The Avenging Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “And how does that help us?” asked Roger.

  “Like this,” said the Saint, and proceeded to explain thus and thus.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DOZED IN GREEN PARK AND DISCOVERED A NEW USE FOR TOOTHPASTE

  1

  To walk from Upper Berkeley Mews to the Ritz Hotel should ordinarily have taken a man with the Saint’s stride and the Saint’s energy about four minutes. Simon Templar in motion, his friends used to say, was the most violent man that ever fumed through London; all his physical movements were made as if they were tremendously important. Buccaneer he was in fact, and buccaneer of life he always looked—most of all when he strode through London on his strange errands, with his incredibly vivid stride, and a piratical anachronism of a hat canted cavalierly aslant over the face of a fighting troubadour.

  But there was nothing of that about the aged greybeard who emerged inconspicuously from a converted garage in Upper Berkeley Mews at half-past eleven that Sunday morning. He did not look as if he had ever been anything in the least like a buccaneer, even fifty years ago, and, if in those decorously wild young days he had once cherished lawless aspirations, he must long since have decently buried all such disturbing thoughts. He walked very slowly, almost apologetically, as if he doubted his own right to be at large, and when he came to Piccadilly he stopped at the edge of the sidewalk and blinked miserably through his dark glasses at the scanty traffic, looking so forlorn and helpless that a plain-clothes man who had been searching for him for hours was moved to offer to help him across the road—an offer which was accepted with plaintive gratitude, and acknowledged with pathetic effusiveness. So an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department did his day’s good deed, and the pottering patriarch shuffled into the Green Park by the gate at the side of the Ritz Hotel, found a seat in the shade, sat there, folded his arms, and presently appeared to sleep…

  He slept for an hour, and then he climbed stiffly to his feet and shambled out of the park by the way he had entered it, turning under the shadow of the Ritz. He pushed through the revolving doors without hesitation, and it says much for the utter respectability of his antique appearance that the flunkey who met him within made no attempt to eject him, but greeted him deferentially, hoping that he would prove to be a millionaire, and certain that he could not turn out to be less than an earl.

  “I wish to see Prince Rudolf,” said the Saint, and he said it in such a way that the lackey almost grovelled.

  “What name, sir?”

  “You may send up my card.”

  The Saint fumbled in his waistcoat pocket; he had a very fine selection of visiting cards, and the ones he had brought with him on this expedition bore the name of Lord Craithness. On the back of one, he wrote, “Maidenhead, June 28.”

  It was the day on which he had last seen the Prince—the day on which Norman Kent had died.

  “Will you take a seat, your lordship?”

  His lordship would take a seat. And he waited there only five minutes, a grave and patient old aristocrat, before the man returned to say that the Prince would see him—as Simon had known he would say.

  It was a perfect little character study, that performance—the Saint’s slow and sober progress down the first-floor corridor, his entrance into the Prince’s suite, the austere dignity of his poise in the moment that he waited for the servant to announce him.

  “Lord Craithness.”

  The Saint heard the door close behind him, and smiled in his beard. And yet he could not have told why he smiled, for at that moment there came back to him all that he had to remember of his first and last meeting with the man who now faced him—and those were not pleasant memories. Once again he saw the friendly house by the Thames, the garden cool and fresh beyond the open French windows, the sunlit waters at the end of the lawn, and Norman Kent with a strange peace in his dark eyes, and the nightmare face of Rayt Marius, and the Prince…Prince Rudolf, calmest of them all, with a sleek and inhuman calm, like a man of steel and velvet, impeccably groomed, exquisite, impassive—exactly as he stood at that moment, gazing at his visitor with his fine eyebrows raised in faint interrogation…not betraying by so much as the flicker of an eyelid the things that must have been in his mind. He could not possibly have forgotten the date that had been written on that card, it could not by any stretch of imagination have omened good news for him, and yet he was utterly master of himself, utterly at his ease…

  “You’re a wonderful man,” said the Saint, and the Prince shrugged delicately.

  “You have the advantage of me.”

  “Have you forgotten so quickly?”

  “I meet many people.”

  The Saint put up his hand and removed his grey wig, his glasses, his beard…straightened up.

  “You should remember me,” he said.

  “My dear Mr Templar!” The Prince was smiling. “But why such precautions? Or did you wish to make your call an even greater surprise?"

  The Saint laughed.

  “The precautions were necessary,” he said, “as you know. But I’ll say you took it well—Highness. I never expected you to bat an eyelash, though—I remembered so well that your self-control was your greatest charm.”

  “But I am delighted to see you.”

  “Are you?” asked Simon Templar, gently.

  2

  The Prince proffered a slim gold case.

  “At least,” he said, “you will smoke.”

  “One of my own,” said the Saint affably. “I find that these are the only brand I can indulge in with safety—my heart isn’t what it was.”

  The Prince shrugged.

  “You have missed your vocation, Mr Templar,” he said regretfully. “You should have been a diplomat.”

  “I could have made a job of it,” said Simon modestly.

  “I believe I once made you an offer to enter my own service.”

  “You did.”

  “And you refused.”

  “I did.”

  “Perhaps you have reconsidered your decision.”

