The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The Saint nodded.

  “I guessed that. That’s why I’ve talked to you. Now we’ve spent enough time for you to be able to put over your story, and I’ve got to be moving.”

  “You know where you’re going?”

  “Yes.” Simon stood up and crushed out his cigarette. “You may hear from me again tonight.”

  The Lieutenant held out his hand and said, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” said the Saint, and went out.

  Rowden and Yard and The Times-Tribune, standing in a little huddle down the corridor, turned and fanned out to stare at him as he strolled towards them. Then the Lieutenant’s voice came from the doorway behind him.

  “Mr Templar is leaving. Now you can all come back here.”

  “You know,” Simon said earnestly to Detective Yard, “I do wish your first name was Scotland.”

  He sauntered on, leaving his favourite plain-clothes man gawping after him like a punch-drunk St. Bernard whose succoured victim has refused to take a drink out of its keg.

  Kinglake’s trephining eyes reamed the blank questioning faces of his returned entr’acteurs. He clamped his teeth defiantly into his stogie, and drew a deep breath. In that breath, every wisp of the convenient alibi that Simon Templar had suggested was swept away, and he was standing stolidly on a decision of his own.

  “If you want to know what we were talking about,” he clipped out, “Templar was giving me a stall, and I pretended to fall for it. Now I’m going to see where he takes me. Yard, you can take charge here. I’m going to follow the Saint myself, and I’m going to bust this whole case if it takes me till Christmas.”

  “But, Lieutenant,” protested the dumbfounded Yard, “what about the Chief? What about?…”

  “The Chief,” Kinglake said shortly, “and the Commissioner, and the Sheriff, and everybody behind them can—”

  He did not say that they could jump in the lake, or go climb a tree, or perform any of the more conventional immolations. It is indeed highly doubtful whether they could have done what the Lieutenant said they could do. But Kinglake was not very concerned just then with literal accuracy. He had an objective of his own which mattered a lot more to him, and he left his extraordinary statement fluttering forgotten in the air behind him as he stalked out.

  Simon Templar was also dominated by one single idea. The murder of Matson had been unfortunate, but he could exonerate himself from it. The murder of Vaschetti had been still more unfortunate, but the excuses he could make for himself for that were flimsy gauze before his own ruthless criticism. But his reaction to that had already reversed itself into a positive driving force that would go on until the skies fell apart—or he did. For the ungodly to have murdered two men almost under his nose and within split seconds of giving him the precious information that he had to get was an insolence and an effrontery that he was going to make them wish they had never achieved. The Saint was angry now in a reckless, cold savage way, not as he had been when he first went from Police Headquarters to the offices of The Times-Tribune, but in a way that could only be soothed out in blood.

  And now he thought he knew where he was going to find the blood that night.

  A taxi took him to the Blue Goose, but this time he didn’t need the driver to vouch for him. The door-keeper remembered him, and let him in at once. He walked through the blue melodious dimness towards the bar, loose-limbed and altogether at his ease, yet there were filaments stirring through all the length of him that kept no touch at all with that lazily debonair demeanour. He caught sight of Olga Ivanovitch sitting at a table with another girl and two obvious wholesale bottle-cap salesmen, but he only gave her a casual wave and went on to find a stool at the bar. He knew she would join him, and he waited good-humouredly while the brawny blond bartender worked over complicated mixtures for a complicated quartet at the other end of the counter.

  Then she was beside him, and he knew it by the perfume she used and the cool satin of her hand before he looked at her.

  “I’m glad you got here,” she said. “Did you get your job done?”

  She was exactly the same, lovely and docile, as if she was only glad of him and wanting to be glad for him; as if death had never struck near her or walked with the men she knew.

  Simon made a movement of his head that seemed to answer the question, unless one stopped to wonder whether it meant yes or no. He went on before that could happen: ‘‘I nearly didn’t come here. What I’d really hoped to do was curl up at home with a good book from the circulating library.”

  “What was the book?”

  “Just a piece of some guy’s autobiography. However, when I went to pick it up, it was gone. A man named Nick Vaschetti had it earlier in the evening. He hadn’t finished with it—but he has now. I suppose you wouldn’t know where it is?”

  Her eyes were still pools of emerald in the mask of her face.

  “Why do you say that?” She seemed to have difficulty in articulating.

  “Lots of people read. It occurred to me—”

  “I mean that this…this Vaschetti…hadn’t finished with the book…but he has now?”

  “He’s given up reading,” explained the Saint carelessly. “He was so upset about having the book taken away from him that he stepped out of an eighth-floor window—with the help of a couple of your pals.”

  He watched the warm ivory of her face fade and freeze into alabaster.

  “He’s…dead?”

  “Well,” said the Saint, “it was a long drop to the sidewalk, and on account of the rubber shortage he didn’t bounce so well.”

  The bartender was standing over them expectantly. Simon said, “Dawson for me, and I guess you know what the lady’s drinking.” He became absorbed in the way the man worked with his big deft hands.

  And then suddenly he knew all about everything, and it was like waking up under an ice-cold shower.

