Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint s-4 Page 15

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How Simon Templar entertained the congregation, and Hermann also had his fun

  1

  "Love, your magic spell is everywhere . . ."

  GAY, MOCKING, cavalier, the old original Saintly voice! And there was nothing but a mischievous laughter in the clear blue eyes that gazed so de­lightedly at Marius across the room—nothing but the old hell-for-leather Saintly mirth. Yet the Saint stood there unarmed and at bay; and Roger knew then that the loss of his own gun made little differ­ence, for Hermann was safely sheltered behind the girl and his Browning covered the Saint without a tremor.

  And Simon Templar cared for none of these things. . . . Lot's wife after the transformation scene would have looked like an agitated eel on a hot plate beside him. By some trick of his own in­imitable art, he contrived to make the clothes that had been through so many vicissitudes that night look as if he had just taken them off his tailor's de­livery van; his smiling freshness would have made a rosebud in the morning dew appear to wear a positively debauched and scrofulous aspect; and that blithe, buccaneering gaze travelled round the room as if he were reviewing a rally of his dearest friends. For the Saint in a tight corner had ever been the most entrancing and delightful sight in all the world. . . .

  "And there's Roger. How's life, sonny boy? Well up on its hind legs—what? . . . Oh, and our one and only Ike! Sonia—your boy friend."

  But Lessing's face was gray and drawn.

  "So it was true, Marius!" he said huskily.

  "Sure it was," drawled the Saint. "D'you mean to say you didn't believe old Roger? Or did Uncle Ugly tell you a naughty story?" And again the Saint beamed radiantly across at the motionless giant. "Your speech, Angel Face: 'Father, I can­not tell a lie. I am the Big Cheese.' . . . Sobs from pit and gallery. But you seem upset, dear heart— and I was looking to you to be the life and soul of the party. 'Hail, smiling morn,' and all that sort of thing."

  Then Marius came to life.

  For a moment his studied impassivity was gone altogether. His face was the contorted face of a beast; and the words he spat out came with the snarl of a beast; and the gloating leer on the lips of the man Hermann froze where it grimaced, and faded blankly. And then the Saint intervened.

  "Hermann meant well, Angel Face," he mur­mured peaceably; and Marius swung slowly round.

  "So you have escaped again, Templar," he said.

  "In a manner of speaking," agreed the Saint modestly. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

  He took out his cigarette case, and the giant's mouth writhed into a ghastly grin.

  "I have heard about your cigarettes," he said. "Give those to me!"

  "Anything to oblige," sighed the Saint.

  He wandered over, with the case in his hand, and Marius snatched it from him. The Saint sighed again, and settled himself on the edge of the big desk, with a scrupulous regard for the crease in his trousers. His eye fell on the box of cigars, and he helped himself absent-mindedly.

  Then Lessing was facing Marius.

  "What have you to say now?" he demanded; and the last atom of emotion drained out of Marius's features as he looked down at the mil­lionaire.

  "Nothing at all, Sir Isaac." Once again that thin, soft voice was barren of all expression, the accents cold and precise and unimpassioned. "You were, after all, correctly informed—in every par­ticular."

  "But—my God, Marius! That war—everything —— Do you realize what this means?"

  "I am perfectly well aware of all the implica­tions, my dear Sir Isaac."

  "You were going to make me your tool in that ——"

  "It was an idea of mine. Perhaps even now ——"

  "You devil!"

  The words bit the air like hot acid; and Marius waved protesting and impatient hands.

  "My dear Sir Isaac, this is not a Sunday school. Please sit down and be quiet for a moment, while I attend to this interruption.''

  "Sit down?" Lessing laughed mirthlessly. The stunned incredulity in his eyes had vanished, to be replaced by something utterly different. "I'll see you damned first! What's more, I'm going to put you in an English prison for a start—and when you come out of that I'll have you hounded out of every capital in Europe. That's my answer!"

  He turned on his heel.

  Between him and the door Hermann still held the girl. And Roger Conway stood beside her.

  "One moment."

  Marius's voice—or something else—brought Lessing up with a snap, and the millionaire faced slowly round again. And, as he turned, he met a stare of such pitiless malevolence that the flush of fury petrified in his face, leaving him paler than before.

