16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  A minute or so later he was lying flat on his tummy on the roof of the streamlined wheelhouse, with the full wind of their twenty knots blowing through his hair, wondering if he could risk a cigarette.

  Straight ahead, the scattered lights of the French coast were creeping up out of the dark, below the strip of tarnishing silver which was all that was left of the daylight. He could just see an outline of the black battlements of a rocky coast; there was nothing by which he could identify it, but from what he knew of their course he judged it to be somewhere south of Cap de la Hague. Down on the starboard beam he picked up a pair of winking lights, one of them flashing red and the other red and white, which might have belonged to Port de Diélette . . .

  "Some more coffee, Loretta?"

  Vogel's bland toneless voice suddenly came to him through one of the open windows; and the Saint drew a deep breath and lowered his head over the edge of the roof to peep in. He only looked for a couple of seconds, but in that time the scene was photographed on his brain to the last detail.

  They were all there—Vogel, Arnheim, Loretta. She had put on a backless white satin dress, perfectly plain, and yet cut with that exquisite art which can make ornament seem garish and vulgar. It set off the golden curve of her arms and shoulders with an intoxicating suggestion of the other curves which it concealed, and clung to the slender sculpture of her waist in sheer perfection: beside her, the squat paunchy bulk of Otto Arnheim with his broad bulging shirtfront looked as if it belonged to some obscene and bloated toad. But for the set cold pallor of her face she might have been a princess graciously receiving two favoured ministers: the smooth hawk-like arrogance of Kurt Vogel, in a blue velvet smoking-jacket, pouring out coffee on a pewter tray at a side table, fitted in completely with the illusion. The man standing at the wheel, gazing straight ahead, motionless except for the occasional slight movements of his hands, intruded his presence no more than a waiting footman would have done. They were all there—and what was going to be done about it?

  Simon rolled over on his back, listening with half an ear to the spasmodic mutter of absurdly banal conversation, and considered the problem. Almost certainly they were heading for Vogel's local, if not his chief, headquarters: the stacks of bullion left openly on the after deck, and the derrick not yet lashed down and covered with its tarpaulin, ruled out the idea that they were putting into any ordinary port. Presumably Vogel had a house or something close to the sea; he might unload the latest addition to his loot and go ashore himself that night, or he might wait until morning. The Saint realised that he could plan nothing until he knew. To attempt to burst into the wheelhouse and cap­ture the brains of the organisation there without an alarm of any sort being raised was a forlorn hope; to think of corralling the crew, one by one or in batches as he found them, armed only with his knife, without anyone in the wheelhouse hearing an outcry, was out of the question even to a man with Simon Tem­plar's supreme faith in his own prowess. Therefore he must wait for an opportunity or an inspiration; and all the time there was a thread of risk that some member of the crew might have been detailed to keep an eye on him and might discover that he had vanished out of his prison . . .

  "The lights, sir."

  A new voice jarred into his divided attention, and he realised that it must be the helmsman speaking. He turned over on his elbow and looked out over the bows. The lights of the shore were very close now; and he saw that two new pairs of lights had appeared on the coast ahead, red and very bright, one pair off the port bow and one pair off the starboard. He guessed that they had been set by Vogel's accomplices on shore to guide the Falkenberg between the tricky reefs and shoals to its anchorage.

  "Very well." Vogel was answering; and then he was addressing Loretta: "You will forgive me if I send you below, my dear? I fear you might be tempted to try and swim ashore, and you gave us a lot of trouble to find you last time you did that."

  "Not with the Saint?"

  There was a sudden pleading tremor of fear in her voice which the Saint had never heard there before, and Simon hung over the edge again to see her as Vogel replied.

  "Of course, that would be difficult for you. Suppose you go to your own cabin? I will see that you are not locked in any longer than is necessary."

  She nodded without speaking, and walked past the steward who had appeared in the doorway. Before she went, Simon had seen the mute embers of that moment's flare of fear in her eyes, and the veiled smirk which had greased through Vogel's reassur­ance of her told him the rest. Once again he stood before the open strong-room of the Chalfont Castle, twenty fathoms down under the tide, wondering why the death that he was expecting did not come; and all the questions that had been fermenting in his mind since then were answered. He could no longer shut out belief from what his brain had been telling him. He knew; and his bowels turned to water. He knew; and the understanding made his knuckles whiten where they gripped the edge of the roof, and burned in his mind like molten lead as he crushed his eyes for a moment into his arm. He was bowed down with an unutterable humility and pride.

  He half rose, with the only thought of following and finding her. She at least must be free, whatever he did with his own liberty . . .

  And then he realised the madness of the idea. He had no knowledge of where her cabin was, and while he was searching for it he was just as likely to open a cabin occupied by some member of the crew—even if no steward or seaman caught sight of him while he was prowling about below decks. And once he was discovered, whatever hope the gods had given him was gone again. Somehow he must still find the strength to wait, though) his muscles ached with the frightful discipline, until he had a chance to take not one trick alone but the whole grand slam.

  "Will you unload the gold to-night?"

