It was this cogent argument which turned my interest to the whatisit, the story in which we have no serious doubt, if any doubt at all, as to the identity of the prime villain. Our problem is to discover the facts and form of his villainy, or to find means to punish him, or to circumvent his menace to the happiness of our preferred characters.
Maxwell Smith, I believe, was one of the early proponents of this style of literary architecture in the popular detective magazines—the business of frankly presenting Desperate Desmond at the outset and centering reader interest on the task of bringing him to book through the untiring efforts of Handsome Harry. And a nice job he did of it. Of course, the classic example of this design is Hugo’s Les Misérables, in which the indefatigable Monsieur Javert dogged the footsteps of Jean Valjean to the end of the chapter.
This yarn is one of my own first experiments with this pattern, and for that reason it may be of some interest to you tireless antiquarians.
—Leslie Charteris (1945)
1
Patricia Holm raised her fair, pretty head from The Times.
“What,” she asked, “is an obiter dictum?”
“A form of foot-and-mouth disease,” said the Saint, glibly. “Obiter—one who obits; dictum—a shirt-front. Latin. Very difficult.”
“Fool,” said his lady.
The Saint grinned, and pushed back his chair. Breakfast was over, a blaze of summer sunshine was pouring through the open windows into the comfortable room, the first and best cigarette of the day was canted up between the Saint’s smiling lips; all was right with the world.
“What’s the absorbing news, anyway?” he inquired lazily.
She passed him the paper, and, as is the way of these things, the matter which had given rise to her question was of the most ephemeral interest—and yet it interested the Saint. Simon Templar had always been the despair of all those of his friends who expected him to produce intelligent comments upon the affairs of the day. To read a newspaper not only bored him to extinction, but often gave him an actual physical pain. Therefore it followed, quite naturally, that when the mood seized him to glance at a newspaper, he usually managed to extract more meat from that one glance than the earnest, regular student of the Press extracts from years of daily labour.
It so happened that morning. Coincidence, of course, but how much adventure is free from all taint of coincidence? Coincidences are always coinciding, it is one of their peculiar attributes; but the adventure is born of what the man makes of his coincidences. Most people say, “How odd!”
Simon Templar said, “Well, well, well!”
But The Times really hadn’t anything exciting to say that morning and certainly the column that Patricia had been reading was one of the most sober of all the columns of that very respectable newspaper, for it was one of the columns in which such hardy annuals as Paterfamilias, Lieut.-Colonel (retired), Pro Bono Publico, Mother of Ten, unto the third and fourth generation. Abraham and his seed for ever, let loose their weary bleats upon the world. The gentleman (“Diehard“) who had incorporated an obiter dictum in his effort was giving tongue on the subject of motorists. It was, as has been explained, pure coincidence that he should have written with special reference to a recent prosecution for dangerous driving in which the defendant had been a man in whom the Saint had the dim beginnings of an interest.
“Aha!” said the Saint, thoughtful-like.
“Haven’t you met that man—Miles Hallin?” Patricia said. “I’ve heard you mention his name.”
“And that’s all I’ve met up to date,” answered the Saint. “But I have met a bird who talks about nothing else but Miles. Although I suppose, in the circumstances, that isn’t as eccentric as it sounds.”
He had, as a matter of fact, met Nigel Perry only a fortnight before, by a slightly roundabout route. Simon Templar, being in a club in Piccadilly which for some unknown reason allowed him to continue his membership, had discovered that he was without a handkerchief. His need being vital, he had strolled over to a convenient shop—without troubling to put on a hat. The rest of the story, he insisted, was Moyna Stanford’s fault. Simon had bought his handkerchief, and the shop assistant had departed towards the cashier with the Saint’s simoleons, when Moyna Stanford walked in, walked straight up to the Saint, and asked if he could show her some ties. Now, Moyna Stanford was very good to look upon, and there were quantities of ties prominently displayed about the shop, and the Saint could never resist anything like that. He had shown her several ties. The rightful tie-exhibitor had returned. There had been some commotion. Finally, they had lunched together. Not including the tie-exhibitor.
