Prelude For War s-19

by Leslie Charteris

  "If it is of any interest to you," he said, "I am Major Bravache, a divisional commander of the Sons of France, about whom I think you said something just now."

  He spoke English excellently, with only a trace of native accent.

  "How perfectly splendid," said the Saint slowly. "But do you know what bad company you're in ? This bird behind me, for instance, with the peashooter boring into my back­bone, whatever he may have told you, I happen to know that his real name is Sam Pietri and he has done three sen­tences for robbery with violence."

  He felt the harmless gun quiver involuntarily against his spine and chuckled inwardly over the awful anguish that must have been twinging through the tissues of the ape-faced man, not only compelled to be an impotent accomplice in snaring fresh victims into the net of his own downfall, but suffering the aftermath of a maltreated skull as well. Simon would have given much for a glimpse of his guardian's face, but he hoped that it was not betraying anything to the opposi­tion. Fortunately, no one was paying any attention to Pietri. Dumaire, his job done, was leaning against the wall and watching Lady Valerie with reptilian eyes in which the only discernible expression had a brazen lewdness that quite plainly revealed his chief preoccupation; Bravache had simply ignored the Saint's last remarks as if he had not heard them. He was busily turning over the things on the table before him. He gave his most detailed attention to the wallet, and he had hardly started on it when a gleam of triumph flowed into his cold eyes. He held up a scrap of buff paper with a large number printed on it.

  "Ah!" he said, with a deep satisfaction that was exag­gerated by his slightly foreign handling of words. "The ticket. That is excellent!"

  As a matter of fact, it was a ticket in an impromptu sweepstake organized over the week end in Peter Quentin's favourite pub on the outskirts of Anford; but the Saint had known that it was there, and had left it there with the deliberate object of leading the comedy on as far as it would go in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.

  He waited to see how far his hope would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester's eyes were like saucers: they looked at first as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing; and then a veiled half-comprehending, half-perplexed expres­sion passed over them which Simon hoped nobody would see. Bravache folded the ticket carefully and put it in his own wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.

  "We are very grateful, my dear lady," he said. "You have done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons of France do not forget services. In future you will be under our protection." He paused, smiling, and there was something wolfish about his smile. "Should anything happen to you—should you, for instance, be murdered by one of our enemies—you will be immediately avenged."

  An arpeggio of spooky fingers stroked up the Saint's back into the roots of his hair. In spite of Bravache's stilted phrasing, the almost farcical old-fashioned melo­drama in which his tongue rolled itself gloatingly around every word, there was something in his harsh voice that was by no means farcical, something which in combination with that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by the unreality of its enunciation. Simon realized for the first time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a cer­tain type of man—a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse with the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possi­ble for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the men­talities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.

  He said lightly: "That'll be fun for you, won't it, Valerie?"

  Bravache looked back at him, and again his eyes were cold and fishy.

  "You have been attempting to discover the secrets of the Sons of France in order to betray them to our enemies," he said. "The penalty for that, as you know, is death."

  "You must have been reading a book," said the Saint admiringly. "Or was that Luker's idea ?"

  The vulpine twist that was meant to be a smile remained on the other man's thin lips.

  "I am acquainted with Mr Luker only as a sympathizer and supporter of our ideals to whom I have the honour to be attached as personal aide," he replied. "Your crime has been committed against an organization of patriots known as the Sons of France, of which I am an officer. You are now the prisoner of the Sons of France. We have been informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary employed by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon and betray our organization. Of that I have sufficient proof." He tapped the pocket where he had replaced his wallet with the sweep­stake ticket in it. "It also appears that you have threatened Lady Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore if you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her."

  Simon's arms were beginning to ache and stiffen from being held up so long. But inside he felt timelessly relaxed, and his mind was a cold pattern of crystalline understanding.

  "You mean," he said unemotionally, "that the idea is to kill both of us, and arrange it so that you can try to spread the story that I murdered Lady Valerie and that the Sons of France killed me to avenge her."

  "I am sure that the theory will find wide acceptance," answered Bravache complacently. "Lady Valerie is young and beautiful, whereas you are a notorious criminal. I think that a great many people will applaud our action, and that even the British police themselves will feel a secret relief which will tend to handicap their inquiries."

  The Saint glanced at Lady Valerie. Her face had been blank with stupefaction; now it was drawn and frightened. Her big brown eyes were fixed on him in mute and hypno­tized entreaty.

  "I told you you had charming friends, darling," Simon remarked.