  "I am afraid you cannot be allowed to leave im­mediately, my dear Sir Isaac," said the giant silk­ily; and there was no mistaking the meaning of the slight movement of the automatic in his hand. "A series of accidents has placed you in possession of certain information which it would not suit my purpose to permit you to employ in the way which you have just outlined. In fact, I have not yet de­cided whether you will ever be allowed to leave."

  2

  THE SAINT cleared his throat.

  "The time has come," he remarked diffidently, "for me to tell you all the story of my life."

  He smiled across at Lessing; and that smile and the voice with it, slashed like a blast of sunshine through the tenuous miasma of evil that had spawned into the room as Marius spoke.

  "Just do what Angel Face told you, Sir Isaac," said the Saint winningly. "Park yourself in a pew and concentrate on Big Business. Just think what a half-nelson you'll have on the Banana Oil market when Angel Face has unloaded his stock. And he won't hurt you, really. He's a plain, blunt man, and I grant you his face is against him, but he's a simple soul at heart. Why, many's the time we've sat down to a quiet game of dominoes—haven't we, Angel Face?—and all at once, after playing his third double-six, he's said, in just the same dear dreamy way: 'Templar, my friend, have you never thought that there is something embolismal about Life?' And I've said, brokenly: 'It's all so—so um­bilical. ' Just like that. 'It's all so umbilical. . . .' Doesn't it all come back to you, Angel Face?"

  Marius turned to him.

  "I have never been amused by your humour, Templar" he said. "But I should be genuinely in­terested to know how you have spent the evening."

  All the giant's composure had come back, save for the vindictive hatred that burned on in his eyes like a lambent fire. He had been secure in the thought that the Saint was dead, and then for a space the shock of seeing the Saint alive had bat­tered and reeled and ravaged his security into a racketing chaos of raging unbelief; and at the ut­termost nadir of that havoc had come the cataclys­mic apparition of Sonia Delmar herself, entering that very room, to overwhelm his last tattered hope of bluff and smash down the ripening harvest of weeks of brilliant scheming and intrigue into one catastrophic devastation; and he had certainly been annoyed. . . . Yet not for an instant could his mind have contained the shred of an idea of de­feat. He stood there by the desk where the Saint sat, a poised and terrible colossus; and behind that unnatural calm the brain of a warped genius was fighting back with brute ferocity to retrieve the ir­retrievable disaster. And Simon looked at him, and laughed gently.

  "To-night's jaunt," said the Saint, "is definite­ly part of the story of my life."

  "And of how many more of your friends?"

  Simon shook his head.

  "You never seem to be able to get away from the distressing delusion that I am.some sort of gang," he murmured. "I believe we've had words about that before. Saint Roger Conway you've met. That in the middle is a new recruit—Saint Isaac Lessing, Regius Professor of Phlebology at the University of Medicine Hat and Consulting Scolecophagist to the Gotherington Gasworks, recently canonized for his article in The Suffragette advocating more clubs for women. 'Clubs, tomahawks, flat-irons, anything you like,' he said. . . . And here we all are."

  "And how many more?" repeated Marius.

  "Isn't that q
uite clear?" sighed the Saint. "There are no more. Let me put it in words of one syllable. The unadulterated quintessence of nihility ——"

  Savagely Marius caught his arm in one gigantic hand, and the Saint involuntarily tensed his mus­cles.

  "Not that way, Angel Face," he said softly. "Or there might be a vulgar brawl. ..."

  Yet perhaps it was that involuntary tensing of an arm of leather and iron, rather than the change in the Saint's voice, that made Marius loose his grip. With a tremendous effort the giant controlled him self again, and his lips relaxed from the animal snarl that had distorted them; only the embers of his fury still glittered in his eyes.

  "Very good. There are no more of you. And what happened on the ship?"

  "Well, we went for a short booze—cruise."

  "And the man who was shot in the motorboat— was he another of your friends?"

  Simon surveyed the ash on his cigar approving­ly.

  "One hates to cast aspersions on the dead," he answered, "but I can't say that we ever became what you might call bosom pals. Not," said the Saint conscientiously, "that I had anything against the man. We just didn't have the chance to get properly acquainted. In fact, I'd hardly given him the first friendly punch on the jaw, and dumped him in that motorboat to draw the fire, when some of the sharpshooting talent pulled the voix celeste stop on him for ever. I don't even know his name; but he addressed me in Grand Opera, so if your ice-cream plant is a bit diminuendo ——"

  Hermann spoke sharply.

