Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “And what are you supposed to do?”

  “Propel him about the bright blue sky.”

  “Where?”

  The Saint bisected a sardine with precision and dexterity.

  “That,” he answered, “is the point. According to rumours, Francis is proposing to extend his cabaristic activities into the other capitals of Europe. But why by air? ‘The latest and most rapid means of transport,’ says you, intelligent-like. Oh, every time. But the whole of civilised Europe is served by very comfortable public airways—very comfortable—and my researches into Mr. Lemuel’s character never made me think he was the sort of cove who’d sacrifice his arm-chair in a pukka flying Pullman and go batting through the blue in an open two-seater air-louse just to save an hour here and there. Mystery Number One. That’s why I was so interested to read that Brother Francis had been trying to aviate solo…you remember?”

  Patricia nodded. “I wondered…”

  “Never give tongue before you’ve got the blue-bottle by the blunt end,” said the Saint. “That’s my motto. But I always believe in taking two looks at anything that seems to have slipped the least bit off the main line, and that was a case in point. Particularly with a man like Francis Lemuel. I’ve always thought he was far too respectable to be above suspicion. Now we may start to learn things.”

  She tried to find out how he had contrived to discover that Mr. Lemuel had been searching for a disreputable aviator; she was equally curious to know how the Saint had contrived to present himself for the job, but Simon Templar still had his own little secrets. About some of the preliminary details of his adventures he was often absurdly reticent.

  “I heard about it,” he said, “and a bloke I met in a pub out at Aldgate landed me on the front door, so to speak…Mystery Number Two, of course, is why the aviator should have been disreputable…”

  He talked energetically about this problem, and left her first questions otherwise unanswered. And with that she had to be content—until, abruptly, he switched off the subject altogether, and for the rest of that day refused to talk any more about what he was pleased to call “affairs of state.”

  Other things happened afterwards—very shortly afterwards. A few other people entered the story, a few other threads came into it, a few diverting decorations blossomed upon it, but the foundations of the story were already laid, and it is doubtful whether any of the subsequent events herein described would have evented at all if Simon Templar had not chanced to catch sight of that innocent paragraph in The Evening Record. For of such material were the Saint’s adventures made.

  And nothing can be more certain than that if the Saint had not been a man of such peculiar genius and eccentric interests he would not to this day carry an eight-inch scar on his right forearm as a memento of the adventure, and Mr. Francis Lemuel would not have experienced such a sudden and cataclysmic elevation, and one Jacob Einsmann might still have been with us, and M. Boileau, the French Minister of Finance, would not have been put to considerable inconvenience—and (which is perhaps even more important) a girl whose name used to be Stella Dornford would not now be married to a bank clerk with very ordinary prospects, and living in a very ordinary apartment in Battersea, and perfectly happy in spite of that.

  2

  The Calumet Club is situated (as the estate agents so beautifully put it) in a spacious basement in Deacon Street, Soho. This statement should be taken at its face value. There are, in fact, no premises whatsoever in any way ostensibly appertaining to the said club on the street level, or on any of the floors above. Entrance to the club is by means of a narrow flight of stone steps leading down into a microscopic area, and through a door opening upon this area one may (if one is known to the management) obtain access to the club itself, via a room which only an estate agent would have the nerve to describe as a vestibule, and past a porter who has been other things in his time.

  The Calumet Club has an extensive if curiously exclusive membership. Things are discussed there—fascinating things. Money, and other objects of vertu, changes hands there. And, sometimes, strange things are said to have happened there—very strange things. The Saint was distinctly interested in the Calumet Club. It was one of the irregular interests of his young life.

  Nevertheless, the visit he paid to it on a certain evening began as a mere matter of routine, and was embarked upon without immediate malice premeditated.