The rest of the story, as the Saint retailed it to Patricia Holm, was perfectly true. He had met Nigel Perry, and had liked him immediately—a tall, dark, cheery youngster, with a million-dollar smile and a two-figure bank balance. The second of those last two items Simon had not discovered until later. On the other hand, it was not very much later, for Nigel Perry had nothing approaching an inferiority complex. He talked with an engaging frankness about himself, his job, his prospects, and his idols. The idols were, at that moment, two—Moyna Stanford and Miles Hallin. It is likely that Simon Templar was shortly added to the list; perhaps in the end he headed the list—on the male side. But at the time of meeting Miles Hallin reigned supreme.
The Saint was familiar with the name of Hallin, and he was interested in the story that Nigel Perry had to tell, for all such stories were interesting to the Saint.
At that breakfast-table, under the shadow of an irrelevant obiter dictum, Simon explained.
“Hallin’s a much older man, of course. Nigel had a brother who was about Hallin’s age. Years ago Hallin and the elder Perry were prospecting some godless bit of desert in Australia. What’s more, they found real gold. And at the same time they found that one of their water-barrels had sprung a leak, and there was only enough water to get one of them back to civilisation. They tossed for it—and for once in his life Hallin lost. They shook hands, and Perry pushed off. After Perry had been gone some time, Hallin decided that if he sat down on the gold mine waiting to die he’d go mad first. So he made up his mind to die on the move. It didn’t occur to him to shoot himself—he just wouldn’t go out that way. And he upped his pack and shifted along in a different direction from the one that Perry had taken. Of course he found a water-hole, and then he found another water-hole, and he got out of the desert at last. But Perry never got out. That’s just a sample of Hallin’s luck.”
“And what happened to the gold?”
“Hallin registered the claim. When he got back to England he looked up young Nigel and insisted on giving him a half-share. But it never came to much—about a couple of thousand, I believe. The lode petered out, and the mine closed down. Still, Hallin did the white thing. Taking that along with the rest, you can’t blame Nigel for worshipping him.”
And yet the Saint frowned as he spoke. He had a professional vanity that was all his own, and something in that vanity reacted unfavourably towards Miles Hallin, whom a sensational journalist had once christened “The Man Who Cannot Die.”
“Are you jealous?” teased Patricia, and the Saint scowled.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But he knew perfectly well. Miles Hallin had cropped up, and Miles Hallin had spoilt a beautiful morning.
“It annoys me,” said the Saint, with what Patricia couldn’t help thinking was an absurd pettishness. “No man has a right to Hallin’s reputation.”
“I’ve heard nothing against him.”
“Have you heard anything against me?”
“Lots of things.”
Simon grinned abstractedly.
“Yes, I know. But has anyone ever called me ‘The Man Who Cannot Die?’”
“Not when I’ve been listening.”
“It’s not a matter of listening,” said the Saint. “That man Hallin is a sort of public institution. Everyone knows about his luck. Now, I should think I’ve had
as much luck as anyone, and I’ve always been much bigger news than Hallin will ever be, but nobody’s ever made a song and dance about that side of my claim to immortality.”
“They’ve had other things to say about you.”
The Saint sighed. He was still frowning.
“I know,” he said. “But I have hunches, old darling. Let me say here and now that I have absolutely nothing against Hallin. I’ve never heard a word against him, I haven’t one reasonable suspicion about him, I haven’t one single solitary fact on which I could base a suspicion. But I’ll give you one very subtle joke to laugh about. Why should a man boast that he can’t die?”
“He didn’t make the boast.”
“Well—I wonder?…But he certainly earned the name, and he’s never given it a chance to be forgotten. He’s capitalised it and played it up for all it’s worth. So I can give you an even more subtle joke. It goes like this: ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it…’”
Patricia looked at him curiously. If she had not known the Saint so well, she would have looked at him impatiently, but she knew him very well.