  He took his breath back gradually, and said without a change in his voice except that the smile was no longer there, “You don’t know Brother Blatt and his playmates very well, do you, Olga? Especially Maris. But if I’d only been a little brighter I’d have just stayed here and found Maris.”

  She was staring at him rigidly, with wide tragical eyes. It was a good act, he thought cynically.

  The bartender stirred their drinks and set them up, fastidiously wiping spots of moisture from the bar around them. Simon appealed to him.

  “I should have asked you in the first place, shouldn’t I, Joe? You could have shown me Maris.”

  The man’s big square face began to crinkle in its ready accommodating smile.

  And the Saint knew he was right—even though the conclusion had come to him in one lightning-flash of revelation, and the steps towards it still had to be retraced.

  Maris, the man nobody knew. Maris, the man nobody had ever heard of. The truly invisible man. The man whom the assistant manager of the Ascot might have been referring to, and have forgotten, even, when he said that he had been chatting with a friend when Nick Vaschetti came home to die. The man nobody ever saw, or ever would see; because they never looked.

  Simon lifted his glass and took a sip from it.

  “You could have told me, couldn’t you?” he said, with his eyes like splinters of blue steel magnetised to the man’s face. “Because everybody calls you Joe, but they don’t give a damn about your last name. And I don’t suppose you’d tell them it’s Maris, anyway.”

  It was strange that everything could be so clear up to that instant, and then he blotted out in an explosion of blackness that sprang from somewhere behind his right ear and dissolved the universe into a timeless midnight.

  11

  There were bells tolling in the distance.

  Enormous sluggish bells that paused in interminable suspense between each titanic bong! of their clappers.

  Simon Templar was floating through stygian space towards them, so that the clanging became louder and sharper and the tempo became more rapid as he sped towar
ds it.

  He was hauling on the bell cords himself. It seemed vaguely ridiculous to be ringing peals for your own funeral, but that was what he was doing.

  His arms ached from the toil. They felt as though they were being pulled out of their sockets. And the knell was blending into pain and sinking under it. A pain that swelled and receded like a leaden tide…like a pulse beat…

  His mind came back gradually out of the dark, awakening to the realisation that the carillon was being played inside his own cranium, and the pain was synchronised with the beating of his own heart.

  He became aware that he was in a windowless chamber with some sort of plastered rock walls. A naked light bulb shone in the middle of the low ceiling. It was a cellar. There were collections and scatterings of the kind of junk that accumulates in cellars. There was an ugly iron furnace, and lines of criss-crosses of pipe hung high under the ceiling, wandering from point to point on undivinable errands, like metal worms in exposed transit from one hole to another.

  He was close to one of the walls, sagging downward and outward, his whole weight hanging from his outstretched arms. He had been tied by the wrists to two of the overhead pipes, about six feet from the floor and the same distance apart. That accounted for the ache in his arms. Otherwise, he was unconfined.

  He found the floor with his feet and straightened his knees. That eased the racking strain on his joints and ligaments, and reduced the pain of the ropes biting into his wrists, and might eventually give the throbbing of his strangled circulation a chance to die down. But it was the only constructive movement he could make.

  Then he saw Olga Ivanovitch.

  She was against the wall at right angles to his, tied to the pipes in exactly the same manner, but she was quite conscious and standing upright. She didn’t look trim and sleek as he had last seen her.

  One of the braids of her coiled hair had broken loose and fallen over her shoulder like a drooping wing, and the demure dark dress she had been wearing was dishevelled and torn away from one creamy shoulder and the lift of a breast. She was watching the Saint’s recovery with eyes like scorched holes in the desperate pallor of her beauty.

  It was the shock of recognition as much as anything which helped to clear the rest of the fuzzy cobwebs from his brain. His headache was more bearable now, but he had an idea that he wouldn’t want anyone to lay a heavy hand on the place behind his right ear where it seemed to come from.

  “To digress a moment from what we were saying,” he managed to remark aloud in a thick voice that grew clearer and stronger with each passing breath, “what the hell did Joe hit me with—a boomerang? I only took a sip of that drink, and it wasn’t any worse than the stuff they served me before.”

  “Blatt hit you from behind,” she said. “He came up behind you while you were talking. I tried to warn you with my eyes. He was very quick, and nobody would have seen it. Then he caught you, and they said you were drunk and passed out. They took you into a back room and that was the end of it.”

  Simon glanced at his surroundings again. They were depressingly reminiscent of many similar surroundings that he had been in before. He seemed to have spent a great deal of his life being knocked on the head and tied up in cellars.

  “And so, by one easy transfer,” he observed, “we arrive in the bomb-proof doghouse.”

  “This is the cellar of my house. There is a back way out of the Blue Goose. They took you out and brought you here.”

  “Well, well, well. We certainly do lead a hectic life. Never a dull moment.”

  Her gaze was wondering.

  “You jest in the face of certain death. Are you a fatalist, or are you only a fool?”

  “I’ve certainly acted like a fool,” Simon admitted ruefully. “But as for this death business—that shouldn’t lose you any sleep. You didn’t have any nightmares over Matson, did you?”

