His eyes raked Graner like rapiers from under lazily drooping lids, skinned him alive and turned his soul inside out. But for the first time he was convinced that Graner was telling the truth as far as he knew it. He couldn’t have invented a new fairy tale like that, on the spur of the moment, that matched so flawlessly with all the circumstances—or if he could, he was an immortal genius to whom the Saint was prepared to erect an altar. Graner couldn’t have been bluffing. It wasn’t humanly plausible. After the treading out he had just undergone, he couldn’t have revived with such supernatural speed. The fight had been licked out of him as effectively as if the Saint had been using his solar plexus for a punching bag ever since they started talking. Later on, yes, given even half an hour in which to pull himself together and iron the knots out of his crafty and vindictive brain—yes, then, by all means, he could be reckoned as crooked and slippery as ever, if not more so. The Saint had no illusions about that. The settling of accounts between them hadn’t even started. But Graner wasn’t in any condition to start faking the audit there and then. Simon was ready to gamble his life on it.
Therefore there must have been some other auxiliary explanation. And there was only one such explanation that came into the Saint’s head. It came flying out of the great voids of space like a comet, crashing resistless through all the narrow mathematical orbits of logic, dazzling him with a sudden blaze of light that exploded like a bomb in the darkness through which he had been trying to grope his way. And yet it was so paralysingly simple that he could have gaped at himself for not having seen it before.
If Graner wasn’t lying, there was only one possible inference. Somebody else was.
3
Simon Templar sat and gasped inaudibly at his own genius. It must have deserved the name, for the intuitive deduction had cut straight through his conscious reasoning. Afterwards his brain had to catch up with it, plodding laboriously over the steps that inspiration had taken in its winged stride. But every step was there, and no deliberate testing he could think of would shake them. The whole solution was one solid and articulated structure, fitting all the foundations of known fact and spanning all the gaps that had puzzled him so irritatingly before.
The cigarette smouldered down between his fingers while his mind raced on from there.
He knew that Aliston and Palermo had taken Hoppy and Joris. It was the one link that made everything else fit together. How it had been done remained to be discovered, though he could make a few guesses. But he knew that that was what had happened. He knew it as surely as he knew that Lauber had got the ticket.
That was how it had all started. The idea must have come into Lauber’s head first, when he awakened in the car on the way back to the house with his brain hazy from the after-effects of Mr Uniatz’s treatment. Lauber would have made the natural efforts of a man recovering consciousness to reconstruct the events which had led up to the black-out. There had been a fight, he would remember, and somebody had hit him over the head. What had happened to the others? Of course, they had already been incapacitated. They had been fighting the intruders while he was still dealing with Joris…He had been searching Joris’s pockets, looking for a ticket…He’d found the ticket, hadn’t he?…Well, what else had happened? The others would tell him what had happened, and Lauber would have pieced the fragmentary accounts together. But he’d got the ticket, hadn’t he? He would have felt in his pocket. Yes, it was there…And at that moment the brilliant idea had probably dawned on him. He’d got the ticket, but none of the others knew he’d got it. They’d been too busy fighting. And the fight had ended with the intruders getting away with Joris and Christine. Why shouldn’t they have got away with the ticket as well? The argument must have carried Lauber away on the instant with its surpassing simplicity. All he had to do was to let the others go on believing that Joris still had the ticket—and when his head had stopped aching enough for him to pick a suitable opportunity, he, Lauber, could slide off into the wide world with two million dollars that he didn’t have to share with anybody.
It was all so transparent that the Saint could analyse Lauber’s mental processes as accurately as if they had been printed on the wall in front of his eyes. And it was proved—proved up to the hilt by the announcement he had heard Lauber making which had almost knocked him off his feet as he entered Graner’s house the night before.
Only that the others hadn’t been quite so credulous as Lauber had expected. Lauber’s statement had clearly come in the middle of an argument in which he was being accused of double-crossing, and it was probably the same argument that had gone on far into the night. In the end, Lauber must somehow have managed to get himself acquitted for the time being, otherwise it was doubtful whether he would have been taking breakfast. Almost certainly he would have been searched, but certainly he would have contrived to hide the ticket by that time, which would have gone some way towards blocking a definite verdict against him. So for a while he had at least managed to get himself left alone, although his conscience might be making him feel less confident about choosing a moment for his getaway than he had anticipated.
But the idea he had started hadn’t finished there. The seed must have taken root in either Palermo’s or Aliston’s imagination, and on the way down to the town that morning one of them would have made a proposition. If there was going to be any double-crossing, they might as well look after themselves. Joris was still a key man in the situation, wherever the lottery ticket was. If they found him, why should they be in a hurry to share him out before they knew how the rest of the deal was going? There was still time to locate the ticket, whether or not they had been wrong about Lauber—and in any case a fifty-fifty division was twice as good as a four-way split…
The Saint’s glow of delight deepened as the colours and details developed in the picture. When he had inwardly labelled the party a thieves’ picnic a few moments ago he hadn’t realised what a perfect summary of the situation it was.
