The Saint and the People Importers (14 page)

A brief medical examination told Simon that the worst his charge could be suffering was concussion, accompanied by minor modifications of the facial profile which could be nothing but an improvement. But he had no way to tell how much longer the coma might last, so Simon gagged him with his own handkerchief and necktie and went to look for Tammy.

He found her in the upstairs living room, asleep in one of those bulbous overstuffed short-haired chairs that looks as if it had been grown in a cellar along with mushrooms. Her position hinted at exhausted collapse in spite of her assertion that sleep would be impossible.

Simon tried not to disturb her while he moved quietly about the place, checking the drawers of a cabinet and a writing table for any useful information. He found nothing more enlightening than a spider or two and a few ancient and much-thumbed girlie magazines. The rest of the apartment was no more rewarding. The kitchen shelves were stocked with only a can of beans and a can of sardines, and the antique refrigerator offered nothing more nourishing than a bottle of beer. If the flat served as a meeting place for Fowler and associates, it apparently was not regularly inhabited.

Only mildly disappointed and not much surprised by his lack of success, the Saint turned out all the lights and sat down by the window, and watched till the sky began to pale, while Tammy breathed heavily near by. He had made up his mind to rest and relax without dozing off, and his reserves of fitness and strength and mental energy were so great that when he stood up again he was able to confront the day with as much alertness and enthusiasm as he could have garnered from six hours’ sleep.

After a visit to the bathroom, he came back and spoke gently to Tammy.

“Time to get up.”

She groaned and tried to burrow farther down into the cushions. He jigged her shoulder.

“You’ve just been made editor of the Evening Record, and Kalki has offered to divorce Fowler and marry you.”

Her eyes opened slightly and she suddenly jerked upright.

“Oh! What’s happening? I fell asleep!”

“Rose-fingered dawn is about to glide through the fields and glens,” Simon said, “and we want to beat the morning traffic rush into London.”

He took her hand and helped her to her feet. Her cheek was creased lightly from contact with the chair, her hair was in platinum tangles, and her eyes were puffy from sleep. As she stood up she saw her face in a mottled mirror over the fireplace.

“Oh, I look awful!”

“Only the least bit ghastly,” he concurred encouragingly. “Go and see what you can do to repair the damage while I see if Shortwave is still snoring.”

Still holding one hand to her face, she wobbled to the door and glanced back.

“I didn’t mean to go to sleep,” she said. “Did anything happen?”

“Nothing you don’t know about already.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“We’ll talk about that on the road, shall we? I’d just as soon not stick around this house any longer than we have to now that it’s light.”

“Amen!” she said, and hurried out.

The Saint went downstairs to where he had left Shortwave tied and gagged. Because of the small filthy window panes, that room was still almost as dark as night. Simon skirted the human bundle on the floor, and threw open the side door, letting in some of the dim morning light. When he turned, he saw that Shortwave was no longer comatose but wide awake, staring up with glistening eyes, wriggling in his bonds like a netted fish.

“Good morning, Sunshine!” the Saint said to him cheerily. “I hope you had lovely nightmares.”

Shortwave could not say anything because of the handkerchief in his mouth, but he made incoherent and clearly unhappy sounds.

Simon gazed down at him benevolently. Using only one hand, he moved the rifle he carried from the casual angle at which he had allowed it to hang and placed its cold muzzle against Shortwave’s forehead directly between the eyes.

“Take a long look, chum,” he said, with the most ghoulish intonation he could command with a straight face. “Because when I start asking you to recite your lessons, and if you forget anything important, the zero I give for flunking is going to drill straight through your tinplated head …”

4

“But what are we going to do with him?” Tammy asked. “We might have been able to sneak him into one of our flats at night, but now we’d never get away with it.”

She referred to Shortwave, who was now neatly tucked away in the trunk of the late Mahmud’s car. Simon, at the wheel, had left the boathouse behind and was feeling his way from one crossroads to the next on his way to the main London highway.

“It’s just as well we can’t sneak him into one of our flats,” he said. “He’s not the kind of house guest I’d enjoy anyway.”

