“I got ’im,” proclaimed a triumphant voice, out of the dark void. “Strike a light, Bill.”
Through an undercurrent of muffled yammering sizzled the crisp kindling of a match. It was held in the hand of Kuzela himself, and by its light the two bruisers glared at each other, their reddened stares of hate aimed upwards and downwards respectively. And before the match went out the opinions of the foundation member found fervid utterance.
“You perishing bleeder,” he said, in accents that literally wobbled with earnestness.
“Peep-bo,” said the Saint, and heard the contortionist effects blasphemously disentangling themselves as he closed the door behind him.
A bullet splintered a panel two inches east of his neck as he shifted briskly westwards. The next door stood invitingly ajar: he went through it as the other door reopened, slammed it behind him, and turned the key.
In a few strides he was across the room and flinging up the window. He squirmed over the sill like an eel, curved his fingers over the edge, and hung at the full stretch of his arms. A foot below the level of his eyes there was a narrow stone ledge running along the side of the building: he transferred himself to it, and worked rapidly along to the nearest corner. As he rounded it, he looked down into the road, twenty feet below, and saw a car standing by the kerb.
Another window came over his head. He reached up, got a grip of the sill, and levered his elbows above the sill level with a skilful kick and an acrobatic twist of his body. From there he was able to make a grab for the top of the lower sash…And in another moment he was standing upright on the sill, pushing the upper sash cautiously downwards.
A murmur of dumbfounded voices drifted to his ears.
“Where the ’ell can ’e ’ave gorn to?”
“Think ’e jumped for it?”
“Jumped for it, yer silly fat-’ead?…”
And then the Saint lowered himself cat-footed to the carpet on the safe side of the curtains in the room he had recently left.
Through a narrow gap in the hangings he could see Kuzela replacing the shattered bulb of the table-lamp by the light of a match. The man’s white efficient hands were perfectly steady; his face was without expression. He accomplished his task with the tremorless tranquility of a patient middle-aged gentleman whom no slight accident could seriously annoy—tested the switch…
And then, as the room lighted up again, he raised his eyes to the convex mirror panel on the opposite wall, and had one distorted glimpse of the figure behind him.
Then the Saint took him by the neck.
Fingers like bands of steel paralysed his larynx and choked back into his chest the cry he would have uttered. He fought like a maniac, but though his strength was above the average, he was as helpless as a puppet in that relentless grip. And almost affectionately Simon Templar’s thumbs sidled round to their mark—the deadly pressure of the carotid arteries which is to crude ordinary throttling what foil play is to sabre work…
It was all over in a few seconds. And Kuzela was lying limply spread-eagled across the desk, and Simon Templar was fitting his key into the lock of the safe.
The plungers pistoned smoothly back, and the heavy door swung open. And the Saint sat back on his heels and gazed in rapture at what he saw.
Five small leather attaché cases stood in a neat row before his eyes. It was superb—splendiferous—it was just five times infinitely more than he had ever seriously dared to hope. That one hundred million lire were lying around somewhere in London he had been as sure as a man can be of anything—Kuzela would never have wasted time transporting his booty from the departure centre to the country house where the Duke of Fortezza had been kept—but that the most extempore bluff should have led him promptly and faultlessly to the hiding-place of all that merry mazuma was almost too good to be true. And for a few precious seconds the Saint stared entranced at the vision that his everlasting preposterous luck had ladled out for his delight…
And then he was swiftly hauling the valises out on to the floor.
He did not even have to attempt to open one of them. He knew…
Rapidly he ranged the bags in a happy little line across the carpet. He picked up his stick and he was adjusting his hat at its most effective angle when the two men who had pursued him returned through the door. But there was a wicked little automatic pivoting round in his free hand, and the two men noticed it in time.
“Restrain your enthusiasm, boys,” said the Saint. “We’re going on a journey. Pick up your luggage, and let’s be moving.”
