The Saint in Action (The Saint Series) Page 24

  A rope was pulled tightly around his wrists, pinioning them together in front of him.

  Again he was told to move, and he found himself ascending a spiral staircase of vertiginous steepness. Most of the treads were broken and rotting, and creaked alarmingly under his weight. The staircase wound itself like a corkscrew around the inner wall of a round tower, which rose straight up from what he had first taken for a sort of hall. At one time, no doubt, there had been a guarding balustrade on the offside, but this had long since ceased to exist, and there was nothing between the climber and a sheer drop to the flagstones below. At the top, he stepped off the last tread on to the floor of what might once have been a small turret room, but which was now hardly more than an unrailed ledge suspended over the black abyss. The only windows were two narrow embrasures, through which he could see nothing but darkness. He was placed against the wall away from the stairs and close to the edge of the floor, and the other end of the rope around his wrists was run through a heavy iron ring set in the masonry above his head and made fast.

  “I can still kick,” he observed solicitously. “Are you sure you’re not taking a lot of chances?”

  “That will not be for long,” said the Z-Man.

  A block of stone weighing about a hundredweight, with a rope round it, was dragged across the floor, and the rope was tied round the Saint’s ankles.

  “You vill kick now?” asked the Z-Man. “Yes?”

  “I fancy—no,” answered the Saint.

  He moved his hands experimentally. His wrists were only held by a slip-knot. If he could drag a little slack out of the rope where it was tied to the ring he might be able to get them free. He wondered why he had been tied so carelessly, and the next moment he knew. As if in answer to a prearranged signal, Raddon stepped forward, and with an effort pushed the rock tied to the Saint’s feet off the ledge. It dragged the Saint’s legs after it, and the slip-knot came tight again instantly as the pull came on it. Simon hung there, excruciatingly stretched out, with only the cord on his wrists to save him from being dragged over the edge.

  The Z-Man came closer.

  “You know why you are here?” he asked. “You haff interfered with my affairs.”

  “Considerably,” Simon agreed.

  In that confined space, the light of the torches was reflected from the walls sufficiently to show the men behind them. Besides the Z-Man and Raddon, the third member of the party, as Simon had suspected, was Welmont, of taxi-cab fame. The two minor Z-Men stood a little behind and to either side of their leader.

  The Z-Man put away his torch and took the Saint’s own knife out of his pocket.

  “You vill tell me how much you know,” he said, “Tell me this, my Saint, und your fine looks vill still be yours.”

  He caressed the knife in his gloved hand, and brought it suggestively forward so that the light glinted on the polished blade.

  “So we now attempt to make the victim’s blood run cold, do we?” said the Saint amusedly, although his joints felt as if they were being torn apart on the rack. “I take it that you’re in the mood for one of your celebrated beauty treatments. Why don’t you operate on yourself first, laddie? You look as if it would improve you.”

  “Tell me vot you know!” shouted the Z-Man furiously. “I giff you just one minute.”

  “And after I’ve done the necessary spilling, I suppose you slit my gizzard with the grapefruit cutter and then bury my remains deeply under the fragrant sod,” said the Saint sardonically. “Nothing doing, Slug. It’s not good enough. I’ve made myself a hell of a nuisance to you, and you won’t be satisfied until I’m as dead as—Mercia Landon.”

  “You fool,” screamed the Z-Man. “I mean vot I say!”

  “That makes us even,” said the Saint. “But I’m not a film actress, remember. Carving your alphabetical ornamentations on my face won’t decrease my earning capacity by a cent. I’m surprised at your moderation. Now that you’ve got me in your ker-lutches I wonder you don’t flay the skin off my back.”

  His utter indifference to the peril he was in was breathtaking. The mockery of his blue eyes and the cool insolence of his voice had something epic about it, as if he had turned back the clock to days when men lived and died with that same ageless carelessness. And yet even while he spoke, his ears were listening. Events had moved faster than he had anticipated. The Z-Man’s lofty eyrie, too, was a factor of the entertainment that Simon had not allowed for. Those crumbling stairs couldn’t be climbed easily and quietly…Time was the essential factor now, and the Saint was beginning to realise that the support upon which he was relying was not at hand—while he was not so much at the mercy of a man as of a homicidal maniac.

  The Z-Man was within arm’s length of him now.

  “No, I do not slit your gizzard,” he said huskily. “I tell you vot I do. I only cut der rope vot hold you up. Und then der stone pulls you down, und we take off der ropes, und you haf had an accident und fallen down. Do you understand?”

  The Saint understood very well. He could feel the dizzy emptiness under his dangling toes. But he still smiled.

  “Well, why don’t you get on with it?” he said tauntingly. “Or have you lost your nerve?”

  “You crazy fool! You think you are funny! But if I take you at your word—”

  “You’re getting careless with that beautiful accent,” mocked the Saint. “If you say ‘vot,’ you ought to say ‘vord.’ The trouble with you is that you’re such a lousy actor. Now if you’d been any good—”

  “You asked for it,” said the other, in a horrible whisper, and slashed at the rope from which the Saint hung.

