18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

by Leslie Charteris

  Simon flung himself sideways as Lauber's gun banged, and heard the plonk of the bullet lodging in the polished table as he spilled over, taking the chair with him. As he rolled over he heard the slam of the door.

  Aliston took two steps forward before wisdom stopped him; but Graner reached the door. He grabbed the handle, but the door stayed closed. Graner took out his gun, and a bullet crashed into the lock.

  The slam of the front door whanged into the series of explosions as Graner smashed his way out into the hall.

  "Don't do it!" screamed Aliston. "He knows where you're coming from, and we don't know where he is!"

  Graner grinned back at him, and his drawn yellow face was like a death's-head mask.

  "You don't understand," he said.

  As Simon drew his legs stealthily up under him, he saw Graner bolting across the hall, straight in line with the open door. Graner's manicured forefinger stabbed at the switch in the opposite wall; and Graner stood there, with that diabolical grin frozen on his face. ...

  The muffled crack of a single shot came from outside; and then there was a dull bellow that rose into a shrill wail of terror and then died. There was no other sound, and Simon remembered that the dogs hunted in silence. . . .

  It was the last thing he did remember. Aliston was a couple of yards away, with his back turned and his gun dangling in one uncertain hand. ... As the Saint braced his toes into the pile of the carpet for a spring, something smacked into the back of his head. . . . There was an instant of vivid brain-splitting agony, a sprinkle of jagged lightning across his eyeballs, and then darkness.

  X How Simon Templar Paid His Debt, and Christine Vanlinden Remembered Hers

  "ARE YOU HURT?" said Christine.

  "My vanity is suffering," said the Saint sourly. "When I pull two sap boners in an hour it makes me shudder. It's my own fault I got hit-I was concentrating so hard on Aliston that I lost sight of Palermo for a minute."

  He was lying on the floor of the attic workroom, which was not the most comfortable couch for a man to lie on and suffer. But for the moment he could do nothing to improve it, because both his hands and feet were securely tied. Christine Vanlinden was just as safely trussed, although she had the slight advantage of being tied in a chair.

  The actual physical damage which Simon had sustained was not so serious. As a matter of fact, his mind had started to rise towards the surface of the opaque fog which had swallowed it up while he was being carried into the room, and the shock of being dropped on the floor had completed his return to consciousness in time for him to hear the door closing again. He estimated that he could have been out for only a few minutes.

  "I was a fool too," Christine said bitterly; and the Saint smiled up at her encouragingly.

  "We all do these things occasionally. But you had more excuse than I had."

  "Where have they kept you all this time?"

  "They haven't been keeping me-that was a fairy tale. Not that it makes much difference. But this is the second time I've been collected."

  He went on to tell her the truth of what had happened.

  And while he talked he was starting to see if he could reach his knife. This time he was not being watched, as he had been before. He rolled over and twisted his wrist back, forcing it upwards against the bind of the ropes in the supple corkscrew turn which he had practised so many times in the past. He felt the hilt of the knife under the tips of his long fingers, and began to work it down. It moved slowly at first, then more easily as he was able to improve his grip. ...

  "I told you Graner was clever," she said. "You were clever enough to fool him for a little while, but as soon as he knew what was going on it was hopeless."

  "You're not flattering," grunted the Saint.

  He had the handle of the knife fully into his fingers now, clear of the sheath; and he was turning it back to saw at the cords around his wrists. The muscles of his forearms were beginning to cramp and ache, but his spirits were taking a new lease of optimism which made the pain seem negligible.

  One other thing was troubling him much more. It gnawed irritatingly at a third fraction of his mind which was left unoccupied by what he was saying and what he was doing. As he went on talking almost mechanically, the half-formed fear took firmer shape and made his voice sound self-conscious to himself. But he went on with his story, up to the statement of what had happened downstairs.

  ". . . so Reuben pressed the button and set the dogs loose. I suppose Lauber had forgotten about them in his excitement. There was an excuse for him too-if I'd been in his place I don't know that I should have seen any other way to save my bacon. I banked on him doing what he did, and I hadn't forgotten the dogs. I had a reminder when I came in with Reuben, and I was only hoping Reuben hadn't forgotten them as well. It was the last part of my drama that didn't go according to plan."

  "The dogs got him?"

  "The last thing I heard, it sounded as if he was getting chewed. I guess Graner let them go on chewing."

  The effort of reaching the cords round his wrists in the awkward position in which he had to hold his knife was making him wriggle on the floor in a way that must have been strange and alarming to watch, for the girl was staring at him curiously.

  "Are you sure you aren't hurt ?"

  "Not a bit."

  The Saint was smiling. He felt another strand of rope give way, and his movements became easier. He relaxed for a instant and then sawed more quickly.

  The third thought in his mind went on. Why, after all, was he in that attic with Christine? Undoubtedly the dogs had gone on making a meal of Lauber, and Reuben wouldn't have ventured out to interfere with them until he was sure that Lauber was no longer dangerous. Undoubtedly, also, Palermo had several grudges to pay off, towards which that bang on the back of the Saint's head would only have looked like a reduced preliminary instalment; undoubtedly it would only have seemed an elementary precaution to tie the Saint up until Lauber had been disposed of and the ticket recovered. But just as undoubtedly the next move would be to ask the Saint some questions about Joris and the other man. . . So why not leave him in the living room, ready for further treatment?

