Saint's Getaway (30 page)

Herr Pelz didn’t even hesitate. He plunged on
to his doom with his mouth hanging open, as fast as his legs would carry
him.
Prince Rudolf was still inside the police station, and even
if he came
out unexpectedly, an excuse should be easy to find.
And
meanwhile
Fortune was opening her cornucopia and de
canting largesse with
a liberality which it would have been a
sin to ignore.
Whether the workman was a thief, an escaped
lunatic, or an
eccentric millionaire—if he could be caught in
that dark alley …
Herr Pelz’s black eyes gleamed like mar
bles. There had been
days when he had ruled a minor under
world as master of the precarious trade
of the garotte, and his
hand had not lost its cunning. It would be
over and finished
in ten seconds, without a sound.

He hurried down the pavement, snatching up
hundred-mark
notes as he went. His fingers grasped the last one as he
turned
into the alley, and a few yards down the lane he saw another.
He stooped
to pick it up… .

And then a massive lump of metal wielded with
masterly
precision crashed into the back of his head. For one
blissful
second he gaped at a complete free fireworks display
that would
have been the making of any Fourth of July; and
then a hospitable
darkness came down and folded him in his
dreams.

Monty Hayward returned like a paladin from
the wars.

He lowered himself to the cobbles beside the
hole in the
road, and looked at the Saint with eyes that were no
longer squinting. There was the seed of a smile in them—a seed such as can only
be sown by the force of a doughty blow struck for
the honour of lawlessness. And the Saint
smiled back.

“Oke?” he drawled.

“Oke,” said Monty Hayward. “I
hid in a doorway and dotted
him a peach. There was a sort of van close
by, and a bloke was
just starting it up. I heard him say they’d have to hustle
to get
to N
ü
rnberg by dinner time, so I
picked up your pal and
heaved him in with the greens.” He looked
round as an an
tique Ford swung into the street and clattered past.
“And there
he goes!”

Simon Templar nodded, and the nod spoke
volumes.

He stood up and stretched his legs.

“Then he won’t bother us for some
time,” he said. “I guess
we can begin.”

“Suits me, Saint.”

The Saint gazed down at him steadily. In
fewer years than
the other man had lived, he had come to know the game
from every
angle, and grown used to its insidious allurements.
Its seductive charms
held him no less than they had always
done; but he knew their treachery.
Even then, he hesitated to
take advantage of Monty’s surrender.

“There’s no need for you to come
inside,” he said. “This isn’t
quite like anything
we’ve done before. We may be running
into a trap. If you’d like to hang on
here for a bit——
”

“Why not get on with it?” said
Monty Hayward shortly.
“I wouldn’t miss a show like this for a
thousand pounds.”

The Saint smiled ruefully.

“On your own head be it,” he said;
but his hand rested on
Monty’s shoulder for a moment.

And then he turned and walked across the road.

He had no illusions about what he was trying
to do. Before
it was finished there might easily be a miniature war
storming
in that peaceful street. He had to take the risk. And if
neces
sary, he’d have to fight the war. It was the only way. Patricia Holm was
inside that police station, irreparably meshed in the
ponderous dragnet of
the Law; and even if he had been a free
man, that would have seemed hopeless
enough—to sit scheming
with lawyers, pulling
the sticky threads of bail and remand,
pitting
miserable atoms of truth against the massed batteries
of intrigue and influence that Rudolf could
command, know
ing that the scales were
weighted against him from the beginning. With the police offering rewards for
his own capture it
couldn’t be
thought of. He was taking the one chance that the
fall of the cards gave him—a clean fighting chance
to win the
game as he had fought it
from the start, as he had won such
games
before, with the honest steel of a gun butt in his hands,
clearing the tangled chess board with a challenge
of death.

He ran up the station steps and entered the
bare vestibule.
On his left was a corridor; farther down he came to a pair
of
glass doors opening into a microscopic space where the com
mon citizen
could stand and lean over a counter to hold con
verse with the Law.
Beyond the counter was an untidy sort of office, in which he could see one
bald-headed policeman writ
ing laboriously at a desk and another
thoughtfully picking his
teeth.

Simon burst in unceremoniously, with one
quick glance
backwards to make sure that Monty was following. The game
had to be
played fast—taken at a rush that would allow the
enemy no time to
ponder over details or gaze too closely at his
own charming features.
He fell breathlessly on the counter
with his face a mask of agitation
under the grime.

“Machen Sie schnell!”
he panted.
“Ein
Kind ist von einem
Motorrad angefahren worden!”

The toothpicking officer might not have been
sentimentally
moved by the thought of a child being knocked down by a
motor-bicycle,
but he had a commendable devotion to duty.

He picked up his cap and came through a flap
in the counter, buttoning the neck of his tunic. Simon stood aside to let
him pass.
As the policeman stepped out of sight of his colleague in the office, Simon hit
him twice on the back of the
neck—two slaughterous ju-jitsu blows delivered
with the edge
of his hand. The policeman slumped forward soundlessly—
straight
into Monty’s arms.

