“I’ll be glad to speak to him in the morning,” said the Saint co-operatively. “We should have lots to talk about—everything on my bill looks like an overcharge to me.”
“He’s on his way here now, sir,” said the clerk from his tonsils. If you could wait a few minutes—”
The Saintly smile would have glowed ethereally in a stained-glass window.
“I’m afraid I haven’t time,” he said. “But when Lieutenant Kearney gets here, do congratulate him for me on his new job. Oh, and give him this letter, will you?”
He laid the communication from the real-estate agents on the desk, and hurried Hoppy out of the lobby before the clerk could reassemble his wits for another attempt to delay him.
Again his car snaked through the traffic at the maximum speed that would still leave it immune from legal interference.
The Saint’s hands were light and steady on the wheel, his keen tanned profile implacably calm against the passing street lights. And while he drove like a precision machine he thought about Monica. Monica drugged, her velvet voice incoherent, her enigmatic eyes blank, her proud body listless and helpless…He thought of worse things than that, and a black coldness lanced through him with an aching intensity that froze his eyes as they stared ahead.
“I’m the dope, Hoppy,” he said in a dead toneless level. “I should have known better than to think I could push her off the stage…She put on that beggar woman’s outfit again, of course. She went back to the Elliott Hotel. But on account of what Junior had spilled, she didn’t last a minute. They were probably taking care of her last night while I was lying there wondering why they didn’t do anything about me.” His voice had a bitterness beyond emotion. “By this time they’ve given her a treatment and they know all the rest about me. Except where I am now. This is the showdown.”
“Who’d’a t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott—de old goat!”
Simon said nothing.
The house on Kelly Drive was as dark as the last time they had seen it, an unimaginative two-storey pile of brick with drawn blinds that made the windows look like sightless eyes.
Simon went to the back door, with Hoppy at his heels. Having picked the lock once before, he took a mere few seconds to open it again.
They stepped into darkness and silence broken only by the monotonous slow pulse of a dripping tap. This was the kitchen. On the other side of the room was the door at the head of the stairs that led down to the basement where initiations into the brotherhood of the beggars were performed. As Simon touched it, it gave way a fraction: it was not quite closed, but the darkness was blacker still beyond the slight opening. He stopped and listened again, and heard nothing. The darkness of the house had not seemed to indicate that there was a guard, but he was jumping to no rash conclusions.
He balanced the gun in his hand and pushed the door wider.
Then he heard it—a faint but clear rustle of movement that threw a momentary uncontrollable syncopation into his heartbeats and sent a flying column of eskimo beetles skirmishing up into his scalp. And with the rustle, a low, sleepy, inarticulate moan.
“What’s dat?” breathed Mr Uniatz hoarsely.
The Saint hardly bothered to whisper. After the first instant’s shock, he understood the rustle and the moan so vividly that the needlessness of further stealth seemed to be established.
“That’s Monica,” he said, and went down the steps.
His pencil flashlight broke the darkness as he reached the bottom, and in the round splash where the beam struck, he saw her.
She lay on a canvas cot in one corner of the cellar. Her wrists were strapped to the side members. As he had expected, she was dressed in the grimy shapeless rags in which he had first met her, but most of the beggar-woman make-up had been roughly wiped from her face. Her eyes were closed, but as the light fell on them her eyelids lifted a little as if with an infinite effort.
“No,” she mouthed huskily. “No…”
“Monica,” he said.
He checked the eagerness of his stride as he reached the cot, to come up to her gently.
“It’s me,” he said. “Simon. Simon Templar.”
Her eyes sought for him as he touched her, and he could see the pin-point contraction of the pupils. He turned the flashlight on his own face, then back to her.
She knew him—the sound of his voice and the glimpse of him. Even through the mists of the drug he saw the awareness of him struggle into her mind, and saw the tiny smile that lighted her whole face for an instant. She tried to raise her head, and her lips formed his name: “Simon…”
The effort was all she could make. Her head fell back and the lids closed over that shining look.
