Simon nodded.
“Since your synthetic detectives had failed to steal that book from me,” he murmured, “it was…ah…remarkably gracious of you.”
His sardonic blue eyes, levelled over the shaft of a cigarette that slanted from between his lips like the barrel of a gun, bored into Lord Iveldown with a light of cold appraisal which made the nobleman shift his feet awkwardly.
“It was an extraordinary situation,” repeated his lordship in a resonant voice, “which necessitated extraordinary measures.” He cleared his throat, adjusted his pince-nez, and rocked on his heels again. “Mr Templar,” he said, “let us not beat about the bush any longer. For purely personal reasons—merely, you understand, because I desire to keep my name free from common gossip—I desire to suppress these base insinuations which happen to have come into your possession, and for that reason I have accorded you this personal interview in order to ascertain what…ah…value you would place on this volume.”
“That’s rather nice of you,” said the Saint guardedly.
“If, for example,” said Lord Iveldown throatily, “a settlement of, shall we say…ah…two thousand pounds—”
He broke off at that point because suddenly the Saint had begun to laugh. It was a very quiet, very self-contained laugh—a laugh that somehow made the blood in Lord Iveldown’s hardened arteries run colder as he heard it. If there was any humour in the laugh, it did not reach the Saint’s eyes.
“If you mentioned two hundred thousand,” said the Saint coolly, “you would have been right on my figure.”
There was a long terrific silence in which the mere rustle of a coat-sleeve would have sounded like the crash of doom. Many seconds went by before Lord Iveldown’s dry cough broke the stillness like a rattle of musketry.
“How much did you say?” he articulated hoarsely.
“I said two hundred thousand pounds.”
Those arctic blue eyes had never shifted from Lord Iveldown’s faintly empurpled face. Their glacial gaze seemed to go through him with the cold sting of a rapier blade—seemed to strip away all his bulwarks of pomposity like tissue, and hold the naked soul of the man quivering on the point like a grub on a pin.
“But that,” said Lord Iveldown tremblingly, “that’s impossible! That’s blackmail!”
“I’m afraid it is,” said the Saint.
“You sit there, before witnesses—”
“Before all the witnesses you like to bring in. I don’t want you to miss the idea, your lordship. Witnesses don’t make any difference. In any ordinary case—yes. If I were only threatening to advertise your illicit love affairs, or anything like that, you could bring me to justice and your own name would quite rightly be suppressed. But in a case like this even the Chief Commissioner couldn’t guarantee you immunity. This isn’t just ordinary haughtiness. This is high treason.”
Simon tapped the ash from his cigarette and blew a smoke-ring towards the ceiling, and once again his relentless eyes went back to Lord Iveldown’s face. Nassen and the other detective, staring at the Saint in sullen silence, felt as if an icy wind blew through the room and goose-fleshed their skin in spite of the warmth of the evening. The bantering buffoon who had goaded them to the verge of apoplexy had vanished as though he had never existed, and another man spoke with the same voice.
“The book you’re talking about,” said the Saint, in the same level dispassionate tones, “is a legacy to me, as you know, from Rayt Marius. And you know what made him a millionaire. His money was made from war and the instruments of war. All those amazing millions—the millions out of which you and others like you were paid, Lord Iveldown—were the wages of death and destruction and wholesale murder. They were coined out of blood and dishonour and famine, and the agony of peaceful nations. Men—and women and children, too—were killed and tortured and maimed to find that money—the money out of which you were paid, Lord Iveldown.”
Lord Iveldown licked his lips, and opened his mouth to speak. But that clear ruthless voice went on, cleaving like a sword through his futile attempt at expostulation.
“Since I have that book, I had to find a use for it. And I think my idea is a good one. I am organising the Simon Templar Foundation, which will be started with a capital of one million pounds—of which your contribution will be a fifth. The Foundation will be devoted to the care and comfort of men maimed and crippled in war, to helping the wives and children of men killed in war, and to the endowment of any cause which has a chance of doing something to promote peace in the future. You must agree that the retribution is just.”
Iveldown’s bluff had gone. He seemed to have shrunk, and was not teetering pompously on the hearth any more. His blotched face was working, and his small eyes had lost all their dominance—they were the mean shifty eyes of a man who was horribly afraid.
