The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Who the hell are you?” rasped Flager uncertainly.

  “On the whole, I think it would be better for you not to know,” said the Saint calmly.

  Another man had climbed into the driver’s seat, and the car vibrated almost imperceptibly as the engine started up. But this second man, although he wore a chauffeur’s peaked cap, had a silhouette that in no way resembled that of the chauffeur whom Sir Melvin Flager employed.

  Under his touch the car began to edge out of the line, and as he saw the movement Flager came back to life. In the stress of the moment he was unable to form a very clear idea of what was happening, but instinct told him that it was nothing to which he wanted to lend his tender person.

  “Well, you won’t kidnap me!” he shouted, and lashed out wildly at the veiled face of the man beside him.

  Which was the last thing he knew about for the next half-hour, for his desperate swing was still far from its mark when a fist like a ball of iron struck him cleanly on the point of the jaw and lifted him back on to the cushions in a dreamless slumber.

  When he woke up, his first impulse was to clasp his hands to his painfully singing head, but when he tried to carry it out his wrists refused to move—they felt as if they were anchored to some solid object. Blinking open his eyes, he looked down at them. They were handcuffed to what appeared to be the steering wheel of a car.

  In another second the memory of what had happened to him before he fell asleep returned. He began to struggle frantically, but his body refused to respond, and he saw that a broad leather strap like the safety belt of an aeroplane had been passed around his waist and fastened in front of his abdomen, locking him securely to his seat. Wildly he looked about him, and discovered that he was actually sitting in the driving seat of a lorry. He could see the hood in front of him, and, beyond it, a kind of white screen which seemed vaguely familiar.

  The feeling that he had been plunged into some fantastic nightmare seized him, and he let out a stifled yell of fright.

  “That won’t help you,” said a cool voice at his side, and Flager jerked his head round to see the veiled face of the unknown man who had sat at his side in the car.

  “Damn you!” he raved. “What have you done to me?”

  He was a large fleshy man, with one of those fleshy faces which look as if their owner had at some time invited God to strike him pink, and had found his prayer instantaneously answered. Simon Templar, who did not like large fleshy men with fleshy pink faces, smiled under his mask.

  “So far, we haven’t done very much,” he said. “But we’re going to do plenty.”

  The quietness of his voice struck Flager with a sudden chill, and instinctively he huddled inside his clothes. Something else struck him as unusual even as he did so, and in another moment he realized what it was. Above the waist, he had no clothes on at all—the whole of his soft white torso was exposed to the inclemency of the air.

  The Saint smiled again.

  “Start the machine, Peter,” he ordered, and Flager saw that the chauffeur who had driven the car was also there, and that he was similarly masked.

  A switch clicked over, and darkness descended on the garage. Then a second switch clicked, and the white screen in front of the lorry’s bonnet lighted up with a low whirring sound. Bewildered but afraid, Flager looked up and saw a free moving picture show.

  The picture was of a road at night, and it unrolled towards him as if it had been photographed from behind the headlights of a car that was rushing over it. From time to time, corners, cross-roads, and the lights of other traffic proceeding in both directions swept up towards him—the illusion that he was driving the lorry in which he sat over that road was almost perfect.

  “What’s this for?” he croaked.

  “You’re taking the place of one of your own drivers for the week-end,” answered the Saint. “We should have preferred to do it out on the road under normal working conditions, but I’m afraid you would have made too much noise. This is the best substitute we were able to arrange, and I think it’ll work all right. Do you know what it is?”

  Flager shook his head.

  “I don’t care what it is! Listen here, you—”

  “It’s a gadget for testing people’s ability to drive,” said the Saint smoothly. “When I turn another switch, the steering wheel you have there will be synchronized with the film. You will then be driving over the road yourself. So long as you keep on the road and don’t try to run into the other traffic, everything will be all right. But directly you make a movement that would have taken you off the road or crashed you into another car—or a cyclist, brother—the film will stop for a moment, a red light will light up on top of the screen, and I shall wake you up like this.”