“Hold him up and talk to him!”
rapped the Saint. “You can be seen from outside. I’ll just get the other
one… .”

Monty propped the policeman against the wall
and clung
to him dazedly. He had never been called upon to do
anything like that, even in his wildest dreams of buccaneering. But the
daylight
lamps in the vestibule were beating down on him like
a battery of limes,
and he knew that to anyone glancing in
from outside he was
as conspicuous as the central figure on a
lighted stage. In a
kind of stage fright he began to recite “The
Wreck of the
Hesperus,”
with violent gesticulations… .

Simon raced back into the office, and the
clerkly constable
looked up. The Saint gave him no more time to think than
he had
given the first man.

“Wollen Sie hinauskommen, bitte? Der
andere Schupo be
darf Hilfe——
”

The scribe rose from his chair grumbling.
Simon caught him
with the same blow as he came through the counter, and
left
him where he fell.

He went back and found Monty returning
hoarsely to the
first
stanza, having lost his memory after three verses.

“And the skipper had taken his little
daughter to bear

“All clear,” said the Saint.

He closed in on the other side of Monty’s
vis-
à
-vis.
Together
they bore the unconscious man into the office and laid him on
the floor, dragging the clerkly one farther in to
join him. Si
mon rummaged round and
discovered handcuffs with which
they
fastened the two policemen’s wrists and ankles; then he
improvised gags with their handkerchiefs and
screwed-up balls of blotting paper. It was all done with amazing speed
and in perfect silence.

The Saint jerked his head towards a door on
the far side of
the
office, through which came the murmur of voices.

“I think that must be the charge
room,” he whispered, in
Monty’s ear. “Don’t make a sound—we
aren’t ready for the
alarm yet——”

A subdued clicking noise blurred into his
speech, and he
looked round swiftly. It came from a private telephone ex
change in
one corner, where a tiny red bulb was blinking its
impatient summons.

The Saint dropped into the operator’s stool
and plugged in
on the calling circuit. Monty listened tensely, trying to
make
out the brief words which were clacking through the receiver
diaphragm.
Only a couple of sentences were spoken; and then
he saw the Saint
smile and clip out a single word of reply.

“Sofort!”

Simon came out of the stool and searched
round for the
main lead-in wire. He found it and broke it loose with one
jerk. Then he spoke a second time in Monty’s ear.

“The Big Cheese is somewhere upstairs. That was him—ask
ing for Pat and the witnesses to be taken up to
his office. Keep
things quiet while I
look after him—there are guns on those stiffs which you can take, and there’s
sure to be another way
out of the
charge room which you’ll have to watch for. Don’t
shoot if you can possibly help it. I’ll be right
back.”

He vanished into the vestibule and turned
into the corridor
which he had already observed. A short way down it there
was a door on the right, through which he heard the same voices talking—the
second entrance to the charge room which he had
already guessed of.
Simon would have given much to listen
there for a while, but the ticking
seconds were vital. The dusk
was now well advanced, and at any moment the
squad cars which had depleted the station staff to a negligible fraction
would be
snoring up the street again with the reports of their
fruitiest chase. And
when that happened the slugs would be
fairly spawning in the salad… .
The Saint closed his lips
grimly and tiptoed past the door without a
backward glance.

He came through to a flight of stone stairs
and went up
them. On the landing above there were doors all around him.
He sank on one knee and scanned the floor for a sign of the
room from
which the telephone call had come. Only one door showed a tell-tale streak of
light dose to the ground. His luck
was holding magnificently. He walked
up to the door and
knocked, instantly receiving the curt command to enter.

A white-haired man with a square jaw and
military shoul
ders, and a middle-aged man with a typical bullet head,
both
in plain clothes, looked up from a desk littered with maps and
papers as
the Saint came in.

Simon let them see his gun and his smile, and
reverted to
his
very best German.

“I believe you were looking for me,” he said.
  

2

The two men coagulated where they stood,
staring at him whitely in the dumb startlement of his arrival. If the door had
opened to
admit a herd of emerald-green hippopotami they
could scarcely have
been more flabbergasted. But beyond the
involuntary swelling
of their eyes and the limp fall of their
chins they made no
movement. Whatever they may have
lacked as shining lights of the Law, they were
not deficient in
human courage.

Several seconds went by before the elder of
the two spoke.

“What do you want?” he asked calmly.

“A little talk,” said the Saint. He
gestured with his auto
matic towards the chief’s right hand, which
was sliding stealthily across the desk towards a row of bell pushes. “You
can save yourself the trouble of ringing—all the wires are disconnected,
and in any
case no one would answer.”

Perhaps he was guilty of stretching the
truth, but the chief
did not know it. And the warning was spoken
with such an air of quiet conviction that it went home as effectively as a shot
from the Saint’s steady gun. The chief’s hand relaxed.