The Saint's Getaway

by Leslie Charteris

  Monty searched around. After a few moments he discov­ered a locker that was plentifully stocked with both hand and leg irons; he came back trailing the chains behind him. Under the Saint's directions the two police officers were efficiently manacled together; and finally an extra pair of handcuffs fast­ened them to a ringbolt set in the wall, which had apparently been used before for the restraint of refractory prisoners.

  The prince smoked tranquilly until his turn came; and then he detached the cigarette end from the long jade holder, placed the holder leisurely in an inside pocket, and extended his own hands for the bracelets.

  "This is a unique experience," he remarked, as Monty locked the cuffs on his wrists. "May I ask where we are to go?"

  "Upstairs," said the Saint coolly. "We've got a little talk coming, and the air's better up there."

  The prince raised his sensitive eyebrows, but he made no reply.

  They went up the stairs in a strange procession: Patricia and Nina Walden leading, the Saint going up backwards after them and covering the cortege, Prince Rudolf and Marcovitch following him, and Monty Hayward bringing up the rear. The prince's face remained impassive. Simon knew that that impassivity belied the workings of that quiet ruthless brain; but the prince and Marcovitch were firmly sandwiched be­tween two fires, and they could do nothing—at the moment. And the Saint didn't care. The prince must have known it— even as the two men in the room above must have known. It was significant that Rudolf had been very silent, ever since that playful séance in the charge room had received its staggering interruption.

  "This way, boys."

  Simon opened the door of the police chief's office and let the caravan file past him. He went in last—closed the door and leaned back on it.

  "Sit down."

  Prince Rudolf sank into a chair. Monty prodded Marco­vitch into another with the nose of his Luger. And the Saint cleared a space on the desk and sat there, dumping the two knotted handkerchiefs beside him. He put away his gun and opened the bundles, pouring the contents of both onto a sin­gle handkerchief in a shimmer of rainbow flames that seemed to light up the whole dingy room.

  "The time has come, Rudolf, for us to have a little reck­oning," he said; and once again, for no reason that the others could think of, he was speaking in German. And yet to Monty Hayward there was no difference, for the man who spoke was still the Saint, making even that stodgy language as vivid and pliable as his own native tongue. "We have a few things to learn—and you can tell us about them. And we'll have all the jewels out to encourage you. Fill your eyes with them, Rudolf. You used to be a rich man. But just for this quarter of a mil­lion pounds' worth of stones you were ready to kill men and torture them; you were ready to run up a list of murders that'd get anyone hanged three times—and frame them onto Monty and me. Which was very unkind of you, Rudy, after all the fun we had together in the old days. But you aren't denying any of it, are you?"

  The prince shrugged.

  "Why should I? It was unfortunate that you personally should be the victim, but——"

  "Highness!"

  Marcovitch sprang up from his chair. And at the same in­stant the Saint came off the desk like a streak of lightning. His fist smashed into the Russian's mouth and sent him reeling back.

  "I never have liked your voice, Uglyvitch," said the Saint evenly. "And it's rude to butt in like that. Gag him, Monty."

  Simon lighted another cigarette while the order was being carried out. It had been a close call, that; but his face showed no sign of it. He had been watching Marcovitch from the start. It was odd how an inferior mentality might sometimes feel brute suspicions before they came to the more highly geared intelligence.

  He sat down in the police chief's chair behind the desk and laid his automatic on the papers in front of him.

  "As you say, it was unfortunate that I should have been the victim," he murmured, as if nothing had happened. "I've never been a very successful victim, and I suppose habits are hard to break. But there were others who weren't so lucky. It was all the same to you."

  "My dear young friend, we are not playing a game for children——"

  "No. We're playing a game for savages. We've come down in the world. Once upon a time it was a game for soldiers—in the old days. I liked you because you were a patriot—and a sportsman—even though we were fighting on opposite sides. Now it's only a game of hunting for sacrifices to put on the altar of your bank account." The Saint's eyes were cold splin­ters of blue light across the table. "Two men died because they stood between you and these jewels. An agent of yours—didn't you refer to him as 'the egregious Emilio?'—murdered Hein­rich Weissmann in my hotel bedroom in Innsbruck after I rescued him from three detectives whom we mistook for ban­dits. He was taking the jewels to Josef Krauss, whom you had allowed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you. You tor­tured Krauss last night; and today, when he had escaped, Marcovitch murdered him on the train between Munich and here. And Marcovitch would also have murdered all three of us if we'd given him the chance."

  "My dear Mr. Templar——"

  "I haven't quite finished yet," said the Saint quietly. "Mar­covitch was the man who raided the brake van on that train, with four more of your hired thugs, to regain those jewels after I'd taken them off you. And when we had to jump off to save our lives, he told the officials that it was I who stole the mail. That also meant nothing to you. You were ready to have all your crimes charged against us—just as you were ready to have them actually committed by your dirty hirelings. You hadn't even the courage to do any of the work yourself, be­fore it was framed onto me. But only a few minutes ago you were ready to apply your torturing methods to a girl, to make certain that there would be more blood on those jewels be­fore you'd done with them. The methods of a patriot and a gen­tleman!"

