The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Ah,” said Detective Yard wisely, as he sighted the Saint.

  Kinglake didn’t even take time out to show surprise. He turned savagely on the frog-shaped house detective.

  “How in hell did this bird get in here?”

  “I came in under my own power,” Simon intervened. “I was thinking of moving, and I wanted to see what the rooms were like. Don’t blame Rowden. He was trying to tell me about the wooden mattresses. If you look again, you’ll see where he was even ripping them open to show me the teak linings.”

  The Lieutenant was not amused. He had never looked like a man who was amused very often, and this was manifestly not one of his nights to relax in a bubble bath of wit and badinage.

  He glared at the Saint balefully and said, “All right. Templar. You asked for it. I told you what was going to happen to you if you didn’t keep your nose clean in this town. Well, this is it. I’m holding you as a material witness in the death of Nick Vaschetti.”

  The arch of the Saint’s brows was angelic.

  “As a witness of what, Comrade? The guy bumped himself off, didn’t he? He stepped out of a window and left off his parachute. He’d heard about the Galveston Police, and he knew that the most precious legacy he could bequeath them was an absolutely watertight suicide. What makes you leave your ever-loving wife warming her own nightie so you can come here and improve your blood pressure?”

  Kinglake’s mouth became a thin slit in his face, and his neck reddened up to his ears, but he kept his temper miraculously. The blood stayed out of his slate-grey stare.

  “Why don’t you save the wisecracks for your column?” he said nastily. “You’ve been mixed up in too many fishy things since you’ve been here—”

  “What makes you assume that I was mixed up in this?”

  “You talked to Vaschetti in the City Gaol this evening. You arranged for him to be sprung, and you arranged to meet him here. I call that being mixed up in it.”

  “You must be psychic,” Simon remarked. “I know I got rid of your Mr Callahan. Or who told you?”

  “I did,” said the voice of The Times-Tribune.

  He stood in the doorway with a vestige of apology on his mild stolid face. Simon turned and saw him, and went on looking at him with acid bitterness.

  “Thanks, pal. Did you bring out a special edition and tell the rest of the world, too?”

  “I did not,” said the city editor primly. “I acted according to the agreement I made with you, as soon as I heard what had happened to Vaschetti.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “The reporter who was supposed to be taking care of him and waiting for you arrived back at the office. I asked him what he thought he was doing, and he said he’d been given a message that I wanted him back at once. Since I hadn’t sent any such message, I guessed something was going on. I wasn’t any too happy about my own position, so I thought I’d better come over and look into it myself. I met Lieutenant Kinglake downstairs, and I told him what I knew.”

  “And so we come up here,” Kinglake said comfortably, “and catch the Saint just like this.”

  The repetition of names ultimately made its impression on the comatose house detective.

  “Gosh,” he exalted, with a burst of awed excitement, “he’s the Saint!” He looked disappointed when nobody seemed impressed by his great discovery, and retired again behind his cigar. He said sullenly, “He told me he was the police.”

  “He told the assistant manager the same thing,” Kinglake said with some satisfaction. “A charge of impersonating an officer will hold him till we get something better.”

  Simon studied the Lieutenant’s leathery face seriously for a moment.

  “You know,” he said, “something tells me you really mean to be difficult about this.”

  “You’re damn right I do,” Kinglake said without spite.

  At that point there was a sudden sharp exclamation from Detective Yard, who had been quartering the room with the same plodding method that he had used out on the flats where the late Henry Stephen Matson had become his own funeral pyre.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, look what we got here.”

  He brought over the shredded gladstone, pointing to the initials stamped on it.

  “H. S. M.,” he spelt out proudly. “Henry Stephen Matson. This could of belonged to that guy we found yesterday!”

  Lieutenant Kinglake examined the bag minutely, but the Saint wasn’t watching him.

