The Saint turned his eyes to the painting over the mantelpiece, and did not see it.
"If we do nothing but suppress Tiny Tim," he said, "England will possess a weapon of war immeasurably more powerful than all the armaments of any other nation. If we stole that away, you may argue that sooner or later some other nation will probably discover something just as deadly, and then England will be at a disadvantage."
He hesitated, and then continued in the same quiet tone.
"But there are hundreds of Tiny Tims, and we can't suppress them all. No secret like that has ever been kept for long; and when the war came we might very well find the enemy prepared to use our own weapon against us."
Once again he paused.
"I'm thinking of all the men who'll fight in that next war, and the women who love them. If you saw a man drowning, would you refuse to rescue him because, for all you know, you might only be saving him for a more terrible death years later?"
There was another silence; and in it the Saint seemed to straighten and strengthen and grow, imperceptibly and yet tremendously, as if something gathered about him which actually filled every corner of the room and made him bulk like a preposterously normal giant. And, when he resumed, his voice was as soft and even as ever; but it seemed to ring like a blast of trumpets.
"There are gathered here," he said, "three somewhat shop-soiled musketeers—and a blessed angel. Barring the blessed angel, we have all of us, in the course of our young lives, broken half the Commandments and most of the private laws of several countries. And yet, somehow, we've contrived to keep intact certain ridiculous ideals, which to our perverted minds are a justification for our sins. And fighting is one of those ideals. Battle and sudden death. In fact, we must be about the last three men in the wide world who ought to be interfering with the makings of a perfectly good war. Personally, I suppose we should welcome it—for our own private amusement. But there aren't many like us. There are too many—far too many—who are utterly different. Men and boys who don't want war. Who don't live for battle, murder, and sudden death. Who wouldn't be happy warriors, going shouting and singing and swaggering into the battle. Who'd just be herded into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter, drunk with a miserable and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few days of squalid agony and die in the dirt. Fine young lives that don't belong to our own barbarous god of battles. . . . And we've tripped over the plans for the next sacrifice, partly by luck and partly by our own brilliance. And here we are. We don't give a damn for any odds or any laws. Will you think me quite mad if I put it to you that three shabby, hell-busting outlaws might, by the grace of God . . ."
He left the sentence unfinished; and for a few seconds no one spoke.
Then Roger Conway stirred intently.
"What do you say?" he asked.
The Saint looked at him.
"I say," he answered, "that this is our picnic. We've always known—haven't we?—at the back of our minds, dimly, that one day we were bound to get our big show. I say that this is the cue. It might have come in any one of a dozen different ways; but it just happens to have chosen this one. I'll summarise. . . ."
He lighted a fresh cigarette and hitched himself further on to the table, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and the fine, rake-hell, fighting face that they all, knew and loved made almost supernaturally beautiful with such a light of debonair daredevilry as they had never seen before.
"You've read the story," he said. "I grant you it reads like a dime novelette; but there it is, staring you in the face, just the same. All at once, in both England and America, there's some funny business going on in the oil and steel and chemical trades. The amount of money locked up in those three combines must be nearly enough to swamp the capitals of any other bunch of industries you could name. We don't know exactly what's happening, but we do know that the big men, the secret moguls of Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, the birds with the fat cigars and the names in -heim and -stein, who juggle the finances of this cockeyed world, are moving on some definite plan. And then look at the goods they're on the road with. Iron and oil and chemicals. If you know any other three interests that'd scoop a bigger pool out of a really first-class war, I'd like to hear of them. . . . Add on Barney Malone's spy story. Haven't you realised how touchy nations are, and how easy it really would be to stir up distrust? And distrust, sooner or later, means war. The most benevolent and peaceful nation, if it's continually finding someone else's spies snooping round its preserves, is going to make a certain song and dance about it. Nobody before this has thought of doing that sort of thing on a large scale— trying to set two European Powers at each other's throats with a carefully wangled quarrel—and yet the whole idea is so gloriously simple. And now it's happened—or happening. . . . And behind it all is the one man in the world with the necessary brain to conceive a plot like that, and the influence and qualifications to carry it through. You know who I mean. The man they call the Mystery Millionaire. The man who's supposed to have arranged half a dozen wars before, on a minor scale, in the interests of high finance. You've seen his name marked in red in those newspapers every time it crops up. It fits into the scheme in a darn sight too many ways—you can't laugh that off. Dr. Rayt Marius. ..."
Norman Kent suddenly spun his cigarette into the fireplace.
"Then Golter might fit in——"
Conway said: "But the Crown Prince is Marius's own Crown Prince !"
"Would that mean anything to a man like Marius?" asked the Saint gently. "Wouldn't that just make things easier for him? Suppose ..."
The Saint caught his breath; and then he took up his words again in a queerly soft and dreamy voice.
"Suppose Marius tempted the Crown Prince's vanity? The King is old; and there have been rumours that a young nation is calling for a young leader. And the Prince is ambitious. Suppose Marius were able to say: 'I can give you a weapon with which you can conquer the world. The only price I make is that you should use it. . . .' "
They sat spellbound, bewildered, fascinated. They wanted to laugh that vision away, to crush and pulverise and annihilate it with great flailing sledge-hammers of rational incredulity. And they could find nothing to say at all.
