The Saint's Getaway (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “We might tie him up.”

  “I know. You tear the curtains into strips, and blow the expense.”

  “There’s a length of rope in Simon’s bag,” said Patricia calmly. “If you’ll wait a second I’ll get it for you.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, and returned in a few moments with a coil of stout cord. Monty took it from her gingerly.

  “I suppose there isn’t anything of this sort that Simon ever travels without,” he commented pessimistically. “If you’ve got a gallows in the cabin trunk, it may save a lot of mucking about when the police catch us.”

  The gunman was still in no condition to make any effective resistance. Monty endeavoured to adapt a working knowledge of knots acquired in some experience of weekend yachting to the peculiar eccentricities of the human frame, and made a very passable job of it. Having reduced his victim to a state of blasphemous helplessness, he dusted the knees of his trousers and turned again to Pat.

  “I seem to remember that the next item is a gag,” he said. “Do you know anything about gags?”

  “I have seen it done,” said the girl unblushingly. “Lend me your handkerchief…And that other one in your breast pocket.”

  She bent over the squirming prisoner, and a particularly vile profanity subsided into a choking gurgle. Monty watched the performance with admiration.

  “You know, I couldn’t have done that,” he said. “And I’ve been editing this kind of stuff all my life. The stories never give you the important details. They just say, ‘Lionel Strong-arm bound and gagged his captive’—and the thing’s done. Where did you learn it all?”

  Patricia laughed.

  “Simon taught me,” she said simply. “If there’s anything that makes him see red, it’s inefficiency. He explains a thing once, and expects you to remember it for the rest of your life. Your brain’s got to be on tiptoe from the time you get up in the morning till the time you go to bed at night. He’s like that himself, and everyone else has got to be the same. It nearly sent me off my rocker till I got used to it, and then I began to see that I’d been half asleep all my life, like eighty per cent of other people. He was right, of course.”

  Monty went over and poured himself out a drink.

  “This is a new line on the private life of an adventurer,” he murmured. “Did he ever explain what one should do when stranded in a hotel with a corpse on the bed and a gun artist under the sofa?”

  “That,” said the girl composedly, “is supposed to be an elementary exercise in initiative.”

  Monty grimaced.

  “Some initiative is certainly called for,” he admitted. “Simon may be away for a week, and then Stanislaus will begin to smell.”

  He wandered pensively back into the bedroom, and wished that he felt suitably depressed. Two hours ago he would have expressed no desire at all to find himself in such a situation. Its potentialities in the way of local colour would have left him uninspired. Four years in France had left him with a profound appreciation of the amenities of peace. On several occasions he had told the Saint that he was always pleased to hear or read of stirring exploits anywhere, but that as far as he personally was concerned he could enjoy enough violence to keep his glands active from an armchair. And if he had to be decoyed into that sort of thing, he most unequivocally wanted it to be gradual. A minor job of shoplifting, if necessary, or an evening out with a pickpocket, would have satisfied his craving for excitement for a long time.

  But since he had been blamelessly landed up to his neck in a kind of thieves’ picnic in which the disposal of corpses and gagged gunmen was supposed to be merely an elementary exercise in initiative, he found himself taking an interest in the affair which he tried to persuade himself was purely morbid. He frisked Weissmann’s clothes with an almost professional callousness, and brought a selection of papers back with him to the sitting-room.

  “While you’re getting your initiative tuned up,” he said, “it might be helpful if we knew something more about Stanislaus.”

  Patricia came and looked over his shoulder as he ran through the meagre supply of documents. There were a couple of letters on heavily-scented pink notepaper, addressed to Heinrich Weissmann at the Dôme, Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris, which disclosed nothing of interest to anyone wishing to have the strength of ten; a letter of credit for two thousand marks, issued by the Dresdner Bank in Köln; the counterfoil of a sleeping-car ticket from Zurich to Milan; and a receipted bill from a hotel in Basle.

  “He certainly did his best to shake off the hue and cry,” said Monty, “but does it tell us anything else?”

  “What about that?” asked Patricia, turning over one of the pink envelopes.

