The Saint Closes the Case (19 page)

The man went on: “The Doctor is a great
man. He is the
greatest man in the world. You should have seen how he
arranged
everything in two minutes. It was magnificent. He
is Napoleon born
again. He is going to make our country the
greatest country in
the world. And you fools try to fight
him——
”

The speech merged into an unintelligible
outburst in the
man’s native tongue; but Roger understood enough. He un
derstood
that a man who could delude his servants into such
a fanatical loyalty
was no small man. And he wondered what
chance the Saint would
ever have had of convincing anyone that Marius was concerned with no patriotism
and no nation
alities, but only with his own gods of money and power.

The first flush of futile anger ebbed from
Conway’s face,
and he lay in stolid silence as he was tied, revolving
plot
and counter-plot in his mind. Hermann, failing to rouse him
with
taunts, struck him twice across the face. Roger never
moved. And the man
spat at him again.

“It is as I thought. You have no
courage, you dogs of Eng
lishmen. It is only when you are many against
one little one—
then you are brave.”

“Oh, quite,” said Roger wearily.

Hermann glowered at him.

“Now, if you had been the one who hit
me——
”

The shrill scream of a bell wailed through
the apartment
with a suddenness that made the conventional sound
electrify
ing. Hermann stopped, stiffening, in the middle of his
sen
tence. And a sour leer came into his face.

“Now I welcome your friend, pig.”

Roger drew a deep breath.

He must have been careless, obvious about it,
for Roger
Conway’s was not a mind much given to cunning. Or
possibly Hermann had been expecting some such move, subconsciously,
and had
his ears pricked for the sound. But he stopped on his way to the door and
turned.

“You would try to give warning,
Englishman?” he purred.

His gun was in his hand. He reached Roger in
three strides.

Roger knew he was up against it. If he didn’t
shout, his one
chance of rescue, so far as he could see, was dished—and
Nor
man Kent with it. If he looked like shouting, he’d be laid out again.
And, if it came to that, since his intention of shouting
had
already been divined, he’d probably be laid out any
way. Hermann wasn’t
the sort of man to waste time gagging
his prisoner. So——

“Go to blazes,” said Roger
recklessly.

Then he yelled.

An instant later Hermann’s gun-butt crashed
into the side
of
his head.

Again he should have been stunned; but he
wasn’t. He decided afterwards that he must have a skull a couple of inches
thick, and
the constitution of an ox with it, to have stood up
to as much as he had.
But the fact remained that he was laid out without being stunned; and he lay
still, trying to collect
himself in time to loose a second yell as
Hermann opened the
door.

Hermann straightened up, turning his gun round
again. He
put it in his coat pocket, keeping his finger on the
trigger; and
then, with something like a panicking terror that the warn
ing might
have been heard and accepted by the person outside
the front door, he
scrambled rather than ran out of the room,
cursing under his
breath.

But the ring was repeated as he reached the
front door, and
the sound reassured him. He could not believe that anyone
who had
heard and understood that one yell would have
rung again so promptly
after it. Whereby Hermann showed
himself a less ingenious psychologist than
the man out
side… .

He opened the door, keeping himself hidden
behind it.

No one entered.

He waited, with a kind of superstitious fear
trickling down his back like a tiny cascade of ice-cold water. Nothing hap
pened—and
yet the second ring had sounded only a moment before he opened the door, and no
one who had rung a second time would go away at once, without waiting to see if
the re
newed
summons would be answered.

Then Conway yelled again: “Look out,
Norman!”

Hermann swore in a whisper.

But now he had no choice. He had been given
his orders. The man who came was to be taken. And certainly the man
who had come, who must have
heard Conway’s second cry even
if he had not
heard the first, could not be allowed to escape
and raise an alarm.

Incautiously, Hermann stepped to the door.

His feet were scarcely clear of the threshold,
outside on
the landing, when a hand like a ham caught his throat
from
behind, over his shoulder, and another enormous hand
gripped
his gun-wrist like a vice. He was as helpless as a child.

The hand at his throat twisted his face round
to the light.
He saw a ponderous red face with sleepy eyes, connected
by
a pillar of
neck with shoulders worthy of a buffalo.

“Come along,” said Chief Inspector
Claud Eustace Teal drowsily. “Come along back to where you sprang from,
and
open your heart to Uncle!”

10. How Simon Templar drove to Bures,

and two policemen jumped in time

The road out of London on the north-east is
one of the less
pleasant ways of finding the open country. For one thing,
it
is infested with miles of tramway, crawling, interminable,
blocking
the traffic, maddening to the man at the wheel of a fast car—especially
maddening to the man in a hurry at the
wheel of a fast car.

Late as it was, there was enough traffic on
the road to balk
the Saint of clear runs of more than a few hundred yards
at
a time. And every time he was forced to apply the brakes,
pause, and reaccelerate, was
pulling his average down.

