Simon drew at his cigarette with a reminiscent smile, while the grey car whirled around Piccadilly Circus and plunged down the Haymarket.
“Anyway, Hoppy and I beetled in while they were away, and took a gander at Sunny Jim. And as a matter of fact, he isn’t dead, though he’s had the narrowest shave that any man ever had, and his head’s going to ring carillons when he wakes up. He’s been creased as neatly as I’ve ever seen it done—the bullet just parted his hair in a new place and knocked him out, but his skull hasn’t any holes in it. That’s when I had my brilliant idea.”
“I was hoping we’d get to that,” said the girl.
“But haven’t you seen it already?” Simon demanded. “Look at what I’ve told you. Here’s Sunny Jim preparing to squeal, and somebody tries to rub him out. Why? Squealers don’t get bumped off, not in this country, just because they may have a little tit-bit to give away. Sunny Jim must have known something worth knowing, and there he was, sitting in his chair, out to the world, and nobody to get in our way. The bumper-offer can’t be sure what’s happened to him, and Claud Eustace is probably quite sure he’s dead. But nobody knows…Isn’t it all pretty obvious?”
“It’s getting clearer.”
“Of course it is! I tell Hoppy to grab the body and hustle it down the fire-escape, out to this car, and pick me up later. And I wait for Claud Eustace and his boy-friend. We exchange the compliments of the season, and have lots of fun and games together. And then I walk out. As soon as the next editions are on the streets, the bumper-offer is going to know that his body disappeared while I was around, and he’s going to work himself into seven different kinds of cold sweat wondering whether it is a body. He may guess that it isn’t, and itch to bump me off for what I may have found out from it, but he can’t do that because if I got killed he’d never know what had happened to the body and where it might turn up next. Doesn’t that make you see the joke?”
Patricia nodded slowly.
“But who,” she said, “was the bumper-offer?”
“Who else could it be,” asked the Saint, “but our old friend that all the excitement and bubble is about—the High Fence?”
There were adequate grounds for the outbreak of official excitement and bubble which had been provoked by the man who was known only by that unusual name.
A fence, in the argot, is nothing to do with steeplechasing or an enclosure containing sheep. He is the receiver of stolen goods, the capitalist of crime, and incidentally the middle-man but for whose functioning larceny in most of its forms would soon die a natural death. He runs less risk than any of the actual stealers, and makes much bigger profits. And very often he takes his cut both ways, making his profit on the receipt of stolen goods and betraying the stealers to a friendly detective at the same time.
The fence is a member of an unchartered union, the only code of which is to pay as little for a purchase as the vendor can be persuaded to accept.
Seven or eight months ago, the invisible tentacles of the CID, which spread wider and more delicately than many of its critics would believe, touched on the rumour of a man who violated that rule. He bought nothing but metals and precious stones, and paid twice as much for them as any other receiver in London was offering. By contenting himself with a hundred per cent profit instead of three hundred per cent he could well afford to do it, but it is a curious fact that no other receiver before him has thought of such a scandalously unethical expedient. And through the strange subterranean channels in which such gossip circulates, the word went round that he was “good.”
Because of the prices he paid, they called him the High Fence, but nobody knew anything more about him. He had no shop where he conducted his business. Anything that was offered to him for sale had to be sent through the post, to an accommodation address which was changed every week. The address was passed round the limited circle of his clients by word of mouth, and it was impossible to find out who first put it into circulation. Every client had always “heard about it” from another—the trail turned inevitably into a hopeless merry-go-round. Nor was the circle of initiates unrestricted. It was a jealously closed ring of talent which the High Fence picked for himself, and queer things were rumoured to have happened to those who had ventured to spread the good news among their friends without permission. To those who were tempted by circumstances to talk to the CID, even queerer things could happen—as we have shown.
The High Fence might never have encountered a serious setback, if there had not been one outlaw in England for whom queer happenings had no terrors, and to whom the scent of booty was the supreme perfume in the breath of life.
