The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 11

  As far as the Saint was concerned, the desired opportunity came his way with a promptness for which he had only a stretch of coincidence to thank. On the night when some of the events already mentioned were told to Simon they had dined at a favourite restaurant of theirs in Beak Street, a quiet little Spanish eating-house where the food was good and cheap and the crowd neither fashionable nor pseudo-Bohemian. It was some time after eleven o’clock when they left, and wandered through side streets towards Shaftesbury Avenue with the vague idea of having another cup of coffee somewhere before going home. They were just turning a corner when Simon saw the man from St. Louis emerging from a doorway. In a flash Simon had caught Patricia’s arm and jerked her back into the narrow lane from which they had just been turning. He leaned against the wall, covering her with his body, with his broad back turned to the Yankee gunman.

  “Tex himself!” he said. “Pretend to be powdering your nose—get out a mirror.”

  His ambition to see Tex Goldman again included a time and place of his own choosing, with the circumstances carefully reviewed and his plan of campaign completely polished—not a chance encounter in a back street that would do little more than advertise his return.

  In the girl’s mirror he saw Goldman step into a taxi and drive off. Patricia saw the gunman for the first time.

  “That’s the boy who’s causing all the trouble. And I wonder what he’s doing around here tonight?”

  They walked on, and Simon studied the doorway that had exhaled the new menace to the peace of London. A small illuminated sign over the lintel announced it as the Baytree Club. The door was open, but all that could be seen was a short passage leading to a flight of stairs, from beyond which came subdued sounds of music. It appeared to be one of those centres of furtive gaiety which one passes almost without noticing in daylight, and which suddenly become attractive when the neon signs wake up and the unprepossessing street outside is hidden in a kindly gloom.

  The Saint stood on the opposite pavement with a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, and surveyed the premises in a contemplative silence. A private car turned into the street and drew up outside the doorway to exude two men who went down the passage and up the stairs.

  “Feel like a spot of night life, Pat?” queried the Saint.

  There was a promise of mischief in his gaze. It might have come to anything or nothing, as the Fates decreed, but he felt that he would like to know more about the place where Tex Goldman descended to common or garden frivolity.

  She nodded.

  “O.K., boy.”

  They were crossing the road when the Saint’s keen ears became aware that the music inside the club had stopped. There was nothing very remarkable in that, for even the most energetic orchestras must rest for a few moments now and then to expand their lungs and gargle. And yet it made the Saint hesitate. Somehow he associated that stoppage with the arrival of the two men who had just gone in—and the peculiar fact that their car was still standing outside, where parking was not allowed. Perhaps the glimpse he had had of Tex Goldman leaving the same premises a few minutes before had made him unduly suspicious. He turned off diagonally along the road, drawing Patricia with him. He seemed to hear the muffled sounds of some commotion inside the club—a commotion that was rather more than the usual babble of conversation that springs up between dances.

  And then he heard the sound of feet pelting down the stairs.

  He guided Patricia into the nearest porch as if he were merely an innocent young citizen taking his girlfriend home from a movie, and again used her mirror inconspicuously. He saw the two men dash out of the doorway and plunge into their car, and before they disappeared he had seen that the lower halves of their faces were covered by their white evening scarves.

  The car pulled out and whirled up the street, passing them where they stood. Other feet were pounding down the steps of the club, and Simon looked round and saw the owner of the first pair reach the pavement. He was a frantic-looking young man with his bow tie draggling loose down his shirt-front, and he yelled “Police!” in a voice that echoed down the street. In a few seconds he was joined by others with the same cry. One or two pale-faced girls crowded out behind the leading men.

  Simon glanced after the departing car. He could still see its tail light as it was swinging round the next corner, and his hand flew to his hip…

  It stayed there. His other hand followed suit, on the other hip. With his coat swept back behind his forearms, he lounged over towards the panic-stricken mob on the pavement. A police whistle was shrilling somewhere nearby. He might have been able to do some damage to the bandits’ car, but the official attention to his tactics might have been more embarrassing than the damage would have been worth. He was not yet ready to take the law into his own hands.

