He looked at the litter of curled wood shavings on the opposite seat, and then up at the partition.
"I suppose you heard all you wanted to?" he said.
The reply came as a surprise to him, in a wry grin that warped its way across the man's face of bitter fatalism.
"I heard nothing, mein lieber Freund. Marcovitch heard— that little cub of the young jackal. If my gun had not stuck in my pocket you would have found him here instead of me."
"He was listening here when you found him?"
"Ja. And I think he has heard too much. You had better kill him quickly, Herr Templar—he will be troublesome."
Krauss coughed painfully; and there was blood on his handkerchief. Then he raised his eyes and saw the uniform of another ticket inspector in the corridor outside, and he seemed to smile cynically under his make-up. As the door grated open again he pulled himself together with an effort of will that must have been almost super-human. It was the most eerie performance that the Saint had ever seen, and it left him dumb with wonder at the magnificent sardonic courage of it.
Krauss jerked himself almost upright in his corner and sat there unsupported, with his hands clasped calmly on his lap. He met the Saint's eyes expressionlessly, and spoke in a voice that rang out oddly with the iron strength of his self-control— a voice that hadn't the minutest tremor in it—as if he were merely setting the trivial capstone on an ephemeral argument.
"After all," he said, "when one is confronted with a summons, one can still pay one's debts with a good grace."
Simon groped around for his ticket and offered it to be clipped.
And Josef Krauss did the same. That was the one simple act with which he paid his debt in the only way that was left to him. He did it with an unflinching rendering of the benevolent and rather fatuous smile that belonged to his disguise, playing out the last lines of his part without a fault, while the hot stab of death seared bitterly into his lungs.
He received his ticket back, and beamed at the inspector.
"We come at half past-eleven to Köln, nicht wahr?"
"At eleven thirty-eight, mein Herr."
"So. Now I am very tired. Will you have to disturb me at Wurzburg and Mainz?"
A note rustled in his hand, and the inspector accepted it graciously.
"If you will allow me to keep your ticket until after we have left Mainz, hochehrwürdener Herr, I will see that your sleep is not interrupted."
"Herzlichen Dank!"
The official bowed his way out respectfully—he had pocketed a tip that would have been notable at any time, and which became almost an epoch-making event when the donor's garb confessed to a vocation whose members are rarely able to compete with millionaires in purchasing the small luxuries of travel. The door closed after him; and Simon turned slowly from watching him go, and saw the dour fatalism grinning again from Krauss's eyes.
"At least, my death will put you to no inconvenience," he said.
Then the supernatural endurance which had shored him up through those last minutes seemed to fall away as if the kingpins had been wiped out of it, and he sagged back with a little sigh.
Simon leaned over and dried a thin trickle of blood from one corner of the relaxed mouth. The glazing eyes stared at him mockingly, and Krauss fought for a breath. He spoke once more, but his voice was so low that the Saint only just caught the words.
"Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamont. . . . Er ist . . . wirklich . . . preislos ..."
Then he was silent.
Simon Templar rose quietly to his feet. He put out a steady hand and pressed the lids down over the derisive eyes that had gone suddenly blind and rigid in their orbits; and then he looked round and saw Monty Hayward in the doorway. Patricia Holm came in behind him.
"You know, Simon," said Monty, after a moment's eloquent stillness, "if you show me a few more stiffs, I believe I shall begin to get quite used to it."
"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint laconically.
He took out his cigarette case and canted a cigarette gently into his mouth, facing the others soberly, while they searched for the meaning of his terseness.
"Did you have trouble with that ticket inspector?" hazarded Patricia.
"Not one little bit." The Saint looked at her straightly. "There wasn't any cause for it. You see, Josef figured he had a bill to pay. He told the inspector he wanted to go to sleep, and tipped him like a prince not to be disturbed till we get to Cologne."
Slowly the other two built up in their minds the full significance of that curt explanation, while the only sound in the compartment was the harsh rattle and jar of their race over the metals. It was a silence which paid its inevitable tribute to the code by which the man in the corner had ordered his grim passing.
