For the merest fraction of a second, a glitter of expression skimmed across the prince's eyes. And then it was gone again, and his sensitive features were once more as impassive as a Siberian sea.
"You appear," he said suavely, "to be forgetting your position."
"You don't say."
The prince's stick swung gracefully from his fingertips.
"You forget, my impetuous young friend, that I am the visitor—and the dictator of the conversation. You are inquisitive, but you may or may not be so ignorant as you wish me to believe. The point is really immaterial. Except that, if you are honestly ignorant, I can assure you—from nothing but my personal regard for you, my dear Mr. Templar—I can assure you that it will be healthier for you to remain in ignorance." He glanced at his watch. "I think we have wasted enough time. Mr. Templar, when you abducted Weissmann, he was carrying a small steel box. I see that you have detached it from him. That box, Mr. Templar, is my property, and I shall be glad to have it."
The Saint lounged even more languidly against the wall.
"I'll bet you'd love it—Highness."
Simon's voice was dreamy. And right down behind that drawling dreaminess his brain was sizzling with the knowledge that somewhere the interview had sprung a leak.
In no way whatsoever had it taken the line he had subconsciously expected of it, and not one of his deliberate discourtesies had been able to startle it back into the way it should have gone. The Saint felt like a second-rate comedian frantically pumping the old oil into a frosted audience, and feeling all the inclement draughts of Lapland whistling back at him to roost below his wishbone. The badinage was going hideously flat. He caught the prince's gaze on him with a quiet wraith of humour in it
"In a few minutes more, my friend, I shall believe that your ignorance is genuine. Or possibly your intelligence has deteriorated. Such things have been known to happen. I will admit that, when I decided to call on you myself, I had my doubts about the wisdom of the proceeding. A natural curiosity of my own persuaded me to take the risk. Now the risk has been justified, and I have been disappointed. It is a pity. But perhaps one cannot have everything. . . ."
"Allow me," murmured the Saint genially, "to mention that I'm doing my utmost to oblige. What, after all, is one corpse more or less between friends? Of course, my shooting isn't what it was, and as a matter of fact it never has been, and if you feel like taking a chance on it——"
"I rarely feel inclined to take chances," said the prince calmly. "But perhaps I have been distracting your attention."
He made a slight signal with his right hand.
Just for an instant, the movement seemed to be nothing more than a meaningless gesture; and the Saint was deceived. And then the scales fell from his eyes—just that one instant too late.
He had forgotten that drumming on the front door of the suite. When it had stopped for the arrival of the prince he had thought no more about it. He had taken it for nothing more than an elementary ruse to enable the prince to make his entrance unobserved through the sitting-room windows; he had cursed himself silently for being so simply taken in, and thereafter had dismissed it from a mind that was fully occupied with other problems. .
And now he grasped his error.
It was literally thrust upon him—jabbed firmly and incontrovertibly into his spine, and purposefully left there. Before that, in his irregular and energetic life, he had experienced the identical sensation. The feel of a gun muzzle in one's back leaves an indelible imprint on one's memory.
Simon stood quite still.
"Disappointing, in its way," said the prince silkily, "but satisfactory in most respects. I can recall the days when you would have been more troublesome."
Unhurriedly he crossed the room and picked up the strongbox, and the Saint watched him coldly. There were two chips of white-hot sapphire in the Saint's eyes, twin lights of concentrated wrath that blazed through a thin crust of glacial immobility. The memory of the old days was seething through his tissues like an elixir of hot gall. The prince was right. Simon Templar had never been so easy.
The Saint's mouth writhed into a grimly tightening line. The softness had gone out of him. He felt as if he had just woken up—as if he had been fumbling feebly through a stifling fog, and suddenly the fog had vanished and he was stretching limber muscles and gulping down great lungfuls of clear mountain air. His brain was as pellucid as an Alpine pool. It had room for only one idea: to get his hands on to the contemptuous faces of the party that had made a fool of him, and hit them. Hit them, and keep on hitting. . . .
