The Saint Closes the Case s-2

by Leslie Charteris

  "It would," said the Saint.

  And he knew at once what he was going to do. It had come to him in a flash—an inspiration, a summarising and deduc­tion and realisation that were instantaneous, and more clear and sure than anything of their kind which could have been produced by any mental effort:

  That he was on toast, and that there was no ordinary way off the toast. That the situation was locked and double-locked into exactly the tangle of dithering subtleties and cross-causes and cross-menaces that he hated more than anything else in the world, as has been explained-—the kind of chess-problem tangle that was probably the one thing in the world capable of reeling him off his active mental balance and sending him raving mad. . . . That to think about it and try to scheme about it would be the one certain way of losing the game. That, obviously, he could never hope to stand up in the same class as Rayt Marius in a complicated intrigue—to try to enter into an even contest with such a past professional master of the art would be the act of a suicidal fool. That, therefore, his only chance to win out was to break the very rules of the game that Marius would least expect an opponent to break. That it was the moment when all the prejudices and convictions that made the Saint what he was must be put to the test. That all his fun­damental faith in the superiority of reckless action over labor­ious ratiocination must now justify itself, or topple down to destruction and take him with it into hell. . . . That, in fact, when all the pieces on the chessboard were so inweaved and dove-tailed and counter-blockaded, his only chance was to smash up the whole stagnant structure and sweep the board clean—with the slash of a sword. . . .

  "Certainly," said the Saint, "I'll give you my decision at once. Roger, give me back that gun, and go and fetch some rope. You'll find some in the kitchen."

  As Conway went out, the Saint turned again to Marius.

  "You have already observed, dear one," he remarked gently, "that I have a genius for summarising situations. But this one can be stated quite simply. The fact is, Angel Face, I propose to apply to you exactly the same methods of persuasion that I was about to employ on your servant. You observe that I have a gun. I can't shoot the pips out of a playing-card at thirty paces, or do any other Wild West stuff like that; but still, I don't think I'm such a bad shot that I could miss anything your size at this range. Therefore, you can either submit qui­etly to being tied up by my friend, or you can be killed at once. Have it whichever way you like."

  A flicker of something showed in the giant's eyes, and was gone as soon as it had come.

  "You seem to have lost your grip on the situation, Mr. Templar," he said urbanely. "To anyone as expert in these matters as you appear to be, it should be unnecessary to ex­plain that I did not come here unprepared for such an obvi­ous riposte. Must I bore you with the details of what will hap­pen to Miss Holm if I fail to return to the place where she is being kept? Must I be compelled to make my conventional move still more conventional with a melodramatic exposition of her peril?"

  "It's an odd thing," said the Saint, in mild reminiscence, "that more than half the crooks I've dealt with have been frantically anxious to avoid melodrama. Now, personally, I just love it. And we're going to have lots of it now—lots and lots and lots, Marius, my little ray of sunshine. . . ."

  Marius shrugged.

  "I thought better of your intelligence, Mr. Templar."

  The Saint smiled, a very Saintly smile.

  His hands on his hips, teetering gently on his toes, he an­swered with the most reckless defiance of his life.

  "You're wrong," he said. "You didn't think well enough of my intelligence. You thought it'd be feeble enough to let me be bluffed into meeting you on your own ground. And that's just what it isn't quite feeble enough to do."

  "I do not follow you," said Marius.

  "Then I'm not the one with softening of the brain," said Simon sweetly, "but you are. I invite you to apply your own admirable system of logic to the situation. I could tell the po­lice things about you, but you could tell the police things about me. Deadlock. You could harm Miss Holm, but I could deprive you of Vargan. Deadlock again—with a shade of odds in your favour on each count."

  "We can rule out the police for the present. If we did so, an exchange of prisoners——"

  "But you don't get the point," said Simon, with a terrible simplicity. "That would be a surrender on my part. And I never surrender."

  Marius moved his hands.

  "I also surrender Miss Holm."

