Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 18
The bellhop showed him the attachment on the wire, and Simon removed it and examined it captiously. It was a small but very efficient wire recorder, as he pointed out.
“You might as well take it home and have some fun with it,” he said. “Or any shop that deals in second-hand recorders should pay a fairly good price for it. If that bogus telephone man comes back and finds it’s gone, I promise you he won’t even let out a peep.”
The bellboy grinned.
“Thank you, Mr Templar. And I hope nobody ever gets the drop on you.”
“Keep your fingers crossed for me,” said the Saint piously, “and your eyes open.”
As soon as his self-appointed sentinel had gone he made a further search and did not take long to find the second memento left by his visitor. This was a plastic box about the size of a couple of cigarette packages, and it was fastened to the underside of the telephone table with a gooey adhesive. Obviously it had been prepared so that all the operator had to do was distract the bellhop’s attention for an instant, strip off a protective covering, and press the sticky side of the box up against the wood, where it would cling without any other fastening.
It was not hard to detach, but he handled it very gingerly, knowing what it contained.
He could look back on many minutes of agonizing suspense in the course of his life, but none that were more icily nerve-racking than those that he spent before he was sure that he had rendered the Engineer’s newest masterpiece harmless.
Even after that he felt tense as he went back downstairs with a small valise which he had already packed, and told the desk clerk that he would be away overnight, and made an especial point of asking for the switchboard to be notified to give that message to any telephone callers. Not until his taxi had pulled away from the door, cutting him off from any chance of being prematurely contacted by Grendel, did he draw a completely relaxed breath.
He did not, however, go out of town, but before they had reached Fifth Avenue he changed the directions which the doorman had relayed to the driver, from the Air Terminal to the other hotel where he had set up his listening post, and it was from there that he called Fernack the next day and invited the detective to meet him for a drink at the Algonquin at five-thirty that evening.
“What’s the idea now?” Fernack asked suspiciously. “Are you thinking you can con me into giving you the same leads I gave Boyd, so you can keep up your newspaper career?”
“Don’t be late,” said the Saint. “And have a police car waiting for you outside—you may need it.”
“This had better be good,” Fernack grumbled. “I read all your articles, because I gotta, but I’m gettin’ a hunch that you’re full of spit. If I was Grendel, you’d worry me a bit less every day.”
Inspector Fernack’s misjudgement could be excused, for he lacked the inside information which gave Grendel’s appreciation of the Saint’s literary output a peculiar piquancy, right up to and including the opening lines of the column which had appeared that morning:
I sincerely hope that none of the home truths I have been expounding here recently will be taken as an attack on those honest union leaders whose efforts have eliminated so many abuses and raised the living standards of every employee and through him of all Americans, without excessively feathering their own nests.
A type like Nat Grendel, my current nominee for the Ignobel Prize, is actually a thorn in the side of every intelligent member of the labor movement, from the national leaders down to the lowliest dues-payer, but some of the suckers who give him their allegiance should see how his nest is feathered.
I made it my duty to case this joint recently, and I will testify that in one glass case alone I saw an assortment of bric-a-brac which even in my amateur estimation would be worth about twenty years’ work at union scale with no taxes, while on his desk, freshly unwrapped, I saw what looked like his latest acquisition—a hunk of Oriental pottery which a consultant has identified from my description as a Yin dynasty lion-dog worth as much as Mr Grendel’s average constituent (if I may use the expression) would spend on a couple of years’ mortgage payments…
Nat Grendel was still chewing a thumbnail over that sentence when Uberlasch arrived late in the afternoon. The matching china figure to the one the Saint had referred to had arrived earlier, by express, with a letter of effusive thankfulness enclosed, and Grendel had been unable to resist unpacking it and setting it on his desk beside its mate, the better to admire their symmetry.
Now he might end up having to pay something like a reasonable market price for the pair, if he wanted to keep them, unless he could think of some foolproof way of double-talking around those gratuitous observations which his faithful fan might just have been cussed enough to read. The probability inflamed all over again a complex of wounds of which his facial inflammations were now only dwindling shadows.
“How many do you vant of dose china nightmares, Nat?” wondered Uberlasch, whose faded eyes missed very little. “Now for half der price I could make you a dog dot vags his tail und barks und eats only flashlight batteries. Dot iss, if it’s schtill true vot I read in der papers.”
“The only thing I want to read in the papers tomorrow,” Grendel said edgily, “is how this precious radio gadget of yours worked.”
The other put down the untidy brown-paper parcel he carried on the desk and opened it. When exposed, its contents were contrastingly compact and tidy.
“Here iss der transchmitter, Nat. It iss already tuned mit der bomb. Here iss der button. Ven it iss time for you, you pusch mit der finger. Dot iss all. You could’ve had it last night, und by now it vould be all over.”
“Templar went somewhere out of town yesterday, I found out from his hotel. That’s why I told you not to hurry. But he’s due back any time now. All I want is to be sure everything’s jake with the thing you planted.”
The Engineer sat down comfortably and lighted a rank cigar.
“If it ain’t, I should be blown up mit it myself,” he said. “I’m not der great psychologist like you, but dot bomb vos put in mit a psychology of genius.”
Simon Templar himself was ready to concede that, with the generosity of one true artist towards another. He admitted as much to Chief Inspector Fernack, in his living room at the Algonquin, while he poured Old Curio over the ice cubes in two glasses.
