12 The Saint in London (The Misfortunes of Mr Teal)

by Leslie Charteris

  The gentle click of a latch behind him made everyone spin round at once; and Patricia gave a little choking cry.

  "Well, well, well!" breathed the smiling man who stood just inside the door. "That's great stuff, Leo--but how on earth do you manage to remember all those words without notes?" It was the Saint.

  X

  He STOOD with his hands in his pockets and a freshly lighted cigarette tilting between his lips, with his hair blown awry by the sixty miles an hour he had averaged and the sparkle of the wind in his eyes; and Hoppy Uniatz stood beside him. According to their different knowledge, the others stared at him with various emotions registering on their dials; and the Saint smiled on them all impartially and came on in.

  "Hullo, Pat," he murmured. "I didn't know you'd asked the Y. M. C. A. to move in. Why didn't you tell me?" His keen blue eyes, missing nothing, came to rest on the gaudily covered volume that Farwill was clutching under his arm. "So you've taken up literature at last, Leo," he said. "I always thought you would."

  To say that Farwill and Iveldown were looking at him as if they had seen a ghost would be a trite understatement. They were goggling at him as if he had been the consolidated incarnation of all the spooks and banshees that ever howled through a maniac's nightmare. Their prosperous paunches were caving in like rubber balloons punctured with a sharp instrument; and it seemed as though all the inflation that escaped from their abdomens was going straight into their eyeballs. There was a sick blotchy pallor in their faces which suggested that they had been mentally spirited away onto the deck of a ship that was wallowing through all the screaming furies of the Horn.

  It was Farwill who first found his voice, It was not much of a voice--it was more like the croak of a strangling frog--but it produced words.

  "Inspector," it said, "arrest that man."

  Teal's somnolent eyes opened a little, and there was a gleam of tentative exhilaration in them. So, after all, it seemed as if he had been mistaken. He was not to be cheated of his triumph. His luck had turned.

  'I was going to," he said and started forward.

  'On what charge?" asked the Saint.

  "The same charge," said Teal inexorably. "Blackmail."

  The Saint nodded.

  "I see," he said and shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, well--no game can go on for ever, and we've had lots of fun." His gaze watched the advancing detective with a hint of wicked banter in it that belied the rueful resignation of his features; but Teal did not see that at once. "It'll be a sensational case," said the Saint. "Let me give you an idea."

  And without warning, with a flow of movements too swift to follow, he took a couple of paces sideways and aimed a punch at what was left of the Honourable Leo's prosperous corporation. Far-will instinctively jerked up his hands; and with a quick smile Simon turned the feint into a deft reach of his hand that caught Her Wedding Secret as it fell.

  Barrow and Teal plunged towards him simultaneously; and the Saint moved rapidly back-- past the automatic that had appeared like magic in the hand of a Mr. Uniatz who this time had not been artificially obstructed on the draw.

  "Stay back, youse guys!" barked Hoppy, in a voice quivering with exultation at his achievement; and involuntarily the two detectives checked.

  The two politicians, equally involuntarily taking the lead in any popular movement, went farther. They went back as far as the confines of the room would allow them.

  "You know your duty, Inspector," said the Home Secretary tremblingly. "I order you to arrest those men!"

  "Don't order a good man to commit suicide," said the Saint curtly. "Nobody's going to get hurt --if you'll all behave yourselves for a few minutes. I'm the bloke who's being arrested, and I want to enjoy it. Readings by the public prosecutor of extracts from this book will be the high spot of the trial, and I want to have a rehearsal."

  He turned the pages and quickly found a place.

  "Now here's a juicy bit that'll whet your appetites," he remarked. "It must have something to do with those reasons of state which you were burbling about, Leo. 'On May 15th I dined again with Farwill, then Secretary of State for War. He was inclined to agree with me about the potentialities of the Aix-la-Chapelle incident for increasing the friction between France and Germany; and on my increasing my original offer to ｣ｧ0,000 he agreed to place before the Cabinet------"

  "Stop!" shouted Farwill shrilly. "It's a lie!"

  The Saint closed his book and put it down; and very slowly the smile returned to his lips.

