Enter the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 5

  Hayn moistened his lips. He was fighting down an insane, unreasoning feeling of panic, and it was the Saint’s quiet, level voice and mocking eyes, as much as anything, that held Edgar Hayn rooted in his chair.

  “Don’t tell me, in fact, that you won’t appreciate the little conjuring trick I came here especially to show you,” said the Saint, more mildly than ever.

  He reached out suddenly and took the cards he had dealt from Hayn’s nerveless fingers. Hayn had guessed what they would prove to be, long before Simon, with a flourish, had spread the cards out face upwards on the table.

  “Don’t tell me you aren’t pleased to see our visiting cards, personally presented!” said Simon, in his very Saintliest voice.

  His white teeth flashed in a smile, and there was a light of adventurous recklessness dancing in his eyes as he looked at Edgar Hayn across five neat specimens of the sign of the Saint.

  7

  “And if it’s pure prune juice and boloney,” went on the Saint, in that curiously velvety tone which still contrived somehow to prickle all over with little warning spikes, “if all that is sheer banana oil and soft roe, I shan’t even raise a smile with the story I was going to tell you. It’s my very latest one, and it’s about a loose-living land-shark called Hayn, who was born in a barn in the rain. What he’d struggled to hide was found out when he died—there was mildew all over his brain. Now, that one’s been getting a big hand everywhere I’ve told it since I made it up and it’ll be one of the bitterest disappointments of my life if it doesn’t fetch you, sweetheart!”

  Hayn’s chair went over with a crash as he kicked to his feet. Strangely enough, now that the murder was out and the first shock absorbed, the weight on his mind seemed lightened, and he felt better able to cope with the menace.

  “So you’re the young cub we’ve been looking for!” he rasped.

  Simon raised his hand.

  “I’m called the Saint,” he murmured. “But don’t let us get melodramatic about it, son. The last man who got melodramatic with me was hanged at Exeter six months back. It don’t seem to be healthy!”

  Hayn looked round. The diners had left, and as yet no one had arrived to take their places, but the clatter of his chair upsetting had roused three startled waiters, who were staring uncertainly in his direction. But a review of these odds did not seem to disturb the Saint, who was lounging languidly back in his seat with his hands in his pockets and a benign expression on his face.

  “I suppose you know that the police are after you,” grated Hayn.

  “I didn’t,” said the Saint. “That’s interesting. Why?”

  “You met some men in the Brighton train and played poker with them. You swindled them right and left, and when they accused you, you attacked them and pinched the money. I think that’s good enough to put you away for some time.”

  “And who’s going to identify me?”

  “The four men.”

  “You surprise me,” drawled Simon. “I seem to remember that on that very day, just outside Brighton racecourse, those same four bums were concerned in beating up a poor little coot of a lame bookie named Tommy Mitre and pinching his money. There didn’t happen to be any policeman about—they arranged it quite cleverly—and the crowd that saw it would most likely be all too scared of the Snake to give evidence. But yours truly and a couple of souls also saw the fun. We were a long way off, and the Snake and his Boys were over the horizon by the time we got to the scene, but we could identify them all, and a few more who were not there—and we shouldn’t be afraid to step into the witness-box and say our piece. No, sonnikins—I don’t think the police will be brought into that. That must go down to history as a little private wrangle between Snake and me. Send one of your beauty chorus out for a Robert and give me in charge, if you like, but don’t blame me if Ganning and the Boys come back at you for it. Knowing their reputations, I should say they’d get the “cat” as well as their six months’ hard, and that won’t make them love you a lot. Have it your own way, though.”

  The argument was watertight, and Hayn realized it. He was beginning to cool down. He hadn’t a kick—for the moment, the Saint had got him right down in the mud with a foot on his face. But he didn’t see what good that was doing the Saint. It was a big bluff, Hayn was starting to think, and he had sense enough to realize that it wasn’t helping him one bit to get all hot under the collar about it. In fact—such was the exhilarating effect of having at last found an enemy that he could see and hit back at—Hayn was rapidly reckoning that the Saint might lose a lot by that display of bravado.

