The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 4

  Simon Templar took the paragraph in his stride, for it was no more than a confirmation and amplification of what he already knew.

  This was at ten o’clock—an extraordinary hour for the Saint to be up and dressed. But on this occasion he had risen early to break the habits of a lifetime and read every page of every newspaper that his man could buy.

  He had suddenly become inordinately interested in politics; the news that an English tourist hailing from Manchester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle had been arrested for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden fascinated him; only such articles as “Why Grandmothers Leave Home” (by Ethelred Sapling, the brilliant author of Lovers in Leeds) continued to leave him entirely icebound.

  But he had to wait for an early edition of The Evening Record for the account of his own exploit:

  …From footprints found this morning in the soft soil, it appears that three persons were involved—one of them a woman. One of the men, who must have been of exceptional stature, appears to have tripped and fallen in his flight, and then to have made off in a different direction from that taken by his companions, who finally escaped by car.

  Mr Hume Smith’s chauffeur, who attempted to arrest these two, and was knocked down by the man, recovered too late to reach the road in time to take the number of their car. From the sound of the exhaust, he judges it to have been some kind of high-powered sports model. He had not heard its approach or the entrance of the three intruders, and he admits that when he first saw the man and the woman he had just woken from a doze.

  The second man, who has been tracked across two fields at the back of Professor Vargan’s house, is believed to have been picked up by his confederates farther along the road. The fact of his presence was not discovered until the arrival of the detectives from London this morning.

  Chief Inspector Teal, who is in charge of the case, told an Evening Record representative that the police have as yet formed no theory as to what was the alarm which caused the hurried and clumsy departure of the spies. It is believed, however, that they were in a position to observe the conclusion of the experiment…

  There was much more, stunted across the two middle columns of the front page.

  This blew in with Roger Conway, of the Saint’s very dear acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of that morning to be summoned to a conference, and he put the sheet before Simon Templar at once.

  “Were you loose in England last night?” he demanded accusingly.

  “There are rumours,” murmured the Saint, “to that effect.”

  Mr Conway sat down in his usual chair, and produced cigarettes and matches.

  “Who was your pal—the cross-country expert?” he inquired calmly.

  The Saint was looking out of the window.

  “No one I know,” he answered. “He kind of horned in on the party. You’ll have the whole yarn in a moment. I phoned Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering under the castle walls a few seconds ago.”

  A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent had reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to admit him. Mr Kent carried a copy of The Evening Record, and his very first words showed how perfectly he understood the Saint’s eccentricities.

  “If I thought you’d been anywhere near Esher last night…”

  “You’ve been sent for to hear a speech on the subject,” said the Saint.

  He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself on the edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to reduce to some sort of order. She came up and stood beside him, and he slid an arm around her waist.

  “It was like this,” he said.

  And he plunged into the story without preface, for the time when prefaces had been necessary now lay far behind those four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he told what he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near Esher, and the two men listened without interruption.

  Then he stopped, and there was a short silence.

  “It’s certainly a marvellous invention,” said Roger Conway at length, smoothing his fair hair. “But what is it?”

  “The devil.”

  Conway blinked.

  “Explain yourself.”

  “It’s what The Clarion called it,” said the Saint; “something we haven’t got simple words to describe. A scientist will pretend to understand it, but whether he will or not is another matter. The best he can tell us is that it’s a trick of so modifying the structure of a gas that it can be made to carry a tremendous charge of electricity, like a thunder-cloud does—only it isn’t a bit like a thunder-cloud. It’s also something to do with a ray—only it isn’t a ray. If you like, it’s something entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the point is that this gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in the sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed lightning.”

  “And when the goat got into the cloud…”

  “It was exactly the same as if it had butted into a web of live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt like a scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet idea, isn’t it?”

  Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his eyes off the ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little and always to the point.

  “Lester Hume Smith has seen it,” said Norman Kent. “And Sir Roland Hale. Who else?”

  “Angel Face,” said the Saint; “Angel Face saw it. The man our friend Mr Teal assumes to have been one of us—not having seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built on the lines of something between Primo Carnera and an overgrown gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—otherwise I mightn’t be here. But which country he’s working for is yet to be discovered.”

  Roger Conway frowned.

  “You think…”

  “Frequently,” said the Saint. “But that was one think I didn’t need a cold towel round my head for. Vargan may have thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the front page, but he got enough publicity to make any wide-awake foreign agent curious.”

  He tapped a cigarette gently on his thumb-nail and lighted it with slow and exaggerated deliberation. In such pregnant silences of irrelevant pantomime he always waited for the seeds he had sown to germinate spontaneously in the brains of his audience.

  Conway spoke first.

  “If there should be another war…”

  “Who is waiting for a chance to make war?” asked Norman Kent.

