“There is nothing more to say,” Graner rapped at him. “We shall take the young lady back with us—that is all.”
“Why?”
“I thought we settled that last night,” answered Graner stonily. “While you’re working for me you will obey all my orders—without argument.”
The Saint smiled at him.
“And suppose I don’t?”
Graner’s hand came out of his pocket.
Simon gazed at the gun with blue eyes full of mockery. He flicked his lighter and held the flame placidly under the end of his cigarette.
“I thought we’d arranged all that,” he murmured. “But if you want to go over it again I suppose I can’t stop you.” He sauntered over to the bed, where he lay down and settled himself comfortably. “If I fix myself like this I shan’t hurt myself when I fall down,” he explained. “Oh, and there’s just one other thing. Before you let off that little popgun and fetch all the hotel in, you must tell me the name of your tailor. I couldn’t bear to die without knowing that.”
Graner stared down at him without expression.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I was born that way,” said the Saint regretfully.
“If you intend to go on like this,” Graner said curtly, “we had better consider our arrangement at an end.”
The Saint closed his eyes.
“Okay, Reuben. But leave the damsel here when you go out. I could use her.”
Graner put the gun back in his pocket. The yellow cane twirled between his fingers for a few seconds’ deathly silence. His eyes glistened like moist marbles behind the lenses of his spectacles.
“I am not accustomed to answering impertinent questions,” he said grittily, “but on this occasion I will make an exception to save unnecessary trouble. I told you last night that your predecessor had been foolish. I might have explained that the others had been unsuccessful in bringing him back. He still has some property of ours, and we are still looking for him. This girl is his daughter, and she may help us to find him. That is the whole explanation.”
“Yeah?” drawled the Saint. “And how much is this ticket worth?”
A new silence blanketed the room, so complete that with his hands clasped behind his head the Saint could hear the ticking of his watch, at the same time as he could hear the girl breathing and the faint rustle of Graner’s fingers sliding over his cane. Simon lay still and let the silence spread itself around and have its fun. He might have been asleep.
“What ticket?”
Graner’s voice jarred gratingly into the quiet, and Simon opened one eye at him.
“I don’t know. But you mentioned it just now.”
“That is quite a different matter. It really has nothing to do with what I was telling you.”
“It seemed to be pretty important when Lauber was talking about it last night!”
The silence fell back again, almost substantial in its intenseness, as though the room were filled with some deadening material through which a few slight and insignificant sounds penetrated from a great distance. And then, as if to give the lie to the illusion, it was horribly shattered—not by any noise from inside the room, but by the ear-piercing shriek of the locomotive which runs through Santa Cruz between the quarries and the mole, dragging rocks to a breakwater that never gets any nearer to completion.
“In a way that is true.” Graner’s delayed response cut into a momentary hiatus in the din. “When he ran away, Joris also took with him a lottery ticket which we had all subscribed to buy—”
“That’s a lie!”
Christine flung the accusation at him while he was still speaking, and Graner’s gaze turned to her with an icy malignance.
“My dear girl—”
The locomotive, coming nearer, let out another eldritch screech which might have come from a soul in torment that was being tormented conveniently close to a powerful microphone. The Saint covered his ears.
Graner was saying, “The ticket won quite a small prize, but naturally we had no wish to lose it—”
“He’s lying—”
“My dear Christine, I should advise you to be more careful of your tongue—”
“He’s lying, he’s lying!” The girl was shaking Simon’s shoulder. “You mustn’t believe him. It won the first prize—it won fifteen million pesetas—”
The engine seemed to be almost under the window, and the engineer, warming to his work, was letting out a series of toots with scarcely a second between them. If the makers of the whistle had set out to create a synthetic reproduction of the nerve racking squeak of a knife blade on a plate amplified fifty thousand times, they couldn’t have succeeded more brilliantly. It was a screaming, torturing, agonising, indescribably fiendish cacophony that seemed to tear the flesh and drive stabbing needles through the eardrums. Perhaps it was just loud enough to attract the attention of a Canary Islander and induce him to move out of the way.
“Don’t all talk at once,” said the Saint. “I can’t hear the music.”
“He’s lying!” Christine’s voice was broken and incoherent. “Oh God—can’t you see it? He’d lie to anybody!”
The Saint opened both eyes.
“Are you lying, Graner?” he asked quietly.
“The exact amount of the prize isn’t material—”
“In other words, you are lying.”
Graner licked his lips.
“Certainly not. Why should I be? I should think it was more obvious that this girl is lying to try and win your sympathy.”
Simon sat up. The locomotive was puffing away down the mole, its ear-splitting squeals growing mercifully fainter as they receded into the distance.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I heard on the boat coming down here that the Christmas lottery had been won in Tenerife, and when I was knocking about the town yesterday somebody told me that no one had been able to find out who had got it. That makes Christine’s story sound more likely than yours—not to mention that I can’t see why everybody should be in such a stew about this ticket if it wasn’t worth much. In this room, about the first thing you wanted to ask her was where the ticket was. You didn’t seem half so excited about the stones that this predecessor of mine is supposed to have knocked off. Lauber wasn’t worried about them, either—all he was talking about last night was the ticket. And the others must have been pretty worked up about it, too, or he wouldn’t have been talking about it to them in that tone of voice. In fact, you want to tell me that this ticket that everybody’s turning handsprings about is really just chicken feed. Which just smells like good ripe sausage to me. So that makes you a part of a liar, anyway.”