  Clearly the Saint didn’t want the police horning in at all. It didn’t even matter that the Saint knew things about Hayn and his activities that would have interested the police. The Saint was on some lay of his own, and the police weren’t being invited to interfere. Very well. So be it.

  The cue for Hayn was to bide his time and refuse to be rattled. But he wished the Saint hadn’t got that mocking, self-possessed air of having a lot more high cards up his sleeve, just waiting to be produced. It spoilt Hayn’s happiness altogether. The Saint was behaving like a fool, and yet, in some disconcertingly subtle way, he managed to do it with the condescending air of putting off a naturally tremendous gravity in order to amuse the children.

  Hayn righted his chair and sat down again slowly; the alert waiter relaxed—they were a tough crowd, and selected more for their qualities of toughness than for their clean fingernails and skill at juggling with plates and dishes. But as Hayn sat down his right hand went behind his chair—his back was towards the group of waiters—and with his fingers he made certain signs. One of the waiters faded away inconspicuously.

  “So what do you propose to do?” Hayn said.

  “Leave you,” answered the Saint benevolently. “I know your ugly dial isn’t your fault, but I’ve seen about as much of it as I can stand for one evening. I’ve done what I came to do, and now I think you can safely be left to wonder what I’m going to do next. See you later, I expect, my beautiful ones.…”

  The Saint rose and walked unhurriedly to the stairs. By that time, there were five men ranged in a row at the foot of the stairs, and they showed no signs of making way for anyone.

  “We should hate to lose you so soon, Mr Templar,” said Hayn.

  The Saint’s lounging steps slowed up, and stopped. His hands slid into his pockets, and he stood for a moment surveying the quintet of waiters with a beatific smile. Then he turned.

  “What are these?” he inquired pleasantly. “The guard of honour, or the cabaret beauty chorus?”

  “I think you might sit down again, Mr Templar,” suggested Hayn.

  “And I think not,” said the Saint.

  He walked swiftly back to the table—so swiftly that Hayn instinctively half rose from his seat, and the five men started forward. But the Saint did not attack at that moment. He stopped in front of Hayn, his hands in his pockets, and although that maddening little smile still lurked on his lips, there was something rather stern about his poise.

  “I said I was going to leave you, and I am,” he murmured, with a gentleness that was in amazing contrast to the intent tautness of his bearing. “That’s what I came here for, ducky—to leave you. This is just meant for a demonstration of all-round superiority; you think you can stop me—but you watch! I’m going to prove that nothing on earth can stop me when I get going. Understand, loveliness?”

  “We shall see,” said Hayn.

  The Saint’s smile became, if possible, even more Saintly. Somehow that smile, and the air of hair-trigger alertness which accompanied it, was bothering Edgar Hayn a heap. He knew it was all bravado—he knew the Saint had bitten off more than he could chew for once—he knew that the odds were all against a repetition of the discomfiture of the Ganning combine. And yet he couldn’t feel happy about it. There was a kind of quivering strength about the Saint’s lazy bearing—something that reminded Edgar Hayn of wire and whipcord and India-rubber and compressed steel
springs and high explosives.

  “In the space of a few minutes,” said the Saint, “you’re going to see a sample of rough-housing that’ll make your bunch of third-rate hoodlums look like two cents’ worth of oxtail—but before I proceed to beat them up, I want to tell you this—which you can pass on to your friends. Ready?”

  Hayn spread out his hands.

  “Then I’ll shoot,” said the Saint. “It’s just this. We Saints are normally souls of peace and goodwill towards men. But we don’t like crooks, blood-suckers, traders in vice and damnation, and other verminous excrescences of that type—such as yourself. We’re going to beat you up and do you down, skin you and smash you, and scare you off the face of Europe. We are not bothered about the letter of the Law, we act exactly as we please, we inflict what punishments we think suitable, and no one is going to escape us. Ganning got hurt, but still you don’t believe me. You’re the next on the list, and by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll be an example to convince others. And it will go on. That’s all I’ve got to say now, and when I’ve left you, you can go forth and spread the glad news. I’m leaving now!”

