Featuring the Saint s-5

by Leslie Charteris

  "Hullo," drawled the Saint.

  He sat down in a vacant chair between them, without waiting to be invited, and beamed from one to the other in a most Saintly way.

  "Beautiful weather we're having, aren't we, Baldy?"

  "What the devil do you want, Templar?" snarled Mr. Mossiter, with no cordiality. "I'm busy."

  "I know, sweetheart," said the Saint gently. "I saw you getting busy. That's why I came over."

  He contemplated Mr. Mossiter with innocent blue eyes; and yet there was something in the very innocence of that stare besides its prolonged steadiness that unaccountably prickled the short hairs on the back of Mossiter's bull neck. It did not happen at once. The stare had focused on its object for some time before that cold draught of perplexedly dawning comprehension began to lap Mossiter's spinal column. But the Saint read all that he wanted to read in the sudden darkening of the livid scar that ran down the side of Mossiter's face from his left temple to his chin; and the Saintly smile became dazzlingly seraphic.

  "Exactly," said the Saint.

  His gaze shifted over to the girl. Her hand was still round her glass-she had been raising it when the Saint reached the table, and had put it down again untasted.

  Still smiling, Simon took the girl's glass in one hand and Mossiter's in the other, and changed them over. Then he looked again at Mossiter.

  "Drink up," he said, and suddenly there was cold steel in his voice.

  What d'you mean?"

  "Drink," said the Saint. "Open your mouth, and induce the liquid to trickle down the gullet. You must have done it before. But whether you'll enjoy it so much on this occasion remains to be seen,"

  "What the hell are you suggesting?"

  "Nothing. That's just your guilty conscience. Drink it up, Beautiful."

  Mossiter seemed to crouch in his chair.

  "Will you leave this table?" he grated.

  "No," said the Saint.

  "Then you will have to leave the club altogether. . . . Waiter!"

  The Saint took out his cigarette case and tapped a cigarette meditatively upon it. Then he looked up. He addressed the girl.

  "If you had finished that drink," he said, "the consequences would have been very unpleasant indeed. I think I can assure you of that, though I'm not absolutely certain what our friend put in it. It is quite sufficient that I saw him drop something into your glass while he was talking just now." He leaned back in his chair, with his back half turned to Mr. Mossiter, and watched the waiter returning across the floor with the porter who had been other things in his time, and added, in the same quiet tone: "On account of the failure of this bright scheme, there will shortly be a slight disturbance of which I shall be the centre. If you think I'm raving mad, you can go to hell. If you've got the sense to see that I'm telling the truth, you'll stand by to make your bolt when I give the word, and meet me outside in a couple of minutes."

  Thus the Saint completed his remarks, quite unhurriedly, quite calmly and conversationally; and then the waiter and the porter were behind his chair.

  "Throw this man out," said Mossiter curtly. "He's making a nuisance of himself."

  It was the porter who had been other things in his time who laid the first rough hand upon the Saint; and Simon grinned gently. The next moment Simon was on his feet, and the porter was not.

  That remark needs little explanation. It would not be profitable to elaborate a description of the pile-driving properties of the left hook that connected with the porter's jaw as Simon rose from his chair; and, in fact, the porter himself knew little about it at the time. He left the ground momentarily and then he made contact with a lot more ground a little farther on, and then he slept.

  The elderly waiter, also, knew little about that particular incident. The best and brightest years of his life were past and over, and it is probable that he was growing a little slow on the uptake in his late middle age. It is, at least, certain that he had not fully digested the significance of the spectacle to which he had just been treated, nor come to any decision about his own attitude to the situation, when he felt himself seized firmly by the collar and the seat of his pants. He seemed to rise astonishingly into the air, and, suspended horizontally in space at the full upward stretch of the Saint's arms, was for an instant in a position to contemplate the beauties of the low ceiling at close range. And the Saint chuckled.

  "How Time flies," murmured the Saint, and heaved the man bodily into the middle of the orchestra-where, it may be recorded, he damaged beyond repair, in his descent, a tenor saxophone, a guitar, and a device for imitating the moans of a stricken hyena.

  Simon straightened his tie and looked about him. Action had been so rapid, during those few seconds, that the rest of the club's population and personnel had not yet completely awoken to understanding and reprisal. And the most important thing of all was that the sudden sleep of the porter who had been other things in his time had not only demoralized the two other officials who were standing in the middle distance, but had also left the way to the exit temporarily clear.

  Simon touched the girl's shoulder.

  "I should push along now, old dear," he remarked, as if there were all the time in the world and nothing on earth to get excited about. "Stop a taxi outside, if you see one. I'll be right along."

  She looked at him with a queer expression; and then she left her chair and crossed the floor quickly. To this day she is not quite sure why she obeyed; but it is enough that she did, and the Saint felt a certain relief as he watched her go.

  Then he turned, and saw the gun in Mossiter's hand. He laughed-it was so absurd, so utterly fantastic, even in that place. In London, that sort of thing only happens in sensational fiction. But there it was; and the Saint knew that Baldy Mossiter must have been badly upset to make such a crude break. And he laughed; and his left hand fell on Mossiter's hand in a grip of steel, but with a movement so easy and natural that Mossiter missed the meaning of it until it was too late. The gun was pointed harmlessly down into the table, and all Mossiter's strength could not move it.