He transferred one of the bags to his left hand, and his gun continued to conduct the orchestra. And under its gentle supervision the two men obeyed his orders. The delirious progress of events during the past couple of minutes had been a shade too much for their ivorine uptakes: their faces wore two uniformly blank expressions of pained bewilderment, vaguely reminiscent of the registers of a pair of precocious goldfish photographed immediately after signing their first talking-picture contract. Even the power of protest had temporarily drained out their vocal organs. They picked up two bags apiece and suffered themselves to be shepherded out of the room in the same bovine vacuity of acquiescence.
In the hall, Simon halted the fatigue party for a moment.
“Before we pass out into the night,” he said, “I want you to be quite clear about one thing. Those bags you’re carrying, as you may or may not know, are each supposed to contain the equivalent of two hundred thousand pounds in ready money, and I want you to know anything that you may be prepared to do to keep all those spondulix for yourselves is just so much tadpole-gizzard beside what I’m prepared to do to prise it off you. So you should think a long while before you do anything rash. I am the greatest gun artist in the world,” said the Saint persuasively, but with a singular lack of honesty, “and I’m warning you here and now that at the first sign I see of any undue enterprise, I shall shoot each of you through the middle of the eleventh spinal vertebra, counting from the bottom. Move on, my children.”
The procession moved on.
It went down the porch steps and through the iron wicket gate to the road, and the Saint brought up the rear with his right hand in his pocket. The comedy was played without witnesses: at that hour Vandemeer Avenue, a quiet backwater even at the height of the day, was absolutely deserted. A sum total of four lighted windows was visible along the whole length of the thoroughfare, and those were too far away to provide the slightest inconvenience in any conceivable circumstances. Hampstead was being good that night…
The car which Simon had observed on his prowl round the exterior of the house was parked right opposite the gate—which was where he had expected it to be. As the two men paused outside the gate, waiting for further instructions, a door of the car opened, and a slim supple figure decanted itself lightly on to the sidewalk. Patricia…She came forward with her swinging long-limbed stride.
“O.K., Simon?”
“O.K., lass.”
“Gee, boy, I’m glad to see you.”
“And I you. And the whole Wild West show was just a sitting rabbit, believe it or believe it not.” The Saint’s hand touched her arm. “Get back behind the wheel, Pat, start her up, and be ready to pull out as soon as the boodle’s on board. It isn’t every day we ferry a cool million across London, and I don’t see why the honour of being the pilot shouldn’t be your share of the act.”
“Right-ho…”
The girl disappeared, and Simon opened another door.
He watched the cases being stowed one by one in the back of the car, and the forefinger of his right hand curled tensely over the trigger of his gun. He had meant every word of his threat to the two men who were doing the job, and they must have known it, for they carried out his orders with commendable alacrity.
And yet Simon felt a faint electric tingle of uneasiness fanning up his back and into the roots of his hair like the march of a thousand ghostly needle-points. He could not have described it in any other way, and he was as mu
ch at a loss to account for it as if the simile had been the actual fact. It was sheer blind instinct, a seventh sense born of a hundred breathless adventures, that touched him with single thrill of insufficient warning—and left it at that. And for once in his life he ignored the danger-sign. He heard the whine of the self-starter, followed by the low-pitched powerful pulsing of the eight cleanly balanced cylinders, and saw the door closed upon the last of the bags: and he turned smiling to the two bruisers. He pointed.
“If you keep straight on down that road,” he said, “it ought to land you somewhere near Birmingham—if you travel far enough. You might make that your next stop.”
One of the men took a pace towards him.
“You just listen a minute—”
“To what?” asked the Saint politely.
“I’m telling yer—”
“A bad habit,” said the Saint disapprovingly. “You must try and break yourself of that. And now I’m sorry, but I can’t stop. I hope you’ll wash the back of your neck, see that your socks are aired, say your prayers every night, and get your face lifted at the first opportunity…Now push your ears back, my cherubs, and let your feet chase each other.”
