The Saint's Getaway (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Right here—right up close to papa, sweetheart!”

  The Saint’s voice rapped at him with a ring that made him start. And Marcovitch came on. He fought every inch of the way, with his lips snarling—but he came on. The single black eye of the gun dragged him inexorably across the room, step by step—that and the living bleak blue eyes behind it.

  He stopped in front of the Saint, a yard away, and the blue eyes looked him over slowly and thoughtfully.

  Then the Saint’s left hand flashed out at him. Marcovitch cringed from the blow that he could not avoid. But the mistake was his—the blow never materialised. Simon had done his job before Marcovitch knew what was happening. There was the sharp splitting tear of rending cloth, and one-half of Marcovitch’s coat hung off him down to the elbow. In another second it was joined by half of his shirt. And the Saint grinned amiably.

  “Wool next to the skin, Uglyvitch?” he murmured. “Dear me! And I thought you were a tough guy…”

  Something else was revealed besides the woollen vest, and that was a band of tape that stretched across the man’s chest and disappeared under his armpit. A neat little bundle hung there, tied in a soiled linen handkerchief slung from the tape which passed over the opposite shoulder.

  Simon ripped it off. There was another similar bundle concealed under the man’s left arm.

  “An old game—which you ought to have remembered, Monty,” said the Saint. “He might just as well have had a gun there…You can go back to your place in the breadline now, Comrade.”

  He pushed Marcovitch away. The man’s face was white with fury, but Simon Templar could endure hardships like that with singular fortitude. The two knotted handkerchiefs filled his spread hand, and their contents crunched juicily when he squeezed them in his fingers.

  He gave the Crown Prince a broadside of his most seraphic smile.

  “Dear old Gaffer Rudolf!” he drawled. “So that’s the simple end of an awful lot of fuss. Well, well, well! We none of us grow younger, do we?—as we’ve been telling each other several times today.”

  The prince gazed at him passionlessly.

  “Would it be in order to congratulate you?” he murmured, and the Saint laughed.

  “Perhaps…when we’ve finished.”

  Simon turned to Monty.

  “If you’d like something more to do, old dear,” he said, “you might try and find some more handcuffs. We shall want six pairs—if the station’ll run to it. Hands only for Rudolf and Marcovitch—they’ve got to walk. Hands and feet for the Law—we don’t want them at all. And mind how you go around that sergeant. He looks as if he might burst at any moment, and you wouldn’t want to get splashed with his supper.”

  Monty searched around. After a few moments he discovered a locker that was plentifully stocked with both hand and leg irons; he came back trailing the chains behind him. Under the Saint’s directions the two police officers were efficiently manacled together, and finally an extra pair of handcuffs fastened them to a ring-bolt set in the wall, which had apparently been used before for the restraint of refractory prisoners.

  The prince smoked tranquilly until his turn came, and then he detached the cigarette-end from the long jade holder, placed the holder leisurely in an inside pocket, and extended his own hands for the bracelets.

  “This is a unique experience,” he remarked, as Monty locked the cuffs on his wrists. “May I ask where we are to go?”

  “Upstairs,” said the Saint coolly. “We’ve got a little talk coming, and the air’s better up there.”

  The prince raised his sensitive eyebrows, but he made no reply.

  They went up the stairs in a strange procession: Patricia and Nina Walden leading, the Saint going up backwards after them and covering the cortege, Prince Rudolf and Marcovitch following him, and Monty Hayward bringing up the rear. The prince’s face remained impassive. Simon knew that that impassivity belied the workings of that quiet ruthless brain, but the prince and Marcovitch were firmly sandwiched between two fires, and they could do nothing—at the moment. And the Saint didn’t care. The prince must have known it—even as the two men in the room must have known. It was significant that Rudolf had been very silent, ever since that playful seance in the charge-room had received its staggering interruption.

  “This way, boys.”

  Simon opened the door of the police chief’s office and let the caravan file past him. He went in last—closed the door and leaned back on it.

  “Sit down.”

  Prince Rudolf sank into a chair. Monty prodded Marcovitch into another with the nose of his Luger. And the Saint cleared a space on the desk and sat there, dumping the two knotted handkerchiefs beside him. He put away his gun and opened the bundles, pouring the contents of both on to a single handkerchief in a shimmer of rainbow flames that seemed to light up the whole dingy room.

  “The time has come, Rudolf, for us to have a little reckoning,” he said, and once again, for no reason that the others could think of, he was speaking in German. And yet to Monty Hayward there was no difference, for the man who spoke was still the Saint, making even that stodgy language as vivid and pliable as his own native tongue. “We have a few things to learn—and you can tell us about them. And we’ll have all the jewels out to encourage you. Fill your eyes with them, Rudolf. You used to be a rich man. But just for this quarter of a million pounds’ worth of stones you were ready to kill men and torture them; you were ready to run up a list of murders that’d get anyone hanged three times—and frame them on to Monty and me. Which was very unkind of you, Rudy, after all the fun we had together in the old days. But you aren’t denying any of it, are you?”

