16 The Saint Overboard Page 14

  "It's as good as finished," he said, with a flash of the old reck­less bravado.

  "Kiss me."

  The lights of the ballroom struck them like a physical blow. The orchestra was still playing. How long had they been away? Ten minutes? Ten years? She slipped into his arms and he went on dancing with her, as if they had never stopped, mechanically. He let the lights and the noise drug his senses, deliberately sink­ing himself in a stupor into which emotion could not penetrate. He would not think.

  They completed a circle of the floor, and rejoined the others. Vogel was just paying a waiter.

  "We thought you would like another drink after your efforts, Mr Tombs. It's quite a good floor, isn't it?"

  4

  Simon forced himself back to reality; and it was like stepping under a cold shower. And exactly as if he had stepped under a cold shower he was left composed and alert again, a passionless fighting machine, perfectly tuned, taking up the threads of the adventure into which he had intruded. The madness of a few moments ago might never have lived in him: he was the man who had come out on to the deck of the Corsair at the sound of a cry in the night, the cynical cavalier of the crooked world, steady-handed and steady-eyed, playing the one game in which death was the unalterable stake.

  "Not at all bad," he murmured. "If I'd been in the Professor's shoes I wouldn't have missed it."

  "I suppose it must always be difficult for the layman to understand the single-mindedness of the scientist. And yet I can sym­pathise with him. If his experiments ended in failure, I'm sure I should be as disappointed as if a pet ambition of my own had been exploded."

  "I'm sure you would."

  Vogel's colourless lips smiled back with cadaverous suavity.

  "But that's quite a remote possibility. Now, you'll be with us to-morrow, won't you? We are making a fairly early start, and the weather forecasts have promised us a fine day. Suppose you came on board about nine ..."

  They discussed the projected trip while they finished their drinks, and on the walk back to the harbour. Vogel's affability was at its most effusive; his stony black eyes gleamed with a curious inward lustre. In some subtle disturbing way he seemed more confident, more serenely devoid of every trace of impa­tience or anxiety.

  "Well—goodnight."

  "Till to-morrow."

  Simon shook hands; touched the moist warm paw of Otto Arnheim. He saluted Loretta with a vague flourish and the out-line of a smile.

  "Goodnight."

  No more. And he was left with an odd feeling of emptiness and surprise, like a man who has dozed for a moment and roused up with a start to wonder how long he has slept or if he has slept at all. Anything that had happened since they came in from that enchanted garden had gone by so quickly that that sudden awakening was his first real awareness of the lapse of time. He felt as if he had been whirled round in a giant sling and flung into an arctic sea, as if he had fought crazily to find his depth and then been hurled up by a chance wave high and dry on some lonely peak, all within a space of seconds. He remembered that he had been talking to Vogel, quietly, accurately, without the slightest danger of a slip, like a punch-drunk fighter who has remained master of his technique without conscious volition. That was illusion: only the garden was real.

  He shook himself like a dog, half angrily; but in a way the sensation persisted. His thoughts went back slowly and deliber­ately, picking their footholds as if over slippery stepping-stones. Loretta Page. She had come out of the fog over Dinard and disturbed his sleep. He had been fascinated by the humour of her eyes and the vitality of her brown body. On an impulse he had kissed her. How long had he known her? A few hours. And she had been afraid. He also had been afraid; but he had found her. They had talked nothing except nonsense; and yet he had kissed her again, and found in that moment a completer peace than he had ever known. Then they had talked of love. Or hadn't they?

  So little had been said; so much seemed to have been under­stood. His last glimpse of her had been as she turned away, with Vogel tucking her hand into his arm; she had been gay and acquiescent. He had let her go. There was nothing else he could do. They were in the same legion, pledged to the same grim code. So he had let her go, with a smile and a flourish, for whatever might come of the fortunes of war, death or dishonour. And he had thought: "Illusion . . ."

  Sssssh . . .