  "You had better know me," said Simon quietly. "I'm called the Saint."

  Baldy Mossiter heard him, staring, and went white.

  "And you must not try to drug little girls," said the Saint A lot of things of no permanent importance have been mentioned in this episode; but the permanently important point of it is that Baldy Mossiter's beautiful front teeth are now designed to his measure by a gentleman in a white coat with a collection of antediluvian magazines in his waiting room.

  3

  A few moments later, the Saint strolled up into the street. A taxi was drawn up by the curb, and the Saint briefly spoke an address to the driver and stepped in.

  The girl was sitting in the far corner. Simon gave her a smile and cheerfully inspected a set of grazed knuckles. It stands to the credit of his happy disposition that he really felt at peace with the world, although the evening's amusement represented a distinct setback to certain schemes that had been maturing in his fertile brain. As a rough-house it had had its virtues; but the truth was that the Saint had marked down the Calumet Club for something more drastic and profitable than a mere rough-house, and that idea, if it was ever to be materialized now, would have to be tackled all over again from the very beginning and a totally different angle. A couple of months of shrewd and patient reconnaissance work had gone west that night along with Baldy Mossiter's dental apparatus, but Simon Templar was incapable of weeping over potential poultry annihilated in the egg.

  "Have a cigarette," he suggested, producing his case, "and tell me your name."

  "Stella Dornford." She accepted a light, and he affected not to notice the unsteadiness of her hand. "Did you-have much trouble?"

  The Saint grinned over his match.

  "Well-hardly! I seemed to get a bit popular all at once- that was all. Nobody seemed to want me to go. There was a short argument-nothing to speak of."

  He blew out the match and slewed round, looking through the wind
ow at the back. There was another taxi close behind, which is not extraordinary in a London street; and, hanging out of the window of the taxi behind, was a man-or the head and shoulders of one-which, to Saint's suspicious mind, was quite extraordinary enough. But he was not particularly bothered about it at the moment, for he had directed his own driver to the Criterion, and nothing would happen there.

  "Where are we going?" asked the girl.

  "Towards coffee," said the Saint. "Or, if you prefer it, something with more kick. Praise be to the blessed laws of England, we can drink for another half-hour yet, if we hire a sandwich to put on the table. And you can tell me the story of your life."

  In the better light of the restaurant, and at leisure which he had not had before, he was confirmed in the impression which he had formed at the Calumet. She was undeniably pretty, in a rather childish way, with a neat fair head and china-blue eyes. A certain grace of carriage saved her from mere fluffiness.

  "You haven't told me your name," she remarked, when he had ordered refreshment.

  "I thought you heard Mossiter address me. Templar-Simon Templar."

  "You seem to be rather a remarkable man."

  The Saint smiled. He had been told that before, but he had no objection to hearing it again. He really had very simple tastes, in some ways.

  "It's rather lucky for you that I am," he answered. "And now, tell me, what were you doing at the Calumet with Baldy?"

  He had some difficulty in extracting her story-in fact, it required all his ingenuity to avoid making the extraction look too much like a cross-examination, for it was evident that she had not yet made up her mind about him.

  He learned, after a time, that she was twenty-one years old, that she was the only daughter of a retired bank manager, that she had run away from the dull suburban circle of her family to try to find fortune on the wrong side of the footlights. He might have guessed that much, but he liked to know. It took some much more astute questioning to elicit a fact in which he was really much more interested.

  ". . . He's a junior clerk in the branch that used to be Daddy's. He came to the house once or twice, and we saw each other occasionally afterwards. It was all rather sweet and silly. We used to go to the pictures together, and once we met at a dance."

  "Of course, you couldn't possibly have married him," said the Saint cunningly, and waited thoughtfully on her reply.

  "It would have meant that I'd never have got away from all the mildewed things that I most wanted to run away from. I wanted to see Life. . . . But he really was a nice boy."

  She had got a job in a revue chorus, and another girl in the same show had taken her to the Calumet one night. There she had met Mossiter, and others. She was without friends in London, and sheer loneliness made her crave for any society rather than none. There had been difficulties, she admitted. One man, a guest of Mossiter's-a German-had been particularly unpleasant. Yes, he was reputed to be very rich. . . .

  "Don't you see," said the Saint, "that Mossiter could only have wanted to drug you for one of two reasons?"

  "One of two?"

  "When does this German go back to Germany?"

  "I think he said he was going back tomorrow-that's Friday, isn't it?"

  Simon shrugged.

  "Such is Life," he murmured; and she frowned.

  "I'm not a child, Mr. Templar."

  "No girl ever is, in her own estimation," said the Saint rudely. "That's why my friends and I have been put to so much trouble and expense in the past-and are likely to go on being bothered in the same way."

  He had expected her to be troublesome-it was a premonition he had had about her from the first-and, as was his way, he had deliberately preferred to precipitate the explosion rather than fumble along through smouldering and smoke. But he was not quite prepared for the reaction that he actually provoked, which was that she simply rose and left the table.

