The Saint in Action (The Saint Series) Read online

  He couldn’t get that look of hers out of his mind. It hurt his pride that she could have mistaken him for the common and vulgar agent of some equally common and vulgar blackmailer. It seemed obvious enough that that was what had happened…But was it? Simon didn’t know exactly how many dazzling figures it took to write down Beatrice Avery’s annual income, but he knew that film stars were burdened with hardly less colossal living expenses, for they have to scintillate off the screen as well as on or else risk submersion in the fathomless swamps of public forgetfulness. And the Saint doubted very much if Beatrice Avery, for all her fabulous salary, could afford to whack out ten thousand pounds as if it were chicken feed. A sum like that spoke for a grade of blackmail that could hardly be called common or vulgar: it hinted at something so dark and ugly that his imagination instinctively tried to turn away from it. He didn’t like to believe that such a golden goddess could have anything in her past that she would pay so much to keep secret. It made him feel queerly grim and angry.

  He finished his lunch, paid his bill, and then looked up the name of Beatrice Avery in the telephone directory. Her address appeared as 21 Parkside Court, Marble Arch. Simon made a mental note of it, paid a call in Piccadilly, and then strolled along to his own apartment in Cornwall House.

  “Anybody called, Sam?” he inquired of the wooden-faced janitor, and Sam Outrell detected a faintly thoughtful note in the Saint’s voice.

  “Were you expecting somebody, sir?”

  “I’m always expecting somebody. But this afternoon, in particular, I shall expect a lady, gloriously fair and graceful, with wavy golden hair—”

  “I know, sir. You mean Miss Holm.”

  “No, I don’t mean Miss Holm,” said Simon, as he strolled to the elevator. “The lady’s name, Sam, is Miss Avery. If she appears before you with my name on her rosebud lips, shoot her straight up.”

  He was whisked to his floor, and as he let himself in to his apartment he found Hoppy Uniatz in the living-room’s best easy chair with his feet on the table. Mr Uniatz was chewing the ragged end of a cigar, and there was an expression on his battle-scarred face which indicated that all was right with the world. The empty whisky bottle on the table may have contributed its own modest quota to this happy state of affairs.

  “Hi, boss,” said Mr Uniatz cordially. “Where ya bin?” Simon spun his hat across the room.

  “Lunching at the Dorchester.”

  “I got no time for dem fancy places,” said Mr Uniatz disparagingly. “Dose pansy dishes ain’t nut’n to eat. Now, yesterday I find a swell jernt where a guy can get a kosher hamboiger wit’ fried onions an’ all de fixin’s—”

  “I wondered why that cigar was so overpowering,” said the Saint, moving carefully out of range of Mr Uniatz’s breathing. “I’m not sure yet, Hoppy, but there are indications that fun and games hover in the middle distance.”

  “Who’s dat, boss?” asked Mr Uniatz, struggling valiantly to get his grey matter flowing.

  This was no small effort, for nature had only provided him with a very small quantity, and even this was of a glue-like consistency.

  “You may be right about the Dorchester,” said the Saint sourly, as he eased himself into a chair. “Anyway, it didn’t do me much good. A charming young lady gave me ten thousand quid and the dirtiest look of the century. Tell me, Hoppy, has anything happened to my face to make it look as if I’d blackmail charming young ladies?”

  “You look okay to me, boss,” said Mr Uniatz blankly. “Who is dis dame?”

  Remembering Mr Uniatz’s mental disadvantages, Simon told his story in simple one-syllable words that would have sent the Director of Children’s Hour programmes delirious with delight. He had had so much practice in that difficult exercise that Mr Uniatz, in spite of the limitations of his cerebral system, finally grasped the basic facts.

  “De goil t’inks you are some udder guy,” he said brightly.

  “You put it in a nutshell, Hoppy,” said the Saint admiringly.

  “De guy who puts de black on her.”

  “Precisely.”

  “De guy,” persisted Hoppy, working nobly to get all his facts in order, “who is playing games in de distance.”

