Enter the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Dicky knew the beginning of despair.

  He threw the seaman from him, sideways, across Hilloran’s very knees, and leapt away. Hilloran stumbled, and Dicky’s hand shot out for the man’s knife wrist, found its mark, twisted savagely. The knife tinkled into the scuppers.

  If Dicky could have made a grip with both hands, he would have had the mastery, but he could only make it with one. His other hand, following the right, missed. A moment later he was forced to release his hold. He swung back only just in time to avoid the left cross that Hilloran lashed out at his jaw.

  Then both Hilloran and the sailor came at him simultaneously, almost shoulder to shoulder.

  Dicky’s strength was spent. He was going groggy at the knees, his arms felt like lead, his chest heaved terribly to every panting breath he took, his head swirled and throbbed dizzily. He was taking his licking.

  He could not counter the blows they both hurled at him at once. Somehow, he managed to duck under their arms, with some hazy notion of driving between them and breaking away into the open, but he could not do it. They had him cold.

  He felt himself flung against the rail. The sailor’s arms pinioned his own arms to his sides; Hilloran’s hands were locked about his throat, strangling him to silence, crushing out life. His back was bent over the rail like a bow. His feet were off the ground.

  The stars had gone out, and the moon had fallen from the sky. His chest was bound with ever-tightening iron bands. He seemed to be suspended in a vast void of utter blackness, and, though he could feel no wind, there was the roaring of a mighty wind in his ears.

  And then, through the infinite distances of the dark gulf in which he hung, above even the great howling of that breathless wind, a voice spoke as a silver bell, saying, “What’s this, Hilloran?”

  6

  Dicky seemed to awake from a hideous dream.

  The fingers loosened from his throat, the iron cage that tortured his chest relaxed, the rushing wind in his ears died down to a murmur. He saw a star in the sky, and, as he saw it, a moon that had not been there before seemed to swim out of the infinite dark, back to its place in the heavens. And he breathed.

  Also, he suddenly felt very sick.

  These things happened almost immediately. He knew that they must have been almost immediate, though they seemed to follow one another with the maddening slowness of the minute hand’s pursuit of the hour hand round the face of a clock. He tried to whip them to a greater speed.

  He could not pause to savour the sensations of this return to life. His brain had never lost consciousness. Only his body was dead, and that had to be forced back to activity without a pause.

  One idea stood out distinctly from the clearing fog that blurred his vision. Audrey Perowne was there, and she had caused an interruption that was saving him, but he was not safe yet. Neither was she.

  She slept, he remembered, in a cabin whose porthole looked out on to the very stretch of deck where they had been fighting, and the noise must have roused her. But, in that light, she could have seen little but a struggling group of men, unless she had watched for a time before deciding to intervene—and that was unlikely. And she must not be allowed to know the true reason for the disturbance.

  Tremayne now understood exactly how things were.

  If Hilloran was prepared to dispose of him, he was prepared to dispose of the girl as well—Dicky had no doubt of that. But that would require some determination. The habit of obedience would remain, and to break it would require a conscious effort. And that effort, at all costs, must not be stimulated by any provocation while Hilloran was able to feel that he had things mostly his own way. All this Dick Tremayne understood and acted upon it in an instant, before his senses had fully returned.

  His feet touched the deck, and he twisted and held the seaman in his arms as he himself had been held a moment earlier. Then he looked across and saw Audrey Perowne.

  She stood by a bulkhead light, where they could see her clearly, and the light glinted on an automatic in her hand. She said again, “Hilloran—”

  And by the impatient way she said it, Dicky knew that she could not have been waiting long for her first question to be answered.

  “It’s all right,” said Dicky swiftly. “One of the men’s gone rather off his rocker. Hilloran and I stopped him, and he fought. That’s all.”

  The girl came closer, and neither Hilloran nor the seaman spoke. Now it was all a gamble. Would they take the lead he had offered them, and attest the lie? Or, rather, would Hilloran?—for the other man would take the cue from him.