“You’re mad!” he said, and his voice cracked. “I can’t listen to anything like that. I won’t listen to it! You’ll change your tune before you leave here, by God! Nassen—”
The two detectives started forward, roused abruptly from their trance, and in the eyes of the Rose of Peckham particularly Simon saw the dawn of a sudden vengeful joy. He smiled, and moved his raincoat a little to uncover the gun in his hand.
“Not just now, Snowdrop,” he said smoothly, and the two men stopped. “I have a date, and you’ve kept me too long already. A little later, I think, you’ll get your chance.” His gaze roved back to Lord Iveldown’s sickly features, on which the fear was curdling to a terrible impotent malevolence, and the Saintly smile touched his lips again for a moment. “I shall expect that two hundred thousand pounds by Saturday midnight,” he said. “I haven’t the least doubt that you’ll do your best to kill me before then, but I’m equally sure that you won’t succeed. And I think you will pay your share…”
4
Simon Templar was not a light sleeper, by the ordinary definition. Neither was he a heavy one. He slept like a cat, with the complete and perfect relaxation of a wild animal, but with the same wild animal’s gift of rousing into instant wakefulness at the slightest sound which might require investigation. A howling thunderstorm would not have made him stir, but the stealthy slither of a cautiously opened drawer brought him out of a dreamless untroubled slumber into tingling consciousness.
The first outward sign of awakening touched nothing more than his eyelids—it was a trick he had learned many years ago, and it had saved his life more than once. His body remained still and passive, and even a man standing close beside his bed could have detected no change in the regular rate of his breathing. He lay staring into the dark, with his ears strained to pick up and locate the next infinitesimal repetition of the noise which had awoken him.
After a few seconds he heard it again, a sound of the identical quality but from a different source—the faint scuff of a rubber sole moving over the carpet in his living-room. The actual volume of sound was hardly greater than a mouse might have made, but it brought him out of bed in a swift writhing movement that made no sound in response.
And thereafter the blackness of the bedroom swallowed him up like a ghost. His bare feet crossed the floor without the faintest whisper of disturbance, and his fingers closed on the door-knob as surely as if he could have seen it. He turned the knob without a rattle, and moved noiselessly across the hall.
The door of the living-room was ajar—he could see the blackness ahead of him broken by a vague nimbus of light that glowed from the gap and shifted his position erratically. He came up to the door softly, and looked in.
The silhouette of a man showed against the darkened beam of an electric torch with the aid of which he was silently and systematically going through the contents of the desk; and the Saint showed his teeth for a moment as he sidled through the doorway and closed the door soundlessly behind him. His fingers found the switch beside the door, and he spoke at the same time.
“Good morrow, Algernon,” he murmured.
The man swung round in the sudden blaze of
light. At the very moment when he started to turn Simon saw the gun in his hand, and thanked his immortal deities that he had not removed his fingers too promptly from the switch. In a split second he had clicked the lever up again, and the darkness fell again with blinding intensity after that one dazzling instant of luminance.
The Saint’s voice floated once more out of the blackness.
“So you pack a rod, do you, Algernon? You must know that rods aren’t allowed in this respectable city. I shall have to speak to you severely about that presently, Algernon—really I shall…”
The beam of the intruder’s torch stabbed out again, printing a white circle of light on the door, but Simon was not inside the circle. The Saint had no rooted fear of being cold-bloodedly shot down in that apartment—the chances of a clean getaway for the shooter were too remote—but he had a very sound knowledge of what a startled burglar, amateur or professional, may do in a moment of panic, and what had been visible of the intruder’s masked face as he spun round had not been tender or sentimental.
Simon heard the man’s heavy breathing as the ray of the flashlight moved to left and right of the door and then began with a wilder haste to dance over the other quarters of the room. For the space of about half a minute it was a game of deadly hide-and-seek: the door appeared to be unguarded, but something told the intruder that he would be walking into a trap if he attempted to make a dash for liberty that way. At the end of that time his nerve broke and he plunged desperately for the only visible path of escape, and in so doing found that his suspicions had been almost clairvoyantly accurate.
