The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I didn’t—”

  “Know?” Simon suggested. “Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boyfriend did. And you must admit that he’s clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man—or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn’t want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me…Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girlfriend instead—some nice motherly creature who…”

  He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.

  “Take it easy,” he drawled. “Maybe I was just kidding. It’s obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man’s. But so were the pyjamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lustreless with fear.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “I’ve heard more original remarks than that,” he said. “But if it’s any help to you, I don’t know what you mean either. I didn’t say the pyjamas had any name embroidered on them—or did I?”

  She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.

  He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savouring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.

  He said, with a slight but sincere shrug, “This isn’t a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn’t in the cards. Anyway, it’ll have to wait now.”

  She said, “I suppose so.”

  He said, “It’s no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?”

  She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  He waited.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, “sometime this afternoon.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because…”

  The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.

  “Barbara,” he said, “it may not occur to you that I’m giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you’re a technical accessory. You know this man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with—literally—murder. And you spend the hours you’ve been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you’ll tell me all about it—at your own convenience.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m getting tough with you, but I’ve known police matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that they ought to unburden their hearts in the interest of right and justice. And I’m sure that wouldn’t appeal to you at all.”

  She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.

  “You sound as if you’d said all this before.”

  “Maybe I have,” he admitted equably. “But it doesn’t make it any less true. Believe it or not, I’ve only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so charmingly referred to as ‘custody.’ Custody is a place out of earshot of any unofficial person which might be too inquisitive, and it isn’t a very pleasant place. In custody, almost anything can happen, and often does.” He blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. “You can still make your own choice, but I wish you’d make the right one.”

  The moment’s flare had died out of her as if it had never happened.

  She said, as if she were repeating a lesson that she had worked out for herself until it became an obsession, “I’ve got to tell this person—first. I’ve got to tell him that I’m going to tell you. I’ve got to give him a chance. He…he’s been the kindest person I ever met. I was nothing…I was practically starving…I’d have done anything…when I met him. He…he’s been very good to me. Always. I want to do what’s right, but I couldn’t just give him to you…like that. I couldn’t be a Judas. At least they give foxes a start, don’t they?”

  Simon considered the question gravely, as though he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had. He felt as if she was important, in a way that was important only to him, and there was always a little time for important things.

  “They do,” he said. “But that’s only because they want the fox to run longer and give the valiant sportsmen a better chase. If they were just being noble and humane, they’d simply shoot him as quickly and accurately as possible, thereby saving him all the agonies of fear, flight, hope, and final despair. Of course that wouldn’t be quite so sporting as letting him run his heart out against a pack of hounds, but the eventual result would be the same.”

  “Sometimes the fox gets away,” she said.

  “The fox never gets away in the end,” he said kindly. “He may get away a dozen times, but there’ll always be a thirteenth time when he makes one little mistake, and then he’s just a trophy for somebody to take home. It’s almost dull, but that’s how it is.”

  “They’ve never caught you.”

  “Yet.”

  He went to the window and peered out. The sky was already darkening with the limpid clarity of sunset, the hour when it seems to grow thinner and deeper so that you almost begin to see through it into the darkness of outer space.

  Without turning, he said, “I gather that you’ve already told the fox.”

  He heard her stir in the chair behind him.

  “Yes.”

  He said, without anger, without disappointment, without anything, “I rather thought you would. I expected that when I left you. Because you really have too much heart for too little sense. I don’t blame you for the heart, but now I want you to try and develop some sense.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she could have been. “But I can’t do anything about it.”

  He turned.

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t you get anything into your head? I told you I was expecting you to tip off the fox. Do you think I’d have expected that, and left you alone to do it, if I hadn’t figured that you’d be doing something for me? I wanted you to make the fox break cover. I wanted him rushed into doing something that would give us a view of him. I wanted to force him into making the mistakes that are going to qualify him for his seat on the griddle. He’s already made one of them, and any minute now he’s going to make another. You’ve done that much to help him, and now you’re doing your damn best to help yourself right into the soup with him. If that isn’t devotion, I don’t know what is.”

  13

  He saw the stunned shock petrifying her face, but he didn’t wait for it to complete or resolve itself. He didn’t have time. And now before she collected herself might be the best chance he would ever have.

  He moved quickly across towards her and sat on the next chair, and his voice was as swift and urgent as the movement.

  “Listen,” he said. “This man is a crook. He is a thief—and stealing iridium is no different from stealing je
wels or coffee or anything else. And in just the same language, he’s a murderer.”

