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Authors: Leslie Charteris

Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Fiction, #Traditional British, #Saint (Fictitious Character)

Saint Errant (2 page)

BOOK: Saint Errant
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“Only a little.”

She turned the stem of her wineglass between her fingers, looking at him quietly.

“Maybe I am. But have you ever heard of the Saint?”

“The Robin Hood of Modem Crime?” murmured Simon, with only the faintest lift of an eyebrow for expression.

“I think it’s the sort of thing he’d do,” she said. “It’s justice, even if it’s against the law. I wish I could meet him. He’d understand. I think he’d say it was worth taking a chance on. You’re very understanding, too, .stranger. You’ve listened to me awfully patiently, and it’s helped a lot. And now you shall talk about anything else you like, and will you please forget it all?”

Simon Templar smiled.

He poured out the last of the wine, and took up his glass. Over the rim of it his clear blue eyes raked the girl with a cavalier challenge that matched his devil-may-care smile and the mocking slant of his brows. His face was alight suddenly.

“I don’t propose to forget, Judith,” he said. “I am the Saint; and the safe hasn’t been made that I can’t open. Nor has any thing else been thought of that I can’t do. We’ll go to Westmount together!”

“This is the place,” said the girl.

Simon switched off the engine and let the car coast to a stop under the lee of the hedge. It was her car-she had been pre pared for that. She had telephoned from the restaurant and it had been fueled and waiting for them at the garage.

Burt Northwade’s home, an unwieldy mansion in the Napoleonic style, stood on a slight rise of ground some distance back from the road, in the center of its extensive and pleasant grounds.

Rising to sit on the door of the convertible, with one foot on the seat, Simon could see the solid rectangle of its upper part painted in dull black on a smudged gray-blue sky. He felt that he knew every corner of it as if he had lived there for years, from the descriptions she had given him and the rough plans she had drawn on the back of the menu, familiarizing him with the configurations of rooms and corridors while their coffee grew cold and neither of them cared. That had been a time of delight shared in adventure which he would always like to re member; but now it was over, and the adventure went on.

It was a night without moon or stars, and yet not utterly dark; perfect for the purpose. She saw the clean-cut lines of his face, recklessly etched in the burst of light as he kindled a cigarette.

“I still don’t know why you should do this for me,” she said.

“Because it’s a game after my own heart,” he answered. “Northwade is a bird I’ve had ideas of my own about for some time. And as for our present object-well, no one could have thought of a story that would have been more likely to fetch me a thousand miles to see it through.”

“I feel I ought to be coming with you.”

He drew smoke into his lungs, and with it the sweet smell of green leaves.

“This sort of thing is my job, and I’ve had more practice you.”

“But suppose Uncle Burt wakes up.”

“I shall immediately hypnotize him so that he falls into a deep sleep again.”

“Or suppose the servants catch you.”

“I shall tie them up in bundles of three and heave them into the outer darkness.”

“But suppose you are caught?”

He laughed.

“It’ll be a sign that the end of the world is at hand. But don’t worry. Even if that happens it’ll cause a certain amount of commotion, and if you hear it I shall expect you to drive rapidly away and await the end in some other province. I shall tell them I came out here on roller skates. It’s not your burglary any more-it’s mine.”

He swung his immaculately tailored legs over the side and dropped lightly to the road, and without another word he was gone, melting into the obscurity like a ghost.

He walked up the turf path beside the drive with the quick confidence of a cat. No lights showed in any of the front windows as he approached, but he made a careful circle of the house for complete certainty. His eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom with the ease of long habit, and he moved without rustling a blade of grass under his feet.

The ground floor was a rugged façade of raised arches and pilasters broken by tall gaunt windows, with a pair of carved oak doors in the middle that would have given way to nothing short of a battering-ram; but it is an axiom of housebreaking that those buildings whose fronts look most like fortresses are most likely to defend their postern gates with a card saying “No Admittance.” In this case, there was an open pantry window six feet above the ground. Simon squeezed up through the aperture, and lowered himself gently over the shelves of viands on the inside.

