The Saint in Action (6 page)

In a few swift noiseless steps he was at the door with his ear close to the panels, in time to hear the first thin grumbling voice say: “In a case like this you should have more sense. You say you work for what you think is good for your country, but you are as stupid as a little child. I am only working for money for myself, but even I am more careful. Or is that the reason why I cannot afford to be stupid?”

“My dear Urivetzky!” The second voice was conciliatory. “It was not so easy as you think. We had to find agents quickly, and at a time when we could take no risks, when everything had to be done in secret, when, if we made a mistake, we could have been imprisoned or even executed. Ingleston had many friends in Sevilla, expropriated aristocrats, and they assured me that he was in sympathy with our cause. I heard the highest recommendations of him before I spoke to him, and we wished to use foreigners whenever possible because they would arouse no suspicion. But every man can be tempted–-“

“It is the business of a leader to choose men who are difficult to tempt,” Urivetzky retorted sourly. “Anyone who was not stupid would know that when you entrust a man with bearer bonds which are not traceable, which can be used for any purpose by the man who possesses them, that you must take care how you choose him.”

“I am not so experienced in these matters as yourself.” The other’s voice had an edge to it. “Unfortunately all the gold of Spain is held by the Banco de Espana, in Madrid, which is held by the Reds, and we shall never know what they have done with it. I regret the necessity for these tricks, but we have no choice.”

“Pah! You have choice enough. How many thousand Germans and Italians are fighting on your side?”

“They are in sympathy with us, but even they would not help us for nothing.”

Urivetzky grunted.

“I also regret your necessities, if they are necessities,” he said. “And I shall regret them more if your other agents have been as badly chosen.”

“They have not been badly chosen. At this moment I have nearly forty thousand pounds in American and English money in my safe, all of it paid over to me by our other agents. Ingleston was the only mistake we have made.”

“And he won’t trouble us any more,” said a third voice, speaking for the first time.

It was a moment after the Saint had decided that it was time for him to locate the keyhole and add another dimension to the drama which was being unfolded for his benefit. He found the hole just as the third voice reached his ears, and scanned the scene through it with some interest.

The room beyond was smaller than the one which he was in, and from the more habitable furnishings and the lines of bookshelves along the walls it appeared to be a small private study.

Urivetzky sat in an armchair with his back to the keyhole—the hairless cranium which showed over the back of the chair could only have belonged to him. In a swivel chair beyond the desk sat another man whom the Saint recognized at once from the photograph he had seen as Luis Quintana himself; he was smiling at the time, exposing the characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime, like rocks left naked at low tide, which ought to be exhibited in museums for the education of Anglo-Saxon maidens who have been misled by ceaseless propaganda into believing in the dentifricial glamour of the Latin grin.

Simon observed those details with his first perfunctory glance. From a curiosity point of view he was more immediately interested in the third member of the party, who sat puffing a cigar in the chair directly facing him. He was a man with a square-looking body and a close-cropped, square-looking grey head; the expression of his mouth was hidden by a thick straggling moustache, but his black eyes were flat and vicious. And the Saint knew intuitively that he must be the unidentified assassin whom for the purposes of convenient reference he had christened Pongo.

“The other bonds have not yet been found,” Urivetzky said acidly.

“They will be found,” Quintana reassured him.

“They had better be found. Otherwise this will be the finish. I am not interested in your country, but I am interested in my living.”

The Rebels’ representative raised his eyebrows.

“Perhaps you exaggerate. If these forgeries are so perfect–-“

“Of course they are perfect. No man in the world could have done better. But they are forgeries. Why are you so stupid? A bond is a work of art. To those who have eyes it has the signature of the creator in every line. So is a forgery a work of art. Look at a connoisseur in an art gallery. Without any catalogue he will study the pictures and he will say, ‘That is a Velasquez, that is a Rembrandt, that is an El Greco.’ So there are men in the world who will look at forgeries of bonds and say, ‘That is a So-and-so, that is a Somebody, that is a Urivetzky.’ It makes no difference if the Urivetzky is most like the original. There are still men who will recognize it.”