  Simon Templar had become profoundly interested in something else. He had still been fidgeting over that bag in the back of his mind even while he had to make more immediate conversation, and it seemed to be sorting itself out. He was scanning the hodgepodge of stuff on the floor rather vacantly while Yard burgeoned into the bowers of Theory.

  “Lieutenant, maybe this Vaschetti was the guy who called himself Blatt an’ got away with Matson’s luggage. So after they throw him out the window, they tear that bag apart while they’re rippin’ up everything else.”

  “Brother,” said the Saint in hushed veneration, “I visualise you as the next Chief of Police. You can see that whole slabs of that lining have been torn right out, but in all this mess I bet you can’t find one square inch of lining. I’ve been looking to see if the ungodly had been smart enough to think of that, but I don’t think they were. Therefore that bag wasn’t chopped up in here. Therefore it was planted just for the benefit of some genius like you.”

  “What else for?” Kinglake demanded curtly.

  “To throw in a nice note of confusion. And most likely, in the hope that the confusion might take some of the heat off Blatt.”

  “If there ever was a Blatt before you thought of him.”

  “There was a Blatt,” the city editor intervened scrupulously. “I think I told you. Vaschetti spoke about him and described him.”

  The Lieutenant handed the gladstone back to his assistant, and kept his stony eyes on the Saint.

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” he stated coldly. “All I care about is that whatever went on here was done inside the city limits of Galveston. There’s no question about my jurisdiction this time. And I’m tired of having you in my hair, Templar. You wanted Vaschetti out of the calaboose. You arranged to meet him here. And I find you in his room in the middle of a mess that makes it look as if he could have been pushed out of that window instead of jumped. You’ve been much too prominent in every bit of this—from finding Matson’s body to going around with Olga Ivanovitch. So I’m just going to put you where I’ll know what you’re doing all the time.”

  “Has there been a political upheaval in the last half-hour,” Simon inquired with sword-edged mockery, “or do you happen to be kidding yourself that if you bring me into court on any charge I won’t manage to tie this job in with the Matson barbecue and raise holy hell with all the plans for a nice peaceful election?”

  Kinglake’s jaw hardened out like a cliff, but the harried expression that Simon had noticed before crept in around his eyes.

  “We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Right now, you’re going to do all your hell-raising in a nice quiet cell.”

  Simon sighed faintly, with real regret. It would have been so much more fun playing it the old way, but he couldn’t take any more chances with that now. This game mattered so much more than the old games that he had played for fun.

  “I hate to disappoint you,” he said, “but I can’t let you interfere with me tonight.”

  He said it with such translucent simplicity that it produced the kind of stunned silence that might exist at the very core of an exploding bomb.

  Detective Yard, the least sensitive character, was the first to recover.

  “Now, ain’t that just too bad!” he jeered, advancing on the Saint, and hauling out a pair of handcuffs as he came, but moving warily because of his own affronted confidence.

  Simon didn’t even spare him a glance. He was facing Kinglake and nobody else, and all the banter and levity had dropped away fro
m his bearing. It was like a prize-fighter in the ring shrugging off his gay and soft silk robe.

  “I want five minutes with you alone,” he said. “And I mean alone. It’ll save you a lot of trouble and grief.”

  Lieutenant Kinglake was no fool. The hard note of command that had slid into the Saint’s voice was pitched in a subtle key that blended with his own harmonics.

  He eyed Simon for a long moment, and then he said, “Okay. The rest of you wait outside. Please.”

  In spite of which, he pulled out his Police Positive and sat down and held it loosely on his knee as the other members of the congregation filed out with their individual expressions of astonishment, disappointment, and disgust.

  There was perplexity even on Kinglake’s rugged bony face after the door had closed, but he overcame it with his bludgeon bluff of harsh peremptory speech.

  “Well,” he said unrelentingly. “Now we’re alone, let’s have it. But if you were thinking you could pull a fast one if you had me to yourself—just forget it, and save the City a hospital bill.”

