The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  But on Quintana’s own statement, there were nearly forty thousand pounds in ready cash in the safe, and they were forty thousand reasons for some deep and sober cogitation before he retired from the scene into which he had so seasonably introduced himself. After all, there was still the outstanding matter of a tenner which the late Mr Ingleston had owed, and in the light of what Simon had learned he could see even less reason than before why it should not be repaid with interest…And there was also the telephone conversation to which Señor Pongo had hastened away, which might be worth listening to.

  The voices went on coming through the door while he stood for a while undecided. “Even you take risks,” Quintana was saying. “If I had known that you would drive here—”

  “That was no risk. There are no policemen looking for me, and taxi drivers are not detectives.”

  This might be the best chance he would have to do something about the safe, while the odds in the study were reduced from three to two. But Pongo might return at any moment—and by the same token, his telephone conversation wouldn’t last for ever. Whereas the safe and its contents would probably manage to keep a jump ahead of disintegration for a few minutes more.

  Simon made his choice with a shrug. He tiptoed back across the room, towards the door that opened on to the landing. He had no idea what was on the other side of it, but that was only an incidental gamble among many others.

  Even so, he was still destined to be surprised.

  The carpet outside must have been very thick, or the door very solid, for he heard nothing until he was a couple of yards from it. And then the door was flung open and Pongo rushed in.

  The light from the landing caught the Saint squarely and centrally as it streamed in, but Pongo was entering so hastily that he was well inside the room before he could check himself.

  Simon leapt at him. His left hand caught the man by the lapels of his coat, and at the same time he side-stepped towards the door, pushing it shut with his own shoulder and turning the key with his right hand. But the shock had slowed up his reaction by a fatal fraction, and the other recovered himself enough to let out a sharp choking yelp before the Saint shifted his grip to his throat.

  The Saint smiled at him benevolently and reached for his gun. But his fingers had only just touched his pocket when light flooded the room from another direction, and a voice spoke behind him.

  “Keep still,” rasped Luis Quintana.

  7

  The Saint let his hand drop slowly, and turned round. Quintana and Urivetzky stood in the communicating doorway, and Quintana held a gun.

  “Good evening, girls,” said the Saint winsomely. Urivetzky let out an exclamation as he saw his face. “The Saint!”

  “In person,” Simon admitted pleasantly. “But you don’t have to stand on ceremony. Just treat me like an old friend of the family.”

  Released from the numbing grip on his windpipe, the square man retreated to a safe distance, massaging his throat tenderly.

  “I mistook the door,” he exploded hoarsely. “I opened this one—and he was inside. He must have been listening. How much he has heard—”

  “Yes,” said Quintana, with slow significance.

  The Saint continued to stand still while Pongo stepped up to him again and took away his gun. The man’s exploring hands also found the cigarette-case in his breast pocket and took it out, and Simon took it gently back from him and helped himself to a cigarette before returning it with a deprecating bow.

  He felt for his lighter, in a bland and genial silence which invited the others to make themselves at home while they selected the next way of breaking it, and his self-possession was so unshaken that it looked as if his stillness was dictated less by the steady aim of Quintana’s gun than by a wholly urbane and altruistic desire to avoid embarrassing the company by seeming to rush them into a decision. What was going on in his own mind was his own secret, and he kept it decorously to himself.

  But it seemed as if he had been somewhat rash in crediting his guardian angel with the organising ability of Henry Ford.

  Certainly a good deal of the system was there, but somewhere along the moving belt something seemed to have gone haywire. Simon experienced some of the emotions that a Ford executive would have experienced if, watching a chassis travelling down the assembly line, at the point where it should have had its tail-light screwed on, he had seen it being rapidly outfitted with a thatched roof and stained-glass windows. Perhaps it was really an improvement, but its advantages were not immediately apparent. Perhaps the fact that Pongo should have chosen to charge through the wrong door in his excitement was really a blessing in disguise, but to the Saint it seemed to have created a situation from which a tactful and prudent man would extract himself with all possible speed. The only question it left was exactly how the withdrawal should be organised.

  It was the square man who first reasserted himself.

  “How long has he been here?” he demanded grimly. The Saint smiled at him.

  “My dear Señor Pongo—”

  The square man drew himself up.

  “My name is not Pongo,” he said with dignity. “I am Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Pérez, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots.”

  “Arriba España,” murmured the Saint solemnly. “But you won’t mind if I call you Pongo, will you? I can’t remember all your other names at once. And the point, my dear Señor Pongo, is not exactly how long I’ve been here but how long you’ve been here.”

  There was a moment’s startled silence, and then Quintana said coldly: “Will you be good enough to explain?”

  Simon gestured slightly with his cigarette.

  “You see,” he said, “unless you have a very good alibi, Pongo, I shall naturally have to include you with the rest of the menagerie. And that will cost you money.”

  Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Pérez’s flat vicious eyes stared at him with a rather stupid blankness. The other two men seemed to have been similarly afflicted with a temporary paralysis of incomprehension. But the Saint’s paternal geniality held them all together with the unobtrusive dominance of a perfect host. With the same natural charm, he tried to relieve them of some of their perplexity.

