Saint on Guard (23 page)

Vaschetti licked his lips again and nodded.

“Sure, sure. It had to be things they didn’t want to send through the mail, or they didn’t want to chance having opened by the wrong person.”

“You knew it was more than that. You knew it was for the Bund, and so it was probably no good for this country.”

“What the hell? I’m an Italian, and I got brothers in Italy. And I never did like the goddam British. This was before the war got here. So what?”

“So you still went on after Pearl Harbor.”

Vaschetti swallowed, and his eyes took another of those fluttering whirls around the room.

“Yeah, I went on. I was in it then, and it didn’t seem to make much difference. Not at first. Besides, I still thought Roosevelt and the Jews were getting us in. I was scared, too. I was scared what the Axis people here might do to me if I tried to quit. But I got a lot more curious.”

“So I started opening these packages. I was taking one to Sche-nectady at the time. I steamed it open, and inside there was four smaller envelopes addressed to people in Schenectady. But they had wax seals on them with swastikas and things, and I was afraid it might show if I tried to open them. So I put them back in the big envelope and delivered it like I was told to. Sometimes I had big parcels to carry, but I didn’t dare monkey with them. I still had to eat, and I didn’t want no trouble either… . But then I got more scared of the FBI and what’d happen to me if I got caught. Now there’s this murder, and I’m through. I been a crook all my life, but I don’t want no federal raps and I don’t want to go to the chair.”

Simon’s sapphire blue eyes studied him dispassionately through a slowly rising veil of smoke. There was nothing much to question or decipher about the psychology of Signor Vaschetti—or not about those facets which held any interest for the Saint. It was really nothing but a microcosmic outline of Signor Mussolini. He was just a small-time goon who had climbed on to a promising bandwagon, and now that the ride ahead looked bumpy he was anxious to climb off.

There could hardly be any doubt that he was telling the truth —he was too plainly preoccupied with the integrity of his own skin to have had much energy to spare on embroidery or invention.

“It’s a fine story,” said the Saint lackadaisically. “But where does it get us with Matson?”

“Like you wrote in the paper, he must have been paid to do some sabotage. He didn’t do it, but he kept the money and took a powder. But you can’t run out on that outfit. That’s why I’m talking to you. They traced him here and gave him the business.”

“That is about how I doped it out,” Simon said with thistledown satire. “But what are you adding besides the applause?”

“I’m telling you, I took one of those letters to Matson in St Louis. That proves he was being paid by the Germans, and that proves you’re right and Kinglake is a horse’s–-“

“But you made this delivery in St Louis. Why are you here in Galveston now?”

Vaschetti sucked on the stub of his cigarette, and dropped it on the floor and trod on it.

“That’s on account of Blatt. I came here from El Paso two weeks ago with a package to give to Blatt at the Blue Goose. I didn’t know Matson was coming here. I didn’t know anything about Matson, except he told me he was working for Quenco. Blatt only paid me up to date and kept me hanging around waiting for some letters he said he’d be sending out. I ran up a pretty big bill at the hotel, and Blatt never came around and I couldn’t reach him. That’s why I flew the kite.”

“Did you meet any of my other friends?”

“I met Weinbach. He’s a fat kraut with a red face and red hai and the palest eyes you ever saw.”

Simon placed the word-picture alongside the description that Port Arthur Jones had given him of the stranger who had been inquiring about him at the Alamo House, and it matched very well. So that was Weinbach.

And that left Maris, whom nobody seemed to have seen at all.

The Saint went on staring at the twitching representative of the Roman Empire.

“You could have told Kinglake this,” he said.

“Yeah. And I’d be here as an accessory to murder, if that sour-pussed bastard didn’t try to make out I was all three murderers in one. No, sir. It’s yours now. Gimme a break, and I’ll write it down and sign it. I’m not going to give any of these dumb cops a free promotion. I’d rather you showed ‘em up instead. Then I’ll feel better about the spot I’m in.”

Simon spun out his smoke in a few moments’ motionless con-templation.

“If it was some time ago that you met Matson in St Louis,” he said, “how come you connected all this up?”

