The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Read online

  The Saint glanced at Lady Valerie. Her face had been blank with stupefaction; now it was drawn and frightened. Her big brown eyes were fixed on him in mute and hypnotised entreaty.

  “I told you, you had charming friends, darling,” Simon remarked.

  He studied Bravache with cold-blooded interest. He felt that in the space of a few minutes he had come to know the man intimately, that he could take his soul apart and lay out all its components. How much of what Bravache had said was genuine fanaticism, or genuine self-deception, however wilful, he could not judge: in that kind of neurotic, the blend of idealism and conscienceless rationalisation became so homogeneous that it was practically impossible to draw a sharp cleavage. But he was not so much interested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mould. Now he was finding the imprint of the same die on a Frenchman, the chilling prototypical hallmark of the breed from which secret police and authorised persecutors are recruited, and it gave him a grimmer measure of the thing he had set out to fight than anything else had done. If the Sons of France had progressed far enough to develop officers like Major Bravache, the wheels must be turning with nightmare speed—

  “It all sounds very neat and jolly, my dear Major Cochon,” he admitted. “Do we start right away?”

  “I think we had better do so,” said Bravache, still smiling with a face of marble. “We have already wasted enough time.” He turned his head. “Dumaire, you know what to do. We will leave you to do it.” He looked at the Saint again, with his lips drawn back from his white even teeth. “You, Mr Templar, will accompany Pietri and myself. If you resist or try to obstruct us you will be shot at once. I advise you to come quietly. I am hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately. Besides”—the gleam of the white teeth was feline—”as a gentleman you will not wish to deprive me of the opportunity to answer some of your remarks which I have not had time to deal with here.”

  The Saint smiled.

  “By no manner of means,” he said. “Only I should rather like to take charge of the interview myself at this point—if you don’t mind.”

  He stepped aside and backwards, and took hold of Pietri by the ear. The movement was so improbable and unexpected that it was completed before either Bravache or Dumaire could reorient their wits sufficiently to do anything about it. And by that time Pietri was securely held, like a writhing urchin in the grip of an old-fashioned schoolmarm, so that his body was between the Saint and Bravache, who was still trying to make up his mind whether to grab for the automatic which he had confidently left lying on the table a yard away.

  Bravache’s poise broke for a moment.

  “Use your gun, you fool!” he thundered.

  “He can’t,” said the Saint. “You tell them why, Sam.”

  An extra turn on the piece of gristle he was holding made his victim squeal like a mouse.

  “There’s nothing in it,” wailed Pietri, with the revolver quivering futilely in his grasp. “They caught me outside—him and two other fellows—”

  Bravache started to move then, and Simon’s voice ripped out like a lash.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Really I wouldn’t. It’s dangerous.”

  And as he spoke, Peter and Hoppy came through the doorway.

  Bravache stood very still. His face was cold and unmoved, but the veins on the backs of his clenched hands stood out in knotty blue cords. Dumaire, caught with one hand at the edge of his coat pocket, prudently let it fall back to his side. He flattened himself against the wall like a cornered rat, with his shoulders hunched up to the jaw level of his small ebony-capped head.

  Simon released Pietri and strolled over to pick up Bravache’s automatic and retrieve his cigarette case and lighter from among his strewn belongings on the table. With a cigarette between his lips and the lighter wick burning steadily, he looked at Bravache with cerulean mockery in his eyes.

  “I’m hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately,” he said in a voice of satin. “Go on, Major—I don’t want anything to interrupt our little chat.”

  2

  The chat appeared to have been interrupted already, so far as Major Bravache was concerned. At any rate, he seemed disinclined to accept the Saint’s invitation to proceed with his discourse. Or else the founts of eloquence had dried up within him. His lips closed down over his teeth until there was only a straight line to show where his mouth had been.

  The Saint left him with a quizzically regretful shrug, and turned to untie Lady Valerie. She stood up and stretched herself, rather like a cat by the fire, and rubbed her chafed wrists. Then she went over to the table where her bag was, in search of the ineluctable restoratives of feminine sangfroid.

  “You gave me some bad moments,” she said, with an attempted nonchalance in which he could still see the signs of strain like carefully darned edges on a poor man’s cuff. “For a long time I was thinking you’d let me down, but of course I ought to have remembered that you never let anyone down.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She appeared from behind a card-sized mirror to point with the scarlet tip of a lipstick.

  “He rang the bell and said you’d sent him round with something special to give me. I thought it was a bit funny, since we’d only said goodbye a little while ago, and he was a rather funny-looking person, but after all I thought a lot of funny things must go on in this life of crime, and I was quite intrigued. I mean, I just didn’t think enough about how funny it was. So I started to let him in, and then these other two followed him in very quickly and there wasn’t anything I could do. They tied me up and searched everywhere. This one was very nasty—he thought I might have the ticket on me, and he didn’t miss anything.”

  She gazed vindictively at Dumaire, who was then having his hands efficiently taped behind his back by Peter Quentin, and kicked him thoughtfully on the shins.

  “Then they made you ring me up?” Simon prompted her.