  “We have here,” he explained, “Comrade Ladek Urivetzky, once of Warsaw and subsequently of various other places. A bloke with quite a reputation in certain circles, if I remember rightly. I think the last time I heard of him was in connection with the celebrated City and Continental Bank case, when he got away with about fifty thousand quid after depositing a bundle of Danish Premium Bonds for security. All the boys at Scotland Yard were looking for him all over the place, and I expect they were still looking for him until they heard that he’d been mopped up in Oviedo. Now it seems that he isn’t dead at all. He’s right here in London, playing happy families with the Representative of the Spanish rebels and,” Simon bowed faintly in the direction of the square man, “Major Vicente Guillermo Gabriel Pongo, of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Whatnots. So I have a feeling that Chief Inspector Teal would be interested to know why two such illustrious gentlemen are entertaining a notorious criminal.”

  There was another short strained stillness, before Quintana broke it with a brittle laugh.

  “If you think that we are here to be bluffed by a common burglar—”

  “Not common,” Simon protested mildly. “Whatever else I may be, I’ve never been called that. Ask Comrade Urivetzky. But in any case, there are worse crimes in this country than burglary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—murder.”

  Major Pérez kept still, watching him with evil intentness.

  “What murder?”

  “Pongo,” said the Saint kindly, “I may have a face like an innocent little child, which is more than you have, but appearances are deceptive. I was not born yesterday. I’ve been listening in this room for some time, and I’d done a good deal of thinking before that, and I think I know nearly a
s much about this racket of yours as is worth knowing.”

  “What racket?” The Saint sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s have it in words of one syllable. A good many things have been done in Spain to get funds for your precious revolution, and since nearly all the official Spanish dough is in Madrid a good many of your tricks have had to sail pretty close to the wind. Well, your contribution was to think up this idea of pledging forged bonds around the place, to get money to pay the Germans and Italians for their guns and aero-planes and tanks and bombs and poison gas and other contributions to the cause of civilisation. Somebody thought of hiring Comrade Urivetzky to do the forging, and you were all set.”

  He leaned back against the mantelpiece and blew a smoke-ring at a particularly hideous ormolu clock.

  “The next thing was to get stooges to pledge the bonds, because if any of them were spotted you didn’t want all your credit to be shot to hell at once. Among others, you collected Comrade Ingleston. You met him on one of his trips to Spain—he spoke Spanish very well, and he had plenty of friends among your crowd, Sevilla being a red-hot monarchist and fascist stronghold, unless it’s changed since I was last there. You made him a proposition, and he took it on. Unfortunately he wasn’t such an idealist as you may have thought, and when he began to find himself with pocketfuls of bearer bonds he heard the call of easy money. He started to go short on his returns. You got suspicious and started to keep tabs on him, and before long there wasn’t much doubt left about it. Ingleston was playing you for suckers, and something had to be done about it. Pongo did it.”

  There was no doubt now that he was holding his audience. They were drinking up every word with a thirsty concentration that would have made some men hesitate to go on, but the Saint knew what he was doing.

  “Last night,” he proceeded with easy confidence, “Pongo was waiting for Ingleston in the street when he came home. He hailed him like a brother, and was invited upstairs. While Ingleston was pouring out a drink, Pongo jumped on him from behind with a hammer. Then after Ingleston was dead he had a look round for the last consignment of forged bonds. He was unlucky there, of course, because I’d already got them.”

  “That is very interesting,” Quintana said deliberately.

  “You’ve no idea how interesting it is,” answered the Saint earnestly. “Suppose you just look at it all at once. Here’s Ladek Urivetzky, a well-known forger and a wanted man, taking shelter here and being like a brother with the pair of you. Here’s Ingleston murdered by a Major of the Third Division of the army of the Spanish Patriots, also among those present. Well, boys, I’m well known to be a broad-minded bloke, and I can’t say that any of it worries me much. Forgers and fascists are more or less in the same class to me, and Ingleston seems to have been the kind of guy that anyone might bump off in an absent-minded moment. I don’t feel a bit virtuous about either side, so I haven’t got any sermons for you. But what I don’t like is you boys thinking you can make yourselves at home and raise hell in this town without my permission. London is the greatest city in the world, and our policemen are wonderful, so I’m told,” said the Saint proudly, “and I don’t like to have them bothered. So if you want to have your fun I’m afraid you’ve got to pay for it.”

  “Pay for it?” repeated Major Pérez, as if the phrase was strange to him. The Saint nodded.

  “If you want to go on amusing yourselves, you have to pay your entertainment tax,” he said. “That’s what I meant when we started talking. If you’re well in this with the others, you’ll have to be assessed along with them.”

  They went on watching him with their mouths partly open and their eyes dark with pitiless malignance, but the Saint’s trick of carrying the battle right back into the enemy’s camp held them frozen into inactivity by its sheer unblushing impudence.

  “And how much,” asked Quintana, with an effort of irony that somehow lacked the clear ring of unshaken self-assurance, “would this assessment be?”

