Saint Errant (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  A pattern suddenly clicked into place in the Saint’s brain, a pattern so monstrous, so inhuman as to arouse his destructive instincts to the point of homicidal mania. The look he turned on Big Bill Holbrook was ice and flame.

  His voice was pitched at conversational level, but each word fell from his lips like a shining sword.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get some new ideas. Not very nice ideas, chum. And if I’m guessing right about what you and your fellow scum have done to this innocent girl, you are liable to cost your insurance company money.”

  He moved toward Holbrook with a liquid grace that had all the co-ordination of a panther’s movement—and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.

  “Stop acting the knight in armor,” he protested. “What in hell you talking about?”

  “It should have been obvious before,” Simon Templar said. “Up on your feet, Holbrook.”

  Holbrook remained at ease.

  “If you’ve got an explanation for all this that doesn’t agree with mine, I want to know it.”

  The Saint paused. There was honest curiosity in the man’s voice—and no fear. That cowardice which had characterized him before was replaced with what seemed an honest desire to hear the Saint’s idea.

  “This girl,” the Saint said, “whoever she is, has breeding, grace, and beauty out of this world. She has been brought up under expensive and sheltered surroundings. You can see that in her every gesture, every expression. She was bred to great wealth, perhaps nobility, or even royalty.”

  Big Bill leaned forward in almost an agony of concentration. Every word of Simon Templar’s might have been a twenty-dollar gold piece, the way he reached for it with every sense.

  The Saint patted his jacket pocket.

  “This jewel is the symbol of her position—heiress, princess, queen, or what have you. You and your unsavory companions kidnapped her, and are holding her for ransom. That would be wicked enough, but you’ve done worse. Somewhere in the course of your nasty little scheme, it seemed like a good idea to destroy a part of her beauty that could be dangerous to you and your precious pals. So you destroyed her mind. With drugs, I have no doubt—drugs that have dulled her mind until she has no memory. Your reasons are clear enough—it was just a sound form of insurance. And now your gang has split up, fighting over the spoils. I don’t know who would have come out on top, if you hadn’t happened to run into me. But I know what the end is going to be now—and you aren’t going to like it. Get on your feet!”

  The command was like a pistol shot, and Big Bill Holbrook jumped. Then he leaned back again and chuckled in admiration.

  “Everything that’s been said about you is true. There’s nobody like you. That’s so much better than Andy Faulks did there’s no comparison. Say, that really would have been something, and look, it’d have explained why she couldn’t remember who she was. Saint, I got to hand it to you. Too bad you’re not in bed in Glendale.”

  For once of a very few times in his life, the Saint was taken aback. The words were spoken with such ease, such sincerity, that Simon’s deadly purpose cooled to a feeling of confusion. While it is true that a man who is accustomed to danger, to gambling for high stakes with death as a forfeit, could simulate feelings he did not actually feel, it is seldom that a man of Big Bill Holbrook’s obvious IQ can look annihilation in the face with an admiring grin.

  Something was still wrong, but wrong in the same way that everything in the whole episode was wrong—wrong with that same unearthly off-key distortion that defeated logical diagnosis.

  The Saint took out a cigarette and lighted it slowly, and over the hiss of the match he heard other sounds which resolved themselves into a blur of footsteps.

  Simon glanced at his watch. Jimmy and Mac had been gone less than half an hour. It was impossible for them to be returning from the village four miles away.

  What had Holbrook said? Something about everything happening faster in dreams? But that was in the same vein of nonsense. Maybe they’d met the boss at the foot of the hill.

  Holbrook said, “What is it? Did you hear something?”

  “Only your friends again.”

  Fear came once more to Holbrook and Dawn Winter. Their eyes were wide and dark with it, turning instantly toward the bunk beds.

  “No,” Simon said. “Not this time. We’ll have this out in the open.”

