side as his escort followed him into the seat behind the wheel. Simon started the engine and reached over to slip the gear lever into first. The headlights were switched on as they moved away from the curb; and Mr Eisenfeld found his first opportunity of giving vent to the emotions that were chasing themselves through his system.

“What the hell’s the idea of this?” he demanded violently.

“We’re going for a little drive, dear old bird,” answered the Saint. “But I promise you won’t have to walk home. My intentions are more honourable than anyone like you could easily imagine.”

“If you’re trying to kidnap me,” Eisenfeld blustered, “I’m telling you you can’t get away with it. I’ll see that you get what’s coming to you ! Why, you …”

Simon let him make his speech without interruption. The lights of the residential section twinkled steadily past them, and presently even Eisenfeld’s flood of outraged eloquence dwindled away before that impenetrable calm. They drove on over the practically deserted roads—it was after midnight, and there were very few attractions in that area to induce the pious citizens of Elmford to lose their beauty sleep—and presently Mr Eisenfeld realized that their route would take them past the site of the almost completed Elmford Riviera on the bank of the river above the town.

He was right in his deduction, except for the word “past.” As a matter of fact, the car jolted off the main highway onto the unfinished road which led down to Elmford’s playground; and exactly in the middle of the two-mile esplanade, under the very shadow of the central monument which Sam Purdell had been so modestly unwilling to accept, it stopped.

“This is as far as we go,” said the Saint, and motioned politely to the door.

Mr Eisenfeld got out. He was sweating a little with perfectly natural fear, and above that there was a growing cloud of mystification through which he was trying to discover some coherent design in the extraordinary series of events which had enveloped him in those last few minutes. He seemed to be caught up in the machinery of some hideous nightmare, in which the horror was intensified by the fact that he could find no reason in the way it moved. If he was indeed the victim of an attempt at kidnapping, he couldn’t understand why he should have been brought to a place like that; but just then there was no other explanation that he could see.

The spidery lines of scaffolding on the monument rose up in a futuristic filigree over his head, and at the top of it the shadowy outlines of the chute where the cement was mixed and poured into the hollow mould of stone roosted like a grotesque and angular prehistoric bird.

“Now we’ll climb up and look at the view,” said the Saint.

Still wondering, Mr Eisenfeld felt himself steered towards a ladder which ran up one side of the scaffolding. He climbed mechanically, as he was ordered, while a stream of unanswerable questions drummed bewil-deringly through his brain. Once the wild idea came to him to kick downwards at the head of the man who followed him; but when he looked down he saw that the head was several rungs below his feet, keeping a safely measured distance, and when he stopped climbing, the man behind him stopped also. Eisenfeld went on, up through the dark. He could have shouted then, but he knew that he was a mile or more from the nearest prison who might have heard him.

They came out on the plank staging which ran around the top of the monument. A moment later, as he looked back, he saw the silhouette of his unaccountable kidnapper rising up against the dimly luminous background of stars and reaching the platform to lean lazily against one of the ragged ends of scaffold pole which rose above the narrow catwalk. Behind him, the hollow shaft of the monument was a square void of deeper blackness in the surrounding dark.

“This is the end of your journey, Al,” said the stranger softly. “But before you go, there are just one or two things I’d like to remind you about. Also, we haven’t been properly introduced, which is probably making things rather difficult for you. You had better know me … I am the Saint.”

Eisenfeld started and almost overbalanced. Where had he heard that name before? Suddenly he remembered, and an uncanny chill crawled over his flesh.

“There are various reasons why it doesn’t seem necessary for you to go on living,” went on that very gentle and dispassionate voice, “and your ugly face is only one of them. This is a pretty cockeyed world when you take it all round, but people like you don’t improve it. Also, I have heard a story from a girl called Molly Provost —her father was Police Commissioner until Tuesday night, I believe.”

“She’s a liar,” gasped Eisenfeld hoarsely. “You’re crazy! Listen–-“

He would have sworn that the stranger had never touched him except with his gun since they got into the car, but suddenly an electric flashlight spilled a tiny strip of luminance over the boards between them, and in the bright centre of the beam he saw the other’s hand running through the contents of a wallet which looked somehow familiar. All at once Eisenfeld recognized it and clutched unbelievingly at his pocket. The wallet which his guest had given him an hour ago was gone; and Eisenfeld’s heart almost stopped beating.

“What are you doing with that ?” he croaked.

“Just seeing how much this installment of graft is worth,” answered the Saint calmly. “And it looks exactly like thirty thousand dollars to me. Well, it might have been more, but I suppose it will have to do. I promised Molly that I’d see she was looked after, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be at your expense. Part of this is your commission for getting this cenotaph filled with cement, isn’t it? … It seems very appropriate.”

Eisenfeld’s throat constricted, and the blood began to pound in his temples.

“I’ll get you for this,” he snarled. “You lousy crook.”

“Maybe I am a crook,” said the Saint, in a voice that was no more than a breath of sound in the still night. “But in between times I’m something more. In my simple way I am a kind of justice… . Do you know any good reason why you should wait any longer for what you deserve?”

