The Saint Closes the Case (17 page)

“Certainly,” said the Saint,
“I’ll give you my decision at
once. Roger, give me back that gun,
and go and fetch some
rope. You’ll find some in the kitchen.”

As Conway went out, the Saint turned again to
Marius.

“You have already observed, dear
one,” he remarked gently,
“that I have a genius for summarising
situations. But this one
can be stated quite simply. The fact is, Angel
Face, I propose
to apply to you exactly the same methods of persuasion
that I was about to employ on your servant. You observe that I have
a gun. I
can’t shoot the pips out of a playing-card at thirty
paces, or do any
other Wild West stuff like that; but still, I
don’t think I’m such a
bad shot that I could miss anything
your size at this range. Therefore, you
can either submit qui
etly to being tied up by my friend, or you
can be killed at once.
Have it whichever way you like.”

A flicker of something showed in the giant’s
eyes, and was
gone
as soon as it had come.

“You seem to have lost your grip on the
situation, Mr. Templar,” he said urbanely. “To anyone as expert in
these
matters as you appear to be, it should be unnecessary to ex
plain that
I did not come here unprepared for such an obvi
ous riposte. Must I
bore you with the details of what will hap
pen to Miss Holm if I
fail to return to the place where she is
being kept? Must I be
compelled to make my conventional
move still more conventional with a
melodramatic exposition
of her peril?”

“It’s an odd thing,” said the Saint,
in mild reminiscence,
“that more than half the crooks I’ve
dealt with have been frantically anxious to avoid melodrama. Now, personally, I
just love it. And we’re going to have lots of it now—lots and lots and
lots, Marius, my little ray of sunshine… .”

Marius shrugged.

“I thought better of your intelligence,
Mr. Templar.”

The Saint smiled, a very Saintly smile.

His hands on his hips, teetering gently on his
toes, he an
swered
with the most reckless defiance of his life.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You
didn’t think well enough of my intelligence. You thought it’d be feeble enough
to let me
be bluffed into meeting you on your own ground. And
that’s just what it isn’t quite feeble enough to do.”

“I do not follow you,” said Marius.

“Then I’m not the one with softening of
the brain,” said
Simon sweetly, “but you are. I invite
you to apply your own
admirable system of logic to the situation. I
could tell the po
lice things about you, but you could tell the police
things
about me. Deadlock. You could harm Miss Holm, but I could
deprive
you of Vargan. Deadlock again—with a shade of
odds in your favour on
each count.”

“We can rule out the police for the
present. If we did so, an
exchange of prisoners——
”

“But you don’t get the point,” said
Simon, with a terrible
simplicity. “That would be a surrender
on my part. And I
never surrender.”

Marius moved his hands.

“I also surrender Miss Holm.”

“And there’s still a difference,
loveliness,” said the Saint. “You see, you don’t really want Miss
Holm, except as a hos
tage. And I do want Vargan very much indeed. I
want to wash
him and comb him and buy him a little velvet suit and
adopt
him. I want him to yadder childishly to me about the binomial
theorem
after breakfast. I want to be able to bring him into
the drawing-room
after dinner to amuse my guests with reci
tations from the
differential calculus. But most of all I want
one of his little toys… . And so, you
see, if I let you go, Miss
Holm would be in
exactly the same danger as if I kept you
here, since I couldn’t agree to your terms of ransom. But the
difference
is that if I let you go I lose my one chance of finding
her, and I should have to trust to luck to come on the scent
again. While I keep you here, though, I hold a
very good card —and I’m not letting it go.”

“You gain nothing——
”

“On the contrary, I gain
everything,” said the Saint, in
that dreamy sing-song. “I gain
everything, or lose more than
everything. But I’m tired of haggling. I’m
tired of playing
your safety game. You’re going to play
my
game
now, Marius,
my cherub. Wait a second while I rearrange the scene…
.”

As Conway came back with a length of cord,
the Saint took from his pocket a little shining cylinder and screwed it swiftly
on to the muzzle of the gun he held.

“This will now make no noise worth
mentioning,” he said.
“You know the gadget, don’t you? So let
me have
your
decision
quickly, Marius, before I remember what I
want to do more
than anything else in the world.”

“It will not help you to kill me.”

“It will not help me to let you go. But
we’ve had all that
before. Besides, I mightn’t kill you. I might just shoot
you through the kidneys, and long before you died of the wound
you’d be
ready to give me anything to put you out of your
agony. I grant you it
wouldn’t improve my chance of finding
Miss Holm, but, on the other hand, it
wouldn’t make it any
worse—and you’d be so dead that it wouldn’t
worry you, any
way. Think it over. I give you two minutes. Roger, time
him by
that clock!”

Marius put his hands behind him at once.

“Suppose I save you the time. I will be
tied now—if you
think that will help you.”

“Carry on, Roger,” said the Saint.

He knew that Marius still did not believe
him—that the fat
man’s description of his ordeal had not made the
impression
it should have made. He knew that Marius’s acquiescence
was
nothing but a bland calling of what the giant estimated to
be a
hopeless bluff. And he stood by, watching with a face of
stone,
while Conway tied the man’s hands behind his back and
thrust him into a
chair.

