Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 2

  The important point was that the Saint had a gold cigarette-case and a large wad of banknotes. In his innocent way, he counted over his pile before their very eyes, announced the total at two hundred and fifty pounds odd, and invited them to congratulate him on his luck. They congratulated him, politely. They remarked on the slowness of the train, and the Saint agreed that it was a boring journey. He said he wished there was some sort of entertainment provided by the railway company for the diversion of passengers on boring journeys. Somebody produced a pack of cards…

  It can be said for them that they gave him the credit for having been warned by his grandmother about the danger of trying to find the Lady. The game selected was poker. The Saint apologetically warned them that he had only played poker once before in his life, but they said kindly that that didn’t matter a bit.

  The fight started just five minutes before the train reached Victoria, and the porters who helped the Snake and his Boys out of the compartment were not thanked. They gave the Boys a bucket of water with which to revive the Snake himself, but they couldn’t do anything about his two black eyes or his missing front teeth.

  Inspector Teal, who was waiting on the platform in the hope of seeing a much-wanted con-man, saw the injured warriors and was not sympathetic.

  “You’ve been fighting, Snake,” he said brightly.

  Ganning’s reply was unprintable, but Mr Teal was not easily shocked.

  “But I can describe him to you,” said the Snake, becoming less profane. “Robbery with violence, that’s what it was. He set on us—”

  “‘Sat,’” is the past tense of ‘sit,’” said Teal, shifting his gum to the other side of his mouth.

  “He’s got away with over three hundred quid that we made today—”

  Teal was not interested.

  “Where d’you make it?” he enquired. “Have you got a real printing press, or do you make it by hand? I didn’t know you were in the ‘slush’ game, Snake.”

  “Look here, Teal,” said Ganning, becoming more coherent, “you can say what you like about me, but I’ve got my rights, the same as anybody else. You’ve got to get after that man. Maybe you know things about him already. He’s either on a lay, or he’s just starting on one, you mark my words. See this!”

  Mr Teal examined the envelope sleepily.

  “What is it?” he asked. “A letter of introduction to me?”

  “He gave it to Ted when he got out. ‘That’s my receipt,’ he said. Didn’t he, Ted? You look inside, Teal!”

  The envelope was not sealed. Teal turned it over, and remarked on the crest of the hotel which had provided it, on the flap. Then, in his lethargic way, he drew out the contents—a single sheet of paper.

  “Portrait by Epstein,” he drawled. “Quite a nice drawing, but it don’t mean anything to me outside of that. You boys have been reading too many detective stories lately, that’s the trouble with you.”

  2

  The Saint, being a man of decidedly luxurious tastes, was the tenant of a flat in Brook Street, Mayfair, which was so far beyond his means that he had long since given up worrying about the imminence of bankruptcy. One might as well be hung for a sheep, the Saint reflected, in his cheerfully reckless way, as for a foot-and-mouth-diseased lamb. He considered that the world owed him a good time, in return for services rendered and general presentability and good-fellowship, and, since the world hitherto had been close-fistedly reluctant to recognize the obligation and meet it, the Saint had decided that the time had come for him to assert himself. His invasion of Brook Street had been one of the first moves in the campaign.

  But the locality had one distinct advantage that had nothing to do with the prestige of its address, and this advantage was the fact that it possessed a mews, a very small and exclusive mews, situated at a distance of less than the throw of a small stone from the Saint’s front door. In this mews were a number of very expensive garages, large, small, and of Austin Seven size. And the Saint owned two of these large garages. In one he kept his own car; the other had been empty for a week, until he had begun smuggling an assortment of curious objects into it at dead of night—objects which only by the most frantic stretch of imagination could have been associated with cars.

  If the Saint had been observed on any of these surreptitious trips, it is highly probable that his sanity would have been doubted. Not that he would have cared, for he had his own reasons for his apparent eccentricity. But as it was, no one noticed his goings-out or his comings-in, and there was no comment.

