Patricia laughed at him quietly. She produced one of the Saint’s razors.
“You’ll look quite different without your moustache,” she said, “and horn-rimmed glasses are a wonderful disguise.”
Monty scraped off his manhood resignedly. He went out into the brightness of the afternoon with many of the sensations of a man who dreams that he is rushing through a crowded street with no trousers on. Every eye seemed to ferret out his guilt and glare ominously after him; every voice that rang out a semitone above normal pitch seemed like a yell of denunciation. His shirt clung to him damply.
If there were no detectives posted anywhere along the short route they had to take, there were two at the platform barrier. They stood beside the ticket inspector and made no attempt to conceal themselves. Monty surrendered the suitcases he carried into the keeping of a persistent porter, and looked hopelessly at the girl. With their hands free, they might stand a chance if they cut and run…But the girl was stone blind to his mute entreaty. She dumped her bag on the porter’s barrow and strode on. A touch of black on her eyebrows, and an adroit use of lipstick, had created a completely new character. She walked right up to the ticket inspector and the two detectives, and stood in front of them with one arm akimbo and her legs astraddle, brazening them through tortoise-shell spectacles larger even than Monty’s.
“Say, you, does this train go to Heidelberg?”
“In Mainz umsteigen.”
“Whaddas that mean, Hiram?”
Her accent would have carved petrified marrow-bones. It was actually one of the detectives who volunteered to interpret.
“In Mainz—exchange trains.”
“Bitte, die Fahrkarten,” said the inspector stolidly.
Monty swallowed, and delved in his pocket for the reservations.
They were passed through without a question. Monty could hardly believe that it had been so simple. He stood by and watched the amused porter stowing their bags away in the compartment, tipped him extravagantly, and subsided weakly into a corner. He mopped his perspiring forehead and looked at Patricia with the vague embryo of a grin.
“Do you mean to tell me this is a sample of your everyday life?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” said the girl carelessly. “Sometimes it’s very dull. You just happen to have dropped into one of the high spots.”
“It must be an acquired taste.”
Patricia laughed, and passed him her cigarette-case.
“You’re having the time of your life, really, if you’d only admit it. It’s a shame about you, Monty—you’re wasted in an office. Simon would give you a partnership for the asking. Why don’t you stay in with us?”
“I think I am staying in with you,” said Monty. “We shall probably go on staying together—in the same clink. Still, I’m always ready to listen to any proposals you have to make.” He struck a match and held it out for her. “Are you included in the goodwill of the business?”
She smiled.
“I might let you hold my hand sometimes.”
“And I suppose as a special treat I could kiss your toes when I’d murdered someone you didn’t approve of.”
“Maybe you might even do that.”
“Well,” said Monty definitely, “I don’t think that’s nearly good enough. You’ll have to think of something much more substantial if you want me to be tempted.”
The girl’s blue eyes bantered him.
“Aren’t you a bit mercenary?”
“No. It’s the Saint’s fault for leaving us alone together so often. I assure you, Patricia, I’m not to be trusted for a minute.”
“We’ll ask Simon about it,” said the girl wickedly, and stood up.
She went over to the window and glanced up and down the platform. Her watch showed less than a minute to the time they were scheduled to start: already the crowd was melting into its compartments, doors were being slammed, and the late arrivals were scurrying about to find their seats…Behind her, a benevolent old clergyman with a pink face and white side-whiskers stopped in the doorway and peered round benignly: Monty leered at him hideously, and he departed.
An official came in and checked their tickets without paying them the least attention…
Patricia was tapping one sensibly rounded brogue on the low heel of the other. She turned and spoke over her shoulder, “Any idea what can have kept him?”
“I could think of several,” said Monty, with a callousness which scarcely attempted to ring true. “The silly mutt ought to have got away with us instead of hanging around talking to Rudolf. Personally I’d rather sit down and talk to a rattlesnake.”
“He had to find out what game Rudolf was playing,” said the girl shortly, and at that moment a shadow fell across them and they both turned round.
Simon Templar stood before them—the Saint himself, with one long arm reaching to the luggage-rack and his feet braced against the preliminary jolting of the train, gazing down at them with a wide reckless grin. Even so it was a second or two before they recognised him. A white straw hat was tilted on to the back of his head, and a monocle in his right eye completed the amazing work of wiping every fragment of character from his face and reducing the features to amiable vacuity. A large carnation burgeoned in his buttonhole, and his tie was pulled into a tight knot and sprung foppishly forward from his neck. Patricia had actually seen him at the far end of the platform, and dismissed him without further thought.
“Hail Columbia,” said the Saint.
Monty Hayward recovered magnificently from his surprise.
“Go away,” he said. “I thought we’d got rid of you. We were just getting along splendidly.”
The Saint stared at him rudely.
“Hullo,” he said, “What’s happened to your little soup-strainer? I always told you something would happen if you didn’t keep moth-balls in it.”
“It was removed by special request,” said Monty, with some dignity. “Pat told me it tickled.”
“But what have you been doing?” asked the girl breathlessly.
