“Let’s exercise the donkey,” he said.
The ensacked Mr Trape was loaded into the cart, and they were moving passively down towards the harbour, before Patricia asked the inevitable question.
“I’m giving Abdul a visitor,” said the Saint cheerfully. “He’s expecting one, and why should he be disappointed? If you want another reason, write it down as my everlasting love of exasperating the ungodly. I have no other mission in life…You’d better stay back here—I’m banking on the sea gang not knowing the land operators, but they’d certainly ask questions about you.”
The girl fell back, and Simon led the donkey out on to the jetty. For a very brief space he wondered if he would be able to locate the tender that awaited him, and then he saw a glistening white speed-boat moored by some steps running down to the water. Its crew was dark-complexioned and swarthy, and to remove all doubt it flew a red burgee with the name Luxor woven into it.
Simon hitched the sack on to his shoulder, and walked brazenly down the steps.
“Here he is,” he said.
Not one of the crew raised an eyebrow. Simon lowered his burden into the boat, saw the engine started, and went back along the causeway in an anguish of noiseless laughter.
5
It had been a simple gesture of a kind that Simon Templar could never resist, and it gave him exactly the same unfathomably primitive satisfaction that an urchin derives from putting his thumb to his nose and extending his fingers outwards. It was a moral catharsis that touched the well-springs of all unsophisticated human bliss. And if he could have witnessed the reception of his jest his pleasure would have been almost too ecstatic to be borne.
Abdul Osman himself came out on deck to supervise the hoisting up of the sack, and the leer on his face did not improve his beauty. Mr Trape was beginning to recover by that time, and the sack was squirming vigorously to an accompaniment of hoarse grunts and indistinguishable words.
“He must have a head of iron, that Englishman,” muttered Osman. “He should have slept for many hours.”
The thought crossed his mind that a man with a constitution like that would stand much torture, and his mouth watered at the prospect. He lifted his foot and kicked the sack cold-bloodedly, and it yelped at each thump of his shoe.
“Before you die you shall have much more to shout for,” said Osman gloatingly. “Take him to the saloon.”
Rough hands dragged the sack below, and Abdul Osman followed. Then it was cut open, and the storm broke.
Osman, it must be admitted, had never been considered even attractively ugly. He was a short pot-bellied man with a fat sallow face and black hair that covered his head in tight curls; out of his own hearing, it was said that much of his family tree was as black as his hair, and certainly he had a squat nose and a yellowish tinge in the whites of his pig-like eyes that supported the theory. A closely-clipped black moustache curved in a broad arch over his thick pouting lips and gave his face, even in repose, an expression of sensual bestiality that was nauseating.
And his rage at the sight of Mr Trape emerging from the sack put him right out of comparison with anything human. His face resembled nothing so much as the fat end of a bloated and malignant slug. His eyes almost disappeared in the rolls of unhealthy looking fat that creased down on them. Clearly marked circles of bright red sprang up and burned on his cheeks, plainly revealing the edges of the skin-grafting operations that had obliterated the Saint’s brands; the rest of his jowl was blotched yellow and grey. And out of his distorted mouth flowed a stream of shrill profanity that was horrible to hear.
Nor was his wrath purely vocal. He kicked Trape again, and kicked and tore at the men who had carried in the sack until they fled from the room. And then, with the most lasting and concentrated malignance he kicked his secretary, who had played no part in the proceedings at all.
But that was nothing unusual. Mr Clements was there to be kicked. He was kicked whenever anything went wrong, and just as impartially when everything went right. Abdul Osman kicked him, cuffed him, and spat in his face, and his secretary cringed. There was something hideous about his quivering submission.
For Clements was a white man. His hair was almost ash-blonde, his shrinking eyes grey.
“Swine!” Osman hissed.
His sunken eyes glittered with the vindictive pleasure that soothed his senses whenever he heaped humiliations on that cowering travesty of a man. Even in that paroxysm of fury the sensation was like balm to his uncontrolled nerves—perhaps it was the very thing that finally turned the tide of his unleashed savagery and began to restore him to reason. For that crawling servile thing that had once been a man was the most permanently soothing monument to Abdul Osman’s vanity in the world. Simon Templar, as a helpless prisoner, might supplant him, but until the day came when Osman could look down and spit in the face of that ultimate triumph the degradation of Clements reigned as his supreme achievement.
Less hastily, ten times more malignantly, Osman reached out a hand, grasped his secretary by the nose, and forced him to his knees. He stared at him contemptuously for a moment; then he put a foot in his face and sprawled him over.
“Get up, pig.”
Clements obeyed.
“Look at me.”
The white man raised his eyes slowly. Abdul Osman saw the red sparks of futile hate glowing in their depths like hot embers, and laughed.
“You know that I always have my revenge, don’t you?” His almost perfect English had a sibilant accent, as if a snake had spoken. “How unfortunate it was that my misguided parents should have sent me to an English school! Unpleasant for me, perhaps, but how much more enduringly regrettable for you! I was a dirty nigger then, wasn’t I? And it seemed so humorous to you to humiliate me. I trust you look back on those days with satisfaction, Clements?”
