Saint's Getaway (9 page)

The prince inhaled slowly from his cigarette.

“I did not know you spoke German, Mr,
Templar,” he re
marked.

“Ah, but there are so many things one
never knows till it’s
too late,” murmured the Saint kindly.
“For instance, you never
knew that I’d be listening in to your
dramatic little scene, did
you? And yet there I was, perching outside
your window with
the dicky-birds and soaking up knowledge with both
tonsils.
… Well, well, well! We all have our ups and downs, as
the bishop philosophically observed when the bull caught him in the thin part
of the pants.”

“I think I owe you an apology,” said
the prince quietly. “I
underrated your abilities—it is a mistake I
have made before.”

Simon beamed at him.

“But it was so obvious, wasn’t it? There
was I with that
bonny little box of boodle, and no means of opening it.
And
there were you announcing yourself as the guy who could open
it or get
it opened. At first I was annoyed. I regret to say that
for a time
I even contemplated the advantages of your meet
ing with a fatal
accident. Since we both coveted the same
prize——
”

“Spare me,” said the prince, with
faint irony. “The point is
already clear.”

The Saint glanced whimsically at the open
strong-box. Then h
is gaze flicked cavalierly back to the prince’s face.

“Should I say—thank you?”

Their eyes clashed like crossed rapiers. Each
of them knew the emotions that were scorching through the other’s mind;
neither of
them betrayed one scantling of his own thoughts or
feelings. The barrage
of intangible steel seethed up between
them in an interval of
tautening silence… . And then the
prince looked down at the glowing end
of his cigarette.

“Your half-charged cartridges are very
useful, Mr. Templar.
But suppose I were to cry out—you would gain
nothing by
killing me——
”

“I don’t know. I should gain nothing by
not killing you.
And you’d look rather funny if you suddenly felt a piece
of
lead taking a walk through your appendix. It’s that element of
doubt, Rudolf, which is so
discouraging.”

The prince nodded.

“The psychology of these situations has
always interested
me,” he said conversationally.

He had picked the stub of cigarette out of his
holder, and
the movement he made was so smooth and natural, so perfectly
timed, that even Simon Templar was deceived. The
prince was reaching
languidly for the ash tray while he spoke … and then his hand shot past its
mark. The lid of the open
strong-box fell with a slam; and the prince was smiling.

“By the way,” he said coolly,
“my appendix is in Buda
pest”

He must have known that his life hung by a
hair, but not a
muscle of his face flinched. There was sudden death in the
Saint’s eyes, cold murder in the tenseness of his trigger finger;
but the
prince might have been talking polite trivialities at an
Embassy
reception… . And suddenly the Saint laughed. He
couldn’t help it. That
exhibition of petrified nerve was the
most breath-taking thing he had ever
witnessed. He laughed,
and scooped in the box with his left hand.

“Some day you’ll sit on an iceberg and
boil,” he predicted
flintly. “But you don’t want to take
another chance like that
this evening, sweetheart. Get back against
that wall and put
your hands up!”

The prince obeyed unhurriedly. With his back
to a bookcase
and the Saint’s gun focusing on his waistline, he spoke
in the
same passionless tone:

“My humane little invention is still at
your disposal, my
dear Mr. Templar. What a pity it is that it fails to meet
with
your approval… .”

“Believe me,” said the Saint.

He hooked a chair round with his foot, and
drew the tele
phone towards him. With one elbow propped on the table,
and the
strong-box parked alongside, he slid one eye onto the
combination panel and
kept the prince skewered on the other.

“Innsbruck achtundzwanzig neun
dreizehn.”

The number clacked back at him from the
receiver. And a
great wide grin of pure beatitude was deploying itself
round
his inside. Even Rudolf could still make his mistakes; and it
seemed to
Simon that the exchange of errors was piling itself
up beautifully on the
side of righteousness and the Public
School Code. But for once he
deliberately chose to let the op
portunity pf chirruping go by. ‘

And then he was through to his own suite at
the K
ö
nigshof.

“Hullo, Pat, old angel! How’s the world?
… Where have I been? Oh, toddling here and there. Wonderful amount of Alp
there is in Austria. The place is simply bulging with it… . Well, don’t
rush me. I’ve been touring the great open
spaces. Pat, where men
are men and women wear flannel
next the skin. Rudolf has been doing the
honours. But
that’ll keep. Shoot me the news from home, old darling… . Whassat? … Well, I will be teetotal and let it snow!”

His forehead was crinkling as he listened,
while the receiver
rattled and spluttered with a recital that began by
making his
hair stand on end. For fully five minutes his granitic
silence
was punctuated only by an infrequent monosyllable that siz
zled into
the transmitter like a splinter of hot quartz.

And then, as the tale went on, he began to
smile. His inter
ruptions wafted through the air on a breath of inward
laugh
ter. And the concluding sentence of the story fetched him half
out of his
chair.

“Did you say that? … Oh, Pat, my
precious cherub—get
me that scaly humbug on the wire!”

He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes
to five, with
barely an hour to go before the dawn. Then another
familiar
accent
answered him.

