Hayn closed the door and came into the centre of the room.
“Now, what about it, Templar?” he said.
“What, indeed?” echoed the Saint.
His lazy eyes shifted over the assembled company.
“Greeting, Herr Braddon,” he murmured. “Hullo, Snake…Great heavens, Snake! What’s the matter with your face?”
“What’s the matter with my face?” Ganning snarled.
“Everything, honey-bunch,” drawled the Saint. “I was forgetting. You were born like that.”
Ganning came close, his eyes puckered with fury.
“I owe you something,” he grunted, and let fly with both fists.
The Saint slipped the blows, and landed a shattering kick to the Snake’s shins. Then Braddon interposed a foot between the Saint’s legs, and as Simon went down Ganning loosed off with both feet…
“That’ll do for the present,” Hayn cut in at last.
He took Templar by the collar and yanked him into a sitting position on a chair.
“You filthy blots!” Tremayne was raving, with the veins standing out purply on his forehead. “You warts—you flaming, verminous—”
It was Braddon who silenced him, with a couple of vicious backhand blows across the mouth. And Dick Tremayne, bound hand and foot, wrestled impotently with ropes that he could not shift.
“We’ll hear the Haynski speech,” Simon interrupted. “Shut up, Dicky! We don’t mind, but it isn’t nice for Gwen to have to watch!”
He looked across at the girl, fighting sobbingly in Hayn’s hold.
“It’s all right, Gwen, old thing,” he said. “Keep smiling, for Jerry’s sake. We don’t worry about anything that these dregs can do. Don’t let them see they can hurt you!”
Hayn passed the girl over to Braddon and Ganning, and went over to the Saint’s chair.
“I’m going to ask you one or two questions, Templar,” he said. “If you don’t want to let the Snake have another go at you, you’ll answer them truthfully.”
“Pleasure,” said the Saint briefly. “George Washington was the idol of my childhood.”
Everything he had planned had suffered a sudden reversal. Gwen Chandler had been caught, and so had Dicky. Their only hope was in Roger Conway—and how long would it be before he discovered the disaster and got busy?…The Saint made up his mind.
“How many of you are there?”
“Seventy-six,” said the Saint. “Two from five—just like when you were at Borstal.”
There was no one behind him. He had got his legs well back under the chair. His arms were also reaching back, and he was edging his little knife out of its sheath.
“You can save the rest of your questions,” he said. “I’ll tell you something. You’ll never get away with this. You think you’re going to find out all about my organization, the plans I’ve made, whether I’ve arranged for a squeal to the police. Then you’ll counter-move accordingly. Hold the line while I laugh!”
“I don’t think so,” said Hayn.
“Then you don’t think as much as a weevil with sleeping sickness,” said the Saint equably. “You must think I was born yesterday! Listen, sweetheart! Last night I posted a little story to Inspector Teal, which he’ll get Monday morning. That letter’s in the post now—and nothing will stop it—and the letter to friend Henri I enclosed with it will make sure the dicks pay a lot of attention to the rest of the things I had to say. You haven’t an earthly, Edgarvitch!”
Hayn stepped back as if he had received a blow, and his face was horribly ashen. The Saint had never imagined that he would cause such a sensation.
“I told you he’d squeak!” Braddon was raging. “You fool—I told you!”
“I told him, too,” said the Saint. “Oh, Edgar—why didn’t you believe your Uncle Simon?”
Hayn came erect, his eyes blazing. He swung round on Braddon.
“Be quiet, you puppy!” he commanded harshly. “We’ve all come to this—that’s why we’ve got those aeroplanes. We leave tonight, and Teal can look for us tomorrow as long as he likes.”
He turned on the Saint.
“You’ll come with us—you and your friend. You will not be strapped in. Somewhere in mid-Channel we shall loop the loop. You understand…Templar, you’ve undone years of work, and I’m going to make you pay for it! I shall escape, and after a time, I shall be able to come back and start again. But you—”
“I shall be flitting through Paradise, with a halo round my hat,” murmured the Saint. “What a pleasant thought!”