And then suddenly there was a blaze of lights that smashed away all shadows and wiped out the beam of his pencil light like a deluge would put out a match.
“Okay,” said the saw-toothed voice of Frankie Weiss. “This is a tommy gun. Don’t try anything, or I’ll blast all three of you.”
The Saint turned.
The stairs behind him had horizontal treads but no solid rises. Thus a man concealed behind them had a good vantage point. The unmistakable nozzle of a sub-machine-gun projected through one of the openings, and behind the Saint, Monica Varing lay directly in the line of fire.
“Drop your guns and reach,” Frankie said.
Simon obeyed.
Hoppy said, “Boss—”
“No,” said the Saint. “You haven’t a chance. Do what Frankie tells you.”
Hoppy’s Betsy clattered ignominiously on the floor.
The gross bulk of Big Hazel Green came out from behind the stairs. She circled around them, kicked their guns out of reach, and searched them with competent hamlike hands. Then she stepped aside again, and Frankie Weiss moved out into the open.
There was a small dew of perspiration on his face, but the weapon he held was perfectly steady.
“How nice to see you, Frankie,” Simon drawled. “You’re looking well, too. That work-out we had together must have done you good.”
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Frankie bit out of the side of his mouth. “Well, when I get through giving you a work-out—”
“The same old dialogue,” sighed the Saint. “I wish I could remember how many times I’ve heard that line. Frankie, you kill me.”
“Maybe you’re not kidding,” Frankie sneered. “Sit down on the bed and keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
The Saint sat down, and Monica Varing stirred again uneasily. He felt very calm and quiet now. The inward exultation that danger could always ignite in him had steadied down and chilled. He had a cold estimate of all their chances, an equally cold watchfulness for his own first opening, an arrogant confidence that when the time came he could do more than any other human being could do.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “that if you’ve done anything to Monica Varing—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Templar,” said a new voice from the top of the stairs. “We may have to kill Miss Varing, but I would never allow that sort of thing.”
It was Mrs Laura Wingate.
15
The Saint watched her come down the stairs, while his brain struggled dizzily to recover its balance. It was fantastic, preposterous. In a story, of course, he would have guessed it long ago, but he had been thinking strictly in realities. This was unreal, and yet he was seeing it with his own eyes.
She was still the same fantastic figure out of a Helen Hokinson drawing. She protruded fore and aft, a plump, apparently brainless woman whose thoughts should have dealt with nothing more dangerous than planning theatre parties or buying Renoirs she couldn’t appreciate. Her lower lip protruded a little; that was the only change.
She looked at the Saint, and he felt one small flicker of chill as their eyes met. The glaring light seemed to bleach all colour out of her eyes, and the ruthless ophidian coldness of the gaze in that powdered face was shocking.
“Good evening, Your Majesty,” he said.
He started to stand up.
“Siddown!” Frankie barked, and the Saint raised his eyebrows as he subsided.
“Excuse me. It was just my old-world manners. I was always taught to stand up when a lady comes into the room—especially if she’s a queen.”
Hoppy said incredulously, “Ya mean dat’s de King of de Beggars? Dat old bag?”
“Shut up,” Frankie snarled.
“It doesn’t matter what they say now,” Mrs Wingate said. “Hazel—”
Big Hazel nodded and went to a small side table. She pulled out a drawer and took out the materials for a hypodermic injection—a syringe, ampules, cotton, alcohol. She began to fit a needle on the glass barrel of the syringe, as efficiently as a trained nurse. Simon realised that she might once have been one.
“Do we get the treatment, too?” he asked.
Mrs Wingate gave him a pale-eyed glance.
“Of course. There are several things I need to know immediately. I want to be sure you tell the truth.”
“You want to know how many people I’ve talked to, is that it?”
“A good deal depends on that, Mr Templar. I have made my arrangements to disappear if necessary. But I hope it will not be necessary yet—or ever.”
“I see,” Simon murmured. “If you can keep your secret safe by a few more murders—very wise of you, Mrs Wingate. I should have remembered my chess better—it’s the Queen that’s the most dangerous piece in the game. Not the King.”
