Then her hand gripped his arm. “I don’t like this,” she said.
Simon smiled. He had read the doubt in her eyes when she first saw the house, and had liked the dam’-fool obstinacy that had marched her into it against his advice and her better judgment. But, while he approved her spirit, he had deliberately taken advantage of it to make sure that she should have her lesson.
“So!” Jacob Einsmann rose from his chair, rubbing his hands gently together. His eyes were fixed upon the girl. “You vould not listen to it vot I say in London, no, you vere so prrroud, but now you yourself to me hof come, aind’t it?”
6
“Aye, laad, we’ve coom,” drawled the Saint. “So you hof got it vot you vanted, yes, no, aind’t it?”
Einsmann turned his head.
“Ach! I remember you…”
“And I you,” said the Saint comfortably. “In fact, I spent a considerable time on the trip over composing a little song about you, in the form of a nursery rhyme for the instruction of small children, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to sing. It goes like this:
Dear Jacob is an unwashed mamser. We like not his effluvium, sir;
If we can tread on Jacob’s graft,
Das wird ja wirklich fabelhaft.
“For that effort in trilingual verse I have already awarded myself the Swaffer Biscuit.”
Einsman leered. “For vonce, Herr Saint, you hof a misdake made.”
“Saint?” The girl spoke, at Simon’s shoulder, startled, half incredulous.
He smiled round at her. “That’s right, old dear. I am that well-known institution. Is this the Boche you mentioned at the Cri—the bird who got fresh at the Calumet?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know…”
“You weren’t meant to,” said Simon coolly. “That was just part of the deception. But I guessed it as soon as Lemuel gave me your name.”
“You vos clever, Herr Saint,” Einsmann said suavely.
“I vos,” the Saint admitted modestly. “It only wanted a little putting two and two together. There was that dinner the other day, for instance. Very well staged for my benefit, wasn’t it? All that trout-spawn and frog-bladder about your cabarets, and Lemuel warbling about the difficulty of getting English girls abroad…I made a good guess at the game then and I’d have laid anyone ten thousand bucks to a slush nickel, on the spat, that it wouldn’t be long before I was asked to ferry over a few fair maidens in Lemuel’s machine. I had your graft taped right out a few days ago, and I don’t see that the present variation puts me far wrong. The only real difference is that Francis is reckoning to have to find another aviator to carry through the rest of the contract—aind’t it?”
His hand went lazily to his hip pocket, and then something jabbed him sharply in the ribs, and he looked down at a heavy automatic in the hand of the imitation butler, who had not left the room.
“You vill bring your gun out verree slowly,” said Einsmann, succulently. “Verree slowly…”
Simon smiled—a slow and Saintly smile. And, as slow as the smile, his hand came into view.
“Do you mind?” he murmured.
He opened the cigarette-case, and selected a smoke with care. The butler lowered his gun.
“Let us talk German,” said the Saint suddenly, in that language. “I have a few things to say which this girl need not hear.” Einsmann’s mouth twisted.
“I shall be interested,” he said ironically.
With an unlighted cigarette between his lips, and the cigarette-case still open in his hands, Simon looked across at the German. Stella Dornford was behind the Saint, the imitation butler stood a little to one side, his automatic in his hand.
“You are a man for whom there is no adequate punishment. You are a buyer and seller of souls, and your money is earned with more human misery than your insanitary mind can imagine. To attempt to visit some of this misery upon yourself would do little good. The only thing to do is to see that you cease to pollute the earth.”
His cold blue eyes seemed to bore into Einsmann’s brain, so that the German, in spite of his armed bodyguard, felt a momentary qualm of fear.
“I only came here to make quite sure about you, Jacob Einsmann,” said the Saint. “And now I am quite sure. You had better know that I am going to kill you.” He took a step forward, and did not hear the door open behind him.
