Patricia leaned over from the back seat.
"Don't you see, boy? We had to get you away somehow, and Monty did the only thing he could. I think he worked it marvellously."
Simon hammered the handcuffs on his knee in a frenzy.
"Oh, Monty was wonderful!" he exploded bitterly. "Monty was Mother's Angel Child! Make your getaway at any cost— that's Monty. Throw up every stake in the game except your own skin. Damn the boodle that we've all been chancing our necks for——"
"It'll do you good," said Monty. "Next time, you won't be in such a hurry to get your friends into trouble."
"But—damn your daft eyes! We had the game in our hands!"
"What game? What is this boodle that all the shindy's about, anyway? You keep us up all night chasing that wretched little box, and I don't suppose you've any more idea what's inside it than I have. For all you know, it's probably a couple of floating kidneys."
Simon sank back in his corner and closed his eyes.
"I can tell you what they were. I've seen 'em. They're the larger half of the Montenegrin crown jewels. They disappeared on their way to Christie's six weeks back. I was thinking of having a dart at them myself. And we could have had 'em for the asking!"
"They wouldn't be any use to me," said Monty, unmoved. "I've given up wearing a crown." He locked the car round a corner and drove on. "What you ought to be doing is thanking God you're sitting here without a bullet in you."
Simon sighed.
"Oh, well," he said—"If you don't want any boodle, that's O. K. with me."
He twisted his hands round and gazed moodily upwards at the stars.
"You know," he said meditatively, "it's extraordinary what bloomers people make in moments of crisis. Take dear old Rudolf, for example. You'd think he'd have remembered that even when you shut a combination lock that's just been opened, you still have to jigger the wheels round to seal it up. Otherwise the combination is still set at the key word. . . . But he didn't remember, which is perhaps as well."
And Simon Templar took his hands from his coat pocket; and the car swerved giddily across the road as Monty Hayward stared from the scintillating jumble of stones in the Saint's hands to the laughing face of the Saint.
VI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD SLEPT UNEASILY,
AND SIMON TEMPLAR WARBLED ABOUT WORMS
"NEXT on the left is ours," said the Saint mildly. "I don't think we'll take the corner till we get there, if it's all the same to you."
Monty straightened the car up viciously within a thumb's breadth of the ditch, and slackened the pressure of his foot on the accelerator. His eyes turned back to the road and stayed there ominously.
"Let me get this clear," he said. "Are you telling me that you've still got the whole total of the boodle?"
"Monty, I am."
"And the Crown Prince is chasing back to his schloss with an entirely empty box."
"You said it."
"So that apart from the police being after us for assault, battery, murder, and stealing a car, your pal Rudolf will be turning round to come after us and slit our throats——"
"And with any luck," supplemented the Saint cheerfully, "Comrade Krauss will also be raising dust along the warpath. I left him with a pretty easy getaway in front of him; and if he roused up at any time while the complete garrison was occupied with the business of hallooing after me, the odds are that he made it. Which ought to keep the entertainment from freezing up."
This third horn on the dilemma was new to Monty and Patricia. Simon Templar explained. He gave a vigorously graphic account of his movements since he had left them to paddle their own canoes at the Königshof, and threw in a bald description of the mediaeval sports and pastimes at the Crown Prince's castle which sent a momentary squirm of horror creeping over their scalps. It took exactly five lines of collocution to link up Comrade Krauss with the man who had vanished from the fateful Room Twelve above the Saint's own suite; and then the whole tangled structure of the amazing web of circumstance in which they were involved became as vividly apparent to the other two as it was to the Saint himself. And the Saint chuckled.
"Boys and girls, my idea of a quiet holiday is just this!"
"Well, it may be your idea of a quiet holiday, but it isn't mine," said Monty Hayward morosely. "I've got a wife and three kiddies in England, and what are they going to think?"