“I remembered.” The other’s eyes shifted craftily. “And I got notes. I didn’t dare play with those inside envelopes, but I been writing down the names of people. And the places I went to in different’ cities. A fellow never knows when some things will come in handy. You can have that list too, if you take care of me, and I don’t care what you do with it. None of those bastards tried to do anything for me when I got in this jam, so the hell with them.”

The Saint barely showed polite interest; yet he felt so close to one of the real things that he had come to Galveston for that he was conscious of rationing his own breathing.

“It’s only fair to tell you, Comrade,” he said very carefully, “that if you give me any information that seems worth it, I shall have to turn it straight over to the FBI.”

Vaschetti’s face was pale in the clearings between his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin, yet in a foolish way he looked almost relieved.

“What you do after you’ve got it is your affair,” he said. “Just gimme a couple hundred dollars and a chance to blow this town, and it’s all yours.”

Simon glanced at the city editor of the Times-Tribune, who was reclining in a junk-pile armchair in the corner with his shabby hat tilted over his eyes, who might have been passed over as asleep except that the eyes were visible and open under the stained straw brim. The eyes touched the Saint briefly and brightly, but nothing else in the composition looked alive. The Saint knew that he was still on his own, according to the agreement.

He said: “What hotel were you working on?”

“The Campeche.”

“How much for?”

“Fifty bucks. And my bill.”

“I’ll take care of all that. You can probably be sprung in a couple of hours. Then I’ll meet you at the Campeche and give you two hundred bucks for that statement and your list of names. Then I’ll give you two hours to start traveling before I break the story. After that, you’re on your own.”

“You made a deal, mister. And as soon as I get that dough, I’ll take my chance on getting out of here or I’ll take what’s coming to me. I don’t want anything except to be all washed up with this.”

His cathartic relief or else his blind faith in his ability to elude the seines of the FBI was either way so pathetic that Simon didn’t have the heart to freeze him down any more. He hitched himself out of the window frame and opened the office door to call back the jailer.

The city editor rocked his antique panama back on his head and tried to keep step beside him as they left.

“I suppose,” he said, “you want me to take care of everything and get the Campeche to withdraw the complaint.”

“I suppose you can do it. You didn’t say anything, so there it is.”

“I can put a man on it. I’ll have him out in a couple of hours, as you said. But don’t ask what happens to me for conspiring to suppress evidence, because I don’t know.”

“We write up the story,” said the Saint, “and we hand King-lake a proof while the presses are rolling. Pie gets the complete dope, and we get the beat. What could be fairer?”

The city editor continued to look dyspeptic and unhappy with all of his face except his bright eyes.

He said: “Where are you going now?”

“Call me at the Alamo House as soon as your stooge has Va-schetti under control,” Simon told him. “I’ve got to take Olga to her treadmill, if she hasn’t run out by this time.”

But Olga Ivanovitch was still sitting in the Saint’s car, to all appearances exactly as he had left her, with her hands folded in her lap and the radio turned on, listening happily to some aspiring and perspiring local comedy program.

She was able to make him feel wrong again, even like that, because she was so naively and incontestably untroubled by any of the things that might have been expected to rasp the edges of deliberate self-control.

“I’m sorry 1 was so long,” he said, with a brusqueness that burred into his voice out of his own bewilderment. “But they’ve started teaching editors two-syllable words lately, and that means it takes them twice as long to talk back to you.”

“I’ve been enjoying myself,” she said; and in her own Slavic and slavish way she was still laughing at him and with him, enjoying the tranquillity of her own uncomplaining acceptance of everything. “Tell me how you talk to editors.”

He told her something absurd; and she sat close against him and laughed gaily aloud as he drove towards the Blue Goose. He was very disconcertingly conscious of the supple firmness of her body as she leaned innocently towards him, and the loveliness of her face against its plaque of yellow braided hair; and he had to make himself remember that she was not so young, and she had been around.

He stopped at the Blue Goose, and opened her door for her without leaving the wheel.

“Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.

He was lighting a cigarette with the dashboard gadget, not looking at her.

“I’ll try to get back before closing time,” he said, “and have a nightcap with you. But I’ve got a small job to do first. I’m a working man—or did you forget?”

