A chilled drop of moisture trickled clammily down his side, and the Saint shook himself in the sudden astonishment of finding that he was sweating. The pale eyes of Josef Krauss loomed up before him again, glazed with that unforgettable film of bitter mockery. Simon set his lips. He couldn't understand himself. In everything physical he was the same as he had always required himself to be: his hand was steady, his sight was clear, his heart beat normally. The rhythm of his aimless hammering still gave him the joy of perfect bodily fitness, trained to the last ounce. And there he was behaving like a frightened schoolboy, losing control of his mind just at the point where it should have been tuning itself up to concert pitch for the showdown.
He forced himself back into the train of thought that kept slipping away from him. How much ground had Marcovitch been able to put between them during those three hours since the carnival in the brake van? Simon tried to work it out again. Half an hour to get to Treuchdingen; at least another half hour to get through to the local police chief; then an hour of romancing and circumstantial fiction. Leaving another hour in which anything might have happened. And meanwhile, what had become of Rudolf? The stolen Rolls would have been recovered before long, once the theft had been notified—certainly before the departure of the next northbound express at five-thirty—and Rudolf would probably elect to follow up by road. He would have to make contact with Marcovitch again somewhere, and Marcovitch was an unstable quantity. The Saint made an effort to put himself in the enemy's place. What would he do if he were Rudolf? He'd have every possible route out of Munich measured out, with points of communication arranged for on all of them. If Marcovitch had succeeded in getting a message back from the station before the train left, which seemed very probable, he would know what road to take as soon as he could find a conveyance; and the rest would simply be a matter of making inquiries at the pre-arranged points along the route to which news might be telephoned. Sooner or later that system would link them up again; and in view of the spare hour with which Simon had to credit Marcovitch, the vote went to sooner. Marcovitch would have made the wires sizzle with the narrative of his accomplishment at the earliest opportunity, and the panegyric would already be waiting for Rudolf to catch it up. Ingolstadt seemed a likely junction. . . . Which meant that Rudolf might even then be speeding on into Treuchtlingen to take over the command. ... And if Marcovitch and his aviary of jailbirds were actually holding on in Treuchtlingen, waiting for Rudolf to meet them there . . .
The Saint took a grim hold on himself. Once again the thread had slipped through a loophole in his mind at that point, as it had done every time before. The fog swirled up again, blotting it out in a maddening haze. He wrestled against it in a moment of frozen savagery, but the mists only swelled thicker. The thread had gone back on him for good, and his own efforts to recapture it only seemed to drive the loose end into a more infuriating obscurity. He felt as if his brain had chosen that moment to fall into a sluggish conflict of cross-purposes with itself—as if one part of it had mutinied and disordered the clean running of the rest, jarring through insubordinately with a shapeless idea of its own. And it was not until many weeks afterwards, when he recalled that span of unaccountable impotence, that he could see in it the interference of some psychic power which was beyond understanding.
He looked up at the flat, concrete face of the police station. Other windows were lighting up as the dusk overtook them, slashing their mathematical squares of luminousness out of the grey blankness of the wall. The low rectangle of doorway was still dark, like a cuneiform rat's hole.
Simon passed a hand over his eyes.
"If we knew which of these things were telephone wires, we might cut 'em," he said, without a change in the cool level of his voice. "I'm not sure that we mayn't have disorganized something already—those were two very classy-looking bits of wire before I repaired "em."
That was all he said. And he left off speaking so naturally that for several seconds Monty Hayward guessed nothing of what had happened.
And yet before the last words were out of his mouth Simon Templar had seen a thing which crushed every other thought out of his head; It burst in on his senses with the stupefying concussion of an exploded bomb, gripping his brain in an icy constriction of sheer paralysis, so that for one heart-stopping instant the whole world seemed to stand still all round him. And then the full torrent of comprehension weltered down on him like a landslide and shattered the fragile stillness as though it had been held in a gigantic bubble of glass, blasting the shredded fragments of his universe into a swimming vortex of incoherence that made the blood roar in his ears like a hundred dynamos.
It had started so very quietly and gently that he had watched its approach without the slightest flicker of suspicion. His eyes had taken it in exactly as they took in the details of the surrounding houses, or an individual cobblestone among the scores that lay all around him—merely as one uneventful item of the general street scene with no particular significance in itself. He sat there and spread himself wide open to it, wide open as a new-born babe crowing innocently at the distended hood of a cobra.
Three people were coming down the road.
The Saint gazed at them merely because he happened to be looking in their direction. They were sixty or seventy yards up the street when he first noticed them, too far away for him to see them as anything but shadowy figures in the failing light; and they meant nothing more to him than any of the other figures that had passed and repassed since he had been sitting there. He watched them without seeing them, while his mind was wholly occupied with other things. The thread of his deductions was still eluding him at the most vital knot, baffling him again in that murky whirlpool of disjointed ideas which persisted in deflecting the straight trajectory of his thoughts, and he was bullying himself back to the fence which his imagination steadily refused to take. If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen . . . The figures came nearer: he made out that one of them was a woman, and somewhere beside her he seemed to catch a sheen of bright metal, but even then he thought nothing of it. The fog had balked him again. He glanced up at the police station—began speaking to Monty, giving no hint of the struggle within himself. . . .