"Wire 'em to come out and join you," said the Saint dispassionately. "We may be wanting all the help we can get"
Monty glowered along the track of the headlights, holding the car steadily on its northward course. They had whizzed through Maurach while Simon was talking, and now they were speeding up the eastern shore of the Achensee. The moon had come up over the mountains, and its strengthening light burnished the still waters of the lake with a sheen like polished jet. Far beyond the lake, behind the black hump of the nearer slopes, an ice-capped peak reared its white head like an enormous beacon, towering in lonely magnificence against a vivid gun-metal sky, so brilliant and luminous that the six forlorn lights that burned in Pertisau looked like ridiculous yellow pin-points beneath it, and their trailing reflections in the water seemed merely niggling impertinences. The night had put on a beauty that was startling, a splendour that only comes to the high places of the earth. The Saint was filling his eyes. It was a night such as he had seen high up in the Andes above Encantada, or again on the Plateau d'Alzo in the heart of Corsica, where the air may be so clear that the mountains ten miles away seem to be leaning over to fall upon you on the broad ridge that will bring you presently to the Grotto des Anges. The queer streak of paganism in him that took no count of time or occasion touched him with its spell. Patricia was unlocking the handcuffs from his wrists; as they fell away, she found her hands caught in one of his.
"The crown of the world," he said.
And, knowing her man, she understood. The clear blue of the night was in his eyes, the gorgeous madness that made him what he was thrilled in his touch. His words seemed to hold nothing absurd, nothing incongruous—only the devil-may-care attar of Saintliness that would have stopped to admire a view on the way to its own funeral.
She smiled.
"I love you when you say things like that," she said.
"I never have loved him," said Monty Hayward cold-bloodedly; "but I might dislike him a little less if he left off gaping at the scenery and told us where we're supposed to be making for."
Simon lighted a cigarette and inspected his watch under the shielded bulb on the dash. He leaned forward, with his face chiselled out in lines of gay alertness, and his mouth curved to a smile.
"The frontier, of course," he said. "That's the first move, anyway; and praise the Lord there's only a few miles to go. Besides, it might have the practical advantage of keeping the cops a little way behind. You wouldn't believe how I'm devoted to the police, but I don't think we want to get intimate with them to-day."
He had begun to work away on the jewels while he talked. With the blade of his pocketknife he was prising the stones loose from their settings and spilling them into a handkerchief spread out on his lap. Under his swift fingers, rubies, pearls, sapphires, and diamonds cascaded down like drops of frozen fire, carelessly heaping themselves into a coruscating little molehill of multicoloured crystals which the Saint's expert eye valued at something in the neighbourhood of a cool quarter of a million. The Maloresco emeralds flopped solidly onto the pile, ruthlessly ripped from their pendant of gold filigree— five flawless, perfectly matched green lozenges the size of pigeons' eggs. A couple of dozen miscellaneous brilliants and three fifty-carat sapphires trickled down on top of them. The Ullsteinbach blue diamond, wedding gift of the Emperor Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc, slumped into the cluster with a shimmer of azure flame. It went on until the handkerchief was sagging under the weight of a scintillating pyramid of relucent wealth that made even Simon Templar blink his eyes. Shorn of their settings, the stones seemed to take on a lustre that was dazz
ling—the sheer lambent effulgence of their own naked beauty.
But these things he appreciated only transitorily, much as a surgeon can only transitorily appreciate the beauty of a woman on whom he has been called to perform an urgent operation. And the same unswerving professional thoroughness was visible in the way he wielded his knife, deftly twisting and cutting away the priceless metal-work and flicking it nonchalantly over the side of the car. Every setting was a work of art, but that very quality made each one too distinctive to be trusted. The size and perfection of the jewels themselves were more than hall mark enough for the Saint's unobtrusive taste in articles of vertu; and, besides, the settings were three times as bulky as the gems they carried. With the frontier only a few minutes distant, Simon Templar felt in his most unobtrusive mood. The speed and skill with which he worked were amazing: he had scarcely finished his cigarette when the last scrap of fretted gold vanished into the darkness, and the accumulation was complete.
He looked up to find Patricia staring at the stones over his shoulder.
"What are they worth, boy?" she whispered.