She moved, after an instant’s silence and stillness; and then he felt his hand brushed away from his mouth with the cigarette still freshly lighted in it, and her mouth was there instead, and this was like the night before only more so. Her arms were locked around his neck, and her face was the ivory blur in front of him, and he remembered that she had been a surprising warm fragrance to him when she did that before, and this was like that again. He had a split second of thinking that this was it, and he had slipped after all, and he couldn’t reach his gun or his knife with her kissing him; and his ears were awake for the deafening thunderbolts that always rang down the curtain on careers like his. But there was nothing except her kiss, and her low voice saying, docilely like she said everything: “Be careful, tovarich. Be careful.”

“I will be,” he said, and put the gears scrupulously together, and had driven quite a fair way before it coordinated itself to him that she was still the only named name of the ungodly whom he had met and spoken to, and that there was no reason for her to warn him to be careful unless she knew from the other side that he could be in danger.

He drove cautiously back to the Alamo House, collected his key from the desk, glanced around to make sure that Detective Yard had found a comfortable chair, and went up to his room in search of a refreshing pause beside a cool alcoholic drink.

Specifically, the one person he had most in mind was the venerable Mr Peter Dawson, a tireless distiller of bagpipe broth who, as we recollect, should have been represented among the Saint’s furniture by the best part of a bottle of one of his classic consommes. Simon Templar was definitely not expecting, as any added attraction, the body of Mr Port Arthur Jones, trussed up and gagged with strips of adhesive tape, and anchored to his bed with hawsers of sash cord, and looking exactly like a new kind of Ethiopian mummy with large rolling eyes; which is precisely what he was.

8 Simon untied him and stripped off the tape. The bellhop at least was alive, and apparently not even slightly injured, to judge by the ready flow of words that came out of him when his mouth was unwrapped.

“Two men it was, Mistah Templah. One of ‘em was that fat man with red hair that Ah done tole you about. Ah’d been off havin’ mah supper, and when I come back, there he is in the lobby. He’s with another tall thin man, like it might be the other gennelman you was askin’ me about. So Ah was goin’ to call your room so you could come down and have a look at them, but the clerk tole me you just went out. Then these men started to get in the elevator, and Ah knew there was somethin’ wrong, Ah knew they wasn’t stayin’ here, and with you bein’ out Ah just figured they was up to no good. So Ah ran up the stairs, and sho’ ‘nuff there they were just openin’ your doah. So Ah ask them what they was doin’, and they tried to tell me they was friends of yours. ‘You ain’t no friends of Mistah Templah’s’ Ah says, ‘because Mistah Templah done tole me to keep mah eyes open for you.’ Then the fat man pulled out a gun and they hustled me in here and tied me up, and then they started search-in’ the room. Ah don’t think they found what they was huntin’ for, because they was awful mad when they went off. But they sho’ made a mess of your things.”

That statement was somewhat superfluous. Aside from the disorder of the furnishings, which looked as if a cyclone had paused among them, the Saint’s suitcase had been emptied on to the floor and everything in it had been tossed around and even taken apart when there was any conceivable point to it.

“Don’t let it get you down, Po’t Arthur,” Simon said cheerfully. “I know they didn’t get what they wanted, because I didn’t leave anything here that they could possibly want. Unless one of them coveted an electric razor, which it seems he didn’t. Just give me a hand with straightening out the wreckage.’

He began to repack his suitcase while Port Arthur Jones became efficient about replacing the carpet and rearranging the furniture.

He was puzzled about the entire performance, for he certainly had no precious goods or papers with him; and if he had had any he certainly wouldn’t have left them in his room when he went out. The ransacking must have stemmed from his connection with the Matson murder, but it seemed a long way for the ungodly to have gone with the mere hope of picking up some incidental information about him. The only reasonable explanation would be that they suspected that Matson might have given him something, or told him where to find something, before he died. But Matson had only muttered about an ostrich-skin case in a gladstone lining; and they had the gladstone. If they had taken the trouble to collect the gladstone, hadn’t they looked in the lining? Or had they just picked it up along with other things, in the broad hope of coming across what they were searching for?