The Saint Steps In s-24

by Leslie Charteris

  Then he returned to Calvin Gray and put a hand on his shoulder, and the old man looked up at him hollow-eyed.

  "Crying won't get you anywhere. This is still a war," said the Saint, and handed him the paper he had written on.

  The girl tried to lean over and see; but Simon took her arm and brought her up to her feet and led her a few steps away. He held her by both elbows, facing him, and gazed at her with all the strength that was in him.

  "Some of this is my fault too," he said. "If I hadn't butted in, it might not have been so bad."

  Then the door opened, and Walter Devan came in.

  He looked like a sales manager who had left a conference room at a crucial moment to answer a phone call.

  "Well?" he inquired briskly.

  The Saint detached himself leisuredly, and lighted another cigarette.

  "So far as I'm concerned," he said, without a flicker of emo­tion, "the answer is still: Nuts."

  "So is mine," said the girl clearly.

  "I'm sorry," said Devan; and it sounded like genuine regret.

  But he looked at Calvin Gray.

  Gray got up off the divan. He was unsteady and haggard, and his eyes burned.

  "Mine isn't," he said. "Can you swear to me that if I do everything you want, nothing will ever happen to Madeline?"

  "Daddy!" said the girl.

  "I can," said Devan.

  The old man's hands twisted together.

  "Then—I will."

  Devan studied him, not with cheap triumph, but with sturdy businesslike satisfaction.

  "I'll get you some paper to write out your process," he said, in quite a friendly way. "Is there anything else you'd like?"

  Gray shook his head.

  "I couldn't write it. It would sound so complicated, and—I don't even know if I could concentrate enough . . . Please . . . Can't you make it easy? Mr. Quennel used to be a chemist himself, didn't he? Take me back to my laboratory, I'll show him——"

  "Daddy," said the girl in torment.

  "I'll show him," Gray said in a kind of hysterical breath­lessness. "He'll understand. And he'll have it all to himself. Nothing in writing. Him and me . . . and nobody'll ever know . . . and Madeline . . . You promise?"

  "Come back to the house and talk to Mr. Quennel yourself," Devan said reasonably.

  He took Calvin Gray's arm and steered him towards the door. But he never turned his back on the Saint; and, almost para­lytically, his right hand stayed with the bulge in his coat pocket where it had been from the time when he came in.

  Madeline Gray tensed in a spasmic impulse to go after him; and the Saint caught her by the shoulders and held her.

  The door closed again.

  Simon Templar's face was like stone.

  "You can't do anything," he said.

  It was a moment of interminable stillness.

  Then with a fierce irresistible movement, she tore herself away from him and flung herself down on the nearest divan, face downwards, her face clutched and buried between her hands. He could see her right hand, the small fingers clenched to whiteness as the knuckles gripped at her temples.

  After a while he lighted another cigarette and took to strolling slowly and silently up and down the room.

  It must have been about ten minutes before she turned over on her back and lay with one fist at her mouth, staring blankly up at the ceiling. And only then he thought it might be safe to speak. And even then, he stood over her and kept his voice so low that it was only just enough to brush her ears.

  He said softly: "Madeline."

  "He didn't have to do it," she said tonelessly. "He didn't."

  He said: "Madeline, this is very probably curtains for all of us, but we don't have to go alone. I gave him a note."

  "It didn't make any difference."

  "I hope it did. I believe it did. I told him what to do."

  She sat up with a sudden start.

  "You told him—what?"

  "I told him we could still do something on our way. I told him to get Quennel over to the laboratory. And then I said I was sure that while he was pretending to demonstrate his process he could put some things together that would go off all at once with a loud noise. And it wouldn't do any of us any good, but it would take Quennel along too, and probably Devan with him. And in the end that may be just as impor­tant." The Saint's voice was very light, no more than a breath between iron lips that scarcely moved. "I sent him to die, Madeline, but in the best way that any of us could do it."

  She was on her feet somehow. She was holding his arms by the sleeves, making little aimless tugging movements, rocking a little in a kind of anguish of inarticulacy. Her eyes were flooding and yet her lips were parted in an unearthly sort of smile.

  "You did that?" she repeated again and again; and it was as if something sang through the break in her voice. "You did that?"

  He nodded.

  Then the door opened, and he turned sharply.

  Andrea Quennel came in.

  4

  She said: "Hullo."

  He looked into her pale empty, eyes that still gave him noth­ing back, and put one hand negligently in his pocket, and said affably: "Hullo to you."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Rehearsing a play," he said.

  "Why are you locked in here?"

  He still didn't know how to take her.

  "We heard that Selznick was looking for us," he said, "so we were going to be very inaccessible and make him double his offer."

  "I thought there was something wrong," she said. "I've seen silly things happen to people who crossed Daddy before. I don't usually worry, because I'm not superstitious, but I was worried about you. So I watched. I saw them carry you out here. And that was even after I tried to warn you to be careful when I left the dining room."

  "So you did," said the Saint slowly.

  "And then later on Mr. Devan came out of here with a man I'd never seen before. Then I thought I'd have to find out what was going on; but there was still the other man at the door——"

  "What other man?"

