Saint Errant (22 page)

“I,” said the Saint, “am a rank amateur in that department.”

“Well, I was too-or Andy was, whichever of us is me-but I read everything I could get my hands on about dreams-or Andy did-and it didn’t help a bit.”

Most men wouldn’t have heard the faint far-off stirring in the forest. But the Saint’s ears, attuned by long practice to detect sound that differed from what should be there, picked up evidence of movement toward the cabin.

“Some one,” he said suddenly, “and I mean one, is coming. Not your pursuers-it’s from the opposite direction,”

Holbrook-Faulks listened.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“I didn’t expect you to-yet. Now that it’s dark, perhaps you’d better slip outside, brother, and wait. I don’t pretend to believe your yam, but that some game is afoot is so obvious that even Sherlock Holmes could detect it. I suggest that we prepare for eventualities.”

The eventuality that presently manifested itself was a girl. And it was a girl who could have been no one but Dawn Winter.

She came wearily into the cabin, disheveled, her dress torn provocatively so that sun-browned flesh showed through, her cloud of golden hair swirled in fairy patterns, her dark eyes brooding, her mouth a parted dream.

The Saint caught his breath and began to wonder whether he could really make Big Bill Holbrook wake up and vanish.

“Do you belong to the coffee and/or brandy school of thought?” he asked.

“Please.” She fell carelessly into a chair, and the Saint coined a word.

She was gamorous beyond belief.

“Miss Winter, pull down your dress or I’ll never get this drink poured. You’ve turned me into an aspen. You’re the most beautiful hunk of flesh I’ve ever seen. Have your drink and go, please.”

She looked at him then, and took in the steel-cable lean ness of him, the height of him, the crisp black hair, the debonair blue eyes. She smiled, and a brazen gong tolled in the Saint’s head.

“Must I?” she said.

Her voice caught at the core of desire and tangled itself for ever there.

“Set me some task,” the Saint said uncertainly. “Name me a mountain to build, a continent to sink, a star to fetch you in the morning.”

The cabin door crashed open. The spell splintered into shining shards. Holbrook-Faulks stood stony-faced against the door.

“Hello, Bill,” the girl said, her eyes still on the Saint. “I came, you see.”

Bill’s gaze was an unwavering lance, with the Saint pinioned on its blazing tip.

“Am I gonna have trouble with you too, Saint?”

The Saint opened his mouth to answer, and stiffened as an other sound reached his ears. Jockey and weight lifter were returning.

“We’ll postpone any jousting over the fair lady for the moment,” Simon said. “We’re about to have more company.”

Holbrook stared wildly around.

“Come on, Dawn. Out the window. They’ll kill us.”

Many times before in his checkered career the Saint had had to make decisions in a fragment of time-when a gun was leveled and a finger whitening on the trigger, when a traffic accident roared toward consummation, when a ship was sinking, when a knife flashed through candlelight. His decision now was compounded of several factors, none of which was the desire for self-preservation. The Saint rarely gave thought room to self-preservation-never when there was something more important to preserve.

He did not want this creature of tattered loveliness, this epitome of what men live for, to get out of his sight. He must therefore keep her inside the cabin. And there was no place to hide….

His eyes narrowed as he looked at the two bunks. He was tearing out the mattresses before his thought was fully formed. He tossed the mattresses in a corner where shadows had re treated from the candle on the table. Then he motioned to Holbrook.

“Climb up. Make like a mattress.”

He boosted the big man into the top bunk, and his hands were like striking brown snakes as he packed blankets around him and remade the bed so that it only looked untidily put together.

“Now you,” he said to the girl.

She got into the lower bunk and lay flat on her back, her disturbing head in the far corner. The Saint deposited a swift kiss upon her full red lips. They were cool and soft, and the Saint was adrift for a second.

Then he covered her. He emptied a box of pine cones on the mattresses and arranged the whole to appear as a corner heap of cones.

He was busy cleaning the dishes when the pounding came on the door.

As he examined the pair, Simon Templar was struck by the fact that these men were types, such types as B pictures had imprinted upon the consciousness of the world.

The small one could be a jockey, but one with whom you could make a deal. For a consideration, he would pull a horse in the stretch or slip a Mickey into a rival rider’s sarsaparilla. In the dim light that fanned out from the door, his eyes were small and ratlike, his mouth a slit of cynicism, his nose a quivering button of greed.