And as he spoke he felt his little knife biting into the cords on his wrists.
“We lose everything we’ve got,” Braddon babbled.
“Including your liberty,” said the Saint softly, and the knife was going through his ropes like a wire through cheese.
They all looked at him. Something in the way he had spoken those three words, something in the taut purposefulness of his body, some strange power of personality, held them spellbound. Bound and at their mercy, for all they knew an unarmed man, he was yet able to dominate them. There was hatred and murder flaring in their eyes, and yet for a space he was able to hold them on a curb and compel them to listen.
“I will tell you why you have lost, Hayn,” said the Saint, speaking in the same gentle, leisured tones that nevertheless quelled them as definitely as if he had backed them up with a gun. “You made the mistake of kidding yourself that when I told you I was going to put you in prison, I was bluffing. You were sure that I’d never throw away such an opening for unlimited blackmail. Your miserable warped temperament couldn’t conceive the idea of a man doing and risking all that I did and risked for nothing but an ideal. You judged me by your own crooked standards.
“That’s where you crashed, because I’m not a crook. But I’m going to make crooks go in fear of me. You and your kind aren’t scared of the police. You’ve got used to them—you call them by their first names and swap cigarettes with them when they arrest you—it’s become a game to you, with prison as a forfeit for a mistake, and bull-baiting’s just the same as tiddly-winks, in your lives. But I’m going to give you something new to fear—the Unknown. You’ll rave about us in the dock, and all the world will hear. And when we have finished with you, you will go to prison, and you will be an example to make others afraid. But you will tell the police that you cannot describe us, because there are still three left whom you do not know, and if we two came to any harm through you, the other three would deal with you, and they would not deal gently. You understand? You will never dare to speak…”
“And do you think you will ever be able to speak, Templar?” asked Hayn in a quivering voice, and his right hand was leaping to his hip-pocket.
And the Saint chuckled, a low triumphant murmur of a laugh. “I’m sure of it!” he said, and stood up with the cords falling from his wrists.
The little throwing-knife flashed across the room like a chip of flying quicksilver, and Hayn, with his automatic half out of his pocket, felt a pain like the searing of a hot iron across his knuckles, and all the strength went out of his fingers.
Braddon was drawing at that moment, but the Saint was swift. He had Edgar Hayn in a grip of steel, and Hayn’s body was between the Saint and Braddon.
“Get behind him, Snake!” Braddon shrilled, but as Ganning moved to obey, the Saint reached a corner.
“Aim at the girl, you fool!” Hayn gasped, with the Saint’s hand tightening on his throat. The Saint held Hayn with one hand only, but the strength of that hold was incredible. With the other hand, he was fumbling with his cigarette-case.
Braddon had turned his gun into Gwen Chandler’s face, while Ganning pinioned her arms. And the Saint had a cigarette in his mouth and was striking a match with one hand.
Now do you surrender?” Braddon menaced.
“Like hell I do!” cried the Saint.
His match touched the end of his cigarette, and in the same movement he threw the cigarette far from him. It made an ex
plosive hiss like a launched rocket, and in a second everything was blotted out in a swirl of impenetrable fog.
Templar pushed Hayn away into the opacity. He knew to a fraction of a square inch where his knife had fallen after it had severed the tendons of Hayn’s hand, and he dived for it. He bumped against Tremayne’s chair, and cut him free in four quick slashes.
Came, from the direction of the window, the sound of smashing glass. A shadow showed momentarily through the mist.
“Gwen!”
It was Jerry Stannard’s agonized voice. The girl answered him. They sought each other in the obscurity.
A sudden draught parted the wreathing clouds of the Saint’s rapid-action smoke-screen.
Stannard, with the girl in his arms, saw that the door was open. The Saint’s unmistakable silhouette loomed in the oblong of light.
“Very, very efficient, my Roger,” said the Saint.
