Saint Overboard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  She looked to see what Vogel was doing. He had taken a chair over to the bookcase and sat down in front of it. The upper shelves had opened like a door, carrying the books with them, and in the aperture behind was the compact instrument panel of a medium-powered radio transmitting station. Vogel had clipped a pair of earphones over his head, and his long white fingers were flitting delicately over the dials—pausing, adjusting, timing his station with quick and practised touches. Somewhere in the stillness she could hear the faint whirr of a generator…And then she heard a clearer, sharper, intermittent tapping, Vogel had found his correspondent, and he was sending a message.

  The staccato rhythm of the transmitter key pattered into her brain and translated itself almost automatically into letters and words. Like everyone else in Ingerbeck’s, she had studied the Morse code as part of her general training: it was second nature to interpret the rattle of dots and dashes, as effortless a performance as if she had been listening to Vogel talking. She did it so instinctively, while the active part of her mind was too turbulent with other thoughts to pay attention, that it was a few seconds before she coordinated what she was hearing.

  Dot-dot-dash-dot…dot-dot-dash…dash-dot-dash-dot…She searched through her memory: wasn’t that the call signal of the radio station at Cherbourg? Then he was giving his own call signal. Then, with the swift efficiency of a professional operator, he was tapping out his message. A telegram. “Baudier, Herqueville…Arrive ce soir vers 9 heures demi. Faites préparer phares…”

  The names meant nothing to her; the message was unimportant—obviously Vogel must have a headquarters somewhere, which he would head for at such a time as this. But the fact that was thundering through her head was the radio itself. It wasn’t merely in touch with a similar station at his headquarters—it could communicate openly with Cherbourg, and therefore presumably with any other wireless telegraph receiving station that it could reach. The Niton station in the Isle of Wight, for instance, might easily be within range; from which a telegram might be relayed by cable to St Peter Port…There seemed to be no question about the acceptance of the message. Obviously the Falkenberg was on the list of registered transmitters, like any Atlantic liner. She almost panicked for a moment in trying to recall the signal by which Vogel had identified himself, but she had no need to be afraid. The letters were branded on her memory as if by fire. Then, if she could only gain five minutes alone in the chair where Vogel was sitting…

  He had finished. He took off the headphones, swung over the main switch in the middle of the panel, turned out the light which illuminated the cupboard, and closed the bookshelf door. It latched with a faint click, and he came towards her again.

  “I didn’t know you were so well equipped,” she said, and hoped he would not notice her breathlessness.

  He did not seem to notice anything—perhaps because he was so confident that he did not care. He shrugged.

  “It is useful sometimes,” he said. “I have just sent a message to announce that we shall soon be on our way.”

  “Where?”

  “To Herqueville—below Cap de la Hague, at the northern end of the Anse de Vauville. It is not a fashionable place, but I have found it convenient for that reason. I have a château there where you can be as comfortable as you wish—after tomorrow. Or, if you prefer, we can go for a cruise somewhere. I shall be entirely at your service.”

  “Is that where you’ll put the Saint ashore?” He pressed up his under lip.

  “Perhaps. But that will take time. You understand—I shall have to protect myself.”

  “If he gives you his word—”

  “Of course, that word of a gentleman!” Vogel smiled sarcastically. “But you must not let yourself forget the other knightly virtue: Chivalry…He might be unwilling to leave you.”

  Loretta had put down her glass. Her head ached with the tumultuous racing of her brain, and yet another part of her mind was numb and unresponsive. She had reached a stage of nervous exhaustion where her thoughts seemed to be torn between the turmoil of fever and the blank stupor of collapse. What did anything matter? She passed a hand over her forehead, pushing back her hair, and said hazily: “But he mustn’t know.”