  "It was Antonio, mein Herr! He stayed on the beach after we took the girl down ——"

  "So!" Marius turned again. "It was one of my own men!"

  "Er—apparently," said the Saint with sorrow.

  "And you were already on the ship?"

  "Indeed to goodness. But only just." The Saint grinned thoughtfully. "And then I met Comrade Vassiloff—a charming lad, with a beautiful set of hairbrushes. We exchanged a little backchat, and then I tied him up and passed on. Then came the amusing error."

  "What was that?"

  "You see, it was a warm evening, so I'd bor­rowed Comrade Vassiloff's coat to keep the heat out. The next cabin I got into was the captain's and he promptly jumped to the conclusion that Comrade Vassiloff was still inhabiting the coat."

  Marius stiffened.

  "Moeller! The man always was a fool! When I meet him again ——"

  The Saint shook his head.

  "What a touching scene it would have been!" he murmured. "I almost wish it could come true. . . . But it cannot be. I'm afraid, Angel Face, that Cap­tain Moeller has also been translated."

  "You killed him?"

  "That's a crude way of putting it. Let me explain. Overcome with the shock of discovering his mistake, he went slightly bughouse, and seemed to imagine that he was a seagull. Launching himself into the empyrean—oh, very hot, very hot!—he disappeared from view, and I have every reason to believe that he made a forced landing a few yards farther on. As I didn't know how to stop the ship ——"

  "When was this?"

  "Shortly after the ceremony. That was the amusing error. When I rolled into his cabin Sonia was there as well, and there was a generally festive air about the gathering. The next thing I knew was that I was married." He saw Marius start, and laughed softly. "Deuced awkward, wasn't it, Angel Face?"

  He gazed at Marius benevolently; but, after that first unpurposed recoil, the giant stood quite still. The only one in the room who moved was Lessing, who came slowly to his feet, his eyes on the girl.

  "Sonia—is that true?"

  She nodded, without speaking; and the million­aire sank back again, white-faced.

  The Saint slewed round on his perch, and it was at Roger that he looked.

  "It was quite an unofficial affair," said the Saint deliberately. "I doubt if the Archbishop of Canterbury would have approved. But the net result ——"

  "Saint!"

  Roger Conway took a pace forward, and the name was cried so fiercely that Simon's muscles tensed again. And then the Saint's laugh broke the hush a second time, with a queer blend of sadness and mockery.

  "That's all I wanted," said the Saint; and Roger fell back, staring at him.

  But the Saint said no more. He deposited an inch and a half of ash in an ashtray, flicked a min­ute flake of the same from his knee, adjusted the crease in his trousers, and returned his gaze again to Marius.

  Marius had taken no notice of the interruption. For a while longer he continued to stare fixedly at the Saint; and then, with an abrupt movement, he turned away and began to pace the room with huge, smooth strides. And once again there was silence.

  The Saint inhaled meditatively.

  An interval of bright and breezy badinage, he realized distinctly, had just been neatly and un­obtrusively bedded down in its appointed niche in the ancient history of the world, and the action of the piece was preparing to resume. And the coming action, by all the portents, was likely to be even brighter and breezier than the badinage—in its own way.

  Thus far Simon Templar had to admit that he had had all the breaks; but now Rayt Marius was definitely in play. And the Saint understood, quite quietly and dispassionately, as he had always un­derstood these things, that a succulent guinea pig in the jaws of a lion would have been considered a better risk for life insurance than he. For the milk of human kindness had never entered the reckon­ing—on either side—and now that Marius had the edge ... As the Saint watched the ruthless, delib­erate movements of that massive neolithic figure, there came back to him a vivid recollection of the house by the Thames where they had faced each other at the close of the last round, and of the passing of Norman Kent . . . and the Saint's jaw tightened a little grimly. For between them now there was infinitely more than there had been then. Once again the Saint had wrecked a cast-iron hand at the very moment when failure must have seemed impossible; and he had never thought of the giant as a pious martyr to persecution. He knew, in that quiet and dispassionate way, that Marius would kill him—would kill all of them—without a mo­ment's compunction, once it was certain that they could not be more useful to him alive.