  It was Arnheim's fat throaty voice; and Simon waited breath­lessly for the reply. It came.

  "Yes—it will be safer. The devil knows what information this man Templar has given to his friends. He is more dangerous than all the detective agencies in the world, and it would be fatal to underrate him. Fortunately we shall need to do nothing more for a long time ... It will be a pity to sink the Falkenberg, but I think it will be wise. We can easily fit out a trawler to recover the gold ... As for disposing of it, my dear Otto, that will be your business."

  "I made the final arrangements before we left Dinard."

  "Then we have very little cause for anxiety."

  Vogel's voice came from a different quarter; and the Saint treated himself to another cautious glimpse of the interior set. Vogel had taken over the wheel and was standing up to the open glass panel in the forward bay, a fresh cigar clipped between his teeth and his aquiline black-browed face intent and complacent. He pushed forward the throttle levers, and the note of the en­gines faded with the rush of the water.

  Simon glanced forward and saw that they were very near the shore. The granite cliffs loomed blackly over them, and he could see the white line of foam where they met the sea. The lights of a village were dotted up the slope beyond, and to the left and right the pairs of red lights which he had noticed before were now nearly in line. Closer still, another light danced on the wa­ter.

  So unexpectedly that it made the Saint flatten himself on the roof like a startled hare, a searchlight mounted close to his head sprang into life, flooding the foredeck and the sea ahead with its blazing beam. As they glided on over the black water, the danc­ing light which he had observed proved to be a lantern standing on one of the thwarts of a dinghy in which a solitary man was leaning over the gunnel fishing for a cork buoy. The helmsman came forward into the drench of light and took the mooring from him with a boathook, making it fast on one of the forward bollards; and the dinghy bumped along the side until the boat­man caught the short gangway and hauled himself dexterously on board, while the Falkenberg's engines roared for a moment in reverse. Then the engines stopped, and the searchlight went out again.

  "Ah, mon cher Baudier!" Vogel greeted his visitor at the door of the wheelho
use. "Ça va bien? Entrez, entrez——"

  He turned to the helmsman.

  "Tell Ivaloff to be ready to go down in a quarter of an hour. And tell Calvieri to have a dress ready for me. I shall be along in a few minutes."

  "Sofort."

  The seaman moved aft along the deck, and Vogel rejoined Baudier and Arnheim in the wheelhouse. And the Saint drew himself up on his toes and fingertips and shot after the helmsman like a great ghostly crab.

  Only the Saint's own guardian angel could have said what was in the Saint's mind at that moment. The Saint himself had no very clear idea. And yet he had made one of the wildest and most desperate decisions of his life in an immeasurable fraction of a second—a decision that he probably would not have dared to make if he had stopped to think about it. He hadn't even got the vaguest idea of the intervening details between the first movement and the final result which he had visioned in that microscopical splinter of time. They could be filled in later. The irresistible surge of inspiration had taken all those petty triviali­ties in its stride, outdistancing logic and coherent planning . . . Without knowing very clearly why, the Saint found himself spreadeagled on the roof again in front of the unsuspectingly ambulating seaman; and as the man passed underneath him Si­mon's arm shot out and grasped him by the throat . . .

  Before the cry which the man might have uttered could gain outlet it was choked back into his gullet by the merciless clutch of those steel fingers, and before he could tear the fingers away the Saint's weight had dropped silently on his shoulders and borne him down to the deck. Staring up with shocked and dilated eyes as he fought, the man saw the cold flash of a knife-blade in the dim light; and then the point of the knife pricked him under the chin.

  The Saint's fierce whisper sizzled in his ear.

  "Wenn du einen Laut von dir gibst, schneide ich dir den Kopf ab."

  The man made no sound, having no wish to feel the hot bite of that vicious blade searing through his neck. He lay still; and the Saint slowly released the grip on his throat and used his freed hand to take the automatic from the man's hip pocket. Then he took his knee out of the man's chest.

  "Get up."

  The man worked himself slowly to his feet, with the muzzle of the gun grinding into his breastbone and the knife still under his eyes.

  "Do you want to live to a ripe old age, Fritz?" asked the Saint gently.

  The man nodded dumbly, licking his lips. And the Saint's white teeth flashed in a brief and cheerless smile.

  "Then you'd better listen carefully to what I'm saying. You're not going to take all of that message to Ivaloff. You're going to take me along, and tell him that Vogel says I'm to go down. That's all. You won't see this gun any more, because it'll be in my pocket; but it'll be quite close enough to hit you. And if you make the slightest attempt to give me away, or speak one word out of your turn, I'll blow the front out of your stomach and let your dinner out for some air. Do you get my drift or shall I say it again?"

  2

  As they moved on, Simon amplified his instructions. He re­placed his knife in its sheath and put it inside his shirt; the gun he slipped into his trouser pocket, turning it up so that he could fire fairly easily across his body. He was still building up his plan while he was giving his orders. Crazy? Of course he was. But any man who was going to win a fight like that had to be crazy any­how.