The prince was smiling at him.
"I can only repeat my assurance, Mr. Templar, that there are times when ignorance is bliss and curiosity may be an expensive pastime. Particularly in one whose hand has lost its cunning."
Simon Templar drew a deep breath.
Then he fired from his pocket.
His gun, with a half-charged cartridge in the chamber, gave no more than an explosive little cough, which merged into the sharp smack of the bullet crashing home into the single electric light switch by the door; and the room was plunged into impenetrable blackness.
The Saint hurled himself sideways. Right behind him he heard the dull plop of an efficiently silenced gun, but he was untouched. He twisted like an eel, and his hand brushed a pair of legs. They heard his grim chuckle in the darkness. There was a gasp, a strangled cry, and a terrific thud that mingled with the slamming of a door.
And after that there was a queer stillness in the room; and in the stillness someone groaned harrowingly. . . .
Monty Hayward dipped in his pocket and found a box of matches. He struck one circumspectly, and looked about him.
Patricia Holm was standing quietly beside the bed; and on the floor the horse-faced gun-in-the-back guy was giving a lifelike imitation of a starfish in its death agony. But the Crown Prince had gone—and so had Simon Templar.
III. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR MADE A JOURNEY,
AND PRINCE RUDOLPH SPOKE OF HIS APPENDIX
THE Saint went through the sitting-room window in a flying leap that landed him on the turf beyond like a crouching puma.
He paused there for a moment with his eyes and ears alert, sifting the shadows for the tell-tale movement which he knew he would find somewhere. And while he paused he felt his spirits soaring upwards till they knocked their heads against the stars.
The bouncing of the gun artist had done him good—more good even than the initial encounter with the thugs who had been heaved in error into the river. On the whole, those three had only been common, or garden, thugs; whereas the gun artist had prodded his gun into the Saint's spinal purlieus, thereby occasioning him considerable discomfort, uneasiness, and inconvenience. Well, things had happened to the gun artist which ought to learn him. The Saint had picked him up by his ankles, bounced him halfway to the ceiling, and allowed him to return to earth under his own steam.
And after that, the temptation to repeat the performance with Prince Rudolf had been almost overwhelming. Only an epic triumph of brains over brawn, a positively prodigious magnificence of will, the Saint modestly believed, had made it possible to withstand the succulent allurements of the idea. But his better judgment, borne up on a wave of Saintly inspiration, told him that the time for playing ball with Rudolf was not yet.
Ten yards away, down by the sheer black walls of the hotel, a blurred glimpse of white showed for the twinkling of an eye, a glimpse that was there and gone again, like the pale belly of a shark turning fathoms deep in a midnight lagoon; and the Saint smiled contentedly. He slipped noiselessly into the murk beside the wall, and followed along on toes that hardly seemed to touch the grass.
The figure ahead was not so stealthy. Simon could hear the soft rustle and pad of thin shoes hurrying over the ground, and once he caught the dry rustling of leaves as the prince scraped past a laurel bush. To a man with the Saint's ears, those sounds were of more value than all the sun arcs in Hol
lywood: they told him everything he wanted to know, without making his own presence so obvious. Flitting inaudibly behind them, he closed in on his quarry until he could actually hear the prince's steady breathing.
A second later, the sudden squeak of a metal hinge fetched the Saint up all standing. Immediately in front of him he could make out an arched opening in the gloom, and for a moment the prince's silhouette was framed in the gap. Then the hinge squeaked its second protest, and the silhouette was gone.
Simon frowned. Laurel bushes he could cope with, dead twigs likewise, and similarly any of the other hazards of night stalking; but squeaking gates were a notch or two above his form. And the Saint knew that when once a gate has made up its mind to squeak it will surely get its squeak in somehow, even though the hand that shifts it has a touch like gossamer.
Thoughtfully he stepped back.