  He stooped suddenly, and grasped the leg of Hayn’s chair and tipped it backwards with one jerking heave. As Hayn tried to scramble to his feet, the Saint put an ungentle foot in his face and upset the table on top of him.

  The five tough waiters were pelting across the floor in a pack. Simon reached out for the nearest chair and sent it skating over the room at the height of six inches from the ground, with a vimful swing of his arms that gave it the impetus of a charging buffalo. It smashed across the leader’s knees and shins with bone-shattering force, and the man went down with a yell.

  That left four.

  The Saint had another chair in his hands by the time the next man was upon him. The waiter flung up his arms to guard his head, and tried to rush into a grapple, but the Saint stepped back and reversed the swing of his chair abruptly. It swerved under the man’s guard and crashed murderously into his short ribs.

  Three…

  The next man ran slap into a sledge-hammer left that hurled him a dozen feet away. The other two hesitated, but the Saint was giving no breathing space. He leapt in at the nearest man with a pile-driving, left-right-left tattoo to the solar plexus.

  As the tough crumpled up with a choking groan under that battering-ram assault, some sixth sense flashed the Saint a warning. He leapt to one side, and the chair Hayn had swung to his head swished harmlessly past him, the vigour of the blow toppling Hayn off his balance. The Saint assisted his downfall with an outflung foot which sent the man hurtling headlong.

  The last man was still coming on, but warily. He ducked the Saint’s lead, and replied with a right swing to the side of the head which gingered the Saint up a peach. Simon Templar decided that his reputation was involved, and executed a beautiful feint with his left which gave him an opening to lash in a volcanic right squarely upon the gangster’s nose.

  As the man dropped, the Saint whipped round and caught Stannard.

  “Fight, you fool!” the Saint hissed in his ear. “This is for local colour!”

  Stannard clinched, and then the Saint broke away and firmly but regretfully clipped him on the ear.

  It was not one of the Saint’s heftiest punches, but it was hard enough to knock the youngster down convincingly, and then the Saint looked round hopefully for something else to wallop, and found nothing. Hayn was rising again, shakily, and so were those of the five toughs who were in a fit state to do so, but there was no notable enthusiasm to renew the battle.

  “Any time any of you bad cheeses want any more lessons in rough-housing,” drawled the Saint, a little breathlessly, “you’ve only got to drop me a postcard and I’ll be right along.”

  This time, there was no attempt to bar his way.

  He collected hat, gloves, and stick from the cloakroom, and went through the upstairs lounge. As he reached the door, he met Braddon returning.

  “Hullo, sweetness,” said the Saint genially. “Pass right down the car and hear the new joke the Boys of the Burg downstairs are laughing at.”

  Braddon was still trying to guess the cause for and meaning of this extraordinary salutation by a perfect stranger, when the Saint, without any haste or heat, but so swiftly and deftly that the thing was done before Braddon realized what was happening, had reached out and seized the brim of Braddon’s hat and forced it well down over his eyes. Then, with a playful tweak of Braddon’s nose and a cheery wave of his hand to the dumbfounded Danny, he departed.

  Danny was not a quick mover, and the street outside was Saintless by the time Braddon had struggled out of his hat and reached the door.

  When his vocabulary was exhausted, Braddon went downstairs in search of Hayn, and stopped open-mouthed at the wreckage he saw.

  Mr Hayn, turning from watching the Saint’s triumphant vanishment, had swung sharply on Stannard. The Saint’s unscathed exit had left Hayn in the foulest of tempers. All around him, it seemed, an army of tough waiters in various stages of disrepair were gathering themselves to their feet with a muttered obbligato of lurid oaths. Well, if there wasn’t an army of them, there were five—five bone-hard heavy-weights—and that ought to have been enough to settle any ordinary man, even on the most liberal computation of odds. But the Saint had simply waded right through them, hazed and manhandled and roasted them, and walked out without a scratch. Hayn would have taken a bet that the Saint’s tie wasn’t even a millimetre out of centre at the end of it. The Saint had made fools of them without turning a hair.

