The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 24

“You’re the only one in that photograph. Really, Luker, I—”

  “I quite understand,” Luker said, with imperturbably measured venom. “This was an attractive business proposition for you so long as somebody else took all the risk, but now that it isn’t going so smoothly you’d like to wash your hands of it, the same as Sangore—of course from the highest motives and with the greatest regard for the honour of the regiment and the old school. I’m sorry that I can’t make it so easy for you. In the past I have helped you to make your fortunes in return for nothing much more than the use of your honest British stupidity, which is so comforting to the public. Doubtless you thought that you were earning the just rewards of your own brilliance, but I assure you that I could have taken my pick from hundreds of distinguished imbeciles of your class. Now for the first time, in a small way, I really need your assistance. You should feel flattered. But in any event I intend to have it. And I can assure you that even if this particular photograph only refers to me, if I should be caught the subsequent investigation would certainly implicate yourselves.”

  He made the statement in a way that left them no doubt of how they might be implicated if the worst came to the worst. But they were too battered to fight back. His words moved like barbs among the balloons of their self-esteem. They stared at him, curiously deflated, trying to persuade themselves that they were not afraid.

  Luker’s square powerful hands lay flat on the blotter in front of him, palm downwards, in a pattern that symbolically and physically and quite unconsciously expressed an instinct of command that held down all opposition. He went on speaking with relentless precision, and with a subtle but incompatible change of manner.

  “You, my dear Algy, have certain connections which will enable you to approach the Chief Commissioner at Scotland Yard. You will use those connections to find out exactly what Templar told the police in Anford, and report to my secretary here as soon as you have the information. I don’t think he can have told them anything important, but it will be safer to find out. You”—he turned to General and Lady Sangore—“will go down to Bledford Manor. Since the house is supposed to be shut up, some local policeman may notice that there are people there and become inquisitive. You must be there to reassure him. You need not see the prisoners if it will embarrass you. I myself am going to Paris tonight, and I have arranged for Templar and Lady Valerie to be taken there—it will be easier to question them and dispose of them later on the other side. But there may be a slight delay before they can be moved, and I want you at Bledford as soon as possible as a precaution. You had better leave at once.”

  He did not consider any further argument. As far as he was concerned, there was no more arguing to be done. He simply issued his commands. As he finished he stood up, and before any of them could raise any more objections he had walked out of the room.

  They sat still for some moments after he had gone, each knowing what was in the minds of the others, each trying to pretend that he alone was still dominant and unshaken.

  Fairweather got up first. He pulled out a big old-fashioned gold watch and consulted it with a brave imitation of his old portly pomposity.

  “Well,” he said croakily, “I must be getting along. Got things to attend to—”

  He bustled out, very quickly and busily.

  The Sangores looked at one another. Then Lady Sangore spoke.

  “It’s all that little tart’s fault,” she said bitterly. “If she’d had any sense or decency at all we shouldn’t be in all this trouble now. As for Luker, he ought to be kicked out of every club in London.”

  “I don’t suppose he belongs to every club in London,” said General Sangore dully.

  His figure, usually so ramrod erect, was bowed and sagging; his shoulders drooped. Suddenly he looked very old and tired and pasty. He seemed bewildered, like a man lost in a chamber of unimaginable horrors; he seemed to be groping through the rusty machinery of his mind for one wheel that would turn to a task for which it had never been designed.