And then the street lights went on suddenly, leaping into yellow orbs of incandescence that studded the dusk with moons. The rays of one of them fell clearly over the three figures less than twenty yards away, striking full on the pale, proud face of the girl in the middle; and Simon saw that it was Patricia Holm.
The Saint went numb. Dully he made out the features of the two men—the policeman on one side, holding her by the arm: Marcovitch on the other, viciously jubilant. The deadly unexpectedness of it stunned him. He felt as if destiny had slammed a door in bis face and turned a key, and he was helplessly watching the bolts sinking home into their sockets, one by one. It was the one thing that he had never even found a place for in his calculations. He tried stupidly to find a reason for it, as if only a logical interpretation could confirm the evidence of his eyes. The lost end of the thread that he had been pursuing whisked through his brain again like a streak of hot quicksilver: "If Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen——" It snapped off there like an overstrained wire, splitting under the shock of a boiling inrush of realization. The facts were there. Patricia was caught, disarmed, locked in the iron clutch of the Law as surely as if the door of a cell had already been closed upon her; and Marcovitch was going with her to the station to clinch the charge. The machinery was in motion, clamping its bars round her, dragging her inexorably into the relentless mill. The bubble had burst.
Dimly Monty Hayward became aware of the terrible stillness beside him, and raised his eyes. The Saint was rigid to his fingertips, staring across the road like a man in a nightmare. Turning to follow that stare, Monty Hayward also saw; and in the next searing instant he also understood.
Then the Saint came to life. A red mist drove across his eyes, and the pent-up desperatio
n of his stillness smithereened into a reckless bloodlust. His right hand leapt to his hip pocket; and then Monty Hayward pulled himself together in a blaze of strength that he had not known he possessed and caught at the flying wrist.
"Simon—that won't help you!"
For a second he thought the Saint would shoot him while he spoke. The Saint's eyes drilled through him sightlessly, as if he had been a stranger, with those pin-points of red fire smouldering behind brittle flakes of blue. There was no vestige of reason or humanity in them—nothing but the insensate flare of a barbaric vengefulness that would have gone up against an army with its bare hands. For that second the Saint was mad— raving blind and deaf with a different madness from any that Monty had seen in him before. Monty looked death in the face, but he held his ground without flinching. He gripped the Saint's wrist like a vise, forcing his words through the dead walls of the Saint's stark insanity. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he saw them groping to their mark. The Saint's wrist relaxed, ounce by ounce, and the red glare sank deeper into his eyes. The eyes wavered from their blind stare for the first time.
"Maybe you're right."
The Saint's voice was almost a whisper; but Monty saw his mouth frame the syllables, and watched a trace of colour creeping back into the lips which had been pressed up into thin ridges of white stone. He let go the Saint's wrist, and Simon picked up a wire and twisted it mechanically.
The street was undisturbed. In all those tense seconds there had only been two violent movements, and neither of those would have impressed any but the closest observer in that faint light. And the pavements were practically deserted, except for the three figures passing under another lamp-post, only half a dozen yards now from the doors of the police station. The curious glances of the. few pedestrians in sight were centred exclusively on the girl: none of them had any attention to spare for the commonplace counter attraction of two workmen squatting over a hole in the road tinkering with wires. Marcovitch never knew how near he had been to extinction. He was gloating over his triumph, oblivious of everything else around him, walking straight for the entrance of the police station without a glance to right or left. It was he who led the way up the steps; and then Simon had one more glimpse of the girl, a glimpse that he would remember all his life, with her fair head fearlessly tilted and the grace of a princess in her unfaltering stride. And then she also was gone, and the dark doorway sprang into empty brilliance after her.
"I think Marcovitch will have to die," said the Saint
The wire broke in the twisting of his fingers like a piece of rotten thread, and he dropped it without noticing that it had broken.
He stared expressionlessly up and down the road. The scattering of people near by were resuming their affairs as if nothing had happened; but at either end of the street he could see more of them, drifting in desultory mosaics under lampposts and lighted windows. Monty had been right—bitterly right. They could never have got away. There wasn't a vehicle of any kind in sight—nothing that they could have commandeered for such an escape as they would have had to make. The first shot would have hemmed them in with a human wall.
Simon felt as if an arctic wind had blown through him, turning his stomach to ice. He sat with his fists clenched in a spasm that ached up his arms, with his eyes fixed on nothing, tasting the dregs of humiliation.
And then he saw a new shaft of luminance swimming round into the street. It fanned out along the line of houses, lifting them in turn into a garish oval of illumination and dropping them back into the dark. For a moment the Saint was caught squarely in the beam, but he had bent his head instinctively and commenced to play with the wires. Then the beam went past him, settling into a long, low stream of light that swept straight down the road and turned the cobblestones into gleaming mountains with black pits behind them. The car sped down the opposite side of the road with the soft hiss of a perfectly balanced engine, and braked to an effortless stop outside the police station.
