Saint's Getaway (6 page)

“Rudolf—my dear old college chum!”
Mirthfully, blissfully,
the Saint’s voice went out in an expansive
hail of welcome.
“This is just like old times! … Monty, you must
let me in
troduce you: this is His Absolute Altitude, the Crown
Prince,
Rudolf himself, who was with us in all the fun and games a
year or two
ago… . Rudolf, meet Saint Montague Hayward, chairman of the Royal
Commission for Investigating the In
cidence of Psittacosis among
Dromedaries, and managing
editor of
The Blunt Instrument,
canonized
this very day for
assassinating a reader who thought a blackleg was
something
to do with varicose veins… . And now you must let us
know
what we can do for you—Highness!”

The prince glanced down with faint distaste
at the bulge of
the Saint’s pocket. Grim, steady as a rock, and
unmistakable,
it had been covering him unswervingly throughout that gay
cascade of nonsense, and not one of the Saint’s exaggerated
movements
had contrived to veer it off its mark by the thou
sandth part of an
inch.

“I sincerely trust, my dear Mr.
Templar,” he remarked, “that
you are not
contemplating any drastic foolishness. One corpse
is quite sufficient
for any ordinary man to have to account for,
and I cannot help
thinking that even such an enterprising
young man as yourself
would find the addition of my own body somewhat inconvenient.”

“You guess wrong,” said the Saint
tersely. “Corpses are my
specialty. I collect ‘em. But still, we’re
beginning to learn
things about you. From that touching speech of yours, we
gather that you belong to the bunch who presented me with
the first
body. Izzat so?”
The prince inclined his head.

“It distresses me to have to admit that
one of my agents was
responsible. The killing was stupid and
unnecessary. Emilio
was only instructed to follow Weissmann and report to me
immediately
he had reached his destination. When Weissmann
was first arrested,
and then rescued and abducted by yourself,
the ridiculous Emilio
lost his head. His blunder is merely a
typical example of
misplaced initiative.” The prince dismissed
the subject with an
airy wave of his hand. “However, the mistake is fortunately not fatal,
except for Weissmann—and Emi
lio will not annoy me again. Is your curiosity satisfied?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it,” said
the Saint pungently. “We’re
only just starting. Our curiosity hasn’t got
its bib wet yet. Who
was this Weissmann bird, anyway?”

The prince raised his finely pencilled eyebrows.
“You seem to require a great deal of
information, my dear Mr. Templar.”

“I soak up information like sponge, old
sweetheart. Tell me
more. What is the boodle?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Granted. What is the boodle? You know.The jack—the swag
—the loot—the mazuma—the stuff that all this song
and dance
is about. The sardines in
that ingenious little can. Gosh-darn
it,”
said the Saint, with exasperation, “you used to understand
plain English. What’s the first prize in the
sweepstake? We’ve
paid for our
tickets. We’re inquisitive. Let’s hear you tell us
what it’s all about.”

For the merest fraction of a second, a glitter
of expression
skimmed across the prince’s eyes. And then it was gone
again,
and his
sensitive features were once more as impassive as a Siberian sea.

“You appear,” he said suavely,
“to be forgetting your posi
tion.”

“You don’t say.”

The prince’s stick swung gracefully from his
fingertips.

“You forget, my impetuous young friend,
that I am the visitor—and the dictator of the conversation. You are
inquisitive, but you may or may not be so ignorant as you wish me to believe.
The point is really immaterial. Except that, if you are
honestly
ignorant, I can assure you—from nothing but my per
sonal regard for you,
my dear Mr. Templar—I can assure you
that it will be healthier for you to
remain in ignorance.” He
glanced at his watch. “I think we have
wasted enough time.
Mr. Templar, when you abducted Weissmann, he was carrying
a small
steel box. I see that you have detached it from him. That box, Mr. Templar, is
my property, and I shall be glad to
have it.”

The Saint lounged even more languidly against
the wall.

“I’ll bet you’d love it—Highness.”

Simon’s voice was dreamy. And right down
behind that
drawling dreaminess his brain was sizzling with the
knowledge
that somewhere the interview had sprung a leak.

In no way whatsoever had it taken the line he
had subcon
sciously expected of it, and not one of his deliberate
discourtesies had been able to startle it back into the way it should have
gone. The
Saint felt like a second-rate comedian frantically
pumping the old oil
into a frosted audience, and feeling all
the inclement draughts
of Lapland whistling back at him to
roost below his wishbone. The badinage
was going hideously
flat. He caught the prince’s gaze on him with a quiet
wraith
of humour in it

“In a few minutes more, my friend, I
shall believe that your ignorance is genuine. Or possibly your intelligence has
deteriorated. Such things have been known to happen. I will ad
mit that,
when I decided to call on you myself, I had my doubts about the wisdom of the
proceeding. A natural curiosity of my
own persuaded me to take the risk. Now
the risk has been justi
fied, and I have been disappointed. It is a
pity. But perhaps
one cannot have everything… .”

