Brighter Buccaneer (26 page)

“Well,” he said bluntly, “have you made up your mind?”

“I should like to come, Mr. Lamantia.”

“Julian,” said Mr. Lamantia attractively, “will do. Haven’t you got a first name-Miss Allfield?”

“Kathleen,” said the girl, with a smile. “Usually Kate.”

The name meant nothing to Mr. Lamantia, who did his best to hold aloof from ordinary criminal circles. He said he preferred Kathleen.

“When do you go?” she asked.

“This afternoon.”

“But you told me —”

“I’ve had to change my plans. I had a cable from Buenos Aires at my hotel this morning-I must get there as soon as I possibly can.”

He had not taken her into his confidence. That could be done later, by delicate and tactful stages, if he felt like prolonging the liaison. His projected journey to South America had been discussed as a purely business affair, in connection with vague talk of a gigantic loan to the Argentine National Railways.

“It would be a wonderful trip for you,” he said. “New places, new people, no end of new entertainments. Never mind about a lot of luggage. You can go home now and pack everything you want to take from London; anything else you need you can buy at Lisbon.”

She hesitated for a few moments, and then turned her deep brown eyes back to him.

“All right.”

His gaze stripped her in quiet elation, but he did not try to make love to her. There would be plenty of time for that. He put on his hat again and went home to finish the last items of his packing; and when he had gone Kate Allfield picked up his private telephone and called the Saint’s apartment.

Peter Quentin answered it, and returned after a few minutes to the bathroom, where the Saint was washing his razor.

“It’s today,” he said. “The boat train leaves at two-thirty, and Kate is supposed to be meeting Julian for lunch at the Savoy first. Kate,” said Peter reflectively, unaware that the same thought had struck Mr. Lamantia, “isn’t nearly so nice as Kathleen.”

Simon turned off the taps that were filling his bath, threw off his pyjamas, and sank into the warm water.

“You have been seeing quite a lot of her lately, haven’t you?” he murmured.

“Only on business,” said Peter, with unnecessary clearness. “After she put us on to this stunt of Julian’s, and volunteered to do the inside work —”

“And the new vocabulary, Peter? Did you get that out of a book?”

The Saint’s mocking blue eyes swerved down from the ceiling and aimed directly at the other’s face. Peter went red.

“I think I did get it from her,” he said. “But that’s nothing.”

Simon picked up the soap and lathered his legs thoughtfully.

“In the preliminary palaver of that Star of Mandalay affair, she told me she was about to retire.”

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t,” said Peter judicially.

“I don’t see why anyone shouldn’t retire,” said the Saint, “when they’ve made a useful pile. Look at you.”

“Why look at me?”

“You’ve done pretty well since we teamed up. About forty thousand quid, I make it.”

These chronicles have only attempted a few incidents in the Saint’s career that were distinguished by some odd twist of luck or circumstance or ingenuity. His crimes were always legion; and it is often hard for the historian to select the exploits which seem most worthy of commemoration.

“I owe you a lot,” said Peter.

“Brickdust,” said the Saint tersely.

He spread the lather over his arms and chest and shoulders, and submerged himself again. Then he said:
“Peter, I let you come in with me because you wanted to and you’d lost your job and you had to live somehow. Now you’ve got forty thousand quid, three thousand a year or more if you invest it skillfully, and you don’t need a job. You don’t need to run to seed in an office. You’re not rich, but you can have all the fun in the world. You can go anywhere, do almost anything you like within reason. If I may talk to you like an uncle-don’t be the pitcher that goes once too often to the well.”

“You’ve never stopped,” said Peter.

The Saint grinned.

“I never could. While I’m strong and alive, I’ve got to go on. When I stop crashing about the world and raising hell, I might as well die. Excitement, danger, living on tiptoe all the time- that’s what life means to me. But it isn’t the same for you.”

“What will you do now?”