There is a time in every man’s life when he knows beyond doubt or common fear that the threads of destiny are running out. It had happened to Al Eisenfeld too suddenly for him to understand—he had no time to look back and count the incredible minutes in which his world had been turned upside down. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea what he was doing, but he knew that he was hearing death in the quiet voice that spoke out of the darkness in front of him.

His muscles carried him away without any conscious command from his brain, and he was unaware of the queer growling cry that rattled in his throat. There was a crash of sound in front of him as he sprang blindly forward, and a tongue of reddish-orange flame spat out of the darkness almost in his face… .

Simon Templar steadied himself on one of the scaffold poles and stared down into the square black mould of the monument; but there was nothing that he could see, and the silence was unbroken. After a while his fingers let go the gun, and a couple of seconds later the thud of its burying itself in the wet cement at the bottom of the shaft echoed hollowly back to him.

Presently he climbed up to the chute from which the monument was being filled. He found a great mound of sacks of cement stacked beside it ready for use, and, after a little more search, a hose conveniently arranged to provide water. He was busy for three hours before he decided that he had done enough.

“And knowing that these thoughts are beating in all our hearts,” boomed the voice of the Distinguished Personage through eight loud-speakers, “it will always be my proudest memory that I was deemed worthy of the honour of unveiling this eternal testimonial to the man who has devoted his life to the task of making the people of Elmford proud and happy in their great city—the mayor whom you all know and love so well, Sam Purdell!”

The flag which covered the carved inscription on the base of the Purdell memorial fluttered down. A burst of well-organized cheering volleyed from five thousand throats. The cameramen dashed forward with clicking shutters. The bandmaster raised his baton. The brass and wood winds inflated their lungs. A small urchin close to the platform swallowed a piece of chewing gum, choked, and began to cry… „ The strains of the “Star Spangled Banner” blasted throbbingly through the afternoon air.

Then, to the accompaniment of a fresh howl of cheering, Sam Purdell stepped to the microphone. He wiped his eyes and swallowed once or twice before he spoke.

“My friends,” he said, “this is not a time when I would ask you to listen to a speecn. There ain’t–isn’t anything I can think of worthy of this honour you have done me. I can only repeat the promise which you have all heard me make before—that while I am Mayor of this city there will be only one principle in everything over which I have control: Honesty and a square deal for every man, woman and child in Elmford.”

The cheers followed his car as he drove away accompanied by his round perspiring wife and his round perspiring daughters. Mrs Purdell clutched his hand in a warm moist grip.

“That was such a beautiful speech you made, Sam,” she said a little tearfully.

Sam Purdell shook his head. He had one secret sorrow.

“I wish Al could have been there,” he said.

IV THE WICKED COUSIN

When simon templar arrived in Los Angeles there was a leaden ceiling of cloud over the sky and a cool wind blowing. A few drops of unenthusiastic rain moistened the pavements and speckled the shoulders of his coat. The porter who was loading his bags into a taxi assured him that it was most unusual weather, and he felt instantly at home.

Later on, comfortably stretched out on a divan in the sitting room of his suite at the hotel in Hollywood upon which he had chosen to confer the somewhat debatable honour of his tenancy, with a highball at his elbow and a freshly lighted cigarette smouldering contentedly between his lips, he turned the pages of the address book on his knee and considered what his next steps should be to improve that first feeling of a welcome return.

He was not there on business. To be quite accurate, none of the stages of the last few months of carefree wandering which had just completed their vague object of leading him across America from coast to coast had been undertaken with a view to business. If business had materialized on more than one occasion, it was be-cause there was something about Simon Templar which attracted adventure by the same kind of mysterious but inescapable cosmic law which compels a magnet to attract steel or a politician to attract attention; and if much of that business was not looked upon favourably by the Law—or would not have been favourably looked upon if the Law had known all that there was to know about it—this was because Simon Templar’s business had an unfortunate habit of falling into categories which gave many people good reason to wonder what right he had to the nickname of the Saint by which he was far more widely known than he was by his baptismal titles. It is true that these buccaneering raids of his which had earned him the subtitle of “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” were invariably undertaken against the property, and occasionally the persons, of citizens who by no stretch of the imagination could have been called desirable; but the Law took no official cognizance of such small details. The Law, in the Saint’s opinion, was a stodgy and elephantine institution which was chiefly justified in its existence by the pleasantly musical explosive noises which it made when he broke it. Certainly he was not thinking of business. In Hollywood he had many genuine friends, few of whom gave much consideration to the sensational legends that were associated with his name in less unsophisticated circles, and his only immediate problem was to which one of them he should first break the dazzling news of his arrival. He paused at one name after another, recalling its personality: movie executives, directors, writers, actors and actresses both great and small and a certain number of ordinary human beings. He wanted—what did he want? A touch of excitement, preferably feminine, beauty, a little of the glamour and gay unreality with which the very name of Hollywood is inseparably linked in imagination if not in fact. He wanted some of these things very much. His last stop had been made in the state of Utah.

There was a girl called Jacqueline Laine whom Simon remembered suddenly, as one does sometimes remember people, with a sense of startling familiarity and a kind of guilty amazement that he should have allowed her to slip out of his mind for so long. Once she was remembered, he had no more hesitation. No one else could have been so obviously the one person in the world whom he had to call up at that moment.

He picked up the telephone.

“Hello, Jacqueline,” he said when she answered. “Do you know who this is?”