The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The exhaust purred as he touched the starter. He pulled the Hirondel out to the foot of the ramp and held it there, warming the engine, until he saw Outrell’s car behind him. Then he let in the clutch and roared up the slope, with the other car following as if it was nailed to his rear fenders.

  At the top he whipped round in a screaming turn out into the narrow street that ran by the back of Cornwall House. There was a taxi parked close by the garage entrance, and a small sports car with a man reading a newspaper in it standing just behind; both of them might have been innocent, but if they were it would do them no harm to be obstructed for a few minutes.

  The Saint raised one hand just above his head and made a slight movement.

  He heard the squeal of Sam Outrell’s brakes behind him, and grinned gently to himself as he locked the wheel for another split-arch turn into Half Moon Street. The snarl of the engine rose briefly, lulled, and then settled into a steady drone as they nosed into Piccadilly, shot across the front of a belated bus, and went humming down the westward slope towards Hyde Park Corner.

  Peter Quentin settled deep into his seat and turned to Hoppy.

  “I hope your insurance policies are all paid up, Hoppy,” he said.

  “I ain’t never had none,” said Mr Uniatz seriously. “I seen guys what try to sell me insurance, but I t’ought dey was all chiselers.” He brooded anxiously over the idea. “Do ya t’ink I oughta get me some, boss?”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late now,” said Peter encouragingly. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter. You haven’t got a lot of wives and things lying around, have you?”

  Mr Uniatz scratched his head with a row of worried fingers.

  “I dunno, boss,” he said shyly. “Every time I get married I am not t’inking about it very much. So I never know if I have got married or not,” he said, summarising his problem with a conciseness that could scarcely have been improved upon.

  Peter pondered over the exposition until he felt himself getting slightly giddy, when he decided that it would probably be safer to leave it alone. And the Saint spun the wheel again and sent the Hirondel thundering down Grosvenor Place.

  “When you two trollops have finished gloating over your sex life,” he said, “you’d better try to remember what happens when we get to Marsham Street.”

  “But we know,” said Peter, carefully continuing to refrain from looking at the road. “Don’t we, Hoppy? If we ever get there alive, which is very unlikely, we jump about in the foreground and try to attract the bullets while the beauteous heroine swoons into Simon’s arms.”

  Simon squeezed the car through on the wrong side of a crawling taxi which was hogging the centre of the road, and while he was doing it neatly swiped Peter’s cigarette with his disengaged hand.

  “That’s something like the idea; except that as usual you’ll be in the background. I’m just building on probabilities, but I think I’ve got it pretty straight. Two or more of the thugs will be in possession. When I ring the bell, one of them will come to the door. They can’t all open it at once, and at least one of them will probably be busy keeping Valerie quiet, and in any case they won’t want any noise that they can avoid. Besides, they’ll be expecting me to walk in like a blindfolded lamb. Now, I think it can only break two ways. Either the warrior who opens the door will open it straight on to a gun…”

  He went on, sketching possibilities in crisp comprehensive lines, dictating move and counter-move in quick sinewy sentences that strung the strides of a supreme tactician together into a connected chain on which even Hoppy Uniatz could not lose his grip. It might all seem very simple in the end, but in that panoramic grasp of detail lay the genius that made amazing audacities seem simple.

  “Okay, skipper,” Peter said soberly, as the car swooped into Marsham Street. “But don’t forget you’re responsible to Hoppy’s widows and my orphans.”

  Ever since the few hectic moments of the ride they had been running with the cut-out closed, and the dying of the engine was scarcely perceptible as Simon turned the switch.

  After the last turn they had slid up practically in silence to their destination, which was one of a row of modern apartment buildings that had not long ago transformed the topography of that once sombre district. One or two other cars were parked within sight, but otherwise the street seemed quiet and lifeless. Simon glanced up at the crossword design of light and dark windows as he stepped out of the car and crossed the pavement, with some attention to the softness of his footsteps, for he knew well how sounds could echo to the upper windows of a silent street at that hour of the night. He said nothing to the others, for all the ground had been covered in advance in his instructions. He read off the apartment number from the indicator in the empty lobby, and an automatic elevator carried them up to the top floor. The Saint was as cool as chromium, as accurate and self-contained as a machine. He left the elevator doors open and waited until Peter and Hoppy had taken up their positions flattened against the wall on either side of the door; then he put his knuckle against the bell.

  There was an interval of perhaps ten seconds, and the door opened.

  It opened, according to the Saint’s first diagnosis, straight on to an awkward-looking silenced revolver in the hand of the stocky ape-faced man who unfastened the latch.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Blank astonishment, anger, and incredulity chased themselves over the Saint’s face—exactly as they were expected to chase themselves.

  “What’s the idea of this?” he demanded wrathfully. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Come in,” repeated the man coldly. “And put your hands up. And hurry up about it, before I give you something.”

