The Saint Closes the Case (14 page)

That the Saint would have acted in exactly
the same way if
the street had been crowded with an equal mixture of
panicky
population, plain-clothes men, and uniformed policemen, was
nothing
whatever to do with anything at all. Once again the
Saint had proved, to his own sufficient
satisfaction, as he had
proved many times in
his life before, that desperate dilemmas
are usually best solved by desperate measures, and that in
telligent foolhardiness will often get by where
too much dis
cretion betrays valour
into the mulligatawny. And the thought
of
the notice that must have been taken of the Hirondel dur
ing the first part of that wild chase (it was not
an inconspicu
ous car at the best of
times, even when sedately driven, that
long,
lean, silver-grey King of the Road) detracted nothing
from the Saint’s estimate of his success. One
could not have
one’s cake and eat it.
And certainly he had obtained the cake
to
eat. Two cakes. Ugly ones… .

Even then there might have been trouble in
Brook Street
when they returned with the cargo, but the Saint did not
allow
any trouble.

There were two men to be taken across the
strip of pavement
to the door of the flat. One man was long and lean, and
the
other man was short and fat; and the lean man slept. The Saint
kept his
grip on one wrist of the fat man, and half supported
the lean man with his
other arm. Roger placed himself on the other side of the lean man.

“Sing,” commanded the Saint; and
they crossed the pave
ment discordantly and drunkenly.

A man in evening dress passed them with a
supercilious
nose. A man in rags passed them with an envious nose. A
pa
trolling policeman peered at them with an officious nose; but the Saint
had opened the door, and they were reeling cacophonously
into the house. So the
officious nose went stolidly upon
its way,
after taking the number of the car from which they
had disembarked, for the law has as yet no power to
prevent
men being as drunk and
disorderly as they choose in their own
homes.
And, certainly, the performance, extempore as it was, had been most convincing.
The lean man had clearly failed to
last the course; the two tall and
well-dressed young men who
supported him
between them were giving most circumstantial
evidence of the thoroughness with which they had lubricated
their withins; and if the sounds emitted by the
fat man were
too wild and shrill to be
easily classified as song, and if he
seemed
somewhat unwilling to proceed with his companions
into further dissipations, and if there was a
strange, strained
look in his
eye—well, the state which he had apparently
reached was regrettable, but nobody’s business… .

And before the suspicious nose had reached the
next corner,
the
men who had passed beneath it were in the first-floor apart
ment above it, and the lean one was being
carelessly dropped
spread-eagle on the sitting-room carpet.

“Fasten the door, Roger,” said the
Saint shortly.

Then he released his agonising hold on the
fat man’s wrist, and the fat man stopped yelping and began to talk.

“Son of a pig,” began the fat man,
rubbing his wrist ten
derly; and then he stopped, appalled at what
he saw.

There was a little knife in the Saint’s
hand—a toy with a six-
inch leaf-shaped blade and a delicately chased
ivory hilt. It
appeared to have come from nowhere, but actually it had
come from
the neat leather sheath strapped to the Saint’s fore
arm under the sleeve,
where it always lived; and the name of
the knife was Anna.
There was a story to Anna, a savage and
flamboyant story of
the godless lands, which may be told one
day: she had taken
many lives. To the Saint she was almost human, that beautifully fashioned,
beautifully balanced little
creature of death; he could do tricks with
her that would have
made most circus knife-throwers look like amateurs. But
at
that moment he was not thinking of tricks.

As Roger switched on the light, the light
glinted on the
blade; but the light in the Saint’s eyes was no less cold
and inclement than the light on the steel.

7. How Simon Templar was Saintly,

and received another visitor

Simon Templar, in all his years of wandering
and adventure,
had only fallen for one woman, and that was Patricia Holm.
Therefore, as might have been expected, he fell heavily. And
yet—he was
realising it dimly, as one might realise an un
thinkable heresy—in
the eighteen months that they had been together he had started to get used to
her. He had, he realised,
been growing out of the first ecstatic
wonder; and the thing
that had taken its place had been so quiet
and insidious that it had enchanted him while he was still unaware of it. It
had had
to await
this shock to be revealed.

And the revelation, when it came, carried with
it a wonder
that infinitely eclipsed the more blatant brilliance of
the won
der that had slipped away. This was the kind of wild and aw
ful wonder
that might overtake a man who, having walked
in the sunshine all
the days of his life, sees the sun itself for
the first time, with a
dreadful and tremendous understanding,
and sees at once a
vision of the darkness that would lie over the
world if the sun ceased from shining.

The Saint said, very softly, to file fat man:
“Son of a pig
to
you, sweetheart. And now listen. I’m going to ask you some
questions. You can either answer them, or die
slowly and
painfully, just as you
like—but you’ll do one or the other be
fore you leave this room.”