“In that case, I suppose Joris and his pal have gone off to cash the ticket,” he said, principally because he felt that he had to say something after all that time.
“If they have done that, they will have been intercepted,” answered Graner. “I have had one of my servants posted outside the shop where the ticket was bought ever since it opened this morning. The ticket cannot be cashed anywhere else.”
And the gorgeous complications of the tangle went on tracing their fantastic convolutions in the Saint’s mind.
Lauber knew where the ticket was, but he didn’t know what had happened to Joris and Christine, and he knew that for the present it certainly wasn’t safe for him to try and cash it. Palermo and Aliston knew where Joris was, but they didn’t know what had happened to the ticket or to Christine. Graner knew where Christine was, and he might hope to find something out from her, but he didn’t know yet what had happened to Joris and the ticket. Every one of them held some of the cards, and every one of them was completely in the dark about the others. And presumably every one of them was prepared to cut anybody else’s throat to fill his own hand or keep what he already held. The intrusion of that two-million-dollar scrap of paper had blown the esprit de corps of the gang to smithereens and opened up the way for what must have been one of the wildest and most unscrupulous free-for-all, dog-eat-dog dissensions that the history of crime could ever have known…
“Your servant doesn’t know what this pal of Joris’s looks like,” Simon pointed out. “Or does he?”
Graner’s slit of a mouth almost smiled.
“He would scarcely need to. If anyone presented that ticket for payment, the whole street would know about it.”
Not, Simon was reflecting, that he had too much to crow about himself. He held tantalising portions of all the cards, and didn’t have a single complete one to himself. He knew that Lauber had got the ticket, but he didn’t know where; he knew that Palermo and Aliston had got Joris and Hoppy, but he didn’t know what they had done with them; he knew that Christin
e was there beside him, but he knew that Graner was just as much there. And within something like the next ten seconds he had got to plan out a definite campaign sequence that would take in all those points.
“Joris won’t be there, and you know it,” said Christine. “Because he hasn’t got the ticket.”
“You mean you have it?” Graner said slowly.
“Neither of us has got it, I told you. It was st—”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted the Saint. “Let’s take this in order. What did happen last night?”
She looked at him sullenly.
“You ought to know.”
“Not me, darling,” said the Saint easily. “I’m a new recruit. I wasn’t in that party.”
“Who were these other two men who interfered?” said Graner.
She didn’t answer at once, and Graner turned to the Saint.
“We’re wasting time here,” he snapped. “The car’s outside—we had better take her back to the house at once. When we get there we shall be able to make her answer questions.”
“Try and take me there,” she said.
She had had time to recover from her first terror, and the hard jaunty pose of which Simon had seen a glimpse the night before was beginning to cover her again. It was as if a brittle shell formed over her that shut out all the other side of her nature which he had seen when she wept over Joris. She seemed to gather herself together with an effort to shake off the spell of Graner’s pitiless beady eyes. Suddenly she took a step away from the wall, and Graner’s hand shot out and caught her wrist.
“If you try to stop me,” she said steadily, “I’ll make enough noise to bring everyone in the hotel up here.”
Graner glanced at the Saint. Simon knew exactly what the glance was intended to convey. He had demonstrated his resourcefulness in a similar situation before, and it was his cue to repeat the performance. But just as he had known what he was doing then, he knew what he was doing now.
He got up off the bed, but it was Graner’s wrist that he took hold of, closing his fingers on it in a ring of steel that numbed the nerves and sinews. He laid the flat of his hand on Graner’s face and pushed him back against the door.
“You mind your own business, Reuben,” he said paternally.
He had turned round with the movement so that his back was towards Christine, and as he spoke his left eyelid drooped in a broad wink.
“And I’ll have your gun—in case you’re still feeling nasty,” he added.
He took the weapon out of Graner’s pocket and transferred it to his own, and as he did so he glared at him warningly and winked again. Graner stared back at him without a change in the venomous glitter of his eyes, but the Saint took no notice. He locked the door and took out the key and gave it to Christine.
“Listen,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. This punk won’t lay a hand on you again while I’m around. We’ll peel him off the door and let you out any time you want to go. But I wish you’d stop and talk for a few minutes more. I’m just working round to a proposition that might interest you.”
She hesitated. The Saint’s back was towards Graner now, and he gave Christine the same encouraging wink and pushed her gently towards the bed.
“Sit down and have a drink,” he said. “You look as if you needed one. And just let me talk for three minutes. You can still scream your head off if anyone tries to stop you going out after that.”
“You can’t say anything that I want to listen to.”
“Don’t be too sure, darling. I have beautiful ideas sometimes.”
He left her and went across the room to rummage in one of his suitcases. It yielded a bottle of whiskey—and something which no one else saw him pick up.
“It’s like this,” said the Saint, as he poured out three glasses. “You say you’ve lost your lottery ticket. Well, things like that do happen. People lose jewelry, and so forth. They don’t often lose two million bucks’ worth at one go, but that doesn’t alter the general principle. When they lose something and they want it back, they mostly offer a reward.”
