The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “You ought to see what happens when I tread on a fairy,” said the Saint.

  Actually his thoughts were chasing far ahead of his words. The miracle had happened—if it was a miracle—and the story went on from there. He was too hardened a traveller in the strange country of adventure to be dumbfounded by any of the unpredictable twists in its trails. But he was wondering, with a tingle of inward exhilaration, where this particular twist was destined to lead.

  He turned up the edge of his mask to light another cigarette, and his mind went back over the events that had brought him out that night, not for the first time, to make the raid that had culminated in this surprise. The laden trucks thundering northwards from the coast, filled to capacity with those easily marketable goods on which the English duties were highest—wines and spirits, cigars and cigarettes, silks and embroideries and Paris models…The rumours in the Press, that leaked out in spite of the efforts of the police, of a super-smuggler whose cunning and audacity and efficient organisation were cheating the Revenue of thousands of pounds a week and driving baffled detectives to the verge of nervous breakdowns…The gossip in pubs along the coast, and the whispers in certain exclusive circles to which no law-abiding citizen had access…The first realisation that he had enough threads in his hands to be irrevocably committed to the adventure—that the grand old days of his outlawry had come back, as they must always go on coming back so long as he lived, when his name could be a holy terror to the police and the ungodly alike, and golden galleons of boodle waited for his joyous buccaneering forays…

  And now he was wondering whether he dared to hope that the due he had been seeking for many weeks had fallen into his hands at last, in the shape of that slim golden beauty in the oil-stained overalls who lay unconscious under his hands.

  He went on thinking without interrupting his examination. She was alive, anyway—her pulse was quick but regular, and she was breathing evenly. There was no blood on her head, and her skull seemed to be intact.

  “That cap probably helped,” he said. “But it only shows you how careful you have to be when you’re patting people on the bean, Hoppy.”

  Mr Uniatz swallowed. “Chees, boss—”

  “It’s all right,” Peter consoled him. “You wouldn’t have missed anything if you had brained her. If there’s going to be any more fun, he’ll have it.”

  The Saint straightened up and turned to the driver of the lorry, who was standing woodenly behind him with his ribs aching from the steady pressure of a Betsy which in spite of Mr Uniatz’s chivalrous distress had never shifted its position.

  “Who is she?” Simon asked.

  The driver glowered at him sullenly. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened—did you find her growing on a tree?”

  “I was just givin’ ’er a lift.”

  “Where to?”

  “That’s none o’ your mucking business.”

  “Oh no?” The Saint’s voice was amiable and unruffled. “Pretty lucky she was all dressed up ready to go riding in a lorry, wasn’t it?”

  The man tightened his jaw and stood silent, scowling at the Saint with grim intensity.

  He was, as a matter of fact, just starting to experience that incredulity of his own recollections of his recent flight through the air which had been referred to before: he was a big man, and he was thinking that he would like to see an attempt to repeat the performance.

  The jar of Hoppy’s gun grinding roughly into his side made him half turn with a darkening glare.

  “Dijja hear de boss ask you a question?” inquired Mr Uniatz, with all the dulcet persuasiveness of a foghorn.

  “You ruddy bastard—”

  “That’ll do,” Simon intervened crisply. “And I wouldn’t take any chances with my health if I were you, brother. That Betsy of Hoppy’s would just about blow you in half, and he’s rather sensitive about his family. We’ll go on talking to you presently.”

  He turned to the others.

  “I don’t know how it strikes any of you bat-eyed brigands,” he said, “but I’ve got a feeling that this is the best break we’ve had yet. After all, a lot of weird things happen in this world of sin, but you don’t usually find girls in overalls riding on smugglers’ trucks with a cargo of contraband stagger soup.”

  “You do when you hold ’em up,” said Peter stoically.