  The Saint froze in the middle of a step, with his mind wiped clean like a slate and an eerie ballet of ice-cold pinpricks skitter­ing up into the roots of his hair. Once again he had been dreaming, and once again he had been brought awake in a chilling flash. Only this time there was no feeling of unreality about the gal­vanic arresting of all his perceptions.

  He stopped exactly as he was when the sound caught him, on his toes, with one foot on the deck of the Corsair and the other reaching down into the cockpit, one hand on a stanchion and the other steadying himself against the roof of the miniature wheel-house, as if he had been turned into stone. All around him was the quiet dimness of the harbour, and the lights of the port spread up the slope from the waterfront in scintillating terraces of winking brilliance in front of him; somewhere on one of the esplanades a couple of girls were giggling shrilly at the inaudible witticisms of their escorts. But for that long-drawn moment the Saint was marooned as far from those outposts of the untroubled commonplace as if he had been left on the last outlaw island of the Spanish Main. And in that space of incalculable separation he stayed like the inanimate imprint of a moving man on a pho­tographic plate, listening for a confirmation of that weird tortured hiss that had transfixed him as he began to let himself down over the coaming.

  He knew that it was no ordinary sound such as Orace might have made in moving about his duties; otherwise it would never have sent that unearthly titillation coursing over his spine. There was a strained intensity about it, a racking sibilance of frightful effort, that had crashed in upon his dormant vigilance as effec­tively as an explosion. His brain must have analysed it instinctively, in an instant, with the lightning intuition bred of all the dangerous years behind him: now, he had to make a laborious effort to recollect the features of the sound and work out exactly why it had stopped him, when subconscious reaction had achieved the same result in a microscopical fraction of the time.

  A few inches in front of his left foot, the open door of the saloon stencilled an elongated panel of light across the cockpit. The ache eased out of his cramped leg muscles as he gently completed his interrupted movements and finished the transfer of his weight down on to his extended toes. And as both his feet ar­rived on the same deck he heard a low gasping moan.

  He touched the gun on his hip; but that might be too noisy. His left hand was still grasping the stanchion by which he had been letting himself down, and with a silent twist he slipped it out of its socket. Then he took a long breath and stepped out across the door of the saloon, squarely into the light.

  He looked down the companion into a room through which a young cyclone seemed to have passed. The bunks had been opened and the bedding taken apart; lockers had been forced open and their contents scattered on the floor; books had been taken from their shelves and thrown down anywhere. The carpet had been ripped up and rolled back, and a section of panelling had been torn bodily away from the bulkhead. The Saint saw all this at once, as he would have taken in the broad features of any background; but his gaze was fixed on the crumpled shape of a man who lay on the floor—-who was trying, with set teeth and pain-wrinkled face, to drag himself up on to his hands and knees. The man whose hiss of convulsive breathing had shocked him out of his sleep-walking a minute ago. Orace.

  Simon put a hand on the rail of the companion and dropped into the saloon. He left his stanchion on the floor and hoisted Orace up on to one of the disordered couches.

  "What's the matter?"

  Orace's fierce eyes stared at him brightly, while he clutched his chest with one rough hand; and Simon saw that the breast of his shirt was red with blood. The man's voice came
with a hoarse effort.

  "Ain't nothink. Look out . . ."

  "Well, let's have a look at you, old son——"

  The other pushed him away with a sudden access of strength. Orace's head was turned towards the half-closed door at the forward end of the saloon, and his jaw was clamped up under the pelmet of his moustache with the same savage doggedness that had been carved into it when Simon had seen him making that heroic fight to get himself up from the floor. And at the same moment, beyond the communicating door, Simon heard the faint click of a latch and the creak of a board under a stealthy foot ...

  A slight dreamy smile edged itself on to the Saint's mouth as he stooped in swift silence to recover his stanchion. Clubbed in his left hand, an eighteen-inch length of slender iron, it formed a weapon that was capable of impressing the toughest skull with a sense of painful inferiority; and the thought that the sportsman who had turned his cabin upside down and done an unascer­tained amount of damage to Orace was still on board, and might come within reach of a shrewd smack on the side of the head, brought a comforting warmth of grim contentment into his veins.