His right hand moved significantly in his pocket, and there was an instant’s perilous silence. And then the man who had spoken jerked his head at the other.
“Come on,” he said.
The two men turned and lurched slowly away, looking back over their shoulders.
And the Saint put one foot on the running-board.
And somewhere, far away, he heard the sound of his own head being hit. It was as extraordinary an experience as any that had ever happened to him. Patricia was looking ahead down the road, while her hand eased the gears quietly into mesh; and the Saint himself had not heard the slightest movement that might have put him on his guard. And the premonitory crawling of his nerves which he had felt a few seconds earlier had performed what it considered to be its duty, and had subsided…He could have believed that the whole thing was an incredibly vivid hallucination—but for the sickening sharp stab of sudden agony that plunged through his brain like a spurt of molten metal and paralysed every milligram of strength in his body.
A great white light swelled up and exploded before his eyes, and after it came a wave of whirling blackness shot with rocketing flashes of dizzy, dazzling colour, and the blackness was filled with a thin high singing note that drilled into his eardrums. His knees seemed to melt away beneath him…
And then, from somewhere above the vast dark gulf into which he was sinking, he heard Patricia’s voice cry out.
“Simon!”
The word seemed to spell itself into his dulled brain letter by letter, as if his mind read it off a slowly uncoiling scroll. But it touched a nerve centre that roused him for one fractional instant of time to fight back titanically against the numbing oblivion that was swallowing him up.
He knew that his eyes were open, but all he could see was one blurred segment of her face, as he might have seen her picture in a badly-focused fade-out that had gone askew. And to that isolated scrap of vision in the overwhelming blackness he found the blessed strength to croak two words:
“Drive on.”
And then a second surge of blackness welled up around him and blotted out every sight and sound, and he fell away into the infinite black void.
CHAPTER 7
“So even your arrangements can break down, Templar—when your accomplice fails you,” Kuzela remarked silkily. “My enterprising young friend, when you are older you will realise that it is always a mistake to rely upon a woman. I have never employed a woman myself for that reason.”
“I’ll bet that broke her heart,” said the Saint.
Once again he sat in Kuzela’s study, with his head still throbbing painfully from the crashing welt it had received, and a lump on the back of it feeling as if it were growing out of his skull like a great auk’s egg. His hair was slightly disarranged, and straps on his wrists prevented him from rearranging it effectively, but the Saintly smile had not lost one iota of its charm.
“It remains, however, to decide whether you are going to be permitted to profit by this experience—whether you are going to live long enough to do so. Perhaps it has not occurred to you that you may have come to the end of your promising career,” continued the man on the other side of the desk dispassionately, and the Saint sighed.
“What, not again?” he pleaded brokenly, and Kuzela frowned.
“I do not understand you.”
“Only a few months ago I was listening to those very words,” explained the Saint. “Alas, poor Wilfred! And he meant it, too. ‘Wilf, old polecat,’ I said, ‘don’t you realise that I can’t be killed before page three hundred and twenty?’ He didn’t believe me. And he died. They put a rope round his neck and dropped him through a hole in the floor, and the consequences to his figure were very startling. Up to the base of the neck he was not so thin—but oh, boy, from then on…It was awfully sad.”
And Simon Templar beamed around upon the congregation—upon Kuzela, and upon the two bruisers who loafed about the room, and upon the negro who stood behind his chair. And the negro he indicated with a nod.
“One of your little pets?” he inquired, and Kuzela’s lips moved in the fraction of a smile.
“It was fortunate that Ngano heard some of the noise,” he said. “He came out of the house just in time.”
“To sock me over the head from behind?” drawled the Saint genially. “Doubtless, old dear. But apart from that—”
“Your accomplice escaped, with my property. True. But, my dear Templar, need that prove to be a tragedy? We have your own invaluable self still with us—and you, I am quite sure, know not only where the lady has gone, but also where you have hidden a gentleman whom I should very much like to have restored to me.”
