The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  His fingers closed on the knob of the library door and turned it slowly, without the faintest rattle. His only fear then was that the door itself might creak as it opened, but it swung back with ghostly smoothness as far as he needed to step into the room.

  Peter Quentin saw him with an instant’s delirious amazement, and quickly averted his eyes. The girl saw him, and her face went white with the clutch of wild, half-believing hope before she also looked away. She sat with her head bent and her eyes riveted on the toe of one shoe, her fingers locked together in intolerable suspense. The crudely assembled features of Mr Uniatz contracted in a sudden awful spasm that seemed to squeeze his eyes half-way out of their sockets: if he had been anyone else, the observer would have said that he looked as if he had a stomach-ache, but on Mr Uniatz it only looked as if the normal frightfulness of his countenance had been lightly stirred by the ripple of a passing thought. And the Saint moved forward like a stalking leopard until he was so close behind Borieff that he could have bitten him in the neck.

  The actual state of Borieff’s neck removed the temptation to do this. Instead, his right hand whipped around Borieff’s gun wrist like a ring of steel, and he spoke into the man’s ear.

  “Boo,” he said.

  The man gasped and whirled round convulsively as if he had been touched with a live wire, but the Saint’s grip on his wrist controlled the movement and kept the gun twisted harmlessly up towards the ceiling. At the same time, Simon’s left hand pushed the automatic he had taken from Lasser forward until he met Borieff’s ribs.

  “I should drop that little toy if I were you,” he said. “Otherwise I might get nervous.”

  He increased the torque on Borieff’s wrist to emphasise his point, and the man yelped and let go the gun. Simon kicked it towards the girl.

  “Just keep him in order for a minute, will you?” he murmured. “If he does anything foolish, mind you hit him in the stomach—it’s more painful there.”

  As she picked up the gun, he pushed Borieff away and took out his knife. With a few quick strokes he had Peter free, and then he turned to Hoppy.

  Peter stood up, peeling off the remains of the adhesive tape.

  “I’m getting discouraged,” he said. “All these years we’ve been trying to get rid of you, and every time we think you’re nicely settled you come back. Won’t you ever learn when to die a hero’s death and give somebody else a chance with the heroine?”

  “I will when I find someone else who’d have a chance,” Simon assured him generously.

  He straightened up from releasing Mr Uniatz’s ankles, and held out the remains of the roll of plaster.

  “Make a parcel of Comrade Borieff, will you, Hoppy?” he said. “We don’t want him to get restive and hurt himself.”

  “Okay, boss,” said Mr Uniatz willingly. “All I need is just one drink—”

  “I’ll have mine first,” said Peter Quentin, swooping hastily on the bottle, “or else there mightn’t be enough to go round.”

  Simon took the glass away from him as he filled it, and strolled over to the girl.

  “Was that date in London very important?” he said. “Or will you come along with us and make it a party?”

  She shook her head.

  “I was only going for Lasser—I had to meet the Frenchman who supplies him and give him his money.”

  “My God,” said the Saint. “I’d almost forgotten—”

  He left her standing there, and disappeared through the communicating door into the next room. In another moment he was back, with the sealed envelope that Lasser had taken from her bag.

  “Is this it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it was worth something the first time I saw it,” said the Saint, and slit it open with his thumbnail.

  When he had counted the thick wad of banknotes that came out of it, his eyebrows were lifted and his eyes were laughing. He added it to the hundred pounds which he had recovered from Jopley, and put it carefully away in his pocket.

  “I can see we staged the showdown on the right evening,” he said. “This will be some consolation to all of us when we divide it up.” His eyes sobered on her again. “Lasser must have trusted you a good deal.”

  “I suppose he knew I was that sort of fool,” she said bitterly.

  “How did you get in with him?”

  “I met him through some friends I used to go sailing with, and he seemed to be an awfully good egg. I’d known him for quite some time when he told me what he was doing and said that he needed some help. I knew it was against the law, but I didn’t feel as if I was a criminal. You know how it is—we’ve all smuggled small things through the customs when we’ve had the chance, and we don’t feel as if we’d done anything wicked. I just thought it’d be great fun with a bit of danger to make it more exciting.”

