The Saint in Action (7 page)

He leaned back against the mantelpiece and blew a smoke ring at a particularly hideous ormolu clock.

“The next thing was to get stooges to pledge the bonds, because if any of them were spotted you didn’t want all your credit to be shot to hell at once. Among others you collected Comrade Ingleston. You met him on one of his trips to Spain—he spoke Spanish very well, and he had plenty of friends among your crowd, Sevilla being a red-hot monarchist and Fascist stronghold, unless it’s changed since I was last there. You made him a proposition, and he took it on. Unfortunately he wasn’t such an idealist as you may have thought, and when he began to find himself with pocket-fuls of bearer bonds he heard the call of easy money. He started to go short on his returns. You got suspicious and started to keep tabs on him, and before long there wasn’t much doubt left about it. Ingleston was playing you for suckers, and something had to be done about it. Pongo did it.”

There was no doubt now that he was holding his audience. They were drinking up every word with a thirsty concentration that would have made some men hesitate to go on; but the Saint knew what he was doing.

“Last night,” he proceeded with easy confidence, “Pongo was waiting for Ingleston in the street when he came home. He hailed him like a brother and was invited upstairs. While Ingleston was pouring out a drink Pongo jumped on him from behind with a hammer. Then after Ingleston was dead he had a look round for the last consignment of forged bonds. He was unlucky there, of course, because I’d already got them.”

“That is very interesting,” Quintana said deliberately.

“You’ve no idea how interesting it is,” answered the Saint earnestly. “Suppose you just look at it all at once. Here’s Ladek Urivetzky, a well-known forger and a wanted man, taking shelter here and being like a brother with the pair of you. Here’s Ingleston murdered by a major of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots, also among those present. Well, boys, I’m well known to be a broad-minded bloke, and I can’t say that any of it worries me much. Forgers and Fascists are more or less in the same class to me; and Ingleston seems to have been the kind of guy that anyone might bump off in an absent-minded moment. I don’t feel a bit virtuous about either side, so I haven’t got any sermons for you. But what I don’t like is you boys thinking you can make yourselves at home and raise hell in this town without my permission. London is the greatest city in the world, and our policemen are wonderful, so I’m told,” said the Saint proudly, “and I don’t like to have them bothered. So if you want to have your fun I’m afraid you’ve got to pay for it.”

“Pay for it?” repeated Major Perez as if the phrase was strange to him.

The Saint nodded.

“If you want to go on amusing yourselves you have to pay your entertainment tax,” he said. “That’s what I meant when we started talking. If you’re well in this with the others you’ll have to be assessed along with them.”

They went on watching him with their mouths partly open and their eyes dark with pitiless malignance; but the Saint’s trick of carrying the battle right back into the enemy’s camp held them frozen into inactivity by its sheer unblushing impudence.

“And how much,” asked Quintana with an effort of irony that somehow lacked the clear ring of unshaken self-assurance, “would this assessment be?”

“It would be about forty thousand pounds,” said the Saint calmly. “That will be a donation of twenty thousand pounds for the International Red Cross, which seems a very suitable cause for you to contribute to, and twenty thousand pounds for me for collecting it. If I heard you correctly you’ve got that much cash in your safe, so you wouldn’t even have the bother of writing a cheque. It makes everything so beautifully simple.”

Quintana’s ironic smile tightened.

“I think it would be simpler to hand you over to the police,” he said.

“Imbecile!” Urivetzky spoke, breaking his own long silence. “What could you tell the police–-“

“Exactly,” agreed the Saint. “And what could I tell them? No, boys, it won’t do. That’s what I was trying to show you. I suppose they couldn’t hurt you much, on account of your position and what not, but they could make it pretty difficult for you. And there certainly wouldn’t be anything left of your beautiful finance scheme. And then I don’t suppose you’d be so popular with the Spanish Patriots when you went home. Probably you’d find yourselves leaning against a wall, watching the firing squad line up.” The Saint shook his head. “No—I think forty thousand quid is a bargain price for the good turn I’m doing you.”

