The Saint in Action (5 page)

“What’s Teal having a spasm about this time?” demanded Peter Quentin. “And why didn’t you let me in on it before?”

“It’s only just begun,” said the Saint.

He told the story from the beginning, in a synoptic rapid-fire outline which omitted no important details except the connecting links which his own imagination was still working on.

“Sherry, Spain, Spanish Rebels, American bearer bonds, mysterious Pongos with hammers and artillery and a Polish forger who was stood up against a wall in Oviedo,” he repeated at the end of it. “And a Spanish civil war still going on and getting bloodier and messier every day, in case you’ve forgotten it. I’ve seen a lot of odd things mixed up together in my time, but I think this is in the running for a prize.”

“But who’s doing what?” said Peter.

“That’s what I’m still trying to get straight,” said the Saint frankly. “Oviedo’s changed hands about half a dozen times, and I don’t remember who was holding it when Urivetzky was wiped up. I don’t know which side Urivetzky was on or why he should have been mixed up in it at all—except that there seem to be amateurs from half the countries in Europe taking sides in the picnic anyway. But I have got an idea what’s in the wind, and I’m going to know some more before I go to bed.”

The car slowed up, and Peter said: “Shall I go round again while you’re thinking?”

Simon flicked the stub of his cigarette through the window.

“I did all my thinking before I sent for you,” he said. “You can cut out here—we’re going to Cambridge Square.”

“I have heard of it,” said Peter with heavy irony. “But not from you. What’s it got to do with this party? I thought you said Graham’s digs were in Bloomsbury.”

“So they are,” said the Saint equably. “And Quin-tana’s digs are in Cambridge Square.”

There was a certain pregnant interval of silence while Peter brought the car out of the park and squeezed it through the tide of traffic swirling around Hyde Park Corner.

“I always thought you were daft,” he said as they floated out of the maelstrom into the calmer waters of Grosvenor Place. “And now I know it.”

“But why?” asked the Saint reasonably. “Comrade Quintana seems to have been quite a pal of Ingleston’s, so he ought to be interested in the news about his boy friend. Or if he’s already heard it he’ll want someone to condole with him in his bereavement. But if he has heard it I should be interested to know how—I sent for all the evening papers, and there wasn’t a line about the murder in any of them.”

“Why shouldn’t he have heard about it from the police?”

“He might have. And yet somehow I don’t think so. I stuck that photograph right under Teal’s bloodhound nose, and he was too busy boiling with thwarted rage because I’d accounted for knowing the name of the corpse to be able to smell a clue when he’d got one. Of course he may have done some more sniffing since then, but even then it may take him some time to realize who Luis Quintana is. And anyway we’ve got to chance it, because Quintana’s our own best clue… . You can stop the car here, Peter—I won’t drive up to the door.”

“What’s making you so modest all of a sudden?” Peter enquired innocently as he applied the brakes.

The Saint smiled and stepped out onto the pavement.

“It comes natural to me,” he said. “And this isn’t going to be an official visit.”

“I’ll bet you don’t even know what sort of a visit it is going to be,” said Peter accusingly; and Simon grinned at him without shame.

“I don’t—which only makes it more interesting. Wait for me here, old lad, and I’ll tell you all about it later.”

He was only confessing the simple truth, but in the way he looked at it there was nothing about it to depress the spirits. The Saint had always been like that— daft, as Peter had called him, but daft with a magnificent insolence of daftness that had driven more than one of his adversaries to desperation as they essayed the hopeless task of predicting his unpredictable impulses. Having nothing to make plans for, the Saint had seen no reason to expend his energy on making them, particularly when so much of it would have been spent on meeting hypothetical difficulties while the real ones were probably never thought of. He had obtained Quintana’s address from a friend on a newspaper, and all he knew about it was that it was number 319 in the square. He had no idea what type of house it was; and on that depended the development of his campaign. On that and on whatever other schemes crossed his mind on the way.