  “I want you to pick up that phone and make a call to Washington,” said the Saint, without rancour. “The number is Imperative five, five hundred. Extension five. If you don’t know what that means, your local FBI gent will tell you. You’ll talk to a voice called Hamilton. After that you’re on your own.”

  Even Kinglake looked as briefly startled as his seamed face could.

  “And if I let you talk me into making this call, what good will it do you?”

  “I think,” said the Saint, “that Hamilton will laugh his head off, but I’m afraid he’ll tell you to save that nice quiet cell for somebody else.”

  The Lieutenant gazed at him fixedly for four or five seconds.

  Then he reached for the telephone.

  Simon Templar germinated another cigarette, and folded into the remnants of an armchair. He hardly paid any attention to the conversation that went on, much less to the revolver that rested for a few more minutes on the detective’s lap. That phase of the affair was finished, so far as he was concerned, and he had something else to think about.

  He had to make a definite movement to bring himself back to that shabby and dissected room when the receiver clonked back on its bracket, and Kinglake said, with the nearest approach to humanity that Simon had yet heard in his gravel voice, “That’s fine. And now what in hell am I going to tell those mugs outside?”

  10

  The Saint could string words into barbed wire, but he also knew when and how to be merciful. He smiled at the Lieutenant without the slightest trace of malice or gloating. He was purely practical.

  “Tell ’em I spilled my guts. Tell ’em I gave you the whole story, which you can’t repeat because it’s temporarily a war secret and the FBI is taking over anyhow, but, of course, you knew all about it all the time. Tell ’em I’m just an ambitious amateur trying to butt into something that’s too big for him: you scared the daylights out of me, which is all you really wanted to do. Tell ’em I folded up like a flower when I tried to sell you my line and you really got tough. So I quit, and you were big-hearted and let me hightail out of here. Make me into any kind of a jerk that suits you, because I don’t want the other kind of publicity and you can get credit for the pinch anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” Kinglake wanted to know, rather petulantly.

  “Because I didn’t know anything about you, or your political problems. Which were somewhat involved, as it turns out.” The Saint was very calmly candid. “After that, I knew even less about your team. I mean guys like Yard and Callahan. This is a small town, as big towns go, and it wouldn’t take long for one man’s secret to become everybody’s rumour. You know how it is. I might not have gotten very far that way.”

  Kinglake dragged another of his foul stogies out of his vest pocket, glared at it pessimistically, and finally bit off the end as if he had nerved himself to take a bite of a rotten apple. His concluding expression conveyed the notion that he had.

  “And I always knew you for a crook,” he said disconsolately.

  The Saint’s smile was almost nostalgically dreamy.

  “I always was, in a technical sort of way,” he said softly. “And I may be again. But there’s a war on, and some odd people can find a use for even odder people…For that matter, there was a time when I thought you might be a crooked cop, which can be worse.”

  “I guess you know how that is, too,” Kinglake said, sourly but sufficiently. “You sounded as if you did.”

  “I think that’s all been said,” Simon replied temperately. “We’re just playing a new set of rules. For that matter, if I’d been playing some of my old rules, I think I could have found a way to pull a fast one on you, with or without the audience, and taken that heater away from you, and made time out of here no matter what you were threatening. I’ve done it before. I just thought this was the best way tonight.”

  The Lieutenant glanced guiltily at his half-forgotten gun, and stuffed it back into his hip holster.

  “Well?” He repeated the word without any of the aggressive implications that he had thrown into it the last time. “Can you feed me any of this story that I’m supposed to have known all along, or should I just go on clamming up because I don’t know?”

  Simon deliberately reduced his cigarette by the length of two measured inhalations. In between them, he measured the crestfallen Lieutenant once more for luck. After that he had no more hesitation.

  If he hadn’t been able to judge men down to the last things that made them tick, he wouldn’t have been what he was or where he was at that instant. He could be wrong often and anywhere, incidentally, but not in the fundamentals of situation and character.

