The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 9

  Even then there might have been trouble in Brook Street when they returned with the cargo, but the Saint did not allow any trouble.

  There were two men to be taken across the strip of pavement to the door of the flat. One man was long and lean, the other man short and fat, and the lean man slept. The Saint kept his grip on one wrist of the fat man, and half supported the lean man with his other arm. Roger placed himself on the other side of the lean man.

  “Sing,” commanded the Saint, and they crossed the pavement discordantly and drunkenly.

  A man in evening dress passed them with a supercilious nose. A man in rags passed them with an envious nose. A patrolling policeman peered at them with an officious nose, but the Saint had opened the door, and they were reeling cacophonously into the house. So the officious nose went stolidly upon its way, after taking the number of the car from which they had disembarked, for the law has as yet no power to prevent men being as drunk and disorderly as they choose in their own homes. And, certainly, the performance, extempore as it was, had been most convincing. The lean man had clearly failed to last the course; the two tall and well-dressed young men who supported him between them were giving most circumstantial evidence of the thoroughness with which they had lubricated their withins, and if the sounds emitted by the fat man were too wild and shrill to be easily classified as song, and if he seemed somewhat unwilling to proceed with his companions into further dissipations, and if there was a strange, strained look in his eye—well, the state which he had apparently reached was regrettable, but nobody’s business…

  And before the suspicious nose had reached the next corner, the men who had passed beneath it were in the first-floor apartment above it, and the lean one was being carelessly dropped spread-eagle on the sitting-room carpet.

  “Fasten the door, Roger,” said the Saint shortly.

  Then he released his agonising hold on the fat man’s wrist, and the fat man stopped yelping and began to talk.

  “Son of a pig,” began the fat man, rubbing his wrist tenderly, and then he stopped, appalled at what he saw.

  There was a little knife in the Saint’s hand—a toy with a six-inch leaf-shaped blade and a delicately chased ivory hilt. It appeared to have come from nowhere, but actually it had come from the neat leather sheath strapped to the Saint’s forearm under the sleeve, where it always lived, and the name of the knife was Anna. There was a story to Anna, a savage and flamboyant story of the godless lands, which may be told one day: she had taken many lives. To the Saint she was almost human, that beautifully fashioned, beautifully balanced little creature of death; he could do tricks with her that would have made most circus knife-throwers look like amateurs. But at that moment he was not thinking of tricks.

  As Roger switched on the light, the light glinted on the blade, but the light in the Saint’s eyes was no less cold and inclement than the light on the steel.

  7

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WAS SAINTLY, AND RECEIVED ANOTHER VISITOR

  Simon Templar, in all his years of wandering and adventure, had only fallen for one woman, and that was Patricia Holm. Therefore, as might have been expected, he fell heavily. And yet—he was realising it dimly, as one might realise an unthinkable heresy—in the eighteen months that they had been together he had started to get used to her. He had, he realised, been growing out of the first ecstatic wonder, and the thing that had taken its place had been so quiet and insidious that it had enchanted him while he was still unaware of it. It had had to await this shock to be revealed.

  And the revelation, when it came, carried with it a wonder that infinitely eclipsed the more blatant brilliance of the wonder that had slipped away. This was the kind of wild and awful wonder that might overtake a man who, having walked in the sunshine all the days of his life, sees the sun itself for the first time, with a dreadful and tremendous understanding, and sees at once a vision of the darkness that would lie over the world if the sun ceased from shining.

  The Saint said, very softly, to the fat man, “Son of a pig to you, sweetheart. And now listen. I’m going to ask you some questions. You can either answer them, or die slowly and painfully, just as you like—but you’ll do one or the other before you leave this room.”

  The fat man was in a different class from that of the wretched little weed in the pot hat from whom Simon Templar had extracted information before. There was a certain brute resolution in the fat man’s beady eyes, a certain snarling defiance in the twist of the thin lips, like the desperate determination of a beast at bay. Simon took no count of that.

  “Do you understand, you septic excrescence?” said the Saint gently.

  And there was hatred in the Saint’s heart, a hatred that was his very own, that no one else could have understood, but there was another kind of devilry in the Saint’s eyes and in the purring gentleness of his voice, a kind of devilry that no one could have helped understanding, that the man in front of him understood with terror, an outward and visible and malignant hatred, and it was plainly centred upon the fat man, and the fat man recoiled slowly, step by step, as the Saint advanced, until he came up against the table and could not move backwards any farther.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m bluffing, dear little fat one,” the Saint went on, in the same velvety voice. “Because that would be foolish of you. You’ve done, or had a hand in doing, something which I object to very much, I object to it in a general way, and always have, but this time I object to it even more, in a personal way, because this time it involves someone who means more to me than your gross mind will ever understand. Do you follow the argument, you miserable wart?”

  The man was trying to edge away backwards round the table, but he could not break away, for the Saint moved sideways simultaneously. And he could not break away from the Saint’s eyes—those clear blue eyes that were ordinarily so full of laughter and bubbling mischief that were then so bleak and pitiless.