  "I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, thank you," was her parting speech.

  He beckoned a waiter, and watched her go with a little smile of rueful resignation. It was not the first time that some thing of that sort had happened to him-cases of that type were always liable to be trying, and fulfilled their liability more often than not.

  "And so she swep' out," murmured Simon wryly, as he pocketed his change; and then he remembered the men who had followed them from the Calumet. "Men"- it was unlikely to be "man." The Calumet bunch were not of that class.

  There were, as a matter of fact, two of them, and their instructions had been definite. They were merely to obtain addresses. It was therefore doubly unfortunate for the one who was concerned to follow Stella Dornford that, when he grasped part of the situation, he should have elected to attempt a coup on his own.

  Stella Dornford tenanted a minute apartment in a block close to the upper end of Wardour Street. The block was in the form of a hollow square, with a courtyard in the centre, communicating with the street by a short passage, and the entrances to all the main staircases opened onto this court yard. Standing in this courtyard, facing the doorway by which the girl had entered, the sleuth glanced up curiously at the windows. A moment later he saw one of the windows light up.

  It was then that he decided upon his folly. The window which had lighted up was a French window, and it gave onto a narrow balcony-and, most tempting of all, it stood ajar, for the night was warm. And the building had been designed in the style that imitates large blocks of stone, with substantial interstices between the blocks. To reach that balcony would be as easy as climbing up a ladder.

  He glanced about him. The courtyard was deserted and the light was poor. Once off the ground, he was unlikely to be noticed even if some other tenant passed beneath him. In the full blaze of his unconscious foolishness the man buttoned his coat and began to climb.

  Standing in the shadows of the passage communicating with the street, Simon Templar watched him go. And, as he watched, with a newborn smile of sheer poetic devilment hovering on his lips, the Saint loaded up his newest toy-a small but powerful air-pistol.

  He had acquired it quite recently, out of pure mischief. It wasn't by any means a lethal weapon, and was never intended for the purpose, but its pellets were capable of making a very painful impression upon the recipient. It had occurred to Simon that, adroitly employed from his window, it might serve as a powerful discouragement to the miscellaneous collection of professional and amateur sleuths whom from time to time he found unduly interested in his movements. But this occasion he had not anticipated, and his pleasure was there fore all the keener.

  As the man on the wall reached the level of the second floor and paused for breath, Simon took careful aim.

  The bullet smacked into the man's hand with a force that momentarily numbed his fingers. With a sharp gasp of pain and fear, he became aware that his hold was broken, and he had not enough strength in his uninjured hand to support himself with that alone. He gasped again, scrabbling wildly at the stone-and then his foot slipped. . . .

  The Saint pocketed his toy, and stepped quickly back into the street-so quickly that the man who was waiting just outside the passage had not time to appreciate his danger before it was upon him. He felt his coat lapels gripped by a sinewy hand, and looked into the Saint's face.

  "Don't follow me about," said the Saint, in a tone of mild and reasonable remonstrance; and then his fist shot up and impacted crisply upon the man's jaw.

  Simon turned and went back down the passage, and crossed the courtyard swiftly; and the first window was flung up as he slipped into the shadow of the doorway opposite.

  He went quickly up the dark stone stairs, found a bell, and pressed it. The door was opened almost immediately, but the girl was equally quick to shut it when she saw who her visitor was.

  The Saint, however, was even quicker-with the toe of his shoe in the opening.

  "There's something outside you ought to see," he said, and pushed quickly through the door while she hesitated.

  Then she recovered
herself.

  "What do you mean by bursting in like this?" she demanded furiously.

  "I told you-there's a special entertainment been put on for your benefit. Come and cheer."

  He opened the nearest door, and went through the tiny sitting room as if he owned the place. She followed him.

  "If you don't get out at once I shall shout for help. There are people all round, and a porter in the basement, and the walls aren't very thick-so you needn't think no one will hear."

  "I hadn't bothered to think," said the Saint calmly. "Besides, they're all busy with the other attraction. Step this way, madam."

  He passed through the open window and emerged onto the balcony. In a moment he found her beside him.

  "Mr. Templar--"

  Simon simply pointed downwards. She looked, and saw the little knot of people gathering about the sprawled figure that lay moaning at the foot of the wall.

  "So perish all the ungodly," murmured the Saint.

  The girl turned a white face.

  "How did it happen?"

  "He and a pal of his followed us from the Calumet. I meant to tell you, but you packed up in such a hurry and such a naughty temper. I followed. He was on his way up to this veranda when I hypnotized him into the belief that he was a performing seal and I was a piece of ripe herring, whereupon he dived after me."

  He turned back into the sitting room and closed the window after her.

  "I don't think you need join the congregation below," he remarked. "The specimen will be taken for a promising cat burglar who's come down in the world, and he will probably get six months and free medical attention. But you might remember this incident-it will help you to take care of your self."

  She looked him in the eyes for several seconds.

  Then: "I apologize," she said quietly.

  "So do I," answered the Saint. "That remark was unnecessarily sarcastic, and my only defense is that you thoroughly deserved it."

  He smiled; and then he reached for his cigarette case.