“Chess,” Hoppy said blankly. “A dame—de King of de Beggars. An’ I t’ought—”
“That it was Elliott. Well, we had some reason to. We were looking for a man in the first place. That’s exactly the false scent Mrs Wingate meant to leave when she coined her title. You know, Hoppy, there was an Egyptian woman a long time ago who had herself crowned Pharaoh. She even insisted on appearing in public with a beard on state occasions. Mrs Wingate never went quite that far, but the disguise was good enough, anyhow. And then she made such good use of Stephen Elliott’s property. The hotel, and this. She seems to specialise in that sort of operation—like giving me Sammy the Leg’s house. I don’t doubt that if anyone else gets hot on the trail, Elliott is the one who’s going to have the explaining to do.” He gazed at Mrs Wingate thoughtfully. “Just between ourselves, and since it won’t go any farther, Laura, I wouldn’t mind betting now that Elliott isn’t even in the racket at all.”
A chilly smile lifted the corners of the woman’s mouth.
“Just between ourselves—and since it won’t go any farther, Mr Templar—you win that bet.”
Simon nodded and watched Big Hazel break the neck of an ampule and begin to fill the syringe.
“In the same vein,” he said, “would it be inquisitive to ask what happens to us after I’ve told you that Lieutenant Kearney knows where we are and is on his way after us?” Laura Wingate’s fat face gave no visible response. “An old bluff like that doesn’t frighten me,” she said. “Especially since I shall know the truth in a few minutes. But I’m glad to answer your question. As you may remember, we have a whisky bottle which you were kind enough to open for Big Hazel. I had meant to plant that in Sammy the Leg’s house, to help fix the Cleve Friend killing on you. Now, Miss Varing’s interference has made me change my plans. I shall use it somewhere else to prove that you killed your man Uniatz in a quarrel over some stolen jewels—I think I shall arrange for them to be stolen from me. Shortly afterwards you and Miss Varing will be found in your car, both shot with your gun, with a suitable farewell note which you will write while you are drugged—the victims of a sensational suicide pact…Go ahead, Hazel.”
The room felt colder to Simon Templar when she had ceased to speak. He lost then any compunctions he might have entertained before. Those bleached, cold eyes regarded him dispassionately as Big Hazel advanced on him with the syringe in one hand and an alcohol-sodden scrap of cotton in the other.
“Roll up your sleeve, Saint,” Mrs Wingate said. “Unless, of course, you would prefer Frankie to start shooting now. But I think common sense will tell you that this will be much the most painless way—for all of you.”
It was paralysing to think that this was the same woman speaking whose verbal italics and vapid girlish giggle had once made him think of her a ludicrous caricature of a stock type.
Slowly Simon began to take off his coat. His deliberate calm of a short while ago had congealed to a glacial calculation. He had left a broad enough clue for Kearney, but he had no guarantee that it would click, or click in time. He knew with great clarity what he would have to do, and what split-second timing it would demand of him.
“Hoppy,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ve made a few mistakes. If you’d only kept up with your marksmanship—like a busy bee…bee…”
Hoppy blinked.
“Yuh?”
The Saint resignedly began on his sleeve.
“Forget it. You can’t hit the bull’s eye every time.”
He finished rolling up the sleeve, and from a corner of his eye he saw dawning comprehension break over Hoppy’s face.
Simon said, “An underground chamber and all the props of violent melodrama. This calls for a last-minute rescue by the Marines, Mrs Wingate.”
The woman flickered her icy glance at him. “Put your arm out, Mr Templar.”
Simon sighed, and offered his brown left forearm to Big Hazel. She dabbed the cotton on it, and grasped his wrist with a wrestler’s hand.
One quick glance assured him that Frankie’s tommy gun was almost obstructed by Big Hazel’s huge frame, after that he didn’t look at it. He watched the approach of the syringe, that was all but engulfed in her giant paw, and all his whipcord muscles were relaxed and waiting.
“Now, Hoppy,” he said coolly.