“H’lo, Monty!” The Saint’s voice was
sparkling. “So you’re
the man who wanted to be good! … Well,
I’ve got some
thing here for you to take back to the Bible class. You
couldn’t
have arranged it better. This is Simon Templar speaking
from
a Grade A
schloss
with whiskers on its chest, and he also feels
the
emigrating urge. Your job is to push out and freeze onto
the
fastest automobile you can get your fists on, and meet me
on the
road to Jenbach. All I’ve got here is the second worst
car in Europe, but I
ought to get that far. Now jump to it——
”

The Saint’s gun cracked. He was a second
late—his bullet
split a thick wedge of wood out of the angle of the dummy
bookcase that was closing behind the prince, and then the hid
den door
had slammed back into place. He heard Monty’s
sharp question and
laughed shortly.

“That was Rudolf on his way, and I
missed him. Don’t worry
—travel!”

He dropped the receiver on its hook and stood
up. The
strong-box fitted bulkily into his poaching pocket. He darted
out into
the empty passage and saw another room on the other
side. From the window
he could locate an eighteen-inch ledge
of stone running just
beneath it. He swung himself over the
sill and went two-stepping along the
brink of sticky death.

IV.
    
HOW MONTY HAYWARD
 
CARRIED
 
ON

THE apotheosis of Monty Hayward did not
actually trouble
the attention of the Recording Angel until some time after
the Saint had catapulted himself through the open windows and
batted off into space on his
own business.

Displaying remarkable agility for a man of his
impregnable
sang-froid, Monty Hayward possessed himself of the weapon
which had fallen from the disabled gunman’s hand, seized its
badly
winded owner by the collar; and lugged him vigorously
into the sitting
room, where the lights were still functioning. There he proceeded methodically
to handicap the wounded
warrior’s recovery by dragging up a massive
Chesterfield and
laying it gently on the wounded warrior’s bosom. Then he
lighted a
cigarette and looked gloomily at Patricia, who had
followed him in.

“Why don’t you scream or
something?” he asked morosely.
“It would help to relieve my
feelings.”

The girl laughed.

“Wouldn’t it be more useful to do
something about Ethel
bert?”

“What—this nasty piece of work?”
Monty glanced down at
the gunman, whose groans were becoming a
fraction less heart
rending as his paralyzed respiratory organs creaked
painfully
back towards normal. “I suppose it might be. What
shall we
do—shoot him?”

“We might tie him up.”

“I know. You tear the curtains into
strips, and blow the
expense.”

“There’s a length of rope in Simon’s
bag,” said Patricia
calmly. “If you’ll wait a second I’ll
get it for you.”

She disappeared into the bedroom and returned
in a few
moments with a coil of stout cord. Monty took it from her
gin
gerly.

“I suppose there isn’t anything of this
sort that Simon ever travels without,” he commented pessimistically.
“If you’ve got
a gallows in the cabin trunk, it may save a lot of mucking
about when the police catch us.”

The gunman was still in no condition to make
any effective
resistance. Monty endeavoured to adapt a working
knowledge
of knots acquired in some experience of week-end yachting
to
the peculiar eccentricities of the human frame, and made a
very
passable job of it. Having reduced his victim to a state of
blasphemous
helplessness, he dusted the knees of his trousers
and turned again to
Pat.

“I seem to remember that the next item is
a gag,” he said.
“Do you know anything about gags?”

“I have seen it done,” said the girl
unblushingly. “Lend me
your handkerchief… . And that other one in
your breast
pocket.”

She bent over the squirming prisoner, and a
particularly
vile profanity subsided into a choking gurgle. Monty
watched the performance with admiration.

“You know, I couldn’t have done that,”
he said. “And I’ve
been editing this kind of stuff all my life. The stories never
give
you the important details. They just
say: ‘Lionel Strongarm bound and gagged his captive’—and the thing’s done.
Where
did you learn it all?”

Patricia laughed.

“Simon taught me,” she said simply.
“If there’s anything that makes him see red, it’s inefficiency. He
explains a thing once,
and expects you to remember it for the rest
of your life. Your
brain’s got to be on tiptoe from the time you get up in
the morning till the time you go to bed at night. He’s like that himself, and
everyone else has got to be the same. It nearly
sent me off my rocker
till I got used to it; and then I began to see that I’d been half asleep all my
life, like eighty per cent of
other people. He was right, of course.”

Monty went over and poured himself out a
drink.

“This is a new line on the private life
of an adventurer,” he
murmured. “Did he ever explain what one
should do when
stranded in a hotel with a corpse on the bed and a gun
artist
under the sofa?”

“That,” said the girl composedly,
“is supposed to be an ele
mentary exercise in initiative.”

Monty grimaced.

“Some initiative is certainly called
for,” he admitted. “Simon may be away for a week, and then
Stanislaus will begin
to smell.”

He wandered pensively back into the bedroom
and wished
that he felt suitably depressed. Two hours ago he would
have
expressed no desire at all to find himself in such a situation.
Its
potentialities in the way of local colour would have left
him
uninspired. Four years in France had left him with a
profound appreciation
of the amenities of peace. On several
occasions he had told the Saint that
he was always pleased
to hear or read of stirring exploits
anywhere, but that as far as
he personally was concerned he could enjoy
enough violence
to keep his glands active from an armchair. And if he had
to
be decoyed into that sort of thing, he most unequivocally
wanted it
to be gradual. A minor job of shop-lifting, if neces
sary, or an evening
out with a pickpocket, would have satis
fied his craving for excitement for a long
time.