  “Naturally. I should not attempt to reconcile him to our bargain. But he will want to know why you are staying with us, and we shall have to find a way to satisfy him. Besides, I have too much to risk…”

  She half turned her head towards a window, so that she need not look at his smooth gloating face. Her head was throbbing with disjointed thoughts that she could not discipline. Radio. Radio. Peter Quentin. Roger Conway. Orace. Steve Murdoch. The Corsair. At St Peter Port. The Royal Hotel. If only a message could get through to them…And Vogel was still talking, with leisured condescension.

  “You understand that I cannot go about with such a cargo as we shall have on board. And there have been other similar cargoes. The banks are no use to me, and they take time to dispose of. Therefore I have my own bank. Down at the bottom of the sea off Herqueville, under thirty feet of water, where no one could find it who did not know the exact bearing, where no one could reach it who did not possess equipment which would be beyond the understanding of ordinary thieves, I have such a treasure in gold and jewels as you have never dreamed of. When I have added today’s plunder to it there will be nearly twelve millions, and I shall think that it may be time to take it away somewhere where I can enjoy it. It is for you to share—there is nothing in the world that you cannot have. Tonight we shall drop anchor above it, and the gold of the Chalfont Castle will be lowered to the same place. I think that perhaps that will be enough. You shall go with me wherever you like, and queens will envy you. But I must see that Templar cannot jeopardise this treasure.”

  He was looking at her sidelong, and she knew with a horrible despair that all his excuses were lies. Perhaps she had always known it. There was only one way in which the Saint could cease to be a danger, by Vogel’s standards, and that was the way which Vogel would inevitably dictate in the end. But first he would play with them while it pleased him; he would let the Saint live—so long as in that way she might be made easier to enjoy.

  “I suppose you must,” she said, and she was too weary to argue.

  “You will not be sorry.”

  He was coming closer to her. His hands touched her shoulders, slipped round behind her back, and she felt as if a snake had crawled over her flesh. He was drawing her up to him, and she half closed her eyes. It was a nightmare not to struggle, not to hit madly out at him and feel the clean shock of her young hands striking into his face, but it would have been like hitting a corpse. And what was the use? Even though she knew that he was mocking her with his promises and excuses, she must submit, she must be acquiescent, just as a man obeys the command of a gun even though he knows that it is only taking him to his death—because until the last dreadful instant there is always the delusion of life.

  His lips were an inch from hers; his black stony eyes burned into her. She could see the waxen glaze of his skin, flawless and tight-drawn as if it had been stretched over a skull, filling her vision. Something seemed to break inside her head—it might have been the grip of the fever—and for a moment her mind ran clear as a mountain stream. And then her head fell back and she went limp in his arms.

  Vogel held her for a second, staring at her, and then he put her down in a chair. She lay there with her head lolling sideways and her red lips open, all the warm golden life of her tempting and unconscious, and he gazed at her in hungry triumph for a moment longer before he rang the bell again for the steward.

  “We will dine at eight,” he said, and the man nodded woodenly. “There will be smoked salmon, langoustine Grand Duc, Suprême de volaille Bergerette, fraises Mimosa.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let us have some of that Château Lafitte 1906.”

  He dismissed the man with a wave of his hand, and carefully pierced the end of a cigar. On his way out on to the deck he stopped by Loretta
’s chair and stroked her cheek.

  All the late afternoon Simon Templar heard the occasional drone of the winch, the heavy tramp of feet on the deck over his head and the mutter of hoarse voices, the thuds and gratings of the incredible cargo coming aboard and being manhandled into place, and he also thought of Peter and Roger and Orace and the Corsair, back in St Peter Port, as Loretta had done. But most of all he was thinking of her, and tormenting himself with unanswerable questions. It was nearly eight o’clock when at last all the noises ceased, and the low-pitched thrum of the engines quivered again under his feet. He looked out of the porthole, over the sheen of the oily seas streaming by, and saw that they were heading directly away from the purple wall of cloud rimmed with scarlet where the sun was dipping to its rest. A seaman guarded by two others who carried revolvers brought him a tray of food and a glass of wine, and half an hour later the same cortège came back for the tray and removed it without speaking. Simon lighted a cigarette and heard the key turn in the lock after them. For the best part of another hour he sat on the bunk with his knees propped up, leaning against the bulkhead, smoking and thinking, while the shadows spread through the cabin and deepened towards darkness, before he ventured to take out the instrument which Fortune had placed in his hands so strangely while he was opening the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle in the green depths of the sea.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR USED HIS KNIFE AND KURT VOGEL WENT DOWN TO HIS TREASURE