“It is hardly likely to fall into their hands. And it was to disarm their suspicion that we had the story sent out that you had been killed.”

“And so perhaps you make more suspicion. This man Templar is not a fool—I have heard too much of him.”

“He will be taken care of also,” said the man known as Pongo. “I have been working all day–-“

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. A servant came in as Quintana answered and turned towards the eliminator of problems.

“There is someone to speak to you on the telephone, sefior,” he said.

The square man gestured smugly at Urivetzky.

“You see?” he said. “Perhaps this is the report I’ve been waiting for.”

He got up and went out; and the Saint straightened the kinks out of his neck and spine. He had done as good a job of eavesdropping as he could have hoped to do, and he had no complaints. Nearly all the questions in his mind had been answered.

But on Quintana’s own statement there were nearly forty thousand pounds in ready cash in the safe, and they were forty thousand reasons for some deep and sober cogitation before he retired from the scene into which he had so seasonably introduced himself. After all, there was still the outstanding matter of a tenner which the late Mr Ingleston had owed; and in the light of what Simon had learned he could sej even less reason than before why it should not be repaid with interest… . And there was also the telephone conversation to which Senor Pongo had hastened away, which might be worth listening to.

The voices went on coming through the door while he stood for a while undecided.

“Even you take risks,” Quintana was saying. “If I had known that you would drive here–-“

“That was no risk. There are no policemen looking for me, and taxi drivers are not detectives.”

This might be the best chance he would have to do something about the safe, while the odds in the study were reduced from three to two. But Pongo might return at any moment—and by the same token his telephone conversation wouldn’t last forever. Whereas the safe and its contents would probably manage to keep a jump ahead of disintegration for a few minutes more.

Simon made his choice with a shrug. He tiptoed back across the room towards the door that opened onto the landing. He had no idea what was on the other side of it, but that was only an incidental gamble among many others.

Even so, he was still destined to be surprised.

The carpet outside must have been very thick or the door very solid, for he heard nothing until he was a couple of yards from it. And then the door was flung open and Pongo rushed in.

The light from the landing caught the Saint squarely and centrally as it streamed in; but Pongo was entering so hastily that he was well inside the room before he could check himself.

Simon leapt at him. His left hand caught the man by the lapels of#his coat, and at the same time he sidestepped towards the door, pushing it shut with his own shoulder and turning the key with his right hand. But the shock had slowed up his reaction by a fatal fraction, and the other recovered himself enough to let out a sharp choking yelp before the Saint shifted his grip to his throat.

The Saint smiled at him benevolently and reached for his gun. But his fingers had only just touched his pocket when light flooded the room from another direction, and a voice spoke behind him.

“Keep still,” rasped Luis Quintana.

VII

The saint let his hand drop slowly and turned round. Quintana and Urivetzky stood in the communicating doorway, and Quintana held a gun.

“Good evening, girls,” said the Saint winsomely.

Urivetzky let out an exclamation as he saw his face.

“The Saint!”

“In person,” Simon admitted pleasantly. “But you don’t have to stand on ceremony. Just treat me like an old friend of the family.”

Released from the numbing grip on his windpipe, the square man retreated to a safe distance, massaging his throat tenderly.

“I mistook the door,” he exploded hoarsely. “I opened this one—and he was inside. He must have been listening. How much he has heard–-“

“Yes,” said Quintana with slow significance.

The Saint continued to stand still while Pongo stepped up to him again and took away his gun. The man’s exploring hands also found the cigarette case in his breast pocket and took it out; and Simon took it gently back from him and helped himself to a cigarette before returning it with a deprecating bow.

He felt for his lighter in a bland and genial silence which invited the others to make themselves at home while they selected the next way of breaking it; and his self-possession was so unshaken that it looked as if his stillness was dictated less by the steady aim of Quintana’s gun than by a wholly urbane and altruistic desire to avoid embarrassing the company by seeming to rush them into a decision. What was going on in his own mind was his own secret, and he kept it decorously to himself.

