The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 9

  He said, “Don’t look now, but I think your husband is joining us.”

  Mrs Ourley did look, of course, but she did not come out with the squeak of coy consternation which one might reasonably have expected from her past performance in her own hallway at Oyster Bay. Instead, her carmined nails dug into the tablecloth so hard that they left furrows in the linen, and her complexion paled under its crust of powder until she looked like a fat frost-bitten ghost. The sheer coagulation of her face was a distillate of all that unearthly majestic austerity that wins battles in the committee meetings of women’s clubs.

  “Let me take care of this,” she said ominously, and stood up.

  She moved with surprising swiftness for her bulk, and she met Milton Ourley halfway down the room. Once again she was like a stately galleon ploughing through a cluttered harbour. Milton might have been compared with a squat broad fussy tug, except that it was the galleon which took him in tow. Simon could hear something like a hoarse spluttering “dabbity dab dab,” like a rumble of distant thunder, but it made just as little difference to the general flow of motion. Mr Ourley might actually have made a great physical effort to struggle towards the Saint’s table, but the achievements of his kampf were not readily discernible. Borne like a cockleshell upon his spouse’s regal bow wave, he was washed back into the lobby, still booming like a frustrated foghorn, and disappeared from the scene.

  Simon kept his head down while he examined and signed the check that was already on the table, and then he caught the eye of the maître d’hôtel and brought him over with a mere wisp of a gesture.

  “Raul,” he said, “how could anyone get out of here without going through the lobby?”

  If the maître d’hôtel had his own and incidentally erroneous theories about the Saint’s motives, he was far too polished a diplomat to give them any expression. In addition to which, and for no professional reasons, he had long since taken the Saint under his generous wing.

  “There is a back way out,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

  “I might even fall in love with it,” said the Saint.

  They went down to the other end of the dining-room, through well-organised pantries and one end of the clean busy kitchen, and past a row of food lockers to a wire-mesh door where the timekeeper rose from his little table and a plate of roast beef to let them out. Beyond that there was a short narrow passage and another door that opened inconspicuously on to Forty-Fourth Street.

  Simon stopped and looked back the way they had come. He pointed.

  “Is that the service elevator?”

  “Yes, sir. Do you want to use it?”

  “That would get me upstairs and back again without going through the lobby too, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Saint rubbed his chin.

  “I’d like to do that first. But will George here let me out when I come down again?”

  “Of course.” Raul turned to the timekeeper. “Please let Mr Templar out whenever he’s ready.” He turned back to the Saint with a flourish. “Is there anything else I can do?”

  Simon grinned as he strolled back towards the service lift.

  “You’ve done plenty already, Raul,” he said. “As it is, I expect you’ve broken all the regulations in the joint, and Mr Case will probably fire you.”

  The maître d’hôtel shrugged cheerfully.

  “Regulations are for everybody else, but not for the Saint.” He said to the elevator operator, “Take Mr Templar upstairs and bring him down again any time he wants to come.” He smiled at the Saint with the happy magnificence of a mayor who has just bestowed the keys of his city, and said with charming impersonality, “Do you wish to leave any message?’

  Simon shook his head.

  “Just stay out of trouble and pretend you didn’t see me go.”

  “But I won’t have seen you go, Mr Templar,” said Raul. “I won’t look.”

  He turned his back, and Simon stepped into the car and was wafted upwards at a suitable pace for a sedate hotel.

  He glanced at his wrist-watch automatically as he stepped out on the third floor, but it was almost a reflex movement and the position of the hands scarcely impressed itself on him at all. The real timing was all in his head—it was a matter of how long it would have taken to discuss this and decide that and then to do something about it. He was working to almost psychically close tolerances, and an error of even a few minutes in his mental clocking might have catastrophic results. And even then he was trying to time-table something so nebulous that his own intuition was practically the only guarantee that it would work out that way at all.

  He slid the key into his door with millimetric stealth, and went into his suite with weightless feet and one hand on the gun which he had borrowed from Mr Varetti before lunch. He had been caught once that day, and he was not going to make the same mistake again.

  But apparently he was still within his margin of time—if it had any real existence at all. There was no one in his living-room, or behind the portières that shut off the bedroom, or in the bathroom or the closet or under the bed. He took each hazard separately and methodically, making no sound to betray his presence until he had covered all of them.

  Even then he was very quiet, and denied himself a cigarette that he would have enjoyed because he didn’t want to leave fresh smoke in the air.

  The suitcase which he had sent up stood beside the sofa in the living-room. He didn’t touch it.

