Send for the Saint

Leslie Charteris

SEND FOR THE SAINT

Contents
I: The Midas Double
Original Teleplay by JOHN KRUSE
Adapted by PETER BLOXSOM

II: The Pawn Gambit
Original Teleplay by DONALD JAMES
Adapted by PETER BLOXSOM

FOREWORD
Whatever else may be said about the Saint stories which have been adapted from television scripts, it can at least be safely asserted that they are works of genius.

My authority for this statement is that all those which have been published hitherto were written up by Fleming Lee, who is a member of Mensa. And as everyone should know, membership in that highly elitist society is restricted to those who can prove an IQ, in the top two percentile of the available statistics, which makers every Mensan officially a genius. On paper, at any rate.

Since the adaptations are also supervised and given their final vetting by myself, I am blushingly obliged to admit that I too am a Mensa member.

This volume introduces the first Saintly efforts of a new adapter, Peter Bloxsom. But to maintain a newly established tradition, I am glad to assure all readers that he too is a Mensan, whom I first met through our common membership.

So you have been warned. We may seem stupid to you, but we have certificates that say we aren’t.

LC

I
THE MIDAS DOUBLE
1
It was on a searingly hot August afternoon in 1950 that Simon Templar uncoiled his lean seventyfour-inch frame from the seat he had occupied for interminable hours in the creaking Parnassian Airways Dakota, and stepped down on to the tarmac of Athens Airport.

From above, as the plane had begun to sink into its droning circuitous approach. Simon had looked down on the city with the same sense of unreality as he had felt on previous visits. There below, scarcely believable in their exact correspondence to all the tourist guidebook photographs, lay the monumental relics of the Old Greece: and there in less than comfortable juxtaposition with them were strewn the lesser glories of the New — those stark and faceless hotel and office blocks that were even then beginning to crawl like a blight across the green and ochre landscape. To anyone possessing, as the Saint possessed, a nodding acquaintance with the history and art of ancient Greece, the thought was inescapable that here was a nation whose architecture had deteriorated along with its Olympic athletes.

The thought being inescapable, Simon had not tried to escape it. He had merely sighed, and promised himself a longer visit before the rot went much farther.

On this occasion, he didn’t mean to get on speaking terms with so much as a single Ionic column. He was purely and simply passing through, en route to London from Lebanon. In Beirut his attention had recently been occupied with one Elil Azziz, a large-scale flesh-trader and particularly unpleasant pustule on the face of humanity. Even the Saint had never been mixed up in a nastier bit of business: and even he had never come closer to death or had more cause to be grateful for the steel-spring nerves and reflexes with which a thoughtful providence had seen fit to equip him. In the end, he had succeeded in administering his own harsh yet poetic brand of justice to the excrescence in question, and in escaping not only with his own life but with some of the excrescence’s more negotiable property, chiefly in the convenient form of banknotes. And the Saint now proposed to spend an indefinite period in London enjoying Mr Azziz’s money on a lavish celebratory scale.

For the sake of accuracy, then, let it be recorded that he intended to remain on Greek soil for a period of just thirtyone minutes, this being the scheduled interval before the connecting flight. And let it be added that he was at that moment — aside from what might be called a certain constitutional readiness of the blood — definitely not in search of further Saintly adventure.

But he had failed to reckon with the persuasive charms of a certain Ariadne …

Despite the heat, no one could have looked more sublimely, insolently relaxed than Simon Templar as he sauntered into the airport passenger building. He had been entertaining himself by guessing at the occupations, preoccupations, and amorous propensities of his fellow passengers; and a faint smile hovered on his tanned piratical features as he wondered idly which of that motley crowd would contrive to smuggle the greatest weight, bulk, or value of contraband goods past the deceptively somnolent-looking Greek customs officers.

Simon had not been slow to notice the girl in the blue-and-gold airport staff uniform. She was armed with a clipboard on which she appeared to be keeping count as the incoming passengers filed past, and Simon had just drawn level with her when she spoke. “Sir! One moment please!”