  1

  The lock surrendered after only five minutes of the Saint’s silent and scientific attack.

  Not that it had ever had much chance to put up a fight. It was quite a good reliable lock by ordinary domestic standards, a sound and solid piece of mechanism that would have been more than adequate for any conventional purpose, but it had never been constructed to resist an expert probing with the sort of tool which Simon Templar was using.

  Simon kissed the shining steel implement ecstatically before he put it away again in his pocket. It was much more than a scrap of cunningly fashioned metal. At that moment it represented the consummation of Vogel’s first and only and most staggering mistake—a mistake that might yet change the places of victory and defeat. By sending him down to open the strong-room, Vogel had given him the chance to select the instrument from the burglar’s kit with which he had been provided, and to slip it under the rubber wristbands into the sleeve of his diving dress; by letting him come up alive, Vogel had given him the chance to use it; by giving him the chance to use it, Vogel had violated the first canon of the jungle in which they both lived—that the only enemy from whom you have nothing to fear is a dead enemy…It was all perfectly coherent and logical, as coherent and logical as any of Vogel’s own tactical exercises, lacking only the first cause which set the rest in motion. For two hours Simon had been trying to discover that first cause, and even then he had only a fantastic theory to which he trembled to give credence. But he would find out…

  A mood of grim and terrible exhilaration settled on him as he grasped the handle of the door and turned it slowly and without sound. At least, whatever the first cause, he had his chance, and it was unlikely that he would have another. Within the next hour or so, however long he could remain at large, his duel with Kurt Vogel must be settled one way or the other, and with it all the questions that were involved. Against him he had all Vogel’s generalship, the unknown intellectual quantity of Otto Arnheim, and a crew of at least ten of the toughest twentieth-century pirates who ever sailed the sea; for him he had only his own strength of arm and speed of wit and eye, and the advantage of surprise. The odds were enough to set his mouth in a hard fighting line, and yet there was a glimmer of reckless laughter in his eyes that would have flung defiance at ten times the odds. He had spent his life going up against impossible hazards, and he had the knowledge that he could have nothing worse to face than he had faced already.

  The latch turned back to its limit, and he drew the door stealthily towards him. It came back without a creak, and he peered out into the alleyway through the widening aperture. Opposite him were other doors, all of them closed. He put his head cautiously out and looked left and right. Nothing. The crew must have been eating, or recuperating from the day’s work in their own quarters: the alleyway was an empty shaft of white paint gleaming in the dim lights which studded it at intervals. And in another second the Saint had closed the door of his prison silently behind him and flitted up the after companion on to the deck.

  The cool air struck refreshingly on his face after the stuffiness of the cabin. Overhead, the sky was growing dark, and the first pale stars were coming out; down towards the western horizon, where the greyness of the sky merged in-distinguishably into the greyness of the sea, they were-becoming brighter, and among them he saw the mast-head lights of some small ship running up from the south-west, many miles astern. The creamy wake stretched away into the darkness like a straight white road.