He sauntered along the south side of the square, assimilating numbers and opening his mind impartially to the free influx of inspiration. Number 319, he discovered, stood in the very southeast corner of the square at the right-angle junction of the two streets that entered the square at that point. It was a broad two-storied house of vaguely Georgian architecture, flanked by the wings of wall common to that type of facade which apparently screened a small surrounding garden. Across the front an entrance driveway ran in past the front door under a pillared portico. And as the Saint stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette and taking in every detail of the building with the trained eye of a veteran, a taxi turned into the drive and coughed itself to a standstill under the porch. Simon moved a little so that he could see between the pillars, and for one moment only he saw the passenger who got out of the cab, as he paid off the driver before he turned and went up the steps through the front door, which had been opened for him as soon as the taxi pulled up.

For one moment only—but that was enough to make the Saint catch his breath so quickly that the lighter in his hand went out. For the man who had gone in, the man whose face he had seen for that paralyzing instant, was Ladek Urivetzky, the supreme forger of the twentieth century, the man who was reported to have been eliminated by a firing squad in Oviedo four weeks ago.

VI

Simon had no doubt of it. He had never met Urivetzky in person, but his memory for faces was as accurate as a card index, and his private collection of photographs and descriptions of outstanding members of the international underworld contained items that would have been envied by more than one official bureau of records. And that sallow, thick-lipped, skull-like face with the curved scar under the left eye was as unmistakable as any face could be without previous firsthand examination.

For some seconds the Saint stood motionless, while the door closed and the empty taxi rattled on out of the driveway and departed into the night. Then he moved on with a tremor of exquisite excitement tugging at his nerves.

He made a complete circuit of the block in which the house stood. It was quite a small block, and the rest of the buildings in it consisted of the ordinary, monotonously identical, tall narrow houses common to that part of London. Built in an unbroken row one against the other, they formed a solid three-sided wall with no openings other than a couple of narrow alleys in one side which led into little courtyards of mews garages buried in the heart of the block. Nowhere did the place seem less effectively protected than it did at the front.

Standing once more on the corner from which he had started off, the Saint drew his cigarette to brightness and studied the fagade again with that tingle of reckless ecstasy working its way deep into the pro-foundest recesses of his being.

Somehow or other he had to get into Quintana’s house, and if the only way to get in was at the front then he would get in at the front. Not that the front door entered into his plans. Any vague idea he might have set out with of brazenly bluffing his way into the owner’s presence had been annihilated beyond resurrection by that one breath-stopping glimpse of Uri-vetzky’s arrival. The brazenness and the bluff might come later, and probably would; but before that the Saint wanted to know what a man who was supposed to be dead was doing at the house of a man whose friend really was dead, and why a man who was admitted to have been the greatest forger of his time was visiting the friend of a man who had had an unaccountable collection of bonds which might have been forged, and why one thread in the lives of all these strangely assorted people linked them together when that thread had its roots in a country where death had lately become a commonplace—and the Saint wanted to know all these things without announcing his intrusion. Wherefore he stood and dissected the possibilities with that stir of lawless delight roaming through his insides. On each side of the house the ground floor was wider than the upper part of the building, so that its flat roof formed a kind of terrace onto which upstairs windows opened. And beyond the garden wall there were two tall trees, growing so close to the side of the house that it looked as if one could step off one of their branches onto the terrace as easily as stepping across a garden path… .

The Saint crossed the road.

He had no qualms about the enormity of what he proposed to do. What occupied his mind much more were the chances of being allowed to commit his crime. There seemed to be an entirely unnecessary number of street lamps clustered around that corner; and while they could never have competed with the noonday sun, they were bright enough to illumine the scene for the eyes of any passer-by who might tend to regard the sight of a man climbing over a wall as a spectacle to which the attention of the neighbourhood might justifiably be directed. But Cambridge Square is a quiet place, and at that hour it was sunk in its regular postprandial coma. The Saint slowed his steps to allow a lone prowling taxi to drag itself past him, and at the same time he measured the wall with his eye. It was not more than seven feet high, and the top was protected with curved iron spikes set in the brickwork—but they were spikes of an old-fashioned pattern which had been clearly designed for a day when burglarious agility was still an undeveloped art. To a wall-climber of the Saint’s experience they were not much more of an obstacle than a row of feathers… .

