The Saint vs Scotland Yard (19 page)

The procession moved on.

It went down the porch steps and through the iron wicket gate to the
road; and the Saint brought up the rear with his
right hand in his
pocket. The comedy was played without
witnesses: at that hour Vandermeer
Avenue, a quiet backwater
even at the height of the day, was absolutely
deserted. A sum
total of four lighted windows was visible along the whole
length of
the thoroughfare, and those were too far away to
provide the slightest
inconvenience in any conceivable circum
stances. Hampstead was
being good that night… .

The car which Simon had observed on his prowl round the
exterior of
the house was parked right opposite the gate—
which was where he
had expected it to be. As the two men
paused outside the gate, waiting for
further instructions, a
door of the car opened, and a slim supple
figure decanted
itself lightly on to the sidewalk. Patricia… . She
came for
ward with her swinging long-limbed stride.

“O.K., Simon?”

“O.K., lass.”

“Gee, boy, I’m glad to see you.”

“And I you. And the whole Wild West show was just a
sitting
rabbit, believe it or believe it not.” The Saint’s hand
touched
her arm. “Get back behind the wheel, Pat, start her
up, and be
ready to pull out as soon as the boodle’s on board.
It isn’t every day we
ferry a cool million across London, and I
don’t see why the
honour of being the pilot shouldn’t be your
share of the
act.”

“Right-ho.
…”

The girl disappeared, and Simon opened another door.

He watched the cases being stowed one by one in the back
of the car,
and the forefinger of his right hand curled tensely over the trigger of his
gun. He had meant every word of his
threat to the two men who were doing
the job; and they must
have known it, for they carried out his orders
with commenda
ble alacrity.

And yet Simon felt a faint electric tingle of uneasiness fan
ning up
his back and into the roots of his hair like the march
of a thousand ghostly
needle-points. He could not have de
scribed it in any other way, and he
was as much at a loss to account for it as if the simile had been the actual
fact. It was sheer blind instinct, a seventh sense born of a hundred breath
less
adventures, that touched him with single thrill of
insufficient
warning—and left it at that. And for once in his
life he ignored the
danger-sign. He heard the whine of the
self-starter, followed
by the low-pitched powerful pulsing of
the eight cleanly
balanced cylinders, and saw the door closed
upon the last of the
bags: and he turned smiling to the two
bruisers. He pointed.

“If you keep straight on down that road,” he said, “it
ought
to land you somewhere near Birmingham—if you travel far
enough. You
might make that your next stop.”

One of the men took a pace towards him.

“You just listen a minute——
”

“To what?” asked the Saint politely.

“I’m telling yer——
”

“A bad habit,” said the Saint disapprovingly. “You must
try
and break yourself of that. And now I’m sorry, but I can’t
stop. I
hope you’ll wash the back of your neck, see that your
socks are aired, say your prayers every
night, and get your face
lifted at the first
opportunity… . Now push your ears back,
my cherubs, and let your feet chase each other.”

His right hand moved significantly in his pocket, and there
was an
instant’s perilous silence. And then the man who had spoken jerked his head at
the other.

“Come
on,” he said.

The two men turned and lurched slowly away, looking back
over their
shoulders.

And the Saint put one foot on the running-board.

And somewhere, far away, he heard the sound of his own head being hit.
It was as extraordinary an experience as any th
at had ever happened
to him. Patricia was looking ahead
down the road, while her hand eased the
gears quietly into
mesh; and the Saint himself had not heard the slightest
move
ment that might have put him on his guard. And the premoni
tory
crawling of his nerves which he had felt a few seconds
earlier had performed
what it considered to be its duty, and
had subsided… .
He could have believed that the whole
thing was an incredibly vivid
hallucination—but for the sicken
ing sharp stab of sudden agony that plunged
through his brain
like
a spurt of molten metal and paralysed every milligram of
strength in his body.

A great white light swelled up and exploded before his eyes;
and after
it came a wave of whirling blackness shot with
rocketing flashes of
dizzy, dazzling colour, and the blackness was filled with a thin high singing
note that drilled into his eardrums. His knees seemed to melt away beneath him.
…

And then, from somewhere above the vast dark gulf into
which he was sinking, he heard
Patricia’s voice cry out.

“Simon!”

The word seemed to spell itself into his dulled brain letter
by letter,
as if his mind read it off a slowly uncoiling scroll.
But it touched a nerve
centre that roused him for one fractional instant of time to fight back
titanically against the
numbing oblivion that was swallowing him up.

He knew that his eyes were open, but all he could see was one blurred
segment of her face, as he might have seen her picture in a badly-focused
fade-out that had gone askew. And
to that isolated scrap of vision in
the overwhelming blackness
he found the blessed strength to croak two
words:

“Drive on.”

And then a second surge of blackness welled up around him
and
blotted out every sight and sound, and he fell away into
the
infinite black void.

Chapter VII

“So even your arrangements can break down, Templar—
when your
accomplice fails you,” Kuzela remarked silkily. “My
enterprising
young friend, when you are older you will realise
that it is always a
mistake to rely upon a woman. I have never employed a woman myself for that
reason.”