"Did Josef make that hole?" queried Monty Hayward presently.
"No. Marcovitch did that—the boy friend who tailed you on board. Josef walked in on him, and lost the draw. The last I saw of Marcovitch, he was busting all records down towards the brake van. And I guess he's my next stop."
The Saint pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and walked past, out into the corridor. Patricia and Monty followed him. They lined up outside; and the Saint drew at his cigarette and gazed through a window into the unrolling landscape.
"Not the three of us," he said. "We aren't muscling in. Pat —I think it's your turn for a show. There may be trouble; and the ungodly are liable to be smooth guys before the Lord. I'd like to have you a carriage length behind me. Keep out of sight—and watch your corners. If the party looks tough, beat it quietly back and flag Monty."
"O. K., Chief."
"Monty, you stay around here till you're sent for. Get talking to someone—and keep talking. Then you'll be in balk. You're the reserve line. If we aren't back in twenty minutes, try and find out what's wrong. And see your gun's working!"
"Right you are, old sportsman."
"And remember your wife and children," said the Saint piously.
He turned on his heel and went roaming down the train, humming an operatic aria under his breath. The decks were clearing for action in fresh earnest, and that suited him down to the ground. And yet a little bug of vague perplexity was starting to nose around in the dark backgrounds of his brain, nibbling about in the impenetrable hinterlands of intuition like the fret of a tiny whetstone. It blurred fitfully on the tenuous outfringings of a deep-buried nerve, sending dim flitters of irritation telegraphing up into the obscure recesses of his consciousness; and every one of those messages feathered up a replica of the same ragged little question mark into the sleek line of his serenity. Ten tunes in a minute he glossed the line down again, and ten times in a minute the identical finicky interrogation smudged through it like a wisp of fabric trailed across an edge of wet paint.
Still humming the same imperturbable tune, he came to the end of a coach and eased himself cautiously round into the connection tunnel. With equal caution he stepped across the swaying platforms and emerged circumspectly into the foyer of the next car. Down the length of the alleyway ahead he saw only a small female infant with platinum blonde pigtails, and continued on his way with unruffled watchfulness.
The dying words of Josef Krauss were ticking over in his mind as a kind of monotonous accompaniment to the melody that carolled contentedly along with him as he walked. They repeated themselves in a dozen different languages, word by word and letter by letter, wheeling and countermarching and forming fours in an infinite variety of restless patterns with all the aimless efficiency of a demonstration platoon of trained soldiers—and with precisely as much intelligence. They went through their repertoire of evolutions like a clockwork machine; and it just didn't mean a thing. They ended up exactly where they started: two simple sentences spoken in a voice that had been so weak as to be incapable of expression, qualified by nothing but the enigmatical derision in the doomed man's eyes. Simon could still see those eyes as vividly as if they had been photographed o
n the air a yard beyond his nose, and the bland, flat gibe in them was the most baffling riddle he had encountered since he began wondering why the female corset should almost invariably be made in the same grisly shade of pink.
Hands still resting loosely in his pockets, Simon Templar continued on his gentle promenade. Nearly every compartment he peered into yielded its quota of specimens for observation, but Marcovitch was not among them. Apart from that serious omission, any philanthropist in the widest sense would have found ample material on which to test the stamina of his eccentric virtue. All along the panorama which unfolded to the Saint's roving eye, other excrescences upon the cosmos roosted at regular intervals in their upholstered pens, each tending his own little candle of witness to God's patronage of the almost human race. Simon looked at them all, and felt his share of the milk of human kindness curdling under the strain. But the second most important question in his mind remained unanswered. It was still probable that Marcovitch was not alone. And if he was not alone, the amount of support he had with him was still an entirely nebulous quantity. The Saint had received no clue by which he could pick out the problematical units of that support from the array of smug bipeds which had passed under his eyes. They might have been there in dozens; or he mightn't have seen one of them yet There was no evidence. It was a gamble on blind odds, and the Lord would have to provide.
