“Mr Morland,” Julius explained, enjoying it, “has been persuaded to sign an unlimited power of attorney made out to his daughter. He will now be taken, as quickly as possible, and by various special routes which I need not tell you about, to Germany. There he will be placed in a concentration camp. You have heard about our concentration camps, no doubt. And of course Miss Morland has heard about them too. Valmon at this moment is probably giving her some additional information. And with your co-operation, we have just been able to show her a small sample of the treatment which her father might receive. But that, of course, is entirely up to her. The Gestapo has great powers of discrimination. If Miss Morland is disposed to help and obey all our instructions, I’m sure that her father need not suffer any more inconvenience than if he were confined to a sanatorium.”
It was all there, and the petty details could fill themselves in…Jim and Elmer could be sent away on some pretext, and other demobilised Bundsmen like Nails would take their place—as Julius had said, they were not very imaginative men, and they would not be hard to deal with…Even Hank Reefe might be got rid of, with a little more ingenuity. Jean could get rid of him…Jean would do whatever she was told, with that fear held over her—exactly as he himself had done a much more improbable thing that night.
“All of which,” said the Saint in a very even voice, “is just as beautiful as I might have expected…if you leave me out of it.”
“I’m afraid I was proposing to do that,” said Julius unctuously. “You’ve been very kind to make it so easy for us. I can hardly tell you how much I appreciated the service you did for me a few minutes ago. But you can imagine it for yourself. Without that, if Miss Morland reciprocated your tender feelings, as she probably did, your disappearance might have made her harder to handle. But now that she has seen you flogging her father, with her own eyes, she will not even need convincing that you have been on our side all along. So she will feel even more alone and helpless, and she will be even more amenable.”
It was the rest of the picture, the link that Simon had tried to find in the car when his brain was still out of step—the clinching knowledge that had been foreshadowed when Julius gave that significant inflection to “Mr Templar is one of our best allies.”
The Saint found himself nodding.
“Did I ever happen to tell you,” he inquired carefully, “that out of a lot of yellow-bellied swine that I’ve met, you could take a very distinguished place?”
Only for an instant Julius’s face took on a deeper flush, and his pale eyes burned behind the thick glasses. And then he smiled again.
“Fortunately your opinions will soon be of no consequence,” he said, and the Saint’s eyes were lazy with contempt.
“You mean after I’ve been—what was your polite totalitarian word for it?—liquidated?”
“Precisely.”
“And when does that happen?”
“Immediately.”
The Saint looked again at the remains of the cigarette in his fingers, and reached for his package. He took out the last cigarette and lighted it very deliberately from the stub. A great deal seemed to depend on that simple action. But when there is so little between a man and the end of his life, not even the smallest thing can be taken lightly.
When he looked up, his eyes were almost gay.
“Do tell me,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve got something picturesque thought out.”
“You had better let Eberhardt tie your hands behind you first.”
A man does these things. Even on the march to execution, he obeys. He becomes trapped into a kind of automatism, in which there is only the one hypnotising thought that death waiting at the end of a few seconds is still not yet death.
With the cigarette held between his lips, Simon put his hands together behind his back. He placed them with the edges of his wrists together and his muscles tense. Eberhardt walked around behind him, and he felt the roughness of cords tightening on his skin.
When Eberhardt stepped away again, pulling out the gun which he had temporarily thrust into one overall pocket, Julius went to the door and switched on some more lights. Deeper reaches of the long barren shed with its Martian islands of machinery sprang into sight under the crude glare of more powerful bulbs hung from the roof.
“Since this was your great discovery, I think it deserves to be your last memory,” Julius said.
He crossed to a larger and much more complicated switchboard which had become visible on one of the side walls, and made another connection. The air trembled with a deep and almost musical note that soared quickly and settled into a thin but tangible whine that Simon could feel in the soles of his feet. He recognised it in a moment as the hum of a mighty generator.
“I don’t know how familiar you are with the process of extracting mercury from cinnabar,” Julius said conversationally.
“Not so familiar as I might be,” said the Saint in the same tone. “Do you stick a glass tube in it and put it in an oven so that it climbs out like a thermometer, or do you sit over it with a microscope and pick it out with tweezers?”
“Here we use some improvements on the Almadén method,” said Julius, rather like a pedantic lecturer. “But the process is fundamentally the same. First the ore is crushed with some new machinery designed by Bruechner of Essen. Then it is carried by a conveyor belt to a continuous furnace. As it passes down through the furnace, it is roasted at high temperature.”
He selected a heavy lever and threw it over, and the shed suddenly trembled with a tremendous thumping clatter like a regiment of cavalry trotting over an iron drumhead. A second similar lever added a harsh groaning whirr to the din.
“The fumes, which contain the mercury, are passed through a condenser which consists first of a masonry chamber, and then pipes of earthenware, wood, and glass,” Julius continued, raising his voice calmly. “The soot which is deposited in the condenser is also worked over for mercury, with an extractor designed by Colonel von Leicht…Let me show you some of this.”