  2

  “Once upon a time,” said the Saint, “there was a wall-eyed wombat named Wilhelmina, who lived in a burrow in Tasmania and grieved resentfully over the fact that Nature had endowed her, like all females of the marsupial family, with an abdominal pouch or sac intended for the reception and protection of new-born marsupials. Since, however, the strabismic asymmetry of Wilhelmina’s features had always deterred discriminating males of her species from making such advances to her as might have resulted in the production of young wombats, she was easily persuaded to regard this useful and ingenious organ as an indecent excrescence invented by the Creator in a lewd and absent-minded moment, and she soon became the leader of a strong movement among other unattractive wombats to suppress all references to it and to decry its use as sinful and reprehensible, and invariably wore a species of apron or sporran to conceal this obscene conformation of tissue from the world. Now it so happened that one night a purblind male wombat named Widgery, of dissolute habits…”

  He sat in the scullery of Bledford Manor with Lady Valerie Woodchester. They sat on the hard cold tile floor with their wrists and ankles bound with strong cord. A smear of blood had dried across Simon’s face, and in spite of his quiet satiric voice his head was aching savagely. Lady Valerie’s face was very dirty, and her hair was in wild disarray; she also had a headache, and she was in a poisonous temper.

  “Oh, stop it!” she burst out jitterily. “You’ve got me into a hell of a nice mess, haven’t you? I suppose you enjoy this sort of thing, but I don’t. Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

  “What would you like me to do?” he asked accommodatingly.

  “What are they going to do with us?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not a thought-reader. But you can use your imagination.”

  She brooded. Her lower lip was thrust out, her pencilled eyebrows drawn together in a vicious scowl.

  “The damned swine,” she said. “I’d like to see them all die the most horrible deaths. I’d like to see them burnt alive, or something, and jeer at them…My God, I wish I had a cigarette…Doesn’t it seem ages since we were having dinner at the Berkeley? Simon, do you think they’re really going to kill us?”

  “I expect their ideas are running more or less along those lines,” he admitted. “But they haven’t done it yet. What’ll you bet me we aren’t dining at the Berkeley again tomorrow?”

  “It’s all very well for you to talk like that,” she said. “It’s your job. But I’m scared.” She shivered. Her voice rose a trifle. “It’s horrible! I don’t want to die! I…I want to have a good time, and wear nice clothes, and…and…Oh, what’s the good?” She stared at him sullenly in the dimming light. “I suppose you think that’s frightful of me. If your girlfriend was in my place I expect she’d think this was an awfully jolly party. I suppose she simply revels in being rolled over in cars, and knocked on the head, and mauled about and tied up and waiting to be killed, and all the rest of it. Well, all I can say is, I wish she was here instead of me.”

  The Saint chuckled. He was not particularly amused, but he didn’t want her nerve to crack completely, and he knew that her breaking point was not very far away.

  “After all, you chose me for a husband, darling. I tried to discourage you, but you seemed to have made up your mind that you like the life. Never mind. I’m pretty good at getting out of jams.”

  “Even if we do get out, I expect my hair will be snow-white or something,” she said miserably.

  She blinked. Her eyes were very large and solemn; she looked very childish and pathetic. A pair of big bright tears formed in her eyes and roiled down her cheeks.

  “I…I do hate this so much,” she whispered. “And I’m so uncomfortable.”

  “All the same, you mustn’t cry,” he said. “The floor’s damp enough already.”

  “It couldn’t be any damper. So why shouldn’t I cry? I can think of dozens of things I’d like to do, and crying’s the only one of
them I can do. So why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because it makes you look like an old hag.”

  She sniffed.

  “Well, that’s your fault,” she said, but she stopped crying. She twisted her head down and hunched up one shoulder and wriggled comically, trying to dry the tears on her blouse. She drew a long shuddering sigh like a baby. She said, “All right, why don’t you talk to me about something and take my mind off it? What were you getting so excited about when the car turned over?”

  The Saint gazed past her, into one of the corners where the dusk was rapidly deepening. That memory had been the first to return to his mind when he painfully recovered consciousness, had haunted him ever since under the surface of his unconcern, embittering the knowledge of his own helplessness.

  “The Reichstag,” he said. “Remember the Reichstag. That’s what Kennet wrote on that bit of paper, which he probably pinched from the headquarters of the Sons of France when he was a member. That’s why he had to be cooled off. He knew one thing too much, among a lot of stuff that didn’t matter, and if he’d lived that one thing might have wrecked the whole scheme.”

