He looked down at his waist.
“And out of all the ordinary belts I’ve got,” he said, “I had to pick one with a new-fangled plastic catch instead of a buckle. If I ever get out of here, it goes straight in the ash-can.”
“A bedspring!” she gasped.
It was a forlorn idea, but they went through some strained contortions to explore its far-fetched possibility. This did not take long.
“The hell with Progress,” said the Saint. “And especially foam rubber.”
They sat on their shared corner of the bunk again, linked together around the corner post.
“There’s nothing we could reach, is there?” she said. “I mean with our feet, as far as they could stretch.”
“No,” he said briefly. “If I could get at my tackle box, it might be a different story. But Julius and Igor aren’t dopes, and they knew I couldn’t make my legs twelve feet long.”
He studied the post that their arms were linked around. It was a smooth pole fully five inches in diameter, with the bunk frames fastened solidly to it at their outside corner. Two other corners of the frames were fastened to the log walls, and their fourth corners were in the corner of the cabin itself. The pole went down to some attachment through a snug-fitting hole in the floor planking, and its upper end was notched into a tie beam overhead. It looked and felt as solid as a growing tree, but it was the only possible weak point left to try.
“Let’s see if we can shake this loose,” Simon said grimly.
For several minutes he heaved, pulled, jolted, pushed, and twisted against the pole from a number of carefully selected angles. Because of the way their arms were intertwined, he knew that some of his savage onslaughts must have hurt her cruelly, but she never uttered a sound of protest and added all that she could of her strength to his efforts.
Presently they were both bruised and spent, and the pole had not budged or given any sign of budging.
“We could start a fire and hope the pole would burn faster than it burned us,” Simon said between deep breaths. “But he took my matches and left them over there on the table, and even a boy scout would need another stick to rub against this one.”
“We could start gnawing it like beavers,” she said, “but I think it would last longer than our teeth.”
Then she suddenly sobbed once, and hid her face in his shoulder.
Simon cursed at not having even a cigarette to bolster an illusion of nonchalance.
So this was what it was like, he thought, when your luck finally ran out. He had been within a hair’s breadth of this identical situation a dozen times before, but always there had been some forgotten trump in his hand, some unappreciated weapon up his sleeve, some ultimate implausible contingency that might yet bring rescuing cavalry over the hill. Now every scant possibility had been checked off in remorseless rotation, every prospective mirage had been methodically eliminated.
As a matter of concrete and incontrovertible fact, unless some fairytale trout popped his head out of the water and with a few exceptionally well-chosen words converted Igor Netchideff to Buddhism, they had—as the cliché succinctly says—had it.
It was a curiously hollow and undramatic realization, in the same way that the somber machinery of an execution is an anticlimax to the pageantry and excitement of a murder trial.
“I guess it had to come to this some time,” said the Saint. “But I never really believed it.”
Presently Marian said, “I wonder why women always have to get raped. And why it seems to matter so much.”
“They should especially avoid tangling with Russians,” he said.
“Do you think you could manage to strangle me?” she asked in a small expressionless voice.
He looked at her, and her eyes were unforgettably serious.
“Shut up,” he said roughly. “Igor may still drop dead first.”
There was a crunch of heavy feet outside, and Igor Netchideff stomped back in, very much alive.
He flung the Saint’s rod down with a resounding crash.
“You try to make me a fool,” he thundered. “First, that absurd fly cannot be cast. It is too light, it has no weight, you cannot throw it anywhere. But second, even when I put it out a little way with the rod in the water, no fish, came for it. No fish would be so stupid, even the fish of a capitalist country. Therefore you only pretend you can do things which you cannot, to deceive and frighten other people with nothing, as your leaders would try to do to the Soviets.”
“You’re too easily discouraged.” said the Saint. “I probably wouldn’t do any better the first time I tried fishing in the Volga, until I learned how to handle a Party line.”
7
The pilot’s face was congested with the frustration of a man who senses that he is being mocked and yet cannot confidently isolate and specify the taunt. After a long moment during which it seemed to be a toss-up whether he would try to rip the Saint to pieces or settle for rupturing one of his own blood-vessels, he turned abruptly and marched himself heavily to the stove.
He chunked fat from a can into the skillet and began to fry the trout which he had cleaned earlier.
The simple activity of watching and turning them, perhaps combined with the savory aromas that began to permeate the air, seemed to alleviate his temper. After a while he began crooning musically to himself as he had done when he was cleaning the fish. But for the baritone register of his voice, it would have been exactly reminiscent of an easily distracted infant burbling obliviously over a newly invented pastime.
Simon and Marian began to experience a sharpening ache of hunger added to their weariness and cramping limbs and other discomforts. But not for anything would they have spoken of it—or, for that matter, said anything at all that might have regained Netchideff’s attention. Any intriguing new line of conversation or argument that might have occurred to them was to be treasured for the moment when Netchideff might need another distraction; for the present he was completely occupied, and that was all that mattered. It was like keeping motionless in the same room with an escaped tiger, hoping in that immobility not to be noticed. But as Simon had said, every minute of precarious survival was still a minute stolen from eternity.