Seven feet up, the wall through which the arch was cut ended in a flat line of deeper blackness against the dense obscurity of the sky. That seemed to be the only hope; and the Saint went for it with a quick spring and a supple pull on his fingers that brought him to the top of the wall like an athletic phantom. He drew his feet up after him without a sound—and stopped there motionless.
Right underneath him a big limousine was parked with its lights out and its engine whispering, barely discernible in the faint luminance which filtered down the alley from an invisible street lamp somewhere in the road at the far end. A man in some sort of livery was closing the door, and Simon heard the prince murmur a curt order. The chauffeur hurried round and climbed in behind the wheel. There was a dull click as he engaged the gears; and the headlights cut a wide channel of radiance out of the darkness of the lane.
Without a moment's hesitation, the Saint stepped out into space and spreadeagled himself silently on the roof.
He was aware that he was doing the maddest of mad things. For all he knew, that car might be preparing to hustle to the other end of Europe. If it chose to do so, it could easily travel two hundred miles before it made its first stop; and every one of those miles would have its chance of hurling him off to certain injury and possible death—apart from the ever present risk of discovery. And back in the Hotel Königshof he had left Monty and Pat to keep their ends up with a corpse and a prisoner, and not one clue between them to indicate what he expected them to do.
But they would have to pull their own weights in the boat, even as the Saint was pulling his. Patricia he knew like his own hand; and Monty Hayward was a veritable tower of strength. They would find their own solution to the revised problem— even if that solution consisted of nothing more desperate than a policy of masterly inaction.
Meanwhile, fully three quarters of his own talents were taken up with the business of maintaining his present strategic position. At the first trial, the roof of the car had seemed most conveniently proportioned to enable him to curl his toes over the rear corners and his fingers over the front ones, thereby stabilizing his equilibrium over a wide base; but after the first five minutes he discovered that his position was unpleasantly reminiscent of the lunch hour in a mediaeval torture chamber. If he had been able to talk, he would have aired his heartfelt sympathy with the venerable sportsmen who allowed their heights to be increased on the six-inches-while-you-wait machine, while the jailers went round the corner to get gay with a butt of mulled sack. The car dodged and bucked round every available corner, heading eastwards out of the town onto the Salzburg road; and at every corner he had to exert all his strength to avoid being flung into the scenery like a pea off a gyroscope. Even when they were clear of the town he was no better off; for the Inn Valley road, for its own mysterious reasons, switches over a series of bridges from one side of the river to the other at every conceivable opportunity and a few others which only an engineering genius could have invented. Moreover, it is covered to a depth of three inches with a layer of fine white dust; and as the car increased its speed the Saint found himself enveloped in a whirling cloud of pulverized rock which invaded his nostrils and turned the lining of his throat into a lime kiln—a form of frightfulness which the mediaeval connoisseurs had omitted to include in their syllabus of entertainment. The Saint clung on like a limpet, breathing through his ears, and dreaming wistfully of feather beds and beer.
After a while he began to get adjusted to the peculiar requirements of his position—for what that was worth. At least, he felt sufficiently secure to try and take a peek at what there was to be seen in the de luxe quarters of the vehicle. Locating a merciful straight stretch of road in front of them, he let go one hand and squirmed himself gingerly round to shoot one eyes through the miniature skylight under his belt buckle.
At the four corners of the rear compartment, clusters of tiny frosted bulbs illuminated the interior. By their light Simon could see the prince reclining in the sybaritic upholstery with the portable safe balanced on his knee. He was idly twiddling the wheels of the combination, and a tranquil smile was gliding over his face. Presently he put the strong-box down on the cushions beside him and rested his chin on his hand, wrapped in inscrutable contemplation.
The Saint grabbed for a hold and flattened himself out again in time to take the next corner. And he also meditated.
The view he had had of the tableau under his tummy was definitely encouraging. Pondering it between the racking strains on his muscles, he elaborated it into a direct and diagnostic confirmation of his theory. The facts as he knew them so far had to link up somehow, and the Saint felt that he could do the linking. That was why he was suffering his present martyrdom.
