The Saint in Action (18 page)

Lasser pointed at the Saint.

“Take him in, Jopley,” he said like a genial host arranging the procession of guests to a dining room.

With an evil grin Jopley pushed the Saint off his balance and half dragged and half carried him through a door at one end of the room. The room that it opened into was almost bare of furniture and smelt strongly of paraffin—even at that moment the Saint’s brow wrinkled with puzzlement as he met the rank, powerful odour.

Jopley heaved him up and shoved him r/oughly into the only chair as Lasser followed them in. The door closed softly behind him—an ancient and massive door of solid oak that settled into place with a faint fuff of perfectly fitting joints, seeming to shut out every sound and contact with the outside world. He stood there smiling benevolently at the Saint, smoothing his large hands one over the other.

“I hope we shan’t have to hurt you very much,” he said. “If you like to tell me at once what happened to those vans we needn’t go any further. But of course I shall take care that your two friends don’t have a chance to find out what you’ve told me, so if they don’t tell the same story we shall have to hurt them until they do.”

The Saint looked at him and then at Jopley. And as he did so he felt the blood run faster in his veins. For Jopley was sliding his gun away into his pocket.

A flood of strength seemed to surge through the Saint’s body like a tidal wave. He could feel the race of it through his muscles, the galvanic awakening of his nerves, the sudden clearing of his brain to crystal brilliance. It was as if his whole being was lifted up in a sublime ecstasy of renewed life. And yet otherwise everything was the same. The corner was just as tight, the prospects just as deadly; but that one action had altered a balance in which the difference between life and death would be weighed. Lasser had already put away his gun. Jopley’s gun was going—had gone. It was in his pocket, and his hands were hanging empty at his sides. In that room, with the two of them together against one man bound hand and foot, they had done what any other two men would have done in the confidence of their obvious superiority. And the astronomical hopelessness of the odds had been lessened by the fraction of time that it would take a man to draw a gun from his pocket… .

Only the Saint’s face betrayed nothing of the fanfares of exultation that were pouring magnificent music through his soul. He moved slightly in his chair, twisting his right hand round as far as he could, and his fingertips touched the hilt of the knife under his sleeve with a thrill that added new harmonies of its own.

“And what happens after we’ve told you all this?” he asked.

Lasser pursed his lips.

“Well, I’m afraid we shall still have to get rid of you. You know too much, Templar, and we can’t risk your being tempted to interfere with us again.”

“Do we get sent to Canada too?”

“No, not to Canada. No. I think we shall just leave you here. This place is being burnt down tonight,” Lasser explained calmly. “You may have noticed the smell of paraffin. Yes. It’s rather antiquated, and I want to rebuild it—something modern, you know. It’s quite well insured, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a fire. Yes, we’ll just have to leave you here with a lighted candle on the floor and kill two birds with one stone if you known what I mean.”

Simon had his knife in his hand, and he was working the point of it under the tapes on his wrists, but for a moment he almost stopped.

“You mean you’d leave us here to be burnt alive?” he said slowly.

“I’m afraid we’d have to. The place is supposed to be unoccupied, you know, and I sent the caretaker away this morning. It ‘d look as if you were tramps who’d broken in to sleep for the night, and you might have set fire to the house yourselves by accident. So it wouldn’t look right if they found bullets in you or anything like that.”

Lasser seemed to ponder over his reasoning again and shook his head with refreshed conviction.

“No, that would never do,” he said, and then his sunny smile dawned again. “But don’t let’s meet our troubles halfway. After all, I’ve heard that in a real fire people are often suffocated by the smoke before they get burnt at all. But we could hurt you a lot first if you didn’t tell us what happened to those vans.”

The Saint’s hands were free—behind his back he could move his wrists apart. But even so, he felt as if his stomach was emptied with a kind of sick revulsion. There was no doubt in his mind that Lasser would have done everything he spoke of with such a genial matter-of-factness—would still do it if the Saint failed in the only gamble he had left. That rich, unchangeably beaming smile was a better guarantee of it even than Jopley’s lowering vindictiveness. And now the Saint seemed to read through it for the first time into something that explained it, something monstrous and gloating, something that smoothed Lasser’s bald glistening forehead into a horrible vacantness of bland anticipation… .

