The Saint Closes the Case (6 page)

The Saint was looking out of the window.

“No one I know,” he answered.
“He kind of horned in on
the party. You’ll have the whole yarn in a
moment. I phoned
Norman directly after I phoned you; he came staggering
under the castle walls a few
seconds ago.”

A peal on the bell announced that Norman Kent
had
reached the door of the apartment, and the Saint went out to
admit him.
Mr. Kent carried a copy of the
Evening Record,
and his very first
words showed how perfectly he understood
the Saint’s eccentricities.

“If I thought you’d been anywhere near
Esher last
night——
”

“You’ve been sent for to hear a speech
on the subject,” said
the Saint.

He waved Norman to a chair, and seated himself
on the
edge of a littered table which Patricia Holm was trying to
reduce to
some sort of order. She came up and stood beside
him, and he slid an
arm round her waist.

“It was like this,” he said.

And he plunged into the story without
preface, for the time
when prefaces had been necessary now lay far
behind those
four. Nor did he need to explain the motives for any of
his actions. In clipped, slangy, quiet, and yet vivid sentences he
told what
he had seen in the greenhouse of the house near
Esher; and the two men
listened without interruption.

Then he stopped, and there was a short
silence.

“It’s certainly a marvellous
invention,” said Roger Conway
at length, smoothing his fair hair.
“But what is it?”

“The devil.”

Conway blinked.

“Explain yourself.”

“It’s what the
Clarion
called
it,” said the Saint; “something
we haven’t got simple
words to describe. A scientist will pre
tend to understand
it, but whether he will or not is another
matter. The best he
can tell us is that it’s a trick of so modifying the structure of a gas that
it can be made to carry a tre
mendous charge of electricity, like a
thunder-cloud does— only it isn’t a bit like a thunder-cloud. It’s also
something to
do with a ray—only it isn’t a ray. If you like, it’s
something
entirely impossible—only it happens to exist. And the
point
is that this
gas just provides the flimsiest sort of sponge in the
atmosphere, and Vargan knows how to saturate the pores in
the
sponge with millions of volts and amperes of compressed
lightning.”

“And when the goat got into the cloud——
”

“It was exactly the same as if it had butted
into a web of
live wires. For the fraction of a second that goat burnt
like a
scrap of coal in a blast furnace. And then it was ashes. Sweet
idea,
isn’t it?”

Norman Kent, the dark and saturnine, took his
eyes off the
ceiling. He was a most unsmiling man, and he spoke little
and always to the point.

“Lester Hume Smith has seen it,”
said Norman Kent. “And
Sir Roland Hale. Who else?”

“Angel Face,” said the Saint;
“Angel Face saw it. The man
our friend Mr. Teal assumes to have been one
of us—-not hav
ing seen him wagging a Colt at me. An adorable pet, built
on
the lines of something between Primo Carena and an over
grown
gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—other
wise I
mightn’t be here. But which country he’s working for is
yet to be discovered.”

Roger Conway frowned.

“You think——
”

“Frequently,” said the Saint.
“But that was one think I
didn’t need a cold towel round my head for.
Vargan may have
thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the
front
page, but he got enough publicity to make any wideawake
foreign
agent curious.”

He tapped a cigarette gently on his thumb-nail
and lighted
it with slow and exaggerated deliberation. In such
pregnant
silences of irrelevant pantomime he always waited for the
seeds he had sown to germinate spontaneously in the brains of
his audience.

Conway spoke first.

“If there should be another war——
”

“Who is waiting for a chance to make
war?” asked Norman
Kent.

The Saint picked up a selection of the papers
he had been
reading before they came, and passed them over. Page
after
page was scarred with blue pencillings. He had marked many
strangely
separated things—a proclamation of Mussolini, the speech of a French delegate
before the League of Nations, the
story of a break in the Oil Trust
involving the rearrangement of two hundred million pounds of capital, the
announcement of a colossal merger of chemical interests, the latest move
ments of
warships, the story of an outbreak of rioting in India,
the story
of an inspired bull raid on the steel market, and
much else that he had
found of amazing significance, even down to the arrest of an English tourist
hailing from Man
chester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle, for
punching
the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden. Roger Conway and
Norman Kent
read, and were incredulous.

“But people would never stand for another
war so soon,”
said Conway. “Every country is disarming——
”

“Bluffing with everything they know, and
hoping that one day somebody’ll be taken in,” said the Saint. “And
every na
tion scared stiff of the rest, and ready to arm again at
any no
tice. The people never make or want a war—it’s sprung on
them by the statesmen with the
business interests behind them,
and
somebody writes a ‘We-Don’t-Want-to-Lose-You-but-We-
Think-you-Ought-to-Go’ song for the brass bands to
play, and millions of poor fools go out and die like heroes without ever
being quite sure what it’s all about. It’s
happened before. Why shouldn’t it happen again?”

“People,” said Norman Kent,
“may have learnt their les
son.”

Simon swept an impatient gesture.

