Saint's Getaway (28 page)

A chilled drop of moisture trickled clammily
down his side,
and the Saint shook himself in the sudden astonishment of
finding
that he was sweating. The pale eyes of Josef Krauss
loomed up before him
again, glazed with that unforgettable
film of bitter mockery. Simon set his
lips. He couldn’t under
stand himself. In everything physical he was
the same as he had always required himself to be: his hand was steady, his
sight was
clear, his heart beat normally. The rhythm of his aimless hammering still gave
him the joy of perfect bodily fitness,
trained to the last
ounce. And there he was behaving like a
frightened schoolboy,
losing control of his mind just at the point where it should have been tuning
itself up to concert
pitch for the showdown.

He forced himself back into the train of
thought that kept slipping away from him. How much ground had Marcovitch been
able to put between them during those three hours since
the
carnival in the brake van? Simon tried to work it out again.
Half an
hour to get to Treuchdingen; at least another half
hour to get through
to the local police chief; then an hour of
romancing and
circumstantial fiction. Leaving another hour
in which anything
might have happened. And meanwhile,
what had become of Rudolf? The stolen
Rolls would have been
recovered before long, once the theft had
been notified—cer
tainly
before the departure of the next northbound express at
five-thirty—and Rudolf would probably elect to follow up by
road. He would have to make contact with
Marcovitch again
somewhere, and
Marcovitch was an unstable quantity. The
Saint made an effort to put himself in the enemy’s place. What would he
do if he were Rudolf? He’d have every possible route out of Munich measured
out, with points of communication
arranged
for on all of them. If Marcovitch had succeeded in getting a message back from
the station before the train left,
which
seemed very probable, he would know what road to take
as soon as he could find a conveyance; and the
rest would sim
ply be a matter of making inquiries at the pre-arranged
points
along the route to which news might
be telephoned. Sooner or later that system would link them up again; and in
view of the
spare hour with which
Simon had to credit Marcovitch, the
vote
went to sooner. Marcovitch would have made the wires sizzle with the narrative
of his accomplishment at the earliest
opportunity, and the panegyric
would already be waiting for
Rudolf to
catch it up. Ingolstadt seemed a likely junction… . Which meant that Rudolf
might even then be speeding on into
Treuchtlingen
to take over the command.
…
And if Mar
covitch and his aviary of jailbirds were actually holding on in
Treuchtlingen, waiting for Rudolf to meet them
there …

The Saint took a grim hold on himself. Once
again the thread had slipped through a loophole in his mind at that
point, as it
had done every time before. The fog swirled up
again, blotting it
out in a maddening haze. He wrestled against
it in a moment of
frozen savagery, but the mists only swelled
thicker. The thread
had gone back on him for good, and his
own efforts to
recapture it only seemed to drive the loose end
into a more
infuriating obscurity. He felt as if his brain had
chosen that moment
to fall into a sluggish conflict of cross-
purposes with
itself—as if one part of it had mutinied and dis
ordered the clean running of the rest,
jarring through insubordinately
with a
shapeless idea of its own. And it was not
until many weeks afterwards, when he recalled that span of
unaccountable impotence, that he could see in it
the inter
ference of some psychic
power which was beyond understanding.

He looked up at the flat, concrete face of the
police station. Other windows were lighting up as the dusk overtook them,
slashing
their mathematical squares of luminousness out of
the grey blankness of
the wall. The low rectangle of doorway
was still dark, like
a cuneiform rat’s hole.

Simon passed a hand over his eyes.

“If we knew which of these things were telephone wires, we
might cut ‘em,” he said, without a change in
the cool level of
his voice. “I’m not sure that we mayn’t have
disorganized some
thing already—those were
two very classy-looking bits of wire
before I repaired “em.”

That was all he said. And he left off speaking
so naturally
that for several seconds Monty Hayward guessed nothing of
what had happened.

And yet before the last words were out of his
mouth Simon
Templar had seen a thing which crushed every other thought
out of his head; It burst in on his senses with the stupefying concussion
of an exploded bomb, gripping his brain in an icy
constriction of sheer
paralysis, so that for one heart-stopping
instant the whole
world seemed to stand still all round him.
And then the full
torrent of comprehension weltered down on
him like a landslide
and shattered the fragile stillness as
though it had been
held in a gigantic bubble of glass, blasting
the shredded
fragments of his universe into a swimming vortex
of incoherence that
made the blood roar in his ears like a hun
dred dynamos.

It had started so very quietly and gently
that he had watched
its
approach without the slightest flicker of suspicion. His eyes
had taken it in exactly as they took in the details
of the sur
rounding houses, or an
individual cobblestone among the
scores
that lay all around him—merely as one uneventful item
of the general street scene with no particular
significance in it
self. He sat there
and spread himself wide open to it, wide
open as a new-born babe crowing innocently at the distended
hood
of a cobra.

Three people were coming down the road.