The man did not answer.
“It was such a pity that you began to try the needle, and then found you couldn’t live without it. And then that you committed that indiscretion which finally put you at my mercy…You were so strong and healthy once, weren’t you?—so proud and brave! You would never have let me strike you. You would have struck me yourself, like this.”
His flat hand smacked the other’s face from side to side—once, twice.
“You would like to strike me again, wouldn’t you? But then there is always the certainty that you would have to bare your back to my little whip. It’s wonderful how hunger for the needle, and the entertainment of my little whip, have curbed your spirits.” He was playing with the man now, drugging his disordered vanity again with the sadistic repetition of a scene that he had played hundreds of times and never tired of. “Pah! I’ve crushed you so much that now you haven’t even the courage to kill yourself and end your misery. You’re mine, body and soul—the idol of the school fawning on the dirty nigger. Doesn’t that reflection please you, Clements?” He was watching the silent man with a shrewdness in his slow malevolence. “You’ll be wanting the needle again about now, won’t you? I’ve a good mind to keep you waiting. It will amuse you to have to come crawling round my feet, licking my shoes, pleading, weeping, slobbering—won’t it, Clements?”
The secretary licked his lips. It looked for a moment as if at last the smouldering fires in him would flare up to some reply, and Osman waited for it hopefully. And then came voices and footsteps on the deck over their heads, feet clattering down the companion, and the door was opened by a smart uniformed Arab seaman to admit a visitor.
It was Galbraith Stride.
“Did you get him?” he demanded huskily.
There were beads of perspiration on his face, and not all of them were due to the heat of the day. Osman’s puffy lips curled at the sight of him.
“No, I didn’t,” he said shortly. “A fool bungled it. I have no time for fools.”
Stride mopped his forehead.
“It’s on my nerves, Osman. He’s been on the Claudette, admitted who he was—who knows what he’ll do next? I tell you—”
“You may tell me all you want to in a few minutes,” said Osman suavely. “I have some business to attend to first—if you will excuse me.” He turned to the seaman. “Ali, send Trape to me.”
The Arab touched his forehead and disappeared, and Osman elbowed his secretary aside and helped himself from an inlaid brass cigarette box on the table. All his self-possession had returned, and somehow his heavy tranquillity was more inhuman than his raving anger.
Presently the Arab came back with Trape. Osman gazed at him unwinkingly for some seconds, and then he spoke.
“I have no time for fools,” he repeated.
Young Harry Trape was sullen and frightened. The ways of violence were not new to him—he had been in prison three times, and once they would have flogged him with a nine-thonged lash if the doctors had not said he was too weak to endure the punishment. Young Harry had a grievance: he had not only been knocked out by the Saint and tied up in a stuffy sack, but he had been viciously kicked both unknowingly and knowingly by the man he had tried to serve, and he felt he had much to complain about. He had come to the saloon prepared to complain, but the snake-like impassiveness of the unblinking stare that fastened on his face held him mute and strangely terrified.
“You are a fool, Trape,” said Osman, almost benevolently, “and I don’t think I require your services any longer. Ali will take you back to St Mary’s in the speed-boat. You will give up your room at Tregarthen’s, make a parcel of all the cocaine you have and post it to the usual address, and then you will take yourself, your friend, and your luggage back to the speed-boat, which will take you both to Penzance immediately. Your money will be waiting for you in London. You may go.”
“Yes, sir,” said Trape throatily.
He left the saloon quickly. The seaman was about to follow him, but Osman stayed him with a gesture.
“It will not really be necessary to go to Penzance, Ali,” he remarked deliberately, and the man nodded and went out.
Stride’s bloodshot eyes stared at the Egyptian.
“My God—you’re a cold-blooded devil!” he half-gasped.
Osman chuckled wheezily.
“Oh, no, not cold-blooded, my dear Stride! You ought to know that. Far from it. But a dead fool is a safe fool, and I believe in safety first. But not cold-blooded. There are times when my flesh burns like fire—have I not told you?”
Galbraith Stride shuddered in spite of himself, for he knew what Osman meant.
“I came to see you about that,” he said jerkily.
“Ah! You have decided?”
Stride nodded. He sat down at the table, helped himself with nervous fingers from the inlaid cigarette box. The secretary stood by, ignored by both.
It was a strange venue for a peace conference, but that was what it was—and it explained also the terror which had come to Galbraith Stride that afternoon on the sunny deck of his yacht, the terror that had looked at him out of two cold reckless eyes that were as blue as the sea. Each of those two men was a power in an underground world of ugly happenings, though in their personal contact there was no question about which was the dominating personality. Even as Abdul Osman’s tentacles of vice reached from Shanghai to Constantinople, so did Galbraith Stride’s stretch from London south to the borders of the Adriatic and out west across the ocean to Rio.
