The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror) Page 12

  "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 allow­ance. But I think you understand me." Once again, a smooth evanescent trickle of honey over the bitingly measured sylla­bles. "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 lit­tle 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?"

  "Naturally, she drove straight to Buckingham Palace," said the Saint.

  Kuzela continued to smile.

  "But you are suspicious. Possibly you think that some harm might befall her, and perhaps you would be unwilling to accept my assurance that she will be as safe as yourself. Well, it is a human suspicion after all, and I can understand it. But suppose we ask you another question. . . . Where is the Duke of Fortezza?" Kuzela drew a small memorandum block towards him, and poised his pencil with engaging expectancy. "Come, come! That is not a very difficult question to answer, is it? He is nothing to you—a man whom you met a few hours ago for the first time. If, say, you had never met him, and you had read in your newspaper that some fatal accident had overtaken him, you would not have been in the least disturbed. And if it is a decision between his temporary inconvenience and your own promising young life . . ." Kuzela shrugged. "I have no wish to use threats. But you, with your experience and imag­ination, must know that death does not always come easily. And very recently you did something which has mortally offended the invaluable Ngano. It would distress me to have to deliver you into his keeping. . . . Now, now, let us make up our minds quickly. What have you done with the Duke?"

  Simon dropped his chin and looked upwards across the desk.

  "Nothing that I should be ashamed to tell my mother," he said winningly; and the other's eyes narrowed slowly.

  "Do I, after all, understand you to refuse to tell me?"

  The Saint crossed his left ankle over to his right knee.

  "You know, laddie," he remarked, "you should be on the movies, really you should. As the strong silent man you'd be simply great, if you were a bit stronger and didn't talk so much."

  For some seconds Kuzela looked at him.

  Then he threw down his pencil and pushed away the pad.

  "Very well, then," he said.

  He snapped his fingers without turning his head, and one of the two bruisers came to his side. Kuzela spoke without giving the man a glance.

  "Yelver, you will bring round the car. We shall require it very shortly."

  The man nodded and went out; and Kuzela clasped his hands again on the desk before him.

  "And you, Templar, will tell us where we are going," he said, and Simon raised his head.

  His eyes gazed full and clear into Kuzela's face, bright with the reckless light of their indomitable mockery, and a sardoni­cally Saintly smile curved the corners of his mouth.

  "You're going to hell, old dear," he said coolly; and then the negro dragged him up out of his chair.

  Simon went meekly down the stairs, with the negro gripping his arm and the second bruiser following behind; and his brain was weighing up the exterior circumstances with light­ning accuracy.

  Patricia had got away—that was the first and greatest thing. He praised the Lord who had inspired her with the sober far­sightedness and clearness of head not to attempt any futile heroism. There was nothing she could have done, and merci­fully she'd had the sense to see it. ... But having got away, what would be her next move?

  "Claud Eustace, presumably," thought the Saint; and a wry little twist roved across his lips, for he had always been the most incorrigible optimist in the world.

  So he reached the hall, and there he was turned round, and hustled along towards the back of the house. As he went, he stole a glance at his wrist-watch. . . . Patricia must have been gone for the best part of an hour, and that would have been more than long enough for Teal to get busy. Half of that time would have been sufficient to get Teal on the phone from the nearest call box and have the house surrounded by enough men to wipe up a brigade—if anything of that sort were going to be done. And not a sign of any such developments had interrupted the playing of the piece. . . .

  Down from the kitchen a flight of steps ran to the cellar; and as the Saint was led down them he had a vivid apprecia­tion of another similarity between that adventure and a con­cluding episode in the history of the late Mr. Garniman. The subterranean prospects in each case had been decidedly unin­viting; and now the Saint held his fire and wondered what treat was going to be offered him this time.

  The cigar-chewing escort stopped at the foot of the steps, and the Saint was led on alone into a small bare room. From the threshold, the negro flung him forward into a far corner, and turned to lock the door behind him. He put the key in his pocket, took off his coat, and rolled up his sleeves; and all the time his dark blazing eyes were riveted upon the Saint.

  And then he picked up a great leather whip from the floor, and his thick lips curled back from his teeth in a ghastly grin.

  "You will not talk, no?" he said.

  He swung his arm; and the long lash whistled and crackled through the air, and snaked over the Saint's shoulders like the recoiling snap of an overstrained hawser.

  Chapter VIII

  Simon reeled away in a slash of agony that ate into his chest as if a thin jet of boiling acid had been sprayed across his back.

  And he went mad.

  Never, otherwise, could he have accomplished what he did. For one blinding instant, which branded itself on his optic nerves with such an eye-aching clarity that it might have stood for an eternity of frozen stillness, he saw everything there was to see in that little room. He saw the stained grey walls and ceiling and the dusty paving underfoot; he saw the locked door; he saw the towering figure of the gigantic hate-vengeful negro before him, and the cyclopean muscles swelling and rippling under the thin texture of the lavender silk shirt; and he saw himself. Just for that instant he saw those things as he had never seen anything before, with every thought of everything else and every other living soul in the world wiped from his mind like chalk marks smeared from a smooth board. . . .

