The Saint vs Scotland Yard (25 page)

“I’ll say I am. I guess it’s safe for me to go back now, and I
know a
dealer in Detroit who’ll give me a good price for my
share. I’ll get
enough to give me a big start, and I’ll make it
grow. There’s no
money in this durned country.”

Elberman shrugged, and opened a door.

He took two paces into the room, and Perrigo took one.
And then
and there the pair of them halted in their tracks like
a Punch and Judy show
whose operator has heard the lunch-
hour siren, the muscles of their jaws
going limp with sheer incredulous astonishment.

Chapter II

“Come right in, boys,” said the Saint breezily.

He reclined gracefully in Isadore Elberman’s own sacrosanct
armchair.
Between the fingers of one hand was a freshly
lighted cigarette;
the fingers of the other hand curved round
the butt of a .38
lead-pump that looked as if it could do
everything the makers
claimed for it and then some. It was as
unsociable-looking a
piece of armament as Perrigo had ever
seen—and he knew what he was talking
about. The sight of it
kept his hands straight down and flaccid at
his sides, as in
nocuous as the fists of something out of a waxwork
exhibition.

If further pictorial detail is required, it may be provided by
mentioning
that the Saint was wearing a light grey suit and a
silk shirt, both of
which showed no traces of ever having been
worn before; and an
unwary angel might have been pardoned
for turning round and hurriedly
overhauling its own con
science after getting one glimpse of the
radiant innocence of
his face.

But most of these interesting points were wasted on the
single-track
minds of the two men in the doorway. Their
retinas, certainly,
registered a photographic impression of the
general homoscape; but
the spotlight of their attention merely
oscillated
momentarily over the broader features of the
picture, and settled
back in focus on the salient factor of the
whole scenery—the starkly-fashioned chunk
of blued steel that
stared unwinkingly into
the exact centre of the six-inch space
between
them, only too plainly ready and eager to concentrate
its entire affection upon whichever of them first
put in a bid
for the monopoly.

“Make
yourselves at home, boys,” murmured the Saint. “Per
rigo, you may close the door—how did you leave
Frankie, by
the way?”

Perrigo, with one hand dumbly obedient on the knob,
started as
if he had received an electric shock. The casual
question needled with
such an uncanny precision slick into the very core of things that he stared
back at the Saint in the dim beginnings of a kind of vengeful terror.

“What do you know about Frankie?” he croaked.

“This and that,” said the Saint, nonchalantly unhelpful.
“Carry
on shutting the door, brother, and afterwards you may
keep on talking.”
He listened to the click of the latch, and
spilled a quantity of
cigarette-ash on to Mr. Elberman’s price
less carpet. “It
was tough on your pal being bumped off in
Durban,” he
continued conversationally, as if he had no other
object but to put his
victims at their ease. “Also, in my opin
ion, unnecessary. I
know Frankie was inclined to be cagey, but
I think a clever man
could have found out what ship he was
sailing home on without sending a man
out to South Africa to
spy on him… . Come in, boys, come in. Sit
down. Have a
drink. I want you to feel happy.”

“Who are you?” snarled Perrigo.

Simon
shifted his mocking gaze to Elberman.

“Do
you know, Isadore?” he asked.

Elberman shook his head, moistening his lips mechanically.

Simon smiled, and stood up. “Sit down,” he said.

He ushered the two men forcefully into chairs, relieving
Perrigo of
a shooting-iron during the process. And then he put his back to. the fire and leaned
against the mantelpiece, spin
ning his gun gently round one finger hooked in
the trigger-
guard.

“I might deceive you,” he said with disarming candour,
“but
I won’t. I am the Saint.” He absorbed the reflex
ripples of
expression that jerked over the seated men, and smiled
again.
“Yes—I’m the guy you’ve been wanting to meet all these years. I am
the man with the load of mischief. I,” said the Saint, who was partial to
the personal pronoun, and apt to become loqua
cious when he found
that it could start a good sentence, “I am
the Holy Terror, and
the only thing for you boys to do is to try and look pleased about it. I’m on
the point of taking a
longish holiday, and my bank balance is just
a few pounds shy
of the amount I’d fixed for my pension. You may not have
heard
anything about it before, but you are going to make a
donation to the
fund.”

The two men digested his speech in silence. It took them a
little
time, which the Saint did not begrudge them. He always
enjoyed these moments.
He allowed the gist of the idea to
percolate deeply into their brains,
timing the seconds by the regular spinning of his gun. There were six of them.
Then—

“What d’you want?” snarled Perrigo.

“Diamonds,” said the Saint succinctly.

“What diamonds?”

Perrigo’s voice cracked on the question. The boil of bellig
erent
animosity within him split through the thin overlay of
puzzlement in which he
tried to clothe his words, and tore the
flimsy bluff to shreds. And the Saint’s
eyes danced.

“The illicit diamonds,” he said, “which Frankie Hormer was
bringing over by arrangement with Isadore. The diamonds for
which
Isadore double-crossed Frankie and took you into part
nership, my pet. The
boodle that you’ve got on your person
right now, pretty Perrigo!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No? Then perhaps Isadore will explain.”