The Saint laughed.
"Enough to buy you a new pair of elastic-sided boots and an embroidered nightcap for Monty," he said. "And then you could write two cheques for six figures, and still have enough change left to stand yourself two steam yachts and a Rolls. That is, if you could sell the loot in the open market. As things are, Van Roeper'll probably beat me down to a lousy couple of million guilders, which means we shall have to pass up one of those cheques and Monty's nightcap. But all the same, lass, it's Boodle with the peach of a B!"
He knotted the corners of his handkerchief diagonally over the spoils, tested the firmness of the bundle, and tossed it effervescently into the air. Then it vanished into his pocket, and he helped himself to another cigarette and settled down in his corner to enjoy the drive.
Monty Hayward was the only one who seemed to have escaped the Saint's own contagious exhilaration. He concentrated his eyes on the task of guiding the car and thought that it was all a pretty bad show. He said so.
"If you'd only left that jewellery as it was, you chump," he said—having only just thought of it himself—"we might have been able to tell the police we'd found it on the road and were on our way to return it."
Simon shook his head.
"We couldn't have told them that, Monty."
"Why not?"
"Because it wouldn't have been true," answered the Saint, with awful solemnity.
"You owl!" snarled Monty Hayward; and relapsed into his nightmare.
It was a nightmare in which he had been groping about for so long that he had lost the power of protesting effectively against anything that it required him to do. Presently, at the Saint's bidding, he stopped the car for a moment while he removed his police uniform, which went into the nearest clump of bushes. Then he suffered himself to be told to drive unhesitatingly up to the frontier post which showed up in the glare of their headlights a few minutes later, where he obediently applied his brakes and waited in a kind of numb resignation while the guards stepped up and made their formal inquisitions. Every instinct that he possessed urged him to turn tail and fly—to leap out of the car and make a desperate attempt to plunge unseen into Germany through the darkness of the woods on their left—even, in one frantic moment, to let in the clutch again and smash recklessly through the flimsy barrier across the road into what looked like unassailable security beyond. That he remained ungalvanized by all these natural impulses was due solely to the paralytic inertia of the nightmare which had him inextricably in its grip. His, it appeared, not to reason why; his but to sit still and wait for somebody to clout him over the bean—and a more depressing fate for anyone who had passed unscathed through the entire excitement of the last war he found it difficult to imagine. He sat mute behind the wheel, endeavouring to make himself as invisible as possible, while the Saint exhibited passports and answered the usual questions. The Saint was as cool as a cucumber. He chattered affably throughout the delay, with an impermeable absence of self-consciousness, and smiled benignly into the light that was flashed over them. The eternity of prickling suspense which Monty Hayward endured passed over the Saint's unruffled head like a soothing zephyr; and when at last the signal was given and they moved on, and the Saint leaned back with a gentle exhalation of breath and searched for his cigarette case, his immutable serenity seemed little less than a deliberate affront.
"I suppose you know what you're doing, brother," said Monty Hayward, as quietly as he could, "but it seems pretty daft to me."
"You bet I knew," said the Saint, and to Monty's surprise he said it just as quietly. "It was simply a matter of taking a chance on the clock. If you hadn't hit that cop at the Königshof quite so hard, it wouldn't have been so easy; but we had to hope we were still a length or two in front of the hue and cry. There's no point in jumping your fences before you come to them. But, believe me, I had that patrol covered from my pocket the whole time, and what might have happened if we'd been unlucky is just nobody's business."
Monty Hayward readjusted his impressions slowly and reluctantly. And then suddenly he shot one of his extraordinarily keen glances at the sober face of the man beside him—a glance that was tempered with the ghost of a smile.
"If we kept straight ahead and drove in relays," he said, "we might make the Dutch frontier to-day. But one gathers that it wouldn't be quite so simple as that."