Einsmann’s florid face had gone white, save for the bright patches of colour that burned in either cheek. Then he spoke, in a sudden torrent of hoarse words. “So! You say you will kill me? But you are wrong. I am not the one who will die tonight, I know you, Herr Saint! Even if Lemuel had not told me, I should still have known enough. You remember Henri Chastel? He was my friend, and you killed him. Ach! You shall not have a quick death, my friend…”
With the Saintly smile still resting blandly on his lips, Simon had closed his cigarette-case with a snap while Einsmann talked, and was returning it to his hip pocket…He performed the action so quietly and naturally that, coming after the false alarm he had caused when he took it out of the same pocket, this movement of his hand passed almost unnoticed. Nor did it instantly seem strange to the audience when the Saint’s hand did not at once return to view. He brought the hand up swiftly behind his back; he had exchanged the cigarette-case for a gun, and he nosed the muzzle of the gun through the gap between his left arm and his body.
“You may give my love to Henri,” he remarked, and touched the trigger.
He saw Einsmann’s face twist horribly, and the German clutched at his stomach before he crumpled where he stood, but Simon only saw these things out of the tail of his eye. He had whipped the gun from under his armpit a second after his first shot. There was no time to fetch it round behind his body into a more convenient firing position, and he loosed his second shot with his forearm lying along the small of his back and the gun aimed out to his left. But the butler’s attention had been diverted at the moment when the Saint fired first, and the man’s reaction was not quite quick enough. He took the Saint’s bullet in the shoulder, and his own shot blew a hole in the carpet.
Then the door slammed shut and Simon turned right round.
The man who had seized Stella Dornford from behind a moment before the Saint’s first shot was not armed, and he had not taken a second to perceive the better part of valour. Unhappily for his future, the instinct of self-preservation had been countered by another and equally powerful instinct, and he had tried to compromise with the two. Perhaps he thought that the armed butler could be relied upon.
The speculation is interesting but unprofitable, for the man’s mental processes are now beyond the reach of practical investigation. All we know is that at that precise instant of time he was heading down the hall with an unconscious burden.
And the Saint had wrenched at the handle of the door and found it locked upon the outside. Simon jerked up his gun again, and the report mingled with a splintering crash.
He jerked the door open, and looked up and down the dark hall. At the far end, towards the back of the house, another door was closing—he saw the narrowing strip of brighter light in the gloom. The strip vanished as he raced towards it, and he heard a key turn as he groped for the handle. Again he raised his automatic, and then, instead of the detonation he was expecting, heard only the click of a dud cartridge. He snatched at the sliding jacket, and something jammed. He had no time to find out what it was; he dropped the gun into his pocket, made certain of the position of the keyhole, and stepped back a pace. Then he raised his foot and smashed his heel into the lock with all his strength and weight behind it.
The door sprang open eighteen inches—and crashed into a table that was being brought up to reinforce it. The Saint leapt at the gap, made it, wedged his back against the jamb, and set both hands to the door. With one titanic heave he flung the door wide and sent the table spinning back to the centre of the room.
The girl lay on the floor by the doorway. On the other side of the room, beyond
the up-turned table, the man who had brought her had opened a drawer in a desk, and he turned with an automatic in his hand.
“Schweinhund!” he snarled, and the Saint laughed.
The Saint laughed, took two quick steps, and launched himself headlong into space in a terrific dive. It took him clear over the table, full length, and muddled his objective’s aim. The man sighted frantically, and fired and the Saint felt something like a hot iron sear his right arm from wrist to elbow. Then Simon had gathered up the man’s legs in that fantastic tackle, and they went to the floor together.
The Saint’s left hand caught the gunman’s right wrist and pinned it to the floor, then, his own right band being numb, he brought up his knee…
He was on his feet again in a moment, gathering the automatic out of the man’s limp hand as he rose.
The girl’s eyes fluttered as he reached her, but the Saint reckoned that freight would be less trouble than first aid. He put his captured gun on a chair, and, as the girl started to try to rise, he yanked her to her feet and caught her over his left shoulder before she could fall again.