  And now he could fill in the steps of reasoning which the wild leap of his inspiration had ignored. The sight of those cases of bullion stacked around the after deck had started it; the grab not yet dismantled and lashed down had helped. Vogel's talk about unloading the gold had fitted in. And then, when he had heard Vogel speak about "going down" again, and gathered that Vogel himself was going to accompany Ivaloff, the complete and incontestable explanation had opened up in his mind like an exploding bomb. Loretta had told him-—-how many hundred years ago?—that Vogel must have some fabulous treasure-house some­where, where much of the proceeds of his astounding career of piracy might still be found, which Ingerbeck's had been seeking for five years. And now the Saint knew where that treasury was. He knew it as certainly as if he could have seen down through the thirty feet of stygian water over the side. Where else could it have been? Where else, in the name of all the sublime and extrav­agant gods of piracy, could Kurt Vogel, taking his loot from the trackless abysses of the sea, have found a more appropriate and inviolable depository for it than down there in the same vast lockers of Davy Jones from which it had been stolen?

  And the Saint was going down there to find it. Vogel was going down with him to show him the last secret. And down there, in the heavy silence of that ultimate underworld, where no other soul could interfere, their duel would be fought out to its finish.

  As they came to the companion, Simon was ripping off his tie and threading it through the trigger-guard of his automatic. He steadied the helmsman as they reached the lower deck.

  "Hold my arm."

  The man looked at him and obeyed. The Saint's blue eyes held him with a wintry dominance that would not even allow the idea of disobedience to come to life.

  "And don't forget," added that smouldering undertone, which left no room for doubt in its audience that every threat it made would be unhesitatingly fulfilled. "If they even begin to suspect anything, you'll never live to see them make up their minds. Move on."

  They moved on. The helmsman stopped at a door a little fur­ther up the alleyway and on the opposite side from the cabin in which Simon had been locked up, and opened it. Ivaloff and the two men who had dressed the Saint before were there, and they looked up in dour interrogation.

  Simon held his breath. His forefinger took up the first pressure on the trigger, and every muscle in bis body was keyed up in terrible suspense. The second which he waited for the helmsman to speak was the longest he could remember. It dragged on through an eternity of pent-up stillness while he watched his inspiration trembling on a balance which he could do no more to control.

  "The Chief says Templar is to go down again . . ."

  Simon heard the words through a haze of relief in which the cabin swam round him. The breath seeped slowly back out of his thawing lungs. His spokesman's voice was practically normal—at least there was not enough shakiness in it to alarm listeners who had no reason to be suspicious. The Saint had been sent down once already; why not again?

  Without a question, the two dressers got to their feet and stumped out into the alleyway, as the helmsman completed the order.

  "He says you, Calvieri, see that there is a dress ready for him. He goes down himself also. He will be along in a few minutes— you are to be quick."

  "Okay."

  The two dressers went on, and Ivaloff was coming out to fol­low them when the helmsman stopped him.

  "You are to stay here. You change into your shore clothes at once, and then you stay below here to see that none of the others come out on deck. No one except the engineer and his assistant must come out for any reason, he says, until this work is finished. Then you will go ashore with him."

  "Boje moy," grumbled the other. "What is this?"

  The helmsman shrugged.

  "How should I know? They are his orders."

  Ivaloff grunted and turned back, unbuckling his belt; and the helmsman closed the door on him.

  It had worked.

  The stage was set, and all the cues given. With that last order, the remainder of the crew were immobilised as effectively as they could have been by violence, and far more simply; while the one man whose unexpected appearance on deck would have blown everything apart was detailed to look after them. A good deal of jollification and whoopee might take place on deck while the authority of Vogel's command kept them below as securely as if they had been locked up—he had no doubt that a man like Vogel would have thoroughly impressed his underlings with the un­pleasant consequences of disobedience. And the exquisite strat­egy of the idea traced the first glint of a purely Saintly smile in the depths of Simon Templar's eyes.
He only hoped that Kurt Vogel, that refrigerated maestro of generalship, would appreciate it himself when the time came ...

  As he drew the helmsman, now white and trembling with the knowledge of what he had done, further along the alleyway, Si­mon flashed a lightning glance over the details of his organisa­tion, and found no flaw. There remained only the helmsman him­self, who could undo all the good work with the speech which he would undoubtedly make as soon as he had the chance. It was, therefore, essential that the chance should not come for a long time . . . Simon halted the man opposite the cabin where he had been imprisoned, and grinned at him amiably. And then his fist smoked up in a terrific uppercut.

  It was a blow that carried with it every atom of speed and strength and science which the Saint had at his disposal. It im­pacted with surgical accuracy on the most sensitive spot of the helmsman's jaw with a clean crisp smack like the sound of a breaking spar, and the man's head snapped back as if it had collided with an express train. Beyond that single sharp crack of collision it caused no sound at all—certainly the recipient was incapable of making any, and the Saint felt reasonably sure that he would not become audible again for a full hour. He caught the man as he fell, lowered him to the ground inside the cabin which he should have been occupying himself, and silently shut the door.