“I honestly don’t know how many times I might have been a sucker for a switch like that,” he said. “They knew, of course, that the odds were about twenty to one I’d hear about any trick they used to get into my room, so they deliberately used one of the corniest routines in the book to make the bet even safer. Perhaps they overdid it a bit in actually showing the bellhop the gizmo on the telephone wire. But I was supposed to feel so smug about finding it that I wouldn’t think I needed to search any farther. And I just possibly might have, if I hadn’t had electronic insurance.”
“But the bomb, man,” fumed the detective, too agitated about fundamentals to notice the last cryptic phrase. “Why didn’t you keep it, or bring it to me? That’d be the kind of evidence—”
“Of what?”
“Any part that’s used in a bomb can be traced, especially before it’s blown up.”
“Did you ever tie anything to the Engineer that way?”
Fernack gulped.
“Somebody was in your room, impersonating a telephone service man. The bellhop could identify him—”
“If he lived to do it. The guy did me a favor. But after what they did to Boyd, and what they had planned for me, can you see me asking him to stick his neck out like that?”
“If he identified the Engineer, I’d have that Dutchman locked up so tight that even Grendel couldn’t spring him.”
“You might, but I doubt it. But even if you did, do you think you’d ever make Uberlasch say who hired him? Just on a point of pig-headed Prussian pride, you couldn’t open his mouth with red-hot crowbars, and if you think you know better you’re only kidding yourself.”
“If we
don’t keep trying,” Fernack said stubbornly, “what’s ever going to stop Grendel?”
“I had a suggestion once, but you didn’t like it.”
The detective looked up grimly.
“I still don’t.”
“Let’s put it this way,” said the Saint. “Grendel and the Engineer are guilty as hell: you know it, and I know it. But under the ordinary processes of law they don’t seem any nearer to getting their comeuppance. However, it’s an ancient legal doctrine that if anyone injures himself in an attempt to commit a crime, it’s strictly his own fault. For instance, if we were standing on the edge of a cliff, and you suddenly tried to shove me over, and I dodged, so that you lost your balance and fell over yourself, it couldn’t be blamed on me for not standing still and letting you push me.”
“So what?”
Simon sipped his drink placidly.
“In the same way, if Grendel was fooling around with some nasty little toy that was intended to blow me to blazes, and instead it went off and disintegrated him—it’d be practically suicide, wouldn’t it?”
“What are you driving at?” rasped Fernack distrustfully. “You didn’t get me up here just for an argument.”
“No,” Simon admitted. “I also thought you might ask me for an alibi, and I couldn’t think of a better one I could give you than yourself. For the rest, I’m betting everything on psychology. I know that Grendel fancies himself as the sharpshooter in that department, but I think I’ve got him out-psychologized—or maybe buffaloed would be a better word,” he said enigmatically.
And then, as if on cue, the telephone rang.
“That should be Grendel now,” said the Saint, putting down his glass. “Come and listen.”
He led the way into the bedroom, and Fernack followed him in glowering uncertainty. Simon lifted the handset and said, “Hullo.”
“Templar?”
“Speaking.” Simon turned the receiver away from his ear and beckoned Fernack closer so that the other could also hear.
“This is Nat Grendel.”
“Well. How are your bruises? They should be sporting some beautiful color effects by now.”
“Do you remember saying that if I had you sitting on a bomb you didn’t believe I’d have the guts to set it off myself?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to show you how wrong you were.”
“Don’t try it, Nat,” said the Saint soberly. “I can’t give you a fairer warning than that.”
“This isn’t a warning,” Grendel said. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard. But right now, I just wanted to tell you about it, so that the last thing you know’ll be that I’m doing it myself. Now.”
Simon prudently moved the receiver a little further from his ear, but the detective, who was caught unprepared, jumped at the loudness of the clack that came from the diaphragm.
“What was that?”
Simon Templar listened a moment longer, to nothing, and then quietly put down the phone.
“That was the accident I was talking about. I got the idea from Shakespeare. You remember that line about ‘the Engineer hoist with his own petard?’ You didn’t ask me how I got rid of the petard that they fixed for me. I suppose it was rather naughty, but the only thing I could think of was to put it inside a piece of china that he was interested in and send it back to him. It wouldn’t’ve hurt him if he hadn’t pressed the button.” The Saint went back into the living room and finished his drink. “Well, I guess we’d better get in that car I told you to have waiting and go see how much mess it made.”
PUBLICATION HISTORY
As with many Saint books of this period, the stories in this book first appeared in The Saint Detective Magazine, a monthly publication that often included a new Saint story along with short stories by other authors. The five stories in this book appeared between August 1956 and September 1957.
The book itself was first published by the Doubleday Crime Club in December 1957. British readers, as with the previous Saint book, had to wait almost a year before they could read it, for a British edition was published on 6 November 1958.
A French translation, Merci, le Saint!, was published in 1960 whilst an Italian edition was published in November 1969 under the title of Grazie al Santo.
All but one of the stories in this book were adapted for the Roger Moore series of The Saint: “The Careful Terrorist” was adapted for the third episode in the show, airing 14 October 1962, whilst “The Bunco Artists” first aired on 19 December 1963; “The Happy Suicide” was broadcast on 11 March 1965, and “The Good Medicine” aired on 6 February 1964. “The Unescapable Word” was renamed “The Inescapable Word” and broadcast on 28 January 1965.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”
—Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview
Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.
He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.
“I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1
One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.
When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.
He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.
He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.
When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he
wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3
X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.
These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4
Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?
“I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5
However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6