Graner stared at him malevolently, but there was no answer that he could make. The Saint’s relentless logic had nailed him up in a corner from which there simply wasn’t a back exit. And Simon Templar knew it.
“Well?”
The Saint’s crisp monosyllable drove in another nail that made Graner’s head jerk back.
“I may have minimised the value of the ticket a little—”
“Or in plain language, you’re just a god-damn liar! So now we know where we are. That’s the first point…Point two: this predecessor of mine—what did you call him—Joris?—this guy Joris has got the ticket. I can believe that, from the way all of you have been behaving. And it doesn’t seem to matter very much to me who it originally belonged to. Having once been pinched, it becomes anybody’s boodle, because somebody’s got to pinch it back before they can get any profit out of it. That’s what you and your precious gang were trying to do. And you were trying to cut me out!”
2
Graner’s hand went to his breast pocket and took out his perfumed handkerchief.
“You didn’t contribute to buying the ticket.”
“I haven’t seen any proof yet that you did, either,” retorted the Saint. “But I’ve told you that that isn’t the point. That ticket is out on the loose now, and you’d have a job to prove th
at it didn’t belong to anybody who’d got it. The point is that you and your boys are looking for it, and you wanted to save my share.”
“It has no connection with your work.”
“Nor has opening safes. But Felson told me I came in for a share of everything you did, and I want to know why you were being so smart and cagey about this.”
It was a shot in the dark that Simon had to take, although it was a fairly safe one. And it didn’t make Graner blink.
“This is something that happened before you joined us,” he said.
“But getting hold of the ticket again isn’t,” said the Saint. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
Graner went up and down on his toes. The vicious lines around his mouth had deepened, and if his eyes had possessed any lethal power the Saint would have been burned to a cinder by that time.
“In due course,” he said, “the subject would probably have been mentioned—”
“Oh, Reuben darling!”
Graner made a brusque gesture.
“It was my idea to do so,” he said, “but the others objected.”
“I thought all your orders had to be obeyed without question.”
“This was a matter of policy, not of organisation.”
“So you let them talk you round.”
“I had to admit that there seemed to be justice in their arguments—”
“I’ll bet that wasn’t difficult for you.” The Saint rolled over on his elbow to douse his cigarette in an ash tray, and then his relentless blue eyes went back to the other’s face. “So once again we know where we stand. You’ve already given up pretending you aren’t a liar. Now you’re going to give up pretending you aren’t a cheap double-crossing skunk as well.”
A dark flush appeared in Graner’s sunken cheeks. He took a step towards the bed, and the stick moved in his hand.
Simon watched him without batting an eyelid.
“If you hit me again,” he said gently, “I can assure you it’ll hurt you more than it hurts me.”
Their stares crossed like swords. Graner’s face was twisted with rage, but the Saint was smiling. It was only the shadow of a smile, but it matched the reckless derision in his eyes.
It did something more. It gave vent to the chortle of delirious ecstasy that was swelling up inside him until his ribs ached with the strain of keeping it under control. He had to use half his muscles to keep himself from laughing in Graner’s face. The tables had been turned in a way that thousands of spiritualists would have given their back teeth to achieve, if they had any back teeth. The Saint had bluffed on an empty hand against an opponent who, he knew, held at least three aces, and he was scooping the kitty away from under Graner’s long nose. In fifteen or twenty minutes he had slammed Reuben Graner down from dominating the situation to trying feebly to make excuses. The unpredictable suddenness and violence of his attack had swept the other off his feet in the first exchanges, and since then the Saint hadn’t let up for an instant. His voice went on, stabbing in blow after blow with the crackling precision of a machine gun, never giving Graner a second’s pause in which to recover his wind.
“You thought you saw your chance to cut me out of my share of fifteen million pesetas, and you grabbed at it. That’s the truth, isn’t it? And that’s my introduction to the privileges of joining up with your lousy outfit. I’m supposed to take that home with me and put it in the bank. You couldn’t have thought up anything better, Reuben. So next time it’s a matter of splitting up any boodle I’ll just have to tell myself I don’t have to worry. Reuben’s a good guy. He’s always been a square shooter. He proved it the first day I was with him. I don’t have anything more to worry about. Like hell I don’t!”
The flush washed itself slowly out of Graner’s cheeks and left them pasty. The hand with the stick in it sank down to his side, and his weight settled down on his heels.
He cleared his throat.
“You may have some justification,” he said thickly. “But I’ve told you—I protested about it, and I was overruled. The others have been with me for a good many years, and naturally they have some influence—”
“That’s still a lie,” said the Saint dispassionately. “But we’ve already dealt with that. The question you’ve got to answer is—where do we go from here?”
