Saint Steps In (15 page)

“Get up,” Simon said relentlessly. “This is only the
begin
ning.”

The
man clawed himself up against the wall. He spat blood,
and spat out an unprintable phrase after it.

Simon hit him again. Morgen’s head caromed off his
knuckles and thudded against the wall.
The man’s eyes were
glazing,
and only the same wall at his back held him upright.

He stood flattened against it, his arms spread out a little to
hold himself up.

“How
does it feel to suffer for your F
ü
hrer?”
Simon asked
gently.

He
hit the man once more, not so hard, but stingingly.

It wasn’t a magnificent performance, and it wasn’t meant to be. It was
simply and callously the mechanical process known
in off-the-record police lore as softening up the
opposition.
But the Saint had no more
compunction about it than he
would have had about gaffing a shark. He was too sure of how
Karl Morgen would have behaved if the
positions had been
reversed.

He was even more sure as he stared down Morgen’s eyes,
still unchangeably vicious and
hate-filled in spite of their un
certain
focus, but beginning to shift in sheer animal dread of
such ruthless punishment.

“This
can go on as long as you like, Karl,” said the Saint,
“and I won’t mind it a bit. I can
spend the rest of the day beat
ing you to a pulp. And in between times we can try some new
tricks with bunsen burners and some of
the hungrier acids.”

“You son of
a bitch!”

“You won’t get around me by flattering my mother. Do we
talk or shall we go on playing?”

He poised his fist again; and for the first time Morgen
flinched and raised one arm to cover his face.

“Well?” Simon prompted.

“What
d’ya want to know?”

“That’s better.”

The Saint took out another cigarette and lighted it. He blew
the first breath of smoke deliberately
into Morgen’s face. If he
had to bully a bully, he could go all the way with it.

“Are you
working for Imberline?” he asked.

“No.”

“What
were you doing with him last night?”

“I
only just met him. I was tryin’ to get a job with Consoli
dated Rubber.”

“Why?”

“I want to eat.”

“It seems to me,” Simon observed, “that you’re rather
fond
of rubber in your
diet.”

“You got me wrong, bud. I’m a chemist. I gotta find a job
I can do.”

Simon’s gaze was
inclement and unimpressed.

“Who
gave you that note to put in my pocket?”

“Somebody else.”

“The
same guy who hired you to snatch Madeline Gray?”

“That wasn’t a snatch. We were just goin’ to scare her a
bit.”

“I said, was
it the same guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Someone I
work for.”

“Karl,”
said the Saint genially, “I’m afraid you’re stalling.
Don’t keep the suspense going too long,
or I might get excited.
Who are you working for?”

“A business
man.”

“Is his name
Schicklgr
ü
ber?”

Morgen’s eyes
burned.

“No.”

Simon
smashed him on the mouth with a long straight left
that bounced his head off the wall again.

“I told you I was excitable,” he said equably. “And
besides
stalling, you’re lying.
I’m sure of that. Now tell me who else you’re working for, and talk fast. Or
else we are going to get
really
rough.”

Morgen wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Okay,
bud,” he rasped. “Have it your way. We have got
Calvin Gray. And if anything happens to
me, it’s gonna be just
too bad about him.”

“You’ve been seeing too many B pictures,” said the Saint
flintily. “That line is so
standard that they put it in the script
with a rubber stamp.”

“You better ask Madeline and see what she thinks.”

Simon didn’t hesitate for an instant.

“I can’t. She’s in New York.”

“Better ask her, just the same.”

“I’d rather ask you. How much will it console you to think
about what’s going to happen to Calvin
Gray while I’m broil
ing
your feet and basting them with nitric acid?”

Morgen
looked at him for quite a while, and that was one
pause which the Saint didn’t hurry. He let it sink in
for all it
was worth.

The
man said: “Couldn’t we make a deal?”

“It depends what the deal is.”

“Gimme
a cigarette, bud.”

Simon
backed off a couple of paces, dipped in his pocket,
fingered out a cigarette, and tossed it over. Morgen
fumbled
the catch, and the
cigarette flipped off his hands and fell to
wards the work-bench. He muttered something and went
to
pick it up. And then
everything erupted.

Morgen
was down on his hands, groping for the cigarette; and he must have been less
groggy than he had left himself
appear.
Or else he was tougher than he boasted. Instead of
straightening up, he dived forward like a sprinter
off the
mark. The dive took him
right under the work-bench. Then
the whole massive bench heaved up at one end as he rose un
der it. Glass slid and crashed on the
floor; but Morgen was
momentarily hidden, arid the Saint had to sidestep fast and
put up a hand to deflect the heavy
table as it teetered over
on to him like a gigantic club. He caught a blurred glimpse
of Morgen plunging out through the
hall, and squeezed
the
trigger of his automatic for a snap shot, but he was off
balance and moving and it hadn’t a
chance.

The
Saint’s vocabulary, displayed to the right audience,
would have entitled him to a priority on
excommunications.

