18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic) Page 9

  "I'll bet that wasn't difficult for you." The Saint rolled over on his elbow to douse his cigarette in an ash tray; and then his relentless blue eyes went back to the other's face. "So once again we know where we stand. You've already given up pretending you aren't a liar. Now you're going to give up pretending you aren't a cheap double-crossing skunk as well."

  A dark flush appeared in Graner's sunken cheeks. He took a step towards the bed, and the stick moved in his hand.

  Simon watched him without batting an eyelid.

  "If you hit me again," he said gently, "I can assure you it'll hurt you more than it hurts me,"

  Their stares crossed like swords. Graner's face was twisted with rage, but the Saint was smiling. It was only the shadow of a smile, but it matched the reckless, derision in his eyes.

  It did something more. It gave vent to the chortle of delirious ecstasy that was swelling up inside him until his ribs ached with the strain of keeping it under control. He had to use half his muscles to keep himself from laughing in Graner's face. The tables had been turned in a way that thousands of spiritualists would have given their back teeth to achieve, if they had any back teeth. The Saint had bluffed on an empty hand against an opponent who, he knew, held at least three aces; and he was scooping the kitty away from under Graner's long nose. In fifteen or twenty minutes he had slammed Reuben Graner down from dominating the situation to trying feebly to make excuses. The unpredictable suddenness and violence of his attack had swept the other off his feet in the first exchanges, and since then the Saint hadn't let up for an instant. His voice went on, stabbing in blow after blow with the crackling precision of a machine gun, never giving Graner a second's pause in which to recover his wind.

  "You thought you saw your chance to cut me out of my share of fifteen million pesetas, and you grabbed at it. That's the truth, isn't it? And that's my intro­duction to the privileges of joining up with your lousy outfit. I'm supposed to take that home with me and put it in the bank. You couldn't have thought up anything better, Reuben. So next time it's a matter of splitting up any boodle I'll just have to tell myself I don't have to worry. Reuben's a good guy. He's always been a square shooter. He proved it the first day I was with him. I don't have anything more to worry about. Like hell I don't!"

  The flush washed itself slowly out of Graner's cheeks and left them pasty. The hand with the stick in it sank down to his side, and his weight settled down on his heels.

  He cleared his throat.

  "You may have some justification," he said thickly. "But I've told you-I protested about it, and I was overruled. The others have been with me for a good many years, and naturally they have some influence --"

  "That's still a lie," said the Saint dispassionately. "But we've already dealt with that. The question you've got to answer is-where do we go from here?"

  "Naturally I shall take it up with the others as soon as we get back to the house --"

  "And naturally you'll cook up a few more fairy tales as soon as you get the chance. Let's have some more truth before you lose the habit again. Where is this Joris guy?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Well, what are your ideas?"

  "I fail to see --"

  "Give your gig lamps a wipe over. Are we through or are we not?"

  Graner's stick rattled on the floor, beating a nerv­ous tattoo on the tiles.

  "I am beginning to think that that would be the best solution."

  "Just as you like." The Saint stood up. "I've told you what I think about that. The door's behind you, and nobody's holding you back. But this girl stays here. If there's a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket knocking around Santa Cruz, and she's one of the clues, I'll keep her. I saw her first, anyway. . . . And you can take that hand out of your pocket again. If you emptied two of those little toys into me I'd still wring your skinny neck before I went out."

  Graner's finger was itching on the trigger, and Simon Templar had no illusions about it. But his poise didn't waver by so much as a fraction of an inch. He simply stood there, his hands on his hips and his shoul­ders lined wide and sinewy against the murky sky out­side the window, looking down at Graner with care­less, unimpressed blue eyes and that shadow of a sar­donic smile on his lips. He knew exactly the strength of the new hand he had dealt himself, and he was ready to take a few chances to make it better while the cards were running his way.