A weight of teak-like bone and muscle landed on his back with a cat-like spring; steel fingers fastened on his gun hand, and another equally strong hand closed round his throat, driving him remorselessly to the floor. They wrestled voicelessly on the ground, but not for long. Simon got the gun away without a single shot being fired, and flung himself clear of his opponent with an acrobatic twist of his body. Then he found his way to the switch and turned on the lights again.
The burglar looked up at him from the floor, breathing painfully, and Simon permitted the muzzle of the captured gun to settle into a steady aim on the centre of the man’s tightly tailored torso.
“You look miserable, Algernon,” he remarked affably. “But you couldn’t expect to have all the fun to yourself, could you? Come on, my lad—take that old sock off your head and let’s see how your face is put together.”
The man did not answer or obey, and Simon stepped forward and whipped off the mask with a deft flick of his hand.
Having done which, he remained absolutely motionless for several ticks of the clock.
And then, softly, helplessly, he started to laugh.
“Suffering snakes,” he wailed. “If it isn’t good old Hoppy Uniatz!”
“Fer cryin’ out loud,” gasped Mr Uniatz. “If it ain’t de Saint!”
“You haven’t forgotten that time, when you took a dive through the window of Rudy’s joint on Mott Street?”
“Say, an’ dat night you shot up Angie Paletta an’ Russ Kovari on Amsterdam Avenue?”
“And you got crowned with a chair and locked in the attic—you remember that?”
Mr Uniatz fingered his neck gingerly, as though the aches in it brought back memories.
“Say,” he protested aggrievedly, “whaddaya t’ink I got for a memory—a sieve?” He beamed again, reminiscently, and then another thought overcast his homely features with a shadow of retrospective alarm. “An’ I might of killed you!” he said in an awed voice.
The Saint smiled.
“If I’d known it was you, I mightn’t have thought this gun was quite so funny,” he admitted. “Well, well, well, Hoppy—this is a long way from little old New York. What brings you here?”
Mr Uniatz scrambled up from the floor, and scratched his head.
“Well, boss,” he said, “t’ings never were de same after prohibition went out, over dere. I bummed around fer a while, but I couldn’t get in de money. Den I hoid dey was room fer guys like me to start up in London, so I come over. But, hell, boss, dese Limeys dunno what it’s all about, fer God’s sake. Why, I asks one mob over here what about gettin’ a coupla typewriters, an’ dey t’ink I’m nuts.” Mr Uniatz frowned for a moment, as if the incapability of the English criminal to appreciate the sovereign uses of machine-guns was still preying on his mind. “I guess I must of been given a bum steer,” he said.
Simon nodded sympathetically, and strolled across to the table for a cigarette. He had known Hoppy Uniatz many years ago as a seventh-rate gunman of the classical Bowery breed, and had never been able to regard him with the same distaste as he viewed other hoodlums of the same species. Hoppy’s outstanding charm was a skull of almost phenomenal thickness, which, while it had protected his brain from fatal injury on several occasions, had by its disproportionate density of bone left so little space for the development of grey matter that he had been doomed from the beginning to linger in the very lowest ranks even of that unintellectual profession, but at the same time it lent to Hoppy’s character a magnificent simplicity which the Saint found irresistible. Simon could understand that Hoppy might easily have been lured across the Atlantic by exaggerated rumours of an outbreak of armed banditry in London, but that was not all he wanted to know.
“My heart bleeds for you, Hoppy,” he murmured. “But what made you think I had anything worth stealing?”
“Well, boss,” explained Mr Uniatz apologetically, “it’s like dis. I get interdooced to a guy who knows anudder guy who’s bein’ blackmailed, an’ dis guy wants me to get back whatever it is he’s bein’ blackmailed wit’ an’ maybe bump off de guy who’s got it. So I’m told to rent an apartment here, an’ I got de one next door to you—it’s a swell apartment, wit’ a bathroom an’ everyt’ing. Dat’s how I’m able to come in de buildings wit’out de janitor stoppin’ me an’ askin’ who I wanna see.”
Simon blew out a thoughtful streamer of smoke—he had overlooked that method of slipping through his defences.