  On the flap was a pencilled line of writing:

  Zr 12, H Königshof.

  “Room 12, Hotel Königshof,” Monty translated promptly. “Looks as if this was the very place he was making for.”

  The girl bit her lip.

  “It’d be a frightful coincidence—”

  “I don’t know. Those squiggly marks in the corner—they’re just the sort of pattern a fellow draws at the telephone. Stanislaus would naturally have some note of the place where he was supposed to deliver the boodle. And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be here. This is the most slap-up hotel for miles around—the very place that a super crook would make his headquarters—” Monty slewed round in his chair and regarded her expectantly. “Suppose the Big Noise was sitting right over our heads?”

  Patricia jumped up.

  “But that’s just what he is doing, if that address is right! Room Twelve is on the first floor. When we came here they offered us Eleven, but Simon wouldn’t have it. He tried to get Twelve, which has a fire escape outside, but it was taken yesterday—”

  “I don’t see that it’s anything to get excited about, anyway,” said Monty soothingly. “If it’s true, it only means that another bunch of toughs may be crashing in here at any moment to commit a few more murders.”

  “I’m going to run up the fire escape and see if I can see anything.”

  Monty looked at her in frank amazement.

  For the first instant he thought she was bluffing. He had instinctively salted down her laconic description of the Saint’s inexorable training. And then he saw the recklessness of the smile that parted her fresh lips, the eager vitality of her slim body, the devil-may-care light in her blue eyes, and the bantering challenge that trembled on the tip of his tongue went unuttered. There was a living embodiment of Saintliness in her that startled. He smiled.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he remarked soberly, “Simon’s a damned lucky man. And you won’t run up the fire escape, because I’m going to.”

  He went out on to the lawn, located the stairway on his left, and groped his way up the narrow iron steps. There was only one window on the first floor which could possibly answer the vague description he had been given, and no light showed through it. He paused on the grating beside it and wondered what on earth he should do next. To scale an awkward species of ladder at that hour of the morning in order to inspect a room, and then to return with the information that it possesses a window constructed of square panes of glass, struck him as being an extraordinarily inane procedure. And he could see nothing inside from where he was. There seemed to be only one alternative, and that was to insert himself surreptitiously into the room.

  Fortunately one of the casements was ajar, and he opened it wide and clambered over the sill with a silent prayer that he might be able to pretend successfully that he was drunk.

  Every movement he made appeared to shake the hotel to its foundations. The loose change clinked in his pockets like a dozen sledge-hammers knocking the hell out of a cracked anvil, his clothes rustled like a forest in a gale, and the sound of his breathing seemed loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The jaws of the prison yawned on every side. He could hear them.

  Then his right shin collided with something hard. He felt around for the offend
ing object, and presently discovered it to be a chair lying on its side. Peering puzzledly into the gloom, he made out the white outline of the bed. He strained his eyes at it for some seconds, and then, with a sudden inspiration, he walked straight across the room and switched on the light…

  Three minutes later he was back in the suite below.

  “I don’t profess to understand anything that’s happening tonight,” he said, “but the bird upstairs has flown. Flown in a hurry, too, because he’s gone without his coat and tie.”

  Patricia stared.

  “But—surely he must have gone to the bathroom.”

  “Not unless he intends to spend the night there. His door was shut, and the key was on the table by the bed. That’s what they call deduction.”

  The girl sat down on the arm of the Chesterfield with a frown of perplexity wrinkling her forehead. The development required some thinking over.

  One thing was as plain as a pikestaff, and she phrased it undemonstratively:

  “If we sit around here doing nothing, we’re just asking to be shot at.”

  “Look here, Pat,” said Monty Hayward, buttressing himself against the mantelpiece, “we’re between several fires. Don’t forget that the police have got it in for us as well. And one of the chief essentials in a mess like this seems to be to have the door open for a clean getaway. Now, what would be the Saint’s idea about that?”

  “He’d say that the main thing was to leave no evidence.”

  “Right. Then the only serious piece of evidence is that stiff in the next room. Whatever happens, we can’t leave him lying about. And since he knew where he was going, and the coast is clear, I should think the best thing we could do is to help him finish his journey.”