  "I don't want to do anything like that," Graner said at last. "If you are prepared to let me put this misunderstanding right --"

  "I see." Simon's answer came back like a gunshot. "So you've got some good reason for wanting to keep me if you can."

  "If you think you are indispensable --"

  "If I wasn't something like that, why didn't you shoot me ten minutes ago?"

  "Naturally I want you, if it can be arranged. That is why you were sent for."

  "And why was that so urgent?"

  The glimpse of an outlet did just what the Saint meant it to do. It made Graner grab for it like a fish going for a baited hook.

  "That is easier to answer. As you know, Felson and another of my men, Holby, are in Madrid on business. The wife of the American ambassador there has some jewels which we have been interested in for some time. If everything goes according to plan, my men will be arriving here with them on Sunday, when, of course, we shall need you."

  The Saint drew a deep silent breath. So a few more things were being explained. It was like scratching bits of gold out of a rock seam with a toothpick, but all the time he was getting somewhere. He thought about that for a moment, and stopped thinking again. The thoughts he had made him feel a trifle lightheaded. First a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket. Then Graner's amazing collection of stolen jewels. Then the jewels of the wife of the American ambassador in Madrid, just for good measure-although the last he had seen of Messrs Felson and Holby made their ar­rival as per schedule seem rather less probable than Graner fondly believed. But the sum total of what he was adding up began to make it seem as if he had butted into a thieves' picnic that made Ali Baba and his forty stooges look like so many scroungers in abandoned ash cans.

  He lighted another cigarette and sat down again.

  "That's a start, anyway," he murmured. "Let's keep the ball rolling. Give me the rest of the dope about this guy Joris and the lottery ticket-and give it me straight this time."

  Graner laid his cane down on the dressing table and took out his cigar case. He fitted a fresh cigar into his amber holder. Simon knew that he was playing for a breathing spell, weighing one thing against another; and this time he let Graner work it out his own way. He knew that it could have only one result.

  "If it will help to rectify your unfortunate impres­sion of our methods," Graner said, "it may be best to be candid with you. I do not know where Joris is. He escaped from the house last night, taking his daughter and the lottery ticket. We discovered their absence soon afterwards, and Lauber and Palermo and Aliston went after them to bring them back. They would probably have been able to do this if some confeder­ates of Joris, whom we knew nothing about, had not arrived in the nick of time and interfered. Joris and his accomplices escaped, but Palermo took a note of the car in which they went off, which was quite conspicuous. As soon as they reported to me, I sent my chauffeur, Manoel, to search Santa Cruz for the car. He found it outside this hotel, but he had a breakdown on his way back and did not arrive until after you had gone to bed. It was then too late to do anything; but first thing this morning I sent Palermo and Aliston down here to do what they could. They telephoned me that they had discovered that Joris and some other man, probably this confederate of his, had stayed at the hotel the night before, but they had left very early in the morning without leaving any address. That is as much as any of us know."

  Simon leaned back and trickled puffs of smoke towards the ceiling, sorting the story out in his mind. Certainly it explained the car which had arrived at the house when he was undressing. Also it explained the absence of Aliston and
Palermo at breakfast time. And in a way it explained what he had heard of Graner's telephone conversation at breakfast, as well as the interruption that had intervened in time to save the Saint from having to demonstrate his skill as a diamond cutter, and Graner's agitation when he returned to the workroom. All of those things fitted in very nicely and neatly.

  But at the same time it let loose a cataract of new questions. It didn't explain why Graner's gang hadn't found Hoppy and Joris, once they had got that far. It didn't explain why Hoppy Uniatz hadn't answered the telephone a little more than half an hour ago. It reaped one crop of enigmas, and left whole rows of freshly germinating riddles sprouting up behind it that made the Saint feel as if his universe had been turned upside down.