  The frantic-looking young man confirmed his guess of what had happened.

  “They held us up—it must have been the gang that’s been holding up all the banks. Took all our money and the girls’ jewellery. We couldn’t do anything, or some of the girls might have got hurt…I say! Officer—”

  A running policeman had appeared and the young man joined the general surge towards him. Simon faded away from the group and rejoined Patricia.

  “Let’s stick around,” he said. “If I know anything, Claud Eustace will be along.”

  He was right in his diagnosis. The chattering crowd gradually filtered back into the club to make its several statements, under the constable’s pressure, and a couple of plain-clothes men arrived from Marlborough Street. After a while another taxi entered the street and released a plump familiar figure. Simon buttonholed him.

  “What ho, Claud!” he murmured breezily. “This is a bit late in life for you to take up dancing. Or has someone been trying to buy a box of chocolates after nine o’clock?”

  The detective looked at him with a rather strained weariness.

  “What are you doing here, Saint?”

  “Taking an after-dinner breather. Giving the gastric juices their ozone. I just happened to be around when the fun started.”

  “Did you see the men?”

  Simon nodded.

  “Yes. But they were half-masked, of course. I got the number of the car, but it looked new, so I suppose it was stolen.”

  Teal rubbed his chin.

  “If you can wait till I’ve finished here I’d like to have a talk with you.”

  “OK. We’ll toddle along to Sandy’s and sniff some coffee. See you there.”

  The Saint took Patricia’s arm, and they strolled through to Oxenden Street. Three-quarters of an hour later Chief Inspector Teal came in and took his place at the counter.

  “Did you get anything useful?” asked the Saint.

  “Nothing,” said Teal shortly. “The men had scarves over their faces, as you said. They were both in evening dress, which lets you out.”

  Simon sighed.

  “That bee in your bonnet buzzes an awful lot,” he protested. “Can’t you think up anything better than that?”

  “You’ve been abroad for a week, haven’t you?”

  “I have. Drinking good beer and associating with some stout Huns. The Secret Service must have been working overtime.”

  “I didn’t suspect you seriously.” Teal stirred three lumps of sugar into his cup. “This wholesale murder isn’t in your line, is it? A wretched clerk and one of our own uniformed men shot down in a week—and nothing to show for it. It fairly makes your blood boil.”

  The detective’s round face was unwontedly hollow in the cheeks. The failures of the last few hectic days were making their mark on his ponderous self-assurance.

  “We’ve tried all the regulars,” he said. “The Green Cross boys are the nucleus of it, we know, but so far they’ve been able to work a system of alibis that have left us flat. Most of them have come into a lot of money that they can’t account for since this trouble started, but that isn’t a crime. We had one of their best men in the other day—a fellow named Orping.
He was playing the American gangster to the life. Between ourselves, we knocked him about a bit—you know what can be done—but we couldn’t shake a thing out of him. I don’t like that American line that Orping’s got hold of. It looks ugly.”

  “Any idea where the stuff’s being fenced?”

  “I’m afraid not. I don’t think it’s being fenced in this country at all.”

  Simon Templar smiled inwardly, but he forebore to point a moral.

  “Who’s the Big Noise?” he asked, and the detective shrugged grimly.

  “If we knew that, the trouble would be practically over. There are rumours that it’s some sort of Yank, and all the registered aliens have come under observation, but we haven’t learned much. Whoever he is, he’s got his men right under his thumb, I’ve never met so many oysters before. The story is that Corrigan was one of the bunch who threatened to squeal, and what happened to him has put the fear of God into everyone else who might have talked.”

  The Saint pushed his hands into his pockets and gazed at the detective with a faint suggestion of mockery.

  “It must have made you wish I was on the road again, Claud. It’s something to think that you may have admitted that my reign of terror wasn’t so bad after all.”