  "And there's still a difference, loveliness," said the Saint. "You see, you don't really want Miss Holm, except as a hos­tage. And I do want Vargan very much indeed. I want to wash him and comb him and buy him a little velvet suit and adopt him. I want him to yadder childishly to me about the binomial theorem after breakfast. I want to be able to bring him into the drawing-room after dinner to amuse my guests with reci­tations from the differential calculus. But most of all I want one of his little toys. . . . And so, you see, if I let you go, Miss Holm would be in exactly the same danger as if I kept you here, since I couldn't agree to your terms of ransom. But the difference is that if I let you go I lose my one chance of finding her, and I should have to trust to luck to come on the scent again. While I keep you here, though, I hold a very good card —and I'm not letting it go."

  "You gain nothing——"

  "On the contrary, I gain everything," said the Saint, in that dreamy sing-song. "I gain everything, or lose more than everything. But I'm tired of haggling. I'm tired of playing your safety game. You're going to play my game now, Marius, my cherub. Wait a second while I rearrange the scene. . . ."

  As Conway came back with a length of cord, the Saint took from his pocket a little shining cylinder and screwed it swiftly on to the muzzle of the gun he held.

  "This will now make no noise worth mentioning," he said. "You know the gadget, don't you? So let me have your decision quickly, Marius, before I remember what I want to do more than anything else in the world."

  "It will not help you to kill me."

  "It will not help me to let you go. But we've had all that before. Besides, I mightn't kill you. I might just shoot you through the kidneys, and long before you died of the wound you'd be ready to give me anything to put you out of your agony. I grant you it wouldn't improve my chance of finding Miss Holm, but, on the other hand, it wouldn't make it any worse—and you'd be so dead that it wouldn't worry you, any­way. Think it over. I give you two minutes. Roger, time him by that clock!"

  Marius put his hands behind him at once.

  "Suppose I save you the time. I will be tied now—if you think that will help you."

  "Carry on, Roger," said the Saint.

  He knew that Marius still did not believe him—that the fat man's description of his ordeal had not made the impression it should have made. He knew that Marius's acquiescence was nothing but a bland calling of what the giant estimated to be a hopeless bluff. And he stood by, watching with a face of stone, while Conway tied the man's hands behind his back and thrust him into a chair.

  "Take over the peashooter again, Roger."

  Then an idea struck the Saint.

  He said: "Before we begin, Roger, you might search him."

  A glimmer of fear, which nothing else in that interview had aroused, contorted the giant's face like a spasm, and the Saint could have shouted for joy. Marius struggled like a fiend, but he had been well bound, and his effort was wasted. The weak spot in the armour. . . .

  Simon waited, almost trembling. Torture he had been grimly prepared to apply; but he recognised, at the same time, how futile it was likely to prove against a man like Marius. He might have resumed the torture of the fat man; but that also would have been less efficacious now that the moral support— or threat—of Marius was there to counteract it. He would obtain some sort of information, certainly—the limits of human endurance would inevitably see to that—but he would have no means of proving its truth. Something in writing, though . . .

  And the colossal f
acility of the success made the Saint's heart pound like a triphammer, in a devastating terror lest the success should turn out to be no success at all. For, if success it was, the rightness of his riposte could not have been more shatteringly demonstrated. If it were true—if Marius had plunged so heavily on the rules of the game as he knew them—­if Marius had been so blindly certain that, under the menace which he knew he could hold over them, neither of the men in Brook Street would dare to lay a hand on him—if . . .

  "English swine!"

  "Naughty temper," said Roger equably.

  "Thank you," said the Saint, taking the letter which Roger handed to him. "Careless of you, Marius, to come here with that on you. Personally, I never commit anything to writing. It's dangerous. But perhaps you meant to post it on your way, and forgot it."

  He glanced at the address.

  "Our old friend the Crown Prince," he murmured. "This should be interesting."

  He slit open the envelope with one swift flick of his thumb, and drew out the typewritten sheet.