Thus the Saint came through to the end of the last carriage, and still he had not seen Marcovitch. He stopped there for a moment, drawing the last puff from his cigarette and flattening the butt under his toe. One episode in his last adventure in England was still far from fading out of his memory, and the remembrance of it sent a sudden ripple of anticipation pulsing through his muscles. He knew that he had not lost Marcovitch. On the contrary—he was just going to meet him. And most assuredly there would be trouble. . . .
A gay glimmer of the Saintly fighting smile touched his lips. The pain which had afflicted him during his patient survey of so much unbeautiful humanity was gone altogether. He had forgotten the very existence of those anonymous boils on the universe. Just one more stage south of him was the brake van, and Simon Templar went towards it with a new unlighted cigarette in his mouth and his hands transferred to his coat pockets. He could have reached out and touched the handle when he saw it jerk and twist under his eyes, and leapt back round the corner. He had one glimpse of the man who came stumbling out—a man in the railroad uniform, capless, with a gash over his temple and his face straining to a shout of terror. It didn't require any genius to reconstruct the whole inside history of that frantic apparition: Simon had no time to think about it anyway, but he guessed enough without thinking. The thud of a silenced gun was one of the diverse incidents that tumbled hectically into one crowded second of lightning action in which there was positively no time for meditation. In the same second Simon caught the brakeman by the arm as he flung past.
"Verweile doch—du hist zu schnell," said the Saint gently. They were face to face for an instant of time; and Simon saw the man's eyes wide and staring. "Let's take a walk," said the Saint.
He screwed the wrist he was holding up into the nape of the brakeman's neck, and pushed him back into the van. There was another shot as they came through, and the man flopped forward like a dead weight. Simon let go and let him fall sideways. Then he kicked the door shut behind him and stood with his shoulders lined up square against it, with his feet spaced apart and three quarters of his weight balancing on his toes.
The cigarette slanted up into a filibustering angle as he smiled.
"Hullo, Uglyvitch," he said.
Marcovitch showed his teeth over the barrel of an automatic. There were four other men round him; and the blithe Saintly gaze swept over them in an arc of affectionate greeting.
"Feelin' happy, boys?" drawled the Saint. "It's a grand day for fireworks." He looked past them at the piles of litter on the floor of the van. Every mailbag had been ripped open, and the contents were strewn across the scenery like the landmark of a megalomaniac's paper-chase. Letters had been torn through and parcels slit across and discarded in a search that had winnowed that vanload of mail through a fine-meshed sieve. "Somebody getting married?" asked the Saint interestedly. "Or is the confetti for me?"
There was a tantalizing invitation in the slow lift of his eyebrows that matched the interrogative inflexion of his voice. Quite coolly he sized up the strength of the men before him, and just as coolly he posed himself in the limelight for them to return the compliment. And he saw them hesitate. If he had been blindfolded he could have deduced that hesitation equally well from the one vital fact that he was still alive. The wide smiling insolence of his unblinking candour, the barefaced effrontery of his very artlessness, walled them into that standstill in a way that no other approach could have done. While it lasted, it held them up as effectively as a regiment of Thomson guns. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that there was no more in it than met the eye. It dangled them on red-hot tenterhooks of uncertainty, peeling their eyes sore with suspicion of the trap they couldn't see.
"Well?"
Marcovitch forced the monosyllable out of his throat in a hoarse challenge that indexed his embarrassment to the last decimal point; and the Saint smiled again.
"This is an auspicious occasion, brother," he remarked amiably. "I've always wanted to know just what it feels like to be a slab-faced little squirt of dill-water with a dirty neck and no birth certificate; and here you are—the very man to tell me. Could you unbosom for us, little flower?"