Quickly he tested his right hand again, and found that his fingers had recovered from the momentary shock. He picked up the gun in that hand.
A faint sound behind him made him turn swiftly, and he saw the gunman crawling towards him with a knife. He had not meant to fire, but the trigger must have been exceptionally sensitive, and the gunman rolled over slowly and lay quite still.
Then the Saint broke down the hall.
A gigantic negro loomed up out of the twilight. Careful of the trigger this time, the Saint snapped the muzzle of the gun into the man’s chest, and the negro backed away with rolling eyes. Keeping him covered, Simon sidled to the door and set the girl gently on her feet. She was able to stand then and she it was who, under his directions, unbarred the door and opened it.
“See if there’s a taxi,” rapped the Saint, and heard her hurry down the steps. A moment later she called him.
He gave her time to get into the taxi herself, and then, like lightning, he sprang through the door and slammed it behind him.
The chauffeur, turning to receive his instructions through the little window communicating between the inside and outside of the cab, heard the shout from the house, and looked round with a question forming on his lips. Then something cold and metallic touched the back of his neck, and one of his fares spoke crisply.
“Gehen Sie schnell, mein Freund!”
The driver obeyed.
The fact that, having been given no destination to drive to, he was quietly steering his passengers in the direction of the nearest police station, is of no great historical interest. For, when he reached the station he was without passengers, and the officials who heard his story were inclined to cast grave doubts upon that worthy citizen’s sobriety, until confirmation of some of his statements arrived through another channel.
Stella Dornford and the Saint had quietly left him in a convenient traffic block, for Simon had much more to do in the next twenty-four hours, and he was in no mood to be delayed by embarrassing inquiries.
7
“And if that doesn’t learn you, my girl,” said the Saint, a trifle grimly, “nothing ever will.”
They were in a room in the hotel where the girl had parked her luggage before proceeding to the interview with Einsmann. The Saint, with a cigarette between his lips and a glass tankard of dark syrupy Kulmbach on the table beside him, was sitting on the bed, bandaging his arm with two white linen handkerchiefs torn into strips. Stella Dornford stood by shame-facedly.
“I’m sorry I was such a fool,” she said.
Simon looked up at her. She was very pale, but this was not the pallor of anger with which she had begun the day.
“Can I help you with that?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said cheerfully. “I’m never hurt. It’s a gift…”
He secured his effort with a safety-pin, and rolled down his sleeve. Then he gave her one of his quick, impulsive smiles.
“Anyway,” he said, “you’ve seen some Life. And that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“You can’t make me feel worse than I do already.”
He laughed, and stood up and she looked round as his hands fell on her shoulders.
“Why worry, old dear?” he said. “It’s turned out all right—so what the hell? You don’t even have to rack your brains to think of an unfutile way of saying, ‘Thank you.’ I’ve loved it. The pleasure of shooting Jacob in the tum-tum was worth a dozen of these scratches. So let’s leave it at that.” He ruffled her hair absently. “And now we’ll beat it back to England, shall we?”
He turned away, and picked up his coat.
“Are you leaving now?” she asked in surprise.
Simon nodded. “I’m afraid we must. In the first place, this evening’s mirth and horseplay is liable to start a certain hue and cry after me in this bouncing burg. I don’t know that that alone would make me jump for the departure platform, but there’s also a man I want to see in England—about a sort of dog. I’m sorry about the rush, but things always seem to happen to me in a hurry. Are you ready?”
They landed for a late meal at Amsterdam and they had not long left Schiphol behind when the darkness and the monotonous roar of the engine soothed Stella Dornford into a deep sleep of sheer nervous weariness. She awoke when the engine was suddenly silenced, and found that they were gliding down into the pale half-light before dawn.
“I think there’s enough light to make a landing here,” Simon answered her question through the telephones. “I don’t want to have to go on to Croydon.”
