Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint
( Saint - 4 )
Leslie Charteris
LESLIE CHARTERIS
KNIGHT TEMPLAR
To
RAYMOND SAVAGE
LONDON, MAY, 1930
CHAPTER ONE
How Simon Templar sang a song, and found some of it true
1
THE SAINT SANG:
"Strange adventure! Maiden wedded
To a groom she'd never seen—
Never, never, never seen!
Groom about to be beheaded,
In an hour on Tower Green!
Tower, Tower, Tower Green!
Groom in dreary dungeon lying—"
" 'Ere," said an arm of the Law. "Not so much noise!"
The Saint stopped, facing round, tall and smiling and debonair.
"Good-evening—or morning—as the case may be," said the Saint politely.
"And what d'you think you're doing?" demanded the Law.
"Riding on a camel in the desert," said the Saint happily.
The Law peered at him suspiciously. But the Saint looked very respectable. The Saint always looked so respectable that he could at any time have walked into an ecclesiastical conference without even being asked for his ticket. Dressed in rags, he could have made a bishop look like two cents at a bad rate of exchange. And in the costume that he had donned for the night's occasion his air of virtue was overpowering. His shirtfront was of a pure and beautiful white that should have argued a pure and beautiful soul. His tuxedo, even under the poor illumination of a street lamp, was cut with such a dazzling perfection, and worn moreover with such a staggering elegance, that no tailor with a pride in his profession could have gazed unmoved upon such a stupendous apotheosis of his art. The Saint, as he stood there, might have been taken for an unemployed archangel—if he had remembered to wear his soft black felt a little less rakishly, and to lean a little less rakishly on his gold-mounted stick. As it was, he looked like a modern pugilist, the heir to a dukedom, a successful confidence man, or an advertisement for Wuggo. And the odour of sanctity about him could have been scented a hundred yards up-wind by a man with a severe cold in the head and no sense of smell.
The Law, slightly dazed by its scrutiny, pulled itself together with a visible effort.
"You can't," said the Law, "go bawling about the streets like that at two o'clock in the morning."
"I wasn't bawling," said the Saint aggrievedly. "I was singing."
"Bawling, I call it," said the Law obstinately.
The Saint took out his cigarette case. It was a very special case; and the Saint was very proud of it, and would as soon have thought of travelling without it as he would have thought of walking down Piccadilly in his pajamas. Into that cigarette case had been concentrated an enthusiastic ingenuity that was typical of the Saint's flair for detail—a flair that had already enabled him to live about twenty-nine years longer than a good many people thought he ought to have. There was much more in that case than met the eye. Much more. But it wasn't in action at that particular moment. The cigarette which the Law was prevailed upon to accept was innocent of deception, as also was the one which the Saint selected for himself.
"Anyway," said the Saint, "wouldn't you bawl, as you call it, if you knew that a man with a name like Heinrich Dussel had recently received into his house an invalid who wasn't ill?''
The Law blinked, bovinely meditative.
"Sounds fishy to me,'' conceded the Law.
"And to me," said the Saint. "And queer fish are my hobby. I'd travel a thousand miles any day to investigate a kipper that was the least bit queer on the kip—and it woudn't be for the first time. There was a smear of bloater paste, once, that fetched me from the Malay Peninsula via Chicago to a very wild bit of Devonshire. . . . But this is more than bloater paste. This is real red herring."
"Are you drunk?" inquired the Law, kindly.
"No," said the Saint. "British Constitution. Truly rural. The Leith police dismisseth us. ... No, I'm not drunk. But I'm thinking of possible accidents. So would you just note that I'm going into that house up there—number 90— perfectly sound and sane? And I shan't stay more than half an hour at the outside—voluntarily. So if I'm not out here again at two-thirty, you can walk right in and demand the body. Au revoir, sweetheart. ..."
And the Saint smiled beatifically, hitched himself off his gold-mounted stick, adjusted the rakish tilt of his hat, and calmly resumed his stroll and his song, while the Law stared blankly after him.
"Groom in dreary dungeon lying,
Groom as good as dead, or dying,
For a pretty maiden sighing—
Pretty maid of seventeen!
Seven-seven-seventeen!"
"Blimey," said the Law, blankly.
But the Saint neither heard nor cared what the Law said. He passed on, swinging his stick, into his adventure.
2
MEET THE SAINT.
His godfathers and his godmothers, at his baptism, had bestowed upon him the name of Simon Templar; but that coincidence of initials was not the only reason for the nickname by which he was far more widely known. One day, the story of how he came by that nickname may be told: it is a good story, in its way, though it goes back to the days when the Saint was nineteen, and almost as respectable as he looked. But the name had stuck. It was inevitable that it should stick, for obviously it had been destined to him from the beginning. And in the ten years that had followed his second and less godly baptism, he had done his very best to live up to that second name—according to his lights. But you may have heard the story of the very big man whose friends called him Tiny.
He looked very Saintly indeed as he sauntered up Park Lane that night.