  Something swished through the air, and a broad stinging piece of leather which felt like a razor strop fell resoundingly across Sir Melvin’s well-padded shoulders.

  Flager gave a yelp of anguish, and the Saint laughed softly.

  “We’ll start right away,” he said. “You know the rules and you know the penalties—the rules are only the same as your own employees have to obey, and the penalties are really much less severe. Wake up, Flager—you’re off!”

  The third switch snapped into place, and Flager grabbed blindly at the steering wheel. Almost at once the picture faltered, and a red light glowed on top of the screen.

  Smack! came the leather strop across his shoulders.

  “Damn you!” bellowed Flager. “What are you doing this for?”

  “Partly for fun,” said the Saint. “Look out—you’re going to hit that car!”

  Flager did hit it, and the strop whistled through the darkness and curled over his back. His shriek tortured the echoes, but Simon was without mercy.

  “You’ll be in the ditch in a minute,” he said. “No…Here comes a corner…Watch it!…Nicely round, brother, nicely round. Now mind you don’t run into the back of this cart—you’ve got plenty of room to pass…Stick to it…Don’t hit the cyclist…You’re going to hit him…Mind the fence—you’re heading straight for it—look out…Look out!”

  The strop whacked down again with a strong and willing arm behind it as the red light sprang up again.

  Squealing like a stuck pig, Sir Melvin Flager tore the lorry back on to its course.

  “How long are you keeping this up for?” he sobbed.

  “Until Monday morning,” said the Saint calmly. “And I wish it could be a month. I’ve never seen a more responsive posterior than you have. Mind the cyclist.”

  “But you’re making me drive too fast!” Flager almost screamed. “Can’t you slow the machine up a bit?”

  “We have to average over thirty miles an hour,” answered the Saint remorselessly. “Look out!”

  Sir Melvin Flager passed into a nightmare that was worse than anything he had thought of when he first opened his eyes. The mechanical device which he was strapped to was not quite the same as the cars he was used to, and Simon Templar himself would have been ready to admit that it might be more difficult to drive. Time after time the relentless leather lashed across his shoulderblades, and each time it made contact he let loose a howl of pain which in itself was a reward to his tormentors.

  After a while he began to master the steering, and long periods went by when the red light scarcely showed at all. As these intervals of immunity lengthened, Flager shrugged his aching back and began to pluck up courage. These lunatics who had kidnapped him, whoever they were, had taken a mean advantage of him at the start. They had fastened him to an unfamiliar machine and promptly proceeded to shoot it through space at forty-five miles an hour: naturally he had made mistakes. But that could not go on for ever. He had got the hang of it at last, and the rest of it seemed more or less plain sailing. He even had leisure to ponder sadistically on what their fate would be when they let him go and the police caught them, as they undoubtedly would be caught. He seemed to remember that the cat-o’-nine-tails was the punishment invariably meted out by the Law for
crimes of violence. Well, flogging him with that leather strop was a crime of violence. He brooded savagely over various tales he had heard of the horrors of that punishment…

  Whack!

  The red light had glowed, and the strop had swung home again. Flager pulled himself together with a curse. It was no good getting careless now that he had mastered the machine. But he was beginning to feel tired. His eyes were starting to ache a little with the strain of keeping themselves glued watchfully to the movie screen ahead. The interminable unwinding of that senseless road, the whirr of the unseen projector, the physical effort of manipulating the heavy steering wheel, the deadly monotony of the task, combined with the heavy dinner he had eaten and a long sequence of other dinners behind it to produce a sensation of increasing drowsiness. But the unwinding of the road never slackened speed, and the leather strop never failed to find its mark every time his wearying attention caused him to make a mistake.

  “You’re getting careless about your corners,” the Saint warned him tirelessly. “You’ll be in the ditch at the next one. Lookout!”

  The flickering screen swelled up and swam in his vision. There was nothing else in the world—nothing but that endlessly winding road uncoiling out of the darkness, the lights of other traffic that leapt up from it, the red light above the screen, and the smack of the leather strop across his shoulders. His brain seemed to be spinning round like a top inside his head when at last, amazingly, the screen went black and the other bulbs in the garage lighted up.

  “You can go to sleep now,” said the Saint.

  Sir Melvin Flager was incapable of asking questions. A medieval prisoner would have been no more capable of asking questions of a man who released him from the rack. With a groan he slumped back in his seat and fell asleep.

  It seemed as if he had scarcely closed his eyes when he was roused again by someone shaking him. He looked up blearily and saw the strange chauffeur leaning over him.

  “Wake up,” said Peter Quentin. “It’s five o’clock on Saturday morning, and you’ve got a lot more miles to cover.”

  Flager had no breath to dispute the date. The garage lights had gone out again, and the road was starting to wind out of the screen again.

  “But you told me I could sleep!” he moaned.

  “You get thirty-five minutes every night,” Peter told him pitilessly. “That averages four hours a week, and that’s as much as you allowed Albert Johnson. Look out!”

  Twice again Flager was allowed to sleep, for exactly thirty-five minutes; four times he watched his two veiled tormentors change places, a fresh man taking up the task while the other lay down on the very comfortable bed which had been made up in one corner and slept serenely. Every three hours he had five minutes’ rest and a glass of water, every six hours he had ten minutes’ rest, a cup of coffee, and a sandwich. But the instant that those timed five or ten minutes had elapsed, the projector was started up again, the synchronization switch was thrown over, and he had to go on driving.

  Time ceased to have any meaning. When, after his first sleep, he was told that it was only five o’clock on Saturday morning, he could have believed that he had been driving for a week; before his ordeal was over, he felt as if he had been at the wheel for seven years. By Saturday night he felt he was going mad; by Sunday morning he thought he was going to die; by Sunday night he was a quivering wreck. The strop fell on his shoulders many times during the last few hours, when the recurrent sting of it was almost the only thing that kept his eyes open, but he was too weary even to cry out…

  And then, at the end of what might have been centuries, Monday morning dawned outside, and the Saint looked at his watch and reversed the switches.

  “You can go to sleep again now,” he said for the last time, but Sir Melvin Flager was asleep almost before the last word was out of his mouth.

  Sunken in the coma of utter exhaustion, Flager did not even feel himself being unstrapped and unhandcuffed from his perch; he did not feel the clothes being replaced on his inflamed back, nor did he even rouse as he was carried into his own car and driven swiftly away.

  And then again he was being shaken by the shoulder, woken up. Whimpering, he groped for the steering wheel—and did not find it. The shaking at his shoulder went on.

  “All right,” he blubbered. “All right, I’m trying to do it. Can’t you let me sleep a little—just once…”

  “Sir Melvin! Sir Melvin!”

  Flager forced open his bloodshot eyes. His hands were free. He was sitting in his own car, which was standing outside his own house. It was his valet who was shaking him.

  “Sir Melvin! Try to wake up, sir. Where have you been? Are you ill, sir?”

  Flager found strength to move his head from one side to the other.

  “No,” he said. “I just want to sleep.”

  And with a deep groan he let his swollen eyelids droop again, and sank back into soothing abysses of delicious rest.

  When he woke up again he was in his own bedroom. For a long time he lay without moving, wallowing in the heavenly comfort of the soft mattress and cool linen, savouring the last second of sensual pleasure that could be squeezed out of the most beautiful awakening that he could remember.

  “He’s coming round,” said a low voice at last, and with a sigh Flager opened his eyes.

  His bed seemed to be surrounded with an audience such as a seventeenth-century monarch might have beheld at a levee. There was his valet, his secretary, his doctor, a nurse, and a heavy and stolid man of authoritative appearance who held an unmistakable bowler hat. The doctor had a hand on his pulse, and the others stood by expectantly.

  “All right, Sir Melvin,” said the physician. “You may talk for a little while now, if you want to, but you mustn’t excite yourself. This gentleman here is a detective who wants to ask you a few questions.”

  The man with the bowler hat came nearer.

  “What happened to you, Sir Melvin?” he asked.

  Flager stared at him for several seconds. Words rose to his lips, but somehow he did not utter them.

  “Nothing,” he said at length. “I’ve been away for the week-end, that’s all. What the devil’s all this fuss about?”

  “But your back, Sir Melvin!” protested the doctor. “You look as if you’d had a terrible beating—”

  “I had a slight accident,” snapped Flager. “And what the devil has it got to do with you, sir, anyway? Who the devil sent for all of you?”

  His valet swallowed.

  “I did, Sir Melvin,” he stammered. “When I couldn’t wake you up all day yesterday—and you disappeared from the theatre without a word to anybody, and didn’t come back for two days—”

  “And why the devil shouldn’t I disappear for two days?” barked Flager weakly. “I’ll disappear for a month if I feel like it. Do I pay you to pry into my movements? And can’t I sleep all day if I want to without waking up to find a lot of quacks and policemen infesting my room like vultures? Get out of my house, the whole damned lot of you! Get out, d’you hear?”

  Somebody opened the door, and the congregation drifted out, shaking its heads and muttering, to the accompaniment of continued exhortations in Flager’s rasping voice.

  His secretary was the last to go, and Flager called him back.

  “Get Nyson on the telephone,” he ordered. “I’ll speak to him myself.”

  The secretary hesitated for a moment, and then picked up the bedside telephone and dialled the number dubiously.

  Flager took the instrument as soon as his manager answered.

  “Nyson?” he said. “Get in touch with all our branch depots immediately. From now on, all our drivers will be on a forty-hour week, and they get a twenty per cent rise as from the date we took them on. Engage as many more men as you need to make up the schedules.”

  He heard Nyson’s incredulous gasp over the line.

  “I beg your pardon. Sir Melvin—did you say—”

  “Yes, I did!” snarled Flager, “You heard me a
ll right. And after that, you can find out if that cyclist Johnson killed left any dependents. I want to do something for them…”

  His voice faded away, and the microphone slipped through his fingers. His secretary looked at him quickly, and saw that his eyes were closed and the hemispherical mound of his abdomen was rising and falling rhythmically.

  Sir Melvin Flager was asleep again.

  THE UNCRITICAL PUBLISHER

  Even the strongest men have their weak moments.

  Peter Quentin once wrote a book. Many young men do, but usually with more disastrous results. Moreover he did it without saying a word to anyone, which is perhaps even more uncommon, and even the Saint did not hear about it until after the crime had been committed.

  “Next time you’re thinking of being rude to me,” said Peter Quentin, on that night of revelation, “please remember that you’re talking to a budding novelist whose work has been compared to Dumas, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, and others.”

  Simon Templar choked over his highball.

  “Only pansies bud,” he said severely. “Novelists fester. Of course, it’s possible to be both.”

  “I mean it,” insisted Peter seriously. “I was keeping it quiet until I heard the verdict, and I had a letter from the publishers today.”

  There was no mistaking his earnestness, and the Saint regarded him with affectionate gloom. His vision of the future filled him with overwhelming pessimism. He had seen the fate of other young men—healthy, upright young men who had had a book published.

  He had seen them tread the downhill path of pink shirts, velvet coats, long hair, quill pens, cocktail parties, and beards, until finally they sank into the awful limbos of Bloomsbury and were no longer visible to the naked eye. The prospect of such a doom for anyone like Peter Quentin, who had been with him in so many bigger and better crimes, cast a shadow of great melancholy across his spirits.