  Patricia looked at him thoughtfully.

  “You mean, plant him in the room upstairs—”

  “Exactly. And let the gang he belongs to take care of him. It’s about time they had some worries of their own.”

  “And what about Ethelbert?”—she indicated the prisoner with a movement of her cigarette.

  “Put a knife beside him and let him do the best he can. Even if they catch him, I don’t think he’ll have anything to say. For one thing, Stanislaus seems to have been no friend of his, and besides, if he wanted to clear up the mystery, he’d have to give an account of what he was doing in here, which wouldn’t be too easy for him.”

  The argument seemed flawless. Patricia herself could offer no improvements on the scheme, and she realised that every wasted minute increased the danger.

  She led the way into the bedroom and produced an electric flashlamp to light Monty on his gruesome task. Luckily the external bleeding had been comparatively slight, and no blood had penetrated to the bedclothes. Monty picked up the rigid body in his arms and went out without another word, and she stayed behind to straighten the sheets and coverlet.

  The feelings of Monty Hayward as he climbed the fire escape for the second time were somewhat disordered. He insisted to himself, on purely logical grounds, that he was scared stiff, but the emotion somehow failed to connect amicably with another stratum of his immortal soul which was having the time of its life. He began to ask himself whether perhaps he had been missing something by steadfastly burying himself in a respectable existence, and immediately he reflected that the prospect of being hanged by the neck for other people’s murders was a damned good thing to miss anyway. He solemnly vowed that the next time he saw a harmless-looking little man being set on by a gang of thugs, he would raise his hat politely and pass by on the other side, and simultaneously he felt rather pleased with himself for the efficiency with which he had laid out his opponent. It was all very difficult, and he pushed himself and his grisly luggage through the first-floor window with some doubts of whether he was really the same man who had been placidly quaffing Pilsner at the Breinössl two hours ago.

  After a moment’s deliberation, he laid the little man artistically down beside the overturned chair, rubbed the chair with his sleeve to remove any fingerprints, and stood back to examine his handiwork. It looked convincing enough…And it was then that the Recording Angel shuddered on his throne and upset the inkpot; for Monty Hayward gazed at his handiwork and grinned…

  Then he switched out the light. He hopped over the window-sill and trotted down the escape with a briskness that was almost rollicking. The glorious company of the Apostles held their breath.

  He was three steps from the bottom when he saw a shadow move in the darkness just below, and a hoarse voice challenged him:

  “Wer da?”

  Monty’s stomach took a short stroll round his interior.

  Then he stepped down to the ground.

  “Hullo, ole pineapple,” he hiccoughed. “Ishnit lovely night? Are you the lighthoush-keeper? Becaush if you are—”

  A light was flashed in his face, and he heard a startled exclamation:

  “Got in Himmel! Der Engländer, der mich in den Fluss geworfren hat—”

  Monty understood, and gasped.

  And then, even as it had happened earlier to Simon Templar, the tattered remnants of his virtue were swept into annihilation like chaff before a fire. If he were destined for the scaffold, so let it be. His boats had been burned for him.

  He flung up his arm and knocked the light aside. As it flew into the air, he had a fleeting glimpse of the battered face of the man he had tackled on the bridge, with his one undamaged eye bulging and his bruised mouth opening for a shout. He crowded every ounce of his strength into a left hook to the protruding chin, and heard the man drop like a pole-axed ox.

  Monty picked him up and carried him into the sitting-room. Monty was smiling. He considered that, that left hook was a beauty.

  “We were only just in time,” he said. “This hotel is getting unhealthy.”

  The girl looked at him open-mouthed.

  “Where was he?”

  “Standing at the bottom of the fire escape, waiting for me. He’s one of the blokes we threw into the river. I think I can guess what happened. If the police were waiting to pinch Stanislaus, they may have been nearly as hot on the trail of the man upstairs. They came dashing along here as soon as they’d reported to headquarters and borrowed a change of clothes—you can see this chap’s uniform is too tight for him. The other two are probably interviewing the management and preparing to break in the door. This one was posted in the garden to see that their man didn’t make a getaway through the window.”