  His eyes raked Graner like rapiers from under lazily drooping lids, skinned him alive and turned his soul inside out. But for the first time he was convinced that Graner was telling the truth as far as he knew it. He couldn't have invented a new fairy tale like that, on the spur of the moment, that matched so flawlessly with all the circumstances-or if he could, he was an immortal genius to whom the Saint was prepared to erect an altar. Graner couldn't have been bluffing. It wasn't humanly plausible. After the treading out he had just undergone, he couldn't have revived with such supernatural speed. The fight had been licked out of him as effectively as if the Saint had been using his solar plexus for a punching bag ever since they started talking. Later on, yes, given even half an hour in which to pull himself together and iron the knots out of his crafty and vindictive brain-yes, then, by all means, he could be reckoned as crooked and slip­pery as ever, if not more so. The Saint had no illu­sions about that. The settling of accounts between them hadn't even started. But Graner wasn't in any condition to start faking the audit there and then. Simon was ready to gamble his life on it.

  Therefore there must have been some other auxiliary explanation. And there was only one such expla­nation that came into the Saint's head. It came flying out of the great voids of space like a comet, crashing resistless through all the narrow mathematical orbits of logic, dazzling him with a sudden blaze of light that exploded like a bomb in the darkness through which he had been trying to grope his way. And yet it was so paralysingly simple that he could have gaped at himself for not having seen it before.

  If Graner wasn't lying, there was only one possible inference. Somebody else was.

  3 Simon Templar sat and gasped inaudibly at his own genius. It must have deserved the name, for the intuitive deduction had cut straight through his conscious reasoning. Afterwards his brain had to catch up with it, plodding laboriously over the steps that inspiration had taken in its winged stride. But every step was there, and no deliberate testing he could think of would shake them. The whole solution was one solid and articulated structure, fitting all the foundations of known fact and spanning all the gaps that had puz­zled him so irritatingly before.

  The cigarette smouldered down between his fingers while his mind raced on from there.

  He knew that Aliston and Palermo had taken Hoppy and Joris. It was the one link that made everything else fit together. How it had been done remained to be discovered, though he could make a few guesses. But he knew that that was what had happened. He knew it as surely as he knew that Lauber had got the ticket.

  That was how it had all started. The idea must have come into Lauber's head first, when he awakened in the car on the way back to the house with his brain hazy from the aftereffects of Mr Uniatz' treatment. Lauber would have made the natural efforts of a man recovering consciousness to reconstruct the events which had led up to the black-out. There had been a fight, he would remember, and somebody had hit him over the head. What had happened to the others? Of course, they had already been incapacitated. They had been fighting the intruders while he was still dealing with Joris. . . . He had been searching Joris' pock­ets, looking for a ticket. . . . He'd found the ticket, hadn't he? ... Well, what else had happened? The others would tell him what had happened, and Lauber would have pieced the fragmentary accounts together. But he'd got the ticket, hadn't he? He would have felt in his pocket. Yes, it was there. . . . And at that moment the brilliant idea had probably dawned on him. He'd got the ticket, but none of the others knew he'd got it. They'd been too busy fighting. And the fight had ended with the intruders getting away with Joris and Christine. Why shouldn't they have got away with the ticket as well? The argument must have carried Lauber away on the instant with its surpassing sim­plicity. All he had to do was to let the others go on believing that Joris still had the ticket-and when his head had stopped aching enough for him to pick a suitable opportunity, he, Lauber, could slide off into the wide world with two million dollars that he didn't have to share with anybody.

  It was all so transparent that the Saint could analyse Lauber's mental processes as accurately as if they had been printed on the wall in front of his eyes. And it was proved-proved up to the hilt by the announce­ment he had heard Lauber making which had almost knocked him off his feet as he entered Graner's house the night before.

  Only that the others hadn't been quite so credulous as Lauber had expected. Lauber's statement had clearly come in the middle of an argument in which he was being accused of double-crossing, and it was probably the same argument that had gone on far into the night. In the end, Lauber must somehow have managed to get himself acquitted for the time being; otherwise it was doubtful whether he would have been taking breakfast. Almost certainly he would have been searched, but certainly he would have contrived to hide the ticket by that time, which would have gone some way towards blocking a definite verdict against him. So for a while he had at least managed to get himself left alone, although his conscience might be making him feel less confident about choosing a mo­ment for his getaway than he had anticipated.