  And even if he had been noticed, it is very doubtful if he would have been recognized. It was the immaculate Saint who left Brook Street and drove to Chelsea and garaged his car near Fulham Road. Then, by a very subtle change of carriage, it was a not-nearly-so-immaculate Saint who walked through a maze of dingy back streets to a house in which one Bertie Marks, a bird of passage, had a stuffy and microscopical apartment. And it was a shabby, slouching, down-at-heel Bertie Marks who left the apartment and returned to the West End on the plebeian bus, laden with the packages that he had purchased on his way, and who shambled inconspicuously into the mews off Brook Street and into the garage which he held in his own name. The Saint did not believe in being unnecessarily careless about details.

  And all these elaborate preparations—the taking of the second garage and the Chelsea apartment, and the creation of the character of Bertie Marks—had been made for one single purpose, which was put into execution on a certain day.

  A few hours after dawn on that day (an unearthly hour for the Saint to be abroad) a small van bearing the name of Carter Paterson turned into the mews and stopped there. Bertie Marks climbed down from the driver’s seat, wiping grimy hands on his corduroys, and fished out a key, with which he opened the door of his garage. Then he went back to his van, drove it into the garage, and closed the doors behind him.

  He knew that his action must have excited the curiosity of the car-washing parade of chauffeurs congregated in the mews, but he wasn’t bothering about that. With the consummation of his plan, the necessity for the continued existence of Bertie Marks was rapidly nearing its end.

  “Let ’em wonder!” thought the Saint carelessly, as he peeled off his grubby jacket.

  He switched on the light, and went and peeped out into the mews. The car-washing parade had resumed its labours, being for the moment too preoccupied to bother about the strange phenomenon of a Carter Paterson van being driven into a garage that had once housed a Rolls.

  The Saint gently slid a bar across the door to shut out any inquisitive explorers, and got to work. The van, on being opened, disclosed a number of large wooden packing-cases which the Saint proceeded to unload on to the floor of the garage. This done, he fetched from a corner a mallet and chisel, and began to prise open the cases and extract their contents. In each case, packed in with wood shavings, were two dozen china jars.

  As each case was emptied, the Saint carried the jars over to the light and inspected them minutely. He was not at all surprised to find that, whereas the majority of the jars were perfectly plain, all the jars in one case were marked with a tiny cross in the glazing. These jars the Saint set aside, for they were the only ones in which he was interested. They were exactly what he had expected to find, and they provided his entire motive for the temporary and occasional sinking of his own personality in the alias of Mr Marks. The other jars he replaced in their respective cases, and carefully closed and roped them to look as they had been before he tampered with them.

  Then he opened the marked jars and poured out their contents into a bucket. In another corner of the garage was a pile of little tins, and in each jar the Saint placed one of these tins, padding the space that was left with cotton wool to prevent rattling. The jars so treated were replaced one by one and the case in its turn was also nailed up again and roped as before—after the Saint, with a little smile plucking at the corners of his mouth, had carefully laid a souvenir of his intervention on the top of the last layer of w
ood shavings.

  He had worked quickly. Only an hour and a half had elapsed from the time when he drove into the garage to the time when he lifted the last case back into the van, and when that had been done he unbarred the garage doors and opened them wide.

  The remains of the car-washing parade looked up puzzledly as the van came backing out of the garage; it registered an even greater perplexity when the van proceeded to drive out of the mews and vanish in the direction of Bond Street. It yelled to the driver that he had forgotten to close his garage after him, but Mr Marks either did not hear or did not care. And when the parade perceived that Mr Marks had gone for good, it went and pried into the garage, and scratched its heads over the litter of wood shavings on the floor, the mallet and chisel and nails and hammer, and the two or three tins which the Saint had found no space for, and which he had accordingly left behind. But the bucket of white powder was gone, riding beside Mr Marks in the front of the van, and very few people ever saw Mr Marks again.