  The prince shrugged.

  “Why should I? It was unfortunate that you personally should be the victim, but—”

  “Highness!”

  Marcovitch sprang up from his chair. And at the same instant the Saint came off the desk like a streak of lightning. His fist smashed into the Russian’s mouth and sent him reeling back.

  “I never have liked your voice, Uglyvitch,” said the Saint evenly. “And it’s rude to butt in like that. Gag him, Monty.”

  Simon lighted another cigarette while the order was being carried out. It had been a close call that, but his face showed no sign of it. He had been watching Marcovitch from the start. It was odd how an inferior mentality might sometimes feel brute suspicions before they came to the more highly geared intelligence.

  He sat down in the police chief’s chair behind the desk and laid his automatic on the papers in front of him.

  “As you say, it was unfortunate that I should have been the victim,” he murmured, as if nothing had happened. “I’ve never been a very successful victim, and I suppose habits are hard to break. But there were others who weren’t so lucky. It was all the same to you.”

  “My dear young friend, we are not playing a game for children—”

  “No. We’re playing a game for savages. We’ve come down in the world. Once upon a time it was a game for soldiers—in the old days. I liked you because you were a patriot—and a sportsman—even though we were fighting on opposite sides. Now it’s only a game of hunting for sacrifices to put on the altar of your bank account.” The Saint’s eyes were cold splinters of blue light across the table. “Two men died because they stood between you and these jewels. An agent of yours—didn’t you refer to him as ‘the egregious Emilio?’—murdered Heinrich Weissmann in my hotel bedroom in Innsbruck after I rescued him from three detectives whom we mistook for bandits. He was taking the jewels to Josef Krauss, whom you had allowed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you. You tortured Krauss last night, and today, when he had escaped, Marcovitch murdered him on the train between Munich and here. And Marcovitch would also have murdered all three of us if we’d given him the chance.”

  “My dear Mr Templar—”

  “I haven’t quite finished yet,” said the Saint quietly. “Marcovitch was the man who raided the brake-van on that train, with four more of
your hired thugs, to regain those jewels after I’d taken them off you. And when we had to jump off to save our lives, he told the officials that it was I who stole the mail. That also meant nothing to you. You were ready to have all your crimes charged against us—just as you were ready to have them actually committed by your dirty hirelings. You hadn’t even the courage to do any of the work yourself, before it was framed on to me. But only a few minutes ago you were ready to apply your torturing methods to a girl, to make certain that there would be more blood on those jewels before you’d done with them. The methods of a patriot and a gentleman!”

  For the first time Simon saw a flush of passion come into the pale face opposite him. The taunt had gone to its mark like a barbed arrow.

  “My dear Mr Templar!” The prince still controlled his voice, but a little of the suavity had gone from it. “Since when have your own methods been above reproach?”

  “I’m not thinking of only myself,” answered the Saint coldly. “I’m only alleged to have robbed a train. Monty Hayward here is accused of murdering Weissmann as well, and he’s the most innocent one of us all. The only thing he ever did was to help me rescue Weissmann in the first place, through a mistake which anyone might have made. And since then, of course, he’s helped me to hold up this police station in order to see justice done, for which no one could blame him. But you know as well as I do that he isn’t a criminal.”

  “His character fails to interest me.”

  “But you know that what I’ve said is the truth.”

  “Have I denied it?”

  The Saint leaned forward over the desk.

  “Will you deny that Weissmann was murdered by an agent of yours and by your orders; that Josef Krauss died in the same way, and that it was Marcovitch and other agents of yours who robbed the mail?”

  The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was recovering his self-control again. His face was calm and satirical.

  “I believe you once headed an organisation which purported to administer a justice above the Law,” he said. “Do I understand that I am assisting at its renaissance?”

  “Do you deny the charge?”

  “And supposing I admit it?”

  “I’m asking a question,” said the Saint, with a face of stone. “Do you deny the charge?”

  A long, tense silence came down on the room. Marcovitch moved again, and Monty’s hand caught him round the neck. The significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward’s understanding, but the drama of the scene held him spellbound. He also had begun to fall into the error that was deluding the Crown Prince: the Saint’s face was as inexorable as a judge’s. The humour and humanity had frozen out of it, leaving the rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the eyes were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the depths of the prince’s soul, holding him impaled on their merciless gaze like a butterfly on a pin. Then tension piled up between them till the air seemed to grow hot and heavy with it.

  “Do you deny the charge?”

  Again those five words dropped through the room like separate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after another with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince’s brain. They had about them the adamantine patience of doom itself. And the prince must have known that that question was going to receive a direct answer if it waited till the end of the world. He had come up against a force that he could no more fight against than he could fight against the changing of the tides, a force that would wear through his resistance as the continual dripping of water wears through a rock.

  And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly picked up his gun.

  “Do you deny the charge?”

  The prince stirred slightly.

  “No.”

  He answered unemotionally, without turning his eyes a fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin in the almost imperceptible lift of his head.

  “Does your worship propose to pronounce sentence?” he inquired mockingly.