Marcovitch licked his lips. He was still casting around for the one necessary hint that would give him confidence to tighten up on the trigger of his gun and send an ounce of swift and unanswerable death snarling into the easy target in front of him. His knuckle was white for the pull-off, the automatic trembling ever so slightly in the suppressed tension of his hand.
"What else have you got to say, Templar?"
"Lots. Have you heard the one about the old farmer named Giles, who suffered acutely——"
"Perhaps you were looking for something?"
The question came in a vicious monotone that dared a direct reply. And the Saint knew that his margin of time for stalling was wearing thin as a wafer under the impatient rasp of the Russian's overstressed nerves.
"Sure—I was taking a look round."
He flaunted Marcovitch eye to eye, with that heedless little smile playing up uncloudedly to the tilt of his cigarette, and his fingers curling evenly round the grip of his own gun. The twitch of a muscle would have roared finis for Marcovitch in the middle of any one of those sentences; but Simon Templar knew when he was deadlocked. He knew he was deadlocked then, and he had known it ever since he stepped into the van. He could have dropped Marcovitch at his pleasure, but the remaining four men represented just so many odds against any human chance of surviving to boast about it. And the Saint was not yet tired of life. He bluffed the deadlock without turning a hair—smiled calmly at it and asked it to play ball—because that was the only thing to do. Any other line would have sung his requiem without further debate. But he knew that his only way out was along the precarious alleyways of peace with honour—with black italics for the peace, if anything. It was unfortunate, admittedlly, but it was one of the immutable verities of the situation. He had breezed in to take a peek at the odds, and there they were in all their mathematical scaliness. A tactful and strategic withdrawal announced itself as the order of the day.
"I just thought I might find some crown jewels," said the Saint; and Marcovitch steadied his automatic.
"Did you?"
Simon nodded. His level gaze slid down the other's coat and detected a bulge in one pocket that signified as much as he required to know.
"Yeah. Only you got here first." Lower down, he caught a gleam of reflected light from the floor. "Excuse me—I think you missed something."
He took a pace forward stooping as if to pick up the stone.
&n
bsp; Then he hurled himself at the knees of the nearest man like the bolt from a crossbow. Marcovitch fired at the same moment, but the Saint's luck held. His impetus somersaulted him clean over the sprawling body of his victim, and he rolled over like a scalded eel and ducked behind the struggling breastwork. His left hand whipped round the man's waist and fastened on the man's gun wrist, holding him in position by the sheer strength of one arm.
"Sorry about this," said the Saint
The others paused for a second, and in that breathing space the Saint got to his feet again, bringing his human shield up with him in a heave of eruptive effort. He backed towards the door, reached it, and got it open; then the man half broke from his hold in a flurry of cursing fight, and Simon flung him away and leapt through the door with a bullet crashing past his ear. Patricia Holm was outside, and the Saint caught her in his arms and spun her round before she could speak.
"Run for it!" he rapped. "This is why angels have wings!"
He thrust her on; and then his eye fell on the emergency rescue outfit in its glass-fronted case on the wall beside him. He let go his gun and put his elbow through the glass, snatching the light axe from its bracket, and ran backwards with it swinging in his hand. Everything was a matter of split seconds in that extraordinarily discreet getaway, and no one knew better than Simon Templar that only an exhibition of agility that would make cats look silly was going to skin a ninth life out of the hornets' nest that had blown up under his feet He had been labelled for the long ride from the moment he had entered that raided brake van: the urgent menace of it had been flaming at him through the atmosphere as plainly as if it had been chalked up on the wall. And the Saint felt appropriately self-effacing. ... As the leading gunman came out of the van, Simon drew back his hand and sent the axe whistling down the corridor in a long, murderous parabola. The man let out an oath and threw up his arms to save his skull—short of committing suicide, he had no option in the matter—and that distraction gave Simon the few seconds' start he needed. He raced up behind the girl and swung her into the nearest compartment, and its solitary occupant looked up from her Ethel M. Dell and displayed a familiar face freezing into a glare of indignant horror.
The Saint's Getaway Page 12