  “He never killed anyone—”

  “Of course not. Not personally. He didn’t have to. A crumb in his class doesn’t need to pull triggers himself, or knot ropes around an old fool’s neck. He has other men to do that—or other women. But that doesn’t make him any less a killer. There was murder done in the first stealing, at Nashville. Two guards by the name of Smith or Jones or Gobbovitch were shot down. Just a couple of names in a newspaper. Probably they had families and relatives and friends here and there, but you don’t think about that when you’re reading. You click your tongue and say isn’t it awful and turn on to your favourite columnist or the funnies. But Mrs Jones has lost a husband who was a hell of a lot more real to her than your boyfriend is to you, and the Gobbovitch brats are going to have to quit school after their primary grades and do the best they can on their own—just because your big-hearted glamour boy hired a couple of cannons to go out and do his shooting for him.”

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  “I want to be sure you know just what kind of a man you’re shielding. A cold-blooded murderer. And a traitor on top of that. Maybe he hasn’t even thought of it that way himself. Maybe he’s been too busy thinking about the money that was helping to keep you in that splendid apartment. But it’s still just as true as if you both had your eyes open.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  His face had neither pity nor passion, but only a relentless and inescapable sincerity that was out of a different universe from the lazy flippancy which he usually wore with the same ease as he wore his clothes.

  “Barbara, there are little guys from farms and filling stations who wouldn’t even know how it all worked who’re fighting more odds than just the enemy because of what he’s doing. They’re wading through steamy slime in South Pacific jungles, and chewing sand in Africa, and freezing to death in their tracks in the Ukraine. But that doesn’t bother your private Santa Claus, so long as there are still a few good chefs in Manhattan and he has plenty of green paper to pay for all the little luxuries that help to alleviate the hardships of the home front. And if you take his side, all that is true about you too.”

  “I’m not taking his side,” she said desperately. “He’s been good to me, and I’m just giving him a chance.”

  “Of course he’s been good to you. You wouldn’t have done anything for him if he hadn’t. No crook or traitor or any other kind of louse can afford to be any other way with anyone he needs for an enthusiastic accomplice.”

  She rocked back and forth in the chair, with a kind of unconscious automatism, as though she was somehow trying to lull back all the tormenting consciences that his steady remorseless voice awakened.

  “I’ve told you,” she repeated dully. “I’ve told you I’ll talk to you later. It’s only a little while. And then you and all your policemen and secret service and FBI men can go after him like a pack of wolves.”

  “There’s just a little more to it than that,” said the Saint quietly. “Us wolves, as you call us, would like to go after him very respectably, and give him a fair trial with proper publicity—just to encourage anyone else who might have similar ideas.”

  “How nice of you,” she said.

  He didn’t know why he went on trying.

  “The evidence you could give,” he said rather tiredly, “could be quite important. That’s just half the reason why I’m talking to you now, and using up all this good breath. The other half is because I’m trying to give you a break. This is your chance to get out from under. I’m not trying to sell you now. It’s too late for that. But I’ve still got to try and make you see that the jig is up, no matter what you do, but you can come out in quite a different light if you just make it possible for me to swear quite truthfully that you’d cooperated to the fullest extent with those fine creatures whom John Henry Fernack loves to refer to as ‘the proper authorities.’ ”

  She gazed at him with dark empty eyes.

  He inhaled through his cigarette again, and said with a glacial evenness that was beginning to grow a little bitter like a winter sunset, “I’m telling you very quickly that this is the best chance you’ll ever have. Maybe the last chance.”

  She hesitated, with her lips working in tiny unconscious patterns. He might have interpreted any of them into an effort to frame the name that he was expecting, but that would only have been his own imagination, and it was not enough.

  He still waited, even when it seemed too long.

  He was that sort of dope.

  And then her lips were still, and tight and sullen and lost again. It was exactly as if a mould had set.

  “You’ll have to wait,” she said stubbornly, and he stood up slowly. “I told you,” she said.

  Simon Templar drew his cigarette bright once more without tasting it, standing quite still and looking at her.

  Everything went through his memory and understanding like a newsreel pouring through some far-off chamber of his brain.

  She was so very beautiful, so physically desirable, and in a light way that might eventually have had more to it she had once briefly been fun. When he had first seen her swinging her long legs on the porch of the late Mr Linnet’s home, he had thought that she was everything that a girl out of a story should have been. It was a pity that in real life story-book introductions didn’t always end up the way story-books ended. But this was not anything that could be changed by wishing.

