Saint Errant (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  But who knows which will be his last story?

  Thus we come to the story in this book, at any rate. And it is certainly one of the latest written. And it is not the best.

  But it is placed here because there is an element in it which you will have to read to discover, which in a collection of this kind is almost impossible to top. Anyhow, I am not yet ready to try.

  —Leslie Charteris

  Simon Templar looked up from the frying pan in which six mountain trout were developing a crisp golden tan. Above the gentle sputter of grease, the sound of feet on dry pine needles crackled through the cabin window.

  It didn’t cross his mind that the sound carried menace, for it was twilight in the Sierras, and the dusky calm stirred only with the rustlings of nature at peace.

  The Saint also was at peace. In spite of everything his enemies would have said, there actually were times when peace was the main preoccupation of that fantastic freebooter; when hills and blue sky were high enough adventure, and baiting a hook was respite enough from baiting policemen or promoters. In such a mood he had jumped at the invitation to join a friend in a week of hunting and fishing in the High Sierras—a friend who had been recalled to town on urgent business almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the Saint in by no means melancholy solitude, for Simon Templar could always put up with his own company.

  The footsteps came nearer with a kind of desperate urgency. Simon moved the frying pan off the flames and flowed, rather than walked, to where he could see through windows in two directions.

  A man came out of the pines. He was traveling on the short side of a dead run, but straining with every gasping breath to step up his speed. He came, hatless and coatless, across the pine-carpeted clearing toward the cabin door.

  He burst through it, and in spite of his relaxation the Saint felt a kind of simmer of anticipating approval. If his solitude had to be intruded on, this was the way it should happen. Unannounced. At a dead run.

  The visitor slammed the door, shot the bolt, whirled around, and seemed about to fold in the middle. He saw the Saint. His jaw sagged, swung adrift on its hinges for a moment, then imitated a steel trap.

  After the sharp click of his teeth, he said, “How did you get in here? Where’s Dawn?”

  “Dawn?” Simon echoed lazily. “If you’re referring to the rosy-fingered goddess who peels away the darkness each morning, she’s on the twelve-hour shift, chum. She’ll be around at the regular time.”

  “I never dreamed you here,” the man said. “Who are you?”

  “You dropped a word,” the Saint said. “ ‘I never dreamed you were here’ makes more sense.”

  “Nuts, brother. You’re part of my dream, and I never saw you before. You don’t even have a name. All the others have, complete with backgrounds. But I can’t place you. Funny…Look here, you’re not real, are you?”

  “The last time I pinched myself, I yelped.”

  “This is crazy,” the man muttered.

  He walked across the pine floor to within a couple of feet of the Saint. He was breathing easier now, and the Saint examined him impassively.

  He was big, only a shade under the Saint’s six feet two, with sandy hair, a square jaw, and hard brown eyes.

  “May I?” he said, and pinched the Saint. He sighed. “I was afraid this was happening. When I put my arms around Dawn Winter in my dreams, she—”

  “Please,” the Saint broke in. “Gentlemen don’t go into lurid detail after the lady has a name.”

  “Oh, she’s only part of my dream.” The stranger stared into space, and an almost tangible aura of desire formed about him. “God!” he whispered. “I really dreamed up something in her.”

  “We must swap reminiscences someday,” the Saint said. “But at the moment the pine-scented breeze is laden with threshings in the underbrush.”

  “I’ve got to hide. Quick! Where can I get out of sight?”

  The Saint waved expressively at the single room. In its four hundred square feet, one might hide a large bird if it were camouflaged as an atlas or something, but that would be about the limit.

  The two bunk beds were made with hospital precision, and even a marble would have bulged under their tight covers. The deck chairs wouldn’t offer sanctuary for even an undernourished mouse, the table was high and wide open beneath the rough top, and the small bookcase was made to display its contents. “If we had time,” the Saint mused, “I could candy-stripe you—if I had some red paint—and put on a barber’s smock. Or…er…you say you’re dreaming all this?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why don’t you wake up—and vanish?”

