The Saint in Persuit (8 page)

As might have been predicted, the second attack wave lumbered on to the field as soon as the first had crunched to a temporary standstill. Arms flying, the bigger of the two strangers—obviously bringing into play all the subtle chiv-alric skills learned in a lifetime of a dockyard brawls—hurled himself into the combat. Hoping to achieve an outflanking triumph he lunged to whip a thick arm around the Saint’s throat from behind. But the Saint caught the arm before its trap-like action was completed, brought the elbow joint against the fulcrum of his shoulder, and all in one magnificently flowing gesture levered his huge assailant up and over and dropped all two hundred pounds of him flat on the pavement not far from the site of his colleague’s plunge.

The said colleague, in the meantime, was dazedly scrambling to his feet, clawing at the Saint’s coat. The bigger thug gasping for breath, grabbed for Simon’s ankle. The battle, though now distinctly onesided in favor of the outnumbered force, was far from over, and it swayed and thudded along the whole length of the dark arcade.

There was a fourth, unseen, participant in the episode, who then moved in to take advantage of the confusion for his own purposes. Only a single element in the drama interested him at all, and that was the white envelope which now lay abandoned in the deep shadows where the fight had begun. He waited his chance, then sidled swiftly along the stone wall, snatched the letter off the ground, and darted away again with an agility amazing in a man of his stout build.

He emerged into one of the side streets on which the alley opened, and the faint rays of a street lamp fell across the whiteness of his Vandyke beard. At the opposite end of the alley he could see the combatants silhouetted in an archway. One of them fell heavily and cried out, and in a moment of sudden alarm the plump man with the beard was afraid he had been seen. He turned and ran, and was still running when he rounded the corner leading on to the main street and ran almost directly into the unsuspecting arms of a pair of damp-shouldered policemen whose minds, until that moment, had been on nothing more violent than the latest international football match.

The bald and bearded runner, so obviously in full flight, knew that he had to come up with an instant explanation.

“Policia!” he cried breathlessly. “In there! Murder! Men fighting!”

His Portuguese left much to be desired so far as elegance of phrase was concerned, but the gist of his meaning was quite clear. The cops propped their caps more firmly into place and took off at a run, while the public-spirited civilian who had given the alarm was left behind shouting and pointing.

“In there! Someone is being killed!”

The policemen disappeared into the arched alley, and the bearded man, tucking the white envelope into an inside pocket, could not suppress a smile of unmitigated smugness. Then, like a busy fat crab, he scuttled away into the shadows.

The gendarmerie, meanwhile, had arrived on the scene of the crime with billy clubs waving, only to find a single tall unruffled man turning from two groaning hulks prostrated at his feet. Sizing up the situation instantly, they each grabbed one of the arms of the tall man and pulled him away from his victims.

“Villain!” keened one of the officers indignantly. “What are you doing assaulting these citizens?”

Simon was able to reply in faultlessly colloquial Portuguese.

“You’ve got it upside down, boys,” he answer calmly. “I’m the one who was getting assaulted.”

On the face of it his assertion was not obviously credible, and the guardians of public order can perhaps not be censured for escorting him into the light at the end of the alley and demanding to inspect his papers.

“You’ll see from my passport that I’m a simple tourist,” Simon assured them, with injured innocence. “Those thugs attacked me and tried to rob me. I’d suggest you grab hold of them instead of …”

He looked towards the men he had left polishing the cobblestones with their shirt fronts. They were strugging to their feet and setting a course which would take them as fast as possible from any opportunity to congratulate their uniformed rescuers.

The Saint pointed commandingly.

“As you’ll notice,” he said, “they aren’t waiting like honest characters to register a complaint. Personally, I intend to report your behavior to my embassy.”

The aristocratic appearance of their captive, as well as the evident justification of what he was saying, was enough to convince the policemen that they might very well be making a mistake of the sort that can have most embarrassing consequences. Without waiting to hear any elaboration of the details with which he would regale his embassy, they ordered him to wait where he was while they chased his attackers. He was only too glad to oblige, and as soon as the cops had taken off around the corner after their rapidly limping quarry he pulled out his fountain-pen flashlight and hurried to the spot where he had thrown Vicky Kinian’s letter.