  It was a pure toss-up—with Audrey’s automatic on Dicky’s side. If Hilloran had a weapon—which he probably had—he would not dare to try and reach it when he was already covered, unless he had a supreme contempt for the girl’s intelligence and straight shooting. And Dicky had surmised that the man was not yet prepared for open defiance.

  But there was a perceptible pause before Hilloran said, “That’s so, Audrey.”

  She turned to the sailor.

  “Why did you want to throw yourself overboard?”

  Sullenly, the man said, “I don’t know, miss.”

  She looked closely at him.

  “They seem to have been handling you pretty roughly.”

  “You should have seen the way he struggled,” said Dicky. “I’ve never seen anyone so anxious to die. I’m afraid I did most of the damage. Here—”

  He took the man’s hand.

  “I’m going to put your finger back,” he said. “It’ll hurt. Are you ready?”

  He performed the operation with a sure touch, and then he actually managed a smile.

  “I should take him below and lock him up, Hilloran,” he remarked. “He’ll feel better in the morning. It must have been the heat.…”

  Leaning against the rail, he watched Hilloran, without a word, take the man by the arm and lead him away. He felt curiously weak, now that the crisis was past and he hadn’t got to fight any more. The blessing was that the girl couldn’t see the bruises that must have been rising on his forehead and the side of his head.

  But something must have shown in his face that he didn’t know was showing, or the way he leaned against the rail must have been rather limp, for suddenly he found her hand on his shoulder.

  “It strikes me,” she said softly, “That that man wasn’t the only one who was roughly handled.”

  Dicky grinned.

  “I got some of the knocks, of course,” he said.

  “Did Hilloran?” she asked quietly.

  He met her eyes, and knew then that she was not deceived. But he glanced quickly up and down the deck before he answered.

  “Hilloran took some knocks, too,” he answered. “but it was a near thing.”

  “They tried to bump you off?”

  “That, I believe, was the general idea.”

  “I see.” She was thoughtful. “Then—”

  “I was trying to sleep on deck,” said Dicky suddenly. “Hilloran was here when I arrived. We saw the man come along and try to climb over the rail—”

  He broke off as Hilloran’s shadow fell between them.

  “I’ve locked him up,” said Hilloran, “but he seems quite sensible now.”

  “Good,” said the girl casually. “I suppose you’d got the better of him by the time I came out. We’ll discuss what’s to be done with him in the morning. Dicky, you might take a turn round the deck with me before we go back to bed.”

  She carried off the situation with such an utter naturalness that Hilloran was left with no answer. Her arm slipped through Dicky’s, and they strolled away.

  They went forward, rounded the deckhouse, and continued aft, saying nothing, but when they came to the stern she stopped and leaned over the taffrail, gazing absorbedly down into the creaming wake.

  Dicky stopped beside her. Where they stood, no one could approach within hearing distance without being seen.

  He took cigarettes and matches from his dressing-gown
pocket. They smoked. He saw her face by the light of the match as he held it to her cigarette, and she seemed rather pale. But that might have been the light.

  “Go on telling me about it,” she ordered.

  He shrugged.

  “You’ve heard most of it. I woke up when they were about to tip me over the side. There was some trouble. I did my best, but I’d have been done if you hadn’t turned up when you did.”

  “Why did you lie to save them?”

  He explained the instinctive reasoning which had guided him.

  “Not that I had time to figure it out as elaborately as that,” he said, “but I’m still certain that it was a darned good guess.”

  “It’s easily settled,” she said. “We’ll put Hilloran in irons—and you’ll have to do the best you can in his place.”

  “You’re an optimist,” said Dicky sardonically. “Haven’t I shown you every necessary reason why he should have the crew behind him to a man? They aren’t the kind that started the story about honour among thieves.”

  She turned her head.

  “Are you suggesting that I should quit?”

  He seemed to see his way clearly.

