Saint on Guard (26 page)

“Tell ‘em I spilled my guts. Tell ‘em I gave you the whole story, ich you can’t repeat because it’s temporarily a war secret and the FBI is taking over anyhow; but of course you knew all about it all the time. Tell ‘ern I’m just an ambitious amateur trying to butt into something that’s too big for him: you scared the day-lights out of me, which is all you really wanted to do. Tell ‘em I folded up like a flower when I tried to sell you my line and you really got tough. So I quit; and you were big-hearted and let me highhtail out of here. Make me into any kind of a jerk that suits you, because I don’t want the other kind of publicity and you can get credit for the pinch anyway.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” Kinglake wanted to know, rather petulantly. “‘Because I didn’t know anything about you, or your political problems. Which were somewhat involved, as it turns out.” The Saint was very calmly candid. “After that, I knew even less about your team. I mean guys like Yard and Callahan. This is a small town, as big towns go, and it wouldn’t take long for one man’s secret to become everybody’s rumor. You know how it is. I might not have gotten very far that way.”

Kinglake dragged another of his foul stogies out of his vest pocket, glared at it pessimistically, and finally bit off the end as if he had nerved himself to take a bite of a rotten apple. His concluding expression conveyed the notion that he had.

“And I always knew you for a crook,” he said disconsolately.

The Saint’s smile was almost nostalgically dreamy.

“I always was, in a technical sort of way,” he said softly. “And I may be again. But there’s a war on; and some odd people can find a use for some even odder people… . For that matter, there was a time when I thought you might be a crooked cop, which can be worse.”

“I guess you know how that is, too,” Kinglake said, sourly but sufficiently. “You sounded as if you did.”

“I think that’s all been said,” Simon replied temperately. “We’re just playing a new set of rules. For that matter, if I’d been playing some of my old rules, I think I could have found a way to pull a fast one on you, with or without the audience, and taken that heater away from you, and made time out of here no matter what you were threatening. I’ve done it before. I just thought this was the best way tonight.”

The Lieutenant glanced guiltily at his half forgotten gun, and stuffed it back into his hip holster.

“Well?” He repeated the word without any of the aggressive implications that he had thrown into it the last time. “Can you feed me any of this story that I’m supposed to have known all along, or should I just go on clamming up because I don’t know?”

Simon deliberately reduced his cigarette by the length of two measured inhalations. In between them, he measured the crestfallen Lieutenant once more for luck. After that he had no more hesitation.

If he hadn’t been able to judge men down to the last things that made them tick, he wouldn’t have been what he was or where he was at that instant. He could be wrong often and anywhere, incidentally, but not in the fundamentals of situation and character.

He said quite casually then, as it seemed to him after his decisior was made: “It’s just one of those stories …”

He swung a leg over the arm of his chair, pillowed his chin or his knee, and went on through a drift of smoke when he was ready.

“I’ve got to admit that the theory I set up in the Times-Tribune didn’t just spill out of my deductive genius. It was almost ancient history to me. That’s what brought me to Galveston and into your hair. The only coincidence I wasn’t expecting, and which I didn’t even get on to for some time afterwards, was that the body I nearly ran over out there in the marshes would turn out to be Henry Stephen Matson—the guy I came here to find.”

“What did you want him for?”

“Because he was a saboteur. He worked in two or three war plants where acts of sabotage occurred, although he was never suspected. No gigantic jobs, but good serious sabotage just the same. The FBI found that out when they checked back on him. But the way they got on to him was frankly one of those weird accidents that are always waiting to trip up the most careful villains. He had a bad habit of going out and leaving the lights on in his room. About the umpteenth time his landlady had gone up and turned them out, she thought of leaving a note for him about it. But she didn’t have a pencil with her, and she didn’t see one lying around. So she rummaged about a bit, and found an Eversharp in one of his drawers. She started to write, and then the lead broke. She tried to produce another one, and nothing happened. So she started fiddling with it and unscrewing things, and suddenly the pencil came apart and a lot of stuff fell out of it that certainly couldn’t have been the inner workings of an Ever-sharp. She was a bright woman. She managed to put it together again, without blowing herself up, and put it back where she found it and went out and told the FBI—of course, she knew that Matson was working for a defense plant. But it’s a strictly incredible story, and exactly the sort of thing that’s always happening.”