  “It would be about forty thousand pounds,” said the Saint calmly. “That will be a donation of twenty thousand pounds for the International Red Cross, which seems a very suitable cause for you to contribute to, and twenty thousand pounds for me for collecting it. If I heard you correctly, you’ve got that much cash in your safe, so you wouldn’t even have the bother of writing a cheque. It makes everything so beautifully simple.”

  Quintana’s ironic smile tightened.

  “I think it would be simpler to hand you over to the police,” he said.

  “Imbecile!” Urivetzky spoke, breaking his own long silence. “What could you tell the police—”

  “Exactly,” agreed the Saint. “And what could I tell them? No, boys, it won’t do. That’s what I was trying to show you. I suppose they couldn’t hurt you much, on account of your position and what not, but they could make it pretty difficult for you. And there certainly wouldn’t be anything left of your beautiful finance scheme. And then I don’t suppose you’d be so popular with the Spanish Patriots when you went home. Probably you’d find yourselves leaning against a wall, watching the firing squad line up.” The Saint shook his head. “No—I think forty thousand quid is a bargain price for the good turn I’d be doing you.”

  Major Pérez grinned at him like an ape.

  “And suppose you didn’t have a chance to use your information?” he said. The Saint smiled with unruffled tranquillity.

  “My dear Pongo—do you really think I’d have come here without thinking of that? Of course you can use your artillery any time you want to, and at this range, with a bit of luck, you might even hit me. But it wouldn’t do you any good. I told some friends of mine that I’d be back with them in ten minutes from now, and if I don’t arrive punctually they’ll phone Scotland Yard and tell Chief Inspector Teal exactly where I went and why. You can think it over till your brains boil, children, but your only way out will still cost you forty thousand quid.”

  8

  The silence that followed lasted longer than any of its predecessors. It was made up of enough diverse ingredients to fill a psychological catalogue, and their conflicting effects combined to produce a state of explosive inertia in which the dropping of a pin would have sounded like a steel girder decanting itself into a stack of cymbals.

  The Saint’s cigarette expired, and he pressed it quietly out on the mantelpiece. For a few moments at least, he was the only man in the room who was immune to the atmosphere of the petrified earthquake which had invaded it, and he was clinging to his immunity as if it was the most precious possession he had—which in fact it was. Whether the hoary old bluff which he had built up with such unblinking effrontery could be carried through to a flawless conclusion was another question, but he had done his best for it, and no man could have done more. And if he had achieved nothing else, he had at least made the opposition stop and think. If he had left them to their immediate and natural impulses from the time when they found him there, he would probably have been nothing but a name in history by this time; they might still plan to let him end the adventure in the same way, but now they would proceed with considerable caution. And the Saint knew that when the ungodly began to proceed with caution, instead of simply leaning on the trigger and asking questions afterwards as common sense would dictate, was when an honest roan might begin to look for loopholes. If there was anything that Simon Templar needed then, it was loopholes, and he was watching for them with a languid and untroubled smile on his lips and his muscles poised and tingling like a sprinter at the start of a race.

  Pérez spoke again, after that momentous silence, in a babble of rapid-fire Spanish. “He means his friends at his apartment.”

  “How many of them are there?” asked Quintana, in the same language.

  “There is a girl and a manservant. Those are the only ones who live there—I made inquiries. No one else has been there today except Graham.”

  Quintana glanced at the Saint again, but the Saint, who understood every word as easily as if
it had been spoken in English, frowned back at him with the worried expression of a man who is trying hard to understand and failing in the attempt.

  “You are sure there is no mistake?” Quintana insisted.

  “That would be impossible. I heard about Graham from Ingleston, and he is not the type of man who would be an associate of the Saint. I followed him to the Saint’s apartment this morning, and Fernández followed him back there when the Saint went in to Ingleston’s. Fernández and Nayder have been watching there ever since, pretending to repair telephone wires.”

  “But your telephone call—”

  “That was Fernández, to know how much longer he should stay there. Also he was suspicious because an old man muffled up so that he could not be recognised had been brought out of the next apartment, and Fernández had been thinking about it and wondering if it was one of the Saint’s gang. Now we know that it must have been the Saint himself.”

  “No one else has gone out the same way?”

  “No.”

  Quintana gazed at the Saint thoughtfully, stroking the barrel of his automatic with his left hand.

  “You will excuse us not speaking English, Mr Templar,” he said at length. “Naturally it is easier for us to speak our own language. But I was just trying to find out how good your case was. Major Pérez assures me that we are more or less in your hands.”

  The Saint, who knew that Major Pérez had done no such thing, returned his gaze with a bland and gullible smile. “That was what I was trying to make you see, dear old bird,” he said, but his pulses were beating a little faster.

  “If you will come into the next room,” said Quintana, “we had better see if we can settle this matter like gentlemen.”

  Urivetzky’s brow blackened incredulously, and he made an abrupt movement.

  “Fools!” he snarled. “Would you let this man—”

  “Please,” said Quintana, turning towards him. “Would you allow me to handle this affair in my own way? We are not criminals—we are supposed to be diplomats.”