  “She didn’t know I was going to hold it up, you fathead. So she’s here for some other reason. Well, she might be just a girl friend of the Menace here, but I don’t think it’s likely. Take a look at her, and then look at him. Of course, if she turned out to be blind and deaf and half-witted—”

  The driver growled viciously, and received another painful prod from Hoppy Uniatz’s gun for his trouble.

  “Well, if she isn’t?” said Peter.

  “Then she’s something a hell of a lot more important. She’s one of the nobs—or she knows ’em pretty well. It’d fit in, wouldn’t it? Remember that last consignment we hijacked? All silk dresses and lace and crêpe de Chine underwhatsits. I always thought there might be a woman in it, and if this is her—”

  “She,” said Peter, helpfully.

  The Saint laughed.

  “The hell with your grammar,” he said. “Let’s get going—it’d spoil everything if somebody else came scooting over this blasted heath just now.”

  He turned away and picked the girl up in his arms like a baby—her body was still limp and lifeless, and it would save a certain amount of trouble if she remained in that state for a little while. So long as Hoppy hadn’t struck hard enough for her to be unconscious too long…

  He put her down in the car, in the seat beside his own, and closed the door. He had left the engine running in case of the need for a quick getaway, and he knew that in waiting so long he had already tempted the Providence that had sent him such a windfall. He straightened up briskly, and strolled to meet the others who were following him.

  “This means that we change our plans a bit,” he said. “I like my beauty sleep as much as any of you, even if I don’t need it so much, but I’ve got to know where this is getting us before we go to bed. You can follow along with the lorry to the Old Barn, Peter, and Hoppy can take it up to town from there while we see if the fairy princess knows any new fairy tales.”

  Mr Uniatz cleared his throat. It sounded like the waste-pipe of a bath regurgitating, but it was meant to be a discreet and tactful noise. Almost the whole of the intervening conversation had been as obscure to him as a recitation from Euripides in the original Greek, but one minor omission stood out in front of him with pellucid clarity. Mr Uniatz was no genius, but he had an unswerving capacity for detail which many more brightly coruscating brains might have envied.

  “Boss,” he said, compressing philosophical volumes into their one irreducible nutshell. “Dis mug.”

  “I know,” said the Saint hurriedly. “I was exaggerating a bit, I’m afraid. It isn’t as bad as all that, really. I don’t believe anyone would actually die of heart failure if they saw it. I’ve looked at it myself several times—”

  “I mean,” said Mr Uniatz shyly, emphasising his objective with another rib-splitting thrust of his Betsy, “dis mug here.”

  “Oh, him. Well—”

  “Do I give him de woiks?” asked Mr Uniatz, condensing into six crystalline monosyllables the problem which dictators of every age and clime have taken thousands of words to propound.

  Simon shrugged tolerantly.

  “If he gets obstreperous, I should say yes,” he murmured. “But if he behaves himself you can put it off for a while. We will have words with him first. If he can put us wise about whether the sleeping beauty is one of the first strings in this racket—”

  “Or even the first string,” said Peter Quentin thoughtfully.

  The Saint put his cigarette to his mouth and drew it to a bright spark of light. For a few moments he was silent. It was a thought that had already occurred to him, long before, but he had been content to l
et the answer produce itself in its own good time. Even stranger things than that had happened, in the cockeyed world of which Simon Templar had made himself the uncrowned king, and when they did occur they were usually the forerunners of even more trouble than he had set out to ask for, which was plenty. But complications like that had to take care of themselves.

  “Who knows?” said the Saint vaguely. “It might just as well have been the secretary of the Women’s Temperance League, who isn’t nearly so good-looking. On your way, Peter—”

  “Hey!” bawled Mr Uniatz.

  His voice, which could never at any time have rivalled the musical accents of a radio announcer, blared into the middle of the Saint’s words with a blood-curdling intensity of feeling that made even Simon Templar’s iron nerves wince. For a moment the Saint was paralysed, while he searched for some sign of the stimulus that was capable of drawing such a response from Mr Uniatz’s phlegmatic throat.