  “I am. We haven’t an earthly—short of out-bribing Hilloran, which’ud mean sacrificing most of our own shares. We aren’t strong enough to fight. And we needn’t bank on Hilloran’s coming back into the fold like a repentant sheep, because we’d lose our bets. He’s got nothing to lose, and everything to gain. We’d served our purpose. He can handle the hold-up just as well without us, and earn another quarter of a million dollars for the shade of extra work. I don’t say I wouldn’t fight it out if I were alone. I would. But I’m not alone, and I suspect that Hilloran’s got a nasty mind. If he’s only thinking of taking your money—I’ll be surprised.”

  She said coolly, “In that case, it doesn’t look as if we’d gain anything by quitting.”

  “I could guarantee to get you away.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t ask me, Audrey. But I know how.”

  She appeared to contemplate the glowing end of her cigarette as though it were a crystal in which she could see the solution of all problems.

  Then she faced him.

  She said, “I don’t quit.”

  “I suppose,” said Dicky roughly, “you think that’s clever. Let me tell you that it isn’t. If you know that the decision’s been framed against you right from the first gong, you don’t lose face by saving yourself the trouble of fighting.”

  “The decision on points may have been framed against you,” she said, “but you can get round that one. You can win on a knock-out.”

  “Possibly—if that were the whole of it. But you’re forgetting something else, aren’t you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Saint.”

  He saw the exaggerated shrug of kimono’d shoulders.

  “I should worry about him. I’ll stake anything he isn’t among the passengers. I’ve had the ship searched from end to end, so he isn’t here as a stowaway. And I haven’t taken many chances with the crew. What is he going to do?”

  “I don’t know. But if the people he’s beaten before now had known what the Saint was going to do—they wouldn’t have been beaten. We aren’t the first people who’ve been perfectly certain they were safe. We aren’t the only clever crooks in the world.”

  Then she said again, “I’ve told you—I don’t quit.”

  “All right—”

  “This is the biggest game I’ve ever played!” she said, with a kind of savage enthusiasm. “It’s more—it’s one of the biggest games that ever has been played. I’ve spent months preparing the ground. I’ve sat up night after night planning everything out to the smallest detail, down to the last item of our getaways. It’s a perfect machine. I’ve only got to press the button, and it’ll run from tomorrow night to safety—as smoothly as any human machine ever ran. And you ask me to give that up!”

  A kind of madness came over Dicky Tremayne. He turned, and his hands fell on her shoulders, and he forced her round with unnecessary violence.

  “All right!” he snapped. “You insist on keeping up this pose that you think’s so brave and clever. You’re damned pleased with yourself about it. Now listen to what I think. You’re just a spoilt, silly little fool—”

  “Take your hands off me!”

  “When I’ve finished. You’re just a spoilt, silly little fool that I’ve a good mind to spank here and now, as I’d spank any other child—”

  The moonlight gleamed on something blue-black and metallic between them.

  “Will you let me go?” she asked dangerously.

  “No. Go ahead and shoot. I say you ought to be slapped, and, by the Lord…Audrey, Audrey, why are you crying?”

  “Damn you,” she said, “I’m not crying.”

  “I can see your eyes.”

  “Some smoke—”

  “You dropped your cigarette minutes ago.”

  His fierce grip had slackened. She moved swiftly, and flung off his hands.

  “I don’t want to get sentimental,” she said shakily. “If I’m crying, it’s my own business, and I’ve got my own good reasons for it. You’re quite right—I am spoilt. I am a fool. I want that quarter of a million dollars, and I’m going to have it—in spite of Hilloran—in spite of you, too, if you want to take Hilloran’s side—”

  “I’m not taking Hilloran’s side. I’m—”

  “Whose side are you taking, then? There’s only two sides to this.”

  The moment had passed. He had chanced his arm on a show of strength…and failed. He wasn’t used to bullying a girl. And through the dispersal of that shell-burst of madness he was aware again of the weakness of his position.