  The iron structure of the fire escape ran outside the bedroom window. Simon had chosen his suite for that reason, but it could work two ways. The front door of the suite could be penetrated in one way or another, but it would present difficulties. Simon thought it would be the fire escape.

  The hallway from the front door met the living-room at an angle so that there was a corner from which he could cover any entrance from equal concealment. He flattened himself into it and waited as patient and motionless as a statue in a niche.

  Somebody in the adjoining suite turned on a radio at full volume, and it blared away for two or three minutes before it was turned down. Even then, it was too loud.

  Of course, it might be the front door. Either Varetti or Walsh might be good with locks, or might be clever enough to con a master key out of somewhere. Or they might even be tough enough to try it with a frontal assault, on a simple smash-grab-and-run basis.

  It was curious how he had always assumed that it would be Varetti and Walsh. Even when he spoke to Fernack on the telephone. He had left them locked up in Barbara Sinclair’s closet intending to have been back there by that time and busy with the job of advancing their acquaintance on his own terms, but all that had been changed for quite a while. He wasn’t quite sure how long ago he had been sure that they were no longer waiting where he had left them, but it seemed now that he had always been sure that they wouldn’t be there. It was one of those fourth-dimensional elisions that saw an end before it could pin down all the steps and stages through which the end would come about.

  He knew that Varetti and Walsh were out again, because only since they were out again could certain other things have happened. Or, conversely, because other things had happened, they must be out again.

  And the rawhide suitcase was standing beside the sofa and someone would come to get it.

  It wouldn’t take much shopping around to settle on one of the suites directly above the one he was in. And from any such starting point a fire escape that ran down through a gloomy inside courtyard that nobody would ever want to look out at anyway would present virtually no problems at all…

  He could really have enjoyed that cigarette.

  But how long could he afford to wait, backing his hunch, while he might always be wrong, and the fox might be away in another spinney?

  The radio next door was blatting forth some emetic commercial about the perils of fungoid feet or some such attractive ailment. He could hear every word as if he were in the room with it. He wondered if it would
be loud enough to drown one of the sounds he was listening for.

  But it wasn’t.

  He heard it.

  It was the slow cautious rasp of a window-sash being eased quietly upwards. And, after that, the subdued rattle of the slats of the Venetian blind being lifted from below.

  So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window, and he had not waited in vain.

  There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.

  The Saint’s ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse “Hurry up! Hurry up!” There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a news-reel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.

  In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.

  Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.

  “Here it is,” he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.

  “If only that sonofagun Templar was here too,” said Mr Walsh, “I’d like to…”

  He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.

  Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet’s prettier fancies in the bud.

  “Why don’t you shut your trap?”

  He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.

  “We’ll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front,” he said.

  “Suppose he’s in the lobby,” Cokey suggested.

  “You go ahead and make sure he isn’t.”

  “I wanna see that sonofagun again.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time.”

  Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremorless at his waist and blue lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.

  It seemed quite unfortunate at that moment that the Algonquin Hotel had omitted to provide two vats of soft plaster of paris among the otherwise well-planned furnishing of the joint. If it had not been for that almost incredible lack of foresight, the cataleptic rigidity of the two men might easily have allowed the Saint to immerse them and withdraw them again without the slightest disturbance of their articulation, thereby creating a pair of moulds for which any wax museum would have been glad to bid. But such sad wastes are an inevitable symptom of our unplanned economy, and Simon Templar had learned to exercise his philosophy on them.

  He said, without undue gloom, “The hands up and clasped behind the back of the head, gentlemen—if you don’t mind my borrowing your own fancy formula, Ricco. Although to be quite candid it just struck me that your vocabulary had slipped a bit. Or is it because you save your party dialogue for the cash customers?”

  Varetti put the bag down gradually and deliberately, and raised his hands in the same way, so that his movements were rather like those of a trained snake, and his eyes were a snake’s eyes, bright and beady and unblinking.

  “How the hell did you get here?” demanded Mr Walsh, almost indignantly.

  “I heard you wanted me,” said the Saint, “so I came a-running. A little faster with the hands, if you don’t mind, Cokey…Thank you…Now, if you’ll both turn your backs I’ll see whether you’ve picked up any new weapons since we last met, and if you are very polite I may refrain from goosing you.”

  Apparently they had been rushed out of either the time or the opportunity to replenish their armoury, or else they had anticipated no such disconcerting need for one, for the only trophy which rewarded his excavations was a six-inch jack-knife from the pocket of Comrade Varetti with a trick spring that whipped the blade open when you pressed a button.