  And at the same moment the Saint made his own gamble. The fingers of his right hand strained up, closed on the iron ring from which he was suspended, tightened their grip, and held it. The strain on his sinews shot red-hot needles through him, and yet he had a sense of serene confidence, a feeling of seraphic inevitability, that no pain could suppress. He had goaded the Z-Man as he had anticipated, and he had been waiting with every nerve and muscle for the one solitary chance that the fall of the cards offered—a game fighting chance to win through. And the chance had come off.

  The rope no longer held him from plunging down to almost certain death, but the steel strength of his own fingers did. And as the rope parted, the slip-knot had loosened so that he could wrench his left hand free.

  “Thanks a lot, sweetheart,” said the Saint.

  A hawk would have had difficulty in following the movements that came immediately afterwards. As the Z-Man gasped with sudden fear, a circle of wrought steel whipped across his shoulder, swung him completely round, and placed him so that his back was towards the Saint. Then the Saint’s left hand snaked under his opponent’s left arm, flashed up to his neck, and secured a half-nelson that was as solid as if it had been carved out of stone.

  “We can now indulge in skylarking and song,” said the Saint. “I’ll do the skylarking, and you can provide the song.”

  To some extent he was right, but the Z-Man’s song was not so much musical as reminiscent of the shriek of a lost locomotive. Some men might have got out of that half-nelson, particularly as the Saint was still crucified between his precarious grip on the ring and the weight that was trying to drag him down into the black void; but the Z-Man knew nothing about wrestling, and all the strength seemed to have gone out of him. Moreover the Saint’s thumb on one side of his captive’s neck, and his lean, brown fingers on the other, were crushing with deadly effect into his victim’s carotid arteries. Scientifically applied, this treatment can produce unconsciousness in a few seconds, but Simon was at a disadvantage, for half his strength was devoted to fighting the relentless drag on his ankles.

  Raddon and Welmont started forward too late. The Saint’s wintry laugh met them at their first step.

  “If anything happens,” he said with pitiless clarity, “your pal goes over first.”

  They checked as if they had run into an invisible wall, and Raddon’s gum
pish face showed white as his torch jumped in his hand.

  “For God’s sake,” he gasped hoarsely. “Wait—”

  “Is dat you, boss?” bawled a foghorn voice far below, and the Saint’s smile became a shade more blissful in spite of the wrenching agony in his right shoulder.

  “This is me, Hoppy,” he said. “You’d better come up quickly—and look out for someone coming down.” He looked over the shuddering bundle of the Z-Man at Raddon and Welmont, still frozen in their tracks.

  “There’s no way out for you unless you can fly,” he said. “How would you like to be a pair of angels?”

  They made no attempt to graduate into a pair of angels. They stood very still as Hoppy Uniatz crashed off the stairs on to the ledge, followed by Patricia, and briskly removed their guns. A moment later an arm like a tree-trunk took the weight off the Saint’s hand and hauled him back to the safety of the floor.

  Patricia was touching the Saint as if to make sure that he was real.

  “Are you all right, boy?” she was asking tremulously. “I was afraid we’d be too late. They’d locked the outside door, and Hoppy was afraid of making a noise—”

  The Saint kissed her.

  “You were in plenty of time,” he said, and yanked the Z-Man clear of the edge of the floor. “Think you could hold him, Hoppy?”

  “Wit’ one finger,” said Mr Uniatz scornfully.

  With one swift hop that was in itself a complete justification of his nickname, he heaved the Z-Man to his feet from behind and held him in a gorilla grip. The Z-Man’s struggles were as futile as the wrigglings of a fly between the fingers of a small boy. And the Saint retrieved his knife and tested the point on his thumb.

  “Hold him just like that, Hoppy,” he said grimly, “so that his tummy occupies the centre of the stage. I want to do some surgery of my own.”

  With a swift movement that made Patricia catch her breath and shut her eyes quickly, he thrust the knife deeply and forcefully into the Z-Man’s protruding stomach. There was a loud, squealing hiss, and the patient deflated like a punctured tyre.

  “I just wanted to see whether it would make a squashy noise or merely explode,” said the Saint placidly. “You can open your eyes, darling. There’s no mess on the floor. Mr Vell is mostly composed of air.”

  With a swift movement he yanked off his victim’s hat, wig, glasses, and beard. “Miss Sheila Ireland, I believe,” murmured the Saint courteously.

  11

  Patricia found her voice first.

  “But I thought you told me Sentinel was the Z-Man,” she said weakly. “We left Orace to tie him up—”

  “I didn’t say so,” answered the Saint. “I told you that I’d met Comrade Sentinel, and I thought I knew who the Z-Man was. But I wanted you to tell the girls about Comrade Sentinel, because I knew she’d remember that he knew about her affair with Raddon, and I knew she’d be scared that he might say something that’d start me thinking, and I knew she’d get the wind up and feel that she had to do something about it—that is, if my suspicions were right. And I was damn right!”