  He studied Bravache with cold-blooded interest. He felt that in the space of a few minutes he had come to know the man intimately, that he could take his soul apart and lay out all its components. How much of what Bravache had said was genuine fanaticism, or genuine self-deception, however wilful, he could not judge; in that kind of neurotic, the blend of idealism and conscienceless rationalization became so homogeneous that it was practically impossible to draw a sharp cleavage. But he was not so much inter­ested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mould. Now he was finding the imprint of the same die on a Frenchman, the chilling pro­totypical hallmark of the breed from which secret police and authorized persecutors are recruited; and it gave him a grimmer measure of the thing he had set out to fight than anything else hitherto had done. If the Sons of France had progressed far enough to develop officers like Major Bravache, the wheels must be turning with night­mare speed. . . .

  "It all sounds very neat and jolly, my dear Major Cochon," he admitted. "Do we start right away?"

  "I think we had better do so," said Bravache, still smiling with a face of marble. "We have already wasted enough time." He turned his head. "Dumaire, you know what to do. We will leave you to do it." He looked at the Saint again, with his lips drawn back from his white even teeth. "You, Mr Templar, will accompany Pietri and myself. If you resist or try to obstruct us you will be shot at once. I advise you to come quietly. I am hoping that as a reason­able man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately. Besides"—the gleam of the w
hite teeth was feline—"as a gentleman, you will not wish to deprive me of the opportunity to answer some of your remarks which I have not had time to deal with here."

  The Saint smiled.

  "By no manner of means," he said. "Only I should rather like to take charge of the interview myself at this point—if you don't mind."

  He stepped aside and backwards, and took hold of Pietri by the ear. The movement was so improbable and unexpected that it was completed before either Bravache or Dumaire could reorient their wits sufficiently to do any­thing about it. And by fhat time Pietri was securely held, like a writhing urchin in the grip of an old-fashioned school-marm, so that his body was between the Saint and Bravache, who was still trying to make up his mind whether to grab for the automatic which he had confidently left lying on the table a yard away.

  Bravache's poise broke for a moment.

  "Use your gun, you fool!" he thundered.

  "He can't," said the Saint. "You tell them why, Sam."

  An extra turn on the piece of gristle he was holding made his victim squeak like a mouse.

  "There's nothing in it," wailed Pietri, with the revolver quivering futilely in his grasp. "They caught me outside —him and two other fellows——"

  Bravache started to move then, and Simon's voice ripped out like a lash.

  "I wouldn't," he said. "Really I wouldn't. It's danger­ous."

  And as he spoke Peter and Hoppy came through the doorway.

  Bravache stood very still. His face was cold and unmoved, but the veins on the backs of his clenched hands stood out in knotty blue cords. Dumaire, caught with one hand at the edge of his coat pocket, prudently let it fall back to his side. He flattened himself against the wall like a cornered rat, with his shoulders hunched up to the jaw level of his small ebony-capped head.

  Simon released Pietri and strolled over to pick up Bra­vache's automatic and retrieve his cigarette case and lighter from among his strewn belongings on the table. With a cigarette between his lips and the lighter wick burning stead­ily, he looked at Bravache with cerulean mockery in his eyes.

  "I'm hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to. the certainty of death immediately," he said in a voice of satin. "Go on, Major, I don't want anything to interrupt our little chat."

  2

  The chat appeared to have been interrupted already so far as Major Bravache was concerned. At any rate, he seemed disinclined to accept the Saint's invitation to proceed with his discourse. Or else the founts of eloquence had dried up within him. His lips closed down over his teeth until there was only a straight line to show where his mouth had been.

  The Saint left him with a quizzically regretful shrug and turned to untie Lady Valerie. She stood up and stretched herself, rather like a cat by the fire, and rubbed her chafed wrists. Then she went over to the table where her bag was, in search of the ineluctable restoratives of feminine sangfroid.

  "You gave me some bad moments," she said, with an attempted nonchalance in which he could still see the signs of strain like carefully darned edges on a poor man's cuffs. "For a long time I was thinking you'd let me down, but of course I ought to have remembered that you never let anyone down."

  "What happened?" he asked.

  She appeared from behind a card-sized mirror to point with the scarlet tip of a lipstick.

  "He rang the bell and said you'd sent him round with something special to give me. I thought it was a bit funny, since we'd only said good-bye a little while ago, and he was a rather funny-looking person, but after all I thought a lot of funny things must go on in this life of crime, and I was quite intrigued. I mean, I just didn't think enough about how funny it was. So I started to let him in, and then these other two followed him in very quickly and there wasn't anything I could do. They tied me up and searched everywhere. This one was very nasty—he thought I might have the ticket on me, and he didn't miss anything."

  She gazed vindictively at Dumaire, who was then having his hands efficiently taped behind his back by Peter Quen­tin, and kicked him thoughtfully on the shins.

  "Then they made you ring me up?" Simon prompted her.

  "Well, when they couldn't find the ticket they said they'd do horrible things to me unless I told them where it was. So I told them I'd given it to you to look after, and I was quite glad to be able to ring you up by that time. I—I sort of knew you'd catch on at once, because you're so fright­fully clever and that's how things always happen in stories."