“I’m afraid Claud Eustace has a depressingly cynical idea of what I’m up to,” said the Saint. “He thinks I know who the High Fence is—in which he’s flattering me too much, and I wish he wasn’t. And he thinks that all I’m wanting is to find out where this bird keeps his boodle and his cash, so that I can take it off him before he gets pinched.”
“In which he’s perfectly right.”
The Saint sighed.
“I don’t know where you get these ideas from,” he said in a pained voice. “By the way, are you going anywhere in particular, or are we just sightseeing?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“Let’s go to Abbot’s Yard—it’s about the only hide-out we have left that isn’t in Teal’s address-book. And I don’t think Sunny Jim is going to be too keen on seeing callers for a while.”
He relaxed at full length, with his eyes half closed against the smoke curling past them from his cigarette, while she circled Sloane Square and headed west along the King’s Road. The soft waves of her fair golden head rippled in the gentle stir of air that came through the windows; her face was as calmly beautiful as if she had been driving them on nothing more innocuous than the commonplace sightseeing tour which he had mentioned. Perhaps she was only calm because even the most adventurous girl, after some years of partnership with such a man, must achieve permanent nonchalance or perish of nervous exhaustion, but one never knew…And in the back of the car, Mr Uniatz and Mr Fasson were both, in their respective ways, silently unconscious.
The car threaded its way more slowly through the clotted congestion of trucks, omnibuses, vans, and drays with which the King’s Road is permanently constipated, and turned off abruptly into a narrow side street composed of cottage hovels with freshly painted and utterly dilapidated fronts in approximately equal proportions. It was one of those Chelsea backwaters which are undergoing a gloomy degradation from honest slumdom to synthetic Bohemianism, and the external symptoms of its decay gave it an air of almost pathetic indecision, like a suburban bank manager on a spree in the high spots, who is trying to make up his mind whether to be thoroughly folksy or very dignified, but who is quite certain that he is as sober and important as any of his co-revellers. But in spite of this uninviting aspect, it contained a comfortable studio which the Saint had found useful before, and Simon roused himself cheerfully to open the door beside him as the car stopped.
“I think it’s a case for the wheel-chair and blanket,” he said, after a judicial survey of Sunny Jim.
The transportation of an unconscious captive across a London pavement is not quite such an easy and automatic affair as the credulous reader of fiction may have been deluded to believe, but Simon Templar had had such problems to solve before. On one of the rare occasions on which Mr Uniatz did not find it necessary to delay the proceedings with unnecessary questions, he hopped intelligently out of the car and opened the door of the studio with a key which the Saint threw at him. After a brief absence, he returned with an invalid chair, Simon took the folded blanket from the seat, and between them they wrapped the limp figure of Sunny Jim Fasson tenderly up in it—so tenderly that there was not enough of him left protruding for any stray passerby to recognize. In this woolly cocoon they carried him to the chair, and in the chair wheeled him up the steps and into the house, with all the hushed solicitude of two expectant nephews
handling a rich and moribund uncle. And, really, that was all about it.
“There is beer in the pantry,” said the Saint, subsiding into a chair in the studio. “But don’t let Hoppy see it, or I never shall. Hoppy, you get a sponge of cold water and see if you can bring the patient round.”
“He does wake up, once,” said Mr Uniatz reminiscently. “In de car. But I club him wit’ de end of my Betsy and he goes to sleep again.”
Simon gazed after him resignedly, and sipped the glass of Carlsberg which Patricia brought to him. A sense of tact and diplomacy could well be added to the other virtues in which Mr Uniatz was so unfortunately deficient. Hoping to extract information from a man by presenting oneself to him as his saviour and honorary guardian angel, one endeavours to calm the aching brain. One tends the wounds. One murmurs consolation and soothing comfort. One does not, intelligently, greet him on his first return to consciousness by clubbing him with the blunt end of a Betsy. It rather ruled out the potentialities of guile and cunning, but the Saint was equally prepared for the alternative.