“Didn’t they tell you my name?” he asked.
“Sure. But all dey tell me is it’s a Mr Templar. When I hear it, I feel somehow I oughta remember de name,” said Mr Uniatz, generously forgetting the indignation with which he had received a recent aspersion on his memory, “but I never knew it was you. Honest, Saint, if I’d of known it was you, it’d of been ixnay on de job, for mine. Ya wouldn’t believe anyt’ing else, woujja, boss?”
The Saint shook his head.
“You know, Hoppy,” he said slowly, “I don’t think I would.”
An idea was germinating in his mind—one of those sublimely fantastic ideas that sometimes came to him, an idea whose gorgeous simplicity, even in embryo, brought the ghost of a truly Saintly smile back to his lips. He forgot his interrupted beauty sleep.
“Could you do with a drink, old man?” he asked.
Hoppy Uniatz allowed the breath to hiss between his teeth, and a light of childlike beatitude irradiated his face.
“Boss,” he replied, “what couldn’t I do wit’ a drink?”
Simon refrained from suggesting any answers to the conundrum. He poured out a liberal measure, and saved his soda-water. Mr Uniatz took the glass, sniffed it, and sucked his saliva for a moment of disciplined anticipation.
“Don’t get me wrong, boss,” he said earnestly. “Dose t’ings I said about Limeys wasn’t meant poisonal. I ain’t never t’ought about you as a Limey. You’ve been in New York, an’ you know what it’s all about. I know we had some arguments over dere, but over on dis side it don’t seem de same. Say, I been so lonesome here it makes me feel kinda mushy to have a little fight like we had just now wit’ a guy like you, who knows what a Roscoe’s for. I wish you an’ me could of teamed up before, boss.”
The Saint had helped himself to a more modest dose of whisky. He stretched himself out on the davenport, and waved Mr Uniatz to an armchair.
“Maybe it’s not too late even now, Hoppy,”
he said, and he had much more to talk about, which kept him out of bed for another two hours.
5
Chief Inspector Teal arrived while the Saint was finishing a belated breakfast. Simon Templar’s breakfasts were usually belated, for he had never been able to appreciate the spiritual rewards of early rising, but on this particular morning the lateness was not entirely his fault. He had already been interrupted twice during the meal, and the bell which heralded the third interruption made him finally abandon a cup of coffee which had abandoned all pretension of being even lukewarm.
“Mr Teal is here, sir,” said Sam Outrell’s voice on the telephone, and the Saint sighed.
“Okay, Sam. Send him up.” He replaced the microphone and turned back to Mr Uniatz, who was engulfing quantities of toast with concentrated gusto, “I’m afraid you’ve got to blow again, Hoppy,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
Mr Uniatz rose wearily. He had been shot out of the Saint’s apartment to make room for other visitors so often that morning that he had grave fears for his digestion. There was one slice of toast left for which even his gargantuan mouth was temporarily unable to find room. In order to eliminate any further risks of having his meal disturbed, he put the slice in his pocket and went out obediently, and he was the first thing that Teal saw when Simon opened the door.
“Hi, Claud,” said Mr Uniatz amiably, and drifted on towards the sanctity of his own quarters.
“Who the deuce is that?” demanded the startled detective, staring after Hoppy’s retreating rear.
The Saint smiled.
“A friend of mine,” he said. “Come along in, Claud, and make yourself uncomfortable. This is just like old times.”
Mr Teal turned round slowly and advanced into the apartment. The momentary human surprise which Hoppy’s greeting had given him faded rather quickly out of his rubicund features. The poise of his plump body as he came to rest in the living-room, the phlegmatic dourness of his round pink face under its unfashionable bowler hat, was exactly like old times. It was Chief Inspector Teal paying an official call: Chief Inspector Teal, with the grim recollection of many such calls haunting his mind, trundling doggedly out once again to take up his hopeless duel with the smiling young freebooter before him. The sum of a score of interviews like that drummed through his head, the memory of a seemingly endless sequence of failures and the bitter presentiment of many more to come was in his brain, but there was no hint of weakness or evasion in the somnolent eyes that rested on the Saint’s brown face.
The Saint in London (The Saint Series) Page 4