“Allow me,” murmured the Saint
genially, “to mention that I’m doing my utmost to oblige. What, after all,
is one corpse
more or less between friends? Of course, my shooting isn’t
what it was, and as a matter of fact it never has been, and if
you feel like taking a chance
on it——”

“I rarely feel inclined to take
chances,” said the prince
calmly. “But perhaps I have been distracting
your attention.”

He made a slight signal with his right hand.

Just for an instant, the movement seemed to be
nothing
more than a meaningless gesture; and the Saint was deceived.
And then
the scales fell from his eyes—just that one instant too
late.

He had forgotten that drumming on the front
door of the
suite. When it had stopped for the arrival of the prince
he had
thought no more about it. He had taken it for nothing more
than an
elementary ruse to enable the prince to make his en
trance unobserved through
the sitting-room windows; he had cursed himself silently for being so simply
taken in, and there
after had dismissed it from a mind that was fully
occupied
with other problems. .

And now he grasped his error.

It was literally thrust upon him—jabbed firmly
and incontrovertibly into his spine, and purposefully left there. Before
that, in
his irregular and energetic life, he had experienced
the identical
sensation. The feel of a gun muzzle in one’s back
leaves an indelible
imprint on one’s memory.

Simon stood quite still.

“Disappointing, in its way,” said
the prince silkily, “but
satisfactory in most respects. I can recall
the days when you
would have been more troublesome.”

Unhurriedly he crossed the room and picked up
the strong
box, and the Saint watched him coldly. There were two
chips
of white-hot sapphire in the Saint’s eyes, twin lights of concen
trated
wrath that blazed through a thin crust of glacial im
mobility. The memory
of the old days was seething through his
tissues like an
elixir of hot gall. The prince was right. Simon
Templar had never
been so easy.

The Saint’s mouth writhed into a grimly
tightening line. The
softness had gone out of him. He felt as if he
had just woken
up—as if he had been fumbling feebly through a stifling
fog, and suddenly the fog had vanished and he was stretching lim
ber muscles
and gulping down great lungfuls of clear moun
tain air. His brain
was as pellucid as an Alpine pool. It had
room for only one
idea: to get his hands on to the contemptu
ous faces of the party
that had made a fool of him, and hit them. Hit them, and keep on hitting… .

The prince was smiling at him.

“I can only repeat my assurance, Mr.
Templar, that there are times when ignorance is bliss and curiosity may be an expensive
pastime. Particularly in one whose hand has lost its cunning.”

Simon Templar drew a deep breath.

Then he fired from his pocket.

His gun, with a half-charged cartridge in the
chamber, gave
no more than an explosive little cough, which merged into
the sharp smack of the bullet crashing home into the single
electric
light switch by the door; and the room was plunged
into impenetrable
blackness.

The Saint hurled himself sideways. Right
behind him he
heard the dull plop of an efficiently silenced gun, but
he was
untouched. He twisted like an eel, and his hand brushed a
pair of
legs. They heard his grim chuckle in the darkness. There
was a
gasp, a strangled cry, and a terrific thud that mingled
with the
slamming of a door.

And after that there was a queer stillness in
the room; and in
the stillness someone groaned harrowingly… .

Monty Hayward dipped in his pocket and found
a box of
matches. He struck one circumspectly, and looked about
him.

Patricia Holm was standing quietly beside the
bed; and on
the
floor the horse-faced gun-in-the-back guy was giving a life
like imitation of a starfish in its death agony.
But the Crown Prince had gone—and so had Simon Templar.

III.
    
HOW
 
SIMON
 
TEMPLAR MADE
 
A
 
JOURNEY,

AND
 
PRINCE
 
RUDOLPH SPOKE
 
OF
 
HIS
APPENDIX

THE Saint went through the sitting-room window in a flying
leap that
landed him on the turf beyond like a crouching
puma.

He paused there for a moment with his eyes
and ears alert, sifting the shadows for the tell-tale movement which he knew
he would
find somewhere. And while he paused he felt his spirits soaring upwards till
they knocked their heads against
the stars.

The bouncing of the gun artist had done him
good—more good even than the initial encounter with the thugs who had
been
heaved in error into the river. On the whole, those three
had only
been common, or garden, thugs; whereas the gun artist had prodded his gun into
the Saint’s spinal purlieus,
thereby occasioning him considerable
discomfort, uneasiness,
and inconvenience. Well, things had happened
to the gun
artist which ought to learn him. The Saint had picked him
up by his ankles, bounced him halfway to the ceiling, and al
lowed him
to return to earth under his own steam.

And after that, the temptation to repeat the
performance
with Prince Rudolf had been almost overwhelming. Only an
epic
triumph of brains over brawn, a positively prodigious
magnificence of will,
the Saint modestly believed, had made it
possible to withstand
the succulent allurements of the idea.
But his better judgment,
borne up on a wave of Saintly inspiration, told him that the time for playing
ball with Rudolf
was not yet.

Ten yards away, down by the sheer black walls
of the hotel, a blurred glimpse of white showed for the twinkling of an eye,
a glimpse
that was there and gone again, like the pale belly of
a shark turning
fathoms deep in a midnight lagoon; and the
Saint smiled
contentedly. He slipped noiselessly into the
murk beside the wall,
and followed along on toes that hardly
seemed to touch the grass.