  “Well, when they couldn’t find the ticket they said they’d do horrible things to me unless I told them where it was. So I told them I’d given it to you to look after, and I was quite glad to be able to ring you up by that time. I…I sort of knew you’d catch on at once, because you’re so frightfully clever and that’s how things always happen in stories.”

  “It makes everything so easy, doesn’t it?” said the Saint satirically. “We must talk some more about that—but I think we’ll talk alone.”

  He watched while the taping of the other prisoners’ wrists was completed; then he started exploring doors. He found one that communicated with the bedroom—a place of glass and natural woods and pale-blue sheets and pillows, with a pale-blue bathroom beyond it that gave an infinitesimally humorous shift to the alignment of his eyebrows. He left the door open and signed to Peter.

  “Bring the menagerie in here,” he said.

  Dumaire, Pietri, and Bravache lurched suddenly in, urged on by the unarguable prodding of gun muzzles.

  On his way in after them, Hoppy Uniatz stopped at the door. It is true, as has perhaps already been made superfluously clear, that there were situations in which the light of intelligence failed to coruscate on Mr Uniatz’s ivorine brow; it is no less true that in the vasty oceans of philosophy and abstract Thought he wandered like a rudderless barque at the mercy of unpredictable winds, but in his own element he was immune to the distractions that might have afflicted lesser men, and his mental processes became invested with the indivagable simplicity of true greatness.

  “Boss,” said Mr Uniatz, with the placidity of a mahatma approaching the settlement of an overdue gr
ocer’s bill, “I t’ink ya better gimme dem shells.”

  “What shells?” asked the Saint lazily.

  “De shells,” explained Mr Uniatz, who was now flourishing Pietri’s silenced revolver in addition to his own beloved Betsy, “you take outa de dumb cannon.”

  Simon blinked.

  “What for?”

  “It won’t make no ners,” explained Mr Uniatz, with a slight perplexity for such slowness on the uptake, “when we are giving dese guys de woiks.”

  The Saint swallowed.

  “Peter’ll give them to you when you need them,” he said, and closed the door hastily on Mr Uniatz’s back.

  He went back and sat on the arm of a chair in front of Lady Valerie. He wanted to smile, but he had too many other things on his mind that were not smiling matters. The recent episode which had been absorbing all his nervous and intellectual energy was over, and his brain was moving on again with restless efficiency. It had not reached an end, but only a fresh beginning.

  She had regained most of her composure. Her face was repaired, and she had lighted a cigarette herself. He had to admit that she possessed amazing recuperative powers. There was a naughty gleam in her eyes that would have amused him at any other time.

  “You always seem to be catching me in these boudoir moments, don’t you?” she said, smoothing her flimsy negligee. “I mean, first I was in my nightie at the fire, and then now. It must be fate, or something. The only trouble is, there won’t be any thrills left when we get really friendly…Of course, I suppose I ought to thank you for rescuing me,” she went on hurriedly. “Thanks very much, darling. It was sweet of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said graciously. “It’s been a pleasure. You must call me again any time you want a helping hand.”

  He got up restlessly, poured himself out a drink, and sat down again.

  “Don’t you think you’d better tell me what it’s all about?” he said abruptly. “I could live through an explanation of this cloakroom-ticket gag.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. She trimmed the end of her cigarette. “Well, you see, they thought I’d got a cloakroom ticket they wanted, so they came to look for it. That’s all.”

  “It isn’t anything like all,” he said bluntly. “Why go on holding out on me? You’ve got something they want—probably some papers that Kennet gave you. You parked them in a cloakroom somewhere, and these birds knew it and wanted the ticket. Or do you want me to believe that they went to all this trouble to get a receipt for Luker’s hat?”

  She frowned at her knees, and then she shrugged.

  “I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know, since you’ve guessed already,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I have got some papers. I thought Algy might like to know, so I just mentioned it to him casually on the telephone tonight.”

  “Meaning what I was talking to you about at the Berkeley.”

  “What was that?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t make me tired. You were trying to sell him those papers.”

  “After all,” she said, “a girl has to live.”

  “How long do you think you’d have lived tonight if it hadn’t been for me?”

  She hesitated.

  “How was I to know Algy would do anything like this?” she said sulkily. “I told him I’d put the papers in a cloakroom and I wasn’t sure where they were. He rang me up later on, just before the monkey-man got here, and offered me ten thousand pounds if I’d bring them round to him right away, but I thought they might be worth more than that, so I pretended I still couldn’t remember what I’d done with them. Of course, I know where they are really.”

  The Saint’s lips tightened.

  “You poor little fly-brained moron,” he exploded uncontrollably. “What makes you think you can cut in on a game like this? Haven’t you had your lesson yet? You know what happened to Kennet and Windlay. You know what happened to you tonight. You heard what Bravache said. If I hadn’t had everything organised, you were booked to go down the drain with me—plus any specialised unpleasantnesses that your boyfriend Dumaire could think of. Is that your idea of a good time?”

  She shuddered almost imperceptibly.