  “I wondered why she suddenly decided that she couldn’t stay away from the studio a little while after I told her the news,” Patricia said slowly. “But I never thought…”

  “I did,” said the Saint. “I did most of my thinking in Sentinel’s office. He was twiddling a pencil—and all at once I remembered that when I was in Bryerby House the Z-Man had been twiddling a pencil too. Only the Z-Man had a different twiddle. Everybody has his own distinctive nervous habits. I started thinking about the Z-Man’s twiddle, wondering where else I’d seen it, and all at once it dawned on me that it was exactly like the way Sheila Ireland had been twiddling her cigarette-holder last night when she was telling us her tale of woe. It nearly knocked me over backwards.”

  He looked across at the dishevelled girl who was still writhing hysterically in Hoppy’s relentless grasp, with the smeared remains of her make-up disfiguring her face, and his eyes were hard and merciless.

  “It wasn’t a bad idea to make yourself up not only like a man, but a fat, repulsive Zeidelmann,” he said. “You nearly fooled me, until I saw you running away from Bryerby House. There’s something funny about the way a woman runs, and that started me thinking. Even then I didn’t get the idea, but I was ready for it. You did the voice pretty well, too, but that was your business. You only fell down on the little details like pencil-twiddling. And of course nobody would expect you to be a woman. But you were woman enough to make Andy Gump go on putting his head in the noose to try and please you, even after he’d come out of stir for the cheques he forged to buy you jewellery. And you were woman enough to know what the threat of disfigurement would mean to a woman.” The Saint’s voice was like icy water flowing down a glacier. “You got it both ways. You put the boodle into your own bank account, and at the same time your rivals were having breakdowns and getting thrown out of the running and letting you climb higher…I wonder how you’d like it if we made the punishment fit the crime?”

  The girl strained madly against Hoppy’s iron hands. “Let me go!” she screamed. “You swine! You couldn’t—”

  “Let her go, Hoppy,” said the Saint quietly.

  Mr Uniatz unlocked his fingers, and the girl tore herself free and stood swaying on the edge of the floor.

  “Would Andy still love you if you had a Z carved on your face?” asked the Saint speculatively.

  He moved the knife in his hand in an unmistakable gesture.

  He had no intention of using it, but he wanted her to feel some of the mental agony that she had given to others before he dealt with her in the only way he could. But all the things he would have liked to do were in his voice, and the girl was too demented with terror to distinguish between fine shades of meaning. She gaped at him in stupefied horror as he took a step towards her, and then, with an inarticulate, despairing shriek, she flung herself backwards into the black pit below…

  Raddon started forward with a queer, animal moan, but Hoppy’s gun whipped up and thrust him back. And the Saint looked at him.

  “It’s no use, Andy,” he said, with his first twinge of pity. “You backed the wrong horse.” He slid his knife back into its sheath and put an arm around Patricia.

  “Where are we?” he asked, in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “This is some sort of old ruin with a modern house built into one wing of it.” She spoke mechanically, with her eyes still hypnotised by the dark silence into which Sheila Ireland had disappeared. “I suppose it belonged to her…”

  The Saint buttoned his coat. Life went on, and business was still business.

  “Then it probably contains a safe with some boodle in it,” he said. “I know a few good causes that could use it. And then we’d better hustle back and untie Comrade Sentinel before he bursts a blood-vessel. We’ll have to take him back to Weybridge and add him to Beatrice and Irene for the alibi we’re going to need when Claud Eustace hears about this. Let’s keep moving.”

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Perhaps Hodders got their numbers wrong. Or maybe they simply underestimated the power of the Saint. Regardless, no sooner had they published the first edition of this book, in June 1937, than they had to rush back to the printers and order another batch, with a second edition appearing the following month. And just four years later, in October 1941, they were on their eleventh edition making this, initially at least, one of the Saint’s best-selling adventures, particularly if you use the number of book reprints as a measure.

  Yet curiously, since the 1940s reprints have been fairly thin on the ground; sure the coming of paperbacks in the post-war 1950s provided two or three editions, and of course there were a couple of reprints to tie in with the first TV series, but once you get passed the initial rush, this is one of the Saint and Leslie Charteris’s less popular books.

  This is echoed in the foreign sales as well, for translations were limited to a handful of reliable markets; the Dutch published De Z-man in 1
939 but understandably renamed it De Saint en de Z-man when it came to reprinting it in the 1960s. The French opted for Le Saint contre Mr Z…in 1947, the Italians for L’asso dei furfanti (which translates as the rather excellent The Ace of Villains) in 1973, whilst the Brazilians and Swedes published their respective translations in 1937 and 1945 respectively.

  All three stories in this book were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore: “The Beauty Specialist” was retitled “Marcia” and was first broadcast on 24 October 1963 as part of the second season. The following week saw the first broadcast of “The Work of Art,” an episode based on “The Spanish War,” whilst “The Unlicensed Victuallers” was renamed “The Hi-Jackers” and was first broadcast on 13 December as part of the third season.

  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