Saint's Getaway (29 page)

The wire broke in the twisting of his fingers
like a piece of
rotten thread, and he dropped it without noticing that it
had
broken.

He stared expressionlessly up and down the
road. The scat
tering of people near by were resuming their affairs as if
noth
ing had happened; but at either end of the street he could see
more of
them, drifting in desultory mosaics under lampposts
and lighted windows.
Monty had been right—bitterly right.
They could never have got away. There
wasn’t a vehicle of any
kind in sight—nothing that they could have
commandeered for
such an escape as they would have had to make. The first
shot
would have hemmed them in with a human wall.

Simon felt as if an arctic wind had blown
through him, turn
ing his stomach to ice. He sat with his fists clenched in
a
spasm that ached up his arms, with his eyes fixed on nothing,
tasting
the dregs of humiliation.

And then he saw a new shaft of luminance
swimming round
into the street. It fanned out along the line of houses,
lifting
them in turn into a garish oval of illumination and drop
ping them
back into the dark. For a moment the Saint was
caught squarely in
the beam, but he had bent his head instinc
tively and commenced
to play with the wires. Then the beam
went past him, settling into a long,
low stream of light that
swept straight down the road and turned the
cobblestones into
gleaming mountains with black pits behind them. The car
sped down the opposite side of the road with the soft hiss of a per
fectly
balanced engine, and braked to an effortless stop out
side the police
station.

Then a wave of gloom rolled back on it as the
headlights
were switched off; and the Saint looked at it over his
shoulder in a throb of incredulous expectation. The chauffeur was run
ning round
to open the door, and as the passenger stood up
Simon saw his profile
clean-cut against the light in the station doorway. It was the Crown Prince
Rudolf.

XI.
    
HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY,

AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO

A WASH

THE Crown Prince dusted his sleeve and walked
up the steps of the police station, exquisite and inscrutable as ever. He
disappeared
into the gaunt building. Simon watched him go.

And then something seemed to crack in the
Saint’s brain.
Something had to give way under the tearing impact of the
desperation
that had engulfed him, and the thing that gave
way was the
desperation itself. A great weight lilted off his
shoulders, and his
lungs opened to a mighty breath of life. The
heaving earth steadied
itself under him. He felt like a strong
swimmer who has been
trapped in a clinging entanglement of
weed, who has fought back out of the
choking darkness into a
blaze of sunlight and blessed air. The
horrible constriction of helplessness broke away from his head, and he felt the
wheels
of his mind spinning sweet and true again, unhindered even
by the
disorder which had been throwing them out of gear
before the bomb
burst. He could have given no reason for that
strange reawakening:
he only knew that the old fighting cour
age had come back,
sending the blood racing warm along his
veins and filling his
muscles with the old unconquerable sense of power. He stretched himself like a
cat in the exultant gath
ering of that flame of indomitable strength.
And already he
knew how the story was going to end.

Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed.
The bleak
ness was still in the Saint’s eyes, but suddenly there
was a
twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue
ice. There
was the phantom of a smile on the Saint’s lips—a smile that had still to reach
the careless glory of pure Saintliness, but yet a smile that had not been
there before. And the
Saint spoke in a voice that shared his smile.

“Could anything be better?”

Monty shied away from that voice as if a
thunderbolt had
hit the ground in front of him. He could hardly believe
that
it came from the man whom he had seen reaching for his gun
a few seconds earlier. It was
lilting—positively lilting.
“I don’t
see what you mean, old chap,” he said awkwardly.
“Don’t you see what’s happened?” The lilt
in the Saint’s voice
was stronger—and
the Saint was still smiling at him. “Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in
Treuchtlingen! He saw Pat somewhere, we don’t. know where, and put the cop onto
her.
Then when he came along here
with her he had to leave a mes
sage at
the rendezvous to say where he’d gone. Rudolf must have arrived a couple of
minutes later, and he naturally fol
lowed
straight on.
And here they are!”

Again Monty Hayward felt as he had done in the
hotel in Munich—that the Saint must have gone bughouse under the
strain. Only
this time the feeling verged on an awful certainty.

“What about it?” he said quietly.

The Saint laughed under his breath.

“This about it! They’re here—Pat,
Rudolf, Marcovitch—the
whole all-star cast of unparagoned palukas!
And the crown
jewels are with them somewhere—I’ll bet you a million
dollars.
Marcovitch would never dare to let them out of his sight.
The whole bag of tricks, Monty, packed up and sealed for delivery
in that
futurist abomination of a
Polizeiamt!
Just as if we’d
fetched
‘em together on purpose for the reunion. And only a
skeleton staff
inside. Every able-bodied man they can lay their
hands on is out in
the wide county chasing our trail through
the cowslips. And here
we are as well—wearing out our sterns on this goddam field of bricks while the
ungodly are collected
for us twenty feet away. We’ve got ‘em
cold!”

Monty stared at him.

“What’s your idea?” he articulated
slowly; and the Saint
answered with five syllables that leapt back
at him like bullets.

“Go in and get “em!”