There came a sound he recognised—the indescribable noise, akin to pthoo! that marked the expulsion of a BB shot from between Hoppy Uniatz’s teeth…
For weeks Hoppy had been improving in accuracy, force, and the principles of oral ballistics. Had the interior of his mouth been rifled like a gun-barrel, his aim might have been bettered, but at this close range there was no chance of a miss. The BB, impelled with velocity and violence, completed the last touch of outrageous grotesquerie by hitting Big Hazel Green in the left eye.
“Next to a custard pie,” the Saint reflected, with some irrepressibly cynical part of his mind that sat in judgement with an eyebrow raised, “I couldn’t think of an improvement. Now—”
The balance of the situation tipped with dazzling suddenness. Big Hazel’s instant reaction to the introduction of a foreign particle into her optic apparatus was to bellow like a wounded bull, let go the Saint’s wrist, and clap her free hand to the injured organ. But simultaneously, without even waiting for that release, the Saint’s free right hand was moving.
If he had merely tried to seize Big Hazel, or to hit her on the jaw, the woman would probably have got away. But Simon Templar’s arm flashed down with a speed that almost blurred the vision, and his hand closed with murderous suddenness over hers. And the hand it closed on was holding a hypodermic syringe of brittle glass.
The barrel of the syringe became instantly a noncohesive assortment of razor-sharp fragments, slicing agonisingly deeper into Big Hazel’s flesh as the Saint’s merciless grip ground tighter. All of her faculties were concentrated, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the immediate, vital, and hysterical necessity of opening her hand before the fingers began falling off. And being thus occupied, she was in no condition to realise that the Saint’s hand had also swung her around until she completely blocked Frankie’s line of fire.
At the same moment, Mr Uniatz moved with an agility that threw a surprising sidelight on his nickname. He dived for the nearest gun on the floor, and fired almost as his paw closed on it. The only sound Frankie Weiss made was a queer sort of choking cough as he went down, and the tommy gun never spoke at all…
“All rig
ht,” Kearney’s voice said from the top of the stairs. “Break it up, or I’ll let all of you have it.”
Simon pushed Big Hazel away and smiled up at him…“Good old Alvin,” he said. “Never too late to take a bow.”
16
Monica Varing turned her head upon the pillow, and her hair moved with it in a shining skein on the bare satin of her shoulder. The robe she wore swooped downward from there in a “V” so deep that Simon Templar, leaning on the high footboard of her hospital bed, was aware of not wholly inexplicable vertigo whenever his eyes wandered that way.
He sighed ostentatiously.
Monica smiled. Her voice was warm temptation.
“Is anything wrong? I thought all your problems were wound up nicely.”
“They are—nearly all.” He grinned rather wryly. “Kearney got a promotion, Elliott cleared his good name, Laura Wingate—” The blue darkened. “Laura Wingate held out a lot longer than I expected, but she’s finally made a confession. Even Fingers Schultz.” The grin came back. “It seems that a gunsel named Fingers Schultz was picked up in the street last night with tyre-marks all over him, apparently the victim of a hit-run driver, but I haven’t asked Sammy the Leg what his car looks like.”
Monica leaned forward, clasping her knees, and smiled at him dazzlingly. The Saint enjoyed his ensuing vertigo.
“Why all the deep sighs, then?”
“Because now we’ll have hardly any excuse for seeing each other. How soon do you expect to get out of this joint?”
“By evening. It was nonsense bringing me in at all, but my manager insisted on a few days’ rest. Tonight I play Nora as usual.”
“And after the show?”
“I was waiting to be asked. What were you thinking of?”
The Saint smiled.
“Exactly the same thing as you,” he said.
THE MASKED ANGEL
INTRODUCTION
Another story I kept saying for years I would have to write some day was a story about prize fighting. Not that I am a particularly rabid fan of boxing, although I was a passable amateur in my youth, before I valued my brains too much to ignore the disadvantage of possibly having them beaten out. But just because I thought the Saint sooner or later had to get into everything.
Call for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 9