Saint's Getaway (2 page)

And even so did it happen to the Saint.

After all, he had done nothing desperately
exciting for a
long time. About twenty-one days. His subconscious was
just
ripe for the caressing touch of a few seductive stumuli. And
then and
there, when his resistance was at its lowest ebb, he
heard and felt the
juicy plonk of his fist sinking home into a
nose.

The savour of that fruity squish wormed itself
wheedlingly
down into the very cockles of his heart. He liked it. It
stirred
the deepest chords of his being. And it dawned persuasively
upon him
that at that moment he desired nothing more of life than an immediate
repetition of that feeling. And, seeing the
nose once more
conveniently poised in front of him, he hit it
again.

He had not been mistaken. His subconscious
knew its stuff.
With the feel of that second biff a pleasant kind of glow
centred itself in the pit of his stomach and tingled electrically
outwards
along his limbs, and the remainder of his doubts melted away before its
spreading warmth. He was punching
the nose of an ugly man, and he was
liking it. Life had no
more to offer.

The ugly man went sprawling back across the
bridge. Then
he came in again with his arms flailing, and the Saint
welcomed him joyfully with a crisp half-arm jolt to the ribs. As
he fetched
up with a gasp, Simon picked a haymaker off the ground and crashed him in a
limp heap.

The Saint straightened his coat and looked
around for fur
ther inspiration.

The party had begun to sort itself out. A
couple of paces
away, Monty Hayward was giving the second thug a
whole-time job; and right beside him the third hoodlum was kneel
ing on the
inoffensive little man’s chest, squeezing his wind
pipe with one hand and
fumbling in his pocket with the other.

Some of which may help to explain why the
third hoodlum
was so utterly and devastatingly surprised by the next few
things that happened to him. Undoubtedly his impression of
the events
that crowded themselves into the following eight
seconds was a trifle hazy. A pair of sinewy
hands locked them
selves together beneath
his chin, and he was conscious of a tall,
lean shape leaning affectionately over him. And then he was
hurled backwards into the air with a jerk that
nearly dislo
cated his spine. He
rolled dizzily over on his knee, reaching
for his hip pocket; and the Saint laughed. It was the one move
that had not till then been made—the move that
Simon had been waiting and hoping for with all the concentrated power
of his dismantled virtue—the move that flooded the
one missing colour into the angelic beauty of the night.

“Dear heart!” said the Saint, and
leapt at him like a pan
ther.

The man was halfway to his feet when the Saint
hit him,
and his hand was less than halfway out of his pocket. The
blow clicked his head back with a force that rocked his cervical ver
tebr
æ
in their sockets, and he slumped blindly up
against the parapet.

Simon piled smotheringly on top of him. Over
the man’s
shoulder he caught a fleeting glimpse of the dark waters
of the
river hurtling sleekly past and breaking creamily against the
broad
piers of the bridge—for the Inn is none of your dignified
and stately
streams, it comes pelting down from the Alps like
a young tidal
wave—and the little fighting smile that played
round the Saint’s lips
slowly widened to an unholy grin. His
right arm circled lovingly round the
man’s legs. After all—why
not?

“Saturday night is bath night,
brother,” said the Saint.

His left hand pushed the man’s face down, and
his right arm hauled upwards. The parapet was squarely in the small of his
victim’s back, and it was easy. The man pivoted over the ma
sonry with
an airy grace to which he had contributed no effort
at all, and
disappeared from view with a faint squawking noise… .

For a second or two the Saint gazed
beatifically down upon
the bubbles that broke the surface of the icy
torrent, letting
the sweetest taste of battle soak lusciously into his
palate. The
die was cast. The last, least hope of salvation that he
might
have had was shredded up and scattered to the winds. He felt
as if a
great load had been lifted from his mind. The old days
had come back. The
fighting and the fun had come back of
their own accord, without his seeking,
because they were his
allotted portion—the rescuing of small men in
distress, and
the welting of the ungodly on the boko. And it was very
good
that these things should be so. It was a beautiful and solemn
thought for
a man who had been good for three whole weeks.

He turned around with a happy little sigh,
nebulously won
dering whether he had by some mischance overlooked any
other
opportunities of nailing down the coffin of his virtue. But
a
temporary peace had settled on the scene of strife. The man
with the
exceptionally villainous face was still in no condi
tion to continue with
the argument. The harmless-looking little man was sitting weakly in the gutter
with his head in his
hands. And on the head of the remaining tough
sat Monty
Hayward, licking a skinned set of knuckles. He looked up
at
the Saint with an air of quiet reflection.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not
sure that a cold bath would
do this bird a lot of harm, either.”

The Saint laughed suddenly.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He stooped and grasped the man’s ankles.
Monty took the
shoulders. The man shot upwards and outwards into space like
a clay pigeon from a trap.
…

They turned again. In the middle of the road,
the last of the
Mohicans was crawling malevolently to his feet; and his
hand also, like the hand of his predecessor, was fetching something
from his
pocket… . For the third time, Simon looked at
Monty, and Monty
looked at the Saint. Their attitudes were sober and judicial; but neither was
able to read in the other’s
eyes the bashfullest suggestion that the good
work should go
unfinished… . The Saint nodded, and they streaked oft
the
mark as one man. The hoodlum was borne away towards the wall. There was
a wild whirl of arms and legs, a splash, and a
silence… .