“What can we do with him, then?”

She had been tensing visibly whenever some workbound driver came into view in his dew-covered automobile, as if each car might harbour a whole troop of detectives specifically charged with rooting Shortwave out from under a blanket in the boot of a late-model Ford.

“We can do the same sort of things to him that he was going to do to us,” the Saint said nonchalantly. “Or at any rate we can threaten to. Until we get what we want out of him.”

“I’m starting to wish I’d stuck to plain reporting,” Tammy said. “Let’s just give ourselves and him up to the police.”

“Why should we give ourselves up to anybody?” the Saint asked. “We haven’t done anything wicked yet.”

Tammy looked at his innocent profile with surprise in her wide eyes, like one child witnessing another in some undreamed-of audacity. In the few minutes it had taken them to prepare to leave the boathouse the ravages of the strenuous night had disappeared from her face, leaving her as fresh as the approaching dawn.

“But back there,” she began, “you …”

Simon raised one finger to his lips.

“See no evil, speak no evil,” he said. “I have an excellent memory, and all I can remember about that place is that we were kidnapped and left there tied up, possibly to be murdered later, but we managed to untie ourselves and escape, because they were too silly to leave anyone to guard us. Isn’t that approximately what you remember?”

She sat back and shook her head. There was the suspicion of a smile on her lightly reddened lips.

“Approximately,” she murmured.

The Saint glanced at her with deep aesthetic appreciation.

“So,” he said, “we don’t have anything to give ourselves up for, do we? Our object, in fact, is to keep ourselves free and mobile so that we can track down Kalki the Corn-ball and his nautical buddy, and get your exclusive story.

We aren’t going to the police yet because that would put all the other newspapers on the trail.”

“Lovely,” she said. “Except we don’t have the faintest idea where they are.”

“We will,” Simon replied, “as soon as we’ve had a heart-to-heart chat with our little friend in the trunk. We already know Fowler is making some kind of pick-up tonight, and I don’t think he means in Shepherd Market.”

Tammy gave a despairing sigh.

“Then we should have waited somewhere where we could watch the boathouse. You already guessed that he was planning to bring his immigrants there.”

” ‘Planning’ is the operative word. From the look of the place, it’s still being prepared for that. Fowler mightn’t be planning to inaugurate it today. You could see, it’s still being worked on. And after last night, he might even feel more like postponing the grand opening. So we can’t afford to take the chance. Since it’s a fair bet that he’ll still use another old-established landing place tonight, I’d rather try to catch him even farther up the line. And that’s where fate allows Shortwave his moment of glory. Against a Wagnerian background transmitted direct to him from Radio Three, he will sing for us at the top of his miserable little lungs, in the course of which concert we shall learn just exactly where Commander Fowler is running his moonlight cruise this evening.”

They had finally come to a highway which a signpost identified as the A40, and Simon swung the car eastwards towards London. The misty pearl-grey of the sky was still barely tinged with pink, and the roads were almost deserted in the hush between the tardiest stragglers and the front-runners of the matutinal deluge.

“So,” he continued, “we’ll take Shortwave to a cosy spot where he can warm up for his command performance, and then I’ll be on my way to foul up Captain Fowler.”

“We’ll be on our way,” she corrected. “Don’t forget our bargain.”

“Sorry,” he said. “My memory is perfect but a bit selective.”

“So I gathered,” she said. “You’ve almost forgotten to tell me where this cosy spot is where we’re taking Shortwave.”

“The Golden Crescent,” Simon answered.

She stared at him.

“That restaurant? Why there?”

“Because neither of us wants him home, so that was the best place I could think of to park him. Do you know the owner?”

“I’ve seen him when I was poking around looking for leads on my story, that’s all.”

The Saint accelerated around a lumbering truck which was already making a heroic start on polluting the atmosphere of the new-borning day with the abominable fumes of the unlamentable Herr Rudolf Diesel’s contribution to the horrors of the internal combustion engine.

