Roger controlled his tongue with a tremendous effort.
He found that he could breathe. The iron bands about his chest had slackened, and the bodily anguish had lessened. There was still the throbbing pain in his back and the throbbing pain in his head, but he was better. And he wasn’t asking for any unnecessary aggravation of his troubles—not just then, anyway.
The man went on: “The Doctor is a great man. He is the greatest man in the world. You should have seen how he arranged everything in two minutes. It was magnificent. He is Napoleon born again. He is going to make our country the greatest country in the world. And you fools try to fight him…”
The speech merged into an unintelligible outburst in the man’s native tongue, but Roger understood enough. He understood that a man who could delude his servants into such a fanatical loyalty was no small man. And he wondered what chance the Saint would ever have had of convincing anyone that Marius was concerned with no patriotisms and no nationalities, but only with his own gods of money and power.
The first flush of futile anger ebbed from Conway’s face, and he lay in stolid silence as he was tied, revolving plot and counter-plot in his mind. Hermann, failing to rouse him with taunts, struck him twice across the face. Roger never moved. And the man spat at him again.
“It is as I thought. You have no courage, you dogs of Englishmen. It is only when you are many against one little one—then you are brave.”
“Oh, quite,” said Roger wearily.
Hermann glowered at him.
“Now, if you had been the one who hit me…”
Zzzzzzzzzzzing!
The shrill scream of a bell wailed through the apartment with a suddenness that made the conventional sound electrifying. Hermann stopped, stiffening, in the middle of his sentence. And a sour leer came into his face.
“Now I welcome your friend, pig.”
Roger drew a deep breath.
He must have been careless, obvious about it, for Roger Conway’s was not a mind much given to cunning. Or possibly Hermann had been expecting some such move, subconsciously, and had his ears pricked for the sound. But he stopped on his way to the door and turned.
“You would try to give warning, Englishman?” he purred.
His gun was in his hand. He reached Roger in three strides.
Roger knew he was up against it. If he didn’t shout, his one chance of rescue, so far as he could see, was dished—and Norman Kent with it. If he looked like shouting, he’d be laid out again. And, if it came to that, since his intention of shouting had already been divined, he’d probably be laid out anyway. Hermann wasn’t the sort of man to waste time gagging his prisoners. So…
“Go to blazes,” said Roger recklessly.
Then he yelled.
An instant later Hermann’s gun-butt crashed into the side of his head.
Again he should have been stunned, but he wasn’t. He decided afterwards that he must have a skull a couple of inches thick, and the constitution of an ox with it, to have stood up to as much as he had. But the fact remained that he was laid out without being stunned, and he lay still, trying to collect himself in time to loose a second yell as Hermann opened the door.
Hermann straightened up, turning his gun round again. He put it in his coat pocket, keeping his finger on the trigger, and then, with something like a panicking terror that the warning might have been heard and accepted by the person outside the front door, he scrambled rather than ran out of the room, cursing under his breath.
But the ring was repeated as he reached the front door, and the sound reassured him. He could not believe that anyone who had heard and understood that one yell would have rung again so promptly after it. Whereby Hermann showed himself a less ingenious psychologist than the man outside…
He opened the door, keeping himself hidden behind it.
No one entered.
He waited, with a kind of superstitious fear trickling down his back like a tiny cascade of ice-cold water. Nothing happened—and yet the second ring had sounded only a moment before he opened the door, and no one who had rung a second time would go away at once, without waiting to see if the renewed summons would be answered.
Then Conway yelled again, “Look out, Norman!”
Hermann swore in a whisper.
But now he had no choice. He had been given his orders. The man who came was to be taken. And certainly the man who had come, who must have heard Conway’s second cry even if he had not heard the first, could not be allowed to escape and raise an alarm.
Incautiously Hermann stepped to the door.
His feet were scarcely clear of the threshold, outside on the landing, when a hand like a ham caught his throat from behind, over his shoulder, and another enormous hand gripped his gun-wrist like a vice. He was as helpless as a child.
The hand at his throat twisted his face round to the light. He saw a ponderous red face with sleepy eyes, connected by a pillar of neck with shoulders worthy of a buffalo.
“Come along,” said Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal drowsily. “Come along back to where you sprang from, and open your heart to Uncle!”
10
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DROVE TO BURES, AND TWO POLICEMEN JUMPED IN TIME
The road out of London on the north-east is one of the less pleasant ways of finding the open country. For one thing, it is infested with miles of tramway, crawling, interminable, blocking the traffic, maddening to the man at the wheel of a fast car—especially maddening to the man in a hurry at the wheel of a fast car.
Late as it was, there was enough traffic on the road to balk the Saint of clear runs of more than a few hundred yards at a time. And every time he was forced to apply the brakes, pause, and re-accelerate was pulling his average down.
