The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (7 page)

“Should be all right,” he mumbled. “Looks the type. Vouched for by Mr. Uniatz. Been to America myself. Can’t pick and choose. Got to decide.”

“Ah, yes,” admitted Farwill despondently, as if the very idea violated all his dearest principles. “We have got to decide.” He inflated his chest again for the only outlet of oratory that was left to him. “Well, Mr. Orconi—ah—Pete, you are doubtless familiar with the general outline of the engagement. This book, of which Mr. Uniatz must have told you, must be recovered—whether by guile or force is immaterial. Nothing must be | permitted to obstruct a successful consummation of the undertaking. If, in the course of your work, it should prove necessary to effect physical injuries upon this man Templar, or even to—er— expedite his decease, humanitarian considerations must not influence our firmness. Now I would suggest that a fee of two hundred pounds––”

Simon straightened up in his chair and laughed rudely.

“Say, whaddaya think I’m lookin’ for?” he demanded. “Chicken feed?”

The Honourable Leo drew further breath for eloquence, and the argument was on. It would scarcely be profitable to record it in detail. It went on for a long time, conducted on the Parliamentary side in rounded periods which strayed abstractly to every other subject on earth except the one in hand and nearly sent the Saint to sleep. But Simon Templar had a serene determination of his own which could even survive the soporific flatulence of Farwill’s long-winded verbiage; he was in no hurry, and he was still enjoying himself hugely. Hoppy Uniatz, endowed with a less vivid appreciation of the simple jests of life, did actually fall into a doze.

At long last a fee of two thousand pounds was agreed on; and the Saint helped himself to a fifth glass of sherry.

“Okay, boys,” he murmured. “We’ll get that guy.”

“Sure,” echoed Mr. Uniatz, rousing with a snort. “We’ll get him.”

Yorkland shuffled about on the edge of his seat, buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, and got up.

“Very well,” he stuttered. “That’s settled. Glad it’s all fixed up. Now I must get back to town. Late already. Important meetings.” His restless eyes glanced at the other member of his side. “Count on me for my share, Farwill.”

The Honourable Leo nodded.

“Certainly,” he reverberated. “Certainly. You may leave it to me to arrange the details.” He drew the sherry decanter towards him and replaced the stopper unobtrusively but firmly. “I think we owe a vote of thanks to Mr. Uniatz for the—er—introduction.”

Simon Templar surveyed him dispassionately over a second Corona.

“You owe more than that, fella,” he said.

Farwill coughed.

“I thought the—er—honorarium was payable when the commission had been—ah—executed.”

“Half of it is,” agreed the Saint pleasantly. “The first half is payable now. I done business with politicians before. You make so many promises in your job, you can’t expect to remember ‘em all.”

“Sure,” seconded Hoppy Uniatz heartily. “Cash wit’ order is de rule in dis foim.”

Farwill drew out his wallet grudgingly; but it was stocked with a supply of currency which indicated that some such demand had not been unforeseen. He counted out a number of banknotes with reluctant deliberation; and Yorkland watched the proceeding with a hint of hollowness in his round face.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “that’s done. Send you a check tonight, Farwill. Thanks. Really must be off now. Excuse me. Good-bye.”

He shook hands all round, with the limp perfunctory grip of the professional handshaker, and puttered out of the room; and they heard his car scrunching away down the drive.

The Saint smiled to himself and raked in the money. He counted it into two piles, pushed one towards Hoppy Uniatz, and folded the other into his pocket. There were five hundred pounds in his own share—it was a small enough sum as the Saint rated boodle, but there were circumstances in which he could take a fiver with just as much pleasure as he would have taken five thousand. It was not always the amount of the swag, it was the twists of the game by which it was collected; and beyond all doubt the twist by which that five hundred had been pulled in ranked high in the scale of pure imponderable delights. On such an occasion even a nominal allowance of loot was its own reward; but still the Saint had not achieved everything that had been in his mind when he set out on that soul-satisfying jag.

One other riddle had been working in his brain ever since he left his apartment that morning, and he led up to it with studied casualness.

“The job’s as good as done, Leo,” he said.

“Sure,” echoed the faithful Mr. Uniatz. “De guy is dead an’ buried.”