  The Saint sighed, and was bracing himself to go into further laborious explanations when the sound of the telephone bell spared him the ordeal. He went to the instrument.

  “Two visitors for you, sir, but they ain’t ladies,” said Sam Outrell hurriedly.

  “Give me two guesses.”

  “You ain’t got time for guessin’, sir,” interrupted the janitor. “It’s Mr Teal, and he’s lookin’ madasell, and he went straight up without letting me call you first. He’ll be there any minute—”

  “Don’t worry, Sam,” said the Saint imperturbably. “I’m not leaving. Go out and get Mr Teal some chewing-gum, and we’ll have a party.”

  The doorbell rang violently, and Simon Templar hung up the telephone and went out to admit his favourite visitor. And the absolute truth is that he hadn’t a cloud on his conscience or any suspicion that the visit would be more than a routine call.

  2

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal thrust his large regulation foot into the opening as soon as the Saint unlatched the door. It was an unnecessary precaution, for Simon flung the door wide and stood aside invitingly, with a smile on his lips and the light of irrepressible amusement in his eyes.

  “Come in, souls,” he said genially. “Make yourselves at home. And what can I do for you today?”

  The invitation was somewhat superfluous; for Mr Teal and the man with him, whom Simon recognised as Sergeant Barrow, were already in. They hadn’t waited to be asked. They came in practically abreast, and Barrow kicked the door to with his foot. The Saint was compelled to back into the living-room in face of that determined entry. There was an unusual aggressiveness about Mr Teal; his plump body seemed taller and broader; the phlegmatic dourness of his round pink face under its shabby derby was increased by the hard lines of his mouth. He looked like a man who was haunted by the memory of many such calls on this smiling young buccaneer—calls which had only lengthened the apparently hopeless duel which he had been waging for years against the most stupendous outlaw of his day. And yet he looked like a man who had a certain foreknowledge that this time he would emerge the victor, and a kind of creepy puzzlement wormed itself into the Saint’s consciousness as the meaning of those symptoms forced itself upon him.

  “Hi, Claud,” said Mr Uniatz, in friendly greeting. Chief Inspector Teal ignored him.

  “I want you, Templar,” he said, turning his sleepy eyes on the Saint.

  “Of course you do, Claud,” said the Saint slowly. “Somebody has sold an onion after closing-time, and you want me to track him down for you. A gang of lemonade smugglers who have eluded Scotland Yard for years have been—”

  “I mean,” Teal said immovably, “that I’m taking you into custody on a charge of—”

  “Wait!” said the Saint tragically. “Think what you’d be losing if you really pulled me in. What would you do with your afternoons if you couldn’t come round here for these charming little conversaziones?”

  “All the talking in the world won’t save you this time, Templar,” said Mr Teal in a hard voice. “Do you want to see the warrants I’ve got? One for your arrest, and another to search this flat.”

  The Saint shrugged watchfully.

  “Well, Claud,” he said resignedly, “if you want to make a fool of yourself again, it’s your funeral. What’s the charge this time?”

  “Demanding money with menaces,” said the detective flatly. For a moment his eyes lost their sham of perpetual boredom; they looked oddly hurt and at the same time contemptuous. “You know how much I’ve wanted to get you, Templar, but now that the time’s come I’d just as soon not have the job. I never thought I shouldn’t even want to touch you.”

  Simon glanced down at his brown hands, and in his mind was a vivid memory of Beatrice Avery’s look of unutter
able loathing. Teal’s voice contained that very look, transmuted into sound. His pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster.

  “Is there something the matter with me?” he asked curiously.

  “Have I suddenly taken on a resemblance to Boris Karloff, or is it only a touch of leprosy?”

  “You’re the Z-man,” retorted Mr Teal, and stopped chewing his cud of tasteless chicle.

  There was a silence that pressed down on the four men like a tangible substance. It was as though the air had become a mass of ectoplasm. Hoppy Uniatz broke the suffocating spell by shuffling his feet. It is doubtful if more than a dozen words of the conversation had infiltrated through the bony mass which protected the sponge-like organisation of nerve-endings which served him in lieu of a brain, but the impression was growing on him that Mr Teal was making himself unpleasant.