Looking at Abdul Osman, one could build about him just such a mastery, but there was nothing about Galbraith Stride to show the truth. And yet it was true. Somehow, out of the restless cunning that evolved from the cowardice of his ineffectual physique, Stride had built up that subterranean kingdom and held it together, unknown to his step-daughter, unknown to the police, unknown even to the princelings of his noisome empire who communicated with him only through that silent Ramon Almido who passed as Stride’s secretary. And thus, with the growth of both their dominions, it had come to a conference that must leave one of them supreme. Abdul Osman’s insatiable lust for power dictated it, for Stride would have been content with his own boundaries. And with it, in the first meeting between them, had come to Abdul Osman the knowledge that he was Stride’s master, that he need not be generous in treating for terms. The spectacle of Stride’s uneasiness was another sop to Osman’s pride.
“What a different conclusion there might have been if we had not both simultaneously thought of depositing the same letters with our solicitors!” said Osman reflectively. “To think that if either of us died suddenly there would be left instructions to the police to investigate carefully the alibi of the other! Quite a dramatic handicap, isn’t it?”
Stride licked his lips.
“That’s the only part of the bargain you’ve kept,” he said. “Why, I’ve just heard you admit that your men have been landing cocaine here.”
“I took the liberty of assuming our agreement to be a foregone conclusion,” said Osman smoothly. Then his voice took on a harsher tone. “Stride, there’s only one way out for you. For the last two years my agents have been steadily accumulating evidence against you—evidence which would prove absorbing reading to your good friends at Scotland Yard. That is the possibility for which you were not prepared, and it’s too late now for you to think of laying the same trap for me. In another month that evidence can be brought to the point where it would certainly send you to prison for the rest of your life. You see, it was so much easier for me than for the police—they did not know whom to suspect, whereas I knew, and only had to prove it.”
Stride had heard that before, and he did not take much notice.
“And so,” continued Osman, “I make you the very fine offer of your liberty, and in return for that you retire from business and I marry Miss Laura.”
Stride started up.
“That’s not what you said!” he blurted. “You said if I…if I gave you Laura—you’d retire from Turkey and—”
“I changed my mind,” said Osman calmly. “Why should I give? I was foolish. I hold all the cards. I am tired of arguing. As soon as this Simon Templar is on board I wish to leave—the year is getting late, and I can’t stand your winters. Why should I make concessions?” He spat—straight to the priceless carpet, an inch from his visitor’s polished shoes. “Stride, you were a fool to meet me yourself. If you had dealt with me through your clever Mr Almido I might have had some respect for you. You are not sufficiently important to look at—it shows me too plainly which of us is going to get his own way.”
He spoke curtly, and, oddly enough for him, with a lack of apparent conceit that made his speech deadly in its emphasis. And Stride knew that Osman spoke only the truth. Yet, even then, if certain things had not happened…
“You are afraid of the Saint, Stride,” said Osman, reading the other’s thoughts. “You are more afraid of him perhaps than you are of prison. You did not know that he knew you, but now that you know you want nothing more than to run away and hide in some place where he can’t find you. Well, you can go. I shouldn’t stand in your way, my dear Stride.”
The other did not answer. Something had broken in the core of his resistance—a thing which only a psychologist who knew the workings of his mind, and the almost superstitious fear which the name of the Saint could still drive into many consciences, could have understood. He sat huddled in a kind of collapse, and Osman looked at him and chuckled again.
“I shall expect a note to tell me that you agree by ten o’clock tonight. You will send it across by hand—and who could be better employed to deliver it than Miss Laura?”
Galbraith Stride stood up and went out without a word.
6
Simon Templar saw Young Harry Trape and his companion carrying their suit-cases down to the quay and thought they were trying to catch the Scillonian, which was scheduled to sail for the mainland at 4:15. He watched their descent rather wistfully, from the hillside where he was walking, for it was his impression that they had got off much too lightly. He was not to know that Abdul Osman had himself decided to dispense with their existence according to th
e laws of a strictly Oriental code by which the penalty of failure was death, but if he had known, the situation would have appealed to his sense of humour even more than the memory of his recent treatment of Young Harry.
At the same time, their departure solved at least one problem, for it definitely relieved Mr Smithson-Smith of further anxiety about the good name of his hotel.
It was past six o’clock when he came back to the village, for the solution of the mystery of an overloaded basket of towels had suddenly dawned on him, and he had set out to visit a few likely spots on the coast in the hope of finding further evidence. He had failed in that, but he remained convinced that his surmise was right.
“It was an ingenious method of smuggling dope,” he told Patricia. “Nobody’s thinking about anything like that here—if they see a strange ship loafing around their only suspicion is that it may be another French poacher setting lobster-pots in forbidden waters, and if the boat looked ritzy enough they simply wouldn’t think at all. The sea party would dump sacks of it somewhere among the rocks, and the Heavenly Twins would fetch it home bit by bit in their basket without attracting any attention. Then they pack it in a suit-case and take it over to Penzance with their other stuff, and there isn’t even a Customs officer to ask if they’ve got a bottle of scent. Which is probably what they’re doing now—I wish we could have arranged a sticky farewell for them.”
He had been much too far away to think of an attempt to intercept the evacuation and the idea of telegraphing a warning to the Chief of Police at Penzance did not appeal to him. Simon Templar had no high idea of policemen, particularly provincial ones. And as a matter of fact his mind was taken up with a graver decision than the fate of two unimportant intermediaries.
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 19