  The Saint smiled.

  “Listen,” he said. “Suppose I said I had. Suppose I told you I’d forgotten the death of my dearest friend. Suppose I said that all the things I once believed in and fought for—the things that he died for—meant nothing more to me. Would you welcome me?”

  “Candidly,” said the Prince, “I should not. I admire you. I know your qualities, and I would give much to have them in my service. But that is an ideal—a daydream. If you turned your coat, you would cease to be what you are, and so you would cease to be desirable. But it is a pity…”

  Simon strolled to a chair. He sat there, watching the Prince through a curling feather of cigarette-smoke. And the Prince, sinking on to the arm of another chair, with a long thin cigarette-holder between his perfect teeth, returned the gaze with a glimmer of amusement on his lips.

  Presently the Prince made one of his indescribably elegant gestures.

  “As you have not come to enlist with me,” he remarked, “I presume you have some other reason. Shall we deal with it?”

  “I thought we might have a chat,” said the Saint calmly. “I’ve discovered a number of obscure odours in the wind during the last twenty-four hours, and I had an idea you might have something to say which would clear the air. Of course, for one thing, I was hoping our dear friend Marius would be with you.”

  The Prince glanced at his watch.

  “I am expecting him at any moment. He was responsible for your friend’s unfortunate—er—accident, by the way. I fear that Marius has never been of a very even temper.”

  “That is one thing I’ve been wanting to know for many weeks,” said the Saint quietly, and for a moment something blazed in his eyes like a sear of blue flame.

  And then, once again, he was smiling.

  “It’ll be quite a rally, won’t it?” he murmured. “And we shall have such a lot to tell each other…But perhaps you’d like to open the palave
r yourself—Highness? For instance, how’s Heinrich?”

  “I believe him to be in good health.”

  “And what did he tell the police?”

  “Ah! I thought you would ask that question.”

  “I’m certainly curious.”

  The Prince tapped his cigarette fastidiously against the edge of an ashtray.

  “If you wish to know, he said that his uncle—an invalid, and unhappily subject to violent fits—had arrived only yesterday from Munich. You entered the house, pretending to be a doctor, before he could disclaim you, and you immediately threatened him with an automatic. You then informed him that you were the Saint, and abducted his uncle. Dussel, naturally, had no idea why you should have done so—but, just as naturally, he considered that that was a problem for the police to solve.”

  Simon nodded admiringly.

  “I’m taking a distinct shine to Heinrich,” he drawled. “You will admit that it was an ingenious explanation.”

  “I’ll tell the world.”

  “But your own strategy, my dear Mr Templar—that was superb! Even if I had not been told that it was your work, I should have recognized the artist at once.”

  “We professionals!” sighed the Saint.

  “And where did you take the lady?”

  The question was thrown off so carelessly, and yet with such a perfect touch, that for an instant the Saint checked his breath. And then he laughed.

  “Oh, Rudolf, that wasn’t worthy of you!”

  “I am merely being natural,” said the Prince, without annoyance. “There was something you wanted to know—you asked me—I answered. And then I followed your example.”

  Simon shook his head, smiling, and sank deeper into his chair, his eyes intent upon an extraordinarily uninteresting ceiling. And he wondered, with a certain reckless inward merriment, what thoughts were sizzling through the brain of the imperturbable hidalgo opposite him.

  He wondered…but he knew that it would be a waste of time to attempt to read anything in the Prince’s face. The Prince was his match, if not more than his match, at any game like that. If Simon had come there to fence—that would have been a duel! Already, in the few words they had exchanged, each had tested afresh the other’s mettle, and each had tacitly recognized that time had fostered no illusions about the other: neither had changed. Weave and feint, thrust, parry, and riposte—each movement was perfect, smooth, cool, effortless…and futile…And neither would yield an inch of ground…And now, where cruder and clumsier exponents would still be ineffectually lunging and blundering, they had admitted the impasse. The pause was of mutual consent.

  Their eyes met, and there was a momentary twist of humour in each gaze.

  “We appear,” observed the Prince politely, “to be in the position of two men who are fighting with invisible weapons. We are both equally at a disadvantage.”

  “Not quite,” said the Saint.

  The Prince fluttered a graceful hand.

  “It is agreed that you are an obstacle in my path which I should be glad to remove. I might hand you over to the police—”

  “But then you might have some embarrassing questions to answer.”

  “Exactly. And as for any private action—”

  “Difficult—in the Ritz Hotel.”

  “Exceedingly difficult. Then, there is reason to believe that you are—or were—temporarily in possession of a property which it is necessary for me to recover.”

  “Dear old Heinrich’s uncle.”

  “Whereas my property is the knowledge of why it is necessary for me to recover—your property.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And an exchange is out of the question.”

  “Right out.”

  “So that the deadlock is complete.”

  “Not quite,” said the Saint again.

  The Prince’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “Have I forgotten anything?”

  “I wonder!”

  There was another moment of silence, and, in the stillness, the Saint’s amazingly sensitive ears caught the ghost of a sound from the corridor outside the room. And, at that instant, with the breaking of the silence by the perfunctory knock that followed on the door, the grim mirth that had been simmering inside the Saint for minutes past danced mockingly into his eyes.