“You can always leave these little things to me,” said Mr Conway modestly, leaning against the front door, with Edgar Hayn, Braddon, and Snake Ganning herded into a corner of the hall at the unfriendly end of his automatic.
14
They took the three men into a room where there was no smoke.
“It was my fiancée,” pleaded Jerry Stannard.
“That’s so,” said the Saint tolerantly. “Dicky, you’ll have to be content with Braddon. After all, he sloshed you when your hands were tied. But nobody’s going to come between the Snake and this child!”
It lasted half an hour all told, and then they gathered up the three components of the mess and trussed them very securely into chairs.
“There were two other men,” said the Saint hopefully, wrapping his handkerchief round a skinned set of knuckles.
“I stuck them up, and Jerry dotted them with a spanner,” said Conway. “We locked them in a room upstairs.”
The Saint sighed.
“I suppose we’ll have to leave them,” he said. “Personally, I feel I’ve been done. These guys are rotten poor fighters when it comes to a show-down.”
Then Conway remembered the message he had left in the landlord’s hands at the Bell, and they piled hurriedly into the car in which Conway and Stannard had driven up. They retrieved the message, tidied themselves, and dined.
“I think we can call it a day,” said the Saint comfortably, when the coffee was on the table. “The cheque will he cashed on Monday morning, and the proceeds will be registered to the London Hospital, as arranged—less our ten per cent commission, which I don’t mind saying I think we’ve earned. I think I shall enclose one of my celebrated self-portraits—a case like this ought to finish in a worthily dramatic manner, and that opportunity’s too good to miss.”
He stretched himself luxuriously, and lighted a fresh cigarette which did not explode.
“Before I go to bed tonight,” he said, “I’ll drop a line to old Teal and tell him where to look for our friends. I’m afraid they’ll have a hungry and uncomfortable night, but I can’t help that. And now, my infants, I suggest that we adjourn to London.”
They exchanged drinks and felicitations with the lord and master of the Bell, and it should stand to the eternal credit of that amiable gentleman that not by the twitch of an eyebrow did he signify any surprise at the somewhat battered appearance of two of the party. Then they went out to their cars.
“Who’s coming back with me?” asked Tremayne.
“I’m going back without you, laddie,” said Jerry Stannard. “Gwen’s coming with me!”
They cheered the Buick out of sight, and then the Saint climbed into the back of the Furillac and seated himself at his ease.
“Mr Conway will drive,” he said. “Deprived of my charming conversation, you will ponder over the fact that our friend is undoubtedly for it. You may also rehearse the song which I’ve just composed for us to sing at his funeral—I mean wedding. It’s about a wicked young lover named Jerry, who had methods decidedly merry. When the party got rough, was he smart with his stuff? Oh, very! Oh, very!…Oh, very!…Take me to the Savoy, Roger. I have a date…Night-night, dear old bacteria!”
THE POLICEMAN WITH WINGS
1
By this time all the world has heard of the Saint. It has been estimated (by those industrious gentlemen who estimate these things) that if all the columns that the newspapers have devoted to the Saint were placed end to end, they would reach from the south-east corner of the Wool-worth Building, New York, to a point seventeen inches west of the commissionaire outside the Berkeley Street entrance of the Mayfair Hotel, London—which, as was remarked at the time, only goes to prove that the bridging of the gulf between rich and poor can be materially helped by the vigorous efforts of a democratic Press.
It was not to be hoped, however, that the Saint could remain for ever under the shroud of anonymity in which he had made his début. Policemen, in spite of the libels of the mystery novelist, possess a certain amount of intelligence, and a large amount of plodding patience, and the Saint’s campaign was a definite challenge. The actual episode in which Chief Inspector Teal began to suspect that Simon Templar might know more about the Saint than he told the world, is, as it happens, of no absorbing interest for the purposes of this chronicle, but it may be recorded that the Saint returned one day from one of his frequent trips abroad, and found reason to believe that unauthorized persons had entered his apartment while he was away.
The detectives who had discovered the flat in Brook Street had searched it thoroughly, as was their duty. They had found nothing, but the traces of their passage were everywhere visible.