  The van drove to an address in the West End, and there Mr Marks delivered the cases, secured a signature to a receipt, and departed, heading further west. On his way, he stopped at St. George’s Hospital, where he left his bucket. The man who took charge of it was puzzled, but Mr Marks was in a hurry and had neither time nor the inclination to enlighten him.

  “Take great care of it, because it’s worth more money than you’ll ever have,” he directed. “See that it gets to one of the doctors, and give him this note with it.”

  And the Saint went back to the wheel of his van and drove away, feeling that he was nearing the end of an excellent day’s work.

  He drove to the Great West Road, and out of London towards Maidenhead. Somewhere along that road he turned off into a side lane, and there he stopped for a few minutes out of sight of the main traffic. Inside the van was a large pot of paint, and the Saint used it energetically. He had never considered himself an artist, but he man-handled that van with the broad sweeping touch of a master. Under his vigorous wielding of the brush, the sign of Carter Paterson, which he had been at some pains to execute artistically the night before, vanished entirely, and the van became plain. Satisfied with the obliteration of the handiwork which only a few hours before he had admired so much, the Saint resumed the wheel and drove back to London. The paint he had used was guaranteed quick-drying, and it lived up to the word of its guarantee. It collected a good deal of dust on the return voyage, and duly dried with a somewhat soiled aspect which was a very fair imitation of the condition in which Mr Marks had received it.

  He delivered it to its home garage at Shepherd’s Bush and paid twenty-four hours’ hire. Some time later Mr Marks returned to Chelsea. A little later still, the not-so-immaculate Simon Templar turned into another garage and collected his trim blue Furillac speedster, in which he drove to his club in Dover Street. And the Simon Templar who sauntered through to the bar and called for a pint of beer must have been one of the most impeccably immaculate young men that that haunt of impeccably immaculate young men had ever sheltered.

  “We don’t often see you as early as this, sir,” remarked the barman.

  “May it be as many years before you see me as early as this again, son,” answered the Saint piously. “But this morning I felt I just had to get up and go for a drive. It was such a beautiful morning.”

  3

  Mr Edgar Hayn was a man of many interests. He was the proud proprietor of Danny’s—a night club in a squalid street off Shaftesbury Avenue—and he also controlled the destinies of the firm of Laserre, which was a small but expensive shop in Regent Street that retailed perfumes, powders, rouges, creams, and all the other preparations essential to modern feminine face-repair. These two establishments were Mr Hayn’s especial pets, and from them he derived the greater part of his substantial income. Yet it might be mentioned that the profits of Danny’s were not entirely earned by the sale of champagne, and the adornment of fashionable beauty was not the principal source of the prosperity of the house of Laserre. Mr Hayn was a clever organizer, and what he did not know about the art of covering his tracks wouldn’t have been missed from one of the microscopical two-guinea alabaster jars in which he sold the celebrated Crème Laserre.

  He was a big, heavy-featured man, clean-shaven, pink complexioned, and faintly bald. His name had not always been Hayn, but a process of naturalization followed by a Deed Poll had given him an indisputable legal right to forget the cognomen of his father—and, incidentally, had eliminated for ever the unpleasant possibility of a deportation order, an exercise of forethought for which Mr Hayn was more than once moved to give his sagacity a pat on the back. The police knew certain things about him which made them inclined to regard him with disfavour, and they suspected a lot more, but there had never been any evidence.

  He was writing letters at the big kneehole desk in his private office at Danny’s when Ganning arrived. The knock on the door did not make him look up. He said, “Come in!”—but the sound of the opening and closing of the door was, to him, sufficient indication that the order had been obeyed, and he went on to finish the letter he had been drafting.

  Only when that was done did he condescend to notice the presence of his visitor.

  “You’re late, Snake,” he said, blotting the sheet carefully.

  “Sorry, boss.”

  Mr Hayn screwed the cap on his fountain-pen, replaced it in his pocket, and raised his eyes from the desk for the first time. What he saw made him sag back with astonishment.