The Saint turned, cocking a quizzical eyebrow, and looked into level wide-apart hazel eyes topped by a mop of dark curly hair. The eyes were set in a youthful elfin face, and the hair asserted itself defiantly against the restraint of the uniform-cap. Simon took in these and certain other details — including the way she filled the well-cut uniform — in a single comprehensively appraising and approving glance, and replied with a seraphic smile, after scarcely an instant’s hesitation:
“How can I help you? Only ask, and if it should lie within my power …”

” It is my pleasure to inform you that you are the two-millionth passenger to pass through Athens Airport,” said the girl, in the slightly formal tones of one who had rehearsed the sentence; and with a flourish of finality she made a large pencilled tick on the top sheet of the wad attached to her clipboard.

As she spoke she returned his smile and found her gaze met by a pair of the most amazingly clear blue eyes she had ever seen. Still more remarkable was the sublime innocence of their expression; but in them too, for a few moments, anyone who knew him well might have detected a faint, elusively mocking light as the Saint digested her announcement, weighed, considered, and formed a sceptical but openminded judgement, before replying enthusiastically:
“What fun! This must be what my dear old Granny had in mind when she used to say I was fated to do something historic one day.”

“The management would like to make a small presentation,” the girl continued. “And there’s some champagne. Please come this way.”

“Well…” Simon hesitated. “I don’t want to risk missing my plane — “

“Please — it will take a few minutes only.”

The Saint possessed, as he sometimes modestly reminded himself, a surprising number of natural assets that were invaluable in his hazardous freebooting trade. Not least among these aptitudes useful to any buccaneer with a hankering to stay in the business was his acute sense of the probable and the improbable — and when the notorious Simon Templar was stopped as the two-millionth passenger, or customer, or for that matter male visitor wearing shoes in a particular shade of brown… then it was entirely to be expected that the notorious Simon Templar should have his reservations concerning the probable truth of the claim.

But it was equally in character that he should have been swayed by his curiosity, and by the pleading in the eyes of a girl in a well-cut uniform. Wherefore the Saint replied, with an even more seraphic smile:
“All right. If you say so, I’ll be delighted. Lead on, darling.”

He followed her through a door marked Official Use Only in English and Greek, into a short corridor leading to another door. They passed through the second door into the open air.

“Are we having the champagne alfresco?” asked the Saint with interest. “Or — forgive my suspicious mind — have you been deceiving me?”

A gleaming new Rolls-Royce in opulent purple stood near by, a grey-uniformed chauffeur behind the wheel. At a nod from the girl, this worthy made some minimal movement of his body, and the Saint heard the abrupt muffled cough of the starter, giving way instantly to the Rolls engine’s well-bred, barely audible throb.

“Would you step into the car, please?” The girl’s voice was still polite, but more matter-of-fact than before. The pleading had left her eyes.

“I think I’d rather not,” Simon replied evenly. “I told you — I’ve got a plane to catch. If I’m going to make it, this is where I leave the party. Sorry. Now, if you’d really had some bubbly on the premises — “

He turned to go back through the same doorway, but even before he did so he knew with virtual certainty what he would encounter. The exact form taken by the expected obstruction was that of an extremely large Greek, dressed in the same grey chauffeur’s livery and holding a squat automatic which he pointed unwaveringly at the Saint’s chest.

“You will get into the car — Mr Templar,” he rasped. For a few moments the Saint soberly contemplated the bulky chauffeur-gunman, whom he instantly christened Big Spiro. In an automatic response — born of long experience of threats and physical struggles and mayhem and all manner of antagonists, large and small, who had pointed guns in his direction down the years — he rapidly measured the distance between them, pictured accurately the leap that would bring him within reach of Big Spiro’s gun hand, gauged the other’s probable speed of reaction and the strength in those massive arms — and concluded that for the time being he had little option but to do as he was told. He shrugged and obeyed the injunction, following the girl into the back of the car.

Big Spiro somehow managed to ease his own gigantic chassis through the same door and to wedge it into the seat beside the Saint’s altogether more practical whipcord proportions without even a momentary deflection of the automatic protruding from his hamlike fist. Next he used the other ham of the pair to conduct an expert and thorough search of Simon’s person: but he found nothing, for the Saint on his ordinary travels had long since ceased to go armed.