“Where are those vans, Templar?” he asked in a silky whisper.

Simon met his gaze with eyes of frosted sapphire.

“They’re where you’ll never find them,” he said deliberately, “you greasy grinning bladder of lard.”

Lasser turned his head as if he was pleased.

“Light the candle, Jopley,” he said.

He took three steps forward and squatted down in front of the Saint like a great glossy toad. With leisured care he began to unlace the Saint’s shoes.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” he muttered protestingly. “You’re only making it worse for yourself. Now we shall have to hurt you anyway. But of course you’ll tell me about the vans. It’s only a question of time, you know. Pargo didn’t want to talk to me either, but he had to before Borieff had finished.”

The Saint looked sideways. Jopley was at the table, fumbling with a box of matches. He was half turned away, intent on a short length of candle stuck in a saucer. The match he had extracted sizzled and flamed suddenly, and at the same moment Simon felt one of his shoes being pulled off.

If anything was to be done it had to be done now— now while Jopley was concentrating on dabbing the match at the candle wick and while Lasser’s head was bent as he tugged at the other shoe.

The Saint breathed a silent prayer to whatever gods he acknowledged and brought his hands from behind him.

His clenched right fist drove down like a hammer at the exposed nape of Lasser’s bent neck. On that blow hung the unthinkable issue of the adventure and the fate of more lives than his own, and the Saint stocked it with all the pent-up strength that was in him. For Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and Pargo and the girl whose life might be worth no more than theirs now that she also knew too much, the Saint struck like a blacksmith, knowing that if he failed to connect completely with one punch he would have no chance to throw in a second. He felt his fist plug achingly into the resisting flesh, and Lasser grunted once and lurched limply forward.

Simon caught him with one hand as he slumped onto his knees, and his other hand dived like a striking snake for the pocket that sagged with the weight of Lasser’s gun.

Jopley looked round, with the candle burning, as the sudden whirl of movement caught his car. An almost comically incredulous expression transfixed nis face as he grasped the import of the scene; but the shock only stopped him for a moment. In the next instant he was grabbing for his own gun and plunging towards the Saint at the same time.

Only for an instant. And then he was brought up again, rocking, as if he had run into an invisible wall, before the round black muzzle of the automatic in the Saint’s hand.

The Saint’s smile was seraphically gentle.

“If I have to shoot you, Algernon,” he said, “I shall be terribly disappointed.”

The man stared at him in silence while Lasser’s unconscious body, released from the Saint’s grasp, slid down and rolled over on the floor.

“You can put your hand in your other pocket,” Simon went on in that soft and terrible voice. “I want the rest of that sticking plaster. And then we will talk a little more about this Guy Fawkes party.”

XII

Standing in the shadows outside the library windows, the Saint studied the scene within. The chairs where Peter and Hoppy and Brenda Marlow sat were ranged roughly at the three corners of a square; approximately at the fourth corner stood Borieff, leaning against the back of an armchair and watching them, with his gun in his hand and a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. Simon could easily have dropped him where he stood, but that was not what he wanted. He saw that Borieff’s back was directly turned to the door through which they had first entered the library and spent a few seconds more printing estimated distances and angles on his memory. Then he returned silently along the path to the room he had just left.

Jopley, taped hand and foot exactly as the Saint had been a little while ago, glared up at him malevolently from the floor; and in another corner Lasser groaned and stirred uneasily as if he was rousing front a troubled sleep; but that was very near the limit of their power of self-expression. The Saint smiled encouragingly at Jopley as he went by.

“I don’t mind if you yell, Algernon,” he said kindly. “I should say that door was almost soundproof, but in any case it ‘d be quite good local colour.”

The other seemed to consider whether he should accept the invitation, but while he was still making up his mind the Saint crossed the room to the door opposite the french windows and let himself out into the dark bare hall.