  “I’ve wangled things through the customs myself,” said the Saint. “But there’s a difference between that and making a business of it.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said helplessly. “I was a damn fool, that’s all. But I didn’t realise…I didn’t have anything to do with the organisation. I went out in the yacht once or twice, and another boat met us in the Channel and we took things on board, and then we came back here and unloaded it and went away. I went to Paris and bought those dresses and things, but Lasser gave me the money and he was to take half the profits. And I used to meet people and take them messages and things when he didn’t want them to know who they were dealing with. I’d never been on one of the lorries before last night, but Lasser wanted two people to go for safety because of the lorries that had disappeared, and there was nobody else available. I know why, now—because Lasser wanted Borieff to help him, and Pargo was being tortured.”

  “You didn’t happen to think that Jopley and Borieff were retired churchwardens, did you?”

  “No—I hated them. But Lasser said you had to employ anyone you could get for jobs like theirs, and I didn’t think even they could go so far.” She shrugged, and her eyes were dark with pain. “Well, it’s my own fault. I suppose you’ll be handing them over to the police, and you’d better take me with you. I shan’t give you any trouble. Whatever happens, I’m glad you beat them.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m afraid it wouldn’t be any good handing them over to the police,” he said. “You see, the Law has such pettifogging rules about evidence.”

  “But—”

  “Oh yes, you could convict them of smuggling, and get them about six months each. But that’s all.”

  “Then—”

  He smiled.

  “Don’t worry about it, darling,” he said. “Just stay here for a minute, will you?” He turned to Peter and Hoppy, and indicated Borieff with a faint nod.

  “Bring him in,” he said, and led the way into the next room.

  Jopley was cursing and fighting against his bonds, and Lasser had recovered enough to be writhing too. Simon dragged them over to the fireplace, and went back to tear down the heavy silk cords that drew the long window hangings. He roped the two men expertly together, and when Borieff arrived he added him to the collection. The other end of the rope he knotted to a bar of the iron grate that set solidly in the brickwork.

  Then he closed the door and looked at Peter and Hoppy, and the smile had gone altogether from his face.

  “There’s just one thing more which you didn’t know,” he said quietly. “Comrade Lasser told me about it in here. There’s supposed to be a fire here tonight—the place is all prepared for it. And after we’d all been worked over like Pargo was—Borieff was the assistant in that, by the way—whatever else happened, however much we told, the idea was to leave us tied up here with a lighted candle burning down to the floor. We were to be got rid of anyway, and according to Lasser we had to be burnt alive so that it would look like an accident.”

  The Saint’s eyes were as cold and passionless as the eyes of a recording angel. “We are the only jury here,” he said. “What is our
justice?”

  The Hirondel thundered down into the valley and soared up the slope on the other side. Somewhere near the first crest of the Purbeck Hills, Simon stopped the car to take out a cigarette, and through the hushing of the engine his ears caught a familiar gurgling sound that made him look round.

  In the back seat, Mr Uniatz detached the bottle from his lips and beamed at him ingratiatingly.

  “I find it in de cabinet where dey keep de liquor, boss,” he explained. “So I t’ought it’d keep us warm on de way home.”

  “At least you won’t freeze to death,” said the Saint philosophically.

  He turned the other way as he struck his lighter, and gazed out into the darkness where the hills rose again at the edge of the sea. Somewhere in the black silhouette of them there was a dull red glow, pulsing and brightening, like a palely luminous cloud. The eyes of the girl beside him turned in the same direction.

  “It looks like a fire,” she said interestedly.

  “So it does,” said the Saint, and drove on without another backward glance, eastwards, towards Lyndhurst.