There was a quicker route than the one he was
taking, he
knew. He had been taken over it once—a route that wound
intricately through deserted side streets, occasionally crossing
the more
populous thoroughfares, and then hurriedly break
ing away into the
empty roads again. It was longer, but it was
quicker to traverse.
But the Saint had only been over it that
once, and that by
daylight; now, in the dark, he could not
have trusted himself
to find it again. The landmarks that a
driver automatically
picks out by day are of little use to him in
the changed aspect of
lamplight. And to get lost would be more
maddening than the
obstruction of the traffic. To waste min
utes, and perhaps
miles, travelling in the wrong direction, to
be muddled by the
vague and contradictory directions of ac
costed pedestrians and
police, to be plagued and pestered
with the continual uncertainty—that
would have driven him
to the verge of delirium. The advantage that
might be gained
wasn’t worth all that might be lost. He had decided as
much
when he swung into the car in Brook Street. And he kept to
the main
roads.

He smashed through the traffic grimly, seizing every oppor
tunity that offered, creating other opportunities
of his own
in defiance of every law
and principle and point of etiquette
governing the use of His Majesty’s
highway, winning priceless
seconds where
and how he could.
        

Other drivers cursed him; two policemen called
on him
to stop, were ignored, and took his number; he scraped a wing in a
desperate rush through a gap that no one else would ever
have
considered a gap at all; three times he missed death by a
miracle
while overtaking on a blind corner; and the pugna
cious driver of a
baby car who ventured to insist on his right
ful share of the road
went white as the Hirondel forced him
on to the kerb to escape annihilation.

It was an incomparable exhibition of pure
hogging, and it
made everything of that kind that Roger Conway had been
told to do
earlier in the evening look like a child’s game with
a push-cart; but the
Saint didn’t care. He was on his way; and
if the rest of the
population objected to the manner of his
going, they could do
one of two things with their objections.

Some who saw the passage of the Saint that
night will remember it to the end of their lives; for the Hirondel, as though
recognising
the hand of a master at its wheel, became almost
a living thing. King
of the Road its makers called it, but that
night the Hirondel was
more than a king: it was the incarnation and apotheosis of all cars. For the
Saint drove with the
devil at his shoulder, and the Hirondel took
its mood from his.
If this had been a superstitious age, those who saw it
would
have crossed themselves and sworn that it was no car at all
they saw
that night, but a snarling silver fiend that roared
through London on the
wings of an unearthly wind.

For half an hour … with the Saint’s thumb
restless on the
button of the klaxon, and the strident voice of the
silver fiend
howling for avenue in a tone that brooked no contention
… and
then the houses thinned away and gave place to the first fields, and the Saint
settled down to the job—coaxing,
with hands as sure and gentle as any
horseman’s, the last pos
sible ounce of effort out of the hundred
horses under his
control… .

There was darkness on either side: the only
light in the
world lay along the tunnel which the powerful headlights
slashed out
of the stubborn blackness. From time to time, out
of the dark, a great
beast with eyes of fire leapt at him,
clamouring, was slipped as a charging
bull is slipped by a
toreador, went by with a baffled grunt and a
skimming
slither of wind. And again and again, in the dark, the
Hirondel
swooped up behind ridiculous, creeping glow-worms,
sniffed at
their red tails, snorted derisively, swept past with a
deep-throated blare.
No car in England could have held the lead of the Hirondel that night

The drone of the great engine went on as a
background of gigantic song; it sang in tune with the soft swish of the tyres
and the rush of the cool night air; and the song it sang was:
“Patricia
Holm… . Patricia…. Patricia… . Patricia Holm!”

And the Saint had no idea what he was going to
do. Nor was
he thinking about it. He knew nothing of the geography of
the “house on the hill”—nothing of the lie of the surrounding
land—nothing of the obstacles that might bar his way, nor of the resistance
that would be offered to his attack. And so he
was not jading himself
with thinking of these things. They
were beyond the reach of idle
speculation. He had no clue:
therefore it would have been a waste of time
to speculate. He
could only live for the moment, and the task of the
moment—
to hurl himself eastwards across England like a thunderbolt
into the
battle that lay ahead.

“Patricia… . Patricia! …”

Softly the Saint took up the song; but his own
voice could not be heard from the voice of the Hirondel. The song of the
car bayed
over wide spaces of country, was bruised and bat
tered between the
walls of startled village streets, was flung
back in rolling echoes from the walls of
hills.

That he was going to an almost blindfold
assault took noth
ing from his rapture. Rather, he savoured the adventure
the more; for this was the fashion of forlorn sally that his heart
cried
for—the end of inaction, the end of perplexity and help
lessness,
the end of a damnation of doubt and dithering. And i
n the Saint’s heart
was a shout of rejoicing, because at last
the God of all good
battles and desperate endeavour had re
membered him again.

No, it wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t a mere lust
for adventure that cared nothing for the peril of those who made the adventure
worth
while. It was the irresistible resurgence of the most
fundamental of all the
inspirations of man. A wild stirring
in its ancient sleep of the spirit
that sent the knights of Arthur
out upon their quests, of Tristan crying for
Isolde, of the flame
in a man’s heart that brought fire and sword
upon Troy, of Roland’s shout and the singing blade of Durendal amid the
carnage of
Roncesvalles. “The sound of the trumpet… .”