But it seemed as if he had been somewhat rash in crediting his guardian angel with the organizing ability of Henry Ford. Certainly a good deal of the system was there, but somewhere along the moving belt something seemed to have gone haywire. Simon experienced some of the emotions that a Ford executive would have experienced if, watching a chassis travelling down the assembly line, at the point where it should have had its taillight screwed on, he had seen it being rapidly outfitted with a thatched roof and stained-glass windows. Perhaps it was really an improvement, but its advantages were not immediately apparent. Perhaps the fact that Pongo should have chosen to charge through the wrong door in his excitement was really a blessing in disguise, but to the Saint it seemed to have created a situation from which a tactful and prudent man would extract himself with all possible speed. The only question it left was exactly how the withdrawal should be organized.

It was the square man who first reasserted himself.

“How long has he been here?” he demanded grimly.

The Saint smiled at him.

“My dear Seiior Pongo–-“

The square man drew himself up.

“My name is not Pongo,” he said with dignity. “I am Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Perez, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots.”

“Arriba Espana,” murmured the Saint solemnly. “But you won’t mind if I call you Pongo, will you? I can’t remember all your other names at once. And the point, my dear Senor Pongo, is not exactly how long I’ve been here but how long you’ve been here.”

There was a moment’s startled silence, and then Quintana said coldly: “Will you be good enough to explain?”

Simon gestured slightly with his cigarette.

“You see,” he said, “unless you have a very good alibi, Pongo, I shall naturally have to include you with the rest of the menagerie. And that will cost you money.”

Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Perez’s flat vicious eyes stared at him with a rather stupid blankness. The other two men seemed to have been similarly afflicted with a temporary paralysis of incomprehension. But the Saint’s paternal geniality held them all together with the unobtrusive dominance of a perfect host. With the same natural charm he tried to relieve them of some of their perplexity.

“We have here,” he explained, “Comrade Ladek Urivetzky, once of Warsaw and subsequently of various other places. A bloke with quite a reputation in certain circles, if I remember rightly. I think the last time I heard of him was in connection with the celebrated City and Continental Bank case, when he got away with about fifty thousand quid after depositing a bundle of Danish premium bonds for security. All the boys at Scotland Yard were looking for him all over the place, and I expect they were still looking for him until they heard that he’d been mopped up in Oviedo. Now it seems that he isn’t dead at all. He’s right here in London, playing happy families with the representative of the Spanish Rebels and”—Simon bowed faintly in the direction of the square man—“Major Vicente Guil-lermo Gabriel Pongo, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Whatnots. So I have a feeling that Chief Inspector Teal would be interested to know why two such illustrious gentlemen are entertaining a notorious criminal.”

There was another short strained stillness before Quintana broke it with a brittle laugh.

“If you think that we are here to be bluffed by a common burglar–-“

“Not common,” Simon protested mildly. “Whatever else I may be I’ve never been called that. Ask Comrade Urivetzky. But in any case there are worse crimes in this country than burglary.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—murder.”

Major Perez kept still, watching him with evil intentness.

“What murder?”

“Pongo,” said the Saint kindly, “I may have a face like an innocent little child, which is more than you have, but appearances are deceptive. I was not born yesterday. I’ve been listening in this room for some time, and I’d done a good deal of thinking before that, and I think I know nearly as much about this racket of yours as is worth knowing.”

“What racket?”

The Saint sighed.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it in words of one syllable. A good many things have been done in Spain to get funds for your precious revolution, and since nearly all the official Spanish dough is in Madrid a good many of your tricks have had to sail pretty close to the wind. Well, your contribution was to think up this idea of pledging forged bonds around the place to get money to pay the Germans and Italians for their guns and airplanes and tanks and bombs and poison gas and other contributions to the cause of civilization. Somebody thought of hiring Comrade Urivetzky to do the forging, and you were all set.”