  "Steady, me lad. We must get this coat off to see what the trouble is ... I never thought you'd go and hit the bottle di­rectly I was out of sight, Orace. And I suppose the cap blew off the ginger ale when you weren't looking . . . There we are. Now if we just change the cut of this beautiful shirt of yours ..."

  He burbled on, as if he were still attending to the patient, while he picked his way soundlessly over the littered floor. His eyes were fixed on the door into the galley, and they were not smiling.

  And then he stopped.

  He stopped because the half-open door had suddenly jerked wide open. Beyond it, the further end of the alleyway was in darkness; but in the shadowy space between the light of the saloon and the darkness beyond he could see the black configuration of a man, and the gun in the man's hand was held well forward so that the light of the saloon laid dull bluish gleams along the barrel.

  "Don't come any closer," said the shadow.

  The Saint relaxed slowly, rising from the slight crouch to which his cautious advance had unconsciously reduced him. The man facing him seemed to be of medium height, square and thickset; his voice had a throaty accent which was unfamiliar.

  "Hullo, old cockroach." Simon greeted him in the gentlest of drawls, with the stanchion swinging loosely and rather speculatively in his hand. "Come in and make yourself at home. Oh, but you have. Never mind. There's still some of the bulkhead you haven't pulled to pieces——"

  "I'll finish that in a minute. Turn round."

  "You're sure you haven't any designs on me?"

  "Turn round!"

  The Saint turned with a shrug.

  "I suppose you know what'll happen if your hand shakes with that gun of yours, brother," he remarked. "You might have an accident and hit me. There's something about your voice which makes me think you've been practising in a place where little things like that don't matter, but over here they're a bit fussy. Have you ever seen a man hanged, old dear? It does the most comic things to his face. Although probably your face is comic enough——"

  "You can forget that stuff," said the man behind him, coldly. "Now just drop that thing you've got in your hand."

  "What, my little umbrella?"

  "Yeah—whatever it is."

  The Saint bent down slowly and laid the stanchion on the floor, choosing the place for it carefully.

  "Now take two steps forward."

  Simon measured the two paces, and stood still. His body was braced for the bullet which might conclude the interlude within the next three seconds, and yet his one desperate hope was pinned to the temptation he had left two steps behind—the iron rod which he had put down so carefully, with one end on an upset ashtray from which it could not be moved without the slight grating sound for which his ears were straining. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Orace leaning rigidly forward on the couch, his scarecrow face set in a stare of indomitable wrath. . . .

  It came—the faint gritting scrape of metal which told him that the stanchion was being picked up. And the Saint flung him­self back with an instantaneous release of his tensed muscles.

  His right heel went kicking backwards like a mule's, straight as a gunshot for the place where the head of the man behind him should have been if he was bending to pick up the stanchion, with all the power of the Saint's vengeful thews packed into it, and a silent prayer to speed it on its way. And the head of the intruder was exactly where Simon had computed it should have been. He felt the ecstatic squelch of the leather sogging home into something hard and only superficially yielding, heard the plop! of a silencer and felt something tug at his sleeve, and spun round, half overbalancing with the violence of his own impetuous effort.

  From the man behind had come one single shrill hiccough of agony: and the Saint twisted round in time to see him rocking back on his haunches with one hand clapped to his face and the blood spurting through his fingers. His other hand still clutched the silenced gun, weaving it round in a blind search for a target. It plopped again, chipping the corner from a mirror on the after bulkhead; and Simon laughed softly and fell on him with his knees. As he grabbed the man's gun wrist he saw Orace lurching forward to pick up the iron bar which had given him his chance, and the obvious justice of the team play appealed to him irrestibly. He rolled under his victim with a quick squirm and a heave, and the man's weight came dead on his hands as Orace struck.

  The Saint wriggled out from underneath and sat up, feeling for a cigarette and leaning against the bunk.

  "A shrewd swipe, Orace—very shrewd," he commented, eyeing the sleeping beauty with professional approval. "It must have made you feel a lot better. What's all the excitement been about?"

