The law awoke to this fact, and simultaneously to a rather alarmed recognition of the existence of the Black Wolves, after a week in which two factories in the North of England were the scenes of explosions which resulted in no little loss of life, and the bullet of an undiscovered sniper actually grazed across the back of the Home Secretary as he stepped into his car outside the House of Commons.
The law found Golter, but the man who had been detailed to follow him and report on his movements somehow contrived to lose him on the afternoon in which a Crown Prince drove in state through the streets of London on his way to a luncheon given by the Lord Mayor.
The procession was arranged to pass by way of the Strand and Fleet Street to the City. From a tiny office which he had rented for the purpose in Southampton Row, of which the police knew nothing, Golter had found an easy way to the roofs of the houses on the north side of Fleet Street. He sat there, in a more or less comfortable position, among the chimney-stacks, from which he could look down and see the street below, while armed men scoured London for a trace of him, and a worried Commissioner ordered a doubling of the plain-clothes detectives stationed along the route.
Golter was a careful and a thoughtful man, and he had a fair grounding in the principles of dynamics. He knew to an inch how high he was from the ground, and he had calculated exactly how many seconds a bomb would take to fall to the street; the fuses of the Mills bombs in his pockets were adjusted accordingly. Again, in Fleet Street, a little farther down towards the Strand, he had measured the distance between two lamp-posts. With the aid of a stop-watch he would discover how long the leading car took to pass between them; then, by consulting an elaborate chart which he had prepared, he would be able to learn at once, without further calculation, exactly at what instant he had to launch his bombs so that they would fall directly into the back of the Crown Prince’s car as it passed. Golter was proud of the scientific precision with which he had worked out every detail.
He smoked a cigarette, drumming his heels gently against the leads. It was fifteen minutes before the procession was due to arrive at that point, according to the official time-table, and already the street below was packed with a dense crowd which overflowed the pavements and wound hampering tentacles into the stream of traffic. The mass of people looked like ants, Golter thought. Bourgeois insects. He amused himself by picturing the ant-like confusion that would follow the detonation of his three bombs…
“Yes, it should be an interesting spectacle.”
Golter’s head snapped round as though it had been jerked by an invisible wire.
He had heard nothing of the arrival of the man who now stood over him, whose gentle, drawling voice had broken into his meditations far more shatteringly than any explosion could have done. He saw a tall, trim, lean figure in a grey fresco suit of incredible perfection, with a soft grey felt hat whose wide brim shaded pleasant blue eyes. This man might have posed for any illustration of the latest and smartest effort of Savile Row in the way of gents’ natty outfitting—that is, if he could have been persuaded to discard the automatic pistol, which is not generally considered to form an indispensable adjunct to What the Well-Dressed Man will Wear this Season.
“Extraordinarily interesting,” repeated the unknown, with his blue eyes gazing down in a rather dreamy way at the throng a hundred feet below. “From a purely artistic point of view, it’s a pity we shan’t be able to watch it.”
Golter’s right hand was sliding towards a bulging pocket. The stranger, with his automatic swinging in a lazy arc that centred over Golter’s stomach, encouraged the movement.
“But leave the pins in, Beautiful,” he murmured, “and pass ’em to me one by one…That’s a good boy!”
He took the bombs in his left hand as Golter passed them over, and handed them to someone whom Golter could not see—a second man who stood behind a chimney-stack.
A minute passed, in which Golter stood with his hands hanging loosely at his sides, waiting for a chance to make a grab at the gun which the stranger held with such an affectation of negligence. But the chance never came.
Instead, came a hand from behind the chimney-stack—a hand holding a bomb. The stranger took the bomb and handed it back to Golter.
“Put it in your pocket,” he directed.
The second and third followed, and Golter, with his coat once again dragged out of shape by the weight, stood staring at the stranger, who, he thought, must be a detective, and who yet behaved in such an incomprehensible manner.
“What did you do that for?” he demanded suspiciously.
“My own reasons,” answered the other calmly. “I am now leaving you. Do you mind?”
Suspicion—fear—perplexity—all the emotions chased and mingled with one another over Golter’s unshaven face. Then inspiration dawned in his pale eyes.
“So you aren’t a busy!”
The stranger smiled.
“Unfortunately for you—no. You may have heard of me. I am called the Saint…”
His left hand flashed in and out of his coat pocket in a swift movement, and Golter, in the grip of a sudden paralysis of terror, stared as if hypnotised while the Saint chalked his grotesque trade-mark on the chimney-stack.
Then the Saint spoke again.
“You are not human. You are a destroyer—an insane killer without any justification but your own lust for blood. If you had any motive, I might have handed you over to the police, who are at this moment combing London for you. I am here not to judge any man’s creed. But for you there can be no excuse…”
He had vanished when Golter looked round for him, wondering why the condemnation did not continue, and the roof was deserted. The Saint had a knack of disappearing like that.
The procession was approaching. Golter could hear the cheering growing rapidly louder, like the roar of many waters suddenly released from burst flood-gates. He peered down. A hundred yards away he could see the leading car crawling through the lane of human ants.