  The Saint was not too disappointed. He had discovered before then that it is only in the less conscientious crime stories that the ungodly are endowed with inexhaustible reserves of artillery from which they can rebound on a few minutes’ notice from any setback, armed to the teeth again and spitting javelins, and moreover he realised that the armament programme must have placed additional handicaps even on the hoodlums who were accustomed to buy their gats by the carton. But he did not complain. He was not the complaining type. He was prepared to make his small contribution to the exigencies of global war.

  He put the knife through its paces with the most detached and fascinated interest while he allowed the two men to turn around again.

  “Very ingenious, Ricco, and quite a credit to the Mafia, or whatever your dear old alma mater was,” he observed appreciatively. “I’m afraid you must have been a very bad little boy when you were young.”

  Varetti showed his white rabbit teeth in a smile that was half a snarl.

  “You’ll find out what kind of a bad boy I am before we’re through,” he said. “Your luck will run out one of these days, and I’m going to be there when it does. You and your exploding cigarettes! I certainly was a chump to be taken in by an old gag like that.”

  “You certainly were, brother,” Simon agreed consolingly. “But you can cheer yourself with the thought that smarter men than you have fallen for it before. And now, if we have to keep up these old-world courtesies, may I trouble you two creeps to back off and park your bottoms on that beautiful sofa behind you? Keeping the hands in the same position, if you don’t mind…That’s the idea…I want you to be comfortable, because I still think of you as my guests, and we are now going to have a brief chat about one thing and another.”

  With just a little more thoughtful reluctance than Walsh, Varetti sank obediently on to the couch, but there was no shift in the bland display of his incisors.

  “Don’t you know you’re wasting your time?” he asked. “We aren’t going to tell you anything. Why don’t you just call the cops?”

  “And then?” Simon inquired, smiling and silky.

  “Then you’ll have to prove that you didn’t invite us in here. And you’ll have to explain why you were so mad when we found that you had a bag of stolen iridium in your apartment.”

  The Saint’s eyes danced with boreal lights.

  “Mr Walsh,” he said, “would you be good enough to open the bag that Ricco is talking about?…Go on…I won’t shoot you.”

  In a state of partial hypnosis buffeted between the menace of the Saint’s gun and the impudent spear-tips in the Saint’s eyes, Mr Walsh slid dubiously off the sofa to obey. He laid the suitcase on its side, and clicked the catch. He raised the lid. He looked.

  So did Ricco Varetti.

  They beheld what must have been one of the finest collections of assorted spheres that had ever been hastily improvised. It ranged from the ripe solidity of bowls that should have been booming smoothly down polished alleys, down to ball-bearings designed to speed the wheels of roller skates, and down from there to buckshot and BB pills for airguns. It included baseballs, cricket balls, billiard balls, and one large sand-packed medicine ball. It was a truly amazing crop of b
alls.

  “All right,” said the Saint amiably. “Let’s have a showdown on that basis. The cops are on their way already, whether you believe it or not, and they are a couple of tough babies. They’ll be crashing in here in a matter of minutes—if they take that long. I’m giving you this one chance to scream everything you can remember about your boss man, and if you don’t want to play with me I’m sure that Kestry and Bonacci will just love showing you the town.”

  11

  To any individual who, like the present chronicler, is acutely conscious of the need to conserve paper in order that there may never be any lack of raw materials on which the latest governmental artist can design new forms to be filled out in sesquicentuplicate, the mere thought of wasting one milligram of precious pulp which might be better devoted to the production of monogrammed Kleenex is instinctively repugnant. Your correspondent therefore proposes to expend no words on describing the reactions of Messieurs Varetti and Walsh, beyond mentioning that they looked as if they had been kicked three inches above the navel by an exacerbated elephant.

  Whereafter, as an equally simple matter of record, it was Cokey Walsh who digested the ultimate total into the single sizzling sentence without which all detective-story dialogue would have dried up long ago.

  “I ain’t talking.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said the Saint, with proper patience, having been in stories before, “But you’ll have to start with some sort of alibi when the cops arrive, and I thought you might like a rehearsal.”

  Varetti moistened his lips.

  “That’s still easy,” he said. “You brought us in here and started all this. You say we were trying to steal something. Well, what was it and where did you get it?”

  “You’re doing fine,” said the Saint encouragingly. “Go on.”

  Varetti shrugged.

  “I don’t have to go on for you. But I can tell you that if there’s going to be any squealing at all, Cokey and I will squeal on you first. And if we have to take any rap, we’ll share it out with you. We could even say that you were in with us all the time, until you started to double-cross us just now.”