  He said quite casually then, as it seemed to him after his decision was made, “It’s just one of those stories…”

  He swung a leg over the arm of his chair, pillowed his chin on his knee, and went on through a drift of smoke when he was ready.

  “I’ve got to admit that the theory I set up in The Times-Tribune didn’t just spill out of my deductive genius. It was almost ancient history to me. That’s what brought me to Galveston and into your hair. The only coincidence I wasn’t expecting, and which I didn’t even get on to for some time afterwards, was that the body I nearly ran over out there in the marshes would turn out to be Henry Stephen Matson—the guy I came here to find.”

  “What did you want him for?”

  “Because he was a saboteur. He worked in two or three war plants where acts of sabotage occurred, although he was never suspected. No gigantic jobs, but good serious sabotage just the same. The FBI found that out when they checked back on him. But the way they got on to him was frankly one of those weird accidents that are always waiting to trip up the most careful villains. He had a bad habit of going out and leaving the lights on in his room. About the umpteenth time his landlady had gone up and turned them out, she thought of leaving a note for him about it. But she didn’t have a pencil with her, and she didn’t see one lying around. So she rummaged about a bit, and found an Eversharp in one of his drawers. She started to write, and then the lead broke. She tried to produce another one, and nothing happened. So she started fiddling with it and unscrewing things, and suddenly the pencil came apart and a lot of stuff fell out of it that certainly couldn’t have been the inner workings of an Eversharp. She was a bright woman. She managed to put it together again, without blowing herself up, and put it back where she found it and went out and told the FBI—of course, she knew that Matson was working for a defence plant. But it’s a strictly incredible story, and exactly the sort of thing that’s always happening.”

  “One of these days it’ll probably happen to you,” Kinglake said, but his stern features relaxed in the nearest approximation to a smile that they were capable of.

  The Saint grinned.

  “It has,” he said…“Anyway, Matson had an FBI man working next to him from then on, so he never had a chance
to pull anything.”

  “Why wasn’t he arrested?”

  “Because if he’d done other jobs in other places, there was a good chance that he had contacts with a general sabotage organisation, and that’s what we’ve been trying to get on to for a long time. That’s why I went to St. Louis. But before I arrived there, he’d scrammed. I don’t think he knew he was being watched. But Quenco was much tougher than anything he’d tackled before. You don’t have any minor sabotage in an explosive factory. You just have a loud noise and a large hole in the ground. I think Matson got cold feet and called it a day. But he wasn’t a very clever fugitive. I’m not surprised that the mob caught up with him so quickly. He left a trail that a wooden Indian could have followed. I traced him to Baton Rouge in double time, and when I was there I heard from Washington that he’d applied for a passport and given his address as the Ascot Hotel in Galveston. He was afraid that his goose was cooked. It was, too—to a crisp.”

  “You were figuring on getting into his confidence and finding out what he knew.”

  “Maybe something like that. If I could have done it. If not, I’d have tried whatever I had to—even to the extent of roasting him myself. Only I’d have done it more slowly. I thought he might have some informative notes written down. A guy like that would be liable to do that sort of thing, just for insurance. Like Vaschetti…I want that ostrich-skin case that was in his gladstone lining, and I want Vaschetti’s diary of his trips and meetings. With those two items, we may be able to clean up practically the whole sabotage system from coast to coast.”

  “What do you mean by ‘we’?” Kinglake asked curiously. “I’ve heard of this Imperative number, but is it a branch of the FBI?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “It’s something much bigger. But don’t ask me, and don’t ask anyone else. And don’t remember that I ever mentioned it.”

  Kinglake looked at the chewed end of his stogie.

  “I just want you to know,” he said, “that I had Matson figured as an ordinary gang killing, and that’s why I would have let it ride. If I’d known it was anything like this, nobody could have made me lay off.”