He expected to see the envelope immediately, and it took him only a few seconds to realize that it was nowhere in the section of the alley where he had thrown it. And yet there was no chance that one of his sparring partners could have grabbed it; he was certain that he had kept them too occupied during the whole melee.

Simon whirled quickly and sprinted after the two policemen. Now that the rainstorm had passed there was no wind to have blown the envelope away, and the only other obvious possibility was that one of the cops had noticed it and snatched it up on the run.

In the narrow street beyond the alley, down to the left, the sounds of the chase were still near, and took the form of sharp shouts and a confused skidding of feet, at least some of them flat.

“In there! He can’t get out!”

“That way! The other one!”

As Simon raced on to the dimly lit scene it became clear that the two fugitives had split up, and that only one of them had had the foresight—or good luck—to pick a route which might conceivably lead to a prolongation of his malodorous career. The second one had made the error of getting himself cornered in a cul de sac full of garbage bins. The Saint arrived in time to see him—the little roach-like entity with the moustache—caught in the powerful beam of one of his pursuers’ electric torches, struggling with the closed rear door of an apartment building which formed the end of the architectural trap. He was shielding his face with one hand and clutching his long knife in the other.

The policemen immediately showed signs of recognition, if not of joy.

“Halt, you unprintable unspeakable!” yelled one of them.

“Halt or I’ll shoot!” shouted the other, snatching out an automatic, but still keeping a respectful distance.

The prodigal obviously anticipated that the Lisbon police force would stop depressingly short of barbequing a fatted calf in honor of his return to the land of the Godly, and in fact were more likely to barbeque him, and this no doubt caused him to panic. Instead of obeying the commands of his pursuers, he took the ungentlemanly and imprudent step of throwing his knife at them, hoping to make his getaway through the apartment building’s back entrance before they could recover their balance.

But there are days in everybody’s life when little things seem continually to go wrong, and it was such a day in the life of Pedro the Population-Adjuster. Little things like a wrong turning and a tightly locked door added up to a moment of acute inconvenience as a cop’s finger squeezed a trigger twice and caused two notable perforations in Pedro’s anatomy just above his hammered-silver belt buckle.

Pedro writhed to the ground and twitched to grotesquely sprawled stillness as the policemen strode to his side to pronounce their benediction.

“Misbegotten swine!”

“He should have had it long ago.”

The Saint intervened.

“I hate to intrude on your sorrow, boys,” he said, “but I wonder if either of you picked up a letter I dropped in the alley back there?”

The two officers became aware of his presence once again.

“Senhor!” one of them hailed him in congratulatory tones. “You were quite right. There is no blame on you. This pig is known to us, and we have finally caught him in one of his crimes!”

“To say the least,” Simon concurred, looking down at the bloodsoaked body at their feet. “I wonder why he was after me?”

“Oh, senhor, he would do anything—stick you up in a back street, kidnap your children, kill! Anything it would pay him to do, he would do. He has been in jail four times —since he was a boy.”

“Five times,” the other officer corrected.

“No, it was four. The last time—”

“And probably it ought to have been forty-five,” Simon cut in pacifically. “But now that he’s no longer a problem, I’m more interested in my letter. Did you happen to find it as you passed through the alley?”

“Letter? No, senhor. No letter.”

Both men shook their heads, confirming to each other that they had found nothing.

“But if you will come to the station with us, senhor, you can describe the other villain and answer questions that may produce …”

Simon declined politely and gave them a half-salute of farewell.

“I have already seen justice done,” he said. “I am satisfied—and there is a lady waiting for me who will be most unsatisfied if I am much later in meeting her.”

“But if you are wanted as a witness, senhor?”