He passed through into the kitchen. With the help of a tiny pocket flashlight he located the main switchboard and removed all the fuses, burying them in a sack of potatoes. If by any chance there should be an accident, the garrison of the house would be more handicapped by a lack of lights than he would. Then he made his way down the main hall and unbarred, unbolted, unchained, and unlocked the great oak portals. Simon Templar owed much of his freedom to a trained eye for emergency exits; and he carried on the good work by opening a pair of windows in the library before he gave a thought to the safe.

The girl had described its location accurately. It was built into one wall, behind a small bookcase which opened away from it like a door; and Simon held his flashlight on it for just three seconds before he decided that it was one of those situations in which neither a bent hairpin, nor a can opener would be adequate.

He slid cheerfully back into the hall and stepped soundlessly up the broad staircase. A large selection of burglarious tools was not part of his usual traveling equipment, but that short coming had rarely troubled him. It was another axiom of his philosophy that non-combination safes have keys, that most keys are in the possession of the owners of the safes, and, therefore, that the plodding felon who finds it necessary to pack nitroglycerin and oxyacetylene blowpipes in his overnight bag is usually deficient in strategic genius. Burt Northwade was sleeping soundly enough, with his mouth open, and a reassuring drone issuing from the region of his adenoids; but even if he had been awake it is doubtful whether he would have heard the opening of his bedroom door, or sensed one movement of the sensitive hands that lifted a bunch of keys from his dressing table and detached an even more probable one from the chain around his neck.

Simon went down the stairs again like a ghost. It was the key from the chain which turned the lock, and the heavy steel door swung back at a touch with the smooth acquiescence that even Simon Templar could never feel without a thrill. He propped his flashlight over one instep so that its light filled the interior of the safe, and went to work with quick white-gloved hands. Once he heard a board crack overhead and froze into seconds of granite immobility; but he knew that he had made no noise, and presently he went on.

The plans were dissected into a thick roll of sheets tied up with tape; the specifications were packed in a long fat envelope with “Pegasus Variable Gear” roughly scrawled on it-that, he had been told, was the name which had been provisionally given to the invention-and a short epic on legal paper was enclosed with them. There were also some letters from various auto mobile manufacturers.

The Saint was so busily engaged for the next ten minutes, and so absorbed in his labors, that he missed certain faint sounds which might otherwise have reached his ears. The first hint of danger came just as he had finished, in the shape of a cautious scuffle of feet on the terrace outside, and a hoarse whisper which was so unexpected that he raised his head almost incredulously.

Then his eyes dropped half instinctively to the safe which he had just closed. He saw something that he had not noticed be fore-a flat leaden tube which rose a bare inch from the floor and disappeared into the crack under the lowest hinge, an obvious conduit for alarm wires. The girl had told him that there were no alarms; but that was one which Northwade had probably preferred to keep secret, and it had taken the Saint off his guard.

The narrow beam of the flashlight snapped out like a silent explosion. Simon leapt through the blackness to the windows, slammed them together, and secured the catch. He was knotting a handkerchief over the lower part of his face as he crossed the room again. In the darkness his hand closed on the doorknob, turned it stealthily; at the same time his fingers stretched downwards, and could feel no key in the lock. It looked as if it might be a tight corner, a crisp and merry getaway while it lasted; but those were the moments when the Saint’s brain worked at its swiftest.

He opened the door with a quick jerk and took one step into the hall. On his right, covering the retreat to the back of the house, stood an outsize butler in a nightshirt with a rolling pin clutched in one hand. On his left, barring the way to the front door, was a wiry youth in trousers and undershirt. A little way up the stairs stood Burt Northwade himself, with a candle in one hand and a young cannon of a revolver in the other. The Saint’s most reckless fighting smile touched his lips under the concealing handkerchief.

“Bon soir, messieurs,” he murmured politely. “It appears that you were not expecting me. I am accustomed to being received in formal dress. I regret that I cannot accept you in this attire.”

He stepped back rapidly through the door, closing it after Mm. The butler and the wiry youth took a few seconds to re cover; then they made a concerted dash for the door. They burst in together, followed by Burt Northwade with the candle. The spectacle of a completely deserted library was the last thing they were expecting, and it pulled them up short with bulging eyes.