The Saint gazed at them merely because he
happened to be looking in their direction. They were sixty or seventy yards up
the street
when he first noticed them, too far away for him to
see them as anything
but shadowy figures in the failing light;
and they meant
nothing more to him than any of the other
figures that had
passed and repassed since he had been sitting
there. He watched them
without seeing them, while his mind
was wholly occupied with other things.
The thread of his deduc
tions was still eluding him at the most vital
knot, baffling him
again in that murky whirlpool of disjointed ideas which
per
sisted in deflecting the straight trajectory of his thoughts, and
he was
bullying himself back to the fence which his imagina
tion steadily refused
to take.
If Marcovitch was waiting for
Rudolf in
Treuchtlingen . .
. The figures came nearer: he
made out
that one of them was a woman, and somewhere
beside her he seemed
to catch a sheen of bright metal, but even
then he thought
nothing of it. The fog had balked him again.
He glanced up at the
police station—began speaking to Monty,
giving no hint of the
struggle within himself… .

And then the street lights went on suddenly,
leaping into
yellow orbs of incandescence that studded the dusk with
moons. The
rays of one of them fell clearly over the three
figures less than
twenty yards away, striking full on the pale, proud face of the girl in the
middle; and Simon saw that it was Patricia Holm.

The Saint went numb. Dully he made out the
features of the two men—the policeman on one side, holding her by the arm:
Marcovitch on the other, viciously jubilant. The deadly unex
pectedness
of it stunned him. He felt as if destiny had slammed
a door in bis face
and turned a key, and he was help
lessly watching the bolts sinking home
into their sockets, one
by one. It was the one thing that he had
never even found a
place for in his calculations. He tried stupidly to find
a reason
for it, as if only a logical interpretation could confirm
the evidence of his eyes. The lost end of the thread that he had
been
pursuing whisked through his brain again like a streak of hot quicksilver:
“If
Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in
Treuchtlingen——
” It
snapped off there like an overstrained
wire, splitting under
the shock of a boiling inrush of realiza
tion. The facts were
there. Patricia was caught, disarmed,
locked in the iron clutch of the Law as
surely as if the door of
a cell had already been closed upon her; and
Marcovitch was going with her to the station to clinch the charge. The machin
ery was in
motion, clamping its bars round her, dragging her
inexorably into the
relentless mill. The bubble had burst.

Dimly Monty Hayward became aware of the
terrible still
ness beside him, and raised his eyes. The Saint was rigid
to
his fingertips, staring across the road like a man in a night
mare.
Turning to follow that stare, Monty Hayward also saw; and in the next searing
instant he also understood.

Then the Saint came to life. A red mist drove across his eyes,
and the pent-up desperation of his stillness
smithereened into a
reckless
bloodlust. His right hand leapt to his hip pocket;
and then Monty Hayward pulled himself together in a
blaze
of strength that he had not
known he possessed and caught at
the
flying wrist.

“Simon—that won’t help you!”

For a second he thought the Saint would shoot
him while he
spoke. The Saint’s eyes drilled through him sightlessly,
as if he had been a stranger, with those pin-points of red fire smoulder
ing behind brittle flakes of
blue. There was no vestige of reason
or
humanity in them—nothing but the insensate flare of a bar
baric vengefulness that would have gone up against
an army
with its bare hands. For that
second the Saint was mad—
raving blind
and deaf with a different madness from any that
Monty had seen in him before. Monty looked death in the face,
but he held his ground without flinching. He
gripped the
Saint’s wrist like a vise,
forcing his words through the dead
walls of the Saint’s stark insanity.
And slowly, infinitely slowly,
he saw them
groping to their mark. The Saint’s wrist relaxed,
ounce by ounce, and the red glare sank deeper into
his eyes.
The eyes wavered from their
blind stare for the first time.

“Maybe you’re right.”

The Saint’s voice was almost a whisper; but
Monty saw his
mouth
frame the syllables, and watched a trace of colour creep
ing back into the lips which had been pressed up
into thin
ridges of white stone. He
let go the Saint’s wrist, and Simon
picked
up a wire and twisted it mechanically.

The street was undisturbed. In all those tense
seconds there
had only been two violent movements, and neither of those
would have
impressed any but the closest observer in that faint
light. And the
pavements were practically deserted, except for
the three figures
passing under another lamp-post, only half a
dozen yards now from the doors of the
police station. The curi
ous glances of the.
few pedestrians in sight were centred ex
clusively on the girl: none of them had any attention to
spare for the commonplace counter attraction of two
workmen
squatting over a hole in the
road tinkering with wires. Marcovitch
never knew how near he had been to extinction. He
was gloating over his triumph, oblivious of
everything else
around him, walking
straight for the entrance of the police
station without a glance to right or left. It was he who led the
way up the steps; and then Simon had one more
glimpse of the
girl, a glimpse that
he would remember all his life, with her
fair head fearlessly tilted and the grace of a princess in her
unfaltering stride. And then she also was gone,
and the dark
doorway sprang into empty
brilliance after her.

“I think Marcovitch will have to
die,” said the Saint