Simon raised languid eyebrows.
“When I was the Wallachian Vice-Consul at Pfaffenhausen,” he said pleasantly, “our diplomacy was governed by a picturesque little Pomeranian poem, which begins:
Der Steiss des Elephanten
Ist nicht, ist nicht so klein.
If you get the idea—”
Kuzela nodded without animosity. His deliberate, ruthless white hands trimmed the end of a cigar.
“You must not think that I am unused to hearing remarks like that, Templar,” he said equably. “In fact, I remember listening to a precisely similar speech from our friend the Duke of Fortezza. And yet—” He paused to blow a few minute flakes of tobacco leaf from the shining top of the desk, and then his pale bland eyes flicked up again to the Saint’s face…“The Duke of Fortezza changed his mind,” he said.
Simon blinked.
“Do you know,” he said enthusiastically, “there’s one of the great songs of the century there! I can just feel it. Something like this:
The Duke of Fortezza.
Quite frequently gets a
Nimpulse to go blithering off on to the blind,
But the Duchess starts bimbling
And wambling and wimbling
And threatens to wallop his ducal behind;
And her ladyship’s threats are
So fierce that he sweats
And just sobs as he pets her
With tearful regrets—Ah!
The Duke of Fortezza
Is changing his mind.
We could polish up the idea a lot if we had time, but you must admit that for an impromptu effort—”
“You underrate my own sense of humour, Templar.” Unemotionally Kuzela inspected the even reddening of the tip of his cigar, and waved his match slowly in the air till it went out. “But do you know another mistake which you also make?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion,” said the Saint cheerfully.
“You underrate my sense of proportion.”
The Saint smiled.
“In many ways,” he murmured, “you remind me of the late Mr Garniman. I wonder how you’ll get on together.”
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br /> The other straightened up suddenly in his chair. For a moment the mask of amiable self-possession fell from him.
“I shall be interested to bandy words with you later—if you survive, my friend.” He spoke without raising his voice, but two little specks of red burned in the cores of his eyes, and a shimmering marrow of vitriolic savagery edged up through his unalteringly level intonation. “For the present, our time is short, and you have already wasted more than your due allowance. But I think you understand me.” Once again, a smooth evanescent trickle of honey over the bitingly measured syllables. “Come, now, my dear young friend, it would be a pity for us to quarrel. We have crossed swords, and you have lost. Let us reach an amicable armistice. You have only to give me a little information, and then, as soon as I have verified it, and have finished my work—say after seven days, during which time you would stay with me as an honoured guest—you would be as free as air. We would shake hands and go our ways.” Kuzela smiled, and picked up a pencil. “Now firstly: where has your accomplice gone?”
“Naturally, she drove straight to Buckingham Palace,” said the Saint.
Kuzela continued to smile.
“But you are suspicious. Possibly you think that some harm might befall her, and perhaps you would be unwilling to accept my assurance that she will be as safe as yourself. Well, it is a human suspicion after all, and I can understand it. But suppose we ask you another question…Where is the Duke of Fortezza?” Kuzela drew a small memorandum block towards him, and poised his pencil with engaging expectancy. “Come, come! That is not a very difficult question to answer, is it? He is nothing to you—a man whom you met a few hours ago for the first time. If, say, you had never met him, and you had read in your newspaper that some fatal accident had overtaken him, you would not have been in the least disturbed. And if it is a decision between his temporary inconvenience and your own promising young life…” Kuzela shrugged. “I have no wish to use threats. But you, with your experience and imagination, must know that death does not always come easily. And very recently you did something which has mortally offended the invaluable Ngano. It would distress me to have to deliver you into his keeping…Now, now, let us make up our minds quickly. What have you done with the Duke?”
The Saint versus Scotland Yard (The Saint Series) Page 12