  “But what did he know?”

  “Do you remember the Reichstag Fire in Berlin? That was the thing that started the Nazi tyranny in Germany. Of course the Nazis said that the Communists had done it, but, but a good many people have always believed that the Nazis arranged it themselves, to give themselves a grand excuse for what they went on to do afterwards. It seems pretty plain that the Sons of France have planned something on the same lines for tomorrow. That piece of paper was a list of various suitable occasions for a blow-up of that sort which had been jotted down and discussed and eliminated for various reasons until just one was left—the opening of the Hostel of Memory at Neuilly, by Comrade Chaulage. The scheme will be to have Comrade Chaulage assassinated during the proceedings. This of course will be the work of the Communists, like the Reichstag Fire, and it will not only be proof of what desperate and disgusting people they are, but it will also be evidence of their contempt for the Heroes of France, which is always a very strong point with the Fascist gang. The Sons of France will claim the assassination as a crowning example of the incompetence of the present Government to keep the Red Bandits in check; so they will mobilise their forces, seize the Government, and proclaim a dictatorship. And there you are.”

  “You mean the Sons of France are going to kill Chaulage,” she said, “and Luker and Algy and General Sangore know all about it.”

  “That was my guess. And I still like it.”

  She seemed a little disappointed, as if she had expected something more sensational than that. Her brief silence seemed to argue that after all there were millions of Frenchmen, and one more or less couldn’t matter as much as that.

  “I think I saw a picture of Chaulage in the paper once,” she said, with almost polite indifference. “A funny little fat man who looks like a retired grocer.”

  “He is,” said the Saint. “He also happens to be Prime Minister of France. And funny little fat Frenchmen who look like retired grocers often have ideas, particularly when they get to be Prime Ministers. Of course that would never be allowed in this country, but it happens there. And one of Comrade Chaulage’s ideas is a bill to take all the private profit out of war, which is naturally very unpopular with Luker and Fairweather and Sangore and the directors of the Siebel Factory. So that makes Comrade Chaulage a doubly suitable victim. And when the Sons of France seize power his bill will be firmly forgotten, people will march about and wave flags, bigger and better armaments will be the cry, the people will be told to be proud of going without butter to pay for bombs, and the people who sell the bombs will be very happy. Hitler and Marteau will scream insults at each other across the frontier like a couple of fishwives, and pretty soon everything will be lined up for a nice bloody war. Some millions of men, women, and children will be burned, scalded, blistered, gassed, shot, blown up, and starved to death, and the arms ring will sit back on its foul fat haunches and rake in the profits on a turnover of about five thousand pounds per corpse, according to the statistics of the last world war.”

  “Would that photograph have something to do with it, too?”

  “That’s probably the most damning evidence of all. It seems to me that there’s only one thing it can possibly mean. The half-witted-looking warrior on the right—you remember him?—he must be the martyr who’s going to do the job. Some poor crazy fanatic they’ve got hold of who’s been sold on the idea of how glorious it would be to give his life for the Cause; or else some ordinary moron who doesn’t even know or care what it’s all about. It must be that, or the photograph doesn’t mean anything. God knows how Kennet managed to take it—we never shall. He risked his life when he did it, and the risk caught up with him in the end, but it’s still a photograph that might make history. It would probably swing all except Marteau’s most fanatical sympathisers against him if it was published; under any government that Marteau wasn’t running it could send Luker to the guillotine…”

  He went on talking not because he wanted to, but to give her the distraction she had asked for. It grew darker and darker until he could no longer see her at all. The time dragged on, and presently he had nothing new to say. Her own contributions were only short strained apathetic sentences which left all the burden of talking to him.

  Presently he heard her stirring in an abrupt restless way which warned him that the sedative was losing its effect. He was silent.

