Saint's Getaway (3 page)

Under his hold, the little man squirmed
sideways like a demented eel, and the attach
é
case which he was still clutching desperately in his right hand smashed at the
Saint’s head in a
homicidal arc. Lazily the Saint swayed back two inches out
side the
radius of the blow; and lazily, almost absent-mindedly,
he clipped
the little man under the jaw and dropped him in his tracks.
…

And then he turned and faced the others, and
his eyes were
the two least lazy things that either of them had ever seen.

“This is just too soon for our picnic to
break up,” he said.

He stooped and seized the little man by the
collar and flung
him
over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The attach
é
case dan
gled from the little
man’s wrist by a short length of chain; and
the Saint gathered it in with his right hand. The discovery of
the chain failed to amaze him: he took it in his
stride, as a detail that was no more than an incidental feature of the general
problem, which could be analyzed and
put in its right place
at a more
leisured opportunity. Undoubtedly he was quite
mad. But he was mad with that magnificent simplicity which is only a
hair’s breadth from genius; and of such is the king
dom of adventurers.

The Saint was smiling as he ran.

He knew exactly what he had done. In the
space of about
two minutes thirty-seven seconds, he had inflicted on his
newest and most fragile halo a series of calamities that made such
minor
nuisances as the San Francisco earthquake appear posi
tively playful by
comparison. Just by way of an hors-d’oeuvre.
And there was no going
back. He had waltzed irrevocably off
the slippery tight wire of
righteousness; and that was that. He
felt fine.

At the end of the bridge he caught Patricia’s arm. Down to
the right, he knew, a low wall ran beside the
river, with a narrow ledge on the far side that would provide a precarious but
possible foothold. He pointed.

“Play leapfrog, darling.”

She nodded without a word, and went over like
a schoolboy.
Simon’s hand smote Monty on the back.

“See you in ten minutes, laddie,”
he murmured.

He tumbled nimbly over the wall with his
light burden on
his back, and hung there by his fingers and toes three
inches above the hissing waters while Monty’s footsteps faded away
into the
distance. A moment later the patrolman’s heavy boots clumped off the bridge and
lumbered by without a pause.

2

Steadily the plodding hoofbeats receded until
they were
scarcely more than an indistinguishable patter; and the
inter
mittent
blasts of the patrolman’s whistle became mere plain
tive squeaks from the Antipodes. An expansive aura of peace
settled
down again upon the wee small hours, and made itself
at home.

The Saint hooked one eye cautiously over the
stonework and
surveyed the scene. There was no sign of hurrying reinforce
ments
trampling on each other in their zeal to answer the patrolman’s frenzied
blowing. Simon, knowing that the inhabit
ants of most
Continental cities have a sublime and blessed gift
of minding their own
business, was not so much surprised as
satisfied. He pulled
himself nimbly over the wall again and reached a hand down to Pat. In another
second she was standing beside him in the road. She regarded him
dispassionately.

“I always knew you ought to be locked
up,” she said. “And
now I expect you will be.”

The Saint returned her gaze with wide blue
eyes of Saintly
innocence.

“And why?” he asked. “My dear
soul—why? What else could
we do? Our reasoning process was absolutely
elementary. The
Law was on its way, and we didn’t want to meet the Law.
Therefore
we beetled off. Stanislaus was just beginning to get
interesting: we were
not through with Stanislaus. Therefore
we took Stanislaus
with us. What could be simpler?”

“It’s not the sort of thing,” said
Patricia mildly, “that re
spectable people do.”

“It’s the sort of thing we do,”
said the Saint

She fell into step beside him; and the Saint
warbled on in
the extravagant vein to which such occasions
invariably moved him.

“Talking of the immortal name of
Stanislaus,” he said, “reminds me of the celebrated Dr. Stanislaus
Leberwurst, a bloke that we ought to meet some day. He applied his efforts to
the
problems of marine engineering, working from the hitherto
ignored
principle of mechanics that attraction and repulsion
are equal and
opposite. After eighty years of research he per
fected a
bateau
in
which the propelling force was derived
from an enormous roll
of blotting paper, which was fed into
the water by clockwork from the bows
of the ship. The blotting
paper soaked up the water, and the water
soaked up the blot
ting paper, thereby towing the contraption through the
briny,
the project was taken up by the Czecho-Slovakian Navy,
but was
later abandoned in favour of tandem teams of trained herrings.”

Patricia laughed and tucked her hand through
his arm.

In such a mood as that it was. impossible to
argue with the Saint—impossible even to cast the minutest drop of dampness
on his
exuberant delight. And if she had not known that it
was impossible,
perhaps she would not have said a word. But
the puckish mischief
that she loved danced in his eyes, and she
knew that he would always be the same.

“Where do we make for now?” she inquired calmly.

“The old pub,” said the Saint.
“And that is where we probe
further into the private life of Stanislaus.”
He grinned boy
ishly. “My God, Pat-—when I think of what life might
have
been if we’d left Stanislaus behind, it makes my blood bubble.
He’s the
brightest ray of sunshine I’ve seen in weeks. I
wouldn’t lose him for
worlds.”