Again the Saint’s bantering attention transferred itself to
the owner
of the house, but Elberman said nothing.

And Simon
shook his head sadly.

“You may be the hell of a bright conspirator, Isadore,” he
remarked,
“but you seem to be the odd man out of this
conversazione. Pardon
me while I do my Wild West stuff.”

He unbuttoned his coat and took a length of light cord
from an
inside pocket. There was a running bowline ready at
one end of it; he
crossed to Elberman’s chair and dropped the
noose over his head,
letting it settled down to his waist. With a
brisk yank and a
couple of twists he had the man’s arms
pinioned to his sides
and the complete exhibit attached to the
chair, finishing off
with a pair of non-skid knots. He per
formed the entire operation with his
left hand, and the gun in his right hand never ceased to keep the situation
under effec
tive
control.

Then he returned to Perrigo.

“Where are they, sweetheart?” he inquired laconically; and
the man
tightened up a vicious lower lip.

“They’re where you won’t find them,” he said.

Simon shrugged.

“The place does not exist,” he said.

His glance quartered Perrigo with leisurely approbation—
north to
south, east to west. Somewhere in the area it covered
was a hundred
thousand pounds’ worth of crystallised carbon,
which wouldn’t take up
much room. A search through the
man’s pockets would only have taken a few
seconds; but the
Saint rather liked being clever. And sometimes he had
inspirations of uncanny brilliance.

“Your trousers and coat don’t match,” he said abruptly.

The inspiration grew larger, whizzing out of the back of
beyond with
the acceleration of something off Daytona Beach,
and the jump that
Perrigo gave kicked it slap into the immediate urgent present.

“And I’ll bet Frankie Hormer’s don’t, either,” said the Saint.

The words came out in a snap.

And then he laughed. He couldn’t help it. His long shot
had gone
welting through the bull’s-eye with point-blank accuracy, and the scoring of
the hit was registered on Perrigo’s face
as plainly as if a
battery of coloured lamps had lighted up and
a steam organ had
begun to play
Down among the Dead Men
to celebrate the
event.

“What’s the joke?” demanded Perrigo harshly; and Simon
pulled
himself together.

“Let me reconstruct it. Diamonds are precious things—espe
cially when
they’re the kind about which possession is the
whole ten points of
the law. If you’re packing a load of that
variety around with
you, you don’t take chances with ‘em. You
keep ‘em as close to
you as they’ll go. You don’t even carry
them in your pockets,
because pockets have their dangers. You
sew them into your
clothes. Frankie did, anyway. Wait a min
ute!” The Saint
was working back like lightning over the
ground he knew. He
grabbed another thread and hauled it out
of the skein—and it
matched. “Why didn’t you cut the diamonds out of Frankie’s clothes? If
you had time to trade
clothes, you had time to do that. Then it must
have been
because it was dangerous. Why so? Because Frankie was
dead!
Because you didn’t want to leave a clue to your motive. You
killed
Frankie, and——
Hold the line, Perrigo!” The gangster
was coming
out of his chair, but Simon’s gun checked him
half-way. “You
killed Frankie,” said the
Saint, “and you
changed
your coat for his.”

Perrigo relaxed slowly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“You do. You’re three minutes late with your bluff. The
train has
pulled out and left you in the gentleman’s
cloakroom. Where you
have no right to be. Take off that
coat!”

Perrigo hesitated for a moment; and then, sullenly, he
obeyed.

He threw the garment down at the Saint’s feet, and Simon
dropped on
one knee. With the flat of his hand he went
padding over every
inch of the coat, feeling for the patch of
tell-tale hardness
that would indicate the whereabouts of
Frankie Hormer’s
half-million-dollar cargo.

That was the
sort of happy harvest that it was an unadulter
ated
pleasure for the Saint to reap—the kind in which you just winked at the ears,
and they hopped down off their stalks and
marched in an orderly
fashion into the barn. It made him feel
at peace with the
world… . Down the sleeves he went, with
tingling fingers, and
over the lapels… . Almost like lifting
shoe-laces out of a
blind beggar’s tray, it was.
…
He went
along the bottom of
the coat and up the back. He turned the
pockets inside out,
and investigated a wallet which he found
in one of them.

And then, with a power-driven vacuum pump starting work
on his
interior, he turned the coat over and began again.

He couldn’t have been mistaken. He’d been as sure of his
deductions
as any man can be. The aptness of them had been
placarded all over the
place. And never in his life before had one of those moments of inspiration led
him astray. He had
grown to accept the conclusions they drew and the
procedures
they dictated as things no less inevitable and infallible
than
the laws of Nature that make water run downhill and mountains sit about
the world with their fat ends undermost. And
now, with a direct
controversion of his faith right under his
groping hands, he felt
as if he was seeing Niagara Falls squirting upwards into Lake Ontario, while
the Peak of Teneriffe perambulated about on its head with its splayed roots
waving
among the clouds.