The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 13

  “The first time I met you, I was afraid something like this might happen,” he said. “You really have been very clever…Of course, when you walked into the Algonquin with that suitcase I knew you were getting on too well.”

  “I hoped somebody would think that.”

  “But I did think I was doing a pretty good job myself.”

  Simon nodded.

  “You were terrific,” he said sincerely. “With all the things that must have been skittering about in your mind, it was the coolest job I ever saw. It was quite a bit later when you spoilt it.”

  “When was that?” asked the other interestedly.

  “When you improvised such a wonderful build-up for the Ourleys. It was just a little too pat. It fitted in just a little too neatly. You might have gotten away with just setting the combination on the bag to open at Ourley’s initials—did you pick those for final insurance, or just out of your own sense of humour, by the way?…It doesn’t matter. But you were just a little too coy about telling me that Ourley might have had a cosy corner of his own with somebody like Barbara waiting for him. And you were just a little too circumstantial and detailed about giving me the inside dope on the intricacies of the Ourley ménage. You bore down too hard on being the impeccable I-don’t-want-to-say-this-but guy. But it couldn’t possibly have been quite as good as that unless you’d known just a little too much…All those little things, but what a big difference they make.”

  Uttershaw grimaced ruefully, the gleaming barrel of his gun still drawing a solid and level line at Simon’s middle.

  “This is an invaluable education,” he remarked. “Please don’t stop.”

  “Even then,” said the Saint agreeably, “I had one or two tiny little doubts. But they went away when you were so careful to find out where Milton was, and when he arrived so aptly a few minutes later. I know it was brilliant of you to stop off at the Harvard Club to tell him his wife was having lunch with me, so that you could be sure he’d come bellowing back to make a commotion that would tie me up for long enough for you to get a start on a whole lot of new adjustments. But what you hadn’t thought of was that even brilliance can be overdone. You were awfully good, Allen, and if it’s any consolation to you, the only mistake you ever made was that you were just too good.”

  They might have been discussing a routine matter of merchandising policy.

  “ ‘O what a tangled web we weave,’ ” Uttershaw said philosophically. “I suppose I really shouldn’t have gone to the Algonquin at all today, but there was nothing about you in the papers in connection with last night’s affair, and I had to find out if you were still at large. I happened to be in the neighbourhood, so I stopped in instead of telephoning. It seemed safe enough at the time. But if I’d been in another part of town, I’d have spent a nickel, and I wouldn’t have run into you, and mightn’t have had half this trouble. As you say, the little things make such a big difference.”

  “Exactly.” In his own strange and equally fantastic way, the Saint was just as interested. He would always be interested, even with death waiting on an unpredictable trigger finger. “You had a beautiful racket, even though it could have looked slightly soiled if you’d considered the people who got hurt in the end. You stole your own property, collected the insurance, and still had the same goods to sell at even more than the legitimate market price. Of course, a few insignificant soldiers might have been blown apart as a derivative result of your business acumen, but soldiers are only hired to get blown apart, aren’t they?”

  Uttershaw rubbed his chin with a familiar gesture.

  “I never really thought about that,” he said, rather sublimely.

  The Saint’s eyes were not even regretful any more.

  “But you threw it all away, Allen. And now you’re going to have to die just like any other soldier, because you couldn’t be satisfied with the dollars you already had in your bank account.”

  The lean grey man shook his head.

  “I don’t know about dying,” he said. “Perhaps you’ve made a few miscalculations yourself. I think you’re banking rather a lot on the testimony of Varetti and Walsh.”

  “I think they’ll talk.”

  “I think you’re forgetting what a good attorney could do to them on the stand. But I don’t even think they will talk. All those things have been tried on them before. And they can’t talk, if they want to get out without anything less than life. But they can plead guilty to just trying to rob your room, and get away with that, and wait for me to buy them a parole. Milton doesn’t know much, and he wouldn’t even dare to say that.”

  “But you’re admitting everything to me.”

  “Why not? The only people who could make it hard for me are Barbara and yourself. And as you so rightly prophesied, I don’t intend to allow either of you to go that far. I hate to do it, but you put me in this position.”

  “Allen!”

  Barbara Sinclair moved towards Uttershaw in a wild kind of rush. She held out her arms as though she expected other arms to receive her, and the Saint’s eyes narrowed as he snapshot his distances. But even before he could have stirred, Uttershaw’s left hand reached flatly to meet her oncoming face, and sent her spinning back. She landed on the floor, with one hand clinging to an overturned chair.

  “Allen,” she said again, with a sort of incredulous tonelessness.

  “Shut up,” Uttershaw said coldly, and the snout of his gun was back on the Saint in the same instant, if it had ever wavered. “Keep still, please,” he said, but the Saint had not moved. Uttershaw glanced at the girl again. “Mr Templar told you all about it,” he said. “You should have believed him. But as he seems to have discovered, you don’t have enough brains.”

  The Saint memorised her blanched face with an expression that was too late for sympathy.

  “I did tell you,” he said.

  “Allen—no!”

  “Yes, my dear,” Uttershaw said. “I’m afraid he was perfectly right.”