  Mr Teal finished his coffee and unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum. His baby-blue eyes looked the Saint over with a certain seriousness.

  “If you only had the sense to keep out of the newspapers, and save the Assistant Commissioner from practising sarcastic remarks on me,” he said, “I shouldn’t be sorry if you were on the road for a while. You can do things that we can’t do officially. We’re trying to get special powers, but you know what that’s likely to mean. It may take us months—and men will be killed every day while we’re helpless. There’s only one way to deal with this sort of thing. You’ve got to fight guns with guns, killing with killing, fear with fear.”

  They separated on an arrangement to lunch together in three days’ time, which was the friendliest parting they had had for many months. It rather tickled Simon to think how the advent of a common enemy might make a branded outlaw almost persona grata with the Law, merely because his killings were more discriminate.

  Patricia and the Saint drove boldly back to Manson Place in a taxi. There was a man tinkering with a motorcycle at the open end of the cul-de-sac: Simon saw him look up as the taxi passed, and reckoned that Tex Goldman would shortly be receiving some interesting news.

  Curiously enough, it did not occur to him that a sharp pair of eyes in the car that had carried the holdup men away from the Baytree Club might have noticed him where he stood in the street a few doors from the scene of the crime.

  He paid off the taxi, and mounted the short flight of steps to the front door of his temporary home circumspectly. The man at the corner still tinkered with his motorcycle. Simon slid aside the pivoted metal plate under the knocker, and studied the indicator bulb which it concealed to make sure that no one had entered the house in his absence before he called Patricia to join him. He kept his right hand in his pocket while he unlocked the door and let her through, and his eyes never ceased their watchful survey of the street, but his precautions were a matter of routine. He was not expecting trouble immediately.

  “It’s rather a pity I let those Green Cross boys know who I was,” he said.

  There were several letters waiting for him, and he sat on the table in the sitting-room and read them while Patricia Holm went to the kitchen to find him a bottle of beer.

  She came back with a tray. He heard her put it down, and then he heard a crash.

  “Never mind the glass,” he said, without looking round. “We can always burgle Woolworth’s for some more. Break the lot if you feel like it.”

  “Simon…I didn’t—”

  The Saint took his eyes off the letter he was reading. A motorcycle was roaring away with an open exhaust. He saw the broken window, and the shining metal cylinder that lay on the floor, and he moved like a streak of lightning.

  The force of his rush hurled the girl bruised and shaken on to the settee, and the next instant the Saint’s weight was flung on the back of it. The heavy piece of leather-upholstered furniture was toppled over by the impact, so that they lay sheltered behind it. In another split second the thunder of the explosion deafened them and the air was full of the whine of flying metal.

  4

  Patricia Holm looked up from her crossword puzzle.

  “Give me a word for ‘sack’ in three letters, boy. ‘M,’ ‘A,’ something.”

  “Bag,” suggested the Saint.

  The girl eyed him sinisterly.

  “What d’you mean—‘bag’? I said—”

  “Eb, A. G.,” insisted the Saint adenoidally. “Bag. With a code id the doze.”

  They were having breakfast in the kitchen, for the sitting-room was uninhabitable. A representative from a firm of decorators whom the Saint had telephoned came round at eleven and inspected the mess wisely.

  “It looks as if there’d been an explosion, sir,” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” said the Saint. “A man came in here and sat on a pin after putting baking powder on his gooseberries in mistake for sugar. We’re still looking for him.”

  An assurance was given that the firm would set to work to make good the damage as quickly as possible, and Simon bathed and dressed himself with unaltered cheerfulness. Any philosophically-minded man in his position could have found something to be cheerful about that morning, for it was a miracle that the Saint was alive. If the pineapple expert had not misjudged the length of his fuse the end of all Saint Stories would have been written in a sticky splash.

