The Saint Meets His Match (31 page)

“Not till I know you
aren’t going to pull any more
slapstick comedy,
sweetheart,” said the Saint. “Where
is
she?”

“Upstairs.”

“Dear—me!” The
automatic nuzzled again into Gugliemi’s
fancy waistcoat.
“I hope you haven’t been forgetting your manners?”

“I will show you.”

“You certainly
will,” said the Saint pleasantly. “But
I’m afraid that if you
have
been forgetting your manners,
I shall be
forced to do things to you which will be not
only painful, but permanently discouraging … Lead
on, Rudolph.”

Gugliemi led on, and the Saint followed him
into the upper room. He saw the light that came to the girl’s eyes
as he entered, and bowed to her with a laugh—the
en
trance happened too obviously
upon its cue, and anything
like that
was bliss and beauty for the Saint, who was
nothing if not melodramatic. And he turned again to the
Italian.

“Remove the
whatnots,” he ordered operatically.

Gugliemi bent shakily to
obey. The straps fell from the girl’s wrists, then from her ankles.

“And now, Jill, has
the specimen behind this tie pin
been getting what you
might call uppish?”

“He was——
”

“Ah-ha!” The
Saint revolved his automatic. “I don’t . want to be premature, Antonio,
but this looks bad for
your matrimonial
prospects. If you remember what I was
saying just now——
”

“But you got here in
time,” Jill protested. “What are
you
going to do?”

“Oh!” said the
Saint, almost reluctantly. “Hasn’t he
been
really nasty?”

“Not really.”

The Saint sighed.

“The old story book
again,” he murmured unhappily.
“You know,
I’ve always wondered what would happen if
the
hero missed his train and blew in half an hour too
late.
And I suppose we shall never know… . But what
was the idea?”

She told him, exactly as
Gugliemi had told her, while
the Italian stood pallidly
silent under the continued
menace of the Saint’s
automatic. And when, at the end of
the story, Simon
turned suddenly on him, Gugliemi almost jumped out of his skin.

“You really mean to
tell me the police passed you that
yarn?”
demanded the Saint. “And you expect me to
believe
it?”

“But it is true,
sair.”

“Which policeman?”
inquired the Saint skeptically.

“A big man—with a
moustache—like this——
”

Gugliemi frowned down his
eyebrows, twisted his
mouth, and thrust out his
jaw in a caricature which the
Saint recognized at once.
So did Jill.

“Cullis!”

Simon sat down on the bed,
regarding the Italian with
a thoughtful air.

“But how did you get here?” Jill was
asking.

“Oh, I breezed along,” said the
Saint. “As a matter of
fact, I was
coming round to see you. My respectable friend
thought he’d like to meet you, so I was sent off to bring
you
along. Just as I turned the corner by the studio I saw you get into a car and
drive away. There wasn’t a taxi in
sight to
give chase in, and in the circumstances I couldn’t raise happy hell in the
street. But I nailed down the num
ber
of the decamping dimbox, and then it was easy
enough to find out who the owner was.”

“But how did you do
that?”

“I consulted a
clairvoyant,” said the Saint, “and he told
me at once. It took a
bit of time, though. However, I got
the man
just as he was putting the car away in the garage. He was persuaded to talk——
”

“You made him
talk?”

“I hypnotized
him,” said the Saint blandly, “and he
talked.
Then I came right along here.”

The girl shook her head
ruefully.

“I’m luckier than I
deserve to be. If I’d thought I
should ever live to fall
for a gag like that——
”

“It’s an old gag
because it’s a good one, darling. Given
the right staging, it
never fails. So I shouldn’t take it too
much
to heart. And now let’s go home, shall we?”

He stood up, and Jill Trelawney was at a loss
for any
thing more to say at that moment. She
could only think
of one feeble remark.

“But what are we
going to do with—this?”

She indicated Gugliemi, and Simon looked at the
man
as if he had never seen him before.

“I’ll take him back to Upper Berkeley
Mews,” he said. “I think I’d like to have a little private talk with
him; that break of yours might turn out to be the most useful thing
you ever did.”

And take Gugliemi he did,
with one hand holding the
man’s arm and another
jamming the muzzle of the auto
matic into his ribs, all
the way from Lambeth to the
studio in Chelsea, in a
taxicab which they were lucky
enough to find as soon as
they emerged onto the main
road. He left Jill at the
studio, saying that he would re
turn in an hour; and he himself went on in the
taxi with
Gugliemi to Upper Berkeley Mews.

He was as good as his
word. It was almost exactly an
hour later when she heard
his key in the lock, and the
next moment he walked in,
as calm and unperturbed as if
nothing of any interest
whatever had happened that
evening.

By that time she had
collected her wits, and she was
ready for him.

“Did you have a good
talk?” she inquired.

“Charming,” said
the Saint, stretching himself out on
the sofa and lighting a cigarette.
“What about a brace of
those kippers I
brought in this morning? My respectable
friend gave me a slap-up dinner, but I’ve still got room
for some good plain food.”