  "What happened to Joris ?" said Christine.

  Simon had known that that was coming. He said: "I left him at the Orotava."

  He winked at her as he said it; and at the same time he felt his wrists coming free. He brought his hands round from behind him and laid one finger warningly on his lips before she could speak.

  "I thought they'd never look for him there again, since they'd grabbed him there once before."

  A couple of quick slashes set his legs free. She was staring at him, breathlessly, incredulously, with a wild light of amazed hope dawning in her face. He whipped out a pencil and a piece of paper, and scrawled quickly: Don't say anything to give the show away. This place is full of electrical gadgets. I've got an idea somebody may be listening in.

  She nodded her understanding. She was almost laughing with dazed relief.

  "There's an aeroplane from Las Palmas to Sevilla on Monday," he said. "I've booked him a berth on it. He'll leave here for Las Palmas tomorrow night on the local interisland boat."

  While he was talking he wrote on his scrap of paper: Booked both of you on the Alicante Star. Leaves at ten tonight. Joris already on board.

  He cut her loose from the chair while she was read­ing it. She looked at him again, her lips parted, half laughing and half crying. As she stood up, her arms went round his neck. The warm young softness of her pressed against him. She was trembling.

  "You've done so much," she breathed. -- He shook his head.

  "We aren't out of the woods yet," he said.

  He disengaged himself gently and went to the win­dow. It was a quarter to eight; and the message he had passed to Julian had told him that he could go away at seven-thirty if nothing had happened. But he knew that Julian had never possessed a watch, and he was praying that the characteristically vague Spanish ideas of time would work fo
r once to his advan­tage. . . . He could have shouted with triumph when he saw the bootblack leaning patiently on his crutch in the shadows under the wall.

  Simon tore off a clean piece of paper and wrote on it in Spanish: Get a taxi and take this to the Seńor Uniatz, at the Hotel Orotava. Have it sent to Room 50. Wait for him and bring him here.

  Underneath he wrote in English: I'm at Graner's and in a jam. Grab a taxi and beat it out here. The bearer is oke and will steer you. Bring your Betsy. Get in and raise hell. If you see any dogs, burn them. They're killers.

  He signed the message with the impish skeleton figure surmounted by a studiously elliptical halo which was the one signature that would leave Hoppy no doubts-the mark of the Saint. And he let Christine read it while he searched his pockets for a coin. Fortunately they had left him his money. He found a duro, and wrapped it up in the paper as he returned to the window. He whistled softly through the bars and saw Julian look up.

  The fluttering white scrap fell at the lad's foot. Simon watched him pick it up, unwrap it and peer at the writing. Then Julian looked up again, touched the peak of his shabby cap and was off, swinging down the road on his crutch as quickly as any other man could have travelled on two sound legs. . . .

  The Saint's eyes met Christine's again, and each of them could read one message that needed no words to express it. If the note reached Hoppy quickly, and Mr Uniatz acted on it with equal speed, the adven­ture might have one ending; if nothing like that happened, there might be quite a different one. It was on the lap of the gods.

  Simon Templar smiled. He was free; but Christine was there with him, and in the house below there were three men who now held the ticket for which they had all risked their lives many times. Outside, presumably, there were still the dogs; and all over the house, all around them and even around the garden through which they would still have to escape before they could find freedom, were all the accumulated electrical ingenuities with which Reuben Graner guarded his for­tress. Even in that room they couldn't consider themselves out of the network of defensive devices with which the house probably bristled from roof to base­ment. And it might not be long before Graner and Aliston and Palermo became tired of listening for hints and reverted to direct action. . . .

  Curiously, the Saint was concerned with none of those things. In all his life, he had never planned anything that was dictated by the possibilities of defeat. He had always prepared for victory.

  And in that room he was locked up with something that interested him profoundly.

  His gaze turned away from Christine's towards the safe in the corner. Once again he was marooned with that incalculable treasure which had tantalised him so much before, separated from him by nothing more than a few inches of special steel and a combination lock which to most other brigands might have been just as discouraging, but which to the Saint was merely an interesting puzzle that might need twenty minutes to half an hour of uninterrupted concentration to solve. Except that even to touch it would set off another of those electrically operated alarms-the muted siren which he had listened to when Graner was opening it.

  In fact, just about everything in the house that mattered seemed to be electrified. Which was all very modern and scientific and efficient, but it also had the corresponding weakness of centralisation-allied with the Spanish inefficiency that had doubtless put the house together in the first place. For instance, it was extremely unlikely that a Tenerife builder would have installed a system of independent fuses. He would have been bursting with pride in his own up-to-date technique if he had even put in one. . . .

  Simon wandered over to the lamp that hung low above the workbench and contemplated it with a glimmer of impudent challenge. The longer he played with the idea, the more its ramifications appealed to him: With the same reckless half-smile lingering on his lips, he took a perra chica out of his pocket and unscrewed the bulb. A moment later he had slipped the coin into the socket and was screwing the bulb back again on top of it. There was the hissing crack of a spark, and the other light went out.