  The Saint picked up a selection of the papers he had been reading before they came, and passed them over. Page after page was scarred with blue pencillings. He had marked many strangely separated things—a statement by Kruschev, the speech of a French delegate before the United Nations, the story of a break in the Oil Trust involving the rearrangement of two hundred million pounds of capital, the announcement of a colossal merger of chemical interests, the latest movement of warships, the story of an outbreak of rioting in India, the story of an inspired bull raid on the steel market, and much else that he had found of amazing significance, even down to the arrest of an English tourist hailing from Manchester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle, for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden. Roger Conway and Norman Kent read, and were incredulous.

  “But people would never stand for another war so soon,” said Conway. “Every country is disarming…”

  “Bluffing with everything they know, and hoping that one day somebody’ll be taken in,” said the Saint. “And every nation scared stiff of the rest, and ready to arm again at any notice. The people never make or want a war—it’s sprung on them by the statesmen with the business interests behind them, and somebody writes a ‘We-Don’t-Want-to-Lose-You-but-We-Think-You-Ought-to-Go’ song for the brass bands to play, and millions of poor fools go out and die like heroes without ever being quite sure what it’s all about. It’s happened
before. Why shouldn’t it happen again?”

  “People,” said Norman Kent, “may have learnt their lesson.”

  Simon swept an impatient gesture.

  “Do people learn lessons like that so easily? The men who could teach them are a past generation now. How many are left who are young enough to convince our generation? And even if we are on the crest of a wave of literature about the horrors of war, do you think that cuts any ice? I tell you, I’ve listened till I’m tired to people of our own age discussing those books and plays—and I know they cut no ice at all. It’d be a miracle if they did. The mind of a healthy young man is too optimistic. It leaps to the faintest hint of glory, and finds it so easy to forget whole seas of ghastliness. And I’ll tell you more…”

  And he told them of what he had heard from Barney Malone.

  “I’ve given you the facts,” he said. “Now, suppose you saw a man rushing down the street with a contorted face, screaming his head off, foaming at the mouth, and brandishing a large knife dripping with blood. If you like to be a fool, you can tell yourself that it’s conceivable that his face is contorted because he’s trying to swallow a bad egg, he’s screaming because someone has trodden on his pet corn, he’s foaming at the mouth because he’s just eaten a cake of soap, and he’s just killed a chicken for dinner and is tearing off to tell his aunt all about it. On the other hand, it’s simpler and safer to assume that he’s a homicidal maniac. In the same way, if you like to be fools, and refuse to see a complete story in what spells a complete story to me, you can go home.”

  Roger Conway swung one leg over the arm of his chair and rubbed his chin reflectively.

  “I suppose,” he said, “our job is to find Tiny Tim and see that he doesn’t pinch the invention while the Cabinet are still deciding what they’re going to do about it?”

  The Saint shook his head.

  For once, Roger Conway, who had always been nearest to the Saint in all things, had failed to divine his leader’s train of thought, and it was Norman Kent, that aloof and silent man, who voiced the inspiration of breath-taking genius—or madness—that had been born in Simon Templar’s brain eight hours before.

  “The Cabinet,” said Norman Kent, from behind a screen of cigarette smoke, “might find the decision taken out of their hands…without the intervention of Tiny Tim…”

  Simon Templar looked from face to face.

  For a moment he had an odd feeling that it was like meeting the other three again for the first time, as strangers. Patricia Holm was gazing through the window at the blue sky above the roofs of Brook Street, and who is to say what vision she saw there? Roger Conway, the cheerful and breezy, waited in silence, the smoke of his neglected cigarette staining his fingers. Norman Kent waited also, serious and absorbed.

  The Saint turned his eyes to the painting over the mantelpiece, and did not see it.

  “If we do nothing but suppress Tiny Tim,” he said, “England will possess a weapon of war immeasurably more powerful than all the armaments of any other nation. If we stole that away, you may argue that sooner or later some other nation will probably discover something just as deadly, and then England will be at a disadvantage.”

  He hesitated, and then continued in the same quiet tone.

  “But there are hundreds of Tiny Tims, and we can’t suppress them all. No secret like that has ever been kept for long, and when the war came we might very well find the enemy prepared to use our own weapon against us.”

  Once again he paused.

  “I’m thinking of all the men who’ll fight in that next war, and the women who love them. If you saw a man drowning, would you refuse to rescue him because, for all you know, you might only be saving him for a more terrible death years later?”

  There was another silence, and in it the Saint seemed to straighten and strengthen and grow, imperceptibly and yet tremendously, as if something gathered about him which actually filled every corner of the room and made him bulk like a preposterously normal giant. And, when he resumed, his voice was as soft and even as ever, but it seemed to ring like a blast of trumpets.