Then a wave of gloom rolled back on it as the headlights were switched off; and the Saint looked at it over his shoulder in a throb of incredulous expectation. The chauffeur was running round to open the door, and as the passenger stood up Simon saw his profile clean-cut against the light in the station doorway. It was the Crown Prince Rudolf.
XI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY,
AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO
A WASH
THE Crown Prince dusted his sleeve and walked up the steps of the police station, exquisite and inscrutable as ever. He disappeared into the gaunt building. Simon watched him go.
And then something seemed to crack in the Saint's brain. Something had to give way under the tearing impact of the desperation that had engulfed him, and the thing that gave way was the desperation itself. A great weight lilted off his shoulders, and his lungs opened to a mighty breath of life. The heaving earth steadied itself under him. He felt like a strong swimmer who has been trapped in a clinging entanglement of weed, who has fought back out of the choking darkness into a blaze of sunlight and blessed air. The horrible constriction of helplessness broke away from his head, and he felt the wheels of his mind spinning sweet and true again, unhindered even by the disorder which had been throwing them out of gear before the bomb burst. He could have given no reason for that strange reawakening: he only knew that the old fighting courage had come back, sending the blood racing warm along his veins and filling his muscles with the old unconquerable sense of power. He stretched himself like a cat in the exultant gathering of that flame of indomitable strength. And already he knew how the story was going to end.
Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed. The bleakness was still in the Saint's eyes, but suddenly there was a twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue ice. There was the phantom of a smile on the Saint's lips—a smile that had still to reach the careless glory of pure Saintliness, but yet a smile that had not been there before. And the Saint spoke in a voice that shared his smile.
"Could anything be better?"
Monty shied away from that voice as if a thunderbolt had hit the ground in front of him. He could hardly believe that it came from the man whom he had seen reaching for his gun a few seconds earlier. It was lilting—positively lilting. "I don't see what you mean, old chap," he said awkwardly. "Don't you see what's happened?" The lilt in the Saint's voice was stronger—and the Saint was still smiling at him. "Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen! He saw Pat somewhere, we don't. know where, and put the cop onto her. Then when he came along here with her he had to leave a message at the rendezvous to say where he'd gone. Rudolf must have arrived a couple of minutes later, and he naturally followed straight on. And here they are!"
Again Monty Hayward felt as he had done in the hotel in Munich—that the Saint must have gone bughouse under the strain. Only this time the feeling verged on an awful certainty.
"What about it?" he said quietly.
The Saint laughed under his breath.
"This about it! They're here—Pat, Rudolf, Marcovitch—the whole all-star cast of unparagoned palukas! And the crown jewels are with them somewhere—I'll bet you a million dollars. Marcovitch would never dare to let them out of his sight. The whole bag of tricks, Monty, packed up and sealed for delivery in that futurist abomination of a Polizeiamt! Just as if we'd fetched 'em together on purpose for the reunion. And only a skeleton staff inside. Every able-bodied man they can lay their hands on is out in the wide county chasing our trail through the cowslips. And here we are as well—wearing out our sterns on this goddam field of bricks while the ungodly are collected for us twenty feet away. We've got 'em cold!"
Monty stared at him.
"What's your idea?" he articulated slowly; and the Saint answered with five syllables that leapt back at him like bullets.
"Go in and get "em!"
A couple of working girls went past them, giggling over the cryptic gossip that working girls giggle over in
every country in the world; and Monty Hayward looked into the twinkling icicles of the Saint's eyes, and knew what he would find there before he looked. The Saint meant every crackling consonant of it. Monty had the dubious consolation of knowing that his diagnosis was a bull's-eye. The Saint was as mad as a hatter's March hare. But it was not the red, homicidal ferocity of a moment ago—it was the madness of the bridge in Innsbruck and the ride into Treuchtlingen, a thing against which Monty couldn't argue any more.
"I'll go with you," he said.
It never occurred to him to question why he said it. Hell!— he was damned anyway. Why worry? There was still a good scrap waiting, and retribution would follow soon enough. He hadn't discovered his new self such a short while ago only to throw it away unused.
He heard the quick rippling voice of the tempter in his ear. Simon was leaning over towards him, scraping a chisel about somewhere among the pipes.
"It's the only thing we can do, Monty. We'll never get a chance like this again. And it's got to be done right now, while they're all busy. Death or glory, Mont!"
"Lead on, son and brother."
The Saint grinned.
He inspected the road sideways under his arm. The chauffeur was patrolling comatosely up and down the road beside the cream-coloured Rolls, with the mystic neutrality of chauffeurs; but Simon recognized him as the man whose nose he had been privileged to pull a few hours before.
"We shall have to remove the grease ball," he said. "I may want his car. And you'll have to remove him, Monty, because he knows me."
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