Major Perez grinned at him like an ape.

“And suppose you didn’t have a chance to use your information?” he said.

The Saint smiled with unruffled tranquillity.

“My dear Pongo—do you really think I’d have come here without thinking of that? Of course you can use your artillery any time you want to; and at this range, with a bit of luck, you might even hit me. But it wouldn’t do you any good. I told some friends of mine that I’d be back with them in ten minutes from now, and if I don’t arrive punctually they’ll phone Scotland Yard and tell Chief Inspector Teal exactly where I went and why. You can think it over till your brains boil, children, but your only way out will still cost you forty thousand quid.”

VIII

The silence that followed lasted longer than any of its predecessors. It was made up of enough diverse ingredients to fill a psychological catalogue, and their conflicting effects combined to produce a state of explosive inertia in which the dropping of a pin would have sounded like a steel girder decanting itself into a stack of cymbals.

The Saint’s cigarette expired, and he pressed it quietly out on the mantelpiece. For a few moments at least he was the only man in the room who was immune to the atmosphere of the petrified earthquake which had invaded it, and he was clinging to his immunity as if it was the most precious possession he had —which in fact it was. Whether the hoary old bluff he had built up with such unblinking effrontery could be carried through to a flawless conclusion was another question; but he had done his best for it, and no man could have done more. And if he had achieved nothing else he had at least made the opposition stop and think. If he had left them to their immediate and natural impulses from the time when they found him there he would probably have been nothing but a name in history by this time: they might still plan to let him end the adventure in the same way, but now they would proceed with considerable caution. And the Saint knew that when the ungodly began to proceed with caution instead of simply leaning on the trigger and asking questions afterwards as common sense would dictate was when an honest man might begin to look for loopholes. If there was anything that Simon Templar needed then it was loopholes; and he was watching for them with a languid and untroubled smile on his lips and his muscles poised and tingling like a sprinter at the start of a race.

Perez spoke again after that momentous silence in a babble of rapid-fire Spanish.

“He means his friends at his apartment.”

“How many of them are there?” asked Quintana in the same language.

“There is a girl and a manservant. Those are the only ones who live there—I made enquiries. No one else has been there today except Graham.”

Quintana glanced at the Saint again; but the Saint, who understood every word as easily as if it had been spoken in English, frowned back at him with the worried expression of a man who is trying hard to understand and failing in the attempt.

“You are sure there is no mistake?” Quintana insisted.

“That would be impossible. I heard about Graham from Ingleston, and he is not the type of man who would be an associate of the Saint. I followed him to the Saint’s apartment this morning, and Fernandez followed him back there when the Saint went in to Ingleston’s. Fernandez and Nayder have been watching there ever since, pretending to repair telephone wires.”

“But your telephone call–-“

“That was Fernandez, to know how much longer he should stay there. Also he was suspicious because an old man muffled up so that he could not be recognized had been brought out of the next apartment, and Fernandez had been thinking about it and wondering if it was one of the Saint’s gang. Now we know that it must have been the Saint himself.”

“No one else has gone out the same way?”

“No.”

Quintana gazed at the Saint thoughtfully, stroking the barrel of his automatic with his left hand.

“You will excuse us not speaking English, Mr Templar,” he said at length. “Naturally it is easier for us to speak our own language. But I was just trying to find out how good your case was. Major Perez assures me that we are more or less in your hands.”

The Saint, who knew that Major Perez had done no such thing, returned his gaze with a bland and gullible smile. “That was what I was trying to make you see, dear old bird,” he said, but his pulses were beating a little faster.

“If you will come into the next room,” said Quintana, “we had better see if we can settle this matter like gentlemen.”

Urivetzky’s brow blackened incredulously, and he made an abrupt movement.

“Fools 1” he snarled. “Would you let this man–-“

“Please,” said Quintana, turning towards him. “Would you allow me to handle this affair in my own way? We are not criminals—we are supposed to be diplomats.”