  The Saint put his hands up and went in. But he went in with his shoulder-blades sliding along the door, so that the other was momentarily cut off from it. Then the man had to turn his back to the doorway when he started to close the door, so as to keep Simon covered at the same time. And that was part of the clockwork of the Saint’s preorganised plan…Simon gave the signal with a gentle cough, and over the man’s shoulder appeared the intent face of Peter Quentin, soundlessly, with a stiff rubber blackjack raised. There was a subdued clunk, and the man’s eyes went comically glassy.

  At that instant other things happened with the smooth timing of a well-rehearsed conjuring trick. The Saint’s hands dropped like striking falcons on to the ape-faced man’s gun, bent his wrists inwards towards the elbow, whipped the revolver out of the suddenly powerless fingers. Simultaneously Peter Quentin was moving aside, to be replaced by Hoppy Uniatz, whose massive paws closed on the man’s throat in a gorilla grip faster than Peter himself could have put away his blackjack and taken the same hold. Meanwhile Peter slid round the man’s side, received the revolver as Simon detached it, and jammed the silencer into the man’s ribs. It was all done with a glossy perfection of team-work that would have dazed the eye of the beholder if there had been any beholder present, all within the space of a scant second, and then the Saint was talking into the man’s ear.

  “One whisper out of you, and they’ll be able to thread you on a flagpole,” he said. Then he stepped back a few inches. “Okay, Hoppy—let him breathe.”

  The crushing grasp of Mr Uniatz’s fingers slackened just sufficiently to allow a saving infiltration of air. The delicately judged blow of the rubber blackjack had deadened the ape-faced man’s brain for just long enough to allow the subsequent manoeuvres to take place, without stunning him permanently. Now he stared at the Saint with squeezed-out eyes in which there was a pallor of voiceless fear.

  “Talk very quietly,” said the Saint, in that ghostly intonation which barely travelled a hand’s breadth beyond the ears of its intended audience. “What was supposed to happen next?”

  “I was to take you in there—there’s two chaps want to see you.”

  Simon’s glance had already covered the tiny hall. The three doors that opened off it were all closed; the ape-faced man had indicated the centre one.r />
  “Good enough,” said the Saint. “Let’s carry on as if nothing had happened.”

  He passed his own automatic to Peter, took away the silenced revolver, spilled the shells out into his palm and dropped them into Peter’s pocket, and thrust the empty weapon back into the hand of its owner.

  “Cover me with it and carry on,” he ordered. “When we go in there, leave the door open. And remember this: my friends will be watching you from outside. If you breathe a word or bat an eyelid to let your reception committee know that everything isn’t going according to plan, and any bother starts—you’ll be the first dead hero of the evening.” The Saint’s voice was as caressing as velvet, but it was as cold and unsentimental as a polar sea. “Let’s go…”

  He turned his back and sauntered over to the middle door, and the ape-faced man, urged on by a last remembrancing prod from the muzzle of the murderous rod which Mr Uniatz had by that time added to the displayed collection of artillery, lurched helplessly after him.

  Simon turned the handle and entered the room with his arms raised. On one side. Lady Valerie Woodchester was roughly tied to a chair, and one of the two men there was bending over her with a hand clamped over her mouth. The other man stood on the opposite side of the room, with a cigarette loosely held in one hand and a small automatic levelled in the other.

  The Saint’s eyes rambled interestedly over the scene.

  “What ho, souls,” he drawled. “And how are all the illegitimate Sons of France tonight?”

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR OBLIGED LADY VALERIE AND CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL REFUSED BREAKFAST

  1

  The man who had been bending over Lady Valerie straightened up. He was slim and sallow, with black hair plastered down over his head until it looked as if it had been waxed. He had quick darting eyes and a sly slinking manner; his movements were abrupt and silent, like those of a lizard. One could imagine him lurking in dark corners for sinister purposes.

  The Saint smiled at Lady Valerie as the lizard-like man withdrew his hand and her face became visible. The first expression on her face was a light of joy and relief, and then when she saw that he kept his hands up, and saw the ape-faced man follow him in with the silenced revolver screwed into his back, it changed through stark unbelief to hopeless dejection.

  “Hullo, darling,” he said. “You do have some nice friends, don’t you?”

  She didn’t respond. She sat there and stared at him reproachfully: she seemed to be deeply disappointed in him. Simon realised that there was some excuse for her, but she would have to endure her unfounded disappointment for a little while longer.

  He transferred his smile to the automatic and the cigarette.

  “Nice weather we’ve been having, haven’t we?” he murmured, keeping the conversational ball rolling single-handed.

  This other man was bigger, and there was an air of conscious arrogance about him. He had the cold intolerant eyes and haughty moustache of a Prussian Guardsman. He gazed back at Simon with fish-like incuriosity, and made a gesture with his cigarette at the sallow man.