  Hayn vented his exasperation on Jerry, and even the fact that he had seen the boy help to tackle the Saint and get the worst of it in their company did not mitigate his wrath.

  “You damned fool!” he blazed. “Couldn’t you see he was up to something? Are you taken in by everyone who tells you the tale?”

  “I told you I couldn’t guarantee him,” Stannard protested. “But when I met him he wasn’t a bit like he was tonight. Honestly, Mr Hayn—how could I have known? I don’t even know what he was after yet. Those cards…”

  “South African grandmothers,” snarled Hayn.

  Braddon intervened.

  “Who was this gentleman, anyway?” he demanded.

  “Gentleman” was not the word he used.

  “Use your eyes, you lunatic!” Hayn flared, pointing to the table, and Braddon’s jaw dropped as he saw the cards.

  “You’ve had that guy in here?”

  “What the hell d’you think? You probably passed him coming in. And from what the Snake said, and what I’ve seen myself, he’s probably right at the top—he might even be the Saint himself.”

  “So that was the gentleman!” said Braddon, only once again he described Simon Templar with a more decorative word.

  Hayn snorted.

  “And that fool Stannard brought him here,” he said.

  “I’ve told you, I didn’t know much about him, Mr Hayn,” Stannard expostulated. “I warned you I couldn’t answer for him.”

  “The kid’s right,” said Braddon. “If he put it over on the Snake, he might put it over on anybody.”

  There was logic in the argument, but it was some time before Hayn could be made to see it. But presently he quieted down.

  “We’ll talk about this, Braddon,” he said. “I’ve got an idea for stopping his funny stuff. He didn’t get clean away—I put Keld on to follow him. By tonight we’ll know where he lives, and then I don’t think he’ll last long.”

  He turned to Jerry. The boy was fidgeting nervously, and Hayn became diplomatic. It wasn’t any use rubbing a valuable man up the wrong way.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper, old man,” he said. “I can see it wasn’t your fault. You just want to be more careful. I ought to have warned you about the Saint—he’s dangerous! Have a cigar.”

  It was Mr Hayn’s peace-offering. Stannard accepted it.

  “No offence,” he said. I’m sorry I let you down.”

 
; “We won’t say anything more about it, old man,” said Hayn heartily. “You won’t mind if I leave you? Mr Braddon and I have some business to talk over. I expect you’ll amuse yourself upstairs. But you mustn’t play any more, you know.”

  “I shan’t want to,” said Stannard. “But, Mr Hayn—”

  Hayn stopped.

  “Yes, old man?”

  “Would you mind if I asked you for that cheque? I’ll give you an IOU now…” “I’ll see that you get it before you leave.”

  “It’s awfully good of you, Mr Hayn,” said Stannard apologetically. “Three thousand pounds it was.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” said Hayn shortly.

  He moved off, cursing the damaged waiters out of his path, and Stannard watched him go, thoughtfully. So far, it had all been too easy, but how long was it going to last? He was watching the early dancers assembling when a waiter, whose face was obscured by a large piece of sticking-plaster, came through with a sealed envelope. Stannard ripped it open, inspected the cheque it contained, and scribbled his signature to the promissory note that came with it. He sent this back to Hayn by the same waiter.

  Although he had disposed of several cocktails before dinner, and during the meal had partaken freely of wine, and afterwards had done his full share in the consumption of liqueurs, his subsequent abstemiousness was remarkable. He sat with an untasted brandy-and-soda in front of him while the coloured orchestra broke into its first frenzies of syncopation, and watched the gyrating couples with a jaundiced eye for an hour. Then he drained his glass, rose, and made his way to the stairs.

  Through the window of the office he saw Hayn and Braddon still engaged in earnest conversation. He tapped on the pane, and Hayn looked up and nodded. The hidden door swung open as Stannard reached it, and closed after him as he passed through.