  It was in Marius's own language, but that was a small dif­ficulty. The Saint took it with him to the telephone; and in a few minutes he was through to a friend who held down a soft job at the Foreign Office by virtue of an almost incredible fa­miliarity with every language on the map of Europe.

  "Glad to find you in," said the Saint rapidly. "Listen—I've got a letter here which I want translated. I don't know how to pronounce any of it, but I'll spell it out word by word. Ready?"

  It took time; but the Saint had found an unwonted patience. He wrote between the lines as the receiver dictated; and pres­ently it was finished.

  He came back smiling.

  Roger prompted him: "Which, being interpreted, means——"

  "I'm leaving now."

  "Where for?"

  "The house on the hill, Bures, Suffolk."

  "She's there?"

  "According to the letter."

  The Saint passed it over, and Conway read the scribbled notes between the lines: ". . . the girl, and she is being taken to a quiet part of Suffolk . . . Bures... house on the hill far enough from the village to be safe . . . cannot fail this time. ..."

  Conway handed it back.

  "I'll come with you."

  The Saint shook his head.

  "Sorry, son, but you've got to stay here and look after the menagerie. They're my hostages."

  "But suppose anything goes wrong, Simon?"

  The Saint consulted his watch. It was still stopped. He wound it up and set it by the mantelpiece clock.

  "I'll be back," he said, "before four o'clock tomorrow morn­ing. That allows for punctures, breakdowns, and everything eke. If I'm not here on the stroke, shoot these birds and come after me."

  Marius's voice rasped in on Conway's hesitation.

  "You insist on being foolish, Templar? You realise that my men at Bures have orders to use Miss Holm as a hostage in an attack or any other emergency?"

  Simon Templar went over and looked down at him.

  "I could have guessed it," he said. "And it makes me weep for your bad generalship, Marius. I suppose you realise that if they sacrifice her, your first and last hold over me is gone? But that's only half the fundamental weakness in your bright scheme. The other half is that you've got to pray against your­self. Pray that I win to-night, Marius—pray as you've never prayed before in your filthy life! Because, if I fail, I'm coming straight back here to kill you in the most hideous way I can in­vent. I mean that."

  He swung round, cool, cold, deliberate, and went to the door as if he were merely going for a stroll round the block before turning in. But at the door he turned to cast a slow, straight glance over Marius, and then to smile at Roger.

  "All the best, old boy," said Roger.

  " 'Battle, murder, and sudden death,' " quoted the Saint softly, with a gay, reckless gesture; and the Saintly smile could never have shone more superbly. "Watch me," said the Saint, and was gone.

  9. How Roger Conway was careless, and Hermann also made a mistake

  Roger Conway shifted vaguely across the room as the hum of Norman Kent's Hirondel faded and was lost in the noises of Regent Street. He came upon the side table where the de­canter lived, helped himself to a drink, and remembered that last cavalier wave of the Saint's hand and the pitiful torment in the Saint's eyes. Then he put down the drink and took a cigarette instead, suddenly aware that he might have to remain wide awake and alert all night.

  He looked at Marius. The giant had sunk into an inscru­table apathy; but he spoke.

  "If you would allow it, I should like to smoke a cigar."

  Roger deliberated.

  "It might be arranged—if you don't need your hands free."

  "I can try. The case is in my breast pocket."

  Conway found it, bit the end, and put it in Marius's mouth and lighted it. Marius thanked him.

  "Will you join me?"

  Roger smiled.

  "Try something newer," he advised. "I never take smokes from strangers these days, on principle. Oh, and by the way, if I catch you trying to burn through your ropes with the end, I shall have much pleasure in grinding it into your face till it goes out."

  Marius shrugged and made no reply; and Roger resumed his cigarette.

  Coming upon the telephone, he hesitated, and then called a number. He was through in a few minutes.

  "Can I speak to Mr. Kent, Orace? . . , Oh, hullo, Nor­man!"

  "Who's that? Roger?"

