The Saint Closes the Case (34 page)

He rose at last to his feet with these
meditations simmering
down into the impenetrable depths of his
mind; and his face
had never been milder.

“Good-afternoon, little one,” he
said softly. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you again. Life, for
the last odd eighteen hours, has seemed very empty without you. But don’t
let’s
talk about that.”

The giant inclined his head.

“You know me,” he said.

“Yes,” said the Saint. “I
think we’ve met before. I seem to
know your face. Weren’t you the stern
of the elephant in the
circus my dear old grandmother took me to
just before I went
down with measles? Or were you the whatsit that stuck in
the
how’s-your-father and upset all our drains a couple of years
ago?”

Marius shrugged. He was again wearing full
morning dress,
as he had been when the Saint first met him in Brook
Street; but the combination of that costume with this new setting, together
with the man’s colossal build and hideously rugged
face, would have been
laughably grotesque if it had not been subtly horrible.

He said: “I have already had some samples
of your humour,
Templar——
”

“On a certain occasion which we all
remember,” said the Saint gently. “Quite. But we don’t charge extra
for an encore,
so
you might as well have your money’s worth.”

Marius’s little eyes took in the others—Roger Conway loung
ing against the bookcase swinging an automatic by
the trigger-
guard, Norman Kent
propped up against the sofa with a
glass
in his hand, Gerald Harding on the other side of the win
dow with his hands in his pockets and a faint
flush on his
boyish face.

“I have only just learnt that you are the
gentleman who
calls himself the Saint,” said Marius.
“Inspector Teal was indis
creet enough to use a public telephone in the
hearing of one
of my men. The boxes provided are not very sound-proof. I
presume this is your
gang?”

“Not ‘gang,’ ” protested the
Saint—“not ‘gang.’ I’m sure
saints never go in gangs. But, yes—these are
other wearers of the halo… .But I’m forgetting. You’ve never been formally
introduced,
have you? … Meet the boys… . On your left,
for instance, Captain
Acting Saint Gerald Harding, sometime
Fellow of Clark’s College, canonised for many charitable
works,
including obtaining a miserly
millionaire’s signature to a five-
figure
cheque for charity. The millionaire was quite annoyed
when he heard
about it.
…
Over there, Saint
Roger Conway,
winner of’ the Men’s Open
Beauty Competition at Noahs
ville,
Ark., in ‘25, canonised for glorifying the American girl.
At least, she told the judge it glorified her…
. On the floor,
Saint Norman Kent,
champion beer-swiller at the last
Licensed
Victuallers’ and Allied Trades Centennial Jamboree,
canonised for standing free drinks to a number of
blind beg
gars on the Feast of
Stephen. The beggars, by the way, were
not
blind until after they’d had the drinks… . Oh, and my
self. I’m the Simple Simon who met a pieman coming
through
the rye. Or words to that
effect. I can’t help feeling that if I’d
been christened Sootlegger I should have met a bootlegger,
which would have been much more exciting; but I
suppose it’s
too late to alter that
now.”

Marius heard out this cataract of nonsense
without a flicker
of expression. At the end of it he said, patiently:
“And Miss
Holm?”

“Absent, I’m afraid,” said the
Saint. “It’s my birthday, and
she’s gone to Woolworth’s to buy me a
present.”

Marius nodded.

“It is not of importance,” he said.
“You know what I have
come for?”

Simon appeared to ponder.

“Let’s see… . You might have come to
tune the piano,
only we haven’t got a piano. And if we had a mangle you
might have
come to mend the mangle. No—the only thing I
can think of is that
you’re travelling a line of straw hats and
natty neckwear.
Sorry, but we’re stocked for the season.”

Marius dusted his silk hat with a tenderly
wielded handker
chief. His face, as always, was a mask.

Simon had to admire the nerve of the man. He
still had a
long score to settle with Marius, and Marius knew it; but
here
was Marius dispassionately dusting a silk hat in the very presence of a
man who had promised to kill him. It was true that
Marius came under a
flag of truce, which he would justly ex
pect a man like the
Saint to respect; but still Marius gave no
sign of recognising
that he was in the delicate position of hav
ing to convey an
ultimatum to a
man who, given the flimsiest
rag of excuse, would
cheerfully shoot him through the
stomach.

“You gain nothing by wasting time,”
said Marius. “I have come in the hope of saving the lives of some of my
men, for
some will certainly be killed if we are forced to
fight.”

“How touching!—as the actress said to the
bishop. Is it
possible that your conscience is haunted by the memory of
the
man you killed at Bures, ducky? Or is it just because funerals
are so
expensive these days?”

Marius shrugged.

“That is my business,” he said.
“Instead of considering that,
you would do better to consider your
own position. Every
telephone line for ten miles has been cut—that was done
as
soon as we had definitely located you. Therefore there can be no quicker
communication with London than by car. And the
local police are not
dangerous. Even Inspector Teal is now out
of touch with his
headquarters, and there is an ambush pre
pared for him into
which he cannot help falling. In addition
to that, at the
nearest cross-roads on either side of this house,
I have posted men in
police uniforms, who will turn back any
car which attempts to
come this way, and who will explain
away the noise of shooting to any
inquisitive persons. It must
be over an hour before any help can come to
you—and then
it can only end in your own arrest. That is, if you are
still
alive. And you cannot possibly hope to deceive me a second
time with
the bluff which you employed so successfully last
night.”

“You’re sure it was a bluff?”

“If it had not been a bluff I should not
have found you
here. Do you really think me so ignorant of official
methods
as to believe that you could possibly have been released so
quickly?”

“And yet,” said the Saint
thoughtfully, “we might have been
put here to bait a
police trap—for you!”

Marius smiled. The