  While he explored the extent of his crew's injuries, Orace told him.

  " 'E came alongside abaht 'arf-parst nine, sir. Said 'e 'ad a messidge from yer. 'Ho, yus?' I ses, 'wot is this 'ere messidge?' 'Yer to go an' meet Mr Tombs at the Queen's right awy,' 'e ses. 'Ho, yus?' I ses, 'well, Mr Tombs's larst words to me was to sty 'ere till it snows,' I ses. So 'e ses: 'This is very urgent. Can I come aboard an' tell yer the rest of the messidge?'—and before I could say anythink 'e'd come aboard. 'Not aht 'ere,' 'e ses, 'where we can be seen. Let's go below.' So 'e goes below, wivout so much as a by-your-leave, an' I follers 'im to tell 'im where 'e gets orf. 'I gotter whisper it,' 'e ses; an' then, bang, I got a biff on the 'ead that lide me right aht."

  "What about this bullet?"

  "That was afterwards. When I woke up 'e was still tearin' the saloon to pieces, an' 'e didn't notice me. I lay doggo fra bit, an' then I got 'old of one of the drawers wot 'e'd pulled out an' shied it at 'im. Must 've knocked 'im arf silly, becos I nearly got me 'ands on 'im, but I 'adn't got me legs back so much as I thought I 'ad, an' 'e pulled out 'is gun an' shot me."

  "And damned nearly killed you," said the Saint thoughtfully.

  The bullet had struck one of Orace's left ribs, glanced off, and torn an ugly gash in the muscle of his arm. So far as the Saint could tell, there were no bones broken; and he busied himself with expertly dressing and bandaging the wound, while his mind probed for the origins of that riotous visit.

  It wasn't homicide alone and primarily, at least—he was sure of that. From the story, the shot which had crippled Orace looked more like an accident of panic, the desperate impulse of any thug who had felt himself on the point of being cornered and captured. And if that had been the object, it would have been easy enough to finish the job—he himself could have been picked off without warning while he stood at the head of the companion. If not that, then what? The eruptive appearance of the saloon provided a ready answer. Vogel was still searching for information; and the legend of convenient harbour thieves had already been established in Dinard.

  There was another suggestion which he remembered as he put the last touches to Orace's bandages.

  "Did a porter bring a couple of trunks along for me?" he ask
ed; and Orace nodded.

  "Yessir. They came abaht arf-parst seven. I put 'em in the starboard cabin."

  Simon went forward as soon as he had finished, and found more or less what he had expected. The cords had been cut away from the trunks, and the locks had been ripped away by the scientific application of a jemmy. One of them was already open, and the lid of the other lifted at a touch. Clearly the visitor had just been completing his investigations when the sound of the Saint's arrival had disturbed him.

  "Which is all very festive and neighbourly," reflected the Saint, as he surveyed the wreckage.

  He strolled back to the saloon in a meditative frame of mind. There remained the problem of the investigator himself, who seemed destined to wake up with a sore head as well as a flattened face. The sore head might return to normal in twenty-four hours; even the flattened face might endear itself by a few years of devotion, and become as acceptable to its owner as the sym­metrical dial which perhaps it had once been; but the informa­tion which had been acquired during the same visit might prove to be more recalcitrant. It must not be allowed to take itself back to Vogel; but on the other hand it was doubtless keeping company with some useful information from the Vogel camp which might form a basis of fair exchange.

  Simon Templar found himself warming to that idea on his return journey. He closed the door of the galley behind him and folded a wet towel which he had collected on his way, grinning at Orace rather dreamily.

  "We might see if your boy friend feels talkative," he said. "And if he doesn't, you may be able to think of some way to thaw him out."

  He cleared a space on one of the settees and yanked the in­truder up on it. For a minute or so he applied the cold towel methodically. Then he felt the back of the man's head, looked closely into his face, and opened up his shirt. After which he moved away and finished his cigarette with contemplative de­liberation. For nothing was more certain than that the sleeping beauty had listened to the last lullaby of all.