  “Disarm and search him, Dumaire.”

  “So your name is Dumaire, is it?” said the Saint politely. “May I compliment you on your coiffure? I’ve never seen floor polish used on the head before. And while this is going on, won’t you introduce me to your uncle?”

  Dumaire said nothing; he simply proceeded to do what he was told and run through the Saint’s pockets. Keys, cigarette case, lighter, money, handkerchief, wallet, fountain pen—he took out the commonplace articles one by one and laid them on a small table in front of the man who appeared to be in charge. While he was waiting for the collection to be assembled, the latter answered Simon’s question.

  “If it is of any interest to you,” he said, “I am Major Bravache, a divisional commander of the Sons of France, about whom I think you said something just now.”

  He spoke English excellently, with only a trace of native accent.

  “How perfectly splendid,” said the Saint slowly. “But do you know what bad company you’re in? This bird behind me, for instance, with the pea-shooter boring into my backbone—whatever he may have told you, I happen to know that his real name is Sam Pietri, and he has done three sentences for robbery with violence.”

  He felt the harmless gun quiver involuntarily against his spine, and chuckled inwardly over the awful anguish that must have been twinging through the tissues of the ape-faced man, not only compelled to be an impotent accomplice in snaring fresh victims into the net of his own downfall, but suffering the aftermath of a maltreated skull as well. Simon would have given much for a glimpse of his guardian’s face, but he hoped that he was not betraying anything to the opposition. Fortunately, no one was paying any attention to Pietri. Dumaire, his job done, was leaning against the wall and watching Lady Valerie with reptilian eyes in which the only discernible expression had a brazen lewdness that quite plainly revealed his chief preoccupation; Bravache had simply ignored the Saint’s last remarks as if he had not heard them. He was busily turning over the things on the table before him. He gave his most detailed attention to the wallet, and he had hardly started on it when a gleam of triumph flowed into his cold eyes. He held up a scrap of buff paper with a large number printed on it.

  “Ah!” he said, with a deep satisfaction that was exaggerated by his slightly foreign handling of words. “The ticket. That is excellent!”

  As a matter of fact, it was a ticket in an impromptu sweepstake organised over the weekend in Peter Quentin’s favourite pub on the outskirts of Anford, but the Saint had known that it was there, and had left it there with the deliberate object of leading the comedy on as far as it would go in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.

  He waited to see how far his hopes would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester’s eyes were like saucers: they looked at first as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and then a veiled half-comprehending half-perplexed expression passed over them which Simon hoped nobody would see. Bravache folded the ticket carefully and put it in his own wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.

  “We are very grateful, my dear lady,” he said. “You have done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons of France do not forget services. In future you will be under our protection.” He paused, smiling, and there was something wolfish about his smile. “Should anything happen to you—should you, for instance, be murdered by one of our enemies—you will be immediately avenged.”

  An arpeggio of spooky fingers stroked up the Saint’s back into the roots of his hair. In spite of Bravache’s stilted phrasing, the almost farcical old-fashioned melodrama in which his tongue roiled itself gloatingly around every word, there was something in his harsh voice that was by no means farcical, something which in combination with that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by the unreality of its enunciation. Simon realised for the first time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a certain type of man—a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse with the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possible for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the mentalities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.

  He said lightly, “That’ll be fun for you, won’t it, Valerie?”

  Bravache looked back at him, and again his eyes were cold and fishy.

  “You hav
e been attempting to discover the secrets of the Sons of France in order to betray them to our enemies,” he said. “The penalty for that, as you know, is death.”

  “You must have been reading a book,” said the Saint admiringly. “Or was that Luker’s idea?”

  The vulpine twist that was meant to be a smile remained on the other man’s thin lips.

  “I am acquainted with Mr Luker only as a sympathiser and supporter of our ideals to whom I have the honour to be attached as personal aide,” he replied. “Your crime has been committed against an organisation of patriots known as the Sons of France, of which I am an officer. You are now a prisoner of the Sons of France. We have been informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary employed by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon and betray our organisation. Of that I have sufficient proof.” He tapped the pocket where he had replaced his wallet with the sweepstake ticket in it. “It also appears that you have threatened Lady Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore if you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her.”

  Simon’s arms were beginning to ache and stiffen from being held up so long. But inside he felt tunelessly relaxed, and his mind was a cold pattern of crystalline understanding.

  “You mean,” he said unemotionally, “that the idea is to kill both of us, and arrange it so that you can try to spread the story that I murdered Lady Valerie and that the Sons of France killed me to avenge her.”

  “I am sure that the theory will find wide acceptance,” answered Bravache complacently. “Lady Valerie is young and beautiful, whereas you are a notorious criminal. I think that a great many people will applaud our action, and that even the British police themselves will feel a secret relief which will tend to handicap their inquiries.”