  And then he became aware that Hoppy was staring straight ahead with a frozen rigidity that was not even conscious of the sensation it had caused. A little to the Saint’s left, the driver of the lorry was looking in the same direction with a glitter of evil satisfaction in his small eyes.

  Simon swung round the other way, and saw that Peter Quentin also was gazing past him with the same petrified immobility. And as the Saint turned round further, he had a feeling of dizzy unreality that made his scalp creep.

  As he remembered it, he had only taken a couple of steps away from his car when Peter Quentin and Hoppy Uniatz and the driver of the lorry had met him. But as he turned, he couldn’t see the car at all where it should have been. The road all around him looked empty in the dull gleam of their torches, apart from the black bulk of the van which overshadowed them. It was another second before he saw where his car was. It had swung off on to the heath in a wide arc in order to straighten up, and while he watched, it bumped back on to the macadam and went skimming away up the road to the north-east, with no more than a soft flutter of gas from the exhaust to announce its departure.

  3

  “One of the things I envy about you,” said Peter Quentin, with a certain relish, “is that magnetic power which makes you irresistible to women. Even if they’ve just been knocked unconscious, the moment they open their eyes and see what’s found them—”

  “It’s a handicap, really,” said the Saint good-humouredly. “Their instinct tells them that if they saw much of me they’d do something their mothers wouldn’t like, so as often as not they tear themselves reluctantly away.”

  “I noticed she looked reluctant,” said Peter. “She took your car, too—that must have been a wrench.”

  The Saint grinned philosophically, and tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail. His spirits were too elastic to know the meaning of depression, and the setback had intriguing angles to it which he was broad-minded enough to appreciate as an artist.

  The lorry, with Peter at the wheel, churned on through West Holme on to the Wareham road, and Simon Templar lounged back on the hard seat beside him, with his feet propped up where the dashboard would have been if the lorry had boasted any such refinements, and considered the situation without malice. In the interior of the van, behind him, Hoppy Uniatz was keeping the original driver under control, and Simon hoped that he wouldn’t do too much damage to the cargo. But even allowing for Mr Uniatz’s phenomenal capacity, there was enough bottled kale there to save the night’s work from being a total loss.

  They were clattering through the sleeping streets of Ringwood before Peter Quentin said, “What are you going to do about the car?”

  “Report it stolen some time tomorrow. She’ll have ditched it by then—it’s too hot to hold on to.”

  “And suppose she reports the lorry first?” Simon shook his head.

  “She won’t do that. It’d be too embarrassing if the police happened to catch us. We came out best on the deal, Peter. And on top of that, we’ve had a good look at her and we’d know her again.”

  “It ought to be easy,” said Peter cheerlessly. “After all, there are only about ten million girls in England, and if we divide the country up between us—”

  “We shan’t have to go that far. Look at it on the balance of probabilities. If she stays in this game, and we stay in it, it’s ten to one that our trails’ll cross again.”

  Peter thought for a moment.

  “Now you come to mention it,” he said, “the odds are bigger than that. If she’s got any sense, she’ll find out who you are from the insurance certificate in the car. And then she’ll be calling on you with a team of gunmen to ask for her lorry back.”

  “I had thought of that,” said the Saint soberly. “And maybe that’s the biggest advantage of all.”

  “It would save us the trouble of having to find someone to give it to,” Peter agreed sympathetically.

  But the Saint blew a cloud of smoke at the low roof of the tiny compartment, and said dreamily: “Just look at it strategically, old lad. All the time we’ve known that there was some big nob, or bunch of nobs, organising this racket—some guy or guys who keep themselves so exclusive that not even their own mob knows who’s at the top. They’re the boys we’re after, for the simple reason that because they’ve got the brains to run the show in a way that the saps who do the dirty work, like our pal in the back here, haven’t got the intelligence to run it, they’ve also got the brains to see that they get the fattest dividend.