The prowling taxi had hauled itself wearily on, and the nearest other car was the limousine in which Peter Quentin was waiting. For the moment there was no other human being nearer than that. Simon Templar’s glance swept once over the panorama, and he knew that it was no use waiting for a better opportunity. The rest was on the lap of the gods.

He made a leap for the top of the wall, caught the base of one spike with his right hand and the curve of another with his left and was over like a flash of dark lightning. A roving cat could hardly have cleared the obstacle with more silent speed.

His feet padded down with the same catlike softness on a paved path on the other side; and for a second he crouched there without movement, exactly as he had landed, listening for any trace of a disturbing sound in the world outside. But his straining ears caught nothing that stood out from the vague normal background of London noise, and in another moment he was darting across an open patch of grass like a fleeting shadow to the foot of one of the trees he had marked down in his survey.

Its branches grew so low down that his hands could reach the lowest of them with the help of an easy jump, and with only a moment’s pause he was working himself up into the short young foliage with the swift suppleness of a trained gymnast. In less than a minute from the time when he had surmounted the wall he was poising himself for the short leap onto the terrace that was his first objective.

Until then he had been screened by the wall and the new leaves that partly clothed the tree; but now he was in the open again, plainly visible to anyone who looked up or looked out, even when he had crossed the terrace to the partial shelter of one of the dark window-doorways that opened onto it. He tried the handle cautiously, but it was fastened on the inside. For some time, which was probably a minute or two but which seemed like a week, he had to work on it with a slender tool which he took from his pocket, before the window opened and let him into the dark room beyond.

He closed the window after him and stood looking out through it, scanning the square below. Beside the limousine near the corner he saw a dark shape pacing to and fro and saw also the erratically fluctuating pin point of a lighted cigarette end; and the sketch of a smile touched his lips. Peter was doubtless collecting enough material to give a heart specialist a year’s course \ of study, but there was the consoling thought that a few more repetitions of the same stimulus would probably give him a lifelong immunity of incalculable value… . Otherwise there were no visible signs of commotion. If any stray wanderers in the vicinity had witnessed any excerpts from the recent unrolling of events they had apparently decided that such affairs were none of their dull and respectable business and had proceeded untroubled on their prosaic ways.

The Saint turned away from the window and undipped the pencil flashlight from his breast pocket. Its thin subdued beam swivelled once round the room —and snapped out again suddenly.

He was in some kind of formal reception room, a gaunt bare chamber with gilt-edged mirrors and velvet drapes and stuffy, uninviting chairs ranged around the walls to leave most of the floor clear. There was nothing remarkable about it except its monumental ugliness, which would have impressed the spiritual descendants of Queen Victoria as being delightfully respectable and dignified. Facing the Saint, as he stood by the window, was a door which presumably led out to a landing or corridor; and on his right was another door communicating with an adjoining room. It was through this communicating door that he had heard the sound of voices which had made him extinguish his torch with involuntary abruptness.

He had heard the answer to a muffled question quite distinctly, spoken in good English but with a strong foreign accent:

“I met him in Sevilla when he was visiting Jerez for his company.”

A slow smile of deep contentment touched the Saint’s lips, and he put his torch away with an inaudible sigh. If he had known all the inside geography of the house and had moreover been gifted with second sight he couldn’t have organized his entrance more accurately and appropriately. It was one of those moments when his guardian angel seemed to have hooked him bodily onto the assembly line of adventure and launched him onto an unerringly triumphant sequence of developments like the routine of some supernal mass-production factory.