“Take over the peashooter again,
Roger.”

Then an idea struck the Saint.

He said: “Before we begin, Roger, you
might search him.”

A glimmer of fear, which nothing else in that
interview had
aroused, contorted the giant’s face like a spasm, and the
Saint could have shouted for joy. Marius struggled like a fiend, but
he had been well bound, and his
effort was wasted.
The weak spot in the
armour… .

Simon waited, almost trembling. Torture he
had been
grimly prepared to apply; but he recognised, at the same
time,
how futile it was likely to prove against a man like Marius. He
might have
resumed the torture of the fat man; but that also
would have been less
efficacious now that the moral support—
or threat—of Marius
was there to counteract it. He would ob
tain some sort of
information, certainly—the limits of human endurance would inevitably see to
that—but he would have no
means of proving its truth. Something in
writing, though …

And the colossal facility of the success made the Saint’s heart
pound like a triphammer, in a devastating terror
lest the suc
cess should turn out to be
no success at all. For, if success it
was,
the rightness of his riposte could not have been more
shatteringly demonstrated. If it were true—if
Marius had
plunged so heavily on the
rules of the game as he knew them—
if
Marius had been so blindly certain that, under the menace
which he knew he could hold over them, neither of
the men
in Brook Street would dare to
lay a hand on him—if …

“English swine!”

“Naughty temper,” said Roger
equably.

“Thank you,” said the Saint, taking
the letter which Roger
handed to him. “Careless of you, Marius,
to come here with that on you. Personally, I never commit anything to writing.
It’s
dangerous. But perhaps you meant to post it on your way, and forgot it.”

He glanced at the address.

“Our old friend the Crown Prince,”
he murmured. “This
should be interesting.”

He slit open the envelope with one swift
flick of his thumb,
and drew out the typewritten sheet.

It was in Marius’s own language, but that was
a small dif
ficulty. The Saint took it with him to the telephone; and
in a
few minutes he was through to a friend who held down a soft
job at the
Foreign Office by virtue of an almost incredible fa
miliarity with every
language on the map of Europe.

“Glad to find you in,” said the
Saint rapidly. “Listen—I’ve
got a letter here which I want translated. I
don’t know how to
pronounce any of it, but I’ll spell it out word by word.
Ready?”

It took time; but the Saint had found an
unwonted patience. He wrote between the lines as the receiver dictated; and
pres
ently it was finished.

He came back smiling.

Roger prompted him: “Which, being
interpreted,
means——
”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Where for?”

“The house on the hill, Bures,
Suffolk.”

“She’s there?”

“According to the letter.”

The Saint passed it over, and Conway read the
scribbled notes between the lines: “…
the girl, and she
is
being
taken
to a quiet part of Suffolk … Bures… house on the
hill
far enough from the village to be safe .
. .
cannot
fail this
time.
…”

Conway handed it back.

“I’ll come with you.”

The Saint shook his head.

“Sorry, son, but you’ve got to stay here
and look after the
menagerie. They’re my hostages.”

“But suppose anything goes wrong,
Simon?”

The Saint consulted his watch. It was still
stopped. He
wound it up and set it by the mantelpiece clock.

“I’ll be back,” he said,
“before four o’clock tomorrow morn
ing. That allows for
punctures, breakdowns, and everything
eke. If I’m not here on the stroke,
shoot these birds and come
after me.”

Marius’s voice rasped in on Conway’s
hesitation.

“You insist on being foolish, Templar?
You realise that my men at Bures have orders to use Miss Holm as a hostage in
an
attack or any other emergency?”

Simon Templar went over and looked down at
him.

“I could have guessed it,” he said.
“And it makes me weep
for your bad generalship, Marius. I suppose
you
realise that
if they sacrifice her, your first and last hold over me
is gone? But that’s only half the fundamental weakness in your bright
scheme. The
other half is that you’ve got to pray against yourself. Pray that I win
to-night, Marius—pray as you’ve never
prayed before in your filthy life!
Because, if I fail, I’m coming straight back here to kill you in the most
hideous way I can in
vent. I mean that.”

He swung round, cool, cold, deliberate, and
went to the
door as if he were merely going for a stroll round the
block
before turning in. But at the door he turned to cast a slow,
straight
glance over Marius, and then to smile at Roger.

“All the best, old boy,” said
Roger.

” ‘Battle, murder, and sudden death,’
” quoted the Saint
softly, with a gay, reckless gesture; and the
Saintly smile could
never have shone more superbly. “Watch me,” said
the Saint,
and was
gone.

9. How Roger Conway
was careless,

and
Hermann
also made a mistake

Roger Conway shifted vaguely across the room as the hum of
Norman Kent’s Hirondel faded and was lost in the
noises of
Regent Street. He came upon
the side table where the de
canter
lived, helped himself to a drink, and remembered that
last cavalier wave of the Saint’s hand and the
pitiful torment
in the Saint’s eyes.
Then he put down the drink and took a
cigarette
instead, suddenly aware that he might have to remain wide awake and alert all
night.