  A bare-faced bluffer like the Saint might still have carried it off, but Dicky Tremayne couldn’t. He dared not go too far. He was tied hand and foot. It had been on the tip of his tongue to throw up the game, then…to tell the truth, present his ultimatum, and damn the consequences. Prudence—perhaps too great a prudence—had stopped him. In that, in a way, he was like Hilloran. Hilloran was in the habit of obedience; Tremayne was in the habit of loyalty; neither of them could break his habit on the spur of the moment.

  “I’m taking your side,” said Dicky.

  And he wondered, at the same time, whether he oughtn’t to have given way to the impulse of that moment’s loss of temper.

  “Then what’s the point of all this?” she demanded.

  “I’m taking your side,” said Dicky, “better than you know. But we won’t go into that any more—not just now, anyway. Let it pass. Since you’re so clever—what’s your idea for dealing with the situation?”

  “Another cigarette.”

  He gave her one, lighted it, and turned to stare moodily over the sea. It was a hopeless dilemma.

  “I wonder,” he thought bitterly, “why a man should cling so fanatically to his word of honour? It’s sheer unnatural lunacy, that’s what it is.”

  He knew that was what it was. But he was on parole, and he would have no chance to take back his parole until the following night at the earliest.

  “What do you think Hilloran’ll do now?” she asked. “Will he try again tonight, or will he wait till tomorrow?”

  The moment was very much past. It might never have been.

  Dicky tried to concentrate, but his brain seemed to have gone flabby.

  “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “In his place, I’d probably try again tonight. Whether Hilloran has that type of mind is another matter. You know him better than I do.”

  “I don’t think he has. He’s had one chance tonight to make the stand against me, and he funked it. That’s a setback, psychologically, that’ll take him some time to get over. I’ll bet he doesn’t try again till tomorrow. He’ll be glad to be able to do some thinking, and there’s nothing to make him rush it.”

  “Will you have any better answer tomorrow than you have now?”

  She
smiled.

  “I shall have slept on it,” she said carelessly. “That always helps.…Good night, Dicky. I’m tired.”

  He stopped her.

  “Will you promise me one thing?”

  “What is it?”

  “Lock your door tonight. Don’t open to anyone—on any excuse.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I should do that, in any case. You’d better do the same.”

  He walked back with her to her cabin. Her hair stirred in the breeze, and the moon silvered it. She was beautiful. As they passed by a bulkhead light, he was observing the serenity of her proud lovely face. He found that he had not lost all his madness.

  They reached the door.

  “Goodnight, Dicky,” she said again.

  “Goodnight,” he said.

  And then he said, in a strange strained voice, “I love you, Audrey. Goodnight, my dear.”

  He was gone before she could answer.

  7

  Dicky dreamed that he was sitting on Hilloran’s chest, with his fingers round Hilloran’s throat, banging Hilloran’s head on the deck. Every time Hilloran’s head hit the deck, it made a lot of noise. Dicky knew that this was absurd. He woke up lazily and traced the noise to his cabin door. Opening one eye, he saw the morning sunlight streaming in through his porthole.

  Yawning, he rolled out of the bunk, slipped his automatic from under the pillow, and went to open the door.

  It was a white-coated steward, bearing a cup of tea. Dicky thanked the man, took the cup, and closed the door on him, locking it again.

  He sat on the edge of the bunk, stirring the tea thoughtfully. He looked at it thoughtfully, smelt it thoughtfully, and poured it thoughtfully out of the porthole. Then he lighted a cigarette.

  He went to his bath with the automatic in his dressing-gown pocket and his hand on the automatic. He finished off with a cold shower, and returned to his cabin to dress, with similar caution, but feeling better.

  The night before, he had fallen asleep almost at once. Dicky Tremayne had an almost Saintly faculty for carrying into practice the ancient adage that the evil of the day is sufficient thereto, and, since he reckoned that he would need all his wits about him on the morrow, he had slept. But now the morrow had arrived, he was thoughtful.