  “What was dat crack again?” he said, his unmusical voice crashing into the silence like a bombshell.

  “Yes, Claud,” said the Saint gently. “What was it?”

  “You heard me the first time,” Teal said crunchily. “You’re the Z-Man, and if I couldn’t prove it I wouldn’t have believed it myself. It’s something new to know that you’ve sunk as low as that.”

  Simon moved across to the mantelpiece and leaned an elegant elbow on it. He pulled hard at his cigarette until the end glowed red, and the smoke stayed down in his lungs. A dim light was breaking in the darkness through which he had been groping his way: he saw, in his mind’s eye, the disarranged knives and forks on Beatrice Avery’s table in the Dorchester Grill, and he knew the meaning of that queer zigzag formation. They had shaped the letter Z, and it was the sudden sight of this that had caused the girl’s terror.

  But the light was still not enough…The Saint’s eyes switched over to Mr Teal, and their clear blue glinted like the sheen of polar waters under the sun.

  “My poor old blundering fathead,” he said kindly. “I’m afraid you’re off the rails again, for the umpteenth time. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Dat goes for me too, boss,” contributed Mr Uniatz, who had clearly understood every word of the Saint’s last terse sentence.

  Mr Teal’s lips thinned out.

  “Oh, you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about?” he barked. “Are you going to deny that you were in the Dorchester Grill an hour ago?”

  “Why should I deny it? I lunched there.”

  “And you spoke to Miss Beatrice Avery?”

  “We had a few brief words, yes. Of course, I suppose that was very wicked of me, because we hadn’t been introduced—”

  “You took a package from her.”

  “No.”

  “You deny taking a package from her?” shouted Mr Teal.

  “I do. She thrust the package into my hand and breezed off before I could even examine it—”

  Teal’s face turned a shade redder.

  “You’re not going to save yourself by quibbling like that,” he snarled. “It’s no good, Templar. You can try it on the jury. You’re under arrest.”

  He took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time in that interview, and a pair of handcuffs clinked in it.

  Simon glanced at them without moving.

  “Hadn’t you better think again, old dear?” he suggested quietly. “I don’t know why I should go out of my way to save your hide, but I suppose I’m funny that way. Perhaps it’s because life wouldn’t be the same if you got chucked out of Scotland Yard on your ear and couldn’t bring your tummy round to see me anymore. Perhaps it’s because I object to being marched into Piccadilly with bracelets over my wrists. But somehow or other I’ve got to save you from yourself.”

  “You don’t have to worry—”

  “But I do, Claud. I can’t help it. It’d keep me awake at night, thinking of you sleeping out in the cold gutters with no one even to buy you a piece of spearmint. And it’s all so obvious. The whole trouble is that you’re jumping to too many conclusions. Just because I’m the Saint, and you never found any other criminals, you think I must be all of them. Then you hear of some guy called the Z-Man, so you think I must be him too. Well, who the hell is this Z-Man, and why haven’t I heard of him before?”

  Chief Inspector Teal bit on his gum in a supercharged effort of self-control that threatened to boil over at any moment. It was only by straining his will-power to the limit that he succeeded in recovering the pose of mountainous boredom that he usually struggled in vain to maintain in the Saint’s maddeningly nonchalant presence.

  “I don’t know what you hope to gain by all this Templar, but you’re wasting your breath,” he said, shifting his lump of worn-out spearmint from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “I’m acting on facts that even you can’t get away from. You may as well know that Sergeant Barrow was in the Dorchester at the time.”

  “Keeping a fatherly eye on me?”

  “No; he was looking for someone else that we’re interested in. But that’s neither here nor there. Barrow happened to see Miss Avery, and for reasons which I’m not going to explain he kept his eye on her.”

  “I only hope his thoughts were pure,” said the Saint piously.