  “There are gathered here,” he said, “three somewhat shop-soiled musketeers—and a blessed angel. Barring the blessed angel, we have all of us, in the course of our young lives, broken half the Commandments and most of the private laws of several countries. And yet, somehow, we’ve contrived to keep intact certain ridiculous ideals, which to our perverted minds are a justification for our sins. And fighting is one of those ideals. Battle and sudden death. In fact, we must be about the last three men in the wide world who ought to be interfering with the making of a perfectly good war. Personally, I suppose we should welcome it—for our own private amusement. But there aren’t many like us. There are too many—far too many—who are utterly different. Men and boys who don’t want war. Who don’t live for battle, murder, and sudden death. Who wouldn’t be happy warriors, going shouting and singing and swaggering into battle. Who’d just be herded into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter, drunk with a miserable and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few days of squalid agony and die in the dirt. Fine young lives that don’t belong to our own barbarous god of battles…And we’ve tripped over the plans for the next sacrifice, partly by luck and partly by our own brilliance. And here we are. We don’t give a damn for any odds or any laws. Will you think me quite mad if I put it to you that three shabby, hell-busting outlaws might, by the grace of God…”

  He left the sentence unfinished, and for a few seconds no one spoke.

  Then Roger Conway stirred intently.

  “What do you say?” he asked.

  The Saint looked at him.

  “I say,” he answered, “that this is our picnic. We’ve always known—haven’t we?—at the back of our minds, dimly, that one day we were bound to get our big show. I say that this is the cue. It might have come in any one of a dozen different ways, but it just happens to have chosen this one. I’ll summarise…”

  He lighted a fresh cigarette and hitched himself farther on to the table, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and the fine, rake-hell, fighting face that they all knew and loved made almost supernaturally beautiful with such a light of debonair dare-devilry as they had never seen before.

  “You’ve read the story,” he said. “I’ll grant you it reads like a dime novelette, but there it is, staring you in the face, just the same. All at once, in both England and America, there’s some funny business going on in the oil and steel and chemical trades. The amount of money locked up in those three combines must be nearly enough to swamp the capitals of any other bunch of industries you could name. We don’t know exactly what’s happening, but we do know that the big men, the secret moguls of Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, the birds with the fat cigars and the names ending in -heim and -stein, who juggle the finances of this cockeyed world, are moving on some definite plan. And then look at the goods they’re on the road with. Iron and oil and chemicals. If you know any other three interests that’d scoop a bigger pool out of a really first-class war, I’d like to hear of them…Add on Barney Malone’s spy story. Haven’t you realised how touchy nations are, and how easy it really would be to stir up distrust? And distrust, sooner or later, means war. The most benevolent and peaceful nation, if it’s continually finding someone else’s spies snooping round its preserves, is going to make a certain song and dance about it. Nobody before this has thought of doing that sort of thing on a large scale—trying to set two European Powers at each other’s throats with a carefully wangled quarrel—and yet the whole idea is so gloriously simple. And now it’s happened—or happening…And behind it all is the one man in the world with the necessary brain to conceive a plot like that, and the influence and qualifications to carry it through. You know who I mean. The man they call the Mystery Millionaire. The man who’s supposed to have arranged half a dozen wars before, on a minor scale, in the interests of high finance. You’ve seen his name marked in red in those newspapers ever
y time it crops up. It fits into the scheme in a darn sight too many ways—you can’t laugh that off. Dr Rayt Marius…”

  Norman Kent suddenly spun his cigarette into the fireplace.

  “Then Golter might fit in…”

  Conway said, “But the Crown Prince is Marius’s own Crown Prince!”

  “Would that mean anything to a man like Marius?” asked the Saint gently. “Wouldn’t that just make things easier for him? Suppose…”

  The Saint caught his breath, and then he took up his words again in a queerly soft and dreamy voice.

  “Suppose Marius tempted the Crown Prince’s vanity? The King is old, and there have been rumours that a young nation is calling for a young leader. And the Prince is ambitious. Suppose Marius were able to say, ‘I can give you a weapon with which you can conquer the world. The only price I make is that you should use it…’”

  They sat spellbound, bewildered, fascinated. They wanted to laugh that vision away, to crush and pulverise and annihilate it with great flailing sledge-hammers of rational incredulity. And they could find nothing to say at all.

  The clock ticked leaden seconds away into eternity.

  Patricia said breathlessly, “But he couldn’t…”

  “But he could!”

  Simon Templar had leapt to his feet, his right arm flung out in a wild gesture.

  “It’s the key!” he cried. “It’s the answer to the riddle! It mayn’t be difficult to nurse up an international distrust by artificial means, but a tension like that can’t be as fierce as a genuine international hatred. It’d want a much bigger final spark to make it blaze up. And the Crown Prince and his ambitions—and Vargan’s invention—they’d make the spark! They’re Marius’s trump card. If he didn’t bring them off his whole scheme might be shipwrecked. I know that’s right!”

  “That man in the garden,” whispered Patricia. “If he was one of Marius’s men…”

  “It was Marius!”

  The Saint snatched a paper from the table, and wrung and smashed it out so that she could see the photograph.