“They don’t offer a reward to the thieves who stole it.”
“Even that has been known to happen.”
The Saint squirted soda into the glasses and picked up two of them. He carried one of them over to Graner, and as he gave it to him he winked again. He handed the other to Christine. Then he went back to the table and picked up his own.
“In any case,” he resumed, “the question doesn’t arise. I didn’t steal your ticket—if I’d got it, I shouldn’t be messing around here. Surely you’re not going to say that if I got it back for you I shouldn’t be entitled to a commission?”
She took another drink from her glass, watching him rather perplexedly.
“Now if you’ve been listening to my recent chat with Reuben,” Simon went on, “you’ll have gathered that he hasn’t been playing ball with me. So if he’s ready to double-cross me, I’m quite ready to do some double-crossing on my own. From what I’ve made out, there are Reuben and three other guys up at the house waiting for a split in this ticket. Then there are a couple more in Madrid who’ll probably expect to be cut in. And at least a couple of minor thugs who may be worth one share between them. So the best I can hope for is to come in for an eighth, even if they don’t try to gyp me out of that. And you don’t get anything.”
He moved a little towards her. She drank again, and leaned her head back against the end of the bed. Once or twice her eyes closed, and she seemed to make an effort to open them.
“You’re a nice kid, Christine, and I wouldn’t mind doing something for you—if it doesn’t cost me anything. From what I hear, there are only three other people in your outfit: Joris and his two pals. Well, if you cut me in there, including yourself, I’d be due for a fifth, which looks a whole lot better to me. If that looks like a proposition to you, you just say the word and I’ll wring this bum Graner’s neck…”
The girl’s head slid suddenly sideways, and Simon caught the glass from her hand before it fell.
He put it on the table and eased her gently down until she was lying on the bed. She lay there limp and relaxed, breathing evenly and peacefully, with her eyes closed, as if she were in a natural sleep. Simon studied her for a few moments, and then he turned round to Graner with a flash of triumph in his eyes.
“What you’ve been needing in your outfit all along, Reuben,” he said kindly, “is a little less melodrama and a lot more of my brains.”
CHAPTER FIVE:
HOW REUBEN GRANER TOOK BACK HIS GUN AND A TAXI DRIVER WAS UNCONVINCED
1
Reuben Graner stepped delicately up to the bed and gazed down at the girl for a while without expression, tapping his mouth with the chased gold knob of his cane.
Presently he looked at the Saint. “Yes, that was good,” he said complacently. “Otherwise we might have had some trouble.”
He reached over for the telephone.
“What d’you think you’re doing now?” asked the Saint.
“Sending for the others to come down and fetch her.”
Simon stretched out a long arm and put his finger on the hook.
“Ixnay,” he said succinctly. “D’you still want to turn the hotel upside down, or are you just daft?”
“There will be no excitement,” said Graner. “When I sent Palermo and Aliston down this morning, they had two large trunks to carry the luggage they expected to bring back. They can bring one of the trunks down again. You have told the hotel you are leaving, and one extra trunk will not disturb them unduly.”
So that was how it had been done, Simon reflected. He had been wondering about that point—it was hardly conceivable that two unconscious men could have been dragged out of the Hotel Orotava into the main square of Santa Cruz in broad daylight without starting a train of gossip that Palermo and Aliston would have been the last to desire. He didn’t know about Joris, but he would have bet that Hoppy Uniatz would never have gone
out on his own feet. Graner’s explanation had cleared up another minor mystery.
The Saint kept his satisfaction to himself. He took the telephone out of Graner’s hand and hung it up again.
“As I was saying,” he remarked, “you still need a lot more of my brains.”
Graner’s stony eyes settled on his face.
“Why?”
“What d’you think would happen if you took her back to the house?”
“She would be persuaded to tell us what she knew.”
“That’s what you think.”
“I can assure you there would be no question about that,” Graner said significantly.
Simon’s gaze dissected him contemptuously.
“If I’m right about what you’re thinking,” he said, “you can forget it again. That’s something I don’t stand for. But in any case you’re talking like a fool as well as a louse. Did you ever invent any way of proving whether anyone was telling the truth when they were being what you call persuaded?”
“It would be proved eventually.”
“Now you’re talking like a spick, on top of everything else. Why wait for ‘eventually’—whenever that is? Hasn’t it occurred to you that Joris wouldn’t have ditched his daughter here? If there’s anything in this party that looks certain to me, it’s that Joris will get in touch with her again, sooner or later. Maybe he’d have done it already if he hadn’t seen your car outside.”
Graner’s face hardened with concentration. The thoughts that were going on under the mask were unreadable, but the Saint didn’t need to read them. He could make a pretty good guess about Graner’s next reaction, and he was perfectly right.
“There is something in what you say. Perhaps it would be better to leave her here for the present. I will tell Palermo to come down and watch her, and we can go back to the house.”
The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 10