He tacked the dues concisely together in his mind.
"Emilio was tailing Stanislaus to report when he made the home base. When I collared Stanislaus, Emilio didn't try to rescue him; he knifed him instead. After which, Rudolf tools and lifts the sardine can. Simple."
The big car sped on; and time became nothing but a meaningless succession of aches. They passed through a jolly-sounding place called Pill, swung right at Schwaz, and began to climb into the mountains. Shortly afterwards, the so-called "first-class" road petered out, and they were jolting over a kind of glorified mule track which boxed the compass along the brink of a contorted precipice. The chauffeur, whose nervous system must have been nothing more than an elementary apparatus rigged up from a few assorted icicles and bits of string, kept his foot hard down on the accelerator and took the hairpin corners on two wheels; and after the first mile of it the Saint buried his face in his sleeve and lost interest in the route. Every few minutes he felt the car heel drunkenly over to one side or the other, while the tires skidded horribly over the loose, treacherous surface; and the Saint felt the flesh crawling on the back of his neck and wondered if any art of surgery would ever induce his bones to settle back into their tortured sockets.
Eventually, with a terrific bump which the Saint at first assumed to be the inevitable end, the car crabbed onto a comparatively level driveway and began to slow down.
Simon raised his head with the feelings of a drowning man who finds himself unexpectedly coming up for the fourth time, and endeavoured to absorb the salient features of the landscape.
Straight in front of him he could see a pitch-black pile rearing up its serrated battlements out of the shrouded dark. The headlamps of the car splashed a wide oval of light over the bleak stone entrance flanked by semicircular bastions, and picked out the gaunt figure of the janitor, who was at that moment hurrying to open the huge wrought-iron gates. To left and right of the archway the forbidding walls of the castle stretched sheer and unbroken to the squat round towers at the corners fifty yards away.
The car moved slowly forward again, and the Saint pulled himself cautiously up onto his toes and fingertips. The gatekeeper was temporarily blinded by the headlights; and Simon knew that that was his only chance. Once the car had passed within the walls, the odds on his being spotted would leap up to twenty-five to one; and having travelled so far, he had no urge to gambl
e his hopes of success on any bet like that.
The gateway was the vulnerable point in the fortifications, with a bare yard of masonry rising over it. As the car passed underneath, Simon set his teeth, gathered his cracking muscles, and jumped. He caught the top of the stonework, and wriggled over with an effort that seemed to split his sinews.
He found himself on a sort of narrow balcony that spanned the archway and disappeared into the turrets on each side. In the courtyard below him he could see the car swinging round to pull up beside a massive door over which a hanging lantern swayed in the slight breeze. The car stopped, and the prince stepped quickly out; as he did so, the door was flung open, and a broad beam of light cast the grotesquely elongated shadow of a footman down the steps. The prince stepped inside, pulling off his gloves; and the door dosed.
Simon's eye roved thoughtfully up the walls above the door. Higher up he could see a narrow streak of light sneaking through a gap in the curtains of a window: while he watched, the window next to it suddenly appeared in a yellow square of radiance.
"Which seems to be our next stop," opined the Saint.
He moved along to the turret on his left, and found a flight of spiral stone stairs running upwards and downwards from the minute landing where he stood. After a second's cogitation, he decided on the upward flight, and emerged onto a broader promenade which ran round the entire perimeter of the walls.
Simon kissed his hand to the unknown architect of that invaluable veranda, and hustled round it as quickly as he dared. A matter of three minutes brought him to a point which he judged to be vertically over the lighted windows; leaning dizzily over the battlements, he was able to make out a dimly illuminated sill. And right under his hands he could feel the thick, gnarled tendrils of a growth of ivy that must have been digging itself in since the days of Charlemagne.
With the slow beginnings of a Saintly smile touching his lips, Simon flexed his arms, took a firm grip on the nearest tentacles, and swung his legs over the low balustrade.
The Saint's Getaway Page 4