  "It makes everything so easy, doesn't it?" said the Saint satirically. "We must talk some more about that, but I think we'll talk alone."

  He watched while the taping of the other prisoners' wrists was completed; then he started exploring doors. He found one that communicated with the bedroom—a place of glass and natural woods and pale blue sheets and pillows, with a pale blue bathroom beyond it that gave an infinitesi­mally humorous shift to the alignment of his eyebrows. He left the door open and signed to Peter.

  "Bring the menagerie in here," he said.

  Dumaire, Pietri and Bravache lurched sullenly in, urged on by the unarguable prodding of gun muzzles.

  On his way in after them, Hoppy Uniatz stopped at the door. It is true, as has perhaps already been made superflu­ously clear, that there were situations in which the light of intelligence failed to coruscate on Mr Uniatz' ivorine brow; it is no less true that in the vasty oceans of philoso­phy and abstract Thought he wandered like a rudderless barque at the mercy of unpredictable winds; but in his own element he was immune to the distractions that might have afflicted lesser men, and his mental processes became invested with the simplicity of true greatness.

  "Boss," said Mr Uniatz, with the placidity of a mahatma approaching the settlement of an overdue grocer's bill, "I t'ink ya better gimme dem shells."

  "What shells?" asked the Saint hazily.

  "De shells," explained Mr Uniatz, who was now flour­ishing Pietri's silenced revolver in addition to his own beloved Betsy, "you take outa de dumb cannon."

  Simon blinked.

  "What for?"

  "Dey don't make no ners," explained Mr Uniatz, with a slight perplexity for such slowness on the uptake, "when we are giving dese guys de woiks."

  The Saint swallowed.

  "I'll give them to you when you need them," he said and closed the door hastily on Mr Uniatz' back.

  He went back and sat on the arm of a chair in front of Lady Valerie. He wanted to smile, but he had too many other things on his mind that were not smiling matters. The recent episode which had been absorbing all his nerv­ous and intellectual energy was over, and his brain was moving on again with restless efficiency. It had not reached an end, but only a fresh beginning.

  She had regained most of her composure. Her face was repaired, and she had lighted a cigarette herself. He had to admit that she possessed amazing recuperative powers. There was a naughty gleam in her eyes that would have amused him at any other time.

  "You always seem to be catching me in these boudoir moments, don't you ?" she said, smoothing her flimsy negli­gee. "I mean, first I was in my nightie at the fire, and then now. It must be fate, or something. The only trouble is, there won't be any thrills left when we get really friendly. ... Of course I suppose I ought to thank you for rescuing me," she went on hurriedly. "Thanks very much, darling. It was sweet of you."

  "Don't mention it," he said graciously. "It's been a pleasure. You must call me again any time you want a helping hand."

  He got up restlessly, poured himself out a drink and sat down again.

  "Don't you think you'd better tell me what it's all about ?" he said abruptly. "I could live through an explanation of this cloakroom-ticket gag."

  "Oh, that," she said. She trimmed the end of her ciga­rette. "Well, you see, they thought I'd got a cloakroom ticket they wanted, so they came to look for it. That's all."

  "It isn't anything like all," he said bluntly. "Why go on holding out on me? You
've got something they want— probably some papers that Kennet gave you. You parked them in a cloakroom somewhere, and these birds knew it and wanted the ticket. Or do you want me to believe that they went to all this trouble simply to get a receipt for Luker's hat?"

  She frowned at her knees, and then she shrugged.

  "I suppose there's no reason why you shouldn't know, since you've guessed already," she said. "As a matter of fact, I have got some papers. I thought Algy might like to know, so I just mentioned it to him casually on the tele­phone tonight."

  "Meaning what I was talking to you about at the Berke­ley."

  "What was that?"

  "Blackmail."

  "I don't understand."

  "Don't make me tired. You were trying to sell him those papers."

  "After all," she said, "a girl has to live."

  "How long do you think you'd have lived tonight if it hadn't been for me?"

  She hesitated.

  "How was I to know Algy would do anything like this ?" she said sulkily. "I told him I'd put the papers in a cloak­room and I wasn't sure where they were. He rang me up later on, just before the monkey-man got here, and offered me ten thousand pounds if I'd bring them round to him right away, but I thought they might be worth more than that, so I pretended I still couldn't remember what I'd done with them. Of course I know where they are really."

  The Saint's lips tightened.

  "You poor little fly-brained moron," he exploded uncon­trollably. "What makes you think you can cut in on a game like this ? Haven't you had your lesson yet ? You know what happened to Kennet and Windlay. You know what hap­pened to you tonight. You heard what Bravache said. If I hadn't had everything organized, you were booked to go down the drain with me—plus any specialized unpleasant­nesses that your boy friend Dumaire could think of. Is that your idea of a good time?"