  Patricia took a cigarette from her case and lighted it with a steady hand.

  “If that bloke’s uniform is too tight for him,” she remarked evenly, “it should just about fit you.”

  Monty raised one eyebrow.

  After a moment’s silence, he bent a calculating eye on the unconscious policeman. When he looked up again there was a twinkle in his gaze.

  “Is that what the Saint would do?” he asked quizzically.

  She nodded.

  “I can’t see any other way out.”

  “Then I expect I could manage it.”

  He knelt down and began to strip off the policeman’s uniform and accoutrements. The trousers went on over his own, with his coat-tails inside—he foresaw possible difficulties in the way of parting permanently with his own garments—and then Patricia was ready for him with the tunic. Tailored for the more generous figure of a Teutonic gendarme, it fitted him perfectly over his own clothes. Monty was transformed.

  He was buckling on the cumbersome sword-belt when the telephone began to ring.

  “If that’s the Saint,” he said, “tell him I never want to speak to him again.”

  Patricia threw herself at the instrument.

  “Hullo…Simon—where have you been?…Oh, don’t play the fool, boy. We must know quickly…Well, the police are here…The police—the men you and Monty threw in the river. Keep quiet and let me tell you.”

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CHASED HIMSELF AND MONTY HAYWARD DID HIS STUFF

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  Simon Templar deposited himself neatly on the roof of the car as it flashed underneath him, and settled himself down to wallow in the side-splitting aspects of the ride.

  The humour of the situation struck him as being definitely rich. To have first induced a wily old veteran like Prince Rudolf to transport you personally to his secret lair, and then, after you have butted violently into an up-and-coming conversazione, plugged his gentleman’s gentleman in the lower abdomen, pulled His Elegant Elevation’s leg, shot a hole in the air an inch from his elevated ear, snaffled a large can of boodle, and made yourself generally unpopular in divers similar ways, to be taking precisely the same route back to the long grass was an achievement of which any man might have been justly proud. And yet that was exactly what the Saint was doing.

  The inspiration had come to Simon while he was listening to Patricia’s story on the telephone, and he had put it into effect without a second’s hesitation. Sprawling tenaciously on his unstable perch, he reviewed the dazzling casualness with which he had scattered all the necessary bait—the mythical car which he had waiting for him and the rendezvous on the road to Jenbach—and marvelled at his own astounding brilliance. And after that had been done, the elopement of Prince Rudolf mattered not at all. In fact, it saved a certain amount of trouble. The Saint had scarcely reached his point of vantage over the archway of the castle when he saw the prince’s car pulling out for the pursuit, and one minute later he was being bowled along on the most hilarious getaway of his eventful life.

  It was the very first time in his tempestuous career that he had ever tacked himself to the lid of an unfriendly limousine and helped enthusiastically to chase himself, and the overpowering Saintliness of the idea made him so weak with laughter that he was barely able to save himself from being bucked off into the surrounding panorama when the car jolted over the ridge that placed it on the mountain road.

  If the voyage to the castle had been hectic, the return journey was the most delirious peregrination in which the Saint ever wanted to take part. How the car itself managed to hold the road at all was more than the Saint could account for by any natural laws. The only conclusion he could come to was that it had been born and bred in a circus and had subsequently been fitted with tyres manufactured from a hitherto unknown form of everlasting glue. Half the time, it seemed to be running with two of its wheels skating about on the loose scree and the other two gyrating airily over the unfathomable abyss. The fact that it would probably have done the very same thing if the Saint had been driving it himself was a consolation that could be ignored. The difference between one’s own masterly manoeuvres at the wheel, and the hare-brained antics of a total stranger, is one which no practical motorist has ever been able to misunderstand. Besides which, a comfortably upholstered seat inside a vehicle, however suicidally driven, is not and never can be quite so awe-inspiring as a smooth and slippery roof on which you have to maintain your crucified posture largely by the adhesive qualities of your eyelids. For Simon Templar there ensued an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes in which he had no further leisure to enjoy the gorgonzolan ripeness of the jest.