  The Saint’s visitor unhappily gnawed his full underlip.

  “I always have before, when the going got tough, but—Oh, hell, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to die—even in my dream. Death is so…so…”

  “Permanent?”

  “Mmm, I guess. Listen, would you be a pal and try to steer these guys away? They’re after me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “You don’t owe me a damn thing, but I’m trying to help Dawn. She—”

  He broke off to fish an object out of his watch pocket. This was a small chamois bag, and out of it he took something that pulsed with incredible fires. He handed it to the Saint.

  “That’s Dawn.”

  The circular fire opal blazed with living beauty—blue, green, gold, cerise, chartreuse—and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder as he looked at the cameo head carved on the unbelievable gem.

  There is beauty to which one can put a name. There is beauty that inspires awe, bravery, fear, lust, greed, passion. There is beauty that softens the savage blows of fate. There is beauty that drives to high adventure, to violence.

  That stone, and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface, was beauty beyond belief. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace again.

  She was the lily maid of Astolat, the lost loveliness that all men seek and never find, the nameless desire that haunts the ragged edge of sleep, that curls a lonely smile and sends vacant eyes searching far spaces.

  Her face was made for—and of? the Saint asked himself—dreaming.

  “Count me in, old boy.”

  He went outside. Through the dusky stillness the far-off unseen feet pounded nearer.

  The feet were four. The men, with mathematical logic, two. One might be a jockey, the other a weight lifter. They tore out of the forest and confronted the Saint.

  “Did you see a kind of big dopey-lookin’ lug?” the jockey asked.

  The Saint pointed to the other side of the clearing where the hill pitched down.

  “He went that way—in a hell of a rush.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  They were off, hot on the imaginary trail, and the sounds of their passage soon faded. The Saint went inside.

  “They’ll be back,” he said. “But meanwhile we can clear up a few points. Could you down a brace of trout? They’ve probably cooled enough to eat.”

  “What do you mean, they’ll be back?”

  “It’s inevitable,” Simon pointed out as he put coffee on, set the table, and gathered cutlery. “They won’t find you. They want to find you. So they’ll be back with questions. Since those questions will be directed at me, I’d like to know what not to answer.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” the Saint countered.

  “I’m—oh, blast it to hell and goddam. The guy you’re looking at is Big Bill Holbrook. But he’s only something I dreamed up. I’m really Andrew Faulks, and I’m asleep in Glendale, California.”

  “And I am the queen of Rumania.”

  “Sure, I know. You don’t believe it. Who would? But since you’ve got me out of a tight spot for the time being, I’d like to tell you what I’ve never told anybody. But who am I telling?”

  “I’m Simon Templar,” said the Saint, and waited fo
r a reaction.

  “No!” Holbrook-Faulks breathed. “The Saint! What beautiful, wonderful luck. And isn’t it just like a bank clerk to work the Saint into his dream?” He paused for breath. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the devil with dames, the headache of cops and crooks alike. What a sixteen-cylinder dream this is.”

  “Your alliterative encomia,” the Saint murmured, “leave me as awed as your inference. Don’t you think you’d better give out with this—er—bedtime story? Before that unholy pair return with gun-lined question marks?”

  The strange man rubbed his eyes in a dazed helpless way.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” he said conventionally.

  But after a while, haltingly, he tried.

  Andrew Faulks, in the normal course of events, weathered the slingshots and arrows of outrageous playmates and grew up to be a man.

  As men will, he fixed his heart and eyes on a girl and eventually married her. As woman will, she gave birth in due course to a boy, Andy Jr, and later a girl, Alexandria.

  He became a bank clerk, and went to and from home on an immutable schedule. He got an occasional raise; he was bawled out at times by the head teller; he became a company man, a white-collar worker, and developed all the political ills that white-collared flesh is heir to. And he dreamed. Literally.

  This was what Big Bill Holbrook told the Saint in the mountain cabin to which Simon had retired to await the blowing over of a rather embarrassing situation which involved items duly registered on police records.