He
skidded around the upturned table and darted through
the hall in pursuit. Morgen was out of sight when the
Saint
got outside, but the
blundering and crashing of his flight
could be heard distinctly in the coppice to the left, and
Simon’s brain was working like a comptometer now—when it was a lit
tle late. Morgen—car keys—a car—the
road … Simon gave
a
second to clear mechanical thought, and started down the
path towards the house. Then after a
few yards he swerved off
through a thin space in the shrubbery to try and head off the retreat.

Something
solid but soft intercepted his feet. He spilled forward with his own momentum,
and sprawled headlong into an unsatisfactory cushion and uncut grass. Half
winded, he rolled over and sat up.

Then he saw what had tripped him.

It was a body which had been plainly exposed by the encounter. Until
recently, it had been inhabited by the late Mr.
Sylvester Angert.
  

4

The
“late” was not to be taken too literally. It wasn’t so very
late. The hands were still limp and
supple, and not particu
larly cold.

As for the instrument which had separated Mr. Angert from
his not very statuesquely modeled clay,
it was most probably the blackjack which Simon still had in his pocket. There
was
no blood on Mr. Angert’s
clothes, no marks of strangulation
on his throat. His mousey face was relaxed, and he didn’t
even
seem to have struggled. But
there was a depression in his skull
just above and behind his right ear which yielded rather
sickeningly to the Saint’s exploring fingers. Apparently Mr. An
gert’s assimilation of calcium had
failed to provide his cra
nium
with the normal amount of resistance, or else Karl Morgen
had underestimated his own strength.
Simon had no doubt that it had been Morgen.

And
Morgen was gone, now, and couldn’t be asked any
more questions.

The Saint used a few more time-honored Anglo-Saxon words
in interesting combinations. Between
the delay of the erupt
ing work-bench, the delay of his fall, and the delay of finding
out whether Sylvester Angert was an
active obstruction or not, Morgen had stretched out too long a lead for the
chase to offer
many
possibilities. Simon Templar raised himself to his feet,
listening, and almost at once he heard
the whirr of a starter,
the
grinding of gears, and the rising roar of an engine too far
off to start him running again.

Then he heard something else—a patter of light feet running
on the path he had just left.
Instinctively he raised the gun he
had never let go, and squirmed back into the shelter of the
nearest bush. A moment
later he saw the girl, and stepped out
again.

“Simon!” she got out breathlessly. “Are you all
right?”

“Fairly,” he said. “I thought I told you to stay in the
house.”

“I know. But I was watching. I saw Karl running away—-I
was afraid something had happened to
you—and …”

That
was when she saw the body of the mousey little man
lying at his feet.

Her
eyes widened, and then darkened with bewilderment.

“But—I was
sure it was Karl—and it wasn’t here——”

“It was Karl,” said the Saint. “And he did run away. We
were in the laboratory, and I was just
getting around to a real heart-to-heart talk with him when he pulled a fast
one. So I
learnt a new trick.”
Simon twisted his lips wryly. “I was run
ning after Karl when I fell over Sylvester.”

Madeline Gray looked down at the motionless figure in rum
pled clothes that didn’t seem to belong
to it any more.

“He looks sort of dead, doesn’t he?” she said uncertainly.

“He
is dead,” said the Saint.

She
swallowed something, and found her breath way down
in her chest.

“You—killed him?”

“No. He was dead when I tumbled over him. He’s been dead
a little while, too. He must have been
snooping around when
Karl came here, and Karl thought he belonged to us and
conked him—just a little too hard. So
they weren’t on the same
side after all
…
This gets more
interesting all the time.”

“I’m
glad you think so,” she said, without any intention of
being smart.

The Saint would scarcely have noticed if she had. His mind
was busy with too many new
adjustments, working resiliently
ahead
from the setback and trying to follow the sudden break in the pattern.

“Go
on back to the house,” he said, “and keep out of sight.
I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He had already disturbed the body and its surroundings
considerably by stumbling over it and
then verifying its condition, so a little more disturbance would make no
difference.
Once again he turned out a
set of pockets, and found nothing very extraordinary except the eavesdropping
device which he
had seen
before. Mr. Angert apparently had been trustful
enough to carry no weapons. There was a bulging
wallet in one
inside pocket, and a
folded sheet of paper with a lot of cryp
tic scribbling on it in another. Simon replaced
everything else,
and took
those two items with him.

He
found Madeline Gray in the living-room, toying nerv
ously with a cigarette.

“I
don’t seem to be much good at this, do I?” she said. “I’m
frightened.”

He smiled encouragement.

“You haven’t screamed yet.” He sat down beside the tele
phone. “Now I’m going to do
something very dull. I’m going
to have to call the FBI.”

“I suppose that is the right thing to do.”

“It’s the only thing to do. I don’t have a fingerprinting out
fit with me, I don’t have access to a
lot of criminal records, I can’t broadcast your father’s description, and I
haven’t got an
army of operatives to follow
every lead. Aside from that, I’m
wonderful.”