His brain was still reeling to encompass the understanding of what the Saint had come to do. The Saint had been there, accusing—and then he had gone, giving Golter back his bombs. Golter could have believed himself to have been the victim of an hallucination. But the fantastic sketch on the chimney-stack remained to prove that he had not been dreaming.
With an hysterical sweep of his arm, he smeared his sleeve over the drawing, and took from his pocket his stop-watch and the time-chart he had made. The leading car had just reached the first of the two lamp-posts on which he had based his calculations. He watched it in a kind of daze.
The Crown Prince drove in the third car. Golter recognised the uniform. The Prince was saluting the crowd.
Golter found himself trembling as he took the first bomb from his pocket and drew the pin, but he threw it on the very instant that his stop-watch and chart indicated.
“The true details of the case,” wrote The Daily Record, some days later, “are likely to remain a mystery for ever, unless the Saint should one day elect to come out into the open and elucidate them. Until then the curiosity of the public must be satisfied with the findings of the committee of Scotland Yard experts who have been investigating the affair—that in some way the Saint succeeded in so tampering with the fuses of the Mills bombs with which Golter intended to attempt the life of the Crown Prince that they exploded the moment he released the spring handle, thereby blowing him to pieces…”
“Whatever the opinions which may be expressed concerning the arrogance of this gentleman who presumes to take the law into his own lawless hands, it cannot be denied that in this case his intervention undoubtedly saved the life of our royal guest, and few will be found to deny that justice was done—though perhaps it was justice of too poetic a character to be generally accepted as a precedent…”
With this sensational climax, which put the name of the Saint on the lips of every man and woman in the civilised world, came the end of a clearly defined chapter in his history.
The
sensation died down, as the most amazing sensations will die down for lack of re-stimulation. In an open letter which was published in every newspaper throughout Europe, the Crown Prince offered his thanks to the unknown, and promised that the debt should not be forgotten if at any time the Saint should stand in need of help from high places. The British Government followed almost immediately with the offer of a free pardon for all past offences on condition that the Saint revealed himself and took an oath to turn his energy and ingenuity into more legitimate channels. The only answer was a considered letter of acknowledgment and regretful refusal, posted simultaneously to all the leading news-agencies.
“Unfortunately,” wrote the Saint, “I am convinced, and my friends with me, that for us to disband at the very moment when our campaign is beginning to justify itself in the crime statistics of London—and (which is even more important) in those more subtle offences against the moral code about which there can be no statistics—would be an act of indefensible cowardice on my part. We cannot be tempted by the mere promise of safety for ourselves to betray the motive which brought us together. The game is more than the player of the game…Also, speaking for myself, I should find a respectable life intolerably dull. It isn’t easy to get out of the rut these days: you have to be a rebel, and you’re more likely to end up in Wormwood Scrubs than Westminster Abbey. But I believe, as I have never believed anything before, that I am on the right road. The things of value are the common, primitive things. Justice is good—when it’s done fanatically. Fighting is good—when the thing you fight for is simple and sane and you love it. And danger is good—it wakes you up, and makes you live ten times more keenly. And vulgar swashbuckling may easily be the best of all—because it stands for a magnificent belief in all those things, a superb faith in the glamour that civilisation is trying to sneer at as a delusion and a snare…As long as the ludicrous laws of this country refuse me these, I shall continue to set those laws at defiance. The pleasure of applying my own treatment to the human sores whose persistent festering offends me is one which I will not be denied…”
And yet, strangely enough, an eagerly expectant public waited in vain for the Saint to follow up this astonishing manifesto. But day after day went by, and still he held his hand, so that those who had walked softly, wondering when the uncanny omniscience of the Unknown would find them out, began to lift up their heads again and boast themselves with increasing assurance, saying that the Saint was afraid.
A fortnight grew into a month, and the Saint was rapidly passing into something like a dim legend of bygone days.
And then, one afternoon in June, yelling newsboys spread a special edition of The Evening Record through the streets of London, and men and women stood in impatient groups on the pavements and read the most astounding story of the Saint that had ever been given to the Press.
It was the story that is told again here, as it has already been retold, by now, half a hundred times. But now it is taken from a different and more intimate angle, and some details are shown which have not been told before.
It is the story of how Simon Templar, known to many as the Saint (plausibly from his initials, but more probably from his Saintly way of doing the most un-Saintly things), came by chance upon a thread which led him to the most amazing adventure of his career. And it is also the story of Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how at one moment in that adventure he held the fate of two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died for an idea.
1
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WENT FOR A DRIVE, AND SAW A STRANGE SIGHT
Simon Templar read newspapers rarely, and when he did read them he skimmed through the pages as quickly as possible and gleaned information with a hurried eye. Most of the matter offered in return for his coppers was wasted on him. He was not in the least interested in politics; the announcement that the wife of a Walthamstow printer had given birth to quadruplets found him unmoved; articles such as “A Man’s Place Is in the Home” (by Anastasia Gowk, the brilliant authoress of Passion in Pimlico) left him completely cold. But a quarter-column, with photograph, in a paper he bought one evening for the racing results chanced to catch his roving gaze and roused a very faint flicker of attention.