Saintly . . . you understand . . . with the capital S. That was how Roger Conway always liked to spell the adjective, and that pleasant conceit may very well be carried on here. There was something about the way Simon wore the name, as there was about the way he wore his clothes, that naturally suggested capital letters in every context.
Of course, he was all wrong. He ought never to have been let loose upon this twentieth century. He was upsetting. Far too often, when he spoke, his voice struck disturbing chords in the mind. When you saw him, you looked, instinctively and exasperatedly, for a sword at his side, a feather in his hat, and spurs at his heels. There was a queer keenness in the chiselling of his tanned face, seen in profile—something that can only be described as a swiftness of line about the nose and lips and chin, a swiftness as well set off by the slick sweep of patent-leather hair as by the brim of a filibustering felt hat—a laughing dancing devil of mischief that was never far from the very clear blue eyes, a magnificently medieval flamboyance of manner, an extraordinary vividness and vital challenge about every movement he made, that too clearly had no place in the organization of the century that was afflicted with him. If he had been anyone else, you would have felt that the organization was likely to make life very difficult for him. But he was Simon Templar, the Saint, and so you could only feel that he was likely to make life very difficult for the organization. Wherefore, as a respectable member of the organization, you were liable to object....
And, in fact, objections had been made in due season—to such effect that, if anything were needed to complete the Saint's own private entertainment at that moment, it could have been provided by the reflection that he had no business to be in England at all that night. Or any other night. For the name of the Saint was not known only to his personal friends and enemies. It was something like a legend, a public institution; not many months ago, it had been headlined over every news
paper in Europe, and the Saint's trademark—a childish sketch of a little man with straight-line body and limbs, and a round blank head under an absurd halo—had been held in almost superstitious awe throughout the length and breadth of England. And there still reposed, in the desk of Chief Inspector Teal, at New Scotland Yard, warrants for the arrest of Simon Templar and the other two who had been with him in all his misdeeds—Roger Conway and Patricia Holm. Why the Saint had come back to England was nobody's business. He hadn't yet advertised his return; and, if he had advertised it, nothing is more certain than that Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal would have been combing London for him within the hour—with a gun behind each ear, and an official address of welcome according to the Indictable Offences Act, 1848, in his pocket....
Wherefore it was very good and amusing to be back in London, and very good and amusing to be on the trail of an invalid who was not ill, though sheltering in the house of a man with a name like Heinrich Dussel....
The Saint knew that the invalid was still there, because it was two o'clock on Sunday morning, and near the policeman a melancholy-looking individual was selling very early editions of the Sunday papers, apparently hoping to catch returning Saturday-night revellers on the rebound, and the melancholy-looking individual hadn't batted an eyelid as the Saint passed. If anything interesting had happened since the melancholy-looking individual had made his last report, Roger Conway would have batted one eyelid, and Simon would have bought a paper and found a note therein. And if the invalid who was not ill had left the house, Roger wouldn't have been there at all. Nor would the low-bodied long-nosed Hirondel parked close by. On the face of it, there was no connection between Roger Conway and the Hirondel; but that was part of the deception....
"Strange adventure that we're trolling:
Modest maid and gallant groom—
Gallant, gallant, gallant groom!
While the funeral bell is tolling,
Tolling, tolling—"
Gently the Saint embarked upon the second verse of his song. And through his manifest cheerfulness he felt a faint electric tingle of expectation. ...
For he knew that it was true. He, of all men living, should have known that the age of strange adventures was not past. There were adventures all around, then, as there had been since the beginning of the world; it was a matter for the adventurer to go out and challenge them. And adventure had never yet failed Simon Templar— perhaps because he had never doubted it. It might have been luck, or it might have been his own uncanny genius; but at least he knew, whatever it was he had to thank, that whenever and wherever anything was happening, he was there. He had been born to it, the spoiled child of a wild tempestuous destiny—born for nothing else, it seemed, but to find all the fun in the world.
And he was on the old trail again.
But this time it was no fluke. His worst enemy couldn't have said that Simon Templar hadn't worked for all the trouble he was going to find that night. For weeks past he had been hunting two men across Europe—a slim and very elegant man, and a huge and very ugly man—and one of them at least he had sworn to kill. Neither of them went by the name of Heinrich Dussel, even in his spare time; but Heinrich Dussel had conferred with them the night before in the slim and very elegant man's suite at the Ritz, and accordingly the Saint had become interested in Heinrich Dussel. And then, less than two hours before the Saint's brief conversation with the Law, had commenced the Incident of the Invalid who was not ill.
"Modest maiden will not tarry;
Though but sixteen year she carry,
She must marry, she must marry,
Though the altar be a tomb—
Tower, Tower, Tower tomb!"
Thus the Saint brought both his psalm and his promenade to a triumphant conclusion; for the song stopped as the Saint stopped, which was at, the foot of a short flight of steps leading up to a door—the door of the house of Heinrich Dussel.