She said, “Let’s hear what you mean, lad. I can’t follow all your riddles.”
“And I can’t always give the answers,” said the Saint.
His chair tilted back as he lounged in it. He inhaled intently from his cigarette, and gazed at the ceiling through a cloud of smoke.
“A hunch,” said the Saint, “isn’t a thing that goes easily to words. Words are so brutally logical, and a hunch is the reverse of logic. And a hunch, in a way, is a riddle, but it has no answer. When you get an answer, it isn’t the answer to a riddle, or the answer to a hunch; it’s the end of a story. I don’t know if that’s quite clear…”
“It isn’t,” said Patricia.
The Saint blew three smoke-rings as if he had a personal grudge against them.
“My great tragedy, sweetheart,” he remarked modestly, “is that I’m completely and devastatingly sane. And the world we live in is not sane. All the insanities of the world used to worry me crazy, without exception—once upon a time. But now, in my old age, I’m more discriminating. Half the things in that newspaper, which I’m pleased to say I’ve never read from end to end, are probably offences against sanity. And if you come to a rag like the Daily Record, about ninety-eight per cent of its printed area is devoted to offences against sanity. And the fact has ceased to bother me. I swear to you, Pat, that I could read a Daily Record right through without groaning aloud more than twice. That’s my discrimination. When I read that an obscure biologist in Minneapolis has said that men would easily live to be three hundred if they nourished themselves on an exclusive diet of green bananas and Vaseline, I’m merely bored. The thing is a simple offence against sanity. But when I’m always hearing about a Man Who Cannot Die, it annoys me. The thing is more than a simple offence against sanity. It sticks up and makes me stare at it. It’s like finding one straight black line in a delirious patchwork of colours. It’s more. It’s like going to a menagerie and finding a man exhibited in one of the cages. Just because a Man Who Cannot Die isn’t a simple insult to insanity. He’s an insult to a much bigger thing. He’s an insult to humanity.”
“And where does this hunch lead to?” asked Patricia, practically.
Simon shrugged.
“I wish I were sure,” he said.
Then, suddenly, he sat upright.
“Do you know,” he said, in a kind of incomprehensible anger, “I’ve a damned good mind to see if I can’t break that man’s record! He infuriates me. And isn’t he asking for it? Isn’t he just asking someone to take up the challenge and see what can be done about it?”
The girl regarded him in bewilderment.
“Do you mean you want to try to kill him?” she asked blankly.
“I don’t,” said the Saint. “I mean I want to try to make him live.”
For a long time Patricia gazed at him in silence. And then, with a little shake of her head, half-laughing, half-perplexed, she stood up.
“You’ve been reading too much G. K. Chesterton,” she said. “And you can’t do anything about Hallin today, anyway. We’re late enough as it is.”
The Saint smiled slowly, and rose to his feet.
“You’re dead right, as usual, old dear,” he murmured amiably. “I’ll go and get out the car.”
And he went, but he did not forget Miles Hallin. And he never forgot his hunch about the man who could not die. For the Saint’s hunches were nearly always unintelligible to anyone but himself, and always very real and intelligible to him, and all at once he had realised that in Miles Hallin he was going to find a strange story—he did not then know how strange.
2
Miles Hallin, as the Saint had complained, really was something very like a national institution. He was never called wealthy, but he always seemed to be able to indulge his not inexpensive hobbies without stint. It was these hobbies which had confirmed him in the reputation that Simon Templar so much disliked.
Miles Hallin was so well known that the newspapers never even troubled to mention the fact. Lesser lights in the news, Simon had discovered, were invariably accounted for. They were “the famous cricketer” or “the well-known novelist” or perhaps, with a more delicate conceit, “the actor.” Simon Templar always had an uneasy feeling that these explanations were put in as a kind of covering each-way bet—in case the person referred to should become well known without anyone knowing why. But Miles Hallin was just—Miles Hallin.