  “Who on earth have you been picking a quarrel with?” he demanded.

  The Snake certainly looked the worse for wear. A bandage round his head covered one eye, and the eye that was visible was nearly closed up. His lips were bruised and swollen, and a distinct lack of teeth made him speak with a painful lisp.

  “Was it Harrigan’s crowd?” suggested Hayn.

  Ganning shook his head.

  “A bloke we met on the train coming back from Brighton last night.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Nope. Ted and Bill were with me. And Mario.”

  “And what was this man trooping round? A regiment?”

  “He was alone.”

  Hayn blinked.

  “How did it happen?”

  “We thought he was a sucker,” explained Snake disgustedly. “Smart clothes, gold cigarette-case, gold-mounted stick, gold watch—and a wad. He showed us the wad. Two-fifty, he said it was. We couldn’t let that go, so we got him into a game of cards. Poker. He said he didn’t know anything about the game, so it looked safe enough—he struck us as being that sort of mug. We were geeing him along nicely right up to ten minutes or so before Victoria, and we’d let him take fifty off us. He was thinking himself the greatest poker player in the world by then, you’d have said. Then we asked him to be a sport and give us a chance of getting our money back on a couple of big jackpots with a five-pound ante. He agreed, and we let him win the first one. We all threw in after the first rise. ‘What about making it a tenner ante for the last deal?’ I said, tipping the wink to the boys. He wasn’t too keen on that, but we jollied him along, and at last he fell for it. It was Ted’s deal, but I shuffled the broads for him.”

  “And your hand slipped?”

  Ganning snorted.

  “Slipped nothin’! My hand doesn’t slip. I’d got that deck stacked better than any conjurer could have done it. And I picked up a straight flush, just as I’d fixed it. Mario chucked in right away, and Ted and Bill dropped out after the first round. That left the Mug and me, and we went on raising each other till every cent the boys and I could find between us was in the kitty. We even turned in our links and Mario’s diamond pin to account for as much of the Mug’s wad as possible. When we hadn’t another bean to stake, he saw me. I showed down my straight flush, and I was just getting set to scoop in the pool when he stopped me. ‘I thought you told me this was next to unbeatable,’ he says, and then he shows down five kings.”

  “Five?” rep
eated Mr Hayn frowning.

  “We were playing deuces wild, and a joker. He’d got the joker.”

  “Well, didn’t you know what he was holding?”

  “It wasn’t the hand I fixed for him to deal himself!”

  Mr Hayn controlled his features.

  “And then you cut up rough, and got the worst of it?”

  “I accused him of cheating. He didn’t deny it. He had the nerve to say, ‘Well, you were supposed to be teaching me the game, and I saw you were cheating all the time, so I thought it was allowed by the rules!’ And he started putting away our pile. Of course we cut up rough!”

  “And he cut up rougher?” suggested Mr Hayn.

  “He didn’t fight fair,” said Ganning aggrievedly. “First thing I knew, he’d jabbed the point of his stick into Ted’s neck before Ted had a chance to pull his cosh, so Ted was out of it. Bill was all ready for a fair stand-up fight with the knuckle-dusters, but this man kicked him in the stomach, so he took the count. Mario and me had to tackle him alone.”

  The Snake seemed disinclined to proceed further with the description of the battle, and Hayn tactfully refrained from pressing him. He allowed the Snake to brood blackly over the memory for a few moments.

  “He wasn’t an amateur,” said Ganning. “But none of us could place him. I’d give the hell of a lot to find out who he was. One of these fly mobsmen you read about, I shouldn’t wonder. He’d got all the dope. Look at this,” said the Snake, producing the envelope. “He shoved that at Ted when he got out. Said it was his receipt. I tried to get Teal to take it up—he was at the station—but he wouldn’t take it seriously.”

  Hayn slipped the sheet of paper out of the envelope and spread it out on his desk. Probably he had not fully grasped the purport of Ganning’s description, for the effect the sight had on him was amazing.