A couple of working girls went past them,
giggling over the
cryptic gossip that working girls giggle over in every
country
in the world; and Monty Hayward looked into the twinkling
icicles of
the Saint’s eyes, and knew what he would find there
before he looked. The
Saint meant every crackling consonant
of it. Monty had the dubious
consolation of knowing that his
diagnosis was a bull’s-eye. The Saint was as
mad as a hatter’s
March hare. But it was not the red, homicidal ferocity of
a
moment ago—it was the madness of the bridge in Innsbruck
and the
ride into Treuchtlingen, a thing against which Monty
couldn’t argue any
more.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

It never occurred to him to question why he
said it. Hell!— he was damned anyway. Why worry? There was still a good scrap
waiting, and retribution would follow soon enough. He
hadn’t discovered his
new self such a short while ago only to
throw it away unused.

He heard the quick rippling voice of the
tempter in his ear.
Simon was leaning over towards him, scraping a chisel
about
somewhere
among the pipes.

“It’s the only thing we can do, Monty.
We’ll never get a
chance like this again. And it’s got to be done right now,
while they’re all busy. Death or glory, Mont!”

“Lead on, son and brother.”

The Saint grinned.

He inspected the road sideways under his arm.
The chauffeur was patrolling comatosely up and down the road beside the
cream-coloured
Rolls, with the mystic neutrality of chauffeurs;
but Simon recognized
him as the man whose nose he had been
privileged to pull a few hours before.

“We shall have to remove the grease
ball,” he said. “I may
want his car. And you’ll have to remove him,
Monty, because
he knows me.”

He gave further instructions.

And thereupon a number of remarkable
experiences began
to enliven the daily round of Herr Bruno Pelz, chauffeur
extraordinary
to His Indescribable Pulchritude the Crown
Prince Rudolf.

They initiated themselves harmlessly enough
with the decep
tively commonplace incident of an overalled workman levering
himself out of the hole in the road where he had been en
gaged in
his own abstruse travail, and walking across to
wards him. They
continued in the same deceptively common
place manner with the
workman approaching Herr Pelz and politely requesting the loan of a match for
his cigarette. And
they went on with Herr Pelz providing the required light;
which was also a very commonplace event in itself, for Herr
Pelz was not yet submerged in
such abysses of indiscriminate
churlishness
as to revolt against the custom of a country where
fire is as free as air. But at that point in Herr
Pelz’s history the
ordinariness of
the affair ended for ever.

He struck a match and held it to the workman’s
cigarette,
glancing at him casually as he did so. And that casual
glance
 
gave him the shock of his life.

Over the uncertain flame the workman was
ogling him with
the most horrifying squint that he had ever seen. The
round, g
oggling eyes swivelled over him with a repulsive significance
that was as
nauseating as the leer of a bloated harpy in a lech
er’s delirium. Herr
Pelz recoiled from it in an involuntary c
onvulsion of disgust.
He felt the hairs rising on the nape of his
neck, as if those
odiously astigmatic eyes had stretched out o
f their orbits and
laid their slimy contact on his flesh. But the workman seemed utterly
unconscious of the repugnance which
he aroused. He muttered his thanks,
and turned away with a
final hideous wink that warped his whole face
into one
ghastly deformity of innuendo.

Herr Pelz’s head revolved in a perfect
mesmerism of loath-
ing to watch him hobbling down
 
the street. He couldn’t
even tear
his gaze away from the man’s back while his memory
was still crawling
with the impressions of that repellent stare. And thus it came about that Herr
Pelz saw what
he might not otherwise have noticed: that as the workman
passed
under the next street lamp he pulled a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket,
and a scrap of paper was dragged out
with it and fluttered down to the
pavement.

Herr Pelz could no more have resisted that
scrap of paper
than he could have vowed himself into a monastery. He
started
towards it without a second thought, impelled solely by the
degenerate
curiosity which the experience had aroused. Then
as he came nearer, he
saw that the scrap of paper was a hun
dred-mark note.

He picked it up, and turned it over
suspiciously in the lamplight. It was unquestionably genuine.

Curiosity gave way to an even more deeply
rooted cupidity. Herr Pelz flashed a furtive glance around him to see if anyone
else had observed the accident. But no one seemed to be pay
ing any
attention to him, and the other workman was ham
mering away at his
pipes with uninterrupted vigour. Herr
Pelz returned his gaze with a little
less revulsion to the bene
ficent ogre’s retreating figure. And as Herr
Pelz looked, the
ogre replaced the handkerchief in his pocket—and a second
hundred-mark note drifted down on to the pavement.
If there
was any manifestation of Providence at which Herr
Bruno Pelz had ever
prayed to be a witness, it was the phe
nomenon of an endless
flood of hundred-mark notes pouring down at his feet; and at that moment he
seemed to be spectating
the nearest approach to such a prodigy that
he was ever likely to see. While he stared up the street with bulging eyes,
a third
scrap of paper fell from the workman’s pocket and
floated down into the
gutter—closely followed by a fourth. A
fifth, a sixth, and a
seventh joined them with incredible rapidity. The workman was shedding money
all over the road like a
perambulating mint. And then he turned off
into a dark side
alley with the eighth hundred marks flopping down to the
pav
ing stones behind him.