  For the first time Simon saw a flush of passion come into the pale face opposite him. The taunt had gone to its mark like a barbed arrow.

  "My dear Mr. Templar!" The prince still controlled his voice, but a little of the suavity had gone from it "Since when have your own methods been above reproach?"

  "I'm not thinking of only myself," answered the Saint coldly. "I'm only alleged to have robbed a train. Monty Hay-ward here is accused of murdering Weissmann as well, and he's the most innocent one of us all. The only thing he ever did was to help me rescue Weissmann in the first place, through a mistake which anyone might have made. And since then, of course, he's helped me to hold up this police station in order to see justice done, for which no one could blame him. But you know as well as I do that he isn't a criminal."

  "His character fails to interest me."

  "But you know that what I've said is the truth."

  "Have I denied it?"

  The Saint leaned forward over the desk.

  "Will you deny that Weissmann was murdered by an agent of yours and by your orders; that Josef Krauss died in the same way; and that it was Marcovitch and other agents of yours who robbed the mail?"

  The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was recovering his self-control again. His face was calm and satirical.

  "I believe you once headed an organization which purported to administer a justice above the law," he said. "Do I understand that I am assisting at its renaissance?"

  "Do you deny the charge?"

  "And supposing I admit it?"

  "I'm asking a question," said the Saint, with a face of stone. "Do you deny the charge?"

  A long, tense silence came down on the room. Marcovitch moved again, and Monty's hand caught him round the neck. The significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward's understanding, but the drama of the scene held him spellbound. He also had begun to fall into the error that was deluding the Crown Prince. The Saint's face was as inexorable as a judge's. The humour and humanity had frozen out of it, leaving the rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the eyes were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the depths of the prince's soul, holding him impaled on their merc
iless gaze like a butterfly on a pin. The tension piled up between them till the very air seemed to grow hot and heavy with it.

  "Do you deny the charge?'

  Again those five words dropped through the room like sepa­rate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after another with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince's brain. They had about them the adamantine patience of doom itself. And the prince must have known that that question was going to receive a direct answer if it waited till the end of the world. He had come up against a force that he could no more fight against than he could fight against the changing of the tides, a force that would wear through his resistance as the continual dripping of water wears through a rock.

  And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly picked up his gun.

  "Do you deny the charge?"

  The prince stirred slightly.

  "No."

  He answered unemotionally, without turning his eyes a fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin in the almost imperceptible lift of his head.

  "Does your worship propose to pronounce sentence?" he in­quired mockingly,

  The Saint's mouth relaxed in a hard little smile.

  Every word had been registered on the ears of the two cap­tive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner cabinet. The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown Prince had fallen at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Mar­covitch was silenced, and now he had gone white and still. The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward was free. ...

  "Your punishment is not in my hands," said the Saint. "It will overtake you in the course of legal justice, and I see no need to interfere."

  He ran his fingers again through the heap of jewels, letting them trickle through his fingers in rivulets of coloured splen­dour that caught the light on a hundred cunning facets.

  "Pretty toys," said the Saint, "but they tempted you. And you could have bought them. You could have had them all for no more trouble than it would have taken you to write a cheque. I shall often wonder why you did it. Was it a kink of yours, Rudolf, that told you you couldn't enjoy them unless they were christened in blood? The Maloresco emeralds—the Ullsteinbach blue diamond——"

  "What did you say?"

  It was Nina Walden who spoke, starting forward suddenly from her place in the background.

  Simon looked at her curiously. He picked up the great blue stone and held it in the light.

  "The Ullsteinbach blue diamond," he said. "Wedding gift of the late Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc—ac­cording to information in The Times. Josef Krauss tried to tell me something about it before he died, but he didn't get far. Do you know anything about it?"

  The American girl took the stone from his fingers and turned it over and over. Then she looked at the Saint again.

  "I know this much," she said. "It's a——"

  "Look out!" yelled Monty.

  He had seen the prince's hand move casually to his sleeve, as if in search of a handkerchief, and had thought nothing of it. Then the hand came out again with a jerk, and the knife that came with it went spinning across the desk in a vicious streak of silver. The Saint hurled himself sideways, and it skimmed past his neck and clattered against the wall. The prince flung himself after it like a madman, clawing at the Saint's gun.

  Simon stood up and met him with a straight left that smashed blood out of the contorted face and set the man stag­gering back against his chair.

  "Keep your gun in his ribs, Monty," ordered the Saint crisply. "This is getting interesting. What were you going to tell me, Miss Walden?"

  The girl gave him back the stone.

  "It's a piece of coloured glass," she said.

  2

  Simon Templar subsided on to the desk as if his legs had given out under him. The room danced round him in a drunken tango. And once again he heard the dying jest of Josef Krauss ringing in his ears: "Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamant. . . . Er ist . ... wirklich . . . preislos. . . ." And the bitter derisive eyes of the man. . . .