He finished his cigarette at leisure while Mr Uniatz applied his belated ministrations, and presently an inaugural groan from the invalid chair brought him up to take over the management of the interview.
“Welcome, stranger,” he said genially.
4
Sunny Jim Fasson did not seem happy. It is not over-stimulating for any man with less solid bone in his head than a Mr Uniatz to first have his skull grazed by a bullet, and then at the first sign of recovery from that ordeal to be slugged over the ear with a gun-butt, and certainly much of the sunshine from which Sunny Jim had once taken his nickname was missing from his countenance. With the damp traces of Hoppy’s first-aid practice trickling down his nose and chin, he looked more like a picture of November Day than one of Hail, Smiling Morn.
It was perhaps discouraging that the first person he saw when he blinked open his eyes was Hoppy Uniatz. He stared at him hazily for a moment, while his memory worked painfully back to its last association with that homely face, and then, remembering all, he half rose from the chair and lashed out with his fist. That also was discouraging, for Mr Uniatz had won his scars in a vocation where the various arts of violence are systematized to the ultimate degree: he hopped aside from the blow with an agility that gave an unexpected meaning to his name, and in another split second he had caught Sunny Jim’s wrist and twisted it firmly up behind his back.
He looked round at the Saint with a beam of justifiable pride, like a puppy that has performed its latest trick. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.
“Okay, boss?” he queried. “Or do I give him de heat?”
“That remains to be seen,” said the Saint imperturbably. He picked up the sponge and weighed it meditatively in his hand. “Is your brain working again, Sunny, or would you like another refresher?”
Fasson glowered at him sullenly, with a hint of fear in his eyes.
“What do you want?” he snarled.
“Personally, I only want a little talk.” Simon weighed the sponge again, and dropped it back in the basin. “But Hoppy seems to have other ideas. By the way, have you met Hoppy? This is Mr Uniatz, Jim—a one hundred per cent American from Poland.”
“I know him,” said Fasson viciously. “He hit me over the head with his gun.”
“So he tells me,” agreed the Saint, with some regret. “Otherwise this little chat of ours might have been much more amicable. But he’s quite a tough guy in his way, is Hoppy, and he’s got a kind of natural habit of hitting people with his gun—either with one end or the other. Do you know what he means when he talks about giving you the heat?”
Sunny Jim did not answer. Studying that suspicious surly face from which all the artificial sunshine had been removed, Simon realized that the friendly conversazione which he had had in mind at the beginning would have wanted a lot of organizing, even without Hoppy’s intervening indiscretion.
“Well, he might mean one of two things, Sunny. He might mean taking you for a ride—ferrying you out to some nice secluded spot and dropping you in a ditch with a tummy-full of liver pills. Or he might mean just making himself sort of unpleasant—twisting your arm off, or burning your feet, or some jolly little romp like that. I never know, with Hoppy. He gets such fascinating ideas. Only the other day, he got hold of a fellow he didn’t care for and tied him out on an iron bedstead and burnt candles under the springs—the bloke was awfully annoyed about it.”
“Who are you?” rasped Fasson shakily.
The Saint smiled.
“Templar is the name, dear old bird. Simon Templar. Of course, there are all sorts of funny rumours about my having another name—people seem to think I’m some sort of desperado called…let me see, what is it?”
The fear in Sunny Jim’s eyes brightened into a sudden spark of panic.
“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re the Saint!”
Simon raised his eyebrows innocently.
“The very name I was trying to remember. People think—”
“You’re the High Fence!”
Simon shook his head.
“Oh, no. You’re wrong about that.”
“You’re the swine who tried to shoot me just now.”
“Wrong again, brother. When I try to shoot people, they don’t usually have a chance to be rude to me afterwards. But don’t let’s talk about unpleasant things like that.” The Saint flipped out his cigarette-case and put a smoke between his lips. “Let’s be friendly as long as we can. I didn’t shoot you, but I happened into your place just after the shooting. I sort of felt that you couldn’t be feeling too happy about the way things were going, so I shifted you out of there. But I still think we ought to have a talk.”