  “I know, that wasn’t very nice. I never was one of those heroines who don’t think life worth living unless bullets are whizzing past their ears and ships sinking under them and houses crashing in ruins about their heads and all that sort of thing. Personally I’m all for a life of selfish self-indulgence, and I don’t care who knows it. If I could get a decent offer for those papers, I’d take it like a shot and skip off to Bermuda or somewhere and enjoy it. The trouble is, I don’t know what they’re worth. What do you think?”

  She looked at him with limpid brown eyes big with artlessness.

  “I’ll give you a shilling for them,” he said.

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of selling them to you,” she said innocently. “What I was thinking was that if I went to a fairly decent pub tonight—the Carlton, for instance, where I should be perfectly safe—and then I rang up Algy and told him he could have the papers for fifteen thousand pounds, he’d most likely do something about it. I mean, after what’s happened tonight, he ought to consider himself damned lucky to get them for fifteen thousand. Don’t you think so?”

  “Very lucky,” said the Saint, with fine-drawn patience. “Where are the papers at the moment?”

  She smiled.

  “They’re in a cloakroom all right. I’ve got the ticket somewhere, only I forget exactly where. But I expect I’ll remember all right when I have to.”

  “I expect you will,” he said coldly. “Even if somebody like Dumaire has to help you.”

  Suddenly he got up and went over to her and took both her hands. The coldness fell out of his voice.

  “Valerie, why don’t you stop being an idiot and let me get into the firing line?”

  She looked at him speculatively for a while, for quite a long while. Her hands were small and soft. He kept still, and heard a taxi rattle past the end of the street. But she shook her head.

  “I’d like to,” she said sadly. “Especially after what you’ve done for me tonight—although if it comes to that, I expect you simply love dashing about rescuing people and doing your little hero act, so perhaps you ought to be a bit grateful to me for giving you such a good chance to do your stuff. And after all, if I just handed over the papers to you, that wouldn’t do much good, would it? Of course, if you wanted to buy them—”

  “To hell with buying them! Haven’t you found out yet that there are some things in life that you can’t measure in money? Haven’t you realised that this is one of them? I don’t know what there is in those papers—maybe you don’t know either. But you must know that things like you’ve seen tonight don’t get organised over scraps of paper with noughts and crosses on them—that men like Bravache and Fairweather and Luker don’t take to systematic murder to stop anybody reading their old love-letters. These men are big. Anything that keeps them as busy as this is big. And I know what kind of bigness they deal in. The only way they can make what they call big money, the only way they can touch the power and glory that their perverted egos crave for, is in helping and schooling nations to slaughter and destroy. What hellish graft is at the back of this show called the Sons of France I don’t know, but I can guess plenty of it. However it works, the only object it can have is to turn one more country aside from civilisation so that the market can be kept right for the men who sell guns and gas. Or else Luker wouldn’t be in it. And he must know that there’s an odds-on chance of bringing it off, or else he still wouldn’t be in it. This may be the last cog in a machine that will wipe out twenty million lives, and you might have the knowledge that would break it up before it gets going. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  She stood up slowly. And she freed her hands.

  “I think I’ll be getting along now,” she said, and her voice was quite stead
y in spite of the reluctance in it. “It’s been a lovely party, but even the best of good times have to come to an end, and I need some sleep. Do you think you could move those men out of the bedroom while I put on some clothes?”

  Simon looked at her.

  The fire that had gone into his appeal was a glowing ingot within him. It was a coiled spring that would drive him until it ran down, without regard for sentiment or obstacles. It was a power transformer for the ethereal vibrations of destiny. Earlier in the evening, the atmosphere of the Berkeley had defeated him, but this was not the Berkeley. He knew that there was only one solution, and there was too much at stake for him to hesitate. He was amazed at his own madness, and yet he was utterly calm, utterly resolute.

  He nodded.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was going to move them anyway. I didn’t think you’d want to keep them for domestic pets.”

  He went over and opened the bedroom door.

  “Bring out the zoo,” he said.

  He stood there while the captives filed out, followed by Peter and Hoppy, and waited until the door had closed again behind the girl. For a few seconds he paced up and down the small room, intent on his own thoughts. Then he picked up the telephone and dialled the number of his apartment in Cornwall House.

  Patricia answered the ring.

  “Hullo, sweetheart,” he said. His voice was level, too certain of its words to show excitement. “Yes…No trouble at all. Everything went according to plan, and we’re all sitting pretty—except the deputation from the ungodly. Now listen. I’ve got a job for you. Call Orace and tell him to expect you. Then get out the Daimler, and tell Sam Outrell to pull Stunt Number Three. As soon as you’re sure you aren’t followed, come over here. Hustle it…No, I’ll tell you when you arrive. There are listeners…Okay, darling. Be seein’ ya.”

  He put down the microphone and turned to Bravache. The pupils of his eyes were like chips of flint.

  “So you were going to kill Lady Valerie and blame it on to me,” he said with great gentleness. “That was as far as we’d got, wasn’t it? The Sons of France avenge the murder of one of their sympathisers, and all sorts of high-minded nitwits wave banners. Do you see any good reason why you shouldn’t take some of your own medicine?”