  "The Ullsteinbach diamond is in America." Nina Walden went on speaking without a glance at the prince. "It was sold to Wilbur G. Tully, the straw hat millionaire, just before the war. The owners were hard up, and they had to raise money somehow: their treasurers wouldn't give them any more, so they raided the crown jewels. This imitation was made, and the real stone was sold to Tully under a vow of secrecy. He keeps it in his private collection. I don't think any living person knows the story besides Tully and myself. But my grandfather made the imitation. I've known about it for years, and I've been saving the scoop for a good occasion. The Archduke Michel did that when he was sowing wild oats in his fifties—and he's Prince Rudolf's father, at present the King of——"

  "Great God in Heaven!"

  The Saint leapt up again. He understood. The mystery was solved in a flash that almost blinded him. He cursed himself for not having thought of it before. And he was half laughing at the same time, shaking with the sublime perfection of the truth.

  "Let me get this straight!" he gasped. "It wasn't the other crown jewels that Rudolf gave a damn about. They just hap­pened to be among the spoils. What he wanted was the Ullsteinbach blue diamond. And he didn't want it because it was valuable, but because it wasn't—because it was literally priceless! He couldn't let the jewels come into any ordinary market, because someone would certainly have discovered the fraud, and the whole deception would have been shown up from the beginning. The old Archduke would probably have been booted off the throne, and Rudolf would have gone with him. He had to let Josef Krauss pinch the jewels, and then take them off Josef. Josef had discovered the secret when he handled the stones, so he had to go. And then I got hold of them by a fluke, and I might have discovered it—so I was a marked man. And everyone with me was in the same boat. Hell! ..."

  The Saint flung out his arms.

  "I said it wasn't ordinary boodle—and it isn't! It's the most priceless collection of boodle that's ever been knocked off! There were men dying and being tortured for it—mail vans broken—policemen sweating—thrones tottering—and all be­cause the star turn of it wasn't worth more than an empty beer bottle! My God—why didn't I know that joke hours ago? Why wasn't I told till now?"

  He hugged Nina Walden weakly.

  Monty swallowed. He didn't know what to say. He realized dimly that he had just heard the unravelling of the most amaz­ing story he was ever likely to hear, but it was all too crush­ingly simple. For the moment his brain refused to absorb the elementary enormity of it.

  In the same daze he saw Simon Templar pick up the glit­tering blue crystal from the carpet where he had dropped it and advance solemnly towards the Crown Prince. And the Saint's voice spoke uncertainly.

  "Rudolf—my cherub—you may have it as the souvenir I promised you."

  Monty saw the prince's livid face. . . .

  And then a new sound broke into the room—faint and dis­tant at first, swelling gradually until it seemed to pierce the eardrums like a rusty needle. The Saint stiffened up and stood still. And he heard it again—the mournful rising and falling wail of a police siren. It shrilled into his brain eerily, mount­ing up to its climax like the shriek of a lost soul, moaning round the room at its height like the scream of a tormented ghost. It was so clear that it might have been actually under his feet.

  Simon sprang to the window and flung it up. Down in the street below he saw two squad cars pulling in to the curb, spilling their loads of uniformed men. Among them, under a street lamp, he could recognize the officer whom he had mis­directed on the road. The pursuit squadron had come home.

  The Saint turned and faced the room. In his heart he had expected no less. He was quite calm.

  "Will you hold the fort again, Monty?" he said.

  He ran quickly down the stairs and the corridor leading to the vesti
bule. As he came out of the corridor he saw the of­ficer mounting the steps. For an instant they stared at each other across the doorway.

  Then Simon slammed the great doors in the officer's face, and dropped the bar across them.

  He heard a muffled shout from outside, and then the thumping of fists and gun butts on the massive woodwork; but he was dashing into the nearest room with a window on the street. He looked out and saw a third squad car driving up; then a bullet slapped through the glass beside him and combed his hair with flying splinters. He ducked, and grap­pled with the heavy steel shuttering that was rolled away on one side of the window. He unfolded it and slammed it into place, and went to the next window. A hail of shots wiped the glass out of existence as he reached it, but the next volley spattered against the plates of armour steel. He had been right about that police station—it was built like a fortress. Simon sprinted from room to room like a demon, barricading one window after another until the whole of the ground floor on the street side was as solid as the walls in which the win­dows were set.

  Then he went through to the back of the building. A section of armed men detached from the main body nearly forestalled him there: there was a back door opening onto a small square courtyard, and one of them had his foot over the threshold when the Saint came to it. Simon swerved round the levelled Luger: the shot singed his arm before he thrust the man back­wards and banged the door after him.

  The other windows at the back were barred, and Simon could tell at a glance that the bars would withstand any as­sault for at least half an hour. A face loomed up in one of the windows while the Saint was making his reconnaissance, and he was barely in time to throw himself to the floor before the man's automatic was spitting lead at him like a machine gun.

  Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

  Simon lay flat on his belly and watched the bullets stringing a ruled line of pock-marks along the plaster of the wall over his head. He crawled out on his stomach and went upstairs again, and when he reached the police chief's office he had a Luger automatic rifle under each arm.