Simon Templar dusted his coat.

“Somehow or other,” he remarked,
after a short interval of
contented rumination, “we seem to have
disposed of the opposition. Let’s have a look at Little Willie.”

He walked over and hitched the cause of all
the trouble to
its feet. In the clear light of one of the standard lamps
mounted on
the parapet, he saw a thin, sallow face from which
two dull brown eyes
blinked at him dazedly. Simon studied the little man curiously. On closer
inspection, the prize he had col
lected from the lucky dip seemed a rather
inadequate re
ward for the expenditure of so much energy and mental
stress;
but the Saint had a sublime faith in his good fortune.

“Where were you on your way to,
George?” he inquired af
fably.

The little man shook his head.

“Ich verstehe nicht.”

“Wohin wollten Sie gehen?”
repeated
the Saint, translating.

To his surprise, the little man’s lips
tightened, and a sullen
glaze came over his eyes. He almost snarled out his reply.

“Ich will gar nichts sagen.”

Simon frowned.

Somewhere a new shrill noise was drifting
through the still
ness of the night, and he realized that both Monty and Pa
tricia
were standing rather tensely at his side; but he paid no
attention.
His brain registered the impressions as if it received
them through a fog. He
had no time to think about them then.

A little pulse was beating deep within him,
throbbing and surging up in a breathless fever of surmise. The stubborn rigid-
ness of
the small man’s mouth had started it, and the harsh
violence of his voice
had suddenly quickened it to a great
pounding tumult that welled
clamorously up and hammered
on the doors of understanding. It was
preposterous, absurd,
fantastic; and yet with an almost jubilant
fatalism he knew
that it was true.

Somewhere there was a catch. The smooth
simplicity of
things as he had seen them till that instant was a
delusion
and a snare. A child of ten could have perceived it; and
yet
the deception had been so bland and natural that the un
masking of
it had the effect of a battering ram aimed at the
solar plexus. And it
had all been so forthright and aboveboard.
A small and harmless-looking
little man is hurrying home with his week’s wages in his little bag. Three
hairy thugs set on him
and proceed to beat him up. Like a good
citizen, you inter
vene. You swipe the ungodly on the snitch, and rescue
Regin
ald. And then, most naturally, you approach your prot
é
g
é
.
You
prepare to comfort him and bathe his wounds, what time
he hails you as his hero and sends for the
solicitors to revise his
will. In your role
of the compleat Samaritan, you inquire
whither
he was going, so that you may offer to shepherd him
a little further on his way… . And then he
bites your head
off——

The Saint laughed.

“Yes, yes, I know, brother.” Very
gently and soothingly he
spoke, just as before; but way down in the
impenetrable un
dertones of his voice that whisper of soft laughter was
lilting about like a mirthful will-o’-the-wisp. “But you’ve got us all
wrong.
Sie haben uns alles
falsch gegotten. Verstehen Sie Espe
ranto?
All those naughty men have gone. We’ve just saved
your life. We’re your bosom pals.
Freunde.
Kamerad. Gott mit
uns,
and all that sort of thing.”

The German language has been spoken better.
The Saint
himself,
who could speak it like a native when he chose, would
have been the first to acknowledge that. But he computed that
he had made his meaning fairly clear. Intelligible
enough, at
any rate, to encourage any
ordinary person to investigate his
credentials
without actual hostility. And definitely he had
given no just cause for
the response which he received.

Perhaps the little man’s normal nerve had
been blown into
space by his adventure. Perhaps his head was still muzzy
with the painful memory of his recent experience. These questions
can never
now be satisfactorily settled. It is only certain that
be was incredibly
foolish.

With a vicious squeal that contorted his whole
face, he
wrenched one arm free from the Saint’s grip and clawed at
the
Saint’s eyes like a tigercat. And with that movement all doubts
vanished
from Simon Templar’s mind.

“Not quite so quickly, Stanislaus,”
he drawled.

He swerved adroitly past the tearing fingers
and pinned the
little man resistlessly against the wall; and then he
felt Monty
Hayward’s hand on his shoulder.

“If you don’t mind me interrupting you,
old man,” Monty
said coolly, “is that bloke over there a friend of
yours?”

Simon looked up.

Along the Rennweg, less than a hundred yards
away, a
man in an unmistakable uniform was blundering towards
them with
his whistle screaming as he ran; and the Saint
grasped the meaning of
the omens that had been drifting
blurredly through his senses while he was
occupied with other
things. He grasped their meaning with scarcely a second’s
pause, in all its fatal and far-reaching implications; and in the
next second
he knew, with a reckless certainty, what he was
doomed to do.

The Law was trying to horn in on his party. At
that very mo
ment it was thumping vociferously towards him on its
great
flat feet, loaded up to its flapping ears with all the elephantine
pomposity
of the system which it represented, walloping
along to crash the
gate of his conviviality with its inept and fa
tuous presence—just as
it had been wont to do so often in the
past. And this time
there were bigger and better reasons than
there had ever been
why that intrusion could not be allowed. Those reasons might not have seemed so
instantaneously con
clusive to the casual and unimaginative observer; but to
the
Saint they stuck out like the skyline of Chicago. And Simon
found that
he was no less mad than he had always been.