“Excellent,” responded Farwill formally.“Ah —excellent.”

He had almost got the decanter away when Simon reached it with a long arm. Farwill winced and averted his eyes.

“This ain’t such bad stuff, Leo,” the Saint commented kindly, emptying his glass and refilling it rapidly. He spilt an inch of ash from his cigar onto the carpet and cocked one foot on to the polished table with a callous disregard for his host’s feeling which he felt would go well with the imaginary character of Pete de Blood, and which soothed his own sleepless sense of mischief at the same time. “About this guy Templar,” he said. “Suppose I do have to rub him out?”

“Rub him out?” repeated Farwill dubiously. “Ah—yes, yes. Suppose you have to kill him.” His eyes shifted for a moment with the hunted look of the politician who scents an attempt to commit him to a definite statement. “Well, naturally it is understood that you will look after yourself.”

“Aw, shucks,” said the Saint scornfully. “I can look after myself. That ain’t what I mean. I mean, suppose he was rubbed out, then there wouldn’t be any way to find out where the book was, an’ the cops might get it.”

Farwill finally collared the decanter and transported it in an absent-minded way to the cellaret, which he locked with the same preoccupied air. He turned round and clasped his hands under his coattails.

“From our point of view, the problem might be simplified,” he said.

The Saint rolled his cigar steadily between his finger and thumb. The question with which he had taxed the imagination of Mr. Uniatz had been propounded again where it might find a more positive reply; but the Saint’s face showed no trace of his eagerness for a solution. He tipped the dialogue over the brink of elucidation with a single impassive monosyllable:

“How?”

“The Saint has a—ah—confederate,” said Far-will, looking at the ceiling. “A young lady. We understand that she shares his confidence in all his —ah—enterprises. We may therefore assume that she is cognizant of the whereabouts of the volume in question. If the Saint were—ah—removed, therefore,” Farwill suggested impersonally, “one would probably have a more—ah—tractable person with whom to deal.”

A flake of ash broke from the Saint’s cigar and trickled a dusty trail down his coat; but his eyes did not waver.

“I get you,” he said.

The simplicity of the argument hit him between the eyes with a force that almost staggered him. Now that it had been put forward, he couldn’t understand how he had failed to see it himself from the beginning. It was so completely and brutally logical. The Saint was tough: everyone knew it, everyone admitted it. And he held the whip hand. But he could be—ah—removed; and the whip would pass into the hands of one lone girl. Undoubtedly the problem might be simplified. It would be reduced to an elementary variant of an old game of which the grim potentialities were still capable of sending a cold trickle down his spine. He should have seen it at once. His hat hung in the hall with a bullet-punched ventilation through the crown which was an enduring testimony that the opposition had neither gone berserk nor sunk into the depths of imbecility; without even charting the pinnacles of satanic cunning, they had merely grasped at the elusive obvious— which he himself had been too wooden-headed to see.

“That’s a great idea,” said the Saint softly. “So after we’ve rubbed out this guy Templar, we go after his moll.”

“Ah—yes,” assented Farwill, staring into the opposite corner as if he were not answering the question at all. “If that should prove necessary-ah—yes.”

“Sure,” chirped Mr. Uniatz brightly, forestalling his cue. “We’ll fix de goil.”

The Saint silenced him with a sudden lift of ice-blue eyes. His voice became even softer, but the change was too subtle for Farwill to notice it.

“Who thought of that great idea?” he asked.

“It was jointly agreed,” said the Honourable Leo evasively. “In such a crisis, with such issues at stake, one cannot be sentimental. The proposition was received with unanimous approval. As a matter of fact, I understand that an abortive attempt has already been made in that direction—I should perhaps have explained that there is another member of our—er—coalition who was unfortunately unable to be present at our recent discussion. I expect him to arrive at any moment, as he is anx- I ious to make your acquaintance. He is a gentleman who has already done valuable independent work towards this—ah—consummation which we all desire.”

The Saint’s eyebrows dropped one slow an gentle quarter-inch over his steady eyes.

“Who is he?”

Farwill’s mouth opened for another elaborate paragraph; but before he had voiced his preliminary “Ah” the headlights of a car swept across the drawn blinds, and the gravel scraped again outside the windows. Footsteps and voices sounded in the hall, and the library door opened to admit the form of the Honourable Leo’s butler. “Lord Iveldown,” he announced.