His fingers closed on the knob of the library door and turned it slowly without the faintest rattle. His only fear then was that the door itself might creak as it opened, but it swung back with ghostly smoothness as far as he needed to step into the room.

Peter Quentin saw him with an instant’s delirious amazement and quickly averted his eyes. The girl saw him, and her face went white with the clutch of wild, half-unbelieving hope before she also looked away. She sat with her head bent and her eyes riveted on the toe of one shoe, her fingers locked together in intolerable suspense. The crudely assembled features of Mr Uniatz contracted in a sudden awful spasm that seemed to squeeze his eyes halfway out of their sockets: if he had been anyone else the observer would have said that he looked as if he had a stomach-ache, but on Mr Uniatz it only looked as if the normal frightfulness of his countenance had been lightly stirred by the ripple of a passing thought. And the Saint moved forward like a stalking leopard until he was so close behind Borieff that he could have bitten him in the neck.

The actual state of Borieff’s neck removed the temptation to do this. Instead his right hand whipped around Borieff’s gun wrist like a ring of steel, and he spoke into the man’s ear.

“Boo,” he said.

The man gasped and whirled round convulsively as if he had been touched with a live wire; but the Saint’s grip on his wrist controlled the movement and kept the gun twisted harmlessly up towards the ceiling. At the same time Simon’s left hand pushed the automatic he had taken from Lasser forward until it met Borieff’s ribs.

“I should drop that little toy if I were you,” he said. “Otherwise I might get nervous.”

He increased the torque on Borieff’s wrist to emphasize his point, and the man yelped and let go the gun. Simon kicked it towards the girl.

“Just keep him in order for a minute, will you?” he murmured. “If he does anything foolish mind you hit him in the stomach—it’s more painful there.”

As she picked up the gun he pushed Borieff away and took out his knife. With a few quick strokes he had Peter free, and then he turned to Hoppy.

Peter stood up, peeling off the remains of the adhesive tape.

“I’m getting discouraged,” he said. “All these years we’ve been trying to get rid of you, and every time we think you’re nicely settled you come back. Won’t you ever learn when to die a hero’s death and give somebody else a chance with the heroine?”

“I will when I find someone else who’d have a chance,” Simon assured him generously.

He straightened up from releasing Mr Uniatz’s ankles and held out the remains of the roll of plaster.

“Make a parcel of Comrade Borieff, will you, Hoppy?” he said. “We don’t want him to get restive and hurt himself.”

“Okay, boss,” said Mr Uniatz willingly. “All I need is just one drink–-“

“I’ll have mine first,” said Peter Quentin, swooping hastily on the bottle, “or else there mightn’t be enough to go round.”

Simon took the glass away from him as he filled it, and strolled over to the girl.

‘Was that date in London very important?” he said. “Or will you come along with us and make it a party?”

She shook her head.

“I was only going for Lasser—I had to meet the Frenchman who supplies him and give him his money.”

“My God,” said the Saint. “I’d almost forgotten–-“

He left her standing there and disappeared through the communicating door into the next room. In another moment he was back with the sealed envelope that Lasser had taken from her bag.

“Is this it?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was worth something the first time I saw it,” said the Saint and slit it open with his thumbnail.

When he had counted the thick wad of bank notes that came out of it, his eyebrows were lifted and his eyes were laughing. He added it to the hundred pounds which he had recovered from Jopley and put it carefully away in his pocket.

“I can see we staged the showdown on the right evening,” he said. “This will be some consolation to all of us when we divide it up.” His eyes sobered on her again. “Lasser must have trusted you a good deal.”

“I suppose he knew I was that sort of fool,” she said bitterly.

“How did you get in with him?”

“I met him through some friends I used to go sailing with, and he seemed to be an awfully good egg. I’d known him for quite some time when he told me what he was doing and said that he needed some help. I’ knew it was against the law, but I didn’t feel as if I was a criminal. You know how it is—we’ve all smuggled small things through the customs when we’ve had the chance, and we don’t feel as if we’d done anything wicked. I just thought it ‘d be great fun with a bit of danger to make it more exciting.”