The Saint's Getaway

by Leslie Charteris

  He went eight kilometers beyond Treuchtlingen on the Ansback road, and abandoned the truck within sight of a cross­roads which would annoy the pursuit still more. They dou­bled back across country, for there were other travellers on the road, and the alarm would soon be spreading like a forest fire.

  "This police force will just hate me before I'm through," said the Saint lightly; and then he laughed. "What'll you do with your share of the boodle, Monty?"

  For once it never occurred to Monty Hayward to question whether that share would ever materialize.

  "I haven't had time to think about it," he said. "I suppose I shall spend most of it on fares—trying to keep out of jail."

  The list of crimes for which he could be tried and almost certainly convicted had faded into the dim outskirts of his consciousness like a tally of old scars. The prospects for his future had gone the same way, Like a distant appointment with the dentist. And yet he knew, from the swift sidelong glance which answered his thoughtless remark, that the Saint had not forgotten. The Saint was thinking of the same thing, even then.

  Monty fell into a kind of reverie as he walked. He knew that the Saint was quietly searching for a scheme that would clear up the tangle and allow Monty Hayward at least to go free, and for a while he allowed himself to fancy that even such a forlorn hope as that might be carried through by a man to whom no hope seemed too forlorn for a dice with the gods. Suppose the miracle had been worked, and the hue and cry spumed past him like a turning tide, leaving him to dry his wings far up on the shore? . . . Then there would be silence for a week or so, broken at length by a characteristic message of salutation to announce that a worthy proportion of the boodle, mysteriously converted into sterling, had been credited to him through his bank—and tell Ann to have a large plateful of those cakes hot from the oven for him next time he called. That would be the Saintly method—a conclusive share-out that precluded all possibility of refusal. And an un-regenerate patchwork of a letter in which every vigorous line would bring back the tang of a ridiculous glamour. . . . And what then? The Consolidated Press, the snug office, the regular hours, the respectable week-ends, the everlasting discussion or rough-neck plots with swan-necked authors, the barometric eye on the circulation figures every Monday. Or an even dead­lier retirement, with a sports car and a yacht for toys, Medi­terranean summers, luxury cruises, and the bromidic gossip of other douce, unambitious parasites who had the whole world for their playground and could only see it as a race track or a tennis court. In either alternative, the same end­less quest for a meaning in life that he had come near to grasping on one wild drive through the Bavarian hills. It gave him a queer feeling of emptiness and futility; and he said very little more during that walk back into the town.

  Simon Templar also was silent. There had been times when he had deliberately tried to shut out from his mind the respon­sibility for Monty Hayward's predicament, and yet it had never been very far below the surface of his thoughts. He had ig­nored it, joked with it, passed it over; but now, with the tight­ening of the net round them, it was brought home to him as another debt that was still to be paid.

  He picked their route with an unerring instinct: to Monty Hayward it seemed almost inconceivable that such a journey could be made in broad daylight without at least one casual observer to see them pass, but the Saint achieved it. There was a spring in his stride and a fighting line to his mouth that told their own tale. For him the story could have only one denoue­ment; but the precious minutes were ticking up against them, and the time he had to play with was hacked sharp and square out of the schedule of destiny. Three hours, perhaps, he might allow for the local gendarmerie to amuse themselves with their squad cars and bloodhounds; but inside that limit the Higher Command would get its circus licked into shape. The Higher Command, with its coat off and the arrears of Löwenbräu oozing out of its stagnant pores, would be fusing telephone wires in all directions with the coordinating groundwork of a cordon that would demand identification papers from a mi­grating tapeworm. The Higher Command, with its ineffable moustachios fairly bristling to avenge the affronts which had been sprayed upon them, would be winnowing through the enclosed area in an almighty clean-up that would fan the pants of every citizen in that peaceful community. The Higher Command, in short, would be taking a personal interest in the gala; and when that time came Simon Templar had no de­sire to be around.