He led the way to a short flight of steps that climbed to a railed catwalk that ran around the nearest huge cylindrical engine. Prodded by Eberhardt, the Saint followed. He stood by the inside rail at the top of the stair, with Julius on one side of him and Eberhardt on the other.
He looked down into something like a huge round vat. From an elevator tower outside the building, a broad chute led down through one wall to the edge of the vat. There was a layer of coarse broken ore on it, and as Julius pulled a mechanical lever near the rail the ore began to trickle down like a slow steady avalanche. Inside the vat, operating from a central axle, a double ring of iron pile-drivers like the multiple legs of a fantastically symmetrical spider rose and fell with monotonous precision, marching round in an endless circle and pounding up and down with a tireless thundering force that shook the girdered framework. Beyond the vat, another conveyor drew crumbled ore from the bottom and raised it to an opening high in the side of a gigantic grey-white kiln.
“This is Bruechner’s reducer,” Julius explained, “which prepares the rock for our fine-ore furnace. It would, naturally, prepare anything else for the same treatment.”
Then the Saint knew just what he meant.
So…this was it. Now and for ever. And there would be no retakes.
He turned the flat of his wrists together, and his upper arms stiffened and his shoulders bowed quietly as if under the load of an unutterable surrender. But he had never been farther from surrender. His lungs locked, and under his shirt, invisibly, the leathery muscles swelled and crisped and strained into corded knots. The ropes cut his flesh, but he never felt them; only one question mattered at that moment, and it sounded curiously academic: how much did Eberhardt, with all his efficiency, know about Houdini…
The Saint straightened up again at last, as if with a final resolution. He took a last deep pull on his cigarette, and half turned, and opened his mouth to let it fall on the platform behind him.
Then he faced Juliu
s again.
“I’m glad you haven’t disappointed me,” he said. “It’s a very charming idea.”
“Will you step off by yourself,” asked Julius, “or would you prefer to be pushed?”
He was not joking. In those words and in his face was the whole evil softness of the man. His round face gleamed with a thin film of sweat, and his small protruding slaty eyes were liquid with pleading. He licked his lips, leaving them wet.
Simon turned and looked down into the pit again, where the terrible revolving iron pistons jolted up and down. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“You must make up your mind,” Julius insisted at length.
Simon waited as long as he could before he raised his head.
“I would much rather be pushed,” he said.
Then they took hold of him, one of them on each side.
And at that moment the last cigarette which he had dropped behind him went off, for he had prepared it for just such a desperate diversion with a roll of toy caps and some photographer’s flash powder which he had bought that afternoon. It was not a new trick, even for him, but it could always be counted on to create one or two precious seconds of disorganisation. And such stolen seconds often made all the difference between reminiscences and obituaries.
It went off with a sharp crack like a small-calibre pistol shot, and a brilliant burst of blue-white luminance that splashed through the shed as if a bolt of lightning had gone through it. The other two men would not have been human if they hadn’t loosened their hold on him and started to turn to see what had happened. And that was as much as he needed. He slipped one hand out of the rope around his wrists, and took hold of them in his turn.
He took Julius’s right wrist in his left hand, and Eberhardt’s left wrist in his right hand, and with simultaneous reverse twists he wrenched each man’s arm backwards and around and high up between the shoulder blades. The agonising leverage bent them forward over the rail. They struggled and kicked deliriously but there was nothing they could do against that lock clamped by fingers of steel. Eberhardt yelled out inarticulately, and the Magnum in his free hand crashed twice like a cannon, but he couldn’t get it around to aim it.
The Saint didn’t even notice it. His legs braced apart like a Colossus, his back straight and rigid, his arms thrust out, he pressed the two men over the rail until their weight was all hung on it. Still he forced them away, inch by inch, until their centres of gravity teetered infinitesimally over it. The sweat broke out on his forehead, and his mouth was a line of stone. And then, with one last convulsive effort, he forced them clear over and let go.
There was one shrill wailing hideous scream that reverberated hollowly through the clangour of the machinery and then nothing but the relentless rhythmic thudding and crunching of the multiple steel shafts trampling their endless circle.
9
Simon Templar stepped back, turned, and went slowly down the stairs. His face had the impassive coldness of a bronze casting. He walked to the door, and methodically turned out all the lights. He didn’t try to stop any of the machinery. Let that finish what it had begun. He went out into the moonlight night.
With the door closed behind him, the deafening clatter sank to a steady rumble. Moon silver lay on the rocks and hills, and etched its sweeps and stipples of jet over the broken spaces; there were stars twinkling in the clear sky. Here, still, was peace. He got into the station wagon, switched on lights and engine, turned, and drove down the road. In a moment there was not even the grumbling of the machines any more, only the whispering hum of the engine and the cool night air slipping by.
He drove to the place near the ranch house where he had been taken before, and stopped there. The next step might have been a little ticklish, but it seemed as if his guardian angel, having at last come out of an alarmingly prolonged siesta, was determined to make amends. He had not even had time to worry over the problem when he saw a man coming towards the car. It was Neumann, carrying his sub-machine gun slackly under his arm.
