Saint and the Fiction Makers (12 page)

‘How did you know?’

‘You forget,’ Simon replied. ‘I wrote the books. Warlock may be a brilliant organizer, but he’s no original thinker. Everything he’s done up to now has been based on what he’s read.’

‘You’re not telling me anything.’

‘Okay, tough girl, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘About what?’ she asked.

‘About what happens in the new book.’

‘The one you’re supposedly writing?’

‘Yes.’

Galaxy compressed her lips as if trying to control her voice.

‘Well,’ she said irritably, ‘what happens?’

‘You never get the half million. Warlock double-crosses you.’

Galaxy looked lost for a moment, then exasperated.

‘Don’t waste your breath,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that movie twenty times.’

‘Which movie is that?’ Simon asked guilelessly.

‘The one where the hero turns the bad characters against one another by making them think they’re planning to double-cross one another. I’m not that dumb.’

‘At least you’re smart enough to see who the hero is,’ Simon rejoined.

He and the girl continued their walk. His probings had convinced him that however eager she was to please him, she had no discernible intention of risking her neck or her promised half million pounds by overstepping the limits which Warlock had imposed.

‘Why can’t you be happy?’ she asked in a softer and more persuasive voice than she had used for the past several minutes. ‘Why fight it? Write a happy ending for everybody.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Simon said, but he was not particularly listening.

His eye had just picked out the window of his room, whose location he had carefully pinpointed before he left it. There was nothing remarkable about it. It was just like all the other windows in the front of the house. But there was a much more humble feature of architecture near it which the Saint found completely fascinating: a fat black drainpipe running vertically from beneath the eaves above his window to the ground thirty feet below. That venerable relic of twentieth-century plumbing’s adolescence would ordinarily have been of no interest whatsoever to anybody, but to the Saint it was the closest thing he had yet seen to a flaw in Warlock’s comfortable prison.

He pretended to have noticed nothing, and turned his attention to the front drive, which led from a double garage beside the house to a locked wire gate inside the older wooden one of the stone wall. One side of the garage was open, and outside it Frug was washing an immense black limousine of the kind sported by embassies and departments of foreign affairs. Frug self-consciously attended to his work and avoided watching the Saint and Galaxy.

‘Is the gate electrified too?’ Simon asked his companion.

‘If you know so much, you must know that,’ she said archly.

‘It’s electrified,’ said the Saint. He nodded towards the limousine. ‘And that hearse over there—it’s from Hurricane Eight, I assume.’

‘Right. It’s got everything just the way you described it.’

‘Amazing. I’d like a ride in it.’

Galaxy smiled.

‘I’m sure you would—but you’d have a lot better chance of taking one if you’d get down to work instead of worrying about escaping.’

Simon shook his head and sighed as he turned towards the front entrance of the house.

‘That’s a woman for you—always brimming with practical suggestions. Work brings freedom, does it? I’m afraid I’ve got to admit it: Warlock has me stymied. I can’t do much but play along and hope it all works out for the best.’

Galaxy hugged his arm and snuggled close to him.

‘You’ll be glad,’ she assured him. ‘It is best this way.’

Simon’s secret thoughts found expression only in another brief glance at the black drainpipe which ran from roof to ground. Then, behind the glass of one of the ground floor windows, he glimpsed the face of Warlock peering out at him, like a warning personified.

‘You can be sure,’ he murmured, ‘I’ll try to make everything work out for the best.’

‘For me too?’ Galaxy insisted.

‘For you especially,’ Simon said, as earnestly as he could.

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW AMITY CAME TO BED, AND NERO JONES LOST A SHOE

1

An observer looking in on the Saint’s bedroom that night—as one was—would have thought he had nothing in mind but sleep. He came out of his bathroom magnificently arrayed in one of the dozen pairs of pyjamas contributed by Warlock to his wardrobe—a composite of sunsets, peacocks’ tails, and fireworks displays which only a man of icy nerves and considerable humour could have worn without flinching— and made a circuit of the room turning out all the lights. When only the single reading lamp on the bed’s headboard was left, he stretched, yawned, and gave the room a last glance.

