Prelude For War s-19

by Leslie Charteris

  "Very clever," he agreed. "But you see it was just the way I expected you to be clever."

  She stared at him.

  "The way you . . ."

  "Yes."

  "But you don't mean you——"

  "Naturally," he lied calmly. "I knew that if you got away, the first thing you'd do would be to get hold of those papers, wherever you'd left them. I wanted to know where they were, and I didn't want to have to beat it out of you. So I just let you get away and fetch them for me."

  "I don't believe you!"

  "Would you like me to tell you all about it? I was behind you all the time. You picked up the ticket at the South Ken­sington post office, and then you went on and collected the package from the checkroom at Paddington. You took the first train down here, and you were driven up from the station by a bloke with no roof to his mouth and one of the oldest taxis on the road. Does that help?"

  She looked as crestfallen as a child that has had a succu­lent lollipop snatched out of its mouth.

  "I think you're beastly," she said.

  "I know. Pigs move pointedly over to the other end of the sty when I come in. And now suppose you tell me what those papers were doing at Paddington."

  "That's easy. You see I had them with me when I was coming down here for last week end, because of course I hadn't read them, and I was going to read them on the train and give them back to Johnny when I saw him. Then I thought if they had all these things in them that were so rude about Algy and General Sangore and the rest of them, perhaps I'd better not take them down with me, because Algy mightn't like it. So I just popped them in the cloakroom meaning to collect them on my way back. But then the fire happened, and—and everything, and I came back in Mr Luker's car, and what with one thing and another I forgot all about them until you started talking about them at the Berkeley. So after last night I thought I'd better see what they were all about."

  "And what are they all about?"

  "I don't know yet, but they look rather dull. You see, I'd only just started to look at them when you came in. I didn't like to open them on the train, because there were always other people in the carriage, and I didn't know if they might not see something they shouldn't see. . . . You can look at them with me if you like. As a matter of fact, I—I meant you to have them anyway."

  Simon gazed at her with the admiration reserved for very special occasions.

  "Darling," he said, "how can I ever have managed to misjudge you?"

  "But I did, really. You don't think I'd have let Algy have them after what happened last night, do you?"

  "Of course not—unless he paid you a much bigger price for compensation."

  "Aren't you a beast!" she said.

  The Saint sighed.

  "Do we have to go into that again?"

  She considered him, pouting.

  "But you do really like me quite a lot, don't you ?"

  "Darling, I adore you."

  "Well, I hope you do, because if you don't I'm going to scream for help and bring the whole town in. On the other hand, provided you're reasonable . . ."

  The Saint put his hands in his pockets. He was patient to the point of languor, completely sure of the eventual outcome. He could afford to bide his time. These preliminaries were incidental illuminations rather than delays.

  "Yes, if I'm reasonable," he said. "Go on. I'm inter­ested."

  "What I mean," she said, "is this. You can't get away from the fact that I'm just as much entitled to these papers as you are. If it comes to that, I'm probably more entitled to them, because after all Johnny gave them to me. So if I let you see them, I don't see why we shouldn't work together. You suggested it first, anyway, and after all you do make lots of money, don't you?"

  He smiled.

  "I keep body and soul together. But do you really think I you'd like being shot at, and having people putting arsenic in your soup and blowing up bombs under your chair and all that sort of thing?"

  "I might get used to it."

  "Even to finding snakes in your bed?"

  "Oh, but I'd expect you to look after me," she said solemnly. "You seem to survive all right, and I expect if I was with you most of the time I'd survive, too. You've got to look after me now, anyhow. It stands to reason that if you got the papers they'll be bound to know you got them from me, and you can't just laugh lightly and walk away and leave me to be slaughtered."

  "Suppose we decide about that after we've seen what these papers are," he suggested gently.

  She seemed to sit more tightly in her chair, and her smile was very bright.

  "You mean we are working together now?" The Saint left the door. He was moving over towards her, still with his hands in his pockets, threading his way with easy nonchalance through the narrow footpaths between the furniture. The glimmer of lazy humour on his lips and eyes was cool and good natured, but under it was a quiet ruthlessness that cannons could not have turned aside.

  "Don't let's misunderstand each other again," he said pleasantly. "I came here just to see those papers. Now I'm going to look at them. There aren't any conditions attached to it. If you want a wrestling match you can have one, but you ought to know that you'll only be wasting your strength. And if you want to scream you can scream, but I don't think you'll get out more than half a beep before I knock you out. And then when you wake up you'll have a headache and a pain in your jaw, and I shall be very sorry for you, but by that time I shall have finished my reading. Does that make everything quite clear?"

  Her eyes blazed at him. All her limbs were tense. She looked as if she were going to scream and risk the conse­quences.

  The Saint didn't move. He had arrived in front of her, and there he waited. In his immobility there was a kind of cynical curiosity. It was plain that she could do what she liked: he was only interested to see what she would choose to do.

  And he wasn't bluffing. His cynicism was not really unkind. He would hate hurting her, but he meant every word he had said. Circumstance had put him on to a plane where the niceties of conventional chivalry could have no weight. And she knew that it was not worth taking up the challenge.