“I’ll bet that broke her heart,” said the Saint.

Once again he sat in Kuzela’s study, with his head still
throbbing
painfully from the crashing welt it had received,
and a lump on the
back of it feeling as if it were growing out
of his skull like a
great auk’s egg. His hair was slightly dis
arranged, and straps
on his wrists prevented him from
rearranging it effectively; but the Saintly
smile had not lost
one iota of its charm.

“It remains, however, to decide whether you are going to be
permitted
to profit by this experience—whether you are going
to live long enough to
do so. Perhaps it has not occurred to
you that you may have come to the end
of your promising
career,” continued the man on the other side of the
desk
dispassionately; and the Saint sighed.

“What, not again?” he pleaded brokenly, and Kuzela
frowned.

“I do not understand you.”

“Only a few months ago I was listening to those very
words,”
explained the Saint. “Alas, poor Wilfred! And he
meant it, too. ‘Wilf,
old polecat,’ I said, ‘don’t you realise that I can’t be killed before page
three hundred and twenty?’ He
didn’t believe me. And he died. They put a
rope round his
neck and dropped him through a hole in the floor, and the
consequences
to his figure were very startling. Up to the base
of the neck he was
not so thin—but oh, boy, from then on.
…
It was awfully sad.”

And Simon Templar beamed around upon the congregation
—upon
Kuzela, and upon the two bruisers who loafed about
the room, and upon the
negro who stood behind his chair.
And the negro he indicated with a nod.

“One of your little pets?” he inquired; and Kuzela’s lips
moved in
the fraction of a smile.

“It was fortunate that Ngano heard some of the noise,” he
said.
“He came out of the house just in time.”

“To sock me over the head from behind?” drawled the Saint
genially.
“Doubtless, old dear. But apart from that——
”

“Your accomplice escaped, with my property. True. But, my
dear
Templar, need that prove to be a tragedy? We have your
own invaluable self
still with us—and you, I am quite sure, know not only where the lady has gone,
but also where you
have hidden a gentleman whom I should very much like to
have
restored to me.”

Simon
raised languid eyebrows.

“When I was the Wallachian Vice-Consul at Pfaffenhausen,” he
said pleasantly, “our diplomacy was governed by a pictur
esque
little Pomeranian poem, which begins:

Der Steiss des Elephanten

I
st nicht, ist nicht
so klein.

If you get the idea——
”

Kuzela nodded without animosity. His deliberate, ruthless
white hands
trimmed the end of a cigar.

“You must not think that I am unused to hearing remarks
like that,
Templar,” he said equably. “In fact, I remember
listening
to a precisely similar speech from our friend the
Duke of Fortezza. And
yet——
” He paused to blow a few
minute flakes of tobacco leaf from the
shining top of the desk,
and then his pale bland eyes flicked up again
to the Saint’s face… . “The Duke of Fortezza changed his mind,”
he said.

Simon
blinked.

“Do you know,” he said enthusiastically, “there’s one of
the
great songs of the century there! I can just feel it. Something
like
this:

The Duke
of Fortezza
Quite
frequently gets a
     
Nimpulse
to go blithering off on to the blind,
But the Duchess starts bimbling
And wambling and wimbling
    
And threatens to wallop his ducal behind;
And her Ladyship’s threats are
So fierce that he sweats
And just sobs as he pets her
With tearful regrets
—
Ah!
The Duke of Fortezza
    
Is changing his mind.

We could polish up the idea a lot if we had time, but you
must admit
that for an impromptu effort——
”

“You underrate my own sense of humour, Templar.” Un
emotionally
Kuzela inspected the even reddening of the tip of
his cigar, and waved
his match slowly in the air till it went out. “But do you know another
mistake which you also make?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion,” said the Saint cheerfully.

“You underrate my sense of proportion.”

The Saint smiled.

“In many ways,” he murmured, “you remind me of the late
Mr.
Garniman. I wonder how you’ll get on together.”

The other straightened up suddenly in his chair. For a
moment the mask of amiable
self-possession fell from him.

“I
shall be interested to bandy words with you later—if you
survive, my friend.” He spoke without raising
his voice; but
two little specks of red burned in the cores of his eyes,
and a
shimmering marrow of vitriolic
savagery edged up through his
unalteringly
level intonation. “For the present, our time is
short, and you have already wasted more than your
due allow
ance. But I think you
understand me.” Once again, a smooth
evanescent trickle of honey over the bitingly measured sylla
bles. “Come, now, my dear young friend, it
would be a pity for
us to quarrel. We
have crossed swords, and you have lost. Let
us reach an amicable armistice. You have only to give me a lit
tle information; and then, as soon as I have
verified it, and
have finished my
work—say after seven days, during which time
you would stay with me as an honoured guest—you would be
as free
as air. We would shake hands and go our ways.” Kuzela smiled, and picked
up a pencil. “Now firstly: where has your
accomplice gone?”