  2 In the darkness, Christine's hand touched his sleeve and fumbled up his arm.

  "Did you do that?" she whispered uncertainly.

  He chuckled softly in the gloom.

  "Yeah. That was Edison Junior. Blew out their fuse. Let's hope it's the only one they've got. Wait a minute."

  He left her again and tiptoed towards the door. A little way from it he fell on one knee and lowered his head until his cheek touched the floor. Not a gleam of light came from the threshold-and the bulb on the stairway must have been switched on when he was brought upstairs, unless the carrying party had stum-bled up in the dark. Even then, some faint glow should have filtered up from the landing below. . . . But he saw nothing.

  He rose, went on to the door and rested one ear lightly against the panels. Somewhere away below he could hear a confused murmur of voices and movement which sounded to him like heavenly music. Even though he had to strain to hear it, it was enough to tell him what he wanted to know.

  The lights downstairs had also gone out. It was safe to assume that every other light in the house was also out of action. And if that had happened, the whole of Graner's elaborate system of electrical alarms had ceased to function at the same time.

  There was one way to turn the theory into certain knowledge, and it was an experiment which would have to be made anyway.

  Simon moved stealthily towards the safe.

  His eyes had the cat's trick of adjusting themselves instantly to darkness, and he had the same feline gift of noiseless movement without effort. He crossed the room until he could feel the safe looming in front of him. He put out his hand and touched it delicately with the tips of his fingers, holding his breath while he did so. The silence was still unbroken. His finger tips slithered down over the smooth surface until they found the handle and shaped themselves around it, With a sudden summoning of his resolution, he tight­ened his fingers and grasped it firmly.

  The siren remained mute.

  "Where are you?"

  Christine's question reached him in a frightened breath as he crouched down in front of the safe door. Simon answered quietly but in his natural voice: "Here."

  He put out his hand and touched her as she searched for him and guided her down to his side. His right hand was already turning the knob of the combination, "What are you doing?"

  Her voice was still unsteady.

  "Opening the safe," he said practically.

  "Can you wait for that?"

  "Lady," said the Saint firmly, "when I last looked inside this tin can it was bulging with a collection of jools that made me feel giddy to look at. I don't say they're worth quite as much as your lottery ticket, but they wouldn't come far behind it. I can always wait for a box of boodle like that."

  "But Graner will be coming --"

  "Not yet-I hope. After all, they left me tied up, and they didn't know I had a knife. The first thing they ought to think of is that the fuse blew out by itself. They'll try to repair it, which ought to keep them out of mischief for a bit. It won't do them any good, because as soon as they put a new fuse in it'll blow out again. Then they may start to smell a rat and wonder how we're getting on. But not until . . . Now be a good girl and keep quiet for a minute while I give my celebrated imitation of a burglar."

  His ear was pressed against the chill steel, listen­ing for the click of the tumblers; his sensitive fingers twirled the dial backwards and forwards, fraction by fraction, probing the secrets of the lock like a physiologist finding his way through an exquisitely fine dissection. To Christine, the quiet and unflurried patience without which his manipulations would have had no posssibility of success must have been maddening. He was aware that she was shivering with the effort of crushing down the natural wild instincts of panic. His own nerves were drawn nearly to snapping point, and the haunting fear that the fuse diversion might not keep Graner and company occupied as long as he had hoped was never out of his mind; but he held himself w
ith an iron self-control.

  Christine's breath came more quickly as the irregu­lar faint ticking of the lock pecked dustily away at the roots of her nerves like erratically falling drops of water in a refined Chinese torture. There was no other sound to relieve the fearful silence of the room-only that bafflingly syncopated tick-tick-tick of the lock, the rhythm of her own breathing and the pounding of her own heart, and the occasional rustle of the Saint's clothes as he changed his position. The minutes dragged on and on, an interminable rosary of remorse­less time. ...

  After a while the ache of nervous tension numbed her into a kind of stupor, from which she roused again to a sharper sense of intolerable torment.

  She caught at his arm.

  "Please!" she implored him incoherently. "Please . . . please ..."

  He laughed.

  "I'm doing my best, sweetheart. Give me a chance."

  "You must have been half an hour already."

  "Sixteen minutes by my watch," he said cheerfully, "Hold on for a little longer and it 'll all be over. You ought to be enjoying yourself. This is a demonstration of painless safe-opening by the greatest expert in the world, and I know dozens of people who'd give their back teeth to be sitting where you are."

  His voice was gay and unruffled, with a magnetic confidence in it that somehow made the ordeal seem trivial. It made her feel as if she could almost see his face again in the dark, the face that was like no other face that she had ever seen in her life, which she could never have forgotten even if she had never seen it again after that first time when he took off his hat in the Plaza de la Republica to let her see it. The vision was as clear now as if she were looking at it. She could see it with the blithe cavalier lines poised on the outer brink of seriousness, the blue eyes intent, the keen lips absent-mindedly playing with a smile; and again she felt the strange spell which he had the power to cast.

  "I'm sorry," she said.