  She was in love with, or hopeful for, or in fear of, or hypnotised by, or standing strongly and stupidly by a man who would have looked like an ideal practice target to savage staggering men in any of the localised hells of the war. And still, whatever the reason might be, there was a pattern set, and it was more solid than any momentary work of his could break.

  She only had to speak two words, two words that made one name, one name that was already tramping through his mind, but she would not do that.

  And he could understand that, just as he could understand the craters on the moon, without being able to do anything about it. He could understand it just as he understood Milton Ourley’s lust for money and a different life from the one he was forced to live at Oyster Bay, and just as he understood Titania Ourley’s eroding hunger for young men and rumbas, and just as he understood Fernack and Varetti and even Cokey Walsh and Allen Uttershaw who played with quotations like a tired juggler toying with a cigar.

  If it wasn’t for the impenetrable blockages like that, they could all have been such nice normal people.

  Like Inspector Fernack, who had lived all his life by the manual which had been given to him when he joined the Department as a rookie cop, was really a nice person. He was straight and square and he knew the Law and he believed in it. When his human nature and his critical sense of realities came out, as it did sometimes, it hurt him. He tried to fight against it but it wasn’t often much good. The mould was set and case-hardened; the reflexes were conditioned for keeps.

  Barbara Sinclair could have married the son of the druggist at the corner of Main and Tenth, in her home town, and she could have bulged and slimmed as she produced future druggists or presidents. She could have gone to Saturday night dances and flirted mildly with her next-door neighbour’s husband while she worried about whether Junior or Freddie or Ike had thrown off the covers and whether the hired girl had fallen asleep or was out keeping a rendezvous on the corner with the top sergeant who had just come into her life.

  Milton Ourley could have been the boss foreman of a crew of dock wallopers, harmlessly loosing off his choleric tongue on the job of lashing bigger and better men into setting new records in ship loading. Little bull-shaped men like that usually made good bosses because they inevitably went around with their shoulders hunched and a chip on both. If only Milton Ourley had never gotten into the money and the money had never gotten into him, he might have been quite a worldly and worthwhile individual who would never have become involved with anythin
g more criminal than a pair of black-market nylons.

  Titania Ourley could have had a husband who knew how to dominate her as she really needed to be dominated, instead of one who had convinced himself and ended by convincing her that the only way to hold her was by pouring more and more wealth and power into her hands. Then she would never have had the fundamental frustration that had reversed itself into her own exaggerated desire to dominate—to dominate the mate whom she despised for being dominated, to conquer and dominate everyone else with whom she came in contact by any kind of gushing effort, to buy or bully the sequacious young men who could flatter her that the charms she had wasted on her ineffectual spouse were still intact and devastating.

  Varetti and Walsh could have climbed a little way up any humdrum but honest ladder, but at the time when their choice was made the Noble Experiment was in ill swill, and it was becoming a simple axiom on the tough street corners where they dawdled that a pint of ersatz gin worth twenty cents could be marketed for a dollar. But to get that market some other merchant or salesman might have to be eradicated, and so the shooting came next and it came with enough impunity so that before long there were no more qualms about murder than there were about swallowing one of the illicit drinks that the murder was done for, not any more for them than for the righteous law-breaking public who didn’t see the blood on the bottles and didn’t give a damn anyway. Cokey Walsh had gone to the snow for the plain practical nerve and speed that he needed, but on any moral issues his soul was as shark-skinned as Varetti’s. The only difference now was that the days of their splendour were gone and they would do their killing for much less money, because they were stragglers from an army that had passed into limbo and like any other stragglers they had to live off the land as best they could.

  Allen Uttershaw was easy to understand. He was a business man who should have been a dilettante. He was a good business man but his only interest in business was the ultimate goal of being able to get out of it and live the vague and graceful life that his peculiar dramatisation of himself required. If he had inherited a million dollars twenty years ago he would have been a timeless and contented flâneur in a world of sleek penthouses, velvet smoking jackets, first editions, vintage wines, silk dressing-gowns, and the conversation of connoisseurs. He would have sauntered with faultless charm and savoir faire through his elegantly lepidopteral existence, quoting his snatches of poetry with that disarming half-smile up his sleeve that always made you wonder if it was worth laughing at him because he had probably just finished laughing at himself, and such contrastingly clamorous subjects as Ourleys and Saints would never have clattered through his peaceful and platonic ken…