  And the Saint went on speaking.

  “I’m not concerned with the fact that you’re merely the agent of Dr Rayt Marius—ah, that makes you jump! I know a little more than you thought I did, don’t I?…But we’re not concerned with that either…If you insist on mixing with people like that, you must be prepared to take the consequences. And if you think the game’s worth the candle, you must also be prepared for an accident with the candle. That’s fair, isn’t it?…So that the point we’re going to disagree about is that you’ve had a share in annoying me—and I object very much to being annoyed…No you don’t, sonny boy!”

  There was a gun in the fat man’s hand, and then there was not a gun in the fat man’s hand, for the Saint moved forward and to one side with a swift, stealthy, cat-like movement, and this time the fat man could not help screaming as he dropped the gun.

  “Ach! You would my wrist break…”

  “Cheerfully, beloved,” said Simon. “And your neck later on. But first…”

  Tightening instead of slackening that grip on the fat man’s wrist, the Saint bent him backwards over the table, holding him easily with fingers of incredible strength, and the man saw the blade of the knife flash before his eyes.

  “Once upon a time, when I was in Papua,” said the Saint, in that dispassionately conversational way which was indescribably more terrifying than any loud-voiced anger, “a man came out of the jungle into the town where I was. He was a prospector, and a pig-headed prospector, and he had insisted on prospecting a piece of country that all the old hands had warned him against. And the natives had caught him at the time of the full moon. They’re always very pleased to catch white men at that time, because they can be used in the scheme of festivities and entertainment. They have primitive forms of amusement—very. And one of their ways of amusing themselves with this man had been to cut off his eyelids. Before I start doing the same thing to you, will you consider for a moment the effect that that operation will probably have on your beauty sleep?”

  “God!” babbled the man shrilly. “You cannot…”
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  The man tried to struggle, but he was held with a hand of iron. For a little while he could move his head, but then the Saint swung on to the table on top of him and clamped the head between his knees.

  “Don’t talk so loud,” said the Saint, and his fingers left the wrist and sidled round the throat. “There are other people in this building, and I should hate you to alarm them. With regard to this other matter, now—did I hear you say I couldn’t do it? I beg to differ. I could do it very well. I shall be very gentle, and you should not feel very much pain—just at the moment. It’s the after-effects that will be so unpleasant. So think. If you talk, and generally behave like a good boy, I might be persuaded to let you off. I won’t promise you anything, but it’s possible.”

  “I will not…”

  “Really not?…Are you going to be difficult, little one? Are you going to sacrifice your beautiful eyelids and go slowly blind? Are you going to force me to toast the soles of your feet at the gas-fire, and drive chips of wood under your finger-nails, and do other crude things like that—before you come to your senses? Really, you’ll be giving yourself a lot of unnecessary pain—”

  And the Saint held the knife quite close to the man’s eyes and brought it downwards very slowly. The point gleamed like a lonely star, and the man stared at it, hypnotised, mute with terror. And Roger Conway was also hypnotised, and stood like a man carved in ice.

  “Do you talk?” asked the Saint caressingly.

  Again the man tried to scream, and again the Saint’s fingers choked the scream back into his windpipe. The Saint brought the knife down farther, and the point of it actually pricked the skin.

  Roger Conway felt cold beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead, but he could not find his voice. He knew that the Saint would do exactly what he had threatened to do, if he were forced to it. He knew the Saint. He had seen the Saint in a hundred strange situations and a hundred moods, but he had never seen the Saint’s face chiselled into such an inexorable grimness as it was then. It was like granite.

  And Roger Conway knew then, in the blazing light of experience, what before then he had only understood mistily, in the twilight of theory—that the wrath of saints can be a far more dreadful thing than the wrath of sinners.

  The man on the table must have understood it also—the fantastic fact that a man of Simon Templar’s calibre in such an icy rage, even in civilised England, would stop at nothing. And the breath that the Saint let him take came in a kind of shuddering groan.

  “Do you talk, beautiful?” asked the Saint again, ever so gently.

  “I talk.”

  It was not a voice—it was a whimper.

  “I talk,” whimpered the man. “I will do anything. Only take away that knife…”

  For a moment the Saint did not move.

  Then, very slowly, like a man in a trance, he took the knife away and looked at it as if he had never seen it before. And a queer little laugh trickled through his lips.

  “Very dramatic,” he remarked. “And almost horrible. I didn’t know I had it in me.”

  And he gazed at the man curiously, as he might have gazed at a fly on a window-pane in an idle moment and remembered stories of schoolboys who were amused to pull off their wings.

  Then he climbed slowly down from the table and took out his cigarette-case.

  The man he had left did not so much raise himself off the table as roll off it, and, when his feet touched the floor, it was seen that he could scarcely stand.

  Roger pushed him roughly into a chair, from which, fingering his throat, he could see the man who still lay where he had fallen.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” said Roger. “The last man the Saint hit like that was out for half an hour, and your pal’s only been out twenty minutes.”