“Well,” he continued, “Mr. Haroon’s role in this immigrant game isn’t completely clear to me, and I’d like to get it straight. Obviously Fowler and his friends have felt chumsy enough with Haroon to make his restaurant a meeting place-“

“But Kalki said Haroon wasn’t part of the gang,” Tammy interrupted.

“Right. Which I could believe. On the other hand, they must have him pretty well under their thumbs, or they couldn’t risk working as close to him as they have.”

On the almost deserted roads, their speed was limited by practically nothing but his discretion, and in what seemed no time at all they were running into Kensington.

“They’ve probably just got him scared to death the way they have everybody else,” Tammy said.

“Probably,” Simon agreed. “I wouldn’t guess that our fat friendly restaurateur is the bravest or strongest man in the world. He’s got an imbalance of blubber over moral fibre. If we need him on the side of the angels, we’ll just have to scare him worse than the bad guys did. But we can’t afford to have an uncertain factor rattling around in the works at this stage, and Mr. Haroon is certainly an uncertain factor, so we’ll drop in for breakfast with Shortwave and see what we can do about battening them both down.”

“He won’t be open this early.”

“We could hardly do this during business hours-that’s why we had to wait out most of the night at that boathouse. But he lives right above the restaurant,” Simon told her. “He’ll probably still be in bed counting cheap sheep jumping into his saucepans.”

When they arrived at the alley behind the Golden Crescent, it was just after six o’clock. The city was barely coming to life, outside of the meat and produce market districts; and in this area dominated by restaurants and theatres, their doors all closed, there was still more an atmosphere of sleeping off the night before than of getting ready for a new day’s business. The few pedestrians seemed on their way to somewhere else, and in the alley there was no sign of life at all.

Simon pulled up at the back door of Haroon’s establishment and switched off the car’s engine.

“Have you ever been to his flat?” Tammy asked.

“No, but he once showed me a separate door around on the street in front. You wait here while I go rouse him and have him open this entrance.”

“You’re not supposed to go anywhere without me,” she said.

The Saint looked momentarily tired.

“I seem to remember that you said that before. Surely we can be parted for three or four minutes without your hurling yourself off Lovers’ Leap.”

“Do you promise you won’t try to give me the slip?” she asked earnestly.

“I do so swear,” he said. “I won’t be gone any longer than it takes to pump up Abdul for the day and roll him down the stairs. All right?”

“All right,” she said. “But I still don’t see why I have to stay here.” She looked over behind her seat. “He certainly can’t get away.”

“That’s what he would have said about us at one point last night,” the Saint reminded her. “But let’s also hope that he hasn’t suffocated by this time. If he has, it might solve Abdul’s meat problem, but it won’t help us.”

He avoided any more discussion by getting quickly out of the car and walking down to the alley’s mouth and around to the front of the restaurant. Next to it was an open doorway exposing worn wooden stairs which led to rooms above the street level. The staircase was dark and smelled sour, like old beer. At the top, to the left and right, Simon found a choice of two doors. The one on the right bore a thumbtacked card signed “Evans” and the one to the left was unmarked.

The Saint knocked on the left-hand door. Presently there was a scuffling sound from within, and then silence. Simon rapped on the door again. More silence.

“Abdul,” he called softly. “This is Simon Templar.”

Reluctant footsteps approached the door.

“Mr. Templar?” Haroon’s voice asked. “It is you, is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“What do you want?”

“Are you always this friendly with big-spending customers?” the Saint enquired. “Among other things, I want to help your business.”

A key rattled in the lock and the door opened a fraction.

Then it opened fully and revealed Abdul Haroon in leather slippers, dark trousers, and clean open-collared white shirt. He looked freshly scrubbed and shaven, like a Grade A apple.

“I don’t want any trouble with anybody,” he said hastily, holding one plump hand out as if he might try to fend off the Saint if he tried to cross the threshold.

“You won’t have any if you’re a good fellow and help me,” Simon told him pleasantly. “As I understand the situation, you’ve had a little trouble making up your mind just whose side you’re on in this business of Kalki’s and Fowler’s, and it’s about time-“

Haroon’s shiny round face suddenly stretched into a great tremulous pudding of dismay.