  "I shouldn't be so melodramatic as that," he said easily. "But of course it's a joke. I suppose it's really gone a bit too far."

  There was another long silence; and then Lord Iveldown cleared his throat.

  "Of course," he said in a cracked voice. "A joke."

  "A joke," repeated Farwill hollowly. "Ah--of course."

  Simon flicked his cigarette through the open window, and a rumble of traffic went by in the sudden quiet.

  "And not, I'm afraid," he murmured, "in the best of taste."

  His eyes strayed back to the staring gaze of Chief Inspector Teal.

  Of all those persons present, Mr. Teal did not

  seem the most happy. It would be inaccurate to say that he realized exactly what was going on. He didn't. But something told him that there was a catch in it. Somewhere in the undercurrents of that scene, he knew, there was something phony-something that was preparing to gyp him of his triumph at the very moment of victory. He had only the dimmest idea of how it was being worked; but he had seen it happen too many times before to mistake the symptoms.

  "What the heck is this joke?" he demanded.

  "Leo will tell you," said the Saint.

  Farwill licked his lips.

  "I--ah--the joke was so--ah--silly that I--ah . . . Well, Inspector, when Mr. Templar approached us with the offer of this--ah--literary work, and--ah--knowing his, if I may say so, notorious--ah--character, I--ah--that is, we-- thought that it would be humorous to play a slight--ah--practical joke on him, with your--ah --unwitting assistance. Ah------"

  "Whereas, of course, you meant to buy it all the time," Simon prompted him gently.

  "Ah--yes," said the Honourable Leo chokingly. "Buy it. Ah--of course."

  "At once," said Lord Iveldown quaveringly, taking out his checkbook.

  "Ah--naturally," moaned the Honourable Leo, feeling for his pen. "At once."

  "Two hundred thousand pounds, was it not, Mr. Templar?" said Lord Iveldown.

  The Saint shook his head.

  "The price has gone up a bit," he said. "It'll cost you two hundred and fifty thousand now--I need a new hat, and the Simon Templar Foundation isn't intended to pay for that."

  With his head swimming and the blood drumming in his ears, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal watched the checks being made out and blotted and handed over. He would never really know how the trick was turned. He only knew that Simon Templar was back; and anything could happen. . . .

  The parting words with which the Saint shepherded the gathering out of the door did nothing to enlighten him.

  "By the way, Leo," said the Saint, "you must remember to tell Neville to send on his share. If you toddle straight back home you'll find him waiting for you. He's standing guard over the Rose of Peckham with a great big gun--and for some reason or other he thinks Snowdrop is me."

  "Sir Humbolt Quipp came in and left a check," said Patricia Holm uncertainly.

  Simon took it and added it to his collection. He fanned out the four precious scraps of paper and brought the Honourable Leo Farwill's contribution to the top. Then he removed this one from the others and gazed at it for a long time with a rather rueful frown.

  "I'm afraid we let Leo off too lightly," he said.

  "When I begin to think what a splendiferous orgy of Teal-baiting we could have had with the Home Secretary permanently under our thumb, I almost wonder whether the Simon Templar Foundation is worth it."

  But later on he brightened.

  "It would ha
ve made life damned dull," he said.

  II

  THE HIGHER FINANCE

  .

  I

  One day some literary faker with more time to waste than I have may write a precious monograph about Doors. He will point out that Doors are both entrances and exits, and draw pseudo-philosophical conclusions about Life and Death. He will drag in the Door which American diplomats always insist on keeping Open, except when they are inside. He may turn aside to toy fancifully with the Door-consciousness of Wolves. He will inevitably mention some famous Doors; such as the Great Door of the cathedral of Poillissy-sur-Loire, on which Voltaire scribbled a rude epigram addressed to the Pope; the Golden Door of the temple of Pashka in Allahabad, on which are engraved 777 sacred cows; the Door of Cesare Borgia's guest house, which drove daggers into the backs of everyone who passed through it; and so forth. Probably he will unscrupulously invent all this part out of his own imagination, exactly as I have done, but nobody will be any the wiser.