  Simon flicked a match into the fireplace and returned to face the prisoner.

  “Let’s hear your little song, honeybunch,” he said briefly.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “First thing of all, I want to know what’s been done with the girl who was taken tonight.”

  “That I do not know.”

  The Saint’s cigarette tilted up to a dangerous angle between his lips and his hands went deep into his trousers pockets.

  “You don’t seem to have got the idea, beautiful,” he remarked sweetly. “This isn’t a game—as you’ll find out if you don’t wake yourself up in rather less time than it takes me to get my hands on you again. I’m quite ready to resume the surgical operation as soon as you like. So go on talking, because I just love your voice, and it helps me to forget all the unpleasant things I ought to be doing to your perfectly appalling face.”

  The man shuddered and cowered back into the depths of the chair. His hands flew to his eyes; it may have been to shut out a ghastly vision, or it may have been to try to escape from the Saint’s merciless blue stare.

  “I do not know!” he almost screamed. “I swear it…”

  “Then tell me what you do know, you rat,” said Simon, “and then I’ll make you remember some more.”

  Words came to the fat man in an incoherent, pelting stream, lashed on by fear.

  He was acting on the instructions of Dr Marius. That was true. The house in Brook Street had been closely watched for the last twenty-four hours, he himself being one of the watchers. He had seen the departure the previous night, but they had not had the means to follow a car. Two other men had been sent to inspect the premises that afternoon, had seen the loaded car outside, and had rushed away together to report.

  “Both of them?” interrupted the Saint.

  “Both of them. It was a criminal mistake. But they will be punished.”

  “How will you be rewarded, I wonder?” murmured Simon.

  The fat man shivered, and went on.

  “One was sent back immediately, but the car had gone. The Doctor then said that he had made other plans, and one man would be enough to keep watch, in case you returned. I was that man. Hermann”—he pointed to the inert figure on the floor—“had just come to relieve me when you came back. We were going to report it.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Both of us.”

  “A criminal mistake,” drawled the Saint sardonically. “But I expect you will be punished. Yes?”

  The man winced.

  Another of his comrades, he said, had been told off to follow the girl. It had been impressed upon the sleuths that no movement should be missed, and no habit overlooked, however trifling. Marius had not divulged the reason for this vigilance, but he had left them in no doubt of its importance. In that spirit Patricia had been followed to Devonshire.

  “Your boss seems very unwilling to meet me again personally,” observed the Saint grimly. “How wise of him!”

  “We could afford to take no risks…”

  “‘We?”

  Simon swooped on the pronoun like a hawk.

  “I mean…”

  “I know what you mean, sweetness,” said the Saint silkily. “You mean that you didn’t mean to let on that you knew more about this than you said. You’re not just a hired crook, like the last specimen of your kind I had to tread on. You’re a secret agent. We understand that. We understand also that, however much respect you may have for the continued wholeness of your own verminous hide, a most commendable patriotism for your misbegotten country will make you keep on fighting and lying as long as you can. Very good. I applaud. But I’m afraid my appreciation of your one solitary virtue will have to stop there—at just that one theoretical pat on the back. After which, we go back to our own private, practical quarrel. And what you’ve got to get jammed well into the misshapen lump of bone that keeps your unwashed ears apart, is that I’m a bit of a fighter myself, and I think—somehow, somehow, I think, dear one—I think I’m a better fighter than you are.”

  “I did not mean…”

  “Don’t lie,” said the Saint, in a tone of mock reproach that held behind its superficial flippancy a kind of glacia
l menace. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t like it.”

  Roger moved off the wall which he had been propping up.

  “Put him back on the table, old boy,” he suggested.

  “I’m going to,” said the Saint, “unless he spills the beans in less than two flaps of a duck’s rudder.”

  He came a little closer to the fat man.

  “Now, you loathsome monstrosity—listen to me. The game’s up. You’ve put both feet in it with that little word ‘we.’ And I’m curious. Very, very curious and inquisitive. I want to know everything about you—the story of your life, and your favourite movie star, and your golf handicap, and whether you sleep with your pyjama trousers inside or outside the jacket. I want you to tell me all about yourself. For instance, when Marius told you that you could let up on the watch here, as he’d made ‘other plans’—didn’t he say that there was a girl concerned in those plans?”

  “No.”

  “That’s two lies,” said the Saint. “Next time you lie, you will be badly hurt. Second question: I know that Marius arranged for the girl to be drugged on the train, and taken off it before it reached London—but where was she to be taken to?”

  “I do not…A-a-a-a-ah!”

  “I warned you,” said the Saint.

  “Are you a devil?” sobbed the man, and the Saint showed his teeth.

  “Not really. Just an ordinary man who objects to being molested. I thought I’d made that quite plain. Of course, I’m in a hurry this evening, so that may make me seem a little hasty. Now, are you going to remember things—truthful things—or shall we have some more unpleasantness?”

  The man shrank back from him, quivering.

  “I do not know any more,” he blubbered. “I swear…”

  “Where is Marius now?”