The clock ticked leaden seconds away into eternity.
Patricia said breathlessly: "But he couldn't——"
"But he could!"
Simon Templar had leapt to his feet, his right arm flung out in a wild gesture.
"It's the key!" he cried. "It's the answer to the riddle! It mayn't be difficult to nurse up an international distrust by artificial means, but a tension like that can't be as fierce as a genuine international hatred. It'd want a much bigger final spark to make it blaze up. And the Crown Prince and his ambitions—and Vargan's invention—they'd make the spark! They're Marius's trump card. If he didn't bring them off his whole scheme might be shipwrecked. I know that's right!"
"That man in the garden," whispered Patricia. "If he was one of Marius's men——"
"It was Marius!"
The Saint snatched a paper from the table, and wrung and smashed it out so that she could see the photograph.
Bad as had been the light when they had found themselves face to face with the original, that face could never have been mistaken anywhere—that hideous, rough-hewn, nightmare expressionlessness, like the carved stone face of a heathen idol.
"It was Marius. . . ,"
Roger Conway came out of his chair.
"If you're right, Saint—I'll believe that you didn't dream last night——"
"It's true!"
"And we haven't all suddenly got softening of the brain—to be listening to these howling, daft deductions of yours——"
"God knows I was never so sure of anything in my life."
"Then——"
The Saint nodded.
"We have claimed to execute some sort of justice," he said. "What is the just thing for us to do here?"
Conw
ay did not answer, and the Saint turned to meet Norman Kent's thoughtful eyes; and then he knew that they were both waiting for him to speak their own judgment.
They had never seen the Saint so stern.
"The invention must cease to be," said Simon Templar. "And the brain that conceived it, which could recreate it— that also must cease to be. It is expedient that one man should die for many people. . . ."
3. How Simon Templar returned to Esher, and decided to go there again
This was on the 24th of June—about three weeks after the Saint's reply to the offer of a free pardon.
On the 25th, not a single morning paper gave more than an inconspicuous paragraph to the news which had filled the afternoon editions of the day before; and thereafter nothing more at all was said by the Press about the uninvited guests at Vargan's demonstration. Nor was there more than a passing reference to the special Cabinet meeting which followed.
The Saint, who now had only one thought day and night, saw in this unexpected reticence the hand of something dangerously like an official censorship, and Barney Malone, appealed to, was so uncommunicative as to confirm the Saint in his forebodings.
To the Saint it seemed as if a strange tension had crept into the atmosphere of the season in London. This feeling was purely subjective, he knew; and yet he was unable to laugh it away. On one day he had walked through the streets in careless enjoyment of an air fresh and mild with the promise of summer, among people quickened and happy and alert; on the next day the clear skies had become heavy with the fear of an awful thunder, and a doomed generation went its way furtively and afraid.
"You ought to see Esher," he told Roger Conway. "A day away from your favourite bar would do you good,"
They drove down in a hired car; and there the Saint found further omens.
They lunched at the Bear, and afterwards walked over the Portsmouth Road. There were two men standing at the end of the lane in which Professor Vargan lived, and two men broke off their conversation abruptly as Conway and the Saint turned off the main road and strolled past them under the trees. Further down, a third man hung over the garden gate sucking a pipe.
Simon Templar led the way past the house without glancing at it, and continued his discourse on the morrow's probable runners; but a sixth sense told him that the eyes of the man at the gate followed them down the lane, as the eyes of the two men at the corner had done.
"Observe," he murmured, "how careful they are not to make any fuss. The last thing they want to do is to attract attention. Just quietly on the premises, that's what they are. But if we did anything suspicious we should find ourselves being very quietly and carefully bounced towards the nearest clink. That's what we call Efficiency."
A couple of hundred yards further on, on the blind side of a convenient corner, the Saint stopped.
"Walk on for as long as it takes you to compose a limerick suitable for the kind of drawing-room to which you would never be admitted," he ordered. "And then walk back. I'll be here."
Conway obediently passed on, carrying in the tail of his eye a glimpse of the Saint sidling through a gap in the hedge into the fields on the right. Mr. Conway was no poet, but he accepted the Saint's suggestion, and toyed lazily with the lyrical possibilities of a young lady of Kent who whistled wherever she went. After wrestling for some minutes with the problem of bringing this masterpiece to a satisfactory conclusion, he gave it up and turned back; and the Saint returned through the hedge, a startlingly immaculate sight to be seen coming through a hedge, with a punctuality that suggested that his estimate of Mr. Conway's poetical talent was dreadfully accurate.
"For the first five holes I couldn't put down a single putt," said the Saint sadly, and he continued to describe an entirely imaginary round of golf until they were back on the main road and the watchers at the end of the lane were out of sight.
Then he came back to the point.
"I wanted to do some scouting round at the back of the house to see how sound the defences were. There was a sixteen-stone seraph in his shirtsleeves pretending to garden, and another little bit of fluff sitting in a deck chair under a tree reading a newspaper. Dear old Teal himself is probably sitting in the bathroom disguised as a clue. They aren't taking any more chances!"
