The Saint Meets His Match (29 page)

“Child,” said
the Saint, “is that still biting?”

“The others were in it
for money.”

“I took a hundred
thousand francs off Essenden in
Paris. It would have been
two hundred thousand if we
hadn’t gone into
partnership. Yes, I know—you’re a dead
loss
to me. But there was that little joke I’ve mentioned
more
than once, if you remember.”

“Is that your
secret?”

“One of them. Didn’t I
tell you I always have been crazy? That’s very important. If I hadn’t been
crazy, there’d have been no joke, and the Lord alone knows
what would have happened to the Angels of Doom; but
certainly there’d have been a lot less mirth and horseplay
in history than there is now… . One day, when this
story’s over, I’ll tell you all about it. All I can say now is
that there was one thing I vowed to do before I went re
spectable; and I can tell you it was well worth doing.
Will that do for to-day, Jill?”

He saw the smiling
perplexity in her face and the
whimsical shake of her
head, and laughed. And then he
looked at his watch and
stood up.

“Do you mind if I
go?” he asked. “It’s my bedtime.”

“At one o’clock in the
afternoon?”

He nodded.

“I told you I hadn’t
had any sleep to speak of for two
nights. And
to-night I’m going to call on a most re
spectable
relative, and I don’t want to look too dissipated.
He
mightn’t be so ready to believe in my virtues as you
are.”

She was surprised into an
obvious remark.

“I didn’t know you
had any relatives.”

“Didn’t you? I had a
father and a mother, among
others. It was most extraordinary. The papers
at the time were full of it.”

“You mean the
Police
News?”

“I don’t remember that the
Police News
was
interested
in me just then,” said the
Saint gravely. “I rather think their interest developed later.”

She had dropped into banter to cover up her
breach of
good criminal manners; but she was
still inquisitive
enough to try to
press a serious question.

“Have you honestly got any relatives who
still know
you?”

It was beautifully
put—that touch of sympathetic curi
osity, the quiet assumption that they
were now intimate
enough to exchange notes.
But Simon only laughed.

“To tell you the truth,” he said,
“this isn’t a really truly
relative,
although I call him Auntie Ethel. But he views
my indiscretions with a tolerant eye, and still believes that
I
shall reform one day. Now let’s talk about supralapsarianism
. I can’t promise when I’ll be in again, Jill, but
it’ll be as soon as I can make it.
…

She went with him to the door and watched him
down
the stairs, and felt unaccountably
lonely when he had
gone.

Simon went straight back
to Upper Berkeley Mews. He
had not been joking when
he spoke of going to bed. He
would have to be up again that night, and
Heaven alone
knew when he would get his next
full night’s rest.

But since he had not
noticed Duodecimo Gugliemi before, the Saint did not miss him on the way home.

2

The Saint had been gone
eight hours when a peal on
the bell rang sharply through the studio and
set the girl’s
heart pounding against her
ribs.

No one should have rung
that bell. The Saint himself
had a key, and no
tradesmen ever called, for obvious
reasons. Who it
could be outside, therefore, except a
detective whom the
Saint had not been so clever in
shaking off as he had
believed : . .

As she stood by the table
with her brain in a whirl the ring was repeated.

She went to the window
and looked out and down into the street, but there was nothing out of the
ordinary to be
seen there—no signs of a cordon or even of one or two
men told off to wait for an escape by another
exit. As for the man at the door, it was impossible to inspect him; for
the entrance of the studio was on the third and
top floor
of the building, and the architect, not knowing that his
building was ever to be used for sheltering a
wanted criminal, had omitted to provide a window looking out
onto the landing, or any other similar means of
inspecting
callers before opening the
front door.

Jill Trelawney thought
all this out in a flash, and made
her decision.

Whoever it was, she would
gain nothing by refusing to
open the door. If it were
the police, the block would be
well surrounded, and the
door would eventually be forced
if she refused to answer
the bell. If it were anyone else
… She had no idea who it could be, but she
must still
answer.

The little automatic that
she was never without in
those days was in her
hand when she went to the door and
opened it.

The first sight of the
man outside was reassuring. Cer
tainly he was not a
detective, whatever else he might be—
he was far too
small and slim ever to have succeeded in
entering the ranks of
the metropolitan police, even if he
had
wanted to. A second glance told her that he was not likely even to have wanted
to; for there was something
unmistakably
un-English about the exaggerated nattiness
of his attire which would have marked him for a foreigner
anywhere, even without the evidence of his thin
dark
features and his restless dark
eyes.

“Mees
Trelawney?”

After only a fractional
hesitation she admitted the
charge. His manner was so
confident that she realized i
mmediately that a bluff
would carry no weight. At the
same time, although he
seemed so certain of her identity,
there was nothing menacing or even
alarming about his
manner.