  Her lower lip thrust out petulantly.

  "Damn you," she whimpered. "Oh, damn you!"

  "I'm sorry," he said, and meant it.

  He bent over her and took the sheaf of papers out of her hand, from behind her, and touched her mouth lightly with his own as he did so.

  She got up and flung herself away from him as far as the topography of the room would let her. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, balanced for any action that might be forced upon him; but the moment of danger was past. She stood by the dressing table glowering at him and biting her lips in a way that he remembered. Her ill temper had something very childish and almost charming about it: she was like a little girl in a pet.

  He sat down on the bed with the sheaf of papers in his hand.

  "Are you going to Scotland for the grouse?" he inquired amiably.

  She took her bag off the dressing table, jerked out a packet of cigarettes, lighted one and moved further away. She stood with her back to him, smoking furiously, tapping one foot on the threadbare carpet, the whole dorsal view of her expressive of raging contempt; but he observed that she was covertly watching him in the long mirror on the wardrobe.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette himself and turned the pages of the dossier that had disordered so many lives and ended at least two of them.

  At once he seemed to have forgotten her existence. He read more and more intently, with a frown of concentration deepening on his face. His intentness shut out everything beyond the information he was assimilating. For a long time there was no sound in the room except the irritating tattoo of Lady Valerie's toe beating on the floor, the rustle of paper and the creaking of rusty bedsprings as he stirred to turn a page.

  And as he read on, a curious empty chill crept over him.

  Lady Valerie fidgeted with the catch on the wardrobe door. She breathed on the mirror and drew s
illy faces with her forefinger in the cloud deposited by her breath, and went on stealing furtive glances at him. At last she turned round in a final fling of exasperation and stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer on the dressing table.

  "Well," she said peevishly, "at least you might tell me what it's all about. Is it very interesting?"

  "Wait a minute," he said, without looking up.

  She pushed the saucer off the dressing table with an exas­perated sweep of her hand. Instead of providing a satis­factory smash, it landed on the carpet with a thick plunk and rolled hollowly away over the linoleum under the washstand.

  The Saint went on reading.

  And as he came towards the end of the manuscript that dry deflated chill seemed to freeze the fire out of him and leave him numb with helpless bafflement.

  For there was nothing in that bulky collection of docu­ments that seemed to be worth much more than the paper it was written on in the way of powder and shot. There were the usual notes on the organization of the arms ring, principally taken from the British end, but none of it was very new. Much of it could have been found in such detailed surveys as Merchants of Death. There were notes on Luker's background, the puppet directors of his various companies, the ramifications of their many subsidiaries, their interna­tional affiliations, their political connections, their methods of business, together with well-authenticated samples of certain notable iniquities. It was all very interesting and highly scandalous, but it would cause no revolutions. Such exposes had been made before, but they had never done more than superficially ruffle the apathy of the great dumb popu­lace which might have risen up in its wrath and destroyed them. And under the laws made by governments themselves financially interested and practically concerned in the suc­cess of the racket, if not actually subsidized by it, there were not even grounds for a criminal prosecution. It was only the kind of oft-repeated indictment that caused a tem­porary furore, during which the racketeers simply laid low and waited for nature to take its course and the birth of sextuplets in Kalamazoo to repossess the front pages of an indifferent press.

  The latter part of the dossier was devoted to the Sons of France considered as part of a sales-promotion campaign backed by Luther and his associates. There was an educa­tive outline of the machinery of the organization, some eye-opening copies of secret orders issued to members, speci­mens of its propaganda and declared objectives, in the usual Fascist jargon—"to eradicate Communism, Pacifism, and all such Jewish-inspired undermining of the heroic spirit of France. ... To institute state control, for the benefit of the people, over literature, art, motion pictures, radio and all other means of disseminating culture. ... To build up the military, naval and air strength of France so that French honour may be prepared to answer the insolence of the Hun." There was good evidence of financial support given to the organization by Luker and certain directors of the Fabrique Siebel des Armes de Guerre—but that, as Simon had pointed out to Teal, was probably not an offence under the law. There were a number of detailed records mostly made up from newspaper cuttings of certain rather revolting acts of violence and terrorism committed by alleged members of the Sons of France, but there was no evidence by which Luker and his associates could have been brought to book as their direct instigators. Certainly there was enough material to have brought down on Luker's head the moral indignation of the whole world, if the world had had any moral sense; but in the way of legal evidence of recognized crimes there wasn't enough to get him as much punishment as he would have earned by driving his car down Piccadilly at thirty-five miles an hour.

  The last page of all was a sheet torn from a cheap memo­randum block, on which someone seemed to have made a note of three functions or events, with their dates. The first and last were so heavily scored out as to be practically unde­cipherable, but the middle one was left plain and untouched in the centre of a frame of doodling arabesques such as a man draws on a pad during a conference. It read:

  25 août: Ouverture de I'Hospice de Mémoire,

  à Neuilly, par M. Chaulage.