But Netchideff hadn’t forgotten them. He was only letting them wait while he attended to something else. When the trout were done to his satisfaction, he brought the pan to the table and sat down and started to eat the fish from it, holding the head in one hand and the tail in the other and taking bites from the fish until it broke apart and he had one piece in each hand to finish in alternate mouthfuls. But in between bites he looked at Simon and Marian with the thoughtfulness of a tiger that is content to deal with one bone at a time.
When he had finished, he licked his fingers, belched resonantly, and continued to sit there looking at them inscrutably, like a conquering Mongol khan considering what to do with his captives. And as he sat, the lids drooped over his eyes, his head nodded, and his breathing became more audible. He fell asleep.
Simon and Marian sat in still more incredulous stillness as the sound of breathing thickened into an unmistakable snore. They let it go on for several minutes before they ventured even to whisper.
“We’re still getting reprieves,” Simon said.
“Yes, but for what?”
“Time to think of something, maybe.”
“We’re not outsmarting him. He’s just playing cat and mouse. I know it now. This is his way of trying to break us down.”
“So long as we don’t break down, we can use the time.”
“I know. I’ll be quiet. I know you’re trying to think.” But for the first time he heard weariness in her voice, the kind of weariness which is the foreshadow of despair.
And he was trying to think, too. He had never stopped. But no thought led to a way out. And only instinctive obstinacy refused to admit that that might very simply be because there was none. But he went on trying.
They talked very little more. It was easier not to. But
whenever one of them moved to revive a numbed muscle, the other could feel it, and it was like an intimate reassurance in the strange closeness which had been forced on them.
Time, which seemed so precious for the miracles it might have to find room for, nevertheless seemed to crawl in slow motion through the revelation of the miracles it was not going to produce…
Until, creeping imperceptibly into dominance against the reverberating counterpoint of the pilot’s snores, the puttering approach of an identifiable motor-boat forced itself into the Saint’s ears, and he looked down at his wrist watch and was stunned to discover how treacherously three hours had melted away.
A moment later the rhythm of Netchideff’s snoring ended in a single grunt. His eyes opened, without any other movement of his body, and he also listened.
He looked out of the window, for a minute or two, while the chugging drew closer. Then he stood up without haste, yawned and stretched mightily, and went to the door. With a brief glance at his prisoners to satisfy himself that they were still helpless, he went out, and they heard his footsteps clumping down towards the lake.
“Well,” she said. “Have you thought of anything?”
He shook his head.
“No.” It was too late for any more pretending. “I’m sorry, Marian.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said with a little sigh. “I always knew I’d meet you some day, but I imagined it very differently from this.”
“You did?” Any conversation would have seemed trivial now, but any triviality was good if it kept worse things out of her mind for a few moments longer. “How?”
“Didn’t my name mean anything to you?”
“I’m afraid not. Should it?”
“Do you remember anyone else named Kent?”
“Oh. Yes.” Two little lines notched in between his brows. “One of my very best friends, a long time ago, was named Kent.”
“Norman Kent.”
His eyes were frozen on her face.
“How did you know?”
“He was an uncle of mine. I hardly remembered him at all as a person, of course—I was still in kindergarten when he died. But I heard about it later, what little anybody ever knew. He was killed doing something with you, wasn’t he?”
“He gave his life,” said the Saint. “For me, and a few others—or perhaps millions. He did one of the bravest things a man ever did for his friends, and maybe for the world too. But I never knew—”
“Why should you? He wouldn’t be likely to talk about a brat like me.”
He was still staring at her half unbelievingly. And through his memory flooded the faces and the voices and the movements of the band of reckless young men that he had led back in those crusading days that were sometimes almost forgotten, the days that Major Vernon Ascony had uncomfortably reminded him of in Singapore to spark the train that had led halfway around the world to this moment. And most vividly of all he recalled a cottage in England, by the Thames, with the shadows of a peaceful summer evening lengthening over the garden, and the dark serious face of Norman Kent as he signed his own death-warrant and managed to hide from all of them what he had done.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked.
“Would it have made any difference? There were other things that seemed a bit more urgent. Anyway, I was hoping for a better occasion, when I could ask you to tell me the whole story.”
“And now there’s no time,” he said bitterly. “But I will tell you. You should be prouder than a princess to have Norman Kent for an uncle.”
“If I were the least bit superstitious,” she said, “I’d have to believe there was some thread of Fate binding the Kent wagon to your star.”
His face had hardened into planes and grooves of bronze.
“It’s a coincidence,” he said flatly. “But I wish to hell you’d kept it to yourself.”
Hurt flicked her face like an invisible whip.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “But in any good corny story, this would be where I repaid a debt and gave you the life that Norman gave me. But I don’t even see a chance of that. I think that’s what’s hardest to take.”
Her arm moved and pressed against his.
“If either of us gets the chance to do the ungodly any damage, right up to the last moment, we’ll do it,” she said. “And, please, I’d like to be kissed just once more by a man who wouldn’t have to force me.”