He calmed them down by showing them a passport with a genuine photograph of himself on it and giving them the name of a hotel at which he was not staying. Having no complaint against him, and perhaps preferring to recite the epic of their deeds to their superiors without any burdensome touches of realism from a stranger, they let him go then, and as he walked away the last words that reached him were: “I will bet you a bottle of Ferreirinha that it was four times!”

Actually the Saint scarcely heard them. He was too preoccupied with the sudden new spine-tingling awareness that he was no longer a free-roving agent circling the perimeter of a situation and leisurely debating his own possible points of entry. Someone even farther outside and still beyond his ken was watching him.

Ill: How the Saint continued

the Pursuit, and was

Observed in his Turn.

“I hope you won’t think I’m rude,” Vicky Kinian said. “It sounds ridiculous to turn down an invitation to a night club on my first night in Portugal, but I’m absolutely bushed. I feel as if I hadn’t slept in a week.”

Curt Jaeger was as sympathetic as ever.

“I don’t blame you,” he said as he escorted her across the lobby of the Tagus. “And from the sound of what you told me at dinner you have an even more exhausting time ahead of you.”

Vicky nodded and wearily started up the stairs.

“I’m getting worn out just arguing with my conscience about the whole thing.”

“If I were you,” Jaeger told her, “I would go on and find this treasure while I was arguing with my conscience. It might be an amusing adventure, and if in the end you decide not to keep it, you should at least be entitled to a finder’s reward.”

His reasoning appealed to Vicky, since it allowed her to do what she wanted to do while telling herself that she was really not doing it.

“I’ll think about it,” she said when they had come to the door of her room. “Anyway, I’ll be going on as soon as I can arrange it.”

“Going on?” he asked.

“I might as well tell you, it’s such a coincidence and you’ve been so nice. I have to go to Switzerland next. I can’t see any harm in telling you that.”

Jaeger almost laughed.

“You do lead a merry chase,” he said. “But the fates seem to be conspiring to keep us together. Of course I too will be going to Switzerland, to my head office, when my business is finished here—which it almost is.”

“Well, I’m glad the fates brought us together here,” Vicky said. “The dinner and the champagne were delicious. And you were very kind to listen to my troubles.”

“Not troubles—opportunities,” he said. “And in case you should worry, let me assure you again that as a point of honour I am as anxious as you that no one else will ever learn what you have told me.”

They shook hands then and said goodnight. Jaeger went back down the stairs to his own room, while Vicky, faint with tiredness, unlocked her door and pushed on the light switch just inside.

For an instant she thought that the strain of the past few days was making her see things, for lounging perfectly relaxed in an armchair half-facing the door was the tall dev-astatingly magnetic man she had noticed downstairs in the lobby that afternoon.

She froze, stared, and her next thought was that she had walked into the wrong room.

“I’m so sorry …” she began, but before she could even start to retreat she collected her wits enough to notice a pair of her own shoes on the floor near the bed, and her cosmetics on the dressing table.

By now the visitor had risen unhurriedly to his feet.

“You needn’t be sorry,” he said in a soothing tone. “Please come in.”

Vicky’s impulse was to turn back and call for help, but the man’s manner and the almost supernatural holding-power of his blue eyes—as clear and bright as a tropical sea even in the yellowish illumination of the hotel room-kept her where she was, poised on the threshold.

“This is my room,” she said unnecessarily. “What are you doing here?”

The man seemed to resist the temptation to make some lighthearted joke.

“I’ll be glad to answer that question, Vicky, but it’ll take a little while,” he told her. “If you’ll please come in and sit down I’ll tell you. Right now you look like a doe ready to bolt for her life.”

“I am ready to bolt,” Vicky assured him. “You tell me what you want, and I’ve got plenty of wide open spaces behind me in case I don’t like what I hear.”

He shrugged.

“At least you’re willing to listen,” he said. “We’re making progress.”

“I think I’ll get the manager,” the girl said uncertainly.

The lean, towering man looked around innocently.

“If you need help, I’ll be glad to oblige. What’s the problem?”

She did not return his glimmer of a smile, but she was no longer quite so tensed for flight.