“One of these days it’ll probably happen to you,” Kinglake said; but his stern features relaxed in the nearest approximation to a smile that they were capable of.

The Saint grinned.

“It has,” he said… . “Anyway, Matson had an FBI man working next to him from then on, so he never had a chance to pull anything.”

“Why wasn’t he arrested?”

“Because if he’d done other jobs in other places, there was a good chance that he had contacts with a general sabotage organisation, and that’s what we’ve been trying to get on to for a long time. That’s why I went to St Louis. But before I arrived there, he’d scrammed. I don’t think he knew he was being watched. But Quenco was much tougher than anything he’d tackled before. You don’t have any minor sabotage in an explosives factory. You just have a loud noise and a large hole in the ground. I think Matson got cold feet and called it a day. But he wasn’t a very clever fugitive. I’m not surprised that the mob caught up with him so quickly. He left a trail that a wooden Indian could have followed. I traced him to Baton Rouge in double time, and when I was there I heard from Washington that he’d applied for a passport and given his address as the Ascot Hotel in Galveston. He was afraid that his goose was cooked. It was, too—to a crisp.”

“You were figuring on getting into his confidence and finding out what he knew.”

“Maybe something like that. If I could have done it. If not, I’d have tried whatever I had to—even to the extent of roasting him myself. Only I’d have done it more slowly. I thought he might have some informative notes written down. A guy like that would be liable to do that sort of thing, just for insurance. Like Vaschetti. … I want that ostrich-skin case that was in his gladstone lining; and I want Vaschetti’s diary of his trips and meetings. With those two items, we may be able to clean up prac-t ically the whole sabotage system from coast to coast.”

“What do you mean by ‘we’?” Kinglake asked curiously. “I’ve heard of this Imperative number; but is it a branch of the FBI?”

Simon shook his head.

“It’s something much bigger. But don’t ask me, and don’t ask anyone else. And don’t remember that I ever mentioned it.”

Kinglake looked at the chewed end of his stogie.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “that I had Matson figured as an ordinary gang killing, and that’s why I would have let it ride. If I’d known it was anything like this, nobody could have made me lay off.”

The Saint nodded.

“I guessed that. That’s why I’ve talked to you. Now we’ve spent enough time for you to be able to put over your story; and I’ve got to be moving.”

“You know where you’re going?”

“Yes.” Simon stood up and crushed out his cigarette. “You may hear from me again tonight.”

The Lieutenant held out his hand and said: “Good luck.”

Thanks,” said the Saint, and went out.

Rowden and Yard and the Times-Tribune, standing in a little huddle down the corridor, turned and fanned out to stare at him as he strolled towards them. Then the Lieutenant’s voice came from the doorway behind him.

“Mr Templar is leaving. Now you can all come back here.”

“You know,” Simon said earnestly, to Detective Yard, “I do wish your first name was Scotland.”

He sauntered on, leaving his favorite plainclothes man gawp-ing after him like a punch-drunk St Bernard whose succored victim has refused to take a drink out of its keg.

Kinglake’s trephining eyes reamed the blank questioning faces of his returned entr’acteurs. He clamped his teeth defiantly into his stogie, and drew a deep breath. In that breath, every wisp of the convenient alibi that Simon Templar had suggested was swept away, and he was standing solidly on a decision of his own.

“If you want to know what we were talking about,” he clipped out, “Templar was giving me a stall, and I pretended to fall for it. Now I’m going to see where he takes me. Yard, you can take charge here. I’m going to follow the Saint myself, and I’m going to bust this whole case if it takes me till Christmas.”