The Saint laughed, and kissed her. He chucked his straw hat up on the rack, loosened his tie, put the monocle away in his pocket, removed the flower from his coat and presented it exquisitely to Monty, and flung himself loosely into a corner seat, long-limbed and piratical and unchangeably disturbing—taking Patricia’s cigarette from her fingers and inhaling from it between merry lips.
“I’ve been keeping the ball rolling and adding another felony to our charge sheet. Rudolf knows that the boodle is now in the post—he’d done a few calories of hot thinking and spooned the confirmation out of the head porter. I didn’t dispute it. Then he offered to join forces and halve the kitty—told me we hadn’t a hailstone’s break in hell of making the grade alone. Well, the time was getting on and I’d got to shake him off somehow. He told me his car was outside and it was mine if I cared to go in cahoots with him, so I told him quite truthfully I should love to borrow it. I think he must have misunderstood me somehow, because we went out together and he was quite shocked when I simply stepped in and drove away. I ran around a couple of blocks into a quiet street behind the station, and bailed out when no one was looking. Then I went through a shop and bought that lid, and an old woman sold me the veg for two marks because she said I’d a lucky face. And—do you know, Monty?—I believe I have!”
Monty nodded.
“You’ll need it,” he said decisively. “If Rudolf catches you again I should think he’ll roast you over a slow fire.”
“He’s likely to try it,” said the Saint lightly. “But d’you know what it was worth?…My villains, think of the situation! Right now we’ve got Rudolf by the short hairs—got him as he’s never been got in his life before. He knows the boodle hasn’t gone out of Germany—I couldn’t have risked it, because it might have been opened by the Customs. His one hope is to trail me and watch me collect my mail. And the worst thing that could possibly happen to him would be to get us into more trouble with the police! Whatever w
e said to his proposition, he was doomed to move heaven and earth to keep the paws of the police from our coat collars, because once we were in jug the boodle’d be lost for ever. He’s got to take everything we give him. We can shoot up his staff—pinch his cars—pour plates of soup down his dicky—and he’s got to open his face from ear to ear and tell the world how he loves a good joke!” Simon rolled over on one elbow and thumped Monty in the stomach. “Boys and girls—do you like it?”
The other two sorted his meaning gradually out of that jubilant cataract of words. They analysed and absorbed it while he laughed at them, and then, before they could marshal their thoughts for a reply, he was raiding and scattering them again with a fresh twist of mountebank’s magic.
“You two were followed to the station. Rudolf’s pals were snooping round the hotel, even if they thought it was safer to stop outside. You can take it that a guy who could deduce the whole idea of shooting boodle into the post office would have his own notions about fire escapes. That little runt we laid out in the Königshof last night is on the train, and I’ll bet he trod in on your heels. The only thing I’m wondering is whether he had time to get a message back before we pulled out.” Simon was radiant. “And now try some more. Have you heard the new scream about the bishop?”
“Bishop?” repeated Monty feebly.
“Yep. And for once there’s no actress in it—”
He broke off as a large-bosomed female burdened with two travelling rugs, a Pekinese, and the works of Ethel M. Dell threaded herself through the door and deposited herself in the vacant corner. The Saint glared at Monty and waved his arms wildly in the air. He raved on as if he had not noticed the intrusion.
“…and you would be locked up if I had my way. You ought to have gone to the hospital. I should think if the authorities knew you were tearing around like this with a dose of scarlet fever they’d clap you straight into an asylum. And what about me? Did I tell you I wanted to catch all your diseases—”
A muffled yelp wheezed out of the strong, silent corner, and the Saint started round in time to see a black bombazine rump undulating agitatedly out of view. Simon settled himself back and grinned again.
“Bishop?” Monty encored hazily. The pace was a bit rapid for him.
“Or something like it. But you must have seen him. Bloke with a face like a prawn and white fur round his ears. Damn it, he was rubbering in here a few minutes back! I was dodging him in and out of lavatories all down the train, which is why I didn’t join you before—him and Rudolf’s five feet of stickphast. Well, I can tell you where I last saw Prawn-face. He was lashed to a chair in the Crown Prince’s schloss with that hellish screw tightening into his skull—being invited to open his strong-box and disclose the sparklers. That parson is Comrade Krauss, the bird who first lifted that packet of jewels and began the stampede!”
Patricia recaptured the remains of her cigarette.
“One minute, boy…No—he couldn’t have recognised Monty and me. He’s never been near us in his life. And you dodged him—But how did he get here?”
“Made his getaway in the confusion, as I expected he would. And if any man’s got a right to be thirsting for Rudolf’s blood, he has. Why he should be on this particular schnellzug is still more than we know—unless maybe he overshot the mark thinking we’d got farther ahead than we have. We shall know soon enough. If this journey is peaceful I shall have lived in vain.”
The prospect appeared to please him. Nothing was more certain than that he was in the one element for which he had been born: the delight of it danced in those rake-hell blue eyes—the eyes of a king in his own kingdom.
“What do we do?” asked Patricia.