  It is difficult, however, to see how the Door of the Barnyard Club, in London, could find a place in any such catalogue, being made of gimcrack deal and having no history or peculiarities. And yet, when it opened in the small hours of a certain morning to let Simon Templar out into Bond Street, it was for that brief moment the Door of Adventure.

  Simon Templar stood at the edge of the sidewalk and put a thin cigarette between his lips, letting the cool air of the night play on his forehead and freshen his lungs; but there was no indication that freshening was his vital need. His dark rakish face seemed to have walked straight out of the open windswept places of the earth rather than out of the strained stuffy atmosphere of a night club, and his gay blue eyes could not have been clearer and keener at any other hour of the day. His strong lawless mouth had a curve of half-amused expectancy, as if his day were just beginning and he had a long list of diverting things to do; but there was nothing on his mind. It was only that Simon Templar's days were always ready to begin, at any hour, whenever adventure offered.

  At his side Mr. Hoppy Uniatz, resplendent in a tight-waisted tuxedo and a shirtfront pinned together with a diamond stud, yawned cavernously and trod on the butt of his cigar. His was a less resiliently romantic soul, and he felt healthily depressed.

  "Say, boss," he remarked querulously, "is dat what dey calls a big night in dis city?"

  "I'm afraid it is," said the Saint.

  Mr. Uniatz had none of that ascetic nobility of character which enables the Englishman to suffer his legislators gladly. He spat mournfully into the road.

  "Chees," he said, with a gloomy emulsion of awe and disgust, "it ain't human. De last joint we're in, dey snatch off all de glasses becos it's twelve-toity. We pay two bucks each to get into dis joint, an' then we gotta pay five bucks fer a jug of lemonade wit' a spoonful of gin in it; an' all they got is a t'ree-piece band an' no floor show. An' de guys sits an' takes it! Why, if any joint had tried to gyp guys like dat in New York, even when we had prohibition, dey'd of wrecked it in two minutes." Mr. Uniatz sighed and reached for. the only apparent conclusion, unaware that other philosophers had reached it long before him: "Well, maybe dem Limeys ain't human, at dat."

  "You forget that this is a free country, Hoppy," murmured the Saint gently.

  He lighted his cigarette and blew out a wreath of smoke at the stars. A few spots of rain were beginning to fall from a bank of cloud that was climbing up from the west, and he scanned the street for a taxi to take them home. As if it had been conjured up in answer to his wish, a cab swung round the corner of Burlington Gardens and chugged towards them; and the Saint watched its approach hopefully. It was fifteen yards away when he saw that the flag was down, and shrugged ruefully. The setback was only an apt epilogue to a consistently inauspicious evening.

  "We'd better walk," he said.

  They turned down towards Piccadilly; and then, as they fell into step, he heard the rattle of the taxi die down and looked back over his shoulder. It had stopped outside the entrance of the Barnyard Club.

  The Saint caught Hoppy's arm.

  "Hold on," he said. "The luck's changed. We stay dry after all."

  They strolled back towards the spot where this minor miracle stood panting metallically while its passenger alighted. It was a girl, he saw as she stood, fumbling with her bag.

  "I'm afraid I haven't anything smaller," she was saying; and he heard that her voice was low and pleasant.

  The driver grunted and climbed down laboriously from his box. Standing in the gutter, he unbuttoned his overcoat, his coat, his waistcoat, his cardigan, and part of his shirt, and began a slow and painful search through the various strange and inaccessible places where London taxi drivers secrete their small change. From scattered areas of his anatomy he collected over a period of time an assortment of coins and looked at them under the light.

  "Sorry, miss, I can't do it," he said at length and began phlegmatically to dress himself again.

  "I'll get change inside," said the girl.

  But Simon Templar had other ideas. They had been growing on him while the driver disrobed, and the Saint had always been an opportunist. He liked the girl's voice and her slim figure and the way she wore her clothes; and that was enough for a beginning.