The girl smiled helplessly. After she had
taken a good look
at the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do.
When you
are walking brazenly through the streets of a foreign city
arm-in-arm with a man who is carrying over his shoulder the abducted body of a
perfect stranger whom for want of better
information he has
christened Stanislaus—a man, moreover, who is incapable of showing any symptoms
of guilt or agita
tion over this procedure—the respectable reactions which
your Auntie Ethel would expect of you are liable to an attack of the
dumb
staggers.

Patricia Holm sighed.

Vaguely, she wondered if there were any power
on earth
that could shake the Saint’s faith in his guardian angels;
but
the question never seemed to occur to the Saint himself. Dur
ing the
whole of that walk back to “the old pub”—in actual fact it took only
a few minutes, but to her it felt like a few
hours—she would have
sworn that not one hair of the Saint’s
dark head was turned
a millimetre out of its place by the
slightest glimmer of anxiety. He was
happy. He was looking
ahead into his adventure. If he had thought at
all about the
risks of their route to the old pub, he would have done so
with
the same dazzlingly childlike simplicity as he followed for his
guiding
star in all such difficulties. He was taking Stanislaus home; and if anybody
tried to raise any objections to that ma
noeuvre—well, Simon Templar’s own floral
offering would cer
tainly provide the
nucleus of a swell funeral… .

But no such objection was made. The streets of
Innsbruck
maintained their unruffled silence, and stayed
benevolently
bare: even the distant yipping of the patrolman’s whistle
had
stopped. And Simon was standing under the shadow of the
wall that
had been his unarguable destination, glancing keenly
up and down the
deserted thoroughfare which it bordered.

“This is indubitably the reward of
virtue,” he remarked.

Stanislaus went to the top of the wall with
one quick heave,
and the Saint stooped again. Patricia felt his hands grip
round
her knees, and she was lifted into the air as if she had been a feather:
she had scarcely settled herself on the wall when the
Saint was up beside
her and down again on the other side like
a great grey cat. She
saw him dimly in the darkness below as
she swung her legs over,
and glimpsed the flash of his white
teeth; irresistibly she was reminded of
another time when he
had sent her over a wall, in the first
adventure she had shared with him—one lean, strong hand had been stretched up
to her
exactly as it was stretched up now, only then it was stretched upwards in
a flourish of debonair farewell—and a deep and
abiding contentment
surged through her as she jumped for
him to catch her in his arms. He eased
her to the ground as
lightly as if she were landing in cotton
wool. She heard his
voice in a blithe whisper: “Isn’t this the
life?”

Above her, on her right, towered the cubical
black bulk of
the old pub—the Hotel K
ö
nigshof,
hugest and most palatial of
all the hotels in Tirol, which the Saint had
chosen just twelve
hours ago for their headquarters. There, with a strategic
eye
for possible emergencies of a rather different kind, he had selected a
suite on the ground floor with tall casement windows opening directly onto the
ornamental gardens; and the
fact that it was the only suite of its kind in
the building and
cost above five pounds a minute could not outweigh its
equally unique advantages.

“Straight along in, old dear,”
spoke the Saint’s whisper,
“and I’ll be right after you with
Stanislaus.”

She started off, feeling her way uncertainly
between confusedly remembered flower beds; but he was beside her again
in a moment, steering her with
an unerring instinct over clear,
level turf.
The windows of their sitting room were already
open, and he found them faultlessly. Inside the room, she
heard him opening a door; and when she had found
the switch
and clicked on the lights
the room was empty.

And then he came back through the
communicating door
of
the bedroom, closing it behind him, and gazed at her re
proachfully.

“Pat, was that the way I raised you—to
let loose all the limes and invite the whole world to gape at us?”

He went over and drew the curtains; and then
he turned
back, and her rueful excuses were swept away into thin air
with his gay laugh.

“In spite of which,” he observed
soberly, “it’s better to be
too careful than too optimistic. The results
are likely to be less
permanently distressing.” He smiled again, and slid an arm
along her shoulders. “And now what do you
think we could
do with a cigarette?”

He pulled out his case and sank luxuriously
into a chair.
Patricia ranged herself on the arm.

“Are you leaving Stanislaus in the
bedroom to cool
off?”

Simon nodded.

“He’s there. You can go in and kiss him
goodnight if you
like—he sleeps the sleep of the just. I handcuffed him
to the
bed and left him to his dreams while we decide what to do
with
him.”

“And what happens if he wakes up and
starts yelling his
head off?”

The Saint blew out a long, complacent wisp of
smoke.

“Stanislaus won’t yell,” he said.
“If there’s one thing that
Stanislaus won’t do when he wakes up, it’s
yell. He may utter
a few subdued bleating cries, but he’ll do nothing
noisier than
that. I’ve been doing a lot of cerebration over Stanislaus
re
cently, and I’m willing to bet that the din he’ll make will be so
deafening
that you could use it for the synchronized accom
paniment of a film
illustrating a chess tournament in a mon
astery of dumb
Trappists. Take that from me.”