  The Saint’s mouth relaxed in a hard little smile.

  Every word had been registered on the ears of the two captive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner cabinet. The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown Prince had fallen at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Marcovitch was silenced, and now he had gone white and still. The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward was free…

  “Your punishment is not in my hands,” said the Saint. “It will overtake you in the course of legal justice, and I see no need to interfere.”

  He ran his fingers again through the heap of jewels, letting them trickle through his fingers in rivulets of coloured splendour that caught the light on a hundred cunning facets.

  “Pretty toys,” said the Saint, “but they tempted you. And you could have bought them. You could have had them all for no more trouble than it would have taken you to write a cheque. I shall often wonder why you did it. Was it a kink of yours, Rudolf, that told you, you couldn’t enjoy them unless they were christened in blood? The Maloresco emeralds—the Ullsteinbach blue diamond—”

  “What did you say?”

  It was Nina Walden who spoke, starting forward suddenly from her place in the background.

  Simon looked at her curiously. He picked up the great blue stone and held it in the light.

  “The Ullsteinbach blue diamond,” he said. “Wedding gift of the late Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc—according to information in The Times. Josef Krauss tried to tell me something about it before he died, but he didn’t get far. Do you know anything about it?”

  The American girl took the stone from his fingers and turned it over and over. Then she looked at the Saint again.

  “I know this much,” she said. “It’s a—”

  “Look out!” yelled Monty.

  He had seen the prince’s hand move casually to his sleeve, as if in search of a handkerchief, and had thought nothing of it. Then the hand came out again with a jerk, and the knife that came with it went spinning across the desk in a vicious streak of silver. The Saint hurled himself sideways, and it skimmed past his neck and clattered against the wall. The prince flung himself after it like a madman, clawing at the Saint’s gun.

  Simon stood up and met him with a straight left that smashed blood out of the contorted face and sent the man staggering back against the chair.

  “Keep your gun in his ribs, Monty,” ordered the Saint crisply. “This is getting interesting. What were you going to tell me, Miss Walden?”

  The girl gave him back the stone.

  “It’s a piece of coloured glass,” she said.

  2

  Simon Templar subsided on to the desk as if his legs had given out under him. The room danced round him in a drunken tango. And once again he heard the dying jest of Josef Krauss ringing in his ears: “Sehen Sie gut nach…dem blauen Diamant…Er ist…wirklich…preisios…” And the bitter derisive eyes of the man…

  “The Ullsteinbach diamond is in America,” Nina Walden went on speaking without a glance at the prince. “It was sold to Wilbur G. Tully, the straw hat millionaire, just before the war. The owners were hard up, and they had to raise money somehow: their treasurers wouldn’t give them any more, so they raided the crown jewels. This imitation was made, and the real stone was sold to Tully under a vow of secrecy. He keeps it in his private collection. I don’t think any living person knows the story besides Tully and myself. But my grandfather made the imitation. I’ve known about it for years, and I’ve been saving the scoop for a good occasion. The Archduke Michel did that when he was sowing wild oats in his fifties—and he’s Prince Rudolf’s father, at present the King of—”

  “Great God in Heaven!”

  The Saint leapt up again. He understood. The mystery was solved in a flash that almost blinded him. He cursed himself for not having thought of it before. And he was half laug
hing at the same time, shaking with the sublime perfection of the truth.

  “Let me get this straight!” he gasped. “It wasn’t the other crown jewels that Rudolf gave a damn about. They just happened to be among the spoils. What he wanted was the Ullsteinbach blue diamond. And he didn’t want it because it was valuable, but because it wasn’t—because it was literally priceless! He couldn’t let the jewels come into any ordinary market, because someone would certainly have discovered the fraud, and the whole deception would have been shown up from the beginning. The old Archduke would probably have been booted off the throne, and Rudolf would have gone with him. He had to let Josef Krauss pinch the jewels, and then take them off Josef. Josef had discovered the secret when he handled the stones, so he had to go. And then I got hold of them by a fluke, and I might have discovered it—so I was a marked man. And everyone with me was in the same boat. Hell!…”

  The Saint flung out his arms.

  “I said it wasn’t ordinary boodle—and it isn’t! It’s the most priceless collection of boodle that’s ever been knocked off! There were men dying and being tortured for it—mail vans broken—policemen sweating—thrones tottering—and all because the star turn of it wasn’t worth more than an empty beer-bottle! My God—why didn’t I know that joke hours ago? Why wasn’t I told till now?”

  He hugged Nina Walden weakly.

  Monty swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. He realised dimly that he had just heard the unravelling of the most amazing story he was ever likely to hear, but it was all too crushingly simple. For the moment his brain refused to absorb the elementary enormity of it.

  In the same daze he saw Simon Templar pick up the glittering blue crystal from the carpet where he had dropped it, and advance solemnly towards the Crown Prince. And the Saint’s voice spoke uncertainly.

  “Rudolf—my cherub—you may have it as the souvenir I promised you.”

  Monty saw the prince’s livid face…