  "A sort of short thick-set man. He's been here before, with another tall man. Mr. Devan said they were salesmen. But he didn't want me to come in."

  "So what did you do?" The Saint found himself curiously tense.

  "Well, I didn't see why I shouldn't go into our own air-raid shelter if I wanted to. So I pretended I'd lost an earring." She had been holding her right hand a little behind her, but now she let it slip into sight. It held an ordinary household ham­mer. "I didn't know what I might be running into, so I brought this with me. So when he was bending down hunting around, I hit him on the head with it and came in."

  The Saint couldn't laugh. That would come later . . . per­haps.

  If there were any laughing afterwards.

  He couldn't think of that at the instant. The simple fact and its connections backwards and forwards, and the thin incred­ible wisp of hope that came with them, struck into his mind with the complete breadth of a single chord. He found that he was gripping Andrea almost brutally by the shoulders.

  "Where is your father now?"

  "He went out with Mr. Devan and that other man. That's why I was worried, because they'd said you'd had a phone call and had to go out, but you were hoping to get back so you hadn't stopped to say goodbye to me; but I thought if you'd just passed out why should they bring you out here, and then why should they go away and leave you——"

  "How long ago was this?"

  She winced under the steel of his fingers, and he hardly no­ticed it.

  "About fifteen minutes ago "

  "Show me where to find a car."

  He thrust her towards the door, and flung it open, and was outside before her. He found himself in a narrow concrete corridor. At one end of it there was a flight of steps running upwards. He raced up them, and came out through an open iron door at the top, and almost tripped over the figure that lay outside.

  Simon turned him over as he
saved himself with one hand on the ground; and enough light came through the opening for him to recognise the chunky individual who had been Karl Morgen's companion in Washington.

  He showed no signs of activity, and it seemed very possible that he had a fractured skull; but just to be on the safe side Simon gave his head another vigorous thump on the ground as he straightened himself up.

  Then he was feeling his way along the paved walk that led away from the shelter, accustoming his eyes to the light of the stars and half a moon, while he heard the two girls stumbling up behind him.

  Suddenly ahead of him there was a quickened heavy move­ment, and he had a fleeting glimpse of a tall angular silhouette against the infinitesimally lighter tint of the sky, only a scrap of a second before the beam of a flashlight stabbed at him like a spear and barely missed him as he eeled off into the shrub­bery that bordered the path. The tall man came running down the wedge of his own light, not making much sound, and switched it off a moment before he came level with the Saint; and at that point Simon moved in on him without any sound at all, his left arm sliding around the man's neck from be­hind and locking his larynx in the crook of his elbow, cutting off voice and breath together while he spoke in the man's ear.

  "You can save this for me too, bud," he said; and then he turned the man deftly around and hit him with the blade of his hand just at the base of the septum, and threw him aside into the bushes as the girls reached him.

  They threaded through winding walks, down into a sunken garden and across it and out again, and then they came around a clump of trees and the house was there, looming large and sedate in the dark and seeming aloof and asleep with the heavy blackout curtains drawn. They ran around it; and on the drive in front, gleaming faintly in the dim moonlight, Simon saw Madeline Gray's car where he had parked it when he arrived.

  He opened the door and she almost fell in; and then An­drea Quennel was beside him.

  Her face was a pale blur in the darkness close to him.

  "You must tell me," she said with a kind of blank despera­tion. "What is this all about?"

  He was glad that she couldn't see the involuntary mask that hardened over his face. There were so many things that per­haps ought to have been said, so many things that it was im­possible to say.

  "I'm going to try like hell to let your father tell you him­self," he said.

  Then he slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door be­fore she could ask any more, and touched the starter and whipped the car away like a racehorse from the gate, leaving her where she stood.

  It was a help that he had driven himself there, and that he had a memory for landmarks and a sense of direction that a homing pigeon could have envied. In a matter of seconds he was on to the coastal road, past Compo Beach and winding along the edge of the marshes at the estuary of the Saugatuck. Then inland a little way, and then wrenching the car around to the left to speed over the bridge across the wider part of the inlet; then to the right again, northwards, to slow down a little, reluctantly, as they skimmed the edge of the town of Westport, and catch a green light and speed up again on the road that follows the west bank of the river and comes in a mile and a half to the Merritt Parkway.

  They were nearly at the Parkway when Madeline said: "Wouldn't it have been better to have phoned?"

  "They'd have been standing right over him when he answered the phone—if they let him answer at all. And they may be only just arriving now."

  "But the police——"

  He shook his head.

  "With all the things I'd have to explain and convince them of, and then to get them moving fast enough? No. It's the same as our trip from Washington. Only worse. But this time perhaps we won't be too late."

  She sat tense and still, leaning forward a little, as if by that she could help the car to make more speed.

  "Have we any chance?"

  "We're trying."

  And they were on the Parkway, the speedometer needle climbing to eighty and eight-five and creeping on, yet with the Saint's fingers effortless and almost caressing on the wheel, driving with one hand only while the other pressed the electric lighter and shook a cigarette out of Devan's pack and set it between his lips.