  For thus is the way paved for adventure, as far as human ingenuity can contrive it, with good sound non-skid tarmac. Upon learning, almost beyond dispute, that Mr. Phineas Poppingcove is a saccharine smuggler, you do not, whatever your principles and prowess, immediately invade his abode, beat him vimfully about the head with some blunt instrument, and so depart with the work of discouragement satisfactorily accomplished. If you discover, after patient investigation, that the rooms in which Miss Désirée Sausage professes to teach the latest ballroom dances (h. & c.) are in reality the dens where foolish men are fleeced of their fathers’ money at wangled games of halma, you do not, even if you are the Saint, instantly force your way into those rooms, shoot the croupier, denounce Miss Sausage, and take the stake-money home with you as a souvenir. Or, if you do, your promising career is liable to terminate abruptly and in a manner definitely glutinous. The Saint, it should be remembered, had been in that sort of game for some time and he knew, better than anyone, the value of painstaking preparation. When everything that could possibly be known about the lie of the land and the personal habits of its denizens was known, and the line of subsequent retreat had been thoroughly surveyed, mapped, dressed, ventilated, and upholstered—then, oh, yes, then the blunt instrument, wielded with decisive celerity and no uncertain hand. But not before.

  This visit to the Calumet Club was definitely “before” and the Saint was therefore prepared and even expecting to behave himself with all the decorum that the occasion demanded.

  He passed to a corner table, ordered a drink, lighted a cigarette, and settled himself comfortably.

  It was then barely eleven, and the club would not begin to do real business for about another half-hour. The nucleus of an orchestra was rhythmically, if a trifle unenthusiastically, insisting that it didn’t care how much some lady unspecified made it blue. To the accompaniment of this declaration of an unselfish devotion of which the casual eye, judging the orchestra solely by appearances, would never have believed them capable, four self-appointed ladies, in two pairs, and two other self-appointed ladies paired with an equal number of temporary gentlemen, were travelling in small circles round a minute section of inferior parquet. At other tables round the floor a scattering of other clients, apparently male and female, were absorbing divers brands of alcohol in the lugubrious fashion in which alcohol is ordinarily absorbed in England during the hours in which the absorption is legal. In fact, the Calumet Club was just yawning and stretching itself preparatory to waking up for the night’s festivities.

  The Saint sighed, inhaled cigarette-smoke luxuriously, tasted the modest glass of beer which the waiter brought him, paid twice the usual retail price for it, added a fifty per cent bonus, and continued to inspect his fellow-members with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

  One by one he dismissed them. Two men whom he had met there several times before saluted him, and he smiled back as if he loved them like brothers. An unattached damsel at an adjacent table smiled sweetly at him, and the Saint smiled back just as sweetly, for he had a reputation to keep up. And then, in another corner, his gaze came to rest upon a man he had seen before, and a girl he had never seen before, sitting together at a table beside the orchestra.

  Simon’s gaze rested upon them thoughtfully, as it had rested upon other people in that room, and it only rested upon them longer than it had rested upon anyone else that night, because at that moment, when his glance fell upon them, something stirred at the back of his brain and opened its inward intangible eye upon the bare facts of the case as conveyed by the optic nerves. The Saint could not have said what it wa
s. At that moment there was nothing about that corner of the scenery to attract such an attention. They were talking quite ordinarily, to judge by their faces and, if the face of the girl was remarkably pleasant to look upon, even that was not unprecedented in the Calumet Club and the entourage of Baldy Mossiter. And yet, in spite of these facts rather than because of them, Simon Templar’s queer instinct for the raw material of his trade flicked up a ghostly eyelid in some dim recess of his mind, and forced him to look longer, without quite knowing why he looked. And it was only because of this that the Saint saw what he saw, when the almost imperceptible thing happened in the course of one of Mr. Mossiter’s frequent and expressive gestures.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” murmured the unattached damsel at the adjacent table, hopefully, but the sweetness of the smile which illuminated the Saint’s features as she spoke was not for her, and it is doubtful whether he even heard.

  He lounged out of his chair and wandered across the room with the long, lazy stride that covered ground with such an inconspicuous speed, and the man and the girl looked up together as he loomed over their table.

  “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 demoralised 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 was 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 chapter, 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 kerb, and the Saint briefly spoke an address to the driver and stepped in.

  The girl was sit
ting 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 set-back 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 materialised 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 window 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 the 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.”