  But the idea he had started hadn't finished there. The seed must have taken root in either Palermo's or Aliston's imagination; and on the way down to the town that morning one of them would have made a proposition. If there was going to be any double-crossing, they might as well look after themselves. Joris was still a key man in the situation, wherever the lottery ticket was. If they found him, why should they be in a hurry to share him out before they knew how the rest of the deal was going? There was still time to locate the ticket, whether or not they had been wrong about Lauber-and in any case a fifty-fifty divi­sion was twice as good as a four-way split. . . .

  The Saint's glow of delight deepened as the colours and details developed in the picture. When he had inwardly labelled the party a thieves' picnic a few moments ago he hadn't realised what a perfect summary of the situation it was.

  "In that case, I suppose Joris and his pal have gone off to cash the ticket," he said, principally because he felt that he had to say something after all that time.

  "If they have done that, they will have been intercepted," answered Graner. "I have had one of my servants posted outside the shop where the ticket was bought ever since it opened this morning. The ticket cannot be cashed anywhere else."

  And the gorgeous complications of the tangle went on tracing their fantastic convolutions in the Saint's mind.

  Lauber knew where the ticket was; but he didn't know what had happened to Joris and Christine, and he knew that for the present it certainly wasn't safe for him to try and cash it. Palermo and Aliston knew where Joris was; but they didn't know what had hap­pened to the ticket or to Christine. Graner knew where Christine was, and he might hope to find something out from her; but he didn't know yet what had hap­pened to Joris and the ticket. Every one of them held some of the cards, and every one of them was com­pletely in the dark about the others. And presumably every one of them was prepared to cut anybody else's throat to fill his own hand or keep what he already held. The intrusion of that two-million-dollar scrap of paper had blown the esprit de corps of the gang to smithereens and opened up the way for what must have been one of the wildest and most unscrupulous free-for-all, dog-eat-dog dissensions that the history of cr
ime could ever have known. ...

  "Your servant doesn't know what this pal of Joris' looks like," Simon pointed out. "Or does he?"

  Graner's slit of a mouth almost smiled.

  "He would scarcely need to. If anyone presented that ticket for payment, the whole street would know about it."

  Not, Simon was reflecting, that he had too much to crow about himself. He held tantalising portions of all the cards, and didn't have a single complete one to himself. He knew that Lauber had got the ticket, but he didn't know where; he knew that Palermo and Aliston had got Joris and Hoppy, but he didn't know what they had done with them; he knew that Christine was there beside him, but he knew that Graner was just as much there. And within something like the next ten seconds he had got to plan out a definite campaign sequence that would take in all those points."

  "Joris won't be there, and you know it," said Christine. "Because he hasn't got the ticket."

  "You mean you have it?" Graner said slowly.

  "Neither of us has got it, I told you. It was st --"

  "Wait a minute," interrupted the Saint. "Let's take this in order. What did happen last night?"

  She looked at him sullenly.

  "You ought to know."

  "Not me, darling," said the Saint easily. "I'm a new recruit. I wasn't in that party."

  "Who were these other two men who interfered?" said Graner.

  She didn't answer at once, and Graner turned to the Saint.

  "We're wasting time here," he snapped. "The car's outside-we had better take her back to the house at once. When we get there we shall be able to make her answer questions."

  "Try and take me there," she said.

  She had had time to recover from her first terror, and the hard jaunty pose of which Simon had seen a glimpse the night before was beginning to cover her again. It was as if a brittle shell formed over her that shut out all the other side of her nature which he had seen when she wept over Joris. She seemed to gather herself together with an effort to shake off the spell of Graner's pitiless beady eyes. Suddenly she took a step away from the wall, and Graner's hand shot out and caught her wrist.