“I’m blowed if I know. I think I shall travel south, and put my trust in the Lord. Something’s sure to happen. Something always does happen, if you go out and challenge it. Adventure never comes. You have to lug it in by the ears. You might settle down in a nice house in England for fifty years, and nothing would ever happen. A few people would die, a few people would get married, they might change over from bridge to canasta or back again, the man next door might run off with his wife’s sister and the grocer’s assistant might run off with the till-that’s all. But you won’t find adventure unless you look for it, and that means living dangerously. Sometimes when I hear fools complaining that life is dull, I want to advise them to knock their bank manager on the head and grab a handful of money and run. After a fortnight, if they could keep running that long, they’d know what life meant. … I expect I shall do something like that, and the chase will start all over again. But somewhere in the south it will be, Peter. Do you know, when I woke up this morning it was cold enough for me to see my breath going up like steam, and when that happens I feel the old call of long days and sunshine and blue skies.”

He stood up, twitched out the plug, and turned the tap of the cold shower. For a few seconds he stood under it, letting it stream down over him and laughing at the stinging brunt of it, rubbing the water over his arms and thighs and chest in a sheer pagan delight of hardiness; and then he climbed out and reached for a towel and cigarette, and his wet hand smote Peter between the shoulder-blades.

“And I feel like a million dollars on it,” he said. “Come on- let’s go and be rude to Julian!”

In a surprisingly short space of time he was dressed, immaculate and debonair as ever, and they walked up Piccadilly together.

“No alibi?” asked Peter.

“Why bother?” smiled the Saint. “If anything could possibly go wrong, Julian would have a swell job trying to explain exactly why he had the entire capital of the firm in a bag in his room, with a one-way passage booked to Buenos Aires-and I don’t think he’d take it on.”

He had a faultless sense of time, and Kate Allfield had also learned that in their profession punctuality may be more precious than many alibis. She had just paid off her taxi when they arrived at the Savoy; and Simon could understand the foolishness of Julian Lamantia no less than the foolishness of Peter Quentin. He had always thought her lovely, even at that first meeting at the airport when he had only just discovered the hypnotic powers of her cigarettes in time; and the affair of the Star of Mandalay had shown him something else about her that he saluted in his own way. But it was Peter Quentin’s hand that she touched first; and Simon knew that with this adventure one more adventurer came to an end.

They went in together, and Peter and Simon stood aside while the girl approached the hall porter and had her name telephoned up to Mr. Lamantia’s room. The reply came back, as they had expected, that she was to be shown up; and the two men strolled along and joined her quite naturally as she was escorted to the lift.

They got out on the third floor, and she stopped the pageboy who accompanied them with a smile.

“I know the way,” she said.

Simon slipped a half-crown into the midget’s hand, and they brushed past him. In a few yards they had the corridor to themselves.

“You might wander downstairs and drift out, Kathleen,” said the Saint. “Go to the Mayfair. We’ll join you there in about half an hour.”

She nodded; and Peter’s fingers slipped away from hers as they passed on.

They reached Mr. Lamantia’s room, and Simon lifted his hand and knocked.

Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr. Lamantia’s emotions at greater length; but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr. Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it. With eighty-five thousand pounds in banknotes of small denominations in his bag, an express service to the tall timber mapped out in front of him, and his aesthetic soul ripe with the remembered beauty and tacit acquiescence of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he opened his door with the vision of her face rising before his eyes, and saw the vision smashed into a whirling kaleidoscope of fragments that came together again at the lean smiling figure of the man who had once come striding through the wet night to drag him out of his car and immerse him in the Thames. His eyes bulged and his jaw dropped; and then the lean” figure’s hand pushed him kindly but firmly backwards and followed him on into the room, and Peter Quentin closed the door behind them and put his back to it.

“Well, Julian,” said the Saint breezily, “how are all the little stocks and shares today?”

A tinge of colour squeezed slowly back into Mr. Lamantia’s ashen face. When he had first seen the figures of men outside his door he had had one dreadful instant of the fear that perhaps after all he had left his retirement too late.

“How did you get up here?” he stammered.

“We flew,” said the Saint affably.