“What did you talk to
Gugliemi about?” she persisted.

“About Judas
Iscariot.”

“Don’t be
funny.”

“But I’m dead serious,
Jill. In that famous name you
have the whole
conversation in a nutshell. He didn’t take
much
persuading, either, and we parted bosom friends.”

“Do you mind giving
me some straight talk? What’s this
game you’re
playing now?”

Simon grinned.

“That,” he
said, “must still be one of my own particular secrets. But I can satisfy
you about Gugliemi, who has a
very kind heart when you dig down to it,
although his
methods are rather low. In
fact, I gather that he was really getting quite fond of you before I arrived
and
spoilt his evening.”

“I quite believe that,” said the girl
grimly.

“Joking apart,”
said the Saint, “he’s an interesting
psychological
specimen: I’d figured that in the first few
minutes.
He was quite ready to put you out of the way in
his own fashion—for a
fee—since he had been told that
you were a
political nuisance. But I had a much better
story to tell him. I didn’t
even have to beat him up, which
I was quite
prepared to do. I took him into my confidence.
I dosed him with a bottle of Chianti I found lying around.
I told him he’d been humbugged all the way down
the
line, and I was able to produce a
bit of evidence to con
vince
him.”

“What evidence was
that?”

“Never mind. But he
was really quite ready to be convinced, because, as I said, you’d made a great
impression on him. And when he saw what the game was, what with
his native
chivalry and another litre of Chianti and my
persuasive
tongue, he switched right round the other
way. And now I believe he’d go out after Cullis with a
gun in each hand and a stiletto behind his ear if
you asked
him to. Did you know his first name was Duodecimo?
That’s a jolly sort of name, that is. We were
getting as
matey as that before the end… . The really interesting
point is our assistant commissioner’s psychology.”

The girl was lighting a cigarette.

“Go on,” she
said.

“You see his
point,” said the Saint. “You’re getting
troublesome,
so Cullis employs Gugliemi to bump you off.
If
Gugliemi doesn’t get caught, so much the better. If he does get caught, and
tries to tell anyone that the assistant
commissioner
employed him to take you for a ride, they’d
just
think he was raving. It was really beautifully simple.
My
respectable friend will just love that story.”

The girl looked at him
curiously.

“Who is this
respectable friend you keep talking
about?”

“Auntie Ethel,”
said the Saint lucidly. “She has a very
fine
sense of humour. For instance, she simply roared over
the
story of those papers that were taken from the Rec
ords
Office.”

Jill Trelawney watched him
with narrowed eyes. She
had not seen him in this
mood before, and it annoyed her.
When they had joined
forces in Birmingham, and
throughout the adventures
which followed—even in the earlier days of bitter warfare—everything had been
perfectly straight and above-board. But now the Saint was
starting to
collect an aura of mystery about him, and she
realized,
almost with a shock, that in spite of the fantastic
manner in which he played his part there was
something
very solid behind his
fooling.

She had always been used to
being in the lead. The
Angels of Doom had
followed her blindly. But Simon
Templar had challenged her
from the very beginning,
and from the very moment
when he had elected to
catapult them into a
preposterous partnership he had
been quietly but steadily usurping her place.
And now,
when he calmly produced a dark
secret which he would
not allow her
to share, while he knew everything that he
needed to know about her, she felt that she had fallen
into a definitely subordinate position. And the
bullet
was a tough one for her to
chew.

But the Saint’s manner
indicated no feelings of tri
umph, or even of
self-satisfaction, which was really so
surprising
that it made the situation still more irritating
to her. If he had been
ordinarily smug about it she could
have
dealt with him. But he had a copyright kind of smugness that was unanswerable.
…

“The papers,”
said Jill deliberately, taking up his re
mark
after it had hung in the air for some seconds, “which
you
took from
the Records Office.”

“Oh, no,” said
the Saint. “The papers which Cullis took from the Records Office!”

She was startled into an
incredulous exclamation.

“Cullis?” she repeated.

Simon nodded.

“Yes. The night
before last I was up all night watching his house. He lives in Hampstead, which
is a dangerous
thing for a man like that to do, in a
house which stands
all by itself with a garden all round.
French windows to his study, too. I sat shivering in the dew behind a bush,
and watched him when he came in. I didn’t know then
what the papers were, of course, but I gathered from his
expression
that they were something pretty big. Next
morning
I heard about Records Office being robbed, and
I guessed what it was.”

“You never told me
how you learnt that.”

“Through the
clairvoyant I mentioned before,” said
the
Saint fluently. “A very useful man. You ought to meet
him… . Last night I went down and did my burglary.
I had to do the drain-pipe work I mentioned and get in
on the first floor, because there were some very useful
burglar alarms all over the downstairs window—a new
kind that you can’t disconnect; and I duly collected the
papers, as you saw. You see, Cullis is getting the wind up.”

Jill Trelawney gazed at
him without speaking.