  And then a red fog bellied up before his eyes, and the stillness seemed to burst inwards like the smithereening of a great glass vacuum bulb.

  He felt nothing more—in that white heat of berserk fury, the sense of pain was simply blotted out. He dodged round the room by instinct, ducking and swerving mechanically, and scarcely knew when he succeeded and when he failed.

  And at his wrists he felt nothing at all.

  The buckle of the strap there was out of reach of his teeth, but he twisted his hands inwards, one over the other, tighten­ing up the leather with all his strength, till his muscles ached with the strain. He saw the edges of the strap biting into his skin, and the flesh swelling whitely up on either side; the pain of that alone should have stopped him, but there was no such thing. And he stood still and twisted once again, with a concen­trated passion of power that writhed over the whole of his upper body like the stirring of a volcano; and the leather broke before his eyes like a stri
p of tissue paper. . . .

  And the Saint laughed:

  The whip sang around again, and he leapt in underneath it and caught it as it fell. And what he had intuitively expected happened. The negro jerked at it savagely—and Simon did not resist. But he kept his hold fast, and allowed all the vicious energy of that jerk to merge flowingly into his own unchecked rush; and it catapulted him to his mark like a stone from a sling. His right fist sogged full and square into the negro's throat with a force that jarred the Saint's own shoulder, and Simon found the whip hanging free in his hand.

  He stepped back and watched the grin melting out of the contorted black face. The negro's chest heaved up to the en­compassing of a great groaning breath, but the shattering mule-power of that pent-up super-auxiliated swipe in the gul­let had stunned his thyro-arytenoids as effectively as if a bullet had gone through them. His mouth worked wildly, but he could produce nothing more than an inaudible whisper. And the Saint laughed again, gathering up the whip.

  "The boys will be expecting some music," he said, very gently. "And you are going to provide it."

  Then the negro sprang at him like a tiger.

  That one single punch which had reversed the situation would have sent any living European swooning off into hours of tortured helplessness, but in this case the Saint had never expected any such result from it. It had done all that he had ever hoped that it would do—obliterated the negro's speaking voice, and given the Saint himself the advantage of the one unwieldy weapon in the room. And with the red mists of unholy rage still swilling across his vision, Simon Templar went grimly into the fight of his life.

  He sidestepped the negro's first maniac charge as smoothly and easily as a practised pedestrian evading a two-horse dray, and as he swerved he brought the whip cracking round in a stroke that split the lavender silk shirt as crisply as if a razor had been scored across it.

  The negro fetched up against the far wall with an animal scream, spun round, and sprang at him again. And again the Saint swayed lightly aside, and made the whip lick venomously home with a report like a gunshot. . . .

  He knew that that was the only earthly hope he had—to keep his opponent tearing blindly through a hazing madness of pain and fury that would scatter every idea of scientific fighting to the four winds. There were six feet eight inches of the negro, most of three hundred pounds of pitiless, clawing, blood-mad primitive malignity caged up with Simon Templar within those blank damp-blotched walls; and Simon knew, with a quiet cold certainty, that if once those six feet eight inches, those three hundred-odd pounds of bone and muscle resolved themselves into the same weight and size of logical, crafty, fighting precision, there was no man in the world who could have stood two minutes against them. And the Saint quietly and relentlessly crimped down his own strength and speed and fighting madness into the one narrow channel that would give it a fighting chance.

  It was a duel between brute strength and animal ferocity on the one hand, and on the other hand the lithe swiftness and lightning eye of the trickiest fighting man alive—a duel with no referee, in which no foul was barred. Tirelessly the Saint went round the room, flitting airily beyond, around, even under the massive arms that grappled for him, bobbing and swooping and turning, up on his toes and supple as a dancer, as elusive as a drop of quicksilver on a plate; and always the tapered leather thong in his hand was whirling and hissing like an angry fer-de-lance, striking and coiling and striking again with a bitter deadliness of aim. Once the negro grabbed at the whip and found it, and the Saint broke his hold with a kick to the elbow that opened the man's fingers as if the tendons had been cut; once the Saint's foot slipped, and he battered his way out of a closing trap in a desperate flurry of rib-creaking body blows that made even the negro stagger for a sufficient moment; and the fight went on.

  It went on till the negro's half-naked torso shone with a streaming lather of sweat and blood, and a sudden kicking lurch in his step shot into Simon's taut-strung brain the wild knowledge that the fight was won.

  And for the first time the Saint stood his ground, with his back to one wall, holding the negro at bay by the flailing sweep of the lash alone.

  Then Simon pressed forward, and the negro went back. . . .

  The Saint drove him into the opposite corner and beat him whimpering to his knees. And then, as the man spilled forward on to his face, Simon leapt in and got an ankle hold.

  "Get your hands right up behind your back," he rasped incisively, "or I'll twist the leg off you!"