  "Excuse me," he said. "Can I help?" She looked up with a start, and for the first time he saw her face clearly. It was small and oval, with a fascinatingly tip-tilted nose and a mouth that would smile easily; her deep brown hair, smooth and straight to the curled ends, framed her face in a soft halo of darkness. But even while he saw her brown eyes regarding him hesitantly he wondered if the dim light had deceived him--or if he had really seen, as he had thought he saw, a leap of sudden fear in them when she first looked up.

  "We're only trying to change a pound," she said.

  He took the note from her fingers and spread out a line of silver coins on her palm in return. She paid off the driver, who proceeded to bury the money in the outlying regions of his clothing; and she would have thanked him and gone on, but the Saint's other ideas had scarcely been tapped.

  "Are you determined to go in there?" he asked, waving his pound note disparagingly in the direction of the Barnyard Club. "Hoppy and I didn't think much of it. Besides, you haven't got your pillow."

  "Why should I want a pillow?"

  "For comfort. Everybody else in there is asleep," he explained, "but the management doesn't provide pillows. They just create the demand."

  The brown eyes searched his face doubtfully, with a glimpse of hunted suspicion that need not have been there. And once again he saw what he had seen before, the glimmering light of fear that went across her gaze--or was it across his own imagination?

  "Thanks so much for helping me--good-night," she said in a breath and left the Saint staring after her with a puzzled smile till the door of the club closed behind her.

  Simon tilted back his hat and turned resignedly to take possession of the asthmatic cab which was left as his only consolation; and as he turned, a hand fell on his shoulder.

  "Do you know that girl?" asked a sleepy voice.

  "Apparently not, Claud," answered the Saint sorrowfully. "I tried to, but she didn't seem to be sold on the idea. Life has these mysteries."

  Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal studied him with half-closed eyes whose drowsiness was nothing but an affectation. His pudgy hand came down from the Saint's shoulder and took away the pound note which he was still holding; and the Saint's brows suddenly came down an invisible fraction of an inch.

  "You don't mind if I have a look at this?" he said.

  It was not so much a question as an authoritative demand; and a queer tingle of supernatural expectation touched Simon Templar's spine for an instant and was gone. For the first time since the . hand fell on his shoulder he looked beyond the detective's broad and portly form and saw another solid bowler-hatted figure, equally broad but a shade less portly, kicking its regulation rubber heels a few paces away, as if waiting for the conversation to conclude. T
he Saint's suddenly quiet and watchful eyes swerved along the sidewalk in the other direction, and saw two other men of the same unmistakable pattern engrossed in inaudible discussion in the shadow of a shop doorway on his right. All at once, without a sound that his unguarded ears had noticed, the deserted street had acquired a population. ...

  A tiny pulse began to beat in the Saint's brain, a pulse that was little more than the echo of his own heart working steadily through a moment of utter physical stillness; and then he drew a deep lungful of air through his cigarette and let the smoke trickle out in a slow feather through the sparse twinkling beads of rain. After all, the night had not failed him. It had merely been teasing. What it would have to offer eventually he still did not know; but he knew that three men out of the mould which he saw do not abruptly assemble in Bond Street, materializing like genii out of the damp paving stones at two o'clock in the morning, and bringing Chief Inspector Teal with them, for no other reason than that they have been simultaneously smitten with an urge to discover at first hand whether the night life of London is as dull as it is universally reputed to be. And wherever and whenever such a deputation of official talent was gathered together, Simon Templar had a potential interest in the proceedings.

  "What's the matter with it?" he inquired thoughtfully.

  Mr. Teal straightened up slowly from his examination of the banknote under one of the taxi's feeble lights. He took out his wallet and folded the bill in deliberately.

  "You won't mind if I look after it for you?" he said, with the same authoritative decision.

  "Help yourself," murmured the Saint lavishly. "Are you starting a collection, or something? I've got a few more of those if you'd like 'em."

  The detective buttoned his coat and glanced towards the two men who were conversing in the adjacent doorway. Without appearing to interrupt their conversation, they moved out onto the pavement and came nearer.

  "I'm surprised at you, Saint," he said, with what in anyone else would have been a tinge of malicious humour, "being taken in with a thing like that at your age. Is this the first time you've seen a bit of slush?"