“They might have tidied the place up after them,” remarked the Saint mildly, standing at gaze before the disorder.
Orace, the Saint’s devoted servant, ran his thumb through the accumulated dust on the mantelpiece, and made strangled snuffling noises of disgust.
He was still struggling ferociously with the mess when they went to bed that night. The Saint, wandering towards his bath the next morning, caught through an open door a glimpse of a sitting-room become magically clean and ship-shape, and was moved to investigate further. Eventually he came upon Orace frying eggs in the kitchen.
“I see you’ve been spring cleaning,” he said.
“Yus,” said Orace, savagely. “Brekfuss narf a minnit.”
“Good scout,” drawled the Saint, and drifted on.
The Saint refused to behave like a hunted man. He went out and about his lawful
occasions, and in consequence it was five days before the police noticed his return. There are times when bare-faced effrontery is the most impenetrable disguise.
But it could not last. There are constables, and they patrol beats, and not the least of their duties is to embody in their reports an account of anything unusual they may notice. There was a night when the Saint, looking out from behind his curtains, saw two men in bowler hats staring up long and earnestly at the lighted windows, which should have been in deserted darkness, and then he knew that it would not be long before the Law reached out an inquiring hand towards him. But he said nothing at the time.
Roger Conway came in at lunchtime the following afternoon to find the Saint in his dressing-gown. Simon Templar was smoking a thin cigar, with his feet on the sill of the open window, and Roger knew at once, from the extraordinary saintliness of his expression, that something had happened.
“Teal’s been here,” said Roger, after a hawk-eyed glance round the room.
“Claud Eustace himself,” murmured the Saint, admiringly. “How did you guess?”
“There’s a discarded piece of chewing gum in that ashtray, and that scrap of pink paper in the fireplace must once have enclosed the piece he went out with. Giving my well-known impersonation of Sherlock Holmes—”
Simon nodded.
“You look dangerously like developing an intelligence, my Roger. Yes, Teal has called. I knew he was coming, because he told me so himself.”
“Liar!” said Mr Conway, pleasantly.
“He told me over the telephone,” said the Saint calmly. “I rang up and asked him, and he told me.”
“He didn’t!”
“He did. I said I was Barney Malone, of the Clarion, and I told him we’d heard a rumour that he was on the Saint’s trail, and asked him if he could say anything about it. ‘Not yet,’ says Teal, who’s pally with Barney, ‘but I’m going to see about it this morning. Come down after lunch and get the story.’ ‘Right,’ I said. And there we were.”
“You have a nerve, Simon.”
“Not so bad, sonny boy. I then proceeded to ring up my solicitors, and Uncle Elias whiffled round and held my hand while we waited for the Law, which arrived about eleven-thirty. There was some argument, and then Teal went home. I hope he doesn’t wait too long for Barney,” added the Saint, piously.
Roger Conway sat down and searched for cigarettes.
“He went like a lamb?”
“Like a lamb. In all our exploits, you see, his case depends on the evidence of the injured parties—and none of the said IPs seem anxious to prosecute. I simply told Teal to get on with it and try to prove something—the innocent-citizen-falsely-accused stunt. Of course, he bluffed for all he was worth, but Uncle Elias and I made him see that his chance wasn’t too hopeful.”
“So you parted like brothers?”
The Saint shrugged.
“I should call it an armed truce. He asked me if I was going on, and I said I hadn’t anything to go on with. I said we were so good that the light of virtue glowing within us made us faintly luminous in the dark.”
“And that was that?”
“He sailed out on a note of warning, very grim and stern and law-abiding. For, of course, he didn’t believe me. And yet I won’t swear that he winked. Uncle Elias didn’t see it, anyway. But I’m afraid Uncle Elias was rather shocked by the whole palaver. However, if you reach out and ring the bell twice, Orace will understand…”
They solemnly toasted each other over the tankards which came in answer to the summons, and then Roger Conway spoke. “There’s a problem which might interest us—”
Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 10