His heavier companion was a different but equally familiar type. This man was Butch to a T. He was large, placid, oafish, and an order taker. His not to reason why; his but to do-or cry. He’d be terribly hurt if he failed to do what he was ordered; he’d apologize, he’d curse himself.

It crossed the Saint’s mind that a bank clerk such as Andrew Faulks had been described would dream such characters.

“So you lied to us,” the little man snarled.

The Saint arched an eyebrow. At the same time he reached out and twisted the little man’s nose, as if he were trying to unscrew it.

“When you address me, Oswald, say ‘sir.’”

The little man sprang back in outraged fury. He clapped one hand to his injured proboscis, now turned a deeper purple than the night. The other hand slid under his coat
Simon waited until he had the gun out of the holster, then leaped the intervening six feet and twisted it from the little man’s hand. The Saint let the gun swing from his finger by it trigger guard.

“Take him, Mac!” grated the disarmed man.

Mac vented a kind of low growl, but did nothing but fidget as the Saint turned curious blue eyes on him. The tableau hung frozen for a long moment before the little man shattered the silence.

“Well? Ya afraid of ‘im?”

“Yup,” Mac said unhappily. “Criminy, Jimmy, ‘f he c’n get the best uh you, well, criminy, Jimmy.”

Jimmy moaned: “You mean you’re gonna stand there and let just one guy take my gun away from me? Cripes, he ain’t a army.”

“No,” Mac agreed, growing more unhappy by the second, “but he kind of seems like one, Jimmy. Didja see that jump? Criminy, Jimmy.”

The Saint decided to break it up.

“Now, Oswald-“

“Didn’ja hear, Mac? Name’s Jimmy.”

“Oswald,” the Saint said firmly, “is how I hold you in my heart. Now, Oswald, perhaps you’ll pour oil on these troubled waters, before I take you limb from muscle and throw you away.”

“We don’t want no trouble,” Jimmy said. “We want Big Bill. You got him, but we got to take him back with us.”

“And who is Big Bill, and why do you want him, and why do you think I have him?”

“We know you got him,” Jimmy said. “This here’s Trailer Mac.”

The Saint nodded at Mac.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Mac broke in, “this guy’s a phony.”

“Charmed, I’m sure.”

Jimmy blinked.

“Owls,” Mac explained, “can’t swim.”

“What the damblasted hell has owls to do with it?” Jimmy demanded.

“He said pour owls on the something waters. So that,” Mac said in triumph, “proves it.”

This, the Saint thought, wanders. He restrained Jimmy from assaulting Mac, and returned to the subject.

“Why should the revelation of this gent’s identity be regarded as even an intimation that I have-what was the name?- Big Bill?”

“Holbrook,” Jimmy said. “Why, this is Trailer Mac. Ain’t you never heard of him? He follered Loopie Louie for eighteen years and finally caught ‘im in the middle of Lake Erie.”

“I never heard of him,” Simon said, and smiled at Mac’s hurt look. “But then there are lots of people I’ve never heard of.”

This, he thought as he said it, was hardly true. He had filed away in the indexes of his amazing memory the dossiers of almost every crook in history. He was certain that he’d have heard of such a chase if it had ever occurred.

“Anyway,” Jimmy went on, “we didn’t go more’n a couple miles till Mac he says Big Bill ain’t here, ‘n he ain’t been here, neither. Well, he come this far, ‘n he didn’t go no farther. So you got him. He’s inside.”

“The cumulative logic in that series of statements is devastating,” the Saint said. “But logicians veer. History will bear me out. Aristotle was a shining example. Likewise all the boys who gave verisimilitude to idiocy by substituting syllogisms for thought processes, who evaded reality by using unsemantic verbalisms for fact-facing and, God save the mark, fact-finding.”

Mac appealed to the superior intellect in his crowd.

“Whut’n hell’s he talkin’ about, Jimmy?”

“I mean,” the Saint said, “Big Bill ain’t here. Come in and case the joint.”

“Whyn’t cha say so?” Mac snarled, and pushed inside.

They searched nook and cranny, and Mac fingered a knot hole hopefully once. They gave the bunk beds a passing glance, and were incurious about the seeming pile of pine cones in the comer. Mac boosted Jimmy up on the big central beam to peer into ceiling shadows, and they scanned the fireplace chimney.

Then they stood and looked at the Saint with resentment.

“Sump’n’s fishy,” Jimmy pronounced. “He’s got to be here. This here”-he pointed-“is Trailer Mac.”