VIII

Simon Templar’s cigar had gone out. He put it down carefully in an ashtray and took out his cigarette case. It stands as a matter of record that at that moment he did not bat an eyelid, though he knew that the showdown had arrived.

“Delighted to see you, Iveldown,” the Honourable Leo was exclaiming. “Yorkland was unfortunately unable to stay. However, you are not too late to make the acquaintance of our new—ah— agents. Mr. Orconi …”

Farwill’s voice trailed hesitantly away. It began to dawn on him that his full-throated flow of oratory was not carrying his audience with him. Something, it seemed, was remarkably wrong.

Standing in front of the door which had closed behind the retiring butler, Lord Iveldown and Mr. Nassen were staring open-mouthed at the Saint with the aspect of a comedy unison dance team arrested in midflight. The rigidity of their postures, the sag of their lower jaws, the glazed bulging of their eyes, and the suffusion of red in their complexions were so ludicrously identical that they might have been reflections of each other. They looked like two peas who had fallen out of their pod and were still trying to realize what had hit them; and the Honourable Leo looked from them to the Saint and back again with a frown of utter bewilderment.

“Whatever is the matter?” he demanded, startled into uttering one of the shortest sentences of his life; and at the sound of his question Lord Iveldown came slowly and painfully out of his paralysis.

He turned, blinking through his pince-nez.

“Is that—that—the American gunman you told me about?” he queried awfully.

“That is what I have been—ah—given to understand,” said Farwill, recovering himself. “We are indebted to Mr. Uniatz for the introduction. I am informed that he has had an extensive career in the underworld of—ah—Pittsburgh. Do you imply that you are already acquainted?”

His lordship swallowed.

“You bumptious blathering ass!” he said.

Simon Templar uncoiled himself from his chair with a genial smile. The spectacle of two politicians preparing to speak their minds candidly to one another was so rare and beautiful that it grieved him to interrupt; but he had his own part to play. It had been no great effort to deny himself the batting of an eyelid up to that point—the impulse to bat eyelids simply had not arisen to require suppressing. Coming immediately on the heels of Leo Farwill’s revelation, he was not sorry to see Lord Iveldown.

“What ho, Snowdrop,” he murmured cordially. “Greetings, your noble Lordship.”

Farwill gathered himself together.

“So you are already acquainted!” he rumbled with an effort of heartiness. “I thought––”

“Do you know who that is?” Iveldown asked dreadfully.

Some appalling intuition made Farwill shake his head; and the Saint smiled encouragingly.

“You tell him, Ivelswivel,” he urged. “Relieve the suspense.”

“That’s the Saint himself!” exploded Iveldown.

There are times when even this talented chronicler’s genius stalls before the task of describing adequately the reactions of Simon Templar’s victims. Farwill’s knees drooped, and his face took on a greenish tinge; but in amplification of those simple facts a whole volume might be written in which bombshells, earthquakes, dynamite, mule-kicks, and other symbols of devastating violence would reel through a kaleidoscope of similes that would still amount to nothing but an anaemic ghost of the sight which rejoiced Simon Templar’s eyes. And the Saint smiled again and lighted his cigarette.

“Of course we know each other,” he said. “Leo and I were just talking about you, your Lordship. I gather that you’re not only the bird who suggested bumping me off so that you’d only have Patricia Holm to deal with, but your little pal Snowdrop was the bloke who tried it on this morning and wrecked a perfectly good hat with his rotten shooting. I shall have to add a fiver onto your account for that, brother; but the other part of your brilliant idea isn’t so easily dealt with.”

Farwill’s face was turning from green to grey.

“I seem to have made a mistake,” he said flabbily.

“A pardonable error,” said the Saint generously. “After all, Hoppy Uniatz didn’t exactly give you an even break. But you didn’t make half such a big mistake as Comrade Iveldown over there––”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nassen make a slight movement, and his hand had flashed to his pocket before he remembered that he had set out to enjoy his joke with so much confidence that he had not even gone heeled. But even if there had been a gun there, he would have reached it too late. Nassen had a hand in his coat pocket already; and there was a protuberance under the cloth whose shape Simon knew only too well.