  THE BEAUTY SPECIALIST

  1

  The fact that Simon Templar had never heard of the “Z-Man” was merely a tremendous proof that the Z-Man himself, his victims, and the police authorities had joined forces in a monumental conspiracy of silence. For the Saint invariably had a zephyr finger on the pulse of the underworld, and the various forms of fun and frolic that went on in the ranks of the ungodly without his knowledge were so few that for all practical purposes they might have been regarded as non-existent.

  He was lunching alone at the Dorchester Grill when the first ripple of new adventure irrigated the dusty dryness of a particularly arid spell. He had been ruminating on the perfidious dullness of the cloudy day when the grill-room was suddenly supplied with its own sunshine. A girl had entered.

  She was alone. She was tall and trim-waisted and as graceful as a dancer, and the soft waves of her fair golden hair rippled in the gentle stir of air caused by her own motion. Exquisitely dressed, devastatingly sure of herself, she was escorted to a vacant table in a sudden hush of awed admiration that enveloped a world-famous film producer, two visiting bishops, three cosmopolitan millionaires, a music-hall comedian, a couple of ancient marquises, and about fifty other minor celebrities in a simultaneous speechlessness of homage. Simon Templar, who had as many human instincts as any of the aforesaid, would have stared at her anyway, but somehow he found himself watching her with even more than that natural curiosity and interest. And a faint tentative tingle went through him as he realised why.

  For an instant, when he had first raised his eyes and seen her, he had wondered if Patricia Holm had missed an appointment of her own and had come to join him. This girl was surprisingly like Pat: the same height, the same fair grace, the same radiant charm. There was something vaguely familiar about her face, too, and now the Saint was no longer reminded of Pat. He wondered who she was, and he was not the kind of man to be satisfied with wondering. “Tell me, Alphonse,” he murmured to the waiter who was hovering about him like a ministering angel, “who is the vision in smoke-blue at that table over there?” The waiter looked across the room.

  “That, sir,” he said, with a certain visible contempt for such ignorance, “is Miss Beatrice Avery.”

  Simon wrinkled his brow.

  “The name strikes a chord, but fails to connect.”

  “Miss Avery is a film star, sir.”

  “So she is. I’ve seen photographs of her here and there.”

  “Her latest picture, Love, the Swindler, is the best thing she’s done,” volunteered the waiter dreamily. “Have you seen it, sir?”

  “Fortunately, no,” answered the Saint, glancing with some pain at the waiter’s enraptured face, and then averting his own. “Swindlers have never interested me—much.”

  The waiter departed hurt, and Simon continued to watch the girl at the other table. It was only a transient interest which held him, his inevitable interest in any exceptionally beautiful girl, coupled with the additional fact, perhaps, that Beatrice Avery was certainly a great deal like Pat…And then, in an instant, as if an invisible magic wand had been waved, his interest became concrete and vital. He flipped out his cigarette-case and put a smoke between his lips. Nobody could have guessed that his attention was more than casually attracted as he lighted the cigarette and inhaled deeply; the sudden lambent glint that came into his blue eyes was masked behind their lazy lids and the filmy curtain of smoke that trickled from his nostrils. But in that instant he knew, with the blissful certainty of experience, that the syncopated clarions of adventure had sounded in the room, even if no other ears were tuned to hear them.

  As the girl had seated herself, a waiter had deftly removed the “reserved” card which had been conspicuously displayed on the table, and the cloud of obsequiously fluttering chefs de restaurant, maîtres d’hôtel, waiters, commis, and miscellaneous bus-boys had faded away. Evidently, she had intimated that she was not yet ready to order. The girl had then given the grillroom a thoughtful once-over as she removed her gloves and lighted a cigarette. These trifling details Simon had noticed while his own waiter was burbling about Love, the Swindler. All very proper and correct—and commonplace. But that which followed was not commonplace at all. Beatrice Avery’s cigarette suddenly dropped from her fingers to the floor, and the colour drained out of her face until the patches of rouge on her cheeks and bright-tinted lips stood out in vivid contrast to the deathly pallor of her skin. Her eyes grew wide and glazed with terror, and she stared at the table as though a snake had suddenly appeared through a hole in the snowy cloth.