Fasson’s shifty eyes travelled round the room, and came back to the Saint’s face. He answered through his teeth.
“I can’t tell you anything.”
“Perhaps you haven’t quite recovered yet,” said the Saint persuasively. “After all, you were going to tell Chief Inspector Teal something. By the way, have you met Mr Uniatz? Only the other day—”
“I don’t know anything!”
Hoppy Uniatz shuffled his feet. It is improbable that more than two consecutive words of the conversation which has just been recorded had percolated through the protective layers of ivory that encased his brain, but he had a nebulous idea that time was being wasted, and he could not see why.
“Do I give him de heat, boss?” he inquired hopefully.
Simon inhaled thoughtfully, and Mr Uniatz, taking silence for an answer, strengthened his grip. Fasson’s face twisted and turned pale.
“Wait a minute!” he gasped shrilly. “You’re breaking my arm!”
“That’s too bad,” said the Saint concernedly. “What does it feel like?”
“You can’t do this to me!” shrieked Sunny Jim. “He’d kill me! You know what happened just now—”
“I know,” said the Saint coolly. “But there are lots of different ways of dying. Hoppy knows no end of exciting ones, and I’ve tried to warn you about him. I don’t really want to have to let him go ahead with what he’s wanting to do, instead of just playing at it as he is now, but if you’ve absolutely made up your mind…”
Sunny Jim gulped. The sharp agony in his shoulder, where Hoppy Uniatz’s powerful leverage was exerting itself, made the other unpleasant possibilities which the Saint had hinted at seem frightfully close at hand, but he could not find a shadow of pity or remorse in the clear blue eyes that were studying him with the dispassionate curiosity of an entomologist watching the wriggling of a captured insect.
“Do you want me to be murdered?” he sobbed.
“I shouldn’t weep at your funeral,” Simon confessed cold-bloodedly. “But I shouldn’t look at things so pessimistically, if I were you. We could probably look after you for a bit, if you told us anything worth knowing—we might even get you out of the country and send you away for a holiday in the South of France
until the excitement’s all over. But you’ve got to spill what you know first, and I’m waiting for it to dawn on you that you’ll either talk voluntarily or else we’ll put you through the mangle and wring it out of you.”
His voice was casual and almost kindly, but there was something so tireless and inflexible behind it that Sunny Jim shivered. He was no hot-house flower himself, but in the circles where he moved there were stories about the Saint, brought in by men who had met that amazing buccaneer to their misfortune—legends that told of a slim bantering outlaw whose smile was more deadly than any other man’s anger, who faced death with a jest and sent men into eternity with his flippant farewell ringing in their ears…The pain in his shoulder sharpened under Hoppy’s impatient hands, and he saw that the Saint’s dark lawless face was quite impassive, with the trace of an old smile lingering absentmindedly on the reckless lips…
“Damn you!” he whimpered. “I’ll talk…But you’ve got to let me go.”
“Tell me something first.”
Fasson’s breath came in a grating sigh.
“The Kosy Korner—in Holborn—”
Simon blew a couple of smoke-rings, and nodded to Mr Uniatz.
“Okay, Hoppy,” he said. “Give him a rest.”
Hoppy Uniatz released his grip, and wiped his palms down his trousers. Insofar as his gargoyle features were capable of expressing such an emotion, he looked shocked. As one who had himself kept an iron jaw under everything that could be handed to him in the back rooms of more than one station house in his own country, the spectacle of a guy who came apart under a mere preliminary treatment filled him with the same half-incredulous disgust that an English gentleman feels on meeting a cad who is not interested in cricket.
“I guess dese Limeys can’t take it, boss,” he said, groping through genuine puzzlement to the only possible conclusion.
Sunny Jim glared at him in vengeful silence. His face was white with pain, and his shoulder really felt as if it had been dislocated. He rubbed it tenderly, while Simon recovered his beer and sat on the edge of the table.
The Saint Goes On (The Saint Series) Page 4