  Simon Templar took a deep breath.

  “Speaking of being put in positions,” he said clearly, “how will you like your position on the broiler at Sing Sing if you do this?”

  “I’m not very worried about that,” Uttershaw said with the same unreal removal from emotion. “You see, I was careful enough to take the elevator to two floors above this, and I walked down here. I also found a fine little back stairway, with an openable window that leads out on to a fire escape. Apparently the management of this hotel trusts its guests. So I’ll have plenty of time for any other arrangements I may think of to account for what I’ve been doing during this time. And I shall certainly take your lecture to heart, and try not to be too brilliant…I’m sorry, but it wouldn’t be fair to leave you any false hopes.”

  The Saint looked at him with a face of stone.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Barbara Sinclair also, still crouched on the floor, speechless and rigid and chalky in a trance of the real horror that she had so immutably refused to see.

  But those choices were over now, for her as they were for Uttershaw.

  And as they might be over for him, too, if he had been so preoccupied with other excessive cleverness that he had overdone his own, after all.

  He said, “This makes quite a curtain.”

  He turned abruptly on his heel, and walked in an aimless way towards the bookcase.

  And thought what an immortal laugh it would be if after so much staging the clock in his mind had never been really right.

  And what a picturesque finale it was…

  “ ‘Our death is but a sleep and a forgetting,’ ” Uttershaw said gently, and the Saint stood still.

  “I hope that will make you very happy,” he said.

  He thought that Inspector Fernack had delayed his entrance to the last possible filament of suspense, doubtless with all conceivable malice aforethought, and then chosen a peculiarly dangerous moment for it. But he admitted to himself that he had helped to ask for that. />
  And the temptation to repay the performance was almost more than he could resist, but he knew at the same time that that filament was too fragile to risk even with a breath.

  He seemed to have no emotional feeling at all, but he had his own quality of mercy that was apart from all the other things.

  As the door burst open, and Fernack lumbered in, and Uttershaw whirled at the sound, Simon Templar took his gun out of the vase of chrysanthemums and fired as carefully as if he had been on a target range.

  16

  The Saint said, “No.”

  “Why?” wheedled Titania Ourley.

  “Because you don’t have to try to pump me for information like you did at the Algonquin, because I’m not investigating your personal nastiness or your husband’s sub-rosa activities. That’s been taken over by the—oh, Lord—proper authorities. Because you can read the newspaper for anything it’s good for you to know. Because I hate to rumba. And,” said the Saint, with dispassionate deliberation, “because you not only look like a cow, but you smell like tuberoses on a fresh grave.”

  He put the telephone back on its rest and lighted a cigarette, but he had barely brought it alive when the bell rang again.

  The operator said, “I have a call from Washington.”

  “Hamilton,” said the telephone, with pleasant precision. “Nice work, Simon.”

  “Thank you,” said the Saint.

  “I just wish that one of these days you’d bring ’em back alive. There is such a thing as good propaganda, if you don’t know it.”

  The Saint hitched himself more comfortably on to his bed, and adjusted his bathrobe over his long legs. His mind was clouded with many memories, and yet the core of it was clear and sure and without remorse.

  “Uttershaw wasn’t such a bad fellow, in his own way,” he said. “I guess my hand must have slipped. But if he had any time to think, I think he would have liked that.”

  The telephone played with its own static.

  “What happens with Ourley?” it asked after a while.

  “I just did a little more for him,” said the Saint. “You could never hang anything on him in a court of law so far as this case is concerned, but he still has Titania, and I’ve come to the conclusion that as a life sentence she’s even worse than Alcatraz. And with the encouragement I gave her a few minutes ago, she should be even better company than she was before.”

  “That Sinclair girl ought to get about ten years, with Fernack’s testimony of what he heard from outside the door before he broke in,” said the telephone callously. “She’s a good-looking number, though, isn’t she? What happened to you? Are you slipping?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Well…Whenever you’re ready, there is something else I’d like to talk to you about.”

  The Saint laughed a little, and it was silent and all the way inside himself, and deep and unimportant and nothing that could be talked about ever.

  “I’ll catch a plane this afternoon and meet you at the Carlton for dinner. I was just wondering what I could find to do.”

  He lay on the bed for a little while longer after he had hung up, smoking his cigarettes and thinking about several things or perhaps not anything much. But he kept remembering a girl with hair that had been stroked by midnight, and eyes that were all darkness, and lips that were like orchid petals. And that was no damn good at all.

  He got up and began to pack.

  THE SIZZLING SABOTEUR

  1

  Simon Templar had met a lot of unusual obstructions on the highway in the course of a long and varied career of eccentric travelling. They had ranged from migrant sheep to diamond necklaces, from circus parades to damsels in distress, and he had acquired a tolerant feeling towards most of them—particularly the damsels in distress. But a partly incinerated tree, he felt, was carrying originality a little far. He thought that the Texas Highway Department should at least have been able to eliminate such exotic hazards as that.