There was a quicker route than the one he was taking, he knew. He had been taken over it once—a route that wound intricately through deserted side streets, occasionally crossing the more populous thoroughfares, and then hurriedly breaking away into the empty roads again. It was longer, but it was quicker to traverse. But the Saint had only been over it that once, and that by daylight; now, in the dark, he could not have trusted himself to find it again. The landmarks that a driver automatically picks out by day are of little use to him in the changed aspect of lamplight. And to get lost would be more maddening than the obstruction of traffic. To waste minutes, and perhaps miles, travelling in the wrong direction, to be muddled by the vague and contradictory directions of accosted pedestrians and police, to be plagued and pestered with the continual uncertainty—that would have driven him to the verge of delirium. The advantage that might be gained wasn’t worth all that might be lost. He had decided as much when he swung into the car in Brook Street. And he kept to the main roads.
He smashed through the traffic grimly, seizing every opportunity that offered, creating other opportunities of his own in defiance of every law and principle and point of etiquette governing the use of His Majesty’s highway, winning priceless seconds where and how he could.
Other drivers cursed him; two policemen called on him to stop, were ignored, and took his number; he scraped a wing in a desperate rush through a gap that no one else would ever have considered a gap at all; three times he missed death by a miracle while overtaking on a blind corner; and the pugnacious driver of a baby car who ventured to insist on his rightful share of the road went white as the Hirondel forced him on to the kerb to escape annihilation.
It was an incomparable exhibition of pure hogging, and it made everything of that kind that Roger Conway had been told to do earlier in the evening look like a child’s game with a push-cart, but the Saint didn’t care. He was on his way, and if the rest of the population objected to the manner of his going, they could do one of two things with their objections.
Some who saw the passage of the Saint that night will remember it to the end of their lives, for the Hirondel, as though recognising the hand of a master at its wheel, became almost a living thing. King of the Road its m
akers called it, but that night the Hirondel was more than a king: it was the incarnation and apotheosis of all cars. For the Saint drove with the devil at his shoulder, and the Hirondel took its mood from his. If this had been a superstitious age, those who saw it would have crossed themselves and sworn that it was no car at all they saw that night, but a snarling silver fiend that roared through London on the wings of an unearthly wind.
For half an hour…with the Saint’s thumb restless on the button of the klaxon, and the strident voice of the silver fiend howling for avenue in a tone that brooked no contention…and then the houses thinned away and gave place to the first fields, and the Saint settled down to the job—coaxing, with hands as sure and gentle as any horseman’s, the last possible ounce of effort out of the hundred horses under his control…
There was darkness on either side: the only light in the world lay along the tunnel which the powerful headlights slashed out of the stubborn blackness. From time to time, out of the dark, a great beast with eyes of fire leapt at him, clamouring, was slipped as a charging bull is slipped by a toreador, went by with a baffled grunt and a skimming slither of wind. And again and again, in the dark the Hirondel swooped up behind ridiculous, creeping glow-worms, sniffed at their red tails, snorted derisively, swept past with a deep-throated blare. No car in England could have held the lead of the Hirondel that night.
The drone of the great engine went on as a background of gigantic song; it sang in tune with the soft swish of the tyres and the rush of the cool night air, and the song it sang was: “Patricia Holm…Patricia…Patricia…Patricia Holm!”
And the Saint had no idea what he was going to do. Nor was he thinking about it. He knew nothing of the geography of the “house on the hill”—nothing of the lie of the surrounding land—nothing of the obstacles that might bar his way, nor of the resistance that would be offered to his attack. And so he was not jading himself with thinking of these things. They were beyond the reach of idle speculation. He had no clue: therefore it would have been a waste of time to speculate. He could only live for the moment, and the task of the moment—to hurl himself eastwards across England like a thunderbolt into the battle that lay ahead.
“Patricia!…Patricia!…”
Softly the Saint took up the song, but his own voice could not be heard for the voice of the Hirondel. The song of the car bayed over wide spaces of country, was bruised and battered between the walls of startled village streets, was flung back in rolling echoes from the walls of hills.
That he was going to an almost blindfold assault took nothing from his rapture. Rather, he savoured the adventure the more, for this was the fashion of forlorn sally that his heart cried for—the end of inaction, the end of perplexity and helplessness, the end of a damnation of doubt and dithering. And in the Saint’s heart was a shout of rejoicing, because at last the God of all good battles and desperate endeavour had remembered him again.
No, it wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t a mere lust for adventure that cared nothing for the peril of those who made the adventure worth while. It was the irresistible resurgence of the most fundamental of all the inspirations of man. A wild stirring in its ancient sleep of the spirit that sent the knights of Arthur out upon their quests, of Tristan crying for Isolde, of the flame in a man’s heart that brought fire and sword upon Troy, of Roland’s shout and the singing blade of Durendal amid the carnage of Roncesvalles. “The sound of the trumpet…”
Thus the miles were eaten up, until more than half the journey must have been set behind him.
If only there was no engine failure…He had no fear for fuel and oil, for he had filled up on the way back from Maidenhead.
Simon touched a switch, and all the instruments on the dashboard before him were illuminated from behind with a queer ghostly luminance. His eye flickered from the road and found one of them.
Seventy-two.
Seventy-four.
Seventy-five…six…
“Patricia!…”
“Battle, murder, and sudden death…”
“You know, Pat, we don’t have a chance these days. There’s no chance for magnificent loving. A man ought to fight for his lady. Preferably with dragons…”
Seventy-eight.