  He applied his leverage vigorously, and the man obeyed him with a yelp. Simon locked the ankle with his knees and bent his weight over it. With quick deft fingers he knotted the tail of the whip round the negro's wrists, and passed the stock over one shoulder, round the neck, and back over the other shoul­der into a slip-knot. A draught of air gulped noisily into the negro's straining lungs, and Simon gave the noose a yank.

  "One word from you, and you graze in the Green Pastures," he stated pungently, and heard the lungful choke sibilantly out again. "And get this," said the Saint, with no increase of friendliness: "if you move the half of an inch in that hog-tie, you'll bowstring your own sweet self. That's all."

  He fished the key of the door out of the negro's pocket and stood up, breathing deeply.

  He himself was starting to look as if he had recently taken a warm shower-bath in his clothes; and now that the anaesthetic red mists were thinning out, a large part of his back was beginning to stiffen itself up into an identical acreage of ache; but he was not yet ready to sit down and be sorry about such minor discomforts. With the key snapping over in the lock, he brushed the hair back off his forehead and opened the door; and the cigar-chewer at the foot of the steps crawled upright like a slow-motion picture, with his jaw sagging nervelessly and his eyes popping from their orbits, gaping at the Saint as he might have gaped at his own ghost. . . .

  Smiling, and without any haste, Simon walked towards him.

  And the man stood there staring at him, watching him come on, numbed with a bone-chilling superstitious terror. It was not until the Saint was within two yards of him that a sobbing little wail gurgled in his throat and he reached feebly round to his hip pocket.

  Of the rest of the entertainment he knew little. He knew that a grip about which there was nothing ghostly seized upon his right wrist before he had time to draw, while another metallic clutch closed round his knees; he knew that the weight came suddenly off his feet; and then he seemed to go floating ethereally through space. Somewhere in the course of that flight an astonishingly hard quantity of concrete impinged upon his skull, but it did not seem an important incident. His soul went bimbering on, way out into the land of blissful dreams. . . .

  And the Saint went on up the steps.

  He was half-way up when a bell jangled somewhere over­head, and he checked involuntarily. And then a tiny skew-eyed grin skimmed over his lips.

  "Claud Eustace for the hell of it," he murmured, and went upwards very softly.

  Right up by the door at the top of the stairs he stopped again and listened. He heard slow and watchful footsteps going down the hall, followed by the rattle of a latch and the cautious whine of slowly turning hinges. And then he heard the most perplexing thing of all, which was nothing more or less than an expansive and omnipotent silence.

  The Saint put up one hand and gently scratched his ear, with a puzzled crease chiselling in between his eyebrows. He was prepared to hear almost anything else but that. And he didn't. The silence continued for some time, and then the front door closed again and the footsteps started back solo on the return journey.

  And then, in the very opposite direction, the creak of a window-sash sliding up made him blink.

  Someone was wriggling stealthily over the sill. With his ear glued to a panel of the door, he could visualise every move­ment as clearly as if he could have seen it. He heard the faint patter of the intruder's weight coming on to the floor, and then the equally faint sound of footsteps creeping over
the linoleum. They connected up in his mind with the footsteps of the man who had gone to the door like the other part of a duet. Then the second set of footsteps died away, and there was only the sound of the man's returning from the hall. Another door opened. . . . And then a voice uttered a corro­sively quiet command.

  "Keep still!"

  Simon almost fell down the steps. And then he windmilled dazedly back to his balance and hugged himself.

  "Oh, Pat!" he breathed. "Mightn't I have known it? And you ring the bell to draw the fire, and sprint round and come in the back way. . . . Oh, you little treasure!"

  Grinning a great wide grin, he listened to the dialogue.

  "Put your hands right up. . . . That's fine. . . . And now, where's Kuzela?"

  Silence.

  "Where is Kuzela?"

  A shifting of feet, and then the grudging answer: "Upstairs."

  "Lead on, sweetheart."

  The sounds of reluctant movement. . . .

  And the whole of Simon Templar's inside squirmed with ecstasy at the pure poetic Saintliness of the technique. Not for a thousand million pounds would he have butted in just then —not one second before Kuzela himself had also had time to appreciate the full ripe beauty of the situation. He heard the footsteps travelling again: they came right past his door and went on into the hall, and the Saint pointed his toes in a few movements of an improvised cachucha.

  And then, after a due pause, he opened the door and fol­lowed on.

  He gave the others time to reach the upper landing, and then he went whisking up the first flight. Peeking round the banisters, he was just in time to get a sight of Patricia disap­pearing into Kuzela's study. Then the door slammed behind her, and the Saint raced on up and halted outside it.

  While after the answering of the dud front-door call there had certainly been a silence. the stillness to which he listened now made all previous efforts in noiselessness sound like an artillery barrage. Against that background of devastating blank-ness, the clatter of a distant passing truck seemed to shake the earth, and the hoot of its klaxon sounded like the Last Trump.