  Especially since there were no local trees in sight to account for it, so that somebody must have taken considerable trouble to import it. The surrounding country was flat, marshy, and reedy, and the sourish salty smell of the sea was a slight stench in the nostrils. The road was a gravelled affair with a high crown, possibly for drainage, and not any too wide although comparatively smooth. It wound and snaked along through alternating patches of sand and reeds like an attenuated sea serpent which had crawled out of Galveston Bay to sun itself on that desolate stretch of beach, so that Simon had seen the log a longish while before he was obliged to brake his car on account of it.

  The car was a nice shiny black sedan of the 1942 or BF (Before Freezing) vintage, but it was no more incongruous on this ribbon of road than its driver. However, Simon Templar was noted for doing incongruous things. En route to Galveston via Texas City on Highway 146, he hadn’t even reached Texas City. Somehow, back where the highway forked left from the Southern Pacific right-of-way, Simon had taken an even lefter turn which now had him heading southward along a most erratic observation tour of the Gulf coastline. A long way from the metropolitan crowding of New York, where he had recently wound up a job—or even of St. Louis, where he had been even more recently. Now his only company was the purring motor and an occasional raucous gull that flapped or soared above the marshland on predatory business of its own. Which didn’t necessarily mean that that business was any less predatory than that of Simon Templar, who under his more publicised nickname of the Saint had once left sundry police departments and local underworlds equally flatfooted in the face of new and unchallenged records of predatoriality—if this chronicler may inflict such a word on the long-suffering Messieurs Funk, Wagnalls, and Webster. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Saint and the seagull was the seagull’s protective parosmia, or perversion of the sense of smell…

  Yet the sun was still three hours high, and it was still twenty miles to Galveston unless the cartographer who had concocted the Saint’s road map was trying in his small way to cheer the discouraged pilgrim.

  And there was the smouldering blackened log laid almost squarely across the middle of the road, as if some diehard vigilante had made it his business to see that no case-hardened voyager rushed through the scenery without a pause in which its deeper fascinations might have a chance to make their due impression on the soul.

  Simon considered his own problem with clear blue eyes as the sedan came to a stop.

  The road was too narrow for him to drive around the log, and in view of the tyre rationing situation it was out of the question to try and drive over it. Which meant that somebody had to get out and move it. Which meant that the Saint had to move it himself.

  Simon Templar said a few casual things about greenhorns who mislaid such sizeable chunks of their camp fires, but at the same time his eyes were glancing left and right with the endless alertness hardening in their sapphire calm, and his tanned face setting into the bronze fighting mask to which little things like that could instantly reduce it.

  He knew from all the pitiless years behind him how easily this could be an effective ambush. When he got out to move the smouldering log, it would be a simple job for a couple of hirelings of the ungodly to attack him. A certain Mr Matson, for instance, might have been capable of setting such a trap—if Mr Matson had known that Simon Templar was the Saint, and was on his way to interview Mr Matson in Galveston, and if Mr Matson had had the prophetic ability to foretell that Simon Templar was going to take this coastal road. But since Simon himself hadn’t known it until about half an hour ago, it appeared that this hypothesis would have credited Mr Matson with a slightly fantastic grade of clairvoyance.

  The Saint stared at the log with all these things in his mind, and while he was doing it he discovered for the first time in his life the real validity of a much handled popular phrase.

  Because he sat there and literally felt his blood run cold.

  Because the log moved.

  Not i
n the way that any ordinary log would have moved, in a sort of solid rolling way. This log was flexible, and the branches stirred independently like limbs.

  Simon Templar had an instant of incredulous horror and sheer disbelief. But even while he groped back into the past for any commonplace explanation of such a defection of his senses, he knew that he was wasting his time. Because he had positively seen what he had seen, and that was the end of it.

  Or the beginning.

  Very quietly, when there was no reason to be quiet, he snapped open the door of the car and slid his seventy-four inches of whipcord muscles out on to the road. Four of his quick light strides took him to the side of the huge ember in the highway. And then he had no more doubt.

  He said, involuntarily, “My God…”

  For the ember was not a tree. It was human.

  It had been a man.

  Instead of a six-foot log of driftwood, the smouldering obstacle had been a man.

  And the crowning horror was yet to come. For at the sound of the Saint’s voice, the blackened log moved again feebly and emitted a faint groan.

  Simon turned back to his car, and was back again in another moment with his light top-coat and a whisky flask. He wrapped the coat around the piece of human charcoal to smother any remaining fire, and gently raised the singed black head to hold his flask to the cracked lips.

  A spasm of pain contorted the man, and his face worked through a horrible crispness.

  “Blue…Goose…” The voice came in a parched whisper. “Mavis…contact…Olga…Ivan…Ivanovitch…”

  Simon glanced around the deserted landscape, and had never felt so helpless. It was obviously impossible for him to move that sickening relic of a human being, or to render any useful first aid.

  Even if any aid, first or last, would have made any difference.

  “Can you hold it until I get some help—an ambulance?” he said. “I’ll hurry. Can you hear me?”

  The burned man rallied slightly.

  “No use,” he breathed. “I’m goner…Poured…gasoline…on me…Set fire…”