The fat man was in a different class from
that of the
wretched little weed in the pot hat from whom Simon
Templar
had extracted information before. There was a certain brute
resolution
in the fat man’s beady eyes, a certain snarling defi
ance in the twist of
the thin lips, like the desperate determination of a beast at bay. Simon took
no count of that.

“Do you understand, you septic
excrescence?” said the Saint
gently.

And there was hatred in the Saint’s heart, a
hatred that was
his very own, that no one else could have understood; but
there was
another kind of devilry in the Saint’s eyes and in the purring gentleness of
his voice, a kind of devilry that no one
could have helped
understanding, that the man in front of
him understood with
terror, an outward and visible and ma
lignant hatred; and it was plainly
centred upon the fat man;
and the fat man recoiled slowly, step by step,
as the Saint advanced, until he
came up against the table and could not
move
backwards any farther.

“I hope you don’t think I’m bluffing,
dear little fat one,”
the Saint went on, in the same velvety voice.
“Because that
would be foolish of you. You’ve done, or had a hand in
doing,
something which I object to very much. I object to it in a gen
eral way,
and always have; but this time I object to it even
more, in a personal
way, because this time it involves someone
who means more to me
than your gross mind will ever under
stand. Do you follow the argument, you
miserable wart?”

The man was trying to edge away backwards
round the ta
ble, but he could not break away, for the Saint moved side
ways
simultaneously. And he could not break away from the Saint’s eyes—those clear
blue eyes that were ordinarily so full of laughter and bubbling mischief that
were then so bleak and
pitiless.

And the Saint went on speaking.

“I’m not concerned with the fact that
you’re merely the
agent of Dr. Rayt Marius—ah, that makes you jump! I know
a little more than you thought I did, don’t I?
…
But we’re
not
concerned with that, either.
…
If you insist on
mixing with
people like that, you must be prepared to take the conse
quences.
And if you think the game’s worth the candle, you
must also be prepared
for an accident with the candle. That’s
fair, isn’t it?
…
So that
the point we’re going to disagree
about is that you’ve had a share in annoying
me—and I object
very much to being annoyed… . No, you don’t, sonny
boy!”
There was a gun in the fat man’s hand, and then there was
not a gun in the fat man’s hand; for the Saint moved forwards and to one
side with a swift, stealthy, cat-like movement, and
this time the fat man
could not help screaming as he dropped
the gun.

“Ach!
You would my wrist
break——
”

“Cheerfully, beloved,” said Simon.
“And your neck later
on. But first
…”

Tightening instead of slackening that grip on
the fat man’s
wrist, the Saint bent him backwards over the table,
holding him easily with fingers of incredible strength; and the man
saw the blade of the knife flash
before his eyes.

“Once upon a time, when I was in
Papua,” said the Saint,
in that dispassionately conversational way
which was indescribably more terrifying than any loud-voiced anger, “a
man
came out of the jungle into the town where I was. He was a
prospector,
and a pig-headed prospector, and he had insisted
on prospecting a
piece of country that all the old hands had
warned him against.
And the natives had caught him at the time of the full moon. They’re always
very pleased to catch
white men at that time, because they can be
used in the scheme of festivities and entertainment. They have primitive forms
of
amusement—very. And one of their ways of amusing themselves with this
man had been to cut off his eyelids. Before I
start doing the same
thing to you, will you consider for a mo
ment the effect that
that operation will probably have on your
beauty sleep?”

“God!” babbled the man shrilly.
“You cannot——
”

The man tried to struggle, but he was held
with a hand of iron. For a little while he could move his head, but then the
Saint swung
on to the table on top of him and clamped the
head between his
knees.

“Don’t talk so loud,” said the
Saint, and his fingers left the
wrist and sidled round the throat.
“There are other people in
this building, and I should hate you to alarm
them. With
regard to this other matter, now—did I hear you say I
couldn’t
do it? I beg to differ. I could do it very well. I shall
be very
gentle, and you should not feel very much pain—just at the
moment.
It’s the after-effects that will be so unpleasant. So
think. If you talk,
and generally behave like a good boy, I
might be persuaded to
let you off. I won’t promise you any
thing, but it’s possible.”

“I will not——
”

“Really not? … Are you going to be
difficult, little one?
Are you going to sacrifice your beautiful eyelids and go slowly
blind? Are you going to force me to toast the soles
of your feet
at the gas-fire, and
drive chips of wood under your fingernails,
and do other crude things like that—before you come to your
senses? Really, you’ll be giving yourself a lot of
unnecessary
pain.
…”

And the Saint held the knife quite close to
the man’s eyes
and brought it downwards very slowly. The point gleamed
like a
lonely star, and the man stared at it, hypnotised, mute
with horror.
And Roger Conway was also hypnotised, and
stood like a man
carved in ice.

“Do you talk?” asked the Saint caressingly.

Again the man tried to scream, and again the
Saint’s fingers
choked the scream back into his windpipe. The Saint
brought the knife down farther, and the point of it actually pricked the
skin.