  It was six o'clock when Treuchtlingen received them again, letting them into its back streets through a narrow path be­tween two houses—less than fourteen hours since that moment by the bridge in Innsbruck when Monty Hayward of his own unsuspecting free will had launched them on that harebrained steeplechase. The town seemed quiet enough. Like the core of a cyclone, it was a paradoxical oasis of tranquillity within the belt of official spleen that must have been raging round it. The Saint and Monty plunged into it as if the mayor were their personal friend, and no one paid any attention to them; but the Saint had expected that much immunity. Doubtless the next day's newspapers would inform him that his exploits had roused the neighbourhood to a fever of indignation, but if he had hoped to be regaled with the magnificent spectacle of Treuchtlingen's aldermen woofling up and down the main street with their ties under their ears and the veins standing out on the backs of their necks he would have been disap­pointed. Treuchtlingen went about its daily business, and left any woofling that might be called for to the authorities who were paid to woofle on suitable occasions. It was a sidelight on the social system which deputes its emotions to a handful of salaried wooflers that had stood the Saint in good stead before; and yet perhaps only Simon knew how thin was the veneer of apathy on which his bluff was based.

  But once they were inside the town concealment was impos­sible, and the only way to proceed was by that sheer arrogance of brass-neckedness in which the Saint's nerve had never failed him. They located the police station without difficulty and walked past it. Farther on, a heaven-sent Weinstube swam into their ken; and Monty Hayward realized that his throat had beeH parched for hours. He glared at the temptation like a starving rabbi resisting a fat slice of ham, but the Saint saw no objection.

  "Why shouldn't we?" drawled the Saint. "We don't want to roam about the streets. We can't go into a Konditorei—they'd think there was something wrong with us. Why not?"

  Their trail turned through the doors. It was Simon who called for beer and sausages, and produced a packet of evil-smelling cigarettes from his overalls. Monty began to wish that he had suffered his thirst in silence: he had caught a smile in the Saint's eye which forboded more mischief.

  "I have been thinking," said the Saint.

  He broke off while their order was placed on the stained wooden table in front of them. To fill up the interval he smiled winningly at the barmaid. She smiled back, disclosing a faceful of teeth that jutted out over, her lower lip like a frozen Niagara of ivory. The Saint watched her departure with some emotion; and then he turned to Monty again and raised his glass. They were in an isolated corner of the room where their conversation could not be overheard.

  "Great thoughts, Monty," said the Saint.

  "I suppose you must think sometimes," conceded Monty discouragingly, without any visible eagerness to probe deeper into the matter. He swilled some Nürnberger round his palate with great concentration. "Why can't they make beer like this in England?" he asked, pulling out the best red herring he could think of.

  "Because of your Aunt Emily," said the Saint, whose pa­tience could be inexhaustible when once he had made up his mind. "In America they have total prohibition, and the beer is lousy. In England they have semi-prohibition, in the shape of your Aunt Emily's wall-eyed Licensing Laws, and the beer is mostly muck. This is a free country where they take a proper pride in their beer, and if you tried to put any filthy chemi­cals in it you'd find yourself in the can. The idea of your Aunt Emily is that beer-drinkers are depraved anyway, and there­fore any poison is good enough to pump into their stomachs —and the rest is a qu
estion of degree. Now let's get back to business. I have been thinking."

  Monty sighed.

  "Tell me the worst."

  "I've been thinking," said the Saint, with his mouth full of sausage, "that we ought to do a job of work."

  He took another draught from his glass and went on merci­lessly.

  "We are disguised as workmen, Monty," he said, "and there­fore we ought to work. We can't stay here indefinitely, and Nina'll only just have got started on the pump-handle. That police station looked lonely to me, and I'd feel happier if we were on the spot"

  "But what d'you think you're going to do?" protested Monty half-heartedly. "You can't go to the door and ask if they've got any chairs to mend.'r

  The Saint grinned.

  "I don't think I could ever mend a chair," he said. "But I know something else I could do, and I've always wanted to do it. I noticed a swell site for it right opposite that police sta­tion. We'll be moving as soon as you're ready."