“But Lieutenant,” protested the dumbfounded Yard, “what about the Chief? What about …”

“The Chief,” Kinglake said shortly, “and the Commissioner, and the Sheriff, and everybody behind them, can–-“

He did not say that they could jump in the lake, or go climb a tree, or perform any of the more conventional immolations. It is indeed highly doubtful whether they could have done what the Lieutenant said they could do. But Kinglake was not very concerned just then with literal accuracy. He had an objective of his own which mattered a lot more to him, and he left his extraordinary statement fluttering forgotten in the air behind him as he stalked out.

Simon Templar was also dominated by o.ne single idea. The murder of Matson had been unfortunate, but he could exonerate himself from it. The murder of Vaschetti had been still more unfortunate, but the excuses he could make for himself for that were flimsy gauze before his own ruthless self-criticism. But his reaction to that had already reversed itself into a positive driving force that would go on until the skies fell apart—or he did. For the ungodly to have murdered two men almost under his nose and within split seconds of giving him the precious information that he had to get was an insolence and an effrontery that he was going to make them wish they had never achieved. The Saint was angry now in a reckless cold savage way, not as he had been when he first went from Police Headquarters to the offices of the Times-Tribune, but in a way that could only be soothed out in blood.

And now he thought he knew where he was going to find the blood that night.

A taxi took him to the Blue Goose; but this time he didn’t need the driver to vouch for him. The doorkeeper remembered him, and let him in at once. He walked through the blue melodious dimness towards the bar, loose-limbed and altogether at his ease; yet there were filaments stirring through all the length of him that kept no touch at all with that lazily debonair demeanor. He caught sight of Olga Ivanovitch sitting at a table with another girl and two obvious wholesale bottle-cap salesmen, but he only gave her a casual wave and went on to find a stool at the bar. He knew she would join him, and he waited good-humoredly while the brawny blond bartender worked over complicated mixtures for a complicated quartet at the other end of the counter.

Then she was beside him; and he knew it by the perfume she used and the cool satin of he’r hand before he looked at her.

“I’m glad you got here,” she said. “Did you get your job done?”

She was exactly the same, lovely and docile, as if she was only glad of him and wanting to be glad for him; as if death had never struck near her or walked with the men she knew.

Simon made a movement of his head that seemed to answer the question unless one stopped to wonder whether it meant yes or no. He went on before that could happen: “I nearly didn’t come here. What I’d really hoped to do was curl up at home with a good book from the circulating library.”

“What was the book?”

“Just a piece of some guy’s autobiography. However, when I went to pick it up, it was gone. A man named Nick Vaschetti had it earlier in the evening. He hadn’t finished with it—but he has now. I suppose you wouldn’t know where it is?”

Her eyes were still pools of emerald in the mask of her face.

“Why do you say that?” She seemed to have difficulty in articulating.

“Lots of people read. It occurred to me–-“

“I mean that this—this Vaschetti—hadn’t finished with the book—but he has now?”

“He’s given up reading,” explained the Saint carelessly. “He was so upset about having the book taken away from him that he stepped out of an eighth-floor window—with the help of a couple of your pals.”

He watched the warm ivory of her face fade and freeze into alabaster.

“He’s—dead?”

“Well,” said the Saint, “it was a long drop to the sidewalk, and on account of the rubber shortage he didn’t bounce so well.”

The bartender was standing over them expectantly. Simon said: “Dawson for me; and I guess you know what the lady’s drinking.” He became absorbed in the way the man worked with his big deft hands.

And then suddenly he knew all about everything, and it was like waking up under an ice-cold shower.

He took his breath back gradually, and said without a change in.his voice except that the smile was no longer there: “You don’t know Brother Blatt and his playmates very well, do you, Olga? Especially Maris. But if I’d only been a little brighter I’d have just stayed here and found Maris.”

She was staring at him rigidly, with wide tragical eyes. It was a good act, he thought cynically.

The bartender stirred their drinks and set them up, fastidiously wiping spots of moisture from the bar around them. Simon appealed to him.

“I should have asked you in the first place, shouldn’t I, Joe? You could have shown me Maris.”

The man’s big square face began to crinkle in its ready accommodating smile.

And the Saint knew he was right—even though the conclusion had come to him in one lightning-flash of revelation, and the steps towards it still had to be retraced.