“Do people learn lessons like that so
easily? The men who
could teach them are a past generation now. How many are
left who are young enough to convince our generation? And
even if we
are on the crest of a wave of literature about the
horrors of war, do
you think that cuts any ice? I tell you, I’ve
listened till I’m
tired to people of our own age discussing
those books and
plays—and I know they cut no ice at all. It’d
be a miracle if they
did. The mind of a healthy young man is
too optimistic. It
leaps to the faintest hint of glory, and finds
it so easy to forget
whole seas of ghastliness. And I’ll tell you
more.
…”

And he told them of what he had heard from
Barney Ma
lone.

“I’ve given you the facts,” he
said. “Now, suppose you saw
a man rushing down the street with a contorted
face, scream
ing his head off, foaming at the mouth, and brandishing a
large
knife dripping with blood. If you like to be a fool, you
can tell
yourself that it’s conceivable that his face is contorted
because
he’s trying to swallow a bad egg, he’s screaming be
cause someone has
trodden on his pet corn, he’s foaming at
the mouth because
he’s just eaten a cake of soap, and he’s just
killed a chicken for
dinner and is tearing off to tell his aunt all about it. On the other hand,
it’s simpler and safer to assume that he’s a homicidal maniac. In the same
way, if you like to be fools, and refuse to see a complete story in what
spells a complete story to me,
you can go home.”

Roger Conway swung one leg over the arm of
his chair and
rubbed
his chin reflectively.

“I suppose,” he said, “our job
is to find Tiny Tim and see
that he doesn’t pinch the invention while the
Cabinet are still
deciding what they’re going to do about it?”

The Saint shook his head.

For once, Roger Conway, who had always been
nearest to
the Saint in all things, had failed to divine his
leader’s train of
thought; and it was Norman Kent, that aloof and silent
man,
who voiced the inspiration of breath-taking genius—or mad
ness—that
had been born in Simon Templar’s brain eight
hours before.

“The Cabinet,” said Norman Kent, from
behind a screen
of cigarette smoke, “might find the decision taken
out of their
hands … without the intervention of Tiny Tim.
…”

Simon Templar looked from face to face.

For a moment he had an odd feeling that it
was like meet
ing the other three again for the first time, as
strangers. Patri
cia Holm was gazing through the window at the blue sky
above the
roofs of Brook Street, and who is to say what vision
she saw there? Roger
Conway, the cheerful and breezy, waited
in silence, the smoke
of his neglected cigarette staining his
fingers. Norman Kent waited also, serious
and absorbed.

The Saint turned his eyes to the painting over
the mantel
piece, and did not see it.

“If we do nothing but suppress Tiny
Tim,” he said, “Eng
land will possess a weapon of war
immeasurably more power
ful than all the armaments of any other
nation. If we stole
that away, you may argue that sooner or later some other
na
tion will probably discover something just as deadly, and
then
England will be at a disadvantage.”

He hesitated, and then continued in the same
quiet tone.

“But there are hundreds of Tiny Tims,
and we can’t sup
press them all. No secret like that has ever been kept for
long;
and when the war came we might very well find the enemy
prepared to
use our own weapon against us.”

Once again he paused.

“I’m thinking of all the men who’ll fight
in that next war,
and the women who love them. If you saw a man drowning,
would you refuse to rescue him
because, for all you know, you
might only be
saving him for a more terrible death years
later?”

There was another silence; and in it the
Saint seemed to
straighten and strengthen and grow, imperceptibly and yet
tremendously,
as if something gathered about him which actu
ally filled every
corner of the room and made him bulk like
a preposterously
normal giant. And, when he resumed, his
voice was as soft and
even as ever; but it seemed to ring like a blast of trumpets.

“There are gathered here,” he said,
“three somewhat shop-soiled musketeers—and a blessed angel. Barring the
blessed
angel, we have all of us, in the course of our young lives, broken half
the Commandments and most of the private laws of
several countries.
And yet, somehow, we’ve contrived to keep
intact certain
ridiculous ideals, which to our perverted minds are a justification for our
sins. And fighting is one of those
ideals. Battle and sudden death. In
fact, we must be about the
last three men in the wide world who ought to
be interfering with the makings of a perfectly good war. Personally, I sup
pose we
should welcome it—for our own private amusement.
But there aren’t many
like us. There are too many—far too
many—who are utterly different. Men and
boys who don’t
want war. Who don’t live for battle, murder, and sudden
death. Who
wouldn’t be happy warriors, going shouting and singing and swaggering into the
battle. Who’d just be herded
into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter,
drunk with a miser
able and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few
days
of squalid agony and die in the dirt. Fine young lives that
don’t
belong to our own barbarous god of battles… . And we’ve tripped over the
plans for the next sacrifice, partly by
luck and partly by
our own brilliance. And here we are. We
don’t give a damn for
any odds or any laws. Will you think m
e quite mad if I put it to you that
three shabby, hell-busting
outlaws might, by the grace of God …”