  Chief Inspector Teal himself called in later. He had the report of the explosives man who had been sent down from the Yard to view the damage. The bomb was a home-made affair of the jam-tin type, but it might have been none the less effective for that. The assortment of broken nails and scrap-iron with which it had been lined had pocked the walls and ceiling like a burst of shrapnel, and slit to ribbons the upholstery that had saved the Saint’s and Patricia’s lives.

  “I’m wondering why they should have bothered about you,” said Teal.

  “Passing over the insult to my fame,” drawled the Saint, “maybe someone overheard your suggestion to me last night. Or else there’s someone in the gang with a grudge against me—Basher Tope is a Green Cross boy, and you may remember that I once had words with him. But don’t take it to heart, Claud—I expect your turn will come.”

  Teal turned his chewing gum over somnolently.

  “You haven’t been interfering already, have you?” he inquired, and the Saint smiled.

  “I never interfere, Claud. You know that.”

  “All the same, I think I’d change my address if I were you,” said the detective.

  Simon stood at the broken window after he had gone and gazed down the road. The motorcycle man was no longer in sight, and it was unlikely that he would return. The crowd which had filled the road after the explosion the night before had had its eyeful and dispersed, and there were no curious sightseers to replace it that morning. London had taken the attempt on the Saint’s life with considerable sang-froid. There were no suspicious loiterers on the vista on which the Saint looked out, but Simon Templar was not deceived.

  “There might be something in Claud’s idea as far as you’re concerned, Pat,” he said. “Ted Orping will be trying again, if none of the others do.”

  “How long is this going on for?” she asked.

  “Until Tex Goldman is the Big Shot of London, or material for a front-page inquest,” said the Saint. “Tex thinks the first and I think the second.”

  She slipped a hand through his arm. He was not utterly surprised at her gaiety.

  “Gee, boy, it’s thrilling!”

  “You’re a wicked little girl,” said the Saint solemnly, “and if anybody hears you talk like that you’ll find yourself thrown out of the YWCA on your ear…But don’t get the idea that Lond
on is going to be like Chicago. There are no gangs coming over here. It’s just a wildcat scheme out of Tex Goldman’s head, but there may be lots of skylarking and song before the swelling goes down.”

  The general public’s interest in Simon Templar’s fate was demonstrated more enthusiastically in newsprint than in person. Harassed editors in search of new headlines connected with the gang menace to London seized on the bombing incident joyfully with an unspoken prayer of thanksgiving for the fact that it happened in time for them to find a position of suitable prominence for it before the country editions went to bed. Morning newspapers work under the tragic disadvantage compared with their brethren of the evening, for they are unable to rush out special editions at any hour of the day in order to scoop an exclusive story. This was the kind of event that they lived for.

  The pashas of Fleet Street shared the Saint’s knowledge that no seriously Chicago-esque wave of lawlessness was on its way, but it takes more than that to stop an experienced news editor. Fleet Street grabbed at the temporary orgy of violent crime, as it appeared to the public at the moment, with both hands. The Saint’s escape was featured on the front page of every national daily, and in it, naturally, was mentioned the essential point that Simon Templar had survived the attack.

  This fact was the subject of a short-tempered conference in the neighbourhood of Baker Street.

  “Let me go after him with a gun, boss,” said Ted Orping. “I’ll get him for you.”

  “Yeah—you’d get him like you got him last time,” replied Tex Goldman sourly. “You’re just a beginner, and from what I hear that guy was toting a gun before you were weaned. You ain’t much to look at, but you’re more use alive than dead.”

  Orping scowled. He had almost thought out a fittingly belligerent retort when Goldman put away his cigar and waved him to silence.

  “Back in St. Louis, when a guy had to be bumped off, we had a way of doing it. I’ll tell you what it was. We found an empty apartment, or a room, or sump’n, that had a window fixed so’s you could see his door. Then a coupla choppers, or maybe sometimes just one, would sit up in that window and watch till he came out. They had a machine-gun, and they didn’t care how long they waited. Some time he had to come out, and then he got his.”