There was a half-filled sheet of paper in the typewriter, and a table nearby was littered with more sheets of paper covered with scrawl and figures the sight of which must have gladdened Warlock’s heart if he had looked in on them via television before his retirement. It was just as well, for the sake of his gladdened heart, that he did not look at the papers more closely, since the figures were meaningless and the scrawl was largely illegible.

Except for the papers and some minor disarrangements of the furniture which further attested to Amos Klein’s and Amity Little’s labours on the Hermetico project, the room was as it had been in the morning … with two important exceptions. At nine that evening, as sunset had faded from the sky, a steel shutter, its movement preceded by an alarm bell reminiscent of those sounded on ships during the testing of watertight doors, had slid down over Simon’s window and clanked firmly into place with the authoritative sound of something that had come to stay until it was ready to leave. At the same time, as the Saint knew without seeing, windows all over the building were undergoing the same sealing process, as were the outer doors.

The presence of the tight steel shutter over the bedroom window was one of the two changes which had taken place since morning. The second was the fact that the door between Simon’s and Amity Little’s room was open. That was the result of no oversight on S.W.O.R.D.‘s part, but of a convincing and passionate argument on Simon’s. He could not work, he insisted, without the presence of his friend and secretary, and he often did his best work in the middle of the night. While other men slept away their drab little lives, his brain would suddenly explode in a sparkling shower of ideas which cried out for immediate transplantation to paper. Without Amity on constant call he could not guarantee that such nocturnal eruptions would not dissipate into outer darkness, lost forever—and with them Warlock’s dreams of wealth and power.

Warlock, convinced by house telephone, had seen the logic of the argument and could think of no special danger in granting Simon’s request. Since there was no chance of escape anyway, what could be the harm in allowing the eccentric artist whatever companion he desired?

So Amity, her room already darkened, waited until Simon’s would be the same.

He gave a last yawn for the benefit of the television monitor, then drew the heavy curtains all around his bed and climbed into the tentlike shelter. Although the reading lamp inside the canopy was still on, he knew that from the point of view of the television eye the room was in total darkness. He had satisfied himself already that there was no lens in his bed, but there was a microphone in what appeared to be a coin-sized decorative grille in the base of the reading lamp.

In Simon’s pyjama shirt pocket were several Band-aids he had taken from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom—which was thoughtfully equipped with everything from cologne to Milk of Magnesia. He tore the backing off one of them, coughing as he did so. He had already prepared a thick pad of facial tissue, also supplied in the bathroom. Coughing several more times, he then let his breathing become deep and regular. Then, very slowly, he placed the pad of tissue over the microphone aperture and taped it into place with the Band-aid. A second piece of adhesive completed the seal, and that particular microphone was deaf.

Next, the Saint turned out the reading lamp, putting the room in total darkness, and left his bed. Wary of other microphones still active, he crept across the rug to his desk and felt for the small tape recorder he had left in one corner. All he had to do then was to cough to cover the sound of depressing the playback switch. The tape began to move. He could feel the turning of the spool. Then he heard the sound of his own breathing coming from the loudspeaker. A moment later he heard a cough and a restless rustling of cloth. It was a production he had carried out carefully during the afternoon while he and Amity had worked on the Hermetico project. The tape contained nothing for forty-five minutes except sounds of breathing and occasional coughing. By the time it fell silent the Saint and Amity—hopefully—would be miles away.

Simon went back to his canopied bed and waited in absolute blackness until he heard a movement of the curtains and Amity crawled in beside him.

‘It’s me,’ she whispered directly into his ear. ‘Surprise. Now let’s see if I can guess who “me” is.:

‘Rat. Just concentrate on getting us out of this padded cell.’

Simon made certain the curtains were drawn tightly. He turned on the reading light. Amity, fully dressed in mini-skirt, sweater, and low-heeled shoes, sat up self-consciously.

‘Literature makes strange bedfellows,’ he remarked. ‘Do you have the fingernail scissors?’