  “In the first dream, I was coming out of this hotel, see. And whammo! Bumping into her woke me—Oh, the hell with it. Whoever was dreaming woke up, but it was me bumped into her. And I was sorry as hell, because, brother, she was something.”

  Some two weeks later, Big Bill said, he bumped into her again. The dream started exactly as its predecessor, progressed exactly to the point of collision.

  “But I didn’t awaken this time. We each apologized all over the place and somehow we were walking along together. Just as I was about to ask her to have dinner, I woke up again.”

  “Or Andy did,” the Saint supplied.

  “Yeah. Whoever. Now this is what happened. Every ten days or two weeks, I’d be back in this dream, starting out of the hotel, crashing into her, walking along, having dinner, getting to know her better each dream. Each one started exactly the same, but each one went a little further into her life. It was like reading the same book over and over, always starting back at the beginning, but getting one chapter further every time. I got so used to it that I’d say to myself, ‘This is where I woke up last time,’ and then after the dream had gone on a bit further I’d begin to think, ‘Well, I guess this must be getting near the end of another installment,’ and sure enough, about that time I’d wake up again.”

  The accidental encounter began to develop sinister ramifications, picked up unsavory characters, and put Big Bill Holbrook in the role of a Robin Hood.

  “Or a Saint,” he amended, “rescuing a beautiful dame from a bunch of lugs.”

  And there was, of course, the jewel.

  It had a history. The fire opal, which seemed to be eternal yet living beauty, had carved upon it the likeness of Dawn’s great-great-grandmother, of whom the girl was the living image.

  The talented Oriental craftsman who had chiseled those features which were the essence of beauty—that wily fellow had breathed upon the cameo gem a curse.

  The curse: It must not get out of the possession of the family—or else.

  Death, deprivation, and a myriad other unpleasantries were predicted if the stone fell into alien hands.

  The name of Selden Appopoulis sort of slithered into the tale. This was a fat man, a lecherous fat man, a greedy fat man, who wanted—not loved—Dawn, and who wanted—and loved—the cameo opal. In some fashion that was not exactly clear to the Saint, the fat man was in a position to put a financial squeeze on her. In each succeeding dream of Andrew Faulks, Glendale bank clerk, Dawn’s position became more and more untenable. In desperation she finally agreed to turn the jewel over to Appopoulis. The fat man sent for the jewel by the two henchmen whom the Saint had directed off into the Holbrook-bare woods.

  “Now in this dream—this here now dream,” Holbrook said, “I took it away from him, see? Andy Faulks went to sleep in Glendale Saturday night and—say, what day is it now?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it seems to me too. And that’s funny. If you’re really part of this dream you’d naturally think it was Tuesday, because your time and my time would be the same. But you don’t seem like part of a dream. I pinched you and—oh, nuts, I’m all mixed up.”

  “Let’s try and be clear about this,” said the Saint patiently. “You know that it’s Tuesday here, but you think you’re dreaming all this in Glendale on Saturday night.”

  “I don’t know,” said the other wearily. “You see, I never dreamed more than one day at a stretch before. But tonight it’s been going on and on. It’s gone way past the time when I ought to have woken up. But I don’t seem to be able to wake up. I’ve tried…My God, suppose I don’t wake up! Suppose I never can wake up? Suppose I never can get back, and I have to go on and on with this, being Big Bill Holbrook—”

  “You could take a trip to Glendale,” Simon suggested gravely, “and try waking Faulks up.”

  Holbrook-Faulks stared at him with oddly unfocused eyes.

  “I can’t,” he said huskily. “I thought of that—once. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I…I’m scared…of what I might find…Suppose—”

  He broke off, his pupils dilated with the formless horror of a glimpse of something that no mind could conceive.

  Simon roused him again, gently: “So you took the jewel—”

  Holbrook snapped out of his reverie.