Simon was more than a little annoyed — in the first place with himself for allowing his curiosity to lead him so easily into a trap, but more particularly with whoever was behind the abduction.

“Just where are we going ?” he demanded tersely, as the big car glided silently away from the airport.

“You will see in good time,” answered the girl. “And by the way — in case you should be so rash as to try to escape — all the car doors are electrically locked and only the driver can release them. Why not just relax ? We do not mean you any harm, but if you attempt any heroics you will certainly be shot.”

“We’d make a lovely couple, you and I,” murmured the Saint, but if the girl understood she gave no sign.

She pressed a button in front of her, and a panel slid back to reveal a telephone. She picked up the handset, dialled, and after a moment’s delay spoke softly into it. Simon had a sufficient smattering of Greek to understand.

“Ariadne reporting, sir. We have Mr Templar. We shall be with you by two-thirty.”

He glanced at his watch and saw that it was two-fifteen.

“Just how long is this pantomime scheduled to last?” he inquired. A veneer of laziness in his voice thinly covered the iron-hard core of anger beneath. “Hours? Days?”

“Please, do not be impatient.”

The mocking eyes danced like chips of blue steel.

“I’ve two main reasons for asking,” he drawled. “One — before long I may very well tire of humouring your giant teddy-bear chum with the popgun. I’ve handled plenty of bigger dumb heavies in my time,” he added, not entirely veraciously in view of Big Spiro’s six feet eight and more than proportional width. “And two — do you realise that about now they’ll be loading my suitcase into a London plane. I have — and I make no secret of it — certain eccentric habits. For example, every once in a while 1 change my socks. Now if I’m to be shortly separated from my spare Argylls… well, I’d prefer to avoid indelicacy, but my company could rapidly — “

“Your suitcase is in the boot of the car,” interrupted Ariadne laconically: and Simon Templar blinked with something very like surprise, and mentally chalked up another point to his anonymous abductor.

With philosophic resignation, he sank farther back into the car’s luxurious air-conditioned comfort and crossed one leg over the other, making the movements with slow careful deliberation in deference to Big Spiro’s trigger finger. No doubt that worthy colossus was under strict orders to deliver his prize alive and well, and no doubt he had been selected for his post with due care: yet however phlegmatically imperturbable he might appear, still a
Greek is a Greek — quintessentially and forever a man of impulse and hot blood. And the Saint, knowing this well, saw no reason to take rash risks with the only skin he possessed.

He began to piece together what he knew or could deduce about the man from whom Ariadne and Big Spiro took their instructions. Who would want to kidnap the Saint ? He had plenty of enemies with old scores to settle, but none in Greece that he knew of. For a moment his mind went back to recent events in Beirut; but on sober reflection he doubted if even the incendiary malevolence of Elil Azziz — especially bearing in mind the somewhat incapacitated condition in which the Saint had left him and his principal henchman that very morning — could have pursued him so swiftly.

As the purple Rolls whispered its insulated way through the Athens suburbs, groups of children gawped after it. Simon Templar, who had his moments of insight, had already categorised it as a far from discreet and inconspicuous vehicle. Not to mince words, it was the very latest model, announced only a month before; the colour was by special order, and Simon had already made a mental list of all the other custom features, among them the air-conditioning system, which together testified to the owner’s flamboyant taste as well as to his ability and readiness to pay for every conceivable luxury. Without doubt this was a wealthy and powerful man, someone used to impressing himself on the world and moulding his surroundings, and who took for granted that he would always get his own way … It might be one of those repulsive nouveaux riches tycoons who had grown newly fat on their lack of scruples in the aftermath of the war and of the civil wars that followed. And this was a man — the Saint felt a momentary grudging admiration — who worked with dazzling speed and efficiency; at most he had had a few hours’ advance notice of Simon’s arrival — and even for that he would have needed direct access to the airline’s passenger list — yet the airport operation had been smooth and unobtrusive, and the uniformed Ariadne had somehow been installed with the connivance or toleration of genuine airport staff.