And then, as Simon Templar paused there, a window was smashed directly above his head, so that chips of splintered glass showered onto the pavement all around him. And there followed a man's sudden sharp yelp of agony, clear and shrill in the silence of the street.
" 'Ere," said a familiar voice, "is this the 'ouse you said you were going into?"
The Saint turned.
The Law stood beside him, its hands in its belt, having followed him all the way on noiseless rubber soles.
And Simon beamed beatifically upon the Law.
"That's so, Algernon," he murmured, and mounted the steps.
The door opened almost as soon as he had touched the bell. And the Law was still beside him.
"What's wrong 'ere?" demanded the Law.
"It is nothing."
Dussel himself had answered the bell, suave and self-possessed—exactly as the Saint would have expected him to be.
"We have a patient here who is—not right in the head. Sometimes he is violent. But he is being attended to."
"That's right," said the Saint calmly. "I got your telephone message, and came right around."
He turned to the Law with a smile.
"I am the doctor in charge of the case," he said, "so you may quite safely leave things in my hands."
His manner would have disarmed the chief commissioner himself. And before either of the other two could say a word, the Saint had stepped over the threshold as if he owned the house.
"Good-night, officer," he said sweetly, and closed the door.
3
NOW THE UNKIND CRITIC may say that the Saint had opened his break with something like the most fantastic fluke that ever fell out of the blue; but the unkind critic would be wrong, and his judgment would merely indicate his abysmal ignorance of the Saint and all Saintly methods. It cannot be too clearly understood that, having determined to enter the house of Heinrich Dussel and dissect the mystery of the Invalid who was not Ill, Simon Templar had walked up Park Lane with the firm intention of ringing the bell, walking in while the butler was still asking him his business, closing the door firmly behind him, and leaving the rest to Providence. The broken window, and the cry that came through it, had not been allowed for in such nebulous calculations as he had made—admitted; but in fact they made hardly any difference to the general plan of campaign. It would be far more true to say that the Saint refused to put off his stroke by the circumstances, than to say that the circumstances helped him. All that happened was that an unforeseen accident intervened in the smooth course of the Saint's progress; and the Saint, with the inspired audacity that lifted him so high above all ordinary adventurers, had flicked the accident into the accommodating machinery of his stratagem, and passed on....
And the final result was unaltered; for the Saint simply arrived where he had meant to arrive, anyway—with his back to the inside of the door of Heinrich Dussel's house, and all the fun before him....
And Simon Templar smiled at Heinrich Dussel, a rather thoughtful and reckless smile; for Heinrich Dussel was the kind of man for whom the Saint would always have a rather thoughtful and reckless smile. He was short, heavily built, tremendously broad of shoulder, thin-lipped, with a high bald dome of a forehead, and greenish eyes that gleamed like glazed pebbles behind thick gold-rimmed spectacles.
"May I ask what you mean by this?" Drussel was blustering furiously.
The Saint threw out his hands in a wide gesture.
"I wanted to talk to you, dear heart.''
"And what do you imagine I can do for you?"
"On the contrary," said the Saint genially, "the point is—what can I do for you? Ask, and you shall receive. I'm ready. If you say 'Go and get the moon,' I'll go right out and get the moon—that's how I feel about you, sweetheart."
Dussell took a step forward.
"Will you stand away from that door? "
"No,'' said the Saint, courteous but definite.
"Then you will have to be removed by force."
"If you could spare me a moment—" began the Saint warily.
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But Heinrich Dussel had half turned, drawing breath, his mouth opening for one obvious purpose.
He could hardly have posed himself better.
And before that deep purposeful breath had reached Dussel's vocal cords on the return journey, his mouth closed again abruptly, with a crisp smack, under the persuasive influence of a pile-driving uppercut.
"Come into my study," invited the Saint, in a very fair imitation of Heinrich Dussel's guttural accent.
"Thank you," said the Saint in his own voice.
And his arms were already around Heinrich Dussel, holding up the unconscious man; and, as he accepted his own invitation, the Saint stooped swiftly, levered Dussel onto his shoulder, moved up the hall, and passed through the nearest door.
He did not stay.
He dropped his burden unceremoniously on the floor, and passed out again, locking the door behind him and putting the key in his pocket. Then, certainly, luck was with him, for, in spite of the slight disturbance, none of the household staff was in view. The Saint went up the stairs as lightly as a ghost.
The broken window had been on the first floor, and the room to which it belonged was easy to locate. The Saint listened for a couple of seconds at the door, and then opened it and stepped briskly inside.
The room was empty.
"Bother," said the Saint softly.
Then he understood.
"If the cop had insisted on coming in, he'd have wanted to see this room. So they'd have shifted the invalid. One of the gang would have played the part. And the real cripple—further up the stairs, I should think...."
And Simon was out of the empty room in an instant, and flashing up the next flight.
As he reached the upper landing, a man—a villainous foreign-looking man, in some sort of livery—emerged from a door.
The Saint never hesitated.
Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint s-4 Page 1