  "Yes. I rang up in case you were getting worried about us. Heaven knows what time we shall get down. . . . No, the car's all right—as far as I know. Simon's gone off in it. ... Brook Street. . . . Well—Marius has got Pat. . . . Yes, I'm afraid so. Got her on the train. But we've got Marius. . . . Yes, he's here. I'm standing guard. We've found out where Pat's been taken, and Simon's gone after her. . . . Somewhere in Suf­folk."

  "Shall I come up?"

  "How? It's too late for a train, and you won't be able to hire anything worth calling a car at this hour. I don't see what you could do, anyway. . . . Look here, I can't talk any more now. I've got to keep both eyes on Marius and Co. . . . I'll leave it to you. . . . Right. So long, old boy."

  He hooked up the receiver.

  It occurred to him afterwards that there was something that Norman could have done. He could have tied up the fat man and the lean man, both of whom were now conscious and free to move as much as they dared. That ought to have been done before Simon left. They ought to have thought of it—or Simon ought to have thought of it. But the Saint couldn't, reasonably, have been expected to think of it, or anything else like it, at such a time. Roger knew both the Saint and Pat too well to be able to blame Simon for the omission. Simon had been mad when he left. The madness had been there all the time, since half-past nine, boiling up in fiercer and fiercer waves behind all the masks of calmness and flippancy and pa­tience that the Saint had assumed at intervals, and it had been at its whitest heat behind that last gay smile and gesture from the door.

  Half an hour passed.

  Roger was beginning to feel hungry. He had had a snack in the station buffet while he was waiting, but the satisfaction of that was starting to wear off. If he had gone to the kitchen to forage, that would have meant compelling his three prison­ers to precede him at the point of his gun. And the kitchen was small. . . . Ruefully Roger resigned himself to a hungry vigil. He looked unhappily at the clock. Four and a half hours be­fore he could shoot the prisoners and dash to the pantry, if he obeyed the Saint's orders. But it would have to be endured. The Saint might have managed the cure, and got away with it; but then, the Saint was a fully qualified adventurer, and what he didn't know about the game was not knowledge. Conway was infinitely less experienced, and knew it. In the cramped space of the kitchen, while he was trying to locate food with one eye and one hand, he might easily be taken off his guard and overpowered. And, in the circumstances, the risk was too great to take.

  If only Norman decided t
o come. ...

  Roger Conway sat on the edge of the table, swinging the gun idly in his hand. Marius remained silent. His cigar had gone out, and he had not asked for it to be relighted. The fat man slouched in another chair, watching Roger with venom­ous eyes. The lean man stood awkwardly in one corner. He had not spoken since he recovered consciousness; but he also watched. The clock ticked monotonously. . . .

  Roger started to whistle to himself. It was extraordinary how quickly the strain began to tell. He wished he were like the Saint. The Saint wouldn't have gone hungry, for one thing. The Saint would have made the prisoners cook him a four-course dinner, lay the table, and wait on him. The Saint would have kept them busy putting on the gramophone and generally running his errands. The Saint would probably have written a letter and composed a few limericks into the bargain. He certainly wouldn't have been oppressed by the silence and the concentrated malevolence of three pairs of eyes. He would have dismissed the silence and whiled away the time by in­dulging in airy persiflage at their expense.

  But it was the silence and the watchfulness of the eyes. Roger began to understand why he had never felt an irresistible urge to become a lion-tamer. The feeling of being alone in a cage of wild beasts, he decided, must be very much like what he was experiencing at that moment. The same fragile dominance of the man, the same unresting watchfulness of the beasts, the same tension, the same snarling submission of the beasts, the same certainty that the beasts were only waiting, waiting, waiting. These human beasts were sizing him up, searching his soul, stripping him naked of all bluff, finding out all his weaknesses in silence, planning, scheming, consider­ing, alert to pounce. It was getting on Roger's nerves. Presently, sooner or later, somehow, he knew, there would be a bid for liberty. But how would it happen?