He turned to her and their lips met, firmly and tenderly, yet without passion, in a kiss such as few men can have known.
But not for an instant had Netchideff slipped out of his awareness altogether.
Almost unconsciously, between their speeches and their silences, he had heard the motor-boat throttle down as it reached the dock. Then, after a short pause, he had heard it start up again, and recede again for a certain distance, and stop again. He realized quickly that Netchideff must have jumped in and told Pavan to take him out at once to the seaplane, to make the repair with the part that Pavan had brought. Then for a long time there had been silence, which was broken at last by the sudden shocking roar of the seaplane’s engine. The seaplane’s engine boomed up in a smooth vibrant prolonged crescendo of power, and died no less smoothly down until a switch cut it off. Then, after a much shorter interval, the stutter of the motor-boat replaced it, plodding stolidly back towards the dock.
The repair had been made and tested: it worked, and the pilot was ready to go.
Pavan entered the cabin first, with Netchideff close behind him. Pavan looked sullen, but the pilot seemed to radiate elemental good spirits. He took the Saint’s automatic from his hip pocket and released the safety.
“Go on, Julius,” he said. “Separate the girl, and handcuff her again.”
“Damn it, you’re a stubborn bastard, Igor,” grumbled Pavan. “Why can’t I make you see how much more complicated this is? You could have given me the stuff you brought while we were out at the plane. Instead of which, I’ll have to go back again with you and—”
“Please,” Netchideff said, grinning—and perhaps only a nervous man would have thought that the gun he held was not too careful about where it pointed. “Do what I ask.”
Pavan took a small key from his pocket and approached the bunk warily. He held one of Marian’s wrists firmly in one hand, staying on the opposite side of her from the Saint, while he unlocked her handcuffs with the other. The instant the hand he was not holding was free, she jerked it around the corner pole and clawed at him like a wildcat, but he was ready for her with strength and leverage. He was extremely skilful, and in only a moment she was handcuffed again, this time behind her back. To escape the still undaunted menace of her wildly kicking feet he flung her bodily at Netchideff. The pilot caught her arm near the shoulder with his left hand alone, holding her at arm’s length and chuckling as she sobbed impotently in his gorilla grasp.
“Now, please, the same for Templar,” Netchideff said.
“What’s the matter with you?” Pavan argued. “Why—”
“Please,” Netchideff said.
Pavan approached Simon even more warily, although with the same technique. But instead of pulling away the instant it was released, as Pavan was reasonably anticipating, the Saint’s free hand shot forward. It grasped Pavan by the slack front of his plaid shirt and then recoiled again with incredible violence, jerking Pavan forward to hit the pole crunchingly with his face.
In another blurring whirlwind of movement it was Pavan whose arms were pinioned behind him, and Simon was holding him up like a shield.
“How about it, Igor?” Simon asked grittily. “Shall we talk a trade?”
“I will show you,” Netchideff said genially.
The gun barked in his hand, and Pavan screamed once and then was only a dead weight in more than a mere figure of speech.
Simon let him fall, and waited for the next shot.
“You only shortened his
life by a few seconds,” Netchideff said. “I had decided to kill him in any case. Since he had already been noticed by the Canadian police, and was stupid enough to let both of you find this place, he could be no more use to us.”
“A nice way to reward an old comrade,” Simon remarked.
“He was not a comrade. It was only a business arrangement.”
Without a change of expression or any other warning Netchideff jerked the girl towards him and hit her on the head with the butt of the gun in his clubbed fist. As her knees buckled, he kept his hold of her and hoisted her over his left shoulder with a twist of his powerful left arm, exactly as he might have slung a heavy sack. And through all those movements the automatic made adaptations so that it did not lose its aim on the Saint for more than a decimal part of a second.
It was all done in a fragment of the time it takes to recite, and Simon still looked down the barrel of the gun and wondered what blind hope would keep him obedient until the irrevocable bullet crashed into his brain.
“Pick up your rod,” Netchideff ordered. “Before I kill you, you will prove that you have lied.”
8
The Saint stood on the floating dock in the bright afternoon sun, the fly rod in his hand. Netchideff had dropped the girl from his shoulder into the bottom of the motor-boat, where she lay still mercifully unconscious, and had cast off the mooring lines. He had not started the motor, but the breeze was carrying the boat steadily away over a widening slick of water. The pilot stood up squarely in the boat with his legs spread like a foreshortened Colossus, the gun which he never forgot to control no matter what else he had to do still leveled at the Saint from his lumpy fist.
“Now, show me if you can cast that thing,” Netchideff said.
“Why should I?” Simon snarled.
Yet in a sort of nightmare automatism he was making the motions of stripping line from the reel, gathering it in loose even coils in his left hand.
“Are you afraid to look foolish?” Netchideff jeered. “Or are you afraid I shall steal your secret?”
“You’re damn right you can’t make me this foolish,” said the Saint. “You can go right ahead and shoot me, but you can’t make me give you a lesson in fly casting.”
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 26