  “But he’ll kill us!” Holbrook began to babble. “It’s awful, the things he’ll do. You don’t know him, Saint. You can’t imagine, you couldn’t—”

  “I can imagine anything,” said the Saint coldly. “I’ve been doing that for some time, and I’m tired of it. Now I’d prefer to know.”

  He crossed the room as the footsteps outside turned into knuckles at the door.

  “Welcome to our study club,” the Saint said.

  Trailer Mac and Jimmy preceded an enormous hulk through the door and, when they saw Holbrook and Dawn, charged like lions leaping on paralyzed gazelles.

  The Saint moved in a lightning blur. Two sharp cracks of fist on flesh piled Mac in one corner, Jimmy in another. They lay still.

  A buttery chuckle caused the Saint to turn. He was looking into a small circular hole. A .38, he computed. He raised his eyes to twins of the barrel, but these were eyes. They lay deep in flesh that swelled in yellowish-brown rolls, flowing fatly downward to describe one of the fattest men the Saint had ever seen. They could only have belonged to a man called Selden Appopoulis.

  “Mr Sydney Greenstreet, I presume?” Simon drawled.

  The buttery chuckle set a sea of flesh ebbing and flowing.

  “A quick action, sir, and an efficient direction of action. I compliment you, and am saddened that you must die.”

  The Saint shrugged. He knew that this fat man, though butter-voiced, had a heart of iridium. His eyes were the pale expressionless orbs of a killer. His mouth was thin with determination, his hand steady with purpose. But Simon had faced all those indications before.

  “I hate to disappoint you, comrade,” he said lightly, “but that line has a familiar ring. And yet I’m still alive.”

  Appopoulis appraised and dismissed the Saint, though his eyes never wavered. He spoke to Holbrook.

  “The opal. Quickly!”

  The butter of his voice had frozen into oleaginous icicles, and Holbrook quailed under the bite of their sharp edges.

  “I haven’t got it, Appopoulis. The Saint has it.”

  Simon was astonished at the change in the fat man. It was subtle, admittedly, but it was there nonetheless. Fear came into the pale gray eyes which had been calmly contemplating murder as a climax to unspeakable inquisitions. Fear and respect. The voice melted butter again.

  “So,” he said warmly. “Simon Templar, the Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the…ah…devil with dames. I had not anticipated this.”

  Once more it struck the Saint that the descriptive phrases were an exact repetition of Holbrook’s. And once more it struck him that the quality of fear in this weird quintet was not strained. And once more he wondered about Holbrook’s fantastic tale…

  “You are expecting maybe Little Lord Feigenbaum?” Simon asked. “Or what do you want?”

  “The cameo opal, for one thing,” Appopoulis said easily. “For the other, the girl.”

  “And what do you intend to do with them?”

  “Cherish them, sir. Both of them.”

  His voice had encyclopedic lust and greed, and the Saint felt as if small things crawled on him.

  Before he could make an answer, stirrings in their respective corners announced the return of Mac and Jimmy to another common plane of existence. Without a word they got groggily to their feet, shook their heads clear of trip hammers, and moved toward the Saint.

  “Now, Mr Templar,” said Appopoulis, “you have a choice. Live, and my desires are granted without violence, or die, and they are spiced with emotions at fever heat.”

&
nbsp; Mac and Jimmy had halted: one small and thunderstruck, one large and paralyzed.

  “Boss,” quavered Jimmy, “did youse say Templar? Da Saint?”

  “The same.” Simon bowed.

  “Chee!” Mac breathed. “Da Saint. Da Robin Hood of Modern Crime, da—”

  “Please,” Simon groaned. “Another record, if you don’t mind.”

  “Boss, we ain’t got a chance,” Jimmy said.

  Appopoulis turned his eyes on the little man.

  “He,” the boss said, “has the opal.”

  This news stiffened their gelatinous spines long enough to set them at the Saint in a two-directional charge.

  The Saint swerved to meet it. He held Jimmy between himself and the unwavering gun of Appopoulis with one hand. With the other he wrought havoc on the features of Mac.