As he had turned the Saint could only see him in profile; but Simon knew as certainly as if he could have seen it that the side of his face which only Urivetzky could see moved in a significant wink. He knew it if from nothing else from the way Urivetzky’s scowl smoothed out into inscrutability.

“Perhaps you are right,” Urivetzky said presently with a shrug. “But these ways are not my ways.”

“Sometimes they are necessary,” said Quintana and turned to Perez. “You agree, Major?”

The Spanish Patriot, with his eyes still fixed on the Saint, brought his features into perfunctory and calculating repose.

“Of course.”

Quintana bowed.

“Will you come this way, Mr Templar?”

Simon hitched himself off the mantelpiece and strolled across to the communicating door. Quintana moved aside to let him pass and immediately fell in behind him and followed him into the study. Urivetzky came after him, and Perez completed the procession and closed the door. It was rather like a special committee going into conference or an ark taking in its crew.

No one who watched the Saint dissolve into the most comfortable armchair would have imagined that there was a single shadow of anxiety in his mind. But behind that one and only shield which he had he was wondering with a cold prickle in his nerves where the next shot was coming from.

He knew that there was something coming. He had put over his own bluff, but even he couldn’t convince himself that it had gone over quite so triumphantly. Except in storybooks things simply didn’t happen that way. Men like Quintana and Urivetzky and Perez didn’t crumple up and stop fighting directly they met an obstacle. And in the very way they had so suddenly seemed to crumple up there was enough to tell him that he would need every mental and physical gift that he had to keep ahead of them through the next couple of moves.

With nothing but an air of lazy good humour he stretched out his hand towards Perez.

“Could I have my cigarette case back now?” he drawled. “Or were you thinking of giving it to somebody for a birthday present?”

“By all means,” said Quintana. “Give it back to him, Perez.”

Simon took back the case and opened it with a certain feeling of relief which he kept strictly to himself. At least, with that in his hands, he had something on his side, little as it was.

“And now,” he said through a veil of smoke, “what about this forty thousand quid?”

“That can be arranged fairly quickly.”

Quintana had sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. He leaned back in it, turning his gun between his hands as if he had ceased to regard it as a useful weapon; but Simon knew that he could bring it back to usefulness quicker than the distance between them could be covered.

“Mr Templar, you are a bold man. Let me point out that you are now inside the residence of the representative of the Spanish Nationalist party. If I shot you now and the fact was ever discovered I doubt whether anything very serious could ever happen to me.”

“Except some of the things I was telling you about,” murmured the Saint.

The other nodded.

“Yes, it would be very inconvenient. But it would not be fatal. I am only mentioning that to show my appreciation of your—nerve. And for some other reasons. Now the alternative to killing you is to pay you your price of forty thousand pounds. But we could not do that without satisfactory guarantees that your own side of the bargain would be kept.”

“And what would they be?”

“Very simple. We have all heard of your reputation, and in your own way you are said to be a man of honour. I expect your associates are of the same type. Well, in diplomatic circles when such situations arise, as they sometimes do, it is customary to bind the agreement with a solemn written undertaking that it will be kept. I shall therefore have to require that undertaking not only from yourself but also from these other persons who you say are in your confidence. They will come here personally and sign it in my presence.”

The Saint moved very little.

“When?”

“I should prefer it to be done tonight.”

“And the money?”

“That will be yours as soon as the undertaking is signed.” Quintana stopped playing with his gun at a moment which left its muzzle conveniently but inconspicuously turned in the Saint’s direction. “I suggest that you should telephone them at once, since the time limit you left them was so short. You will say nothing to them except that you require them to come here at once. Provided that there are no—accidents, the whole thing can be settled within half an hour.”

The Saint’s deep breath took in a long drift of smoke. So that was the move. It was something to know, even if the knowledge made nothing any easier.

He said without a trace of perturbation: “How do I know that you’ve really got the cash to do your share?”