There was, at least, enough light for the Saint to make a perfect landing and he taxied up to the deserted hangers and left the machine there for the mechanics to find in the morning. Then he went in search of his car.
In the car, again she slept, and it is therefore not surprising that she never thought of Francis Lemuel until after he had unloaded her into one of the friendliest sitting-rooms she had ever seen, and after he had prepared eggs and bacon and coffee for them both, and after they had smoked two cigarettes together. And then it was Simon who reminded her.
“I want you to help me with a telephone conversation,” he said, and proceeded to coach her carefully.
A few minutes later she had dialled a number and was waiting for the reply. Then, “Are you Piccadilly thrrree-eight thrrree-four?” she asked sweetly.
The answer came in a decorated affirmative. “You’re wanted from Berlin.”
She clicked the receiver hook, and then the Saint took over the instrument.
“Dot vos you, Lemuel, no?…You vould like to hear about it der business, aind’t it?…Ja! I hof seddled it altogether der business. Der man vill not more trrouble gif, andt der samples I hof also received it, yes…”
A couple of lines of brisk dialogue, this time in German, between the Saint and an excellent impersonator of the Berlin exchange, cut short the conversation with the Saint hurriedly concluding, “Ja! I to you der particulars tomorrow vill wrrrite…”
“It’s detail that does it,” murmured Simon complacently, as he replaced the receiver.
Stella Dornford was regarding him with a certain awe.
“I’m beginning to understand some of the things I’ve read about you,” she said, and the Saint grinned, for no false modesty had ever been numbered among his failings.
Shortly afterwards he excused himself, and when he returned to the sitting-room, which was in a surprisingly short space of time, he had changed out of the characteristically conspicuous suit in which he had travelled, and was wearing a plain and unnoticeable blue serge. The Saint’s phenomenal speed of dressing would have made the fortune of a professional quick-change artist and he was as pleased with the girl’s unspoken astonishment at his feat as he had been with her first compliment.
“Where are you going?” she demanded, when she had found her voice.
“To see you home,
first,” he answered briskly. “And then I have a little job of work to do.”
“But why have you changed?”
The Saint adjusted a cheap black tie.
“The job might turn into a funeral,” he said. “I don’t seriously think it will, but I like to be prepared.”
She was still mystified when he left her at the door of her apartment.
From there he drove down to Piccadilly, and left his car in St. James’s Street, proceeding afterwards on foot. Here the reason for his change of costume began to appear. Anyone might have remarked the rare spectacle of a truly Saintly figure parading the West End of London at six o’clock in the morning arrayed in one of the most dazzling creations of Savile Row, but no one came forward to describe the soberly dressed and commonplace-looking young man who committed the simplest audacity of the season.
Nor could he ever afterwards have been identified by the sleepy-eyed porter who answered his ring at a certain bell in Jermyn Street, for, when the door was opened, Simon’s face was masked from eyes to chin by a handkerchief folded three-cornerwise, and his hat-brim shaded his eyes. So much the porter saw before the Saint struck once, swiftly, mercifully, and regretfully, with a supple rubber truncheon…
The Saint closed the door behind him, and unbuttoned his double-breasted coat. There were a dozen turns of light rope wound round his waist belt-fashion, and with these he secured the janitor hand and foot, completing the work with a humane but efficient gag. Then he lifted the unconscious man and carried him to a little cubicle at the back of the hall, where he left him—after taking his keys.
He raced up the stairs to the door of Lemuel’s apartment, which was on the second floor.
It was the work of a moment only to find the right key. Then, if the door were bolted…But apparently Lemuel relied on the security of his Yale and the watchfulness of the porter…
The Saint passed like a cat down the passage mat opened before him, listening at door after door. Presently he heard the sound of rhythmic breathing and he entered Lemuel’s bedroom without a sound, and stood over the bed like a ghost.
Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 5