"Meaning," said Conway, "that we shall either have to be very cunning or very violent."
"Something like that," said the Saint.
He was preoccupied and silent for the rest of the walk back to the Bear, turning over the proposition he had set himself to tackle.
He had cause to be—and yet the tackling of tough propositions was nothing new to him. The fact of the ton or so of official majesty which lay between him and his immediate objective was not what bothered him; the Saint, had he chosen to turn his professional attention to the job, might easily have been middleweight champion of the world, and he had a poor opinion both of the speed and fighting science of policemen. In any case, as far as that obstacle went, he had a vast confidence in his own craft and ingenuity for circumventing mere massive force. Nor did the fact that he was meddling with the destiny of nations give him pause: he had once, in his quixotic adventuring, run a highly successful one-man revolution in South America, and could have been a fully accredited Excellency in a comic-opera uniform if he had chosen. But this problem, the immensity of it, the colossal forces that were involved, the millions of tragedies that might follow one slip in his enterprise . . . Something in the thought tightened tiny muscles around the Saint's jaw.
Fate was busy with him in those days.
They were running into Kingston at the modest pace which was all the hired car permitted, when a yellow sedan purred effortlessly past them. Before it cut into the line of traffic ahead, Conway had had indelibly imprinted upon his memory the bestial, ape-like face that stared back at them through the rear window with the fixity of a carved image.
"Ain't he sweet?" murmured the Saint.
"A sheik," agreed Conway.
A smile twitched at Simon Templar's lips.
"Known to us," he said, "as Angel Face or Tiny Tim—at the option of the orator. The world knows him as Rayt Marius. He recognised me, and he's got the number of the car. He'll trace us through the garage we hired it from, and in twenty-four hours he'll have our names and addresses and Y.M.C.A. records. I can't help thinking that life's going to be very crowded for us in the near future."
And the next day the Saint was walking back to Brook Street towards midnight, in the company of Roger Conway, when he stopped suddenly and gazed up into the sky with a reflective air, as if he had thought of something that had eluded his concentration for some time.
"Argue with me, Beautiful," he pleaded. "Argue violently, and wave your hands about, and look as fierce as your angelic dial will let you. But don't raise your voice."
They walked the few remaining yards to the door of the Saint's apartment with every appearance of angry dissension. Mr. Conway, keeping his voice low as directed, expatiated on the failings of the Ford car with impassioned eloquence. The Saint answered, with aggressive gesticulations:
"A small disease in a pot hat has been following me half the day. He's a dozen yards behind us now. I want to get hold of him, but if we chase him he'll run away. He's certain to be coming up now to try and overhear the quarrel and find out what it's about. If we start a fight we should draw him within range. Then you'll grab him while I get the front door open."
"The back axle——" snarled Mr.Conway.
They were now opposite the Saint's house; and the Saint halted and turned abruptly, placed his hand in the middle of Conway's chest, and pushed.
Conway recovered his balance and let fly. The Saint took the blow on his shoulder, and reeled back convincingly. Then he came whaling in and hit Mr. Conway on the jaw with great gentleness. Mr. Conway retaliated by banging the air two inches from the Saint's nose.
In the uncertain light it looked a most furious battle; and the Saint was satisfied to see Pot Hat sneaki
ng up along the area railings only a few paces away, an interested spectator.
"Right behind you," said the Saint softly. "Stagger back four steps when I slosh you."
He applied his fist caressingly to Conway's solar plexus, and broke away without waiting to see the result; but he knew that his lieutenant was well trained. Simon had just time to find his key and open the front door. A second later he was closing the door again behind Conway and his burden.
"Neat work," drawled the Saint approvingly. "Up the stairs with the little darling, Roger."
As the Saint led the way into the sitting-room, Conway put Pot Hat down and removed his hand from the little man's mouth.
"Hush!" said Conway in a shocked voice, and covered his ears.
The Saint was peering down through the curtains.
"I don't think anyone saw us," he said. "We're in luck. If we'd planned it we might have had to wait years before we found Brook Street bare of souls."
He came back from the window and stood over their prisoner, who was still shaking his fist under Conway's nose and burbling blasphemously.
"That'll be all for you, sweetheart," remarked the Saint frostily. "Run through his pockets, Roger."
"When I find a pleeceman," began Pot Hat quiveringly.
"Or when a policeman finds what's left of you," murmured Simon pleasantly. "Yes?"
But the search revealed nothing more interesting than three new five-pound notes—a fortune which such a seedy-looking little man would never have been suspected of possessing.
"So it will have to be the third degree," said the Saint mildly, and carefully closed both windows.
He came back with his hands in his pockets and a very Saintly look in his eyes.
"Do you talk, Rat Face?" he asked.
"Wotcher mean—talk? Yer big bullies——"
"Talk," repeated the Saint patiently. "Open your mouth, and emit sounds which you fondly believe to be English. You've been tailing me all day, and I don't like it."
The Saint Closes the Case s-2 Page 4