  “I have seen too much to have nightmares,” she said wearily. “But I give you my word that I have never had a hand in any murder. I didn’t know they were going to kill Matson. I knew nothing about him, except that he was one of their men, and I was told to amuse him. But after he had been killed—what could I do? I couldn’t bring him back to life, or even prove that they did it.

  And Vaschetti. I thought Vaschetti was safe in gaol when I…”

  “When you what?”

  “When I went to his room this afternoon to see if I could find—anything.”

  The Saint wondered if the blow on his head had done something to him. He looked at her through a film of unreality.

  He said, “Such as a diary of names and places?”

  “Anything. Anything I could find. I thought he might have kept something, and I wanted it.”

  “What for—blackmail?”

  “To turn over to the FBI, when I had enough.”

  He had learned before that he couldn’t needle her, but it was a discovery that she could astound him.

  “You mean you were planning to sell your own gang down the river?”

  “Of course.”

  Maybe it was better to occupy his twinging head with material things. On due consideration he admired the basic ingenuity of the way he was tied up. It was so simple and practical and economical of rope, and yet it completely eliminated all the standard tricks of escape. There was no chance of reaching a knot with the fingertips or the teeth, or cleverly breaking a watch-glass and sawing the cords on a sharp fragment, or employing any of the other devices which have become so popular in these situations. It was one of the most effective systems the Saint had encountered in an exceptionally privileged experience, and he made a mental note to use it on his next prisoner.

  Meanwhile he said, without much subtlety, “But would that have been cricket, tovarich? Do you want me to believe that anyone so beautiful could sink so low?”

  For an instant he thought that he actually struck a flash from her green eyes.

  “Why do you think I’m here now—tovarich?”

  “I had wondered about that,” he said. “But I decided you might have a fetish about being crucified.”

  “I’m here because they don’t trust me any more. I helped to bring you here. I wanted them to believe I was still helping them. I couldn’t do anything else…And I was only waiting for a chance to help you…They tied you up. I helped them. And then, suddenly, they took hold of me and tied me up, too. I fought them, but it was no use.”

  “You have such a sweet honest face—why shouldn’t they trust you?”

  “That was because of what you said in the Blue Goose,” she told him without resentment. “You asked me if I had Vaschetti’s book. Before that, they thought it was you who had been there first. But when Maris heard you accuse me he was suspicious. They knew that I liked you, and I had seen you. And for Maris, a little suspicion is enough.”

  Simon decided that there was not so much profit in standing upright as he had hoped. If he rested his arms, the cords gnawed at his wrists again; if he favoured his wrists, the strain of fatigue on his shoulders tautened slowly into exquisite torture. He had had no sensation in his hands and no control of his fingers for some time.

  “And you really expect me to swallow that without water?” he asked scornfully.

  “It doesn’t matter much what you believe now,” she replied tiredly. “It’s too late. We shall both be dead in a little while. We cannot escape, and Siegfried is pitiless.”

  “Pardon me if I get a bit confused among all these people, but who is Siegfried?”

  “Siegfried Maris. You call him Joe. I think he is the head of the Nazi sabotage organisation in the United States.”

  The Saint thought so, too. He had had that all worked out before Blatt hit him on the head. It explained why Matson had ever gone to the Blue Goose at all. It explained why Vaschetti had touched there in his travels. It explained why the Blue Goose played such a part in the whole incident—why it was the local focus of infection, and why it could send its tendrils of corruption into honest local politic
al dishonesty, squeezing and pressing cunningly here and there, using the human failings of the American scene to undermine America. A parasitic vine that used the unassuming and unconscious flaws in its host to destroy the tree…It was not incredible that the prime root of the growth should turn out to be Siegfried Maris, whom everyone knew as Joe. Simon had always had it in his mind that the man he was hunting for would turn out to be someone that everybody called Joe. And this was the man. The man who could have anything around and not be part of it; who could always say, whatever happened, that he just happened to be legitimately there. The man nobody saw, in the place nobody thought of…

  “Comrade Maris,” said the Saint, “has been offstage far too much. It’s not fair to the readers. What is he doing now?”

  “I expect he’s upstairs, with the others. Searching my house.”

  “He must like the place. How long have we been here?”

  “Not very long. Not long at all.”

  “What’s he searching for?”

  “The book,” she said. “Vaschetti’s little book.”

  “Why here?”

  “Because I did find it. Because it has half the code names and meeting places in this country listed in it. But Maris will find it. I couldn’t hide it very well.”

  Simon was able to shrug his left shoulder tentatively. No weight dragged on it. They would have found and taken the gun in his spring holster, of course. It wouldn’t have been much use to him if they hadn’t. However…

  “So it was you who tore Vaschetti’s room at the Ascot apart,” he said. “But your mob thought it was me. That’s why my room was gone over this evening while we were out together, and a coloured friend of mine nearly had coloured kittens. You aren’t overlooking any bets, are you? And since Vaschetti’s indiscreet memoirs are still missing—not to mention Brother Matson’s notes and papers—”

  “They have those,” she said listlessly. “They were in the gladstone bag.”

  He was shaken as if he had been jolted in the ribs, but he went on.