"Solomon said it first," assented the Saint bluntly. "We shan't take any more frontiers in our stride, and I don't think we shall enjoy much more friendly flapjaw with the constabulary. That was just our break. But there won't be a policeman in Central Europe who doesn't know our horrid histories by lunch-time; and if our pals among the ungodly can't raise a fleet of cars with the legs of this one you may call me Archibald. You were thinking we'd finished—and we've only just begun!" All at once the Saint laughed. "But shall I tell you?"
Monty nodded.
"I'll give you a new angle on the life of crime," said the Saint lavishly. "I'll hand it you for nothing, Mont—the angle that your bunch of footling authors never get. Every one of 'em makes the same mistake, just like you made yourself. Take this: Any fool can biff a policeman on the jaw. Every other fool can swipe a can of assorted bijouterie that's simply dropped into his lap. And any amount of mutts can throw a bluff that'll get by—once, for a ten-minute session. Believe it or not. And then you think it's all over bar the anthem. But it isn't. It's only just started on its way."
Monty accepted the proposition without comment. After a moment's consideration, the uncompromising accuracy of it was self-evident.
He drove on in silence, squeezing the last possible kilometer per hour out of the powerful engine. From time to time he stole a glimpse at the driving mirror, momentarily expecting to see the darkness of the road behind bleached with the first fault nimbus of pursuing headlights. It was strange how the intoxication of the chase, following on the turbulent course of that night's unsought adventure, had sapped his better judgment—stranger still, perhaps, how the foundations of his cautious common sense had been undermined by so much eventful proximity to a man whom in normal times he had always regarded as slightly, if quite pleasantly, bugs. The rush of the wind stroked his face with a hypnotic gentleness; the hum of the machine and the lifting sense of speed soothed his conscience like an insidious drug. For one dizzy moment it seemed to him that there must be worse ways of spending a night and the day after it—that there were more soul-destroying things in a disordered world than biffing policemen on the jaw and flying from multiple vengeance on the hundred horses of a modern highwayman's Mercedes Benz. He thought like that for one moment of incredible insanity; and then he thought it again, and decided that he must be very ill.
But a tincture of that demoralized elation stayed with him and lent an indefinable zest to the drive, while the sky paled for the dawn and the stolen car slid swiftly down the long slopes of
the Bavarian hills toward Munich. Beside him, Simon Templar calmly went to sleep. ...
The rim of the sun was just topping the horizon, and the air was full of the unforgettable sweet dampness of the morning, when the first angular suburbs of the city swam towards them out of the bare plain; and the Saint roused and stretched himself and felt for the inevitable cigarette. As the streets narrowed and grew gloomier, he picked up his bearings and began to direct the edging of their route eastward. It was full daylight when they pulled up before the Ostbahnhof, and an early street car was disgorging its load of sleepy workmen towards the portals of the station. Simon swung himself over the side and piled their light luggage out on the pavement. He touched Monty on the shoulder.
"I think we're a bit conspicuous as a trio," he said. "But if you hopped that street car it'd take you to the Hauptbahnhof, and the Metropole is almost opposite. We'll see you there."
And once again Monty Hayward found himself alone. He made his way to the hotel as he had been instructed, and found Patricia and the Saint waiting for him. Monty felt a little bit too tired to argue. Left to himself, he would have kept moving till he dropped, with the one idea of setting as many miles as possible between his own rudder and the wrath to come. And yet, when he rolled into bed half an hour later, he had a comfortable feeling that he had earned his rest. There is something about the lethargy of healthy physical fatigue, allied with the appreciation of dangers faced and survived, a sense of omnipotence and recklessness, which awakes the springs of an unfathomable primitive contentment; something that can stupefy all present questions along with all past philosophic doubts; something that can wipe away the strains of civilized complexity from a man's mind, and give him the peace of an animal and the sleep of a child.
Monty Hayward would have slept like a child if it had not been for the endless stream of street cars, which thundered beneath his window, rattling in every joint, clanging enormous bells, blowing hooters, torturing their brakes, crashing, colliding, spraying their spare parts onto large sheets of tin, and generally straining every bolt to uphold the standard of nerve-shattering din of which, the continent of Europe is so justly proud.
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