Simon Templar, even in his superlatively casual acquaintance with the newspapers, had had every opportunity to become familiar with the face of Miles Hallin, though he had never seen the man in the flesh. That square-jawed, pugnacious profile, with the white teeth and crinkled eyes and flashing smile, had figured in more photographs than the Saint cared to remember. Mr. Miles Hallin standing beside the wreckage of his Furillac at Le Mans—Mr. Miles Hallin being taken aboard a lug after his speedboat Red Lady had capsized in the Solent—Mr. Miles Hallin after his miraculous escape during the King’s Cup Air Race, when his Elton “Dragon” caught fire at five thousand feet—Mr. Miles Hallin filming a charging buffalo in Tanganyika—Simon Templar knew them all. Miles Hallin did everything that a well-to-do sportsman could possibly include in the most versatile repertory, and all his efforts seemed to have the single aim of a spectacular suicide, but always he had escaped death by the essential hair’s-breadth that had given him his name. No one could say that it was Miles Hallin’s fault.
Miles Hallin had survived being mauled by a tiger, and had killed an infuriated gorilla with a sheath-knife. Miles Hallin had performed in bull fights before the King of Spain. Miles Hallin had gone into a tank and wrestled with a crocodile to oblige a Hollywood movie director. Miles Hallin had done everything dangerous that the most fertile imagination could conceive—and then some. So far as was known, Miles Hallin couldn’t walk a tight-rope, but the general impression was that if Miles Hallin could have walked a tight-rope he would have walked a tight-rope stretched across the crater of Vesuvius as a kind of appetiser before breakfast.
Miles Hallin bothered the Saint through the whole of that weekend.
Simon Templar, as he was always explaining, and usually explaining in such a way that his audience felt very sorry for him, had a sensitivity to anything the least bit out of the ordinary that was as tender as a gouty toe. The lightest touch, a touch that no one else would have felt, made him jump a yard. And when he boasted of his subtle discriminations, though he boasted flippantly, he spoke no less than the truth. That gift and nothing else had led him to fully half his adventures—that uncanny power of drawing a faultless line between the things that were merely eccentric and the things that were definitely wrong. And Miles Hallin struck him, in a way that he could not explain by any ordinary argument, as a thing that was definitely wrong.
Yet it so chanced, this time, that the Saint came to his story by a pure fluke—another and a wilder fluke th
an the one that had merely introduced him to a man whose brother had been a friend of Hallin’s. But for that fluke, the Saint might to this day have been scowling at the name of Miles Hallin in the same hopeless puzzlement. And yet the Saint felt no surprise about the fluke. He had come to accept these accidents as a natural part of his life, in the same way as any other man accepts the accident of finding a newspaper on his breakfast table, with a sense (if he meditated it at all) that he was only seeing the inevitable outcome of a complicated organisation of whose workings he knew nothing, but whose naturally continued existence he had never thought to question. These things were ordained.
In fact, there was an unexpected guest at a house-party at which the Saint spent his weekend.
Simon Templar had met Teddy Everest in Kuala Lumpur, and again, years later, at Corfu. Teddy Everest was the unexpected guest at the house-party, but it must be admitted that he was unexpected only by the Saint.
“This is my lucky day,” murmured Simon, as he viewed the apparition. “I’ve been looking for you all over the world. You owe me ten cents. If you remember, when you had to be carried home after that farewell festival in K.L., I was left to pay for your rickshaw. You hadn’t a bean, I know that, because I looked in all your pockets. Ten cents plus five per cent compound interest for six years…”
“Comes to a lot less than you borrowed off me in Corfu,” said Everest cheerfully. “How the hell are you?”
“My halo,” said the Saint, “is clearly visible if you get a strong light behind me…Well, damn your eyes!” The Saint was smiling as he crushed the other’s hand in a long grip. “This is a great event, Teddy. Let’s get drunk.”
The party went with a swing from that moment.
Teddy Everest was a mining engineer, and the Saint could also tell a good story; between them, they kept the ball rolling as they pleased. And on Tuesday, since Everest had to go to London on business, he naturally travelled in the Saint’s car.
Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 16