  Monty Hayward finished his beer with rather less enthusi­asm than he had started it, while Simon clinked money on the table and treated himself to another yard of the barmaid's teeth. It was on the tip of Monty's tongue to spread out a bar­rage of other and less half-hearted protests—to say that the jam was tight enough as they were without giving it any gratui­tous chances—but something else rose up in his mind and stopped him. And he knew at the same time that nothing would have stopped the Saint. He caught that smile in the Saint's eye again; but now it was aimed straight at him, with a sprin­kling of banter in it, cutting clean as a rapier thrust to his in­most thoughts. It stripped the meaningless habit of lukewarm criticism clear away from him, taking him back to other mo­ments in those fourteen crowded hours which he had lately been remembering with a contentment that he could not have explained in words. It brought him face to face with a self that was still unfamiliar to him, but which would never be un­familiar again. In that instant of utter self-knowledge he felt as if he had broken out of a bondage of heavy darkness; he was a free man for the first time in his life.

  "O. K.," he said.

  They went out into the streets again, finding them softened by the first shadows of twilight. Monty was still wondering what new lunacy had brewed itself in the Saint's brain, but he asked no more questions.

  Men and women passed them on the pavements, sparing them no more than a vacant glance which observed nothing.

  Monty began to feel the flush of a growing confidence. After all, there was nothing about him which could legitimately induce a sane population to stand still and gape at him. He looked again at the Saint, detachedly, and saw a subtle change in his leader which increased that assurance. The Saint was slouching a little, putting his weight more ruggedly on his heels, with his shoulders rounded and the half-smoked ciga­rette drooping negligently from one corner of his mouth: he was just a plain, unaspiring artisan, with Socialistic opinions and an immoderate family. Again the picture was perfect; and Monty knew that if he played his own rôle half as well he would pass muster in any ordinary crowd.

  A miscellaneous junk store showed up on the other side of the road, with its wares overflowing onto benches set out on the sidewalk. Simon crossed the road and invaded the gloom­ily odorous interior. He emerged with a large and shabby sec­ond-hand bag, with which they continued their journey. A hardware store was the next stop, and there Simon proceeded to acquire an outfit of tools. The purchase taxed his German to the utmost, for the layman's technical vocabularies may be sketchy enough in his own language, without venturing into the complexities of a specialized foreign jargon. The Saint, who could carry on any everyday conversation in half a dozen different dialects, could no more have trusted himself to ask for a centre-bit or a handspike than he could have knitted himself a suit of combinations. He explained that his kit had been stolen, and bluffed his way through, wandering round the shop and collecting likely-looking instruments here and there, while he kept the proprietor occupied with a flow of patter that was coarse enough to keep any laughter-loving Boche amused for hours. It was finished at last, and they hit the footway again while the storekeeper was still wheezing over the Saint's final sally.

  "Well—what are we supposed to be?" inquired Monty Hay-ward interestedly, as they turned their steps back towards the police station; and the Saint shrugged at him skew-eyed.

  "I haven't the vaguest idea, old lad. But if we don't look impressively energetic it won't be my fault."

  They stopped directly opposite the station, and Simon laid his bag down carefully in the road. Gazing about rather blankly, Monty noticed for the first time that there was a rec­tangular metal plate let into the cobbles at his feet. Simon fished a hooked implement out of his bag, inserted it in a sort of keyhole, and yanked up the slab. They got their fingers un­der the edge and lifted it out onto the road beside the chasm which it disclosed. Without batting an eyelid, the Saint de­liberately spread out an imposing array of tools all round him, sat down in the road with his legs dangling through the hole, and stared down at the maze of lead tubes and insulated wiring which he had uncovered, with an expression of owlish sagacity illuminating his face.

  2

  "It's not so good if you happen to open up a sewer by mis­take," Simon remarked solemnly, "but this looks all right."