  Simon hadn’t the remotest idea what it was all about. That was the common factor of most adventures—you usually didn’t, until you were well into them. The difference between the Saint and most other men was that most other men were satisfied to wonder and let it go at that; whereas the Saint had to find out. And Simon Templar had discovered, after some years of experiment, that the most direct way of finding anything out was to go and ask somebody who knew. Characteristically, he didn’t hesitate for a second. Almost without any conscious decision on his part, his seventy-four inches of lean debonair immaculacy had unfolded from their chair and were sauntering across to Beatrice Avery’s table, and he was smiling down at her with sapphire lights twinkling in gay blue eyes that few women had ever been able to resist.

  “Could you use an unemployed knight-errant?” he murmured.

  The girl seemed to shrink back. Some of the colour had returned to her face, but her eyes were more terrified than ever. He could see, at close quarters, that her resemblance to Pat was purely superficial. She had none of that calm ethereal tranquillity that was Pat’s very own. She opened her bag as if she was too dazed and desperate to have grasped what he was saying.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said breathlessly.

  He was a bit slow on the repartee for two reasons. First, he was wondering why she had expected him at all, and secondly he was searching the square of snowy whiteness with its gleaming glass and silver for some explanation of the frozen horror that he had seen in her face. Everything was in order except for the fact that a knife and two forks were out of their correct places and laid in a peculiar zigzag. Even the most fastidious stickler for table ceremony would hardly have registered quite so much horror at that displacement of feeding tools, and Beatrice Avery looked like the healthily unceremonious kind of girl who wouldn’t have cared a hoot if all the knives and forks and spoons were end-up in a flower-pot in the middle of the table.

  “I came over as soon as you sent out the distress signals,” Simon began, and then he stopped short out of sheer incredulous startlement.

  The girl had taken something from her bag, and she was looking at him with such an expression that the words died a natural death on his lips. She had conquered her fear, and instead of the terror that had been there before, her eyes were charged with so much loathin
g and hatred and disgust that Simon Templar knew just what it felt like to be one of those wriggly things with too many legs that make their abode under flat stones. The reaction was so amazing and unexpected that for once in his life the Saint was at a loss for words. He invariably had such a totally different effect on beauteous damsels in distress that his self-esteem felt as though it had been hit by a coal truck.

  “I have nothing whatever to say to you.” The girl suddenly thrust a bulky envelope into his hand, and rose. “But if you have any regard at all for my feelings please return at once to your own table.”

  Her voice was low and musical, but it had in it the bitter chill of an arctic night. She didn’t even look at him again, or she would have seen the utter bewilderment in his eyes. She closed her red mouth very tightly and walked with a steady tread and long exquisitely graceful legs towards the exit. Simon was convinced that she had never done anything half so fine before the camera.

  He stood and watched her out of sight, and then returned slowly to his own table in a kind of seething fog. The Manhattan he had ordered earlier had arrived, and he drank it quickly. He felt that he needed it. And then, in a hazy quest for enlightenment, he took another look at the envelope which she had left in his paralysed hands. It was not sealed, and the numbed feeling in the pit of his stomach tightened as he glanced into it.

  “Well, well, well!” he murmured softly.

  His tanned face hardened into bronze lines of puzzled concentration, with his eyes steadied into fragments of blued steel against the sunburned background: for the envelope was stuffed full with Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds apiece.

  He withdrew the ends and flicked his thumb over them.

  Without careful counting he calculated that the wad contained about a hundred bills—ten thousand genuine and indisputable pounds. After his recent experience, and in spite of the Manhattan, he was in no condition to resist shocks of that kind. Boodle he had seen in his time, boodle in liberal quantities and many different forms, but he had always worked for it. He had never seen it come winging into his hands, when he wasn’t even looking for it, like pigeons going home to roost. At any other time he would have been inclined to accept it as one of the many inexplicable beneficences of his devoted guardian angel, but he didn’t feel like that now.