Simon left the headlights on, to dazzle Neumann as much as possible, and opened the door beside him. Without getting out, he swung around on the seat so that he was clear of the steering wheel and his legs were out of the car; then he bent over as if he were fumbling for something he had dropped on the running board. He heard Neumann coming close, but he waited until he saw the man’s feet and knew his distance exactly.
“Heil Schickelgruber,” said the Saint, and straightened up like a spring.
His fist smashed squarely on to Neumann’s fleshy nose in a co-ordinated extrusion of the same movement that had the vicious potency of a mule’s hind leg. Neumann gave a weird squeaky hiccough and went reeling and back-pedalling and windmillng back for three or four paces until his heel caught and he went sprawling.
It was no time for any of the polite gestures of refined combat.
The Saint took one step, and jumped on the man’s chest with both feet. It sounded as if something cracked, but Simon didn’t wait to be sure. He grabbed the Tommy gun out of the man’s limp grasp and pounded the butt on the man’s head several times, until he was quite sure that Party Member Neumann would take no further active part in the festivities that night, if ever.
Simon went back to the station wagon and switched out the lights. The episode had not been entirely silent, but it seemed to have attracted no attention. There were no sounds of interest anywhere. The lighted window in the ranch house was still lighted, but the shades had been drawn and nobody had looked out. The Saint thought that he saw the silhouette of Max Valmon pass across it, as if pacing up and down, but he could not be sure.
He headed towards the outer buildings from which Don Morland had been brought. Chinks of light showed there from between the crevices of closed shutters. He had no way of guessing how many demobilised Bundsmen there would be inside, but he had an idea that there would be several. But he had the grips of the Tommy gun in his hands now, and the exact number was not too important.
Actually, there were nine. They looked up with the blank faces of frozen fish when he threw open the door. Three of them were lying on the cots which were ranged along both sides of the big barrack-like dormitory; the other six were apparently having some quiet fun for themselves with Don Morland, who was tied to a chair in the centre of the room.
The Saint’s forefinger was feather-light on the trigger of his machine gun.
“I’m sorry to interrupt a happy cultural evening, boys,” he said affectionately, “but this is round-up time. Two of you can untie Mr Morland. The rest of you will please move to the back of the room with your hands high in the air. You may try any tricks you like, but I must tell you that nothing would amuse me more than blowing large holes in your dinners.”
None of them, it seemed, felt overly ambitious. They herded sullenly towards the back of the room, to be joined in another few moments by the two who had stayed behind to untie Morland.
The old man half fell out of the chair, and then pulled himself up and limped towards the Saint.
Simon waved him to one side, out of the line of fire.
“Have you been around long enough to know any good place where we can lock them up?” he asked.
“There’s a sort of store-room right back there,” said Morland. “It doesn’t have any windows, and the door only opens from this side. That’s where they kept me.”
“Then they must know it’s all right,” said the Saint and raised his gun and his voice a little: “Into the doghouse comrades.”
The men went in. It was rather a tight squeeze, but they all made it. Morland closed the door on them and slid a heavy wooden bolt into its socket.
Simon went up and inspected the fastening. It looked solid enough, but nine muscular Aryans were a slightly different proposition from one old retired dentist.
“Better give me a hand with the beds,” he said.
He hauled one cot out and set it against the door, facing out lengthwise. Between them, they jamme
d four more cots up against it in the same direction, until the line reached to within a foot of the far wall. The remaining space they wedged full of chests and chairs and other assorted furniture until it was certain that nothing less than a tank could have broken out of the back room.
Simon surveyed the barricade with approval.
“I can’t help thinking it’s going to be quite uncomfortable for them,” he remarked. “Rather like the Black Hole of Calcutta. But then, they’ll only appreciate Leavenworth so much more when they get there.”
It was then that he heard two muffled shots from a distance outside.
He snatched up the Tommy gun and ran out of the bunkhouse. Instinctively he headed towards the ranch building—there was no other place in the vicinity from which it was likely that the reports could have come. But after a few yards he paused. There was no other noise or commotion. The one lighted window in the ranch house still glowed steadily, a single blank square of yellow in the halftone dark.
Simon went towards it more slowly and cautiously. He stepped on to the verandah, and found a door near the window. Light came from under it. There was no sound at all, inside or outside.
The Saint kicked the door inwards and took two steps into the room. Across from him, unbound but unarmed, Jean Morland stared at him with wide-eyed horror and contempt. Between them, on the floor, Max Valmon and the man called Nails lay in the grotesque attitudes of sudden death.
He heard a single footfall behind him, and a gun jarred into his back. A voice that was somehow familiar, and yet distorted so that he didn’t recognise it at once, said, “Drop the gun.”
Simon stood still and dropped it.
The voice said, “Go on in.”
Simon obeyed. It seemed as if a time machine had been turned back and he was repeating a scene that had already been played once that night.
“Now turn round.”
The Saint turned, and saw Hank Reefe standing square in the doorway, frosty-eyed and expressionlessly leather-faced, with his old-fashioned Colt held level at his hip.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 8