  She shuffled again, coming closer, until her shoulder touched his. He could feel her trembling. It would have helped if he could have held her. But his wrists were bound so tightly that his hands were already numb; long ago he had tried every trick he knew to release himself, but the knots had been too scientifically tied, and anything with which he might have cut himself free had been taken from him while he was unconscious.

  Because there was nothing else he could do, he kissed her, more gently than he had ever done before. For a while she gave herself up hungrily to the kiss, and then she dragged her lips desperately away.

  “Oh, hell,” she sobbed. “I always thought it’d be so marvellous if you ever did that, and now it just makes everything worse.”

  “I know,” he said. “It must be dreadful to feel so safe.”

  Then she giggled a little hysterically, and presently her head drooped on his shoulder and they were quiet for a long time. He sat very still, trying to strengthen and comfort her with his own calm, and the truth is that his thoughts were very far away.

  In the kitchen, two men sat smoking moodily. The plate on the kitchen table between them was piled high with ash and the ends of stubbed-out cigarettes.

  One of them was Pietri. He was not coloured in tasteful stripes any more, but a certain raw redness combined with an unusually clean appearance about his face testified to the labour with which they had been removed. The shaven baldness of his head was concealed by a loud tweed cap which he refused to take off. The other man was quite young, with close-cropped fair hair and a prematurely hardened face. In his coat lapel he wore the button badge of the British Nazis.

  He yawned, and said in the desultory way in which their conversation had been conducted for some hours, “You know, it’s a funny thing, but I never thought I’d have the job of putting the Saint out of action. In a way, I used to admire that fellow a bit at one time. Of course, I knew he was a crook, but he always seemed a pretty sound chap at heart. When I read about him in the papers, I used to think he’d be worth having in the British Nazis. Of course he deserves what’s coming to him, but I’m sort of glad I haven’t got to give it to him myself.”

  Pietri yawned more coarsely. He had no political leanings: he simply did what he was paid to do. To him, the British Nazis were nothing but a gang of half-hearted amateur hooligans who got into scraps with the police and the populace without the incentive of making money out of it, which proved that they must be barmy…

  “You’re new to this sort of
thing, ain’t you?” he said pityingly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the other touchily. “I’ve beaten up plenty of bastards in my time.” He paused reminiscently. “I was in a stunt last Sunday, when we broke up a Communist meeting in Battersea Park. We gave them a revolution, all right. There was an old rabbi on the platform with long white hair and white whiskers, and he was having a hell of a good time telling all the bloody Reds a lot of lies about Hitler. He’s having a good time in the hospital now. I got him a beauty, smack in the mouth, and knocked his false teeth out and broke his jaw.” He sat up, cocking his ears. “Hullo—this must be Bravache at last.”

  He got up and went out of the kitchen and across the hall. His feelings were mixed: they were compounded partly of pride, partly of a sort of uneasy awe. He was a picked man, chosen because the leaders of the movement knew that his loyalty and efficiency could be absolutely relied on; he was one of the first to be entrusted with the business of liquidating an enemy. In future he would probably be detailed again for similar deadly errands. He was one of the storm troops, the striking force of the movement, and their duty was to be merciless. As he opened the front door, the young British Nazi saw himself being very strong and merciless, a figure of iron. It made him feel pretty good.

  A two-seater sports car had drawn up beside the black Packard that was parked in the drive, and Bravache was already stumping up the steps. Dumaire followed him. Their faces, like Pietri’s, looked scoured and tender, and they also kept their hats on. Bravache raised his hand perfunctorily as the British Nazi came to attention and gave a full Fascist salute.

  “The prisoners?” he said curtly.

  “This way, Major.”

  The young British Nazi led the way briskly through the kitchen, opened the scullery door, and switched on the light. Lady Valerie stirred and gave a little moan as the sudden blaze stabbed her eyes. Bravache bowed to her with punctilious mockery, his lips parting in the unhumorous wolfish smile that Simon remembered.