  “Highness—”

  It was Marius, looming gigantically in the doorway, with a flare of triumph in the face that might have served as a model for some hideous heathen idol, and triumph in his thin rasping voice.

  And then he saw the Saint, and stopped dead.

  “You see that our enterprising young friend is with us once more, my dear Marius,” said the Prince suavely, and Simon Templar rose to his feet with his most seraphic smile.

  3

  “Marius—my old college chum!”

  The Saint stood there in the centre of the room, lean and swift and devil-may-care, his hands swinging back his coat and resting on his hips, and all the old challenging hints of lazy laughter that both the other men remembered were glinting back through the tones of his voice. The reckless eyes swept Marius from head to foot, with the cold steel masked down into their depths by a shimmer of gay disdain.

  “Oh, precious!” spoke on that lazy half-laughing voice. “And where have you been all these months? Why haven’t you come round to hold my hand and reminisce with me about the good old days, and all the fun we had together? And the songs we used to sing…And do you remember how you pointed a gun at me one night, in one of our first little games, and I kicked you in the—er—heretofore?”

  “Marius has a good memory,” said the Prince dryly.

  “And so have I,” beamed the Saint, and his smile lightened a little. “Oh, Angel Face, I’m glad to meet you again!”

  The giant turned, and spoke harshly in his own language, but the Prince interrupted him.

  “Let us speak English,” he said. “It will be more interesting for Mr Templar.”

  “How did he come here?”

  “He walked up.”

  “But the police—”

  “Mr Templar and I have already discussed that question, my dear Marius. It is true that Dussel had to make certain charges in order to cover himself, but it might still be inconvenient for us if Mr Templar were arrested.”

  “It is awkward for you, you know,” murmured Simon sympathetically. The Prince selected a fresh cigarette.

  “But your own news, my dear Marius? You seemed pleased with yourself when you arrived—”

  “I have been successful.”

  “Our friend will be interested.”

  Marius looked across at the Saint, and his lips twisted malevolently. And the Saint remembered what lay between them…

  “Miss Delmar is now in safe hands,” said the giant slowly. Simon stood quite still.

  “When you rang me up—do you remember?—to boast—I asked the Exchange for your number. Then the directory was searched, and we learned your address. Miss Delmar was alone. We had no difficulty, though I was hoping to find you and some of your friends there as well—”

  “Bluff,” said the Saint unemotionally.

  “I think not, my dear Mr Templar,” said the Prince urbanely. “Dr Marius is really a most reliable man. I recollect that the only mistake we have made was my own, and he advised me against it.”

  Marius came closer.

  “Once—when you beat me,” he said vindictively. “When you undid years of work—by a trick. But your friend paid the penalty. You also—”

  “I also—pay,” said the Saint, with bleak eyes.

  “You—”

  “My dear Marius!” Once again the Prince interrupted. “Let us be practical. You have succeeded. Good. Now, our young friend has elected to interfere in our affairs again, and since he has so kindly delivered himself into our hands—”

  Suddenly the Saint laughed.

  “What shall we do with the body?” he murmured. “Well, souls, I’ll have to give you time to think that out. Meanwh
ile, I shouldn’t like you to think I was getting any grey hairs over Marius’s slab of ripe boloney about Miss Delmar. My dear Marius, that line of hooey’s got wheels!”

  “You still call it a bluff?” sneered the giant “You will find out—”

  “I shall,” drawled Simon. “Angel Face, don’t you think this is a peach of a beard? Makes me look like Abraham in a high wind…”

  Absent-mindedly the Saint had picked up his disguise, and axed the beard to his chin and the dark glasses to his nose. The hat had fallen to the floor. Moving to pick it up, he kicked it a yard away. The second attempt had a similar result. And it was all done with such a puerile innocence that both Marius and the Prince must have been no more than vaguely wondering what motive the Saint could have in descending to such infantile depths of clowning—when the manoeuvre was completed with a breath-taking casualness.

  The pursuit of his hat had brought the Saint within easy reach of the door. Quite calmly and unhurriedly he picked up the hat and clapped it on his head.

  “Strong silent man goes out into the night,” he said. “But we must get together again some time. Au revoir, sweet cherubs!”

  And the Saint passed through the sitting-room door in a flash, and a second later the outer door of the suite banged.

  Simon had certainly visited the Prince with intent to obtain information, but he had done so, as he did all such things, practically without a plan in his head. The Saint was an opportunist: he held that the development of complicated plans was generally nothing but a squandering of so much energy, for the best of palavers was liable to rocket on to unexpected rails—and these surprises, Simon maintained, could only be turned to their fullest advantage by a mind untrammelled by any preconceived plan of campaign. And, if the Saint had anticipated anything, he had anticipated that the arrival of Rayt Marius in the role of an angel-faced harbinger of glad tidings would result in a certain amount of more or less informative backchat before the conversation became centred on prospective funerals. And, indeed, the conversazione had worn a very up-and-coming air before the Prince had switched it back into such a very practical channel. But Prince Rudolf had that sort of mind, wherefore the Saint had chased his hat.