“Maybe we better go get the boss, huh, Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “He’ll find Big Bill.”

“Who,” the Saint inquired, “is the boss?”

“You’ll see,” Jimmy promised. “He won’t be scared of you.

He’s just down the hill in the town. Stopped off to play a game of billiards. So we’ll be seein’ ya, bub.”

They went off into the night, and the Saint stood quite still for a moment in a little cloud of perplexity.

Never before had he been faced with a situation that was so full of holes.

He added up known data: a man who had a fabulous jewel, who claimed to be the projected dream of his alter ego; a girl of incredible beauty said to be another creation of that dream; and two characters who were after the man and/or the jewel and/or-perhaps-the girl.

Mac and Jimmy had searched the cabin. They professed to have overlooked an object the size of Big Bill Holbrook. Their proof that they had overlooked him: “This here’s Trailer Mac.” They assumed he would remain here while they walked four miles to the settlement and back with their boss who was said to have stopped off to shoot a game of billiards.

But would a man on the trail of that fire opal stop off to play billiards? Would two pseudo-tough guys go away and leave their quarry unguarded?

No, the Saint decided. These were the observable facts, but they were unimportant. They masked a larger, more sinister pattern. Great forces must be underlying the surface trivia. Undeniably, the jewel was a thing to drive men to madness. It could motivate historic bloodshed. The girl, too, possessing the carven features of the gem, could drive men to-anything. But for the life of him, the Saint could not get beneath the surface pattern to what must be the real issues. He could only cling to the conviction that they had to exits, and that they must be deadly.

He turned back to the bunk beds.

“Come on out, kids,” he said. “The big bad wolves have temporarily woofed away.”

Fear lingered in the dark depths of Dawn Winter’s eyes, making her even more hauntingly beautiful. The Saint found strange words forming on his lips, as if some other being possessed them.

He seemed to be saying: “Dawn … I’ve seen the likeness of every beauty in history or imagination. Every one of them would be a drab shadow beside you. You are so beautiful that the world would bow down and worship you-if the world knew of your existence. Yet it’s impossible that the world doesn’t know. If one single person looked at you, the word would go out. Cameramen would beat a path to your door, artists would dust off their palettes, agents would clamor with contracts. But somehow this hasn’t happened. Why? Where, to be trite, have you been all my life?”

He couldn’t define the expression which now entered her eyes. It might have been bewilderment, or worry, or fear, or an admixture.

“I-I-” She put a hand as graceful as a calla lily against her forehead. “I-don’t know.”

“Oh, don’t let’s carry this too far.” It sounded more like himself again. “Where were you born, where did you go to school, who are your parents?”

She worried at him with wide, dark eyes.

“That’s just the trouble. I-don’t remember any childhood. I remember only my great-great-grandmother. I never saw her, of course, but she’s the only family I know about.”

Big Bill’s facial contortions finally caught the Saint’s eye. They were something to watch. His mouth worked like a cork screw, his eyebrows did a cancan.

“I gather,” said the Saint mildly, “that you are giving me the hush-hush. I’m sorry, comrade, but I’m curious. Suppose you put in your two cents.”

“I told you once,” Big Bill said. “I told you the truth.”

“Pish,” Simon said. “Also, tush.”

“It’s true,” Big Bill insisted. “I wouldn’t lie to the Saint.”

The girl echoed this in a voice of awe.

“The Saint? The Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the”-she blushed-“the
devil with dames.”

It occurred to Simon, with a shock of remembrance, that her phrases were exactly those of Big Bill’s when he learned his host’s identity. And even they had been far from new. The Saint thought of this for a moment, and rejected what it suggested. He shook his head.

“Let’s consider that fire opal then, children. It’s slightly fabulous, you know. Now, I don’t think anybody knows more than I do about famous jools. Besides such well-known items as the Cullinan and the Hope diamonds, I am familiar with the history of almost every noteworthy bauble that was ever dug up. There’s the Waters diamond, for example. No more than a half dozen persons know of its existence, its perfect golden flawless color. And the Chiang emerald, that great and beautiful stone that has been seen by only three living people, myself included. But this cameo opal is the damn warp of history. It couldn’t be hidden for three generations without word of it get ting out. In the course of time, I couldn’t have helped hearing about it. But I didn’t. … So it doesn’t exist. But it does. I know it exists; I’ve held it in my hand-“