  “Yeah, and I lammed out for this cabin. Dawn was supposed to meet me here. But I guess I can’t control all these characters. Say,” he asked suddenly, “who do you suppose I am? Faulks or Holbrook?”

  “I suggest you ask your mother, old boy.”

  “This ain’t funny. I mean, who do you really suppose I am? Andy Faulks is asleep and dreaming me but I’ve got all his memories, so am I a projection of Andy or am I me and him both? None of these other characters have any more memories than they need.”

  Simon wondered if the two men chasing Holbrook were his keepers; he could use a few. In fact, Simon reflected, keepers would fit into the life of Holbrook-Faulks like thread in a needle. But he sipped his brandy and urged the man to continue.

  “Well, something’s happened,” Holbrook-Faulks said. “It never was like this before. I never could smell things before. I never could really feel them. You know how it is in a dream. But now it seems like as if you stuck a knife in me I’d bleed real blood. You don’t suppose a…a reiterated dream could become reality?”

  “I,” said the Saint, “am a rank amateur in that department.”

  “Well, I was too—or Andy was, whichever of us is me—but I read everything I could get my hands on about dreams—or Andy did—and it didn’t help a bit.”

  Most men wouldn’t have heard the faint far-off stirring in the forest. But the Saint’s ears, attuned by long practice to detect sound that differed from what should be there, picked up evidence of movement toward the cabin.

  “Some one,” he said suddenly, “and I mean one, is coming. Not your pursuers—it’s from the opposite direction.”

  Holbrook-Faulks listened.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “I didn’t expect you to—yet. Now that it’s dark, perhaps you’d better slip outside, brother, and wait. I don’t pretend to believe your yarn, but that some game is afoot is so obvious that even Sherlock Holmes could detect it. I suggest that we prepare for eventualities.”

  The eventuality that presently manifested itself was a girl. And it was a girl who could have been no one but Dawn Winter.
>
  She came wearily into the cabin, disheveled, her dress torn provocatively so that sun-browned flesh showed through, her cloud of golden hair swirled in fairy patterns, her dark eyes brooding, her mouth a parted dream.

  The Saint caught his breath and began to wonder whether he could really make Big Bill Holbrook wake up and vanish.

  “Do you belong to the coffee and/or brandy school of thought?” he asked.

  “Please.” She fell carelessly into a chair, and the Saint coined a word.

  She was glamorous beyond belief.

  “Miss Winter, pull down your dress or I’ll never get this drink poured. You’ve turned me into an aspen. You’re the most beautiful hunk of flesh I’ve ever seen. Have your drink and go, please.”

  She looked at him then, and took in the steel-cable leanness of him, the height of him, the crisp black hair, the debonair blue eyes. She smiled, and a brazen gong tolled in the Saint’s head.

  “Must I?” she said.

  Her voice caught at the core of desire and tangled itself forever there.

  “Set me some task,” the Saint said uncertainly. “Name me a mountain to build, a continent to sink, a star to fetch you in the morning.”

  The cabin door crashed open. The spell splintered into shining shards. Holbrook-Faulks stood stony-faced against the door.

  “Hello, Bill,” the girl said, her eyes still on the Saint. “I came, you see.”

  Bill’s gaze was an unwavering lance, with the Saint pinioned on its blazing tip.

  “Am I gonna have trouble with you too, Saint?”

  The Saint opened his mouth to answer, and stiffened as another sound reached his ears. Jockey and weight lifter were returning.

  “We’ll postpone any jousting over the fair lady for the moment,” Simon said. “We’re about to have more company.”

  Holbrook stared wildly around.

  “Come on, Dawn. Out the window. They’ll kill us.”

  Many times before in his checkered career the Saint had had to make decisions in a fragment of time—when a gun was leveled and a finger whitening on the trigger, when a traffic accident roared toward consummation, when a ship was sinking, when a knife flashed through candlelight. His decision now was compounded of several factors, none of which was the desire for self-preservation. The Saint rarely gave thought room to self-preservation—never when there was something more important to preserve.