She asked it from her own corner, with her hands tucked in the broad leather belt of her tweed costume. It was a swashbuckler’s belt with a great silver buckle, an outrageous belt, a belt that no lady would have dreamed of wearing, and she looked like a scapegrace Diana. She asked her question with long slim legs stretched out and her fair head tilted rather lazily back on the cushions, with a hint of the same laziness in her voice—perhaps the most obvious thing she could have said, but it made Monty Hayward fill his eyes with her, belt and all. And the Saint pulled her hair.
“What do we do, lass?” he challenged. “Well, what’s wrong with a little tour of inspection? I could just do with a glimpse of the ungodly gnashing their teeth to give me an appetite for lunch.”
“What’s wrong with sitting where we are?” replied Monty reasonably. “We aren’t getting into mischief. You could spend several hours working out how you’re going to get me across the next frontier and take the jewels with you as well. And by the way, where are the ruddy things?”
“They’ll be waiting for us at the poste restante in Cologne—where moth and rust may corrupt, but Rudolf will have a job to break through and steal.”
Monty scratched his head.
“I’m still trying to get that clear,” he said. “What have you done with them?”
“Bunged ’em into the post, laddie—all done up in brown paper, with bits of string and sealing-wax and everything. As I told Rudolf. They’re on their way now—they might even be on this very train—but there’s no detective on earth who could prove now that I’d ever had anything to do with them, even if he thought of looking for them in the right place. In this game the great idea is to have brains,” said the Saint modestly.
Monty digested the pronouncement with becoming gravity. And then Patricia stood up.
“Let’s go, boy,” she said recklessly, and the Saint hauled himself up with a laugh.
“And shall we dally with the archdeacon or gambol with the gun artist?”
He framed the question in a tone that required no answer, balancing himself easily in the swaying carriage, with a cigarette between his lips and one hand shielding his lighter—he was as unanswerable as a laughing whirlwind with hell-for-leather blue eyes. He was not even thinking of alternatives.
And then he saw the hole that had been bored through the partition on his left—just an inch or two below the mesh of the luggage-grid.
The raw white edges of it seemed to blaze into his vision out of the smooth drab surface of the varnished woodwork, pinning him where he stood in a sudden hush of corrosive immobility. Then his gaze flicked down to the half-dozen fresh white splinters that lay on the seat, and the smile in his eyes hardened to a narrow glitter of steel.
“Or should we just sit here and behave ourselves?” he murmured, and the change in his voice was so contrasting that the other two stared at him.
Monty recovered the use of his tongue first.
“That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard you say for a long time,” he remarked, as if he still doubted whether he should believe his ears. “You can’t be feeling well.”
“But, Simon—”
Patricia broke in with a different incredulity. And the Saint dropped a hand on her shoulder.
His other hand went out in a grim gesture that travelled straight to the hole in the partition.
“Let’s keep our heads, Pat.” The smile was filtering back into his voice, but it was so gentle that only the most sensitive ear could have picked it out. “Monty’s the moderating influence—and he may be right. We don’t want to make things unnecessarily difficult. There’s a long journey in front of us, and I’m not sure that I should object to a little rest. I’m not so young as I was.”
He subsided heavily into his corner with a profound sigh, and the visible part of his audience tore their eyes from the telltale perforation in the wall and looked at him in the tense dawning of comprehension.
“Good night, my children,” said the Saint sleepily.
But he was reaching to his feet again as he said it, and there was not a trace of sleepiness in one inch of the movement. It was like the measured straightening of a bent spring. And it was just as he came dead upright that a dull thud seemed to bump itself on the partition, clearly audible above the monotonous rattling of the wheel
s.
“And happy dreams,” said the Saint, in the softest of all whispers.
He slid out soundlessly into the corridor. Down towards the end of it he saw the back of a man lurching from side to side in a clumsy attempt to run, and instinctively the Saint’s step quickened. Then he glanced sidelong into the next compartment as he passed it—he was merely satisfying a professional desire to see the other end of the listening-hole which had tapped through into his private business, but what he saw there made him pull up with his fingers hooking round the edge of the sliding door. Without another thought he shot it back along its grooves and let himself in. He went in quietly and without fear, for the eyes of the man who was crumpled up in the far corner looked at him with the calm greeting of one who has already seen beyond the Curtain. It was Josef Krauss, with one hand clutched to his side and the grey pallor of death in his face.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CONTINUED TO BE DISCREET AND MONTY HAYWARD IMPROVED THE SHINING HOUR
1
Simon Templar pulled the door shut behind him and went over to the dying man. He started to fumble with the buttons of the stained black waistcoat, but Krauss only smiled.
“Lassen Sie es nur,” he said huskily. “It is not worth the time. The old fox has finished his journey.”
Simon nodded. The first glance had told him that there was nothing he could do. He sat down beside the stricken thief and supported him with an arm round his shoulders, and Krauss looked at him with the same calm and patient eyes.
“I have only seen you once before, Herr Templar. That was when you saved me from the screw.” A shiver passed over the man’s bulky frame. “If I had lived, I should have repaid that kindness by robbing you. You know that?”
“Does it matter?” asked the Saint.
Krauss shook his head. There were beads of perspiration starting through the pink greasepaint on his face, and each breath cost him an effort.
“Now the time is too short for these things,” he said.
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