  It was like dancing, like feathers on the breeze, the way the Saint moved. Even to himself it had the kind of exhilaration that a fight may only experience once in a lifetime. He had a sense of power, of supernatural co-ordination, of invincibility beyond anything he had ever known. He cared nothing for the knowledge that Appopoulis was skipping around on the outskirts of the fray, trying to find an angle from which he could terminate it with a well-placed shot. Simon knew that it was no fear of killing Jimmy that stayed the fat man’s finger on the trigger—it was simply the knowledge that it would have wasted a shot, that the Saint could have gone on using Jimmy as a shield, alive or dead. The Saint knew this coolly and detachedly, as if with a mind separate from his own, while he battered Mac’s face into a vari-colored pulp.

  Then Mac’s eyes glazed and he went down, and the Saint’s right hand snaked hipwards for his own gun while his left flung Jimmy bodily at the paunch of Appopoulis.

  And that was when the amazing, the incredible, and impossible thing went wrong. For Jimmy didn’t fly away from the Saint’s thrust, as he should have, like a marble from a slingshot. Somehow he remained entangled with the Saint’s arm, clinging to it as if bogged in some indissoluble bird-lime, with a writhing tenacity that was as inescapable as a nightmare. And Simon looked down the barrel of Appopoulis’s gun and saw the fat man’s piggy eyes brighten with something that might have been lust…

  The Saint tried to throw a shot at him, but he was off balance, and the frenzied squirming of his erstwhile shield made it like trying to shoot from the back of a bucking horse. The bullet missed by a fraction of an inch, and buried itself in the wall beside the mirror. Then Appopoulis fired back.

  The Saint felt a jar, and a flame roared inside his chest. Somehow, he couldn’t pull the trigger any more. The gun fell from his limp fingers. His incredulous eyes looked full in the mirror and saw a neat black hole over his heart, saw it begin to spread as his life’s blood gushed out.

  It was strange to realize that this was it, and it had happened to him at last, as it had always been destined to happen someday, and in an instant he was going to cheat to the back of the book for the answer to the greatest mystery of all. Yet his last conscious thought was that his image was sharp and clear in the mirror. When he had seen Dawn’s reflection, it had been like one seen in an agitated pool…

  When he opened his eyes again it was broad daylight, and the intensity of the light told him that it must have been more than twelve hours since he had been shot.

  He was lying on the floor of the cabin. He felt for his heart. It was beating strongly. His hand did not come away sticky with blood.

  His eyes turned hesitantly down to his shirt. There was no hole in it. He jumped to his feet, felt himself all over, examined himself in the mirror. He was as whole as he’d ever been, and he felt fine.

  He looked around the cabin. The mattresses were piled in the corner under the pine cones, the bunks unmade. Otherwise there were no signs of the brawl the night before. No trace of Jimmy and Mac, or Appopoulis. No Big Bill Holbrook. No Dawn…

  And no hole in the wall beside the mirror where his hopeless shot at Appopoulis had buried itself.

  The Saint shook his head. If it had all been a dream, he might have to seriously consider consulting a psychiatrist. Dreams reach only a certain point of vividness. What he remembered was too sharp of definition, too coherent, too consecutive. Yet if it wasn’t a dream, where were the evidences of reality, the bullet hole in his chest, in the wall?

  He went to the door. There should be footprints. His cabin had rated with Grand Central Station for traffic last night.

  There were no footprints, other than his own.

  Simon reached for a cigarette, and suddenly sniffed it suspiciously before he put it in his mouth. If some joker, either in fun or malice, had adulterated his tobacco with some more exotic herb…But that, too, was absurd. A jag of those dimensions would surely bequeath a hangover to match, but his head was as clear as the mountain air.

  He fumbled in his pockets for a match. Instead, his questing fingers touched something solid, a shape that was oddly familiar—yet impossibly alien. The tactile sensation lasted only for an instant, before his hand recoiled as if the thing had been red hot. He was afraid, actually afraid, to take it out.