  We’ve been messing about for some time, annoying them in small ways like this and trying to get a lead, and all the time we’ve been trying to keep ourselves under cover. Now I’m just beginning to wonder if that was the smartest game we could have played. In any case, the game’s been changed now, whether we like it or not, and I don’t know that I’m broken-hearted. Now we’re on the range to be shot at, and while that’s going on we may get a look at the shooters.”

  “Who’ll still be just the saps who do the dirty work.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  For once, Peter restrained the flippant retort which came automatically to his mind. He knew as well as any man that the Saint had been proved big enough game to bring the shyest and most cautious hunters out of hiding. There was something about the almost fabulous stories which had been built up around the character of the Saint that tended to make otherwise careful leaders feel that he was a problem of which the solution could not be safely deputed to less talented underlings.

  “All the same,” he said, “we were getting along pretty well with Pargo.”

  “He was still only one of the rank and file—or maybe you might call him a sergeant. It was a bit of luck that we found him driving the first lorry we hijacked with what I knew about his earlier career of crime, and he had sense enough to see that it was safer for him to take his chance with us than have himself parked in a sack outside Scotland Yard, but I don’t know that he could ever have got a line on the nobs…I made a date to meet him later tonight, by the way—when he rang me up about this lorry-load he said he’d be driving down from town in the small hours and might have some more tips, so I thought we’d better get together.”

  “Tell him to give us a ring when we’re going to be bumped off,” said Peter. “I’d like to know about it, so I can pay my insurance premium.” The Saint looked at his watch.

  “We’ve got an hour and a half to go before that,” he said. “And we may get a squeal out of Hoppy’s protégé before then.”

  His earlier relaxation, in which he had been not so much recovering from a blow as waiting for the inspiration for a fresh attack, had vanished altogether. Peter Quentin could feel the atmosphere about him, more than through anything he said in the gay surge of vitality that seemed to gather around him like an invisible aura, binding everyone within range in a spell of absurd magic which was beyond reason and was yet humanly impossible to resist, and once again Peter found himself surrendering blindly to that scapegrace wizardry.

  “All right,” he said ridiculously. “Let’
s squeeze the juice out of him and see what we get.”

  Near Stoney Cross they had swung off the main road into a narrow track that seemed to plunge into the cloistered depth of the New Forest, as if it would drift away into the heart of an ancient and forgotten England where huntsmen in green jerkins might still leap up to draw their bows at a stag springing from covert; actually it was a meandering and unkempt road that wandered eventually into the busy highways that converged on Lyndhurst. Somewhere along this road Peter Quentin hauled the wheel round and sent them jolting along an even narrower and deeper-rutted track that looked like nothing but an enlarged footpath. They lurched round a couple of sharp turns, groaned up a forbidding incline, and jarred to a sudden stop.

  Peter switched out the lights, and the Saint put his feet down and stretched his cramped limbs.

  “We all know about housemaid’s knee,” he remarked, “but did you ever hear about truck-driver’s pelvis? That’s what I’ve got. If I were a union man I should go on strike.”

  He opened the door and lowered himself tenderly to the ground, massaging the kinks out of his bones.

  In front of him, a broad squat mass loomed blackly against the starlight—the Old Barn, which really had been a derelict thatched Tudor barn before Peter Quentin found it and transformed its interior into a cosy rural retreat with enough modern conveniences to compete with any West End apartment. It had the advantage of being far from any listening and peeping neighbours, and the Saint had found those assets adequate reason for borrowing it before. In that secluded bivouac, things could be done and noises could be made which would set a whole suburb chattering if they happened in it…

  There was an inexorable assurance of those facts implicit in the resilience of the Saint’s stride as he rambled towards the rear of the van. And as he approached it, in the silence which had followed the shutting off of the scrangling engine, he heard a hoarse voice raised in wailing melody.

  “If I had de wings of a nangel,

  From dese prison walls I would fly,

  I would fly to de arms of my darling,