  “Barrow saw you take a package from Miss Avery, and immediately afterwards he saw her leave the restaurant,” continued Mr Teal coldly. “He accosted her in the foyer—”

  “Disgusting, I call it,” said the Saint. “What these policemen get away with—”

  “He showed her his authority—”

  “She must have been thrilled,” murmured Simon.

  “She refused to say anything, and Barrow rang me up,” went on Teal, his self-control gradually slipping and his voice taking on its old familiar blare. “I got hold of these warrants, but I went to Miss Avery’s flat first. She denied knowing anything about the Z-Man, but I’d been expecting that. What I did make her admit was that the package she handed you contained a large sum of money.”

  “Ten thousand pounds,” said the Saint lazily. “I counted it.” Teal glowered at him, pop-eyed.

  “I want that package—”

  “Sorry, old dear,” said the Saint regretfully. “I haven’t got it”

  “You haven’t got it!” brayed Mr Teal.

  “Calm yourself, sweetheart,” drawled the Saint. “Much as I hate parting with perfectly good boodle when it’s pushed right into my hand, I realised that a mistake had been made. Always the perfect gentleman, I immediately took steps to correct the error. On my way home I stopped at a District Messenger office and bunged the package back to Miss Avery, with contents intact. So you see, Claud, old thing, you’ll have to tear those warrants up and go back to the Assistant Commissioner and let him flay you alive. And now that that’s all cleared up, what about a smoke and a drink?”

  He flicked open his cigarette-case with one hand, and indicated the whisky decanter with the other. Hoppy Uniatz, aware of the decanter’s presence for the first time, moved mechanically towards it, licking his dry lips. Mr Teal, who had been unravelling his tonsils from his epiglottis, lumbered forward like a migrating volcano.

  “You’re not getting away like that this time, Templar,” he said thickly. “You’re coming with me! We’ve been after the Z-Man for a long time now, and now we’ve got him. Are you coming quietly?”

  “About as quietly as a brass band,” answered the Saint, succinctly. “But you needn’t blow your whistles and bring in a troop of rozzers. I’m not going to pull a gun on you or start any rough-house. I know it’s a serious thing to interfere with an officer of the law in the execution of his duty—even when he’s a mahogany-headed dope with barnacles all over his brain like you are. You say you’re armed to the molars with warrants, or else I’d just bounce you out on your fat stomach and call it a day.” His blue eyes rested on Mr Teal like twinkling icicles. “So instead of that I’ll give you a chance to save your bacon. Before you commit the unmitigated asininity of arr
esting me, and thereby get yourself slung out of a perfectly good job, don’t you think you’d better take the one obvious step?”

  Nothing was obvious to Mr Teal except that he had got Simon Templar where he wanted him at last. But there was a mocking buccaneering challenge in the Saint’s voice that could not go unanswered.

  “What obvious step?” he asked scorchingly. “I’ve got all the evidence I need—”

  “I’m sorry; I forgot for the moment that you’re only a detective,” Simon apologised. “Let me put it into simple words. My answer to you is that Miss Avery gave me the ten thousand quid by mistake, and I rectified the mistake by immediately sending the money back to her. She’s bound to have received it by now—and I know she’s on the telephone. Since she seems to be the only important witness against me, wouldn’t it be rather a good idea to make quite certain that all this beautiful evidence of yours is really in the bag?”

  He indicated his own instrument and his meaning was clear enough. But Chief Inspector Teal merely grunted and opened the handcuffs.

  “That’s an old one, isn’t it?” he said contemptuously. “While I’m fooling about with the telephone you make your getaway. I’m surprised that you should suggest such a whiskery—”

  He was interrupted by the shrill ringing of the twin bells of the telephone, and the Saint automatically reached for the instrument.

  “No, you don’t!” barked Mr Teal. “I’ll take it.”

  Simon couldn’t help smiling, for the detective was doing the very thing he had just been sneering at. But the Saint had no desire to make a getaway. He had a hunch that he knew where that call was coming from.

  “Hullo!” said Mr Teal, in a carefully controlled Saintly voice.

  “Is that Mr Simon Templar?”