But in a moment he
explained himself.

“I come from the part
of Meester Templar. He has been
arresting.”

A sudden fear took her by
the throat.

“Arrested?
When?”

“Very near here. He
meet me last night and say he has
work for me. This
morning I meet him again, he bring me
along here, and he
tell me to wait outside while he go in,
and
then we go off together and he tell me what it is to do.
Then we get a little way from here, and a man recognize
him in the street and say ‘I want you.’ “

The visitor waved his
arms expressively.

“And Mr. Templar told
you to come here?”

“Oh, no. But he look
at me, and I know what to do.”

She understood. The Saint
could not have said anything before the police without giving her away.
. “Who
are you?” she asked.

“I am Duodecimo Gugliemi,” said the
little man dra
matically. “Now I tell
you. Meester Templar, he get in a
taxicab
with the detective, and I get in another taxicab
and I follow. Then a piece of paper come out of the taxi-
cab window, and I stop my taxicab and pick it up.
Here
it is.”

He flourished a muddy
scrap of paper, and she took it
from him and deciphered the
smudged scrawl:

Wait in car outside
Scotland Yard ten o’clock.

S.
        

“Why didn’t you come
before?” she snapped. “If this was only just after he left
here—-“

“I had to get a car.
It is outside now. A friend of mine
is driver. Meester Templar, he know my
friend also.”

“Wait a minute.”

She left him at the door and was back in a
moment,
slipping into her coat and cramming
her hat onto her
head. Her little gun
was in its holster at her side, under
her coat.

“Now we’ll go.”

The Italian was scuttling
down the stairs in front of
her, and she followed
quickly. There was a closed car
standing by the curb, and
Gugliemi opened the door for
her. She stepped in, and he
followed, and the car began
to move off almost at
once.

It was only then that she
saw that thin gauze blinds
were drawn across all the windows. She sat
quite still.

“What are those
curtains doing?”

“You must not see
where we go. It would be dangerous for you to see.”
 

She sat in silence, with a
delirious kaleidoscope of con
flicting speculations
whirling over in her brain. She was sure only of one thing, and that was that
she had been
incredibly stupid. She peered at the
man beside her, but
he was gazing steadily ahead, and
seemed to have tem
porarily forgotten her existence.

Presently, when her watch
told her they had been driv
ing for nearly half an
hour, Gugliemi spoke:

“We arrive. You must
let me put this over your eyes.”

There was a flash of a
white handkerchief in his hand.

“Is—that—so?”

“I am afraid you
cannot refuse. I must tie this over your
eyes,
and you must not make me be violent about it,
because
I do not like being violent.”

She waited. The blur of
white moved towards her, and she felt the soft caress of silk on her face. And
then she
twitched her automatic from its
holster and rammed it
into the man’s ribs.

“You’re moving too
fast, Duodecimo,” she said softly.
“Think
again—and think quickly!”

The Italian continued
imperturbably with his task.

“I’ll count three,”
she rapped. “You can start saying
your
prayers now.
One—”

“And then the car
stop, the police come, and you are
arresting,” he replied calmly.
“But do not trouble, Mees Trelawney, I have already unloaded your
gun.”

She realized that the car had stopped, and
could have wept with rage against herself.

“Will you get out?”

She could feel rather than see the stronger
light that
entered as the door was opened;
but she had been well
blindfolded.
She could not even get a glimpse of the
ground under her feet. Even a
change to lift the bandage
for a moment was
not given her, for both her wrists were
firmly grasped.

“There are some steps down——”

He guided her along what
seemed to be a passage, up a
few more steps that grated
like bare stone under her
shoes, round a corner.

“Now there are some stairs.”

She climbed them with his
hand on her arm guiding
her—four flights—and then
he opened a door and led her
through. In a few more
paces he checked her, and she felt
something hard
pressed against the back of her knees.

“Sit down.”

She obeyed. She felt his
hands at her wrists, the rough
contact of tightening leather straps, and the
cold touch of
a metal buckle… . Then the
same thing at her ankles.
… Four
straps held her as firmly as steel chains; and then the handkerchief was
untied.

The room in which she found herself was small
and
dingily furnished. The paper was peeling
off the walls,
and the carpet was
patched and frayed at the edges. There
was
a truckle bed in one corner, and on a rickety table
stood a bottle, a
few glasses, and the remains of a sandwich
reposing on a piece of newspaper.

She was sitting in a
solid oaken chair which seemed to
have no place in that room and might
even have been acquired for the occasion. The straps which he had just
fastened pinned her wrists to the arms of it, and
her
ankles to the legs, and she knew at once that she would
never be able to free herself unaided if she sat
there for
the rest of her life. So
much she knew even before she
pitched all her strength against the
seasoned leather, and
found the little
Italian watching her with a kind of de
tached amusement.