  Fastened to it with a detachable clip was a photograph of three men, one of whom was Luker, apparently talking in an office. And in the bottom corner of the memorandum sheet was pencilled in a different hand, so quick and careless as to require a clairvoyant to read it:

  Remember the R———?

  The last word eluded even the Saint's powers of divina­tion. And that was all there was.

  3

  Simon Templar lighted another cigarette with the dis­passionate detachment of a machine. He was more cold and grim than the girl had ever seen him, or had ever realized that he could be. He looked up at her with blue eyes that bit with the intolerable glittering cold of interstellar space.

  "Come here," he said.

  No power of mind that she could conceive could have disobeyed him.

  She came over, in spite of herself, like a mindless robot. He took her hand and drew her down on to the bed beside him.

  "Is this all there ever was in this package?"

  "I—I think so."

  "Have you taken anything out ?"

  "No."

  He knew she was telling the truth. As he was then, she could never have made him believe a lie.

  "Was the envelope sealed when you put it in the check­room?"

  "Yes."

  "It didn't look as if it had been tampered with when you got it out?"

  "No."

  But there he knew he was on the wrong tack. If Luker and Company had been able to get at the packet, they wouldn't have left any of it. And if they had known where it was, in order to tamper with it, they wouldn't have been going to such lengths to locate it.

  This was all that there had ever been. And this was what Kennet and Windlay had died for.

  He had expected that that dossier would give him a light that would make clear all mysteries, and instead it had only given him a darker riddle. He stared at that enigmatic last sheet with a glacial and immobile fury. Whatever Kennet and Windlay had been murdered for must be hidden there —he was as sure of that as he could be sure of anything, but that was no help to him. ... In a sudden uncontrolla­ble defining of his belief he ripped off the rest of the heavy batch of papers and tossed them into her lap.

  "There you are," he said. "You can have 'em. If there's anything there that's worth a penny more than the News of the World would pay you for it it 'll take somebody a lot cleverer than me to dig it out."

  "That's very nice of you," she said. "Anything that's no use, and you don't want, I can have. What's that page you're keeping ?"

  "I wish I knew."

  "May I see it?"

  She was sitting straight up, with a curious distant dignity.

  He looked at her. In his mind was a nebulous puzzlement that he could not bring into sharp focus. She had not asked for terms then, nor did she go on to ask for them, but he didn't seem to have enough attention to spare for that.

  He moved the paper a little, and she read it over his arm.

  " 'The twenty-fifth of August—Opening of the Hospital of Memory——' "

  " 'The Hostel of Memory, at Neuilly,' " he said. "I've heard something about it. It's an old chateau converted into a sort of Old Soldiers' Home, endowed by the French gov­ernment for disabled veterans of the Great War to end their days in in reasonably pleasant surroundings."

  " 'By Monsieur Chaulage,' " she read. "Isn't he the presi­dent, or the premier, or something?"

  He nodded, and a recollection struck him like a deadened blow.

  "And tomorrow is the twenty-fifth of August," he said.

  She stared at him with wide expressionless eyes. There was nothing definable that her eyes could have expressed. She was as nonplussed as himself. They gazed at one another in the barren communion of hopeless bewilderment, knowing that here was something that might make their blood run cold if they could understand it, and yet not know­ing what to fear.

  Presently she looked at the sheet again.

&
nbsp; "What's the rest of it?" She leaned over further to peer at the spidery scrawl across the corner. " 'Remember the——' What is it, Simon? It looks like 'Rinksty.' "

  "You're as good a thought reader as I am. Does it mean anything to you?"

  "Nothing."

  An idea crossed his mind.

  "Do you know the handwriting?"

  "Of course. It's Johnny's writing."

  "Johnny's! Then you must know what it means—you must be able to read it——"

  She shook her head.

  "But I can't! Nobody ever could, when he wrote like that. Usually he wrote quite neatly, but when he was in a hurry he just scrawled things down like that and if you were lucky and you knew what he was likely to be writing about you could sometimes guess what the words were from the first letters and how long they looked."

  "But he meant this for you. He scribbled it on the page to make you think of the point. 'Remember the Rinksty?' —or whatever it is. He thought it would mean something to you. Is it something that he'd told you about before when he was talking? Is it a ship? Is it a hotel? Is it a pet name of your own that you had for some place where you used to meet—some place where he might have told you about this? For God's sake, think!"

  The Saint's voice hammered at her with passionate inten­sity; the grip of his fingers must have been bruising her arm. Somehow he was neither pleading nor commanding, but his fire would have melted stone. She was not stone. She twisted her fingers together and looked here and there, and her face was crumpled with the frantic effort of memory; but her eyes were big and tragic when they came to his face again.

  "It's no good," she said. "It doesn't ring a bell anywhere. It isn't any place we went to, I'm sure of that."

  "Or anything he talked about?"

  "He used to talk about so many things, but as I told you I never paid any more attention than I could help, because it all seemed so frightfully earnest and important and I'm much too young to start bothering about important things."