  He hauled up a length of wire and inspected its broken end with the absorbed concentration of a monkey that has scratched up a bonanza in its cousin's scalp. He tapped Monty on the shoulder and required him also to examine the frayed strands of copper, pointing them out one by one in a dumb-show that registered a Wagnerian crescendo of distress and disapproval. Monty knelt down beside the hole and shook his head in manifest sympathy. Rousing himself from his grief, the Saint picked up a hammer and launched a frenzied as­sault on the nearest length of lead pipe. It lasted for the best part of a minute; and then the Saint sat back and surveyed the dents he had made with an air of professional satisfac­tion.

  "Gimme that file," he grunted.

  Monty pasted it over; and the Saint bowed his head and began to saw furiously at the angles of a joint that he had spotted lower down in the pit.

  If there had been any genuine experts in the vicinity that performance would never have got by for ten seconds; but no one seemed sufficiently inquisitive to make a lengthy study of the Saint's original methods. Hardly anyone gave them a second glance. Planted right out there in the naked expanse of the highway, they were hidden as effectively as if they had buried themselves under the ground. And the necks of Treucht­lingen were innocent of the taint of rubber. An occasional automobile honked round them, and a dray backed up close to Monty's posterior and parked there while the driver went into a good pull-up for carmen. Apart from the infrequent sounds of plodding boots or grinding machinery going past them, they might have been a couple of ancient lights for all the sensation they provoked. So long as he didn't electrocute himself or carve into a gas main and blow the windows out of the street, the Saint figured that he was on velvet

  And if he had wanted to be near the scene of action, he couldn't have got much closer without walking in and intro­ducing himself. As he bent down over his improvised program of free services to the Treuchtlingen municipality, he could study the whole architecture of the police station under his left arm—a drab, two-storied building to which not even the kindly shades of the evening could lend any mystery. It stood up as squat and unimaginative as the laws behind it, a monument of prosaic modernity wedged in among the random houses of a more leisurely age. Simon looked up at the regular squares of window that divided the stark façade in geometric sym­metry, and saw the first of them light up.

  "Six-thirty," he said to Monty. "Nina must be getting them warmed."

  Monty fiddled with a spanner.

  "There's no chance that she left before we arrived, is there? She might have got what she wanted quicker than we expected."

  "Not here or anywhere else, in a blockhouse like that. There isn't a government official anywhere in th
e world who could get anything done in less than seventy-nine times as long as it'd take you or me to do it. They're all born with moss under their feet—it's one of the qualifications."

  The Saint lugged out another line of cable and battered it ferociously with a chisel. Underneath the triviality of his words ran a thin, taut thread of strain. Monty heard it then for the first time, hardening the edges of Simon's voice. There was no weakness about it, no trace of fear: it was the strain of a man whose faculties were strung up to a singing intensity of alertness, the cold expectancy of a boxer waiting to enter the ring. It showed up something that Monty alone had overlooked dur­ing those fourteen hours of his adventure. The Saint's own op­timism had made it all seem so easy, even in its craziest gyra­tions; and yet that very smoothness had derived itself from nothing but the steel core of inflexible purpose behind the whimsical blue eyes that had unconsciously slitted themselves down for a moment into two splinters of the same steel. And the story had still to be brought to the only possible end. ...

  Simon snapped his cable in the middle, tied the pieces to­gether again, wrapped a strip of insulating tape round the connection, and hammered it out flat. His movements had the gritty restraint of fettered impatience. Inside that cubist's bellyache of a fortress the real work was being done for him by a girl; and as the time went on he knew that he would rather have done it himself—shot up the police station in per­son and extracted his information at the snout of a Webley. Anything would have been better than that period of nerve-rasping inaction. He knew that he was thinking like a fool— that any such course would have been nothing short of a high road to suicide—but he couldn't help thinking it. The suspense had started to tug at the muscles of his stomach in an inter­mittent discharge of hampered energy. Somehow it shook up the cool flow of his mind, when he should have been focusing solely on the task that was coming to him as soon as the infor­mation was obtained. It was as if he had been trying to see down into a pool of clear water, and every now and then something in the depths stirred up a cloud of silt and swal­lowed up his objective in a turbid fog. Somewhere in that fog Marcovitch was sneering at him, capering farther and farther beyond his reach. ...