Suddenly his left fist shot over with the whole weight of his shoulder behind it. The upper knuckles came on the line of Mr. Lamantia’s twitching mouth, the lower knuckles on the point of his jaw-bone, clean and crisp in the horizontal centre of his face; and Mr. Lamantia had a hazy feeling that his brain had been knocked off its moorings and was revolving slowly and painfully inside his skull. When it had settled down again to a rhythmic but stationary singing, he became aware that the automatic which he had been trying to pull from his hip pocket was gone.

“Tie him up, Peter,” said the Saint calmly.

Peter Quentin came off the door and produced a coil of stout cord from under his coat. Mr. Lamantia went down fighting, but Peter’s muscular handling rapidly reduced him to mere verbal protest, which was largely biological in tone.

“I’ll get you for this, you swine,” was his only printable comment.

“And gag him,” said the Saint.

The process was satisfactorily completed under the Saint’s expert supervision. Simon had found Mr. Lamantia’s cigar-case; and while the knots were being tested he talked and smoked.

“I notice that the welkin hasn’t rung with your shrieks for help, Julian. Can it be that you have something on your conscience? … I’m sorry about all these formalities, but we don’t really want a disturbance, and in the heat of the moment you might have been tempted to do something rash which we should all regret. The staff are sure to find you in a year or two, and then you can explain that some pals did this to you for a joke. I’m sure you’ll decide that’s the best story to tell, but you need a little time to think it over.”

He strolled round the room examining the items of Mr. Lamantia’s baggage, and eventually chose the smallest bag.

“Is this the one, Peter?”

“That’s it.”

Simon turned the lock with an instrument he had in his pocket, and glanced inside. The notes were there, in thick bundles, exactly as they had been passed across the counter of the bank. With a sigh of righteous satisfaction the Saint closed the attache case again and picked it up.

“Let’s go.”

He bowed politely to the speechless man on the bed, replaced the excellent cigar between his teeth, and sauntered to the door. Without a care in the world he opened it-and looked straight into the face of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

If there had been any competition for grades of paralysis in that doorway, it would have been a thankless task for the judge. Mr. Lamantia had already given his own rendering of a man being kicked in the mid-section by an invisible mule; and now for two or three strung seconds Simon Templar and Chief Inspector Teal gazed at each other in an equally cataleptic immobility. Out in the great world around them, ordinary policemen scurried innocently about their beats, the London traffic dashed hither and thither at a rate of hundreds of yards an hour, the surface of the earth was rotating at five hundred miles every half-hour, whizzing around the sun at seventy-six miles a minute, and tearing through space with the rest of the solar system at over twelve miles per second; but in the midst of all this bustle of cosmic activity those two historic antagonists stared at each other across a yard of empty air without the movement of a muscle.

On Mr. Teal’s rubicund features showed no visible emotion beyond the isolated, slow, incredulous expansion of his eyes: the Saint’s tanned face was debonairly impassive: but behind the Saint’s steady blue eyes his brain was covering ground at a speed it had already been required to make before.

Once before, and once only, in Simon’s hectic career, Teal had caught him red-handed; but then there had been a perfect alibi prepared, a grim challenge ready, and a clear getaway in the offing. At other times, of course, there had been close calls, but they had also been anticipated and legislated for in advance. And, with that alibi or getaway at hand, events had taken their natural course. Teal had been baited, defied, dared, punched in the tummy, or pulled by the nose: those were the rich rewards of foresight. But there was none of that now.

And the Saint smiled.

Teal’s right hand was still poised in mid-air, raised for the official and peremptory knock that he had been about to deliver when the door opened so astonishingly in front of him: he might have forgotten its existence. But the Saint reached out and drew it down and shook it, with that incomparable Saintly smile lighting his face again with as gay a carelessness as it had ever held.

“Come in, Claud,” he said. “You’re just in time.”

And with that breaking of the silence Teal came back to earth with a jolt that closed his mouth almost with a snap. He advanced solidly into the room, and another burly man in plain clothes who was with him followed him in. They took in the scene in a couple of purposeful glances.