Seventy-nine.
A corner loomed out of the dark, flung itself at him, menacing, murderous. The tyres, curbed with a cruel hand, tore at the road, shrieking. The car swung round the corner, on its haunches, as it were…gathered itself, and found its stride again…
Ping!
Something like the crisp twang of the snapping of an overstrained wire. The Saint, looking straight ahead, blinking, saw that the windscreen in front of him had given birth to a star—a star of long slender points radiating from a neat round hole drilled through the glass. And a half-smile came to his lips.
Ping!
Bang!
Bong!
The first sound repeated; then, in quick succession, two other sounds, sharp and high, like the smack of two pieces of metal. In front of him they were. In the gleaming aluminium bonnet.
“Smoke!” breathed the Saint. “This is a wild party!”
He hadn’t time to adjust himself to the interruption, to parse and analyse it and extract its philosophy. How he came to be under fire at that stage of the journey—that could wait. Something had gone wrong. Someone had blundered. Roger must have been tricked, and Marius must have escaped—or something. But, meanwhile…
Fortunately the first shot had made him slow up. Otherwise he would have been killed.
The next sound he heard was neither the impact of a bullet nor the thin, distant rattle of the rifle that fired it. It was loud and close and explosive, under his feet it seemed, and the steering wheel was wrenched out of his hand—nearly.
He never knew how he kept his grip on it. An instinct swifter than thought must have made him tighten his hold at the sound of that explosion, and he was driving with both hands on the wheel. He tore the wheel round in the way it did not want to go, bracing his feet on clutch and brake pedals, calling up the last reserve of every sinew in his splendid body.
Death, sudden as anything he could have asked, stared him in the face. The strain was terrific. The Hirondel had ceased to be his creature. It was mad, runaway, the bit between its tremendous teeth, caracoling towards a demoniac plunge to destruction. No normal human power should have been able to hold it. The Saint, strong as he was, could never have done it—normally. He must have found some supernatural strength.
Somehow he kept the car out of the ditch for as long as it took to bring it to a standstill.
Then, almost without thinking, he switched out the lights.
Dimly he wondered why, under that fearful gruelling, the front axle hadn’t snapped like a dry stick, or why the steering hadn’t come to pieces under his hands.
“If I come out of this alive,” thought the Saint, “the Hirondel Motor Company will get an unsolicited testimonial from me.”
But that thought merely crossed his mind like a swallow skimming a quiet pool—and was lost. Then, in the same dim way, he was wondering why he hadn’t brought a gun. Now he was likely to pay for the reckless haste with which he had set out. His little knife was all very well—he could use it as accurately as any man could use a gun, and as swiftly—but it was only good for one shot. He’d never been able to train it to function as a boomerang.
It was unlikely that he was being sniped by one man alone. And that one solitary knife, however expertly he used it, would be no use at all against a number of armed men besieging him in a lamed car.
“Obviously, therefore,” thought Simon, “get out of the car.”
And he was out of it instantly, crouching in the ditch beside it. In the open, and the darkness, he would have a better chance.
He wasn’t thinking for a moment of a getaway. That would have been fairly easy. But the Hirondel was the only car he had on him, and it had to be saved—or else he had to throw in his hand. Joke. The obvious object of the ambusca
de was to make him do just that—to stop him, anyhow—and he wasn’t being stopped…
Now, with the switching off of the lights the darkness had become less dark, and the road ran through it, beside the black bulk of the flanking trees, like a ribbon of dull steel. And, looking back, the Saint could see shadows that moved. He counted four of them.
He went to meet them, creeping like a snake in the dry ditch. They were separated. Avoiding the dull gleam of that strip of road, as if afraid that a shot from the car in front might greet their approach, they slunk along in the gloom at the sides of the road, two on one side and two on the other.
It was no time for soft fighting. There was that punctured front wheel to be changed, and those four men in the way. So the four men had to be eliminated—as quickly and definitely as possible. The Saint was having no fooling about.
The leader of the two men on Simon’s side of the road almost stepped on the dark figure that seemed to rise suddenly out of the ground in front of him. He stopped and tried to draw back so that he could use the rifle he carried, and his companion trod on his heels and cursed.
Then the first man screamed, and the scream died in a choking gurgle.
The man behind him saw his leader sink to the ground, but there was another man beyond his leader—a man who had not been there before, who laughed with a soft whisper of desperate merriment. The second man tried to raise the automatic he carried, but two steely hands grasped his wrists, and he felt himself flying helplessly through the air. He seemed to fly a long way—and then he slept.
The Saint crossed the road.
A gun spoke from the hand of one of the two men on the other side, who had paused, irresolute, at the sound of the first scream. But the Saint was lost again in the shadows.
They crouched down, waiting, watching, intent for his next move. But they were looking down along the ditch and the grass beside the road, where the Saint had vanished like a ghost, but the Saint was above them then, crouched like a leopard under the hedge at the top of the embankment beside them, gathering himself stealthily.
The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 12