‘Yes.’

Simon stood up on the mattress with the small pair of sharply pointed scissors in one hand. With the other hand he grasped the velvet roof of the canopy.

‘Now turn out the light,’ he whispered.

The following stage of the operation was carried out in silence. Simon worked the scissors through the cloth above him and slowly cut out a circle of the material roughly two feet in diameter. He handed the piece of cloth down to Amity, who held his legs to steady him during the next part of his work.

He had already ascertained during the afternoon that the ceiling was not the original, which probably had been plaster long cracked with age, but was modern plasterboard in two by two foot squares nailed directly to the beams.

‘Are you sure,’ he had said to Amity in the afternoon during one of their later dances, ‘that S.W.O.R.D. doesn’t have some sort of an alarm system rigged to the ceilings?’

‘I’m not sure of anything,’ she had answered rather emotionally. ‘Do you think I can read Warlock’s mind? Do you think I built the place or something?’

‘In any of your books, was the ceiling rigged?’ he had asked firmly.

‘No, I never thought of that.’

‘Not very bright.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Be grateful,’ Simon had told her soothingly. ‘That little oversight may save our lives.’

Now, however, as he actually brought the point of the scissors into contact with one of the cracks between sections of plasterboard, he felt more hope than confidence. Could he be certain that Warlock would have followed Amos Klein’s works slavishly enough to include even the oversights in the construction of his headquarters? There was no guarantee that the first penetration of the scissors, or the first prying away of a section of plasterboard, would not result in a deafening and potentially deadly eruption of alarms and pounding feet in hallways all over the building.

Simon slipped the point of the scissors between the adjoining pieces of ceiling material until he felt the scissors press against the wooden beams to which the plasterboard was nailed. There was no alarm. Not breathing, but hearing the sound of his own breathing from the tape recorder, Simon cautiously moved the scissors to one side, using them as a lever to pry the board from the wooden beam. Instinctively he worked slowly, as if he thought he could slam the board back into place at the first sound of ringing bells and thereby avoid detection, even though he knew that one split second of alarm would guarantee catastrophe at this point.

Still, he worked slowly, and not only through an unreasoning desire to avoid an alarm which, if it existed, could not be avoided, but because of the necessity for silence. Three nails held the square of plasterboard to a beam on each of its sides, which meant that the Saint, with his tiny pair of scissors, had to work loose six nails without a squeak of metal in wood nor a rattle of the already loosened edges of the board against the beams. Envying the recorded ease with which his lungs had enjoyed their oxygen that afternoon, he breathed with silent caution and eased the nails from their seats in the wood.

The next to the last was stubborn. It had no intention of budging without a fight, and when it did it creaked from the hard wood with what sounded to Simon’s ears like the legendary shriek of a mandrake torn living from the earth.

‘Shh!’ said Amity.

Simon restricted his reaction to vivid mental images of Amity hanging by her thumbs from the ceiling of Warlock’s subterranean torture chamber. Silently he passed down the square of plasterboard, and his companion slipped it under the bed.

‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘up you go.’

He formed a stirrup with his hands in order to boost her through the hole in the ceiling. She steadied one of her feet there.

‘Ready,’ she whispered.

‘Down!’ Simon snapped.

‘What?’

‘Someone’s coming.’

Simon dropped Amity on to the bed without much regard for how she landed. The footsteps he had heard approaching in the corridor were at the door. There were four rapid knocks.

‘Keep still,’ Simon whispered to Amity. ‘Get your clothes off, and if anybody pokes his head in here try to keep his eyes on you and hope he doesn’t notice the hole in the ceiling.’

Amity’s protesting gasps were cut short as he rolled quickly from the bed, drawing the curtains behind him. Almost blind in the darkness, he managed to locate the tape recorder and slap down the ‘off button just as a gentle ping announced the unlocking of his room’s door. As it opened, he staggered bleary-eyed into the fan of bright light that came in from the hall.

‘What is it?’ he mumbled. ‘What’s happening?’

The ample form of Bishop presented itself on the threshold.