The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 12

  3

  “Did you have a nice dinner?” asked Patricia Holm. “And how was the new candidate for your harem?”

  Simon Templar peeled off his coat, unbuttoned his shirt to the waist, and deposited himself at a restful angle on the chesterfield under the open windows. Through the curtains came the ceaseless grind of Piccadilly traffic and a stir of sultry air tainted with petrol fumes and grime, too thick and listless to be properly termed a breeze, but in spite of that the spacious apartment in Cornwall House which was the Saint’s London headquarters attained an atmosphere of comparative peace and freshness.

  “There are mugs of all kinds, but there are very special and superlative mugs who do their mugging in London, and we are it,” he said gloomily. “I had a beautiful dinner, thanks. The truites au bleu were magnificent, and the pigeons truffés in aspic were a dream. The candidate was looking her best, which is pretty good. She went home early. Since then I’ve been drowning my sorrows at the Café Royal.”

  Patricia contemplated him discerningly.

  “The dinner was beautiful, and the candidate was looking her best, and she went home early,” she repeated. “What was the matter with her?”

  “She wanted her beauty sleep,” said the Saint. “After you with that barley water, Hoppy.”

  He stretched out a long arm and retrieved the bottle of Scotch from Mr Uniatz’s jealous grasp.

  “What Hoppy needs is compressed whisky, so he could get a bottle into a wineglass,” he commented.

  “Was it your scintillating conversation that made her yawn?” inquired Peter Quentin. “Or did she have the wrong kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?”

  Simon splashed soda into his glass and drank meditatively.

  “She’s an attractive wench,” he said. “I like her. She’s so innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry shark. The trouble is that if she’s not careful she’s going to wake up one day and find herself in a dark alley with her throat cut, and that will be a great pity for anyone with a face and figure like hers.”

  “Say, where do ya get dat stuff?” demanded Mr Uniatz loudly.

  He sat forward on the edge of his chair, his ham-like hands practically obliterating his half-empty glass, with a deep frown corrugating the negligible clearance between his eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically rough-cast face chopped into masses of fearsome challenge.

  Simon raised his head to stare at him. A criticism like that coming from Mr Uniatz, a man to whom any form of mental exercise was such excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint’s god-like ability to Think, had something awe-inspiring about it that numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he didn’t stop strutting round and getting wise to himself. For one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been made that night, and the whisky which had for years been flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy’s asbestos throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden sensitive section of his entrails.

  Mr Uniatz reddened bashfully under the stares that impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being the focus of so much attention. But he clung valiantly to his point.

  “It sounds like a pipe-dream to me, boss,” he said.

  “Let me get this straight,” said the Saint carefully. “I gather that you don’t think that Valerie Woodchester runs any risk of getting her throat cut. Is that the idea?”

  Mr Uniatz looked about him in dazed perplexity. He seemed to think that everyone had gone mad.

  “I dunno, boss,” he said, refusing to be sidetracked. “What I wanna know is where do ya get dat stuff?”

  “What stuff?” asked Peter faintly.

  “De compressed whisky,” said Mr Uniatz.

  There was a pregnant silence.

  The Saint laid his head slowly back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

  “Hoppy,” he said solemnly, “I love you. When I die, the word ‘Uniatz’ will be found written on my heart.”

  “How about if de goil is selling it, boss?” ventured Mr Uniatz, tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. “Maybe she’s in de racket too, woikin’ for de chemical factory where dey make it.”

  Simon passed him the whisky bottle.

  “Maybe she is, Hoppy,” he said. “It’s an idea, anyway. Give yourself some more nourishment while we think it over.”

  “Didn’t you get anything useful out of her?” asked Patricia.

  “She held out on me,” said the Saint ruefully. “I did my best, but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing as it may seem, she wouldn’t confide in me. The secrets of her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart so far as I’m concerned.”

  Peter clicked his tongue.

  “You’ve met her four times now, and she hasn’t confided in you,” he said in accents of distress. “You must be losing your touch. They don’t usually hold out so long.”

  “What do you mean by ‘they?’ ” demanded the Saint un-blushingly.

  “He means your harem candidates,” said Patricia. “The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn’t given way to your manly charms.”

  Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.

  “She’s tough, all right,” he said. “But I don’t know how tough. She’ll need all she’s got to sit in on this game. She’s sitting in, and I’m still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are…There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home.”

  “You started to get somewhere, then,” said Peter. The Saint nodded.

  “Oh, yes, I started. But I didn’t finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though—I found that out, even if she didn’t admit it. But she’s going to play her own hand, and so she’ll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult.”

  He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.

  “Goddammit,” he said quietly, “it’s a complete and perfect set-up—with only the foundation missing. I’ve worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have too. We’ll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece.”

  “All right,” said Peter. “You run over it. We like hearing you listen to yourself.”

  “Here it is, then. We’ve got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He’s on a job. In this case he’s in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather—two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respectability, but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put up. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entraîneuse for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very agile professional Pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to put Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate accident. The Coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest nicely hamstrung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly, and meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay again.”

  “And so soothing,” said Peter. “Especially for the corpses.”

  “Unfortunately this isn’t quite the end of it. The ungodly haven’t found Kennet’s incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome b
y Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence—either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie’s psychology.”

  “I thought we should come to that eventually,” said Patricia.

  Simon threw a cushion at her.

  “She’s not a bad kid, really,” he said. “But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalise anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident, and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit—possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She’s absent-mindedly gone just a little further than she’d ever gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realises that it’s given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn’t want to confide in me. She’s paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she’s got some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet’s work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat’s-paw; or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two.”

  Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

  “And she’s the only link we’ve got with what’s going on?” he said.

  “The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn’t get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn’t be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we’re tied hand and foot. We’re just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she’s playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait, and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?”

  “You tell us,” said Patricia.

  There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the pow-wow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, coming to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dissolved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

  “I got it, boss!” he announced ecstatically. “What we gotta do wit’ dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off.”

  “Before she takes off what?” asked the Saint foggily.

  “Before she takes off wit’ de compressed whisky.” said Mr Uniatz proudly. “De stuff de temperance outfit she’s woikin’ for t’rows out of de aeroplanes.” Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavishness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. “Chees, boss, why didden we t’ink of dat before? It’s in de bag!”

  Simon looked at him for a moment, and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.

  And at that instant the telephone bell rang.

  The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpectedness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint’s large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour, and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.

  Simon picked up the microphone.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “Is that you, Simon darling?” it answered. “This is Valerie.”

  A feathery tingle passed up the Saint’s spine, and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an indefinable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.

  “Hullo, darling,” he said evenly. “And how are you?”

  “I’m all right, thanks…Listen, Simon—you remember that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?”

  Simon drew at his cigarette.

  “Of course,” he said without hesitation. “It’s quite safe.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “You see, I’m afraid I’ve got to have it back at once. I’m awfully sorry to be such a nuisance, but it’s frightfully important. I mean, could you bring it round right away? It’s all frightfully thrilling, but I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. Can you possibly manage it?”

  “Easily,” he said. “I was just looking for something useful to do.”

  “You know where I live, don’t you?”

  “I should think so. I looked it up in the phone book as soon as I got back to town, and I’ve just been waiting for an invitation.”

  “Well, you’ve got one now. And listen. Nobody must know you’re coming to see me. I’ll tell you why afterwards.”

  “No one shall even guess where I’ve gone,” said the Saint, with his eyes on Patricia. “I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

  “Thanks so much, darling,” she said. “Do hurry.”

  “I will.”

  He laid the microphone gently back on its bracket, and stood up. The dance of his blue eyes was as if he had been asleep all the evening and had just become awake. He had no more doubts or problems. All the dammed-up, in-turned energy with which he had been straining was crystallised suddenly into the clean sharp leap of action. He was smiling.

  “Did you get that, souls?” he said.

  “She wants to see you,” said Patricia. “Am I supposed to get excited?”

  “She wants more than that,” he said. “She wants a cloakroom ticket which she gave me to keep for her—which she never gave me. She wants it at once, and nobody’s to know where I’ve gone. And somebody was listening on the wire all the time to make sure she said all the right things. So I don’t see how I can refuse the date.” The Saint’s smile was dazzlingly seraphic. “I told you something was bound to happen, and it’s starting now!”

  4

  “Excuse me a minute while I get into my shooting clothes,” he said.

  He vanished out of the nearest door, but the room had hardly had time to adapt itself to his disappearance when he was back again. The Saint could always make a professional quick-change artist look like an elderly dowager dressing for a state ball, and when he was in a hurry he could do things with clothes that bordered on the miraculous. He came back in a grey lounge suit whose sober hue had no counterpart in the way he wore it, which was with all the peculiarly rakish elegance that was subtly infused into anything he put on. His fresh shirt was buttoned and his tie was tied, and he was feeding a fully charged magazine into the butt of a shining Luger.

  “You’re not really going, are you?” asked Patricia hopelessly.

  She knew when she said it that it was a waste of words, and the scapegrace slant of his brows was sufficient answer.

  “Of course not, darling,” he said. “These are my new pyjamas.”

  “But you’re doing just what they want you to do!”

  “Maybe. But do they know that I know it? I don’t think so. That phone call was as straightforward as a baby’s prayer—to the guy who was checking up on it. Only Valerie knows that she never gave me a cloakroom ticket, and she knows I know it. She’s on the spot in her own flat, and that was the only way she could tip me off and call for help. Do you want me to stay home and knit?”

  Patric
ia stood up. She kissed him.

  “Be careful, boy,” she said. “You know I look terrible in black.”

  Peter Quentin finished his drink, and rose. He buttoned his coat with a deep sigh.

  “I suppose this is the end of our chance of a night’s rest,” he said pessimistically. “I ought to have stayed in Anford.” He saluted Patricia. “Will you excuse Hoppy and me if we trot along to take care of the dragons while your problem child is striking attitudes in front of the heroine? We don’t want anything to happen to him—it would make life so horribly quiet and peaceful.”

  Simon stopped at the door.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “There may be policemen and other emissaries of the ungodly prowling around outside. We’d better not take chances. Will you call down to Sam Outrell, Pat, and tell him to meet me in the garage?”

  As they rode down in the elevator he felt the springy elation of the moment spreading its intoxication through his muscles. The lucid swiftness of his mind ran on, constructing a clear objective framework of action in which he moved with unhurried precision with each step unerringly laid out a fraction of time before he reached it.

  Down in the basement garage Sam Outrell, the janitor, was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened, with a look of placid expectancy on his pleasant bucolic face. He fell in at the Saint’s side as Simon walked across to where the Hirondel stood waiting in its private bay.

  “Goin’ out on business again, sir?” he queried, with the imperturbation of many years of experience of the Saint’s unlawful occasions.

  “I hope so, Sam.” The Saint cocked his legs over the side while Peter and Hoppy climbed into their own seats. “I don’t want to stage a big demonstration, but you might just do a quiet job of obstructing if anyone’s waiting for us. Take your own heap and follow me up the ramp, and see that you stick tight on my tail. When I wave my hand, swing across the road and stall your engine. I’ll only want two or three minutes.”