Two coincidences led him from that idly assimilated item of news to a red-hot scent, the fascination of which for him was anything but casual.
The first came the next day, when, finding himself at Ludgate Circus towards one o’clock, it occurred to him to call in at the Press Club in the hope of finding someone he knew. He found Barney Malone, of The Clarion, and was promptly invited to lunch, which was exactly what he had been looking for. The Saint had an ingrained prejudice against lunching alone.
Conversation remained general throughout the meal, except for one bright interlude.
“I suppose there’s nothing new about the Saint?” asked Simon innocently, and Barney Malone shook his head.
“He seems to have gone out of business.”
“I’m only taking a rest,” Simon assured him. “After the calm, the storm. You wait for the next scoop.”
Simon Templar always insisted on speaking of the Saint as if he himself was that disreputable outlaw. Barney Malone, for all his familiarity with Simon’s eccentric sense of humour, was inclined to regard this affectation as a particularly aimless pleasantry.
It was half an hour later, over coffee, that the Saint recalled the quarter-column which had attracted his attention, and asked a question about it.
“You may be quite frank with your Uncle Simon,” he said. “He knows all the tricks of the trade, and you won’t disappoint him a bit if you tell him that the chief sub-editor made it up himself to fill the space at the last moment.”
Malone grinned.
“Funnily enough, you’re wrong. These scientific discoveries you read about under scare headlines are usually stunt stuff, but if you weren’t so uneducated you’d have heard of K. B. Vargan. He’s quite mad, but as a scientist his class is A1 at the Royal Society.”
“So there may be something in it?” suggested the Saint.
“There may, or there may not. These inventions have a trick of springing a leak as soon as you take them out of the laboratory and try using them on a large scale. For instance they had a death-ray years ago that would kill mice at twenty yards, but I never heard of them testing it on an ox at five hundred.”
Barney Malone was able to give some supplementary details of Vargan’s invention which the sub-editor’s blue pencil had cut out as unintelligible to the lay public. They were hardly less unintelligible to Simon Templar, whose scientific knowledge stopped a long way short of Einstein, but he listened attentively.
“It’s curious that you should refer to it,” Malone said, a little later, “because I was only interviewing the man this morning. He burst into the office about eleven o’clock, storming and raving like a lunatic because he hadn’t been given the front page.”
He gave a graphic description of the encounter.
“But what’s the use?” asked the Saint “There won’t be another war for hundreds of years.”
“You think so?”
“I’m told so.”
Malone’s eyebrows lifted in that tolerantly supercilious way in which a journalist’s eyebrows will sometimes lift when an ignorant outsider ventures an opinion on world affairs.
“If you live for another six months,” he said, “I shall expect to see you in uniform. Or will you conscientiously object?”
Simon tapped a cigarette deliberately on his thumb-nail.
“You mean that?”
“I’m desperately serious. We’re nearer to these things than the rest of the public, and we see them coming first. In another few months the rest of England will see it coming. A lot of funny things have been happening lately.”
Simon waited, suddenly keyed up to interest, and Barney Ma
lone sucked thoughtfully at his pipe, and presently went on:
“In the last month, three foreigners have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned for offences against the Official Secrets Act. In other words, espionage. During the same period, four Englishmen have been similarly dealt with in different parts of Europe. The foreign governments concerned have disowned the men we’ve pinched, but since a government always disowns spies as soon as they get into trouble, on principle, no one ever believes it. Similarly, we have disclaimed the four Englishmen, and, naturally, nobody believes us either—and yet I happen to know that it’s true. If you appreciate really subtle jokes, you might think that one over, and laugh next time I see you.”
The Saint went home in a thoughtful mood.
He had a genius that was all his own—an imaginative genius that would take a number of ordinary facts, all of which seemed to be totally unconnected, and none of which, to the eye of anyone but himself, would have seemed very remarkable, and read them into a signpost pointing to a mystery. Adventure came to him not so much because he sought it as because he brazenly expected it. He believed that life was full of adventure, and he went forward in the full blaze and surge of that belief. It has been said of a man very much like Simon Templar that he was “a man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears”; that saying might almost equally well have been said of the Saint, for he also, like Michael Paladin, had heard the sound of the trumpet, and had moved ever afterwards in the echoes of the sound of the trumpet, in such a mighty clamour of romance that at least one of his friends had been moved to call him the last hero, in desperately earnest jest.
“‘From battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us!’” he quoted once. “How can any live man ask for that? Why, they’re meat and drink—they’re the things that make life worth living! Into battle, murder, and sudden death, Good Lord, deliver me up to the neck! That’s what I say…”
Thus spoke the Saint, that man of superb recklessness and strange heroisms and impossible ideals, and went on to show, as few others of his age have shown, that a man inspired can swashbuckle as well with cloak and stick as any cavalier of history with cloak and sword, and there can be as much chivalry in the setting of a modern laugh as there can ever have been in the setting of a medieval lance, that a true valour and venture finds its way to fulfilment, not so much through the kind of world into which it happens to be born, as through the heart with which it lives.
The Saint Closes the Case (The Saint Series) Page 2