  He stood there for a little while in the shadow of the deckhouse and absorbed the scene. The only sounds he could hear there were the churning rush of the water and the dull drone of the engines driving them to the east. Above him, the long boom of the grab jutted out at a slight angle, with the claw gear dangling loosely lashed to the taffrail, and all around him the wet wooden cases of the bullion from the Chalfont Castle were stacked up against the bulkheads. He screwed an eye round the corner and inspected the port deck. It was deserted, but the air-pump and telephone apparatus were still out there, and he saw four diving suits on their stretchers laid out in a row like steam-rollered dummies with the helmets gathered like a group of decapitated heads close by. Further forward he could see the lights of the wheelhouse windows cutting the deck into strips of light and darkness; he could have walked calmly along to them, but the risk of being prematurely discovered by some member of the crew coming out for a breather was more than he cared to take. Remembering the former occasion on which he had prowled over the ship, he climbed up over the conveniently arranged stairway of about half a million pounds on to the deckhouse roof, and went forward on all fours.

  A minute or so later he was lying flat on his tummy on the roof of the streamlined wheelhouse, with the full wind of their twenty knots blowing through his hair, wondering if he could risk a cigarette.

  Straight ahead, the scattered sights of the French coast were creeping up out of the dark, below the strip of tarnishing silver which was all that was left of the daylight. He could just see an outline of the black battlements of a rocky coast; there was nothing by which he could identify it, but from what he knew of their course he judged it to be somewhere south of Cap de la Hague. Down on the starboard beam he picked up a pair of winking lights, one of them flashing red and the other red and white, which might have belonged to Port de Diélette…

  “Some more coffee, Loretta?”

  Vogel’s bland toneless voice suddenly came to him through one of the open windows, and the Saint drew a deep breath and lowered his head over the edge of the roof to peep in. He only looked for a couple of seconds, but in that time the scene was photographed on his brain to the last detail.

  They were all there—Vogel, Arnheim, Loretta. She had put on a backless white satin dress, perfectly plain, and yet cut with that exquisite art which can make ornament seem garish and vulgar. It set off the golden curve of her arms and shoulders with an intoxicating suggestion of the other curves which it concealed, and clung to the slender sculpture of her waist in sheer perfection; beside her, the squat paunchy bulk of Otto Arnheim with his broad bulging shirtfront looked as if it belonged to some obscene and bloated toad. But for the set cold pallor of her face she might have been a princess graciously receiving two favoured ministers, the smooth hawk-like arrogance of Kurt Vogel, in a blue velvet smoking-jacket, pouring out coffee on a pewter tray at a side table, fitted in completely with the illusion. The man standing at the wheel, gazing straight ahead, motionless except for the occasional slight movements of his hands, intruded his presenc
e no more than a waiting footman would have done. They were all there—and what was going to be done about it?

  Simon rolled over on his back, listening with half an ear to the spasmodic mutter of absurdly banal conversation, and considered the problem. Almost certainly they were heading for Vogel’s local, if not his chief, headquarters: the stacks of bullion left openly on the after deck, and the derrick not yet lashed down and covered with its tarpaulin, ruled out the idea that they were putting into any ordinary port. Presumably Vogel had a house or something close to the sea; he might unload the latest addition to his loot and go ashore himself that night, or he might wait until morning. The Saint realised that he could plan nothing until he knew. To attempt to burst into the wheelhouse and capture the brains of the organisation there without an alarm of any sort being raised was a forlorn hope; to think of corralling the crew, one by one or in batches as he found them, armed only with his knife, without anyone in the wheelhouse hearing an outcry, was out of the question even to a man with Simon Templar’s supreme faith in his own prowess. Therefore he must wait for an opportunity or an inspiration, and all the time there was a thread of risk that some member of the crew might have been detailed to keep an eye on him and might discover that he had vanished out of his prison…

  “The lights, sir.”

  A new voice jarred into his divided attention, and he realised that it must be the helmsman speaking. He turned over on his elbow and looked out over the bows. The lights of the shore were very close now, and he saw that two new pairs of lights had appeared on the coast ahead, red and very bright, one pair off the port bow and one pair off the starboard. He guessed that they had been set by Vogel’s accomplices on shore to guide the Falkenberg between the tricky reefs and shoals to its anchorage.