In an abruptly contrasting silence, the nightshirted butler re turned to life. He tiptoed gingerly forward, and peered with a majestic air behind and under a large settee in a far corner of the room. The wiry youth, inspired by his example, made a dash to the nearest window curtains and pulled them wide apart, disclosing a large area of glass with the round goggling faces of two other servants pressed against it from the outside, like startled fish in an aquarium. Burt Northwade discreetly remained a scant yard inside the doorway with his sputtering candle held helpfully aloft.

On the top of a massive ladder of bookshelves beside the door, Simon Templar rose like a panther from his prone position and dropped downwards. He fell squarely behind Northwade, easing his fall with a hand applied to the crown of Northwade’s head, which drew from the tycoon a sudden squeal of terror. The same hand pushed Northwade violently forward, and the candle which supplied the only illumination of the scene flickered and went out.

In the darkness the door banged.

“We might even get back in time to have a dance some where,” said the Saint.

He materialized out of the gloom beside her like a wraith; and she gasped.

“Did you have to scare me?” she asked, when she had got her breath.

He chuckled. Back towards the Northwade mansion there were sounds of muffled disturbance, floating down to his ears like the music of hounds to an old fox. He slipped into the driving seat and touched the starter. The engine purred un-protestingly.

“Did something go wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing that wasn’t taken care of.”

The car gathered speed into the blaze of its own headlights. Simon felt for a cigarette and lighted it from the dashboard gadget.

“Did you get everything?” she asked.

“I am the miracle man who never fails, Judith,” he said reproachfully. “Hadn’t I explained that?”

“But that noise-“

“There seems to have been some sort of alarm that goes off when the safe is opened, which you didn’t know about. Not that it mattered a lot. The ungodly were fatally slow in assembling, and if you’d seen their waist measurements you wouldn’t have been surprised.”

She caught his arm excitedly.

“Oh, I can’t quite believe it! … Everything’s all right now. And I’ve actually been on a raid with the Saint himself! Do you mind if I give way a bit?”

She reached across him to the button in the middle of the steering wheel. The horn blared a rhythmic peal of triumph and defiance into the night: “Taaa ta-ta, taaa ta-ta, taa ta-ta!” Like a jubilant trumpet. Simon smiled. Nothing could have fitted better into the essential rightness of everything that had happened that evening. It was true that there had been a telephone in the library, and if there was an extension upstairs there might be gendarmes already watching the road; but they would be an interesting complication that could be dealt with in its proper turn.

Then he coaxed the car around a sharp bend and saw a row of red lights spring up across the road. He dropped his hand thoughtfully to the brake.

“This wasn’t here when we came by first,” he said, and realized that the girl had gone tense and still.

“What do you think it is?” she whispered.

The Saint shrugged. He brought the car to a standstill with its bumper three yards from the red lights, which appeared to be attached to a long plank rigged squarely across his path-he could not see what was beyond the plank.

Then he felt a hard cold jab of metal in the side of his head, and turned quickly. He looked down the barrel of a gun in the hand of an overcoated man who stood beside the car.

“Take it easy,” advised the man with grim calmness.

The Saint heard a rustle of movement beside him, and glanced around. The girl was getting out. She closed the door after her, and stood on the running board.

“This is as far as I ride, stranger,” she said.

“I see,” said the Saint gently.

The man with the gun jabbed again.

“Let’s have those papers,” he ordered.

Simon took them from his breast pocket. The girl received them, and turned on the dashboard light to squint down the roll of plans and read the inscription on the long envelope. Her golden-yellow hair stirred like a shifting halo in the slight breeze.

“Burt Northwade hasn’t got a brother who’s a professor at Toronto,” she explained, “and I’m no relative of the family. Apart from that, most of what I told you was true. Northwade bought this invention from a young Rumanian inventor-I don’t know what sort of a price he gave for it, but he bought it. Actually there’s no patent on it, so the biggest value to a manufacturer is in keeping it secret till he can come out with it ahead of the others. He was going to sell it to Ford, as I told you.”

BOOK: Saint Errant
8.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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