  The address of Andrew Faulks was in the Glendale directory. The house was a modest two-bedroom affair on a side street near Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A wreath hung on the door. A solemn gentleman who looked like, and undoubtedly was, an undertaker opened the door. He looked like Death rubbing white hands together.

  “Mr Faulks passed on last night,” he said in answer to the Saint’s query. Unctuous sorrow overlaid the immediate landscape.

  “Wasn’t it rather sudden?”

  “Ah, not exactly, sir. He went to sleep last Saturday, passed into a coma, and never awakened.”

  “At what time,” Simon asked, “did he die?”

  “At ten-forty,” the man replied. “It was a sad death. He was in a delirium. He kept shouting about shooting someone, and talked about a saint.”

  Simon had moved into the house while listening to the tale of death and found himself looking off the hallway into a well-lighted den. His keen eyes noted that while most of the shelves were gay with the lurid jackets of adventure fiction, one section was devoted to works on psychology and psychiatry.

  Here were the tomes of Freud, Adler, Jung, Brill, Bergson, Krafft-Ebing, and lesser lights. A book lay open on a small reading table.

  The Saint stepped inside the room to look at it. It was titled In Darkest Schizophrenia by William J Holbrook, Ph.D.

  Simon wondered what the psychic-phenomena boys would do with this one. This, he thought, would certainly give them a shot in the aura.

  “Mrs Faulks is upstairs, sir,” the professional mourner was saying. “Are you a friend of the family? I’ll be glad to ask whether she can see you.”

  “I wish you’d just show her this.” Simon forced one hand into a pocket. “And ask her—”

  He never finished the question. Never.

  There was nothing in the pocket for his hand to find. Nothing to meet his fingertips but a memory that was even then darkening and dying out along his nerves.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  The eight stories in this book were all written, initially, for magazine publication: “Judith” first appeared in the January 1934 edition of The American Magazine with a subsequent first British appearance being in the April 1934 edition of The Strand Magazine. “Iris” was based on a radio script entitled “The Man Who Murdered Shakespeare,” an original script written by Irvin Ashkenazy for the very first series of The Saint on the radio, which aired on 22 March, 1945. The prose version of the story then appeared in the Winter 1948 edition of Mystery Book Magazine before being collected in this volume. “Lida” first appeared in the August 1947 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine whilst “Jeannine” made it in to the February 1948 edition of Argosy prior to this book. “Lucia” is one of the older stories, having first made print in the November 1937 edition of Double Detective magazine; “Teresa,” meanwhile, is almost as old, as it first appeared in t
he 5 November, 1938 edition of The Winnipeg Tribune under the title of “Masquerouge” and was subsequently syndicated to a number of newspapers around that date. “Luella” appeared in the October 1946 edition of Rex Stout’s Mystery Quarterly whilst “Emily” debuted in the November 1948 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. “Dawn,” which is an unusual story for Leslie Charteris and the Saint anyway, first appeared under the title of “The Darker Drink” in the October 1947 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It was then retitled to fit in with the ethos of this book, but subsequent magazine and book publications have reverted back to its original title.

  The book was first published in late 1948 by the Doubleday Crime Club with a British edition following in August 1949. A French translation appeared in 1949 under the not terribly complicated title of Le Saint at les Femmes whilst a Spanish edition, with the even less complicated title of El Santo Errante, appeared in 1958.

  All but two of the stories in this book were adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore: “Judith” appeared as part of the first season, initially airing on Thursday, 3 October, 1963 and starring Julie Christie as the eponymous lady. “Teresa” followed the week after, whilst “Iris” had to wait until 7 November. “Luella” first aired on 23 January, 1964 whilst “Lucia,” for reasons lost in the mists of time, was retitled “Sophia” and in an episode directed by Roger Moore first appeared on 27 February, 1964. “Lida” and “Jeannine” had to wait until the third season and were first broadcast on 4 October, 1964 and 11 October, 1964 respectively.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”