  Presently she said, as if because any kind of conversation was better than listening to the same ceaseless clock-tick of terror: "How much does Andrea know?"

  "I think she's fairly dumb," he said in the same way. "Devan said she was dumb. They just used her. And so did I. As I told you, in Washington I eventually tried to let her think she'd taken me in, because she might be a useful contact. And she was."

  "But now you know why she asked you over there tonight."

  "I know why she asked me in the first place. They had a story for her, and they must have known from past experi­ence that she shouldn't be hard to sell. Maybe she never has been quite so monumentally dumb, but she knew how to leave her brain alone. It was the easiest defence of her own kind of Social Stability . . . Only, as it worked out this evening, I invited myself."

  "And she let you walk into it."

  "She knew that I knew what I was walking into. She tried to stop me last night, when I didn't know. She may have fig­ured that I had all the right cards up my sleeve, or else I wouldn't want to walk in. She may have changed sides again, and been glad to see me sticking my neck out. It might have been vengeance, or it might have been her kind of help; or she might have just put her brain to sleep again. I wouldn't know. She must have done a lot of odd things in her life that you couldn't explain in ten-year-old language."

  "Only she fell in love with you," Madeline said. "I've heard all your story, and I've seen her."

  The Saint let cigarette smoke trail away from his lips, and kept his eyes on the unfolding road.

  "I didn't make her do that." He was cold and apart in a way that she had never felt from him before. "She saved our lives tonight, whether she knew it or not, and whatever she meant to do. Don't ever forget that." There were some things that it was almost impossible to put together in words. "I'm afraid nothing is going to be easy for her now."

  And they were past Talmadge Hill, swooping down and up long easy switchbacks, the engine humming to the perfection of its power, the tires hissing on the roadbed and the wind ruffling at the windows, almost as if they were flying, the sense of speed lulled by the smoothness of his driving and the isola­tion of the darkness around them, with only the road to see ahead and the tail lights of other cars being overtaken like crawling glowworms and fluttering angrily for an instant as they were passed and then being lost in silence behind.

  He thought, this was one time when he didn't give a damn if the whole Highway Patrol was out after him, and just be­cause of that there wouldn't be a single one of them in the country. And there wasn't.

  And then they were near the turning he had to take, and suddenly he recognised it, and crammed on the brakes and spun the wheel and spurred the engine, and they were scream­ing around and bucking through a break in the highway divi­sion, right under the lights of some inoffensive voyager in the other lane who probably lost two pounds of weight and a year's growth on the spot, while the Saint balanced the car against its own rolling momentum like a tightrope walker and dived it into the twisting lane that led towards Calvin Gray's home.

  It was only then that she said: "Have you got a gun or any­thing?"

  "I borrowed one from Karl. He owed me something," he said, and didn't bother to explain about Karl.

  And then they were nearing the entrance of Gray's estate, and he killed the engine and cut the lights and coasted the car to a stop a few yards short of the stone gateway.

  He got out and said "This way," and drew her out through the same door, and closed it again without a sound, and they went quickly in up the drive and past the house, as softly as he could lead her. There was a great silence all around them now, with even the undertones of their own traveling wiped out; and he realised that for miles his ears had been keyed for the sound that he dreaded
and that he must have heard, the concussion of unnatural thunder and the blaze of unnatural lightning that would have said finallv that they were too late. And it still might come at any instant, but so far it hadn't, and the only light was the faint untroubled silver of the moon.

  He only took her so far because he wanted to be sure that he found the right path; and then they found it, and he knew exactly where he was, and he stopped for a second to halt her. "You wait here. Lie down, and be quiet."

  "I want to go with you."

  "You couldn't do anything. And you'd make more noise than I will. And if anything happens, somebody has to tell the story."

  His lips touched her face, and he was gone, and he had scarcelv paused at all.

  And so perhaps this was the end of all stories; and if it was, there could have been worse ones.

  He came like a shadow to the door of the laboratory build­ing, and turned the handle without a sound with his left hand while his right slid the borrowed revolver out of his pocket. His nerves were spidery threads of ice, and time stood still around him like a universe that had run down.

  He thought then, in a crazy disassociation, that it would be strange to die that way, because you would never even know you died. You wouldn't even have time to hear or feel anything. There would be some sort of silent and insensate shock that would take the inside of your mind and blot it out, like the putting out of a light and a great hand that picked you up and wiped you away. One instant you would be there, and the next instant you wouldn't be there, but it wouldn't mean anything, because you wouldn't be there to know.

  Through the tiny hall, as he went in, he could see all of them by the long bench where the rubber apparatus was set up. He could see Hobart Quennel, balanced and absorbed in watching, and Walter Devan standing a little back with one hand in the side pocket of his coat, and Calvin Gray's thin hands adjusting themselves around a large glass flask of straw-colored liquid to pick it up.

  The Saint stood in the doorway with his gun leveled, and tried to launch his voice on the air like a feather, mostly so that it would steal into the ears of Calvin Gray without any shock that might precipitate disaster.