  Yet the Saint pursued the pleasures of his cigar as if he had nothing else to think about. In his life he had never walked very far from sudden death; and it had been a good life.... It was Lessing who broke first under the strain of that silence. The millionaire started up with a kind of gasp.

  "I'm damned if I'll stay here like this!" he babbled. "It's an outrage! You can't do things like this in England."

  Simon looked at him coldly.

  "You're being obvious, Ike," he remarked, "and also futile. Sit down."

  "I refuse ——"

  Lessing swung violently away towards the door; and even the Saint could not repress a smile of entirely unalloyed amusement as the millionaire fetched up dead for the second time of asking be­fore the discourteous ugliness of Hermann's auto­matic.

  "You'll pick up the rules of this game as we go along, Ike," murmured the Saint consolingly; and then Marius, whose measured pacing had not swerved by a hair's breadth for Lessing's protest, stopped by the desk with his finger on the bell.

  "I have decided," he said; and the Saint turned with a seraphic smile.

  "Loud and prolonged applause," drawled the Saint.

  He stood up; and Roger Conway, watching the two men as they stood there eye to eye, felt a queer cold shiver trickle down his spine like a drizzle of ghostly icicles.

  3

  JUST FOR A COUPLE of seconds it lasted, that clash of eyes—as crisp and cold as a clash of steel. Just long enough for Roger Conway to feel, as he had never felt before, the full primitive savagery of the volcanic hatreds that seethed beneath the stillness. He felt that he was a mere spectator at the climax of a duel to the death between two reincarnate paladins of legend; and for once he could not re­sent this sense of his own unimportance. There was something prodigious and terrifying about the cul­mination of that epic feud—something that made Roger pr
ay blasphemously to awake and find it all a dream. . . . And then the Saint laughed; the Saint didn't give a damn; and the Saint said: "You're a wonderful asset to the gayety of na­tions, Angel Face."

  With a faint shrug Marius turned away, and he was placidly lighting a fresh cigar when the door opened to admit three men in various stages of un­dress.

  Simon inspected them interestedly. Evidently the household staff was not very large, for he recognized two of the three at once. The bullet-headed specimen in its shirt-sleeves, unashamedly rubbing the sleep out of its eyes with two flabby fists, was obviously the torpescent and bibulous Bavarian who had spoken so yearningly of his bed. Next to him, the blue-chinned exhibit without a tie, propping itself languidly against a bookcase, could be identified without hesitation as the Bow­ery Boy who was a suffering authority on thirsts. The third argument for a wider application of capital punishment was a broken-nosed and shifty-eyed individual whom the Saint did not know— nor, having surveyed it comprehensively, did Simon feel that his life had been a howling wilder­ness until the moment of that meeting.

  It was to Broken Nose that Marius spoke.

  "Fetch some rope, Prosser," he ordered curtly, "and tie up these puppies."

  "Spoken like a man, Angel Face," murmured the Saint approvingly as Broken Nose departed.

  "You think of everything, don't you? . . . And may one ask what you've decided?"

  "You shall hear, "he said.

  The Saint bowed politely and returned to the serene enjoyment of his cigar. Outwardly he re­mained as unperturbed as he had been throughout the interview, but all his faculties were tightening up again into cool coordination and razor-edged alertness. Quietly and inconspicuously he flexed the muscles of his forearm—just to feel the reas­suring pressure of the straps that secured the little leather sheath of Belle. When Hermann had taken his gun he had not thought of Belle; nor, since then, had the thought seemed to occur to Marius; and with Belle literally up his sleeve the Saint felt confident of being able to escape from any system of roping that might be employed—provided he was left unobserved for a few minutes. But there were others to think of—particularly the girl. Simon stole a glance at her. Hermann still held her with her right arm twisted up behind her back— holding her like that, in the back seat, he had forced the Saint to drive the car back. "And if you do not behave, English swine," he had said, "I will break the arm." It had been the same on the walk up the long drive. "If you escape, and I do not shoot you, English swine, she will scream until you return." Hermann had the most sweet and en­dearing inspirations, thought the Saint, with his heart beating a little faster; and then his train of thought was interrupted by the return of Mr. Prosser in charge of a coil of rope.