“Naturally I shall take it up with the others as soon as we get back to the house—”
“And naturally you’ll cook up a few more fairy tales as soon as you get the chance. Let’s have some more truth before you lose the habit again. Where is this Joris guy?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, what are your ideas?”
“I fail to see—”
“Give your gig lamps a wipe over. Are we through or are we not?”
Graner’s stick rattled on the floor, beating a nervous tattoo on the tiles.
“I am beginning to think that that would be the best solution.”
“Just as you like.” The Saint stood up. “I’ve told you what I think about that. The door’s behind you, and nobody’s holding you back. But this girl stays here. If there’s a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket knocking around Santa Cruz, and she’s one of the dues, I’ll keep her. I saw her first, anyway…And you can take that hand out of your pocket again. If you emptied two of those little toys into me I’d still wring your skinny neck before I went out.”
Graner’s finger was itching on the trigger, and Simon Templar had no illusions about it. But his poise didn’t waver by so much as a fraction of an inch. He simply stood there, his hands on his hips and his shoulders lined wide and sinewy against the murky sky outside the window, looking down at Graner with careless, unimpressed blue eyes and that shadow of a sardonic smile on his lips. He knew exactly the strength of the new hand he had dealt himself, and he was ready to take a few chances to make it better while the cards were running his way.
“I don’t want to do anything like that,” Graner said at last. “If you are prepared to let me put this misunderstanding right—”
“I see.” Simon’s answer came back like a gunshot. “So you’ve got some good reason for wanting to keep me if you can.”
“If you think you are indispensable—”
“If I wasn’t something like that, why didn’t you shoot me ten minutes ago?”
“Naturally I want you, if it can he arranged. That is why you were sent for.”
“And why was that so urgent?”
The glimpse of an outlet did just what the Saint meant it to do. It made Graner grab for it like a fish going for a baited hook.
“That is easier to answer. As you know, Felson and another of my men, Holby, are in Madrid on business. The wife of the American ambassador there has some jewels which we have been interested in for some time. If everything goes according to plan, my men will be arriving here with them on Sunday, when, of course, we shall need you.”
The Saint drew a deep silent breath. So a few more things were being explained. It was like scratching bits of gold out of a rock seam with a toothpick, but all the time he was getting somewhere. He thought about that for a moment, and stopped thinking again. The thoughts he had made him feel a trifle light-headed. First a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket. Then Graner’s amazing collection of stolen jewels. Then the jewels of the wife of the American ambassador in Madrid, just for good measure—although the last he had seen of Messrs Felson and Holby made their arrival as per schedule seem rather less probable than Graner fondly believed. But the sum total of what he was adding up began to make it seem as if he had butted into a thieves’ picnic that made Ali Baba and his forty stooges look like so many scroungers in abandoned ash cans.
He lighted another cigarette and sat down again.
“That’s a start, anyway,” he murmured. “Let’s keep the ball rolling. Give me the rest of the dope about this guy Joris and the lottery ticket—and give it me straight this time.”
Graner laid his cane down on the dressing table and took out his cigar ca
se. He fitted a fresh cigar into his amber holder. Simon knew that he was playing for a breathing spell, weighing one thing against another, and this time he let Graner work it out his own way. He knew that it could have only one result.
“If it will help to rectify your unfortunate impression of our methods,” Graner said, “it may be best to be candid with you. I do not know where Joris is. He escaped from the house last night, taking his daughter and the lottery ticket. We discovered their absence soon afterwards, and Lauber and Palermo and Aliston went after them to bring them back. They would probably have been able to do this if some confederates of Joris, whom we knew nothing about, had not arrived in the nick of time and interfered. Joris and his accomplices escaped, but Palermo took a note of the car in which they went off, which was quite conspicuous. As soon as they reported to me, I sent my chauffeur, Manoel, to search Santa Cruz for the car. He found it outside this hotel, but he had a breakdown on his way back and did not arrive until after you had gone to bed. It was then too late to do anything, but first thing this morning I sent Palermo and Aliston down here to do what they could. They telephoned me that they had discovered that Joris and some other man, probably this confederate of his, had stayed at the hotel the night before, but they had left very early in the morning without leaving any address. That is as much as any of us know.”
Simon leaned back and trickled puffs of smoke towards the ceiling, sorting the story out in his mind. Certainly it explained the car which had arrived at the house when he was undressing. Also it explained the absence of Aliston and Palermo at breakfast time. And in a way it explained what he had heard of Graner’s telephone conversation at breakfast, as well as the interruption that had intervened in time to save the Saint from having to demonstrate his skill as a diamond cutter, and Graner’s agitation when he returned to the workroom. All of those things fitted in very nicely and neatly.
But at the same time it let loose a cataract of new questions. It didn’t explain why Graner’s gang hadn’t found Hoppy and Joris, once they had got that far. It didn’t explain why Hoppy Uniatz hadn’t answered the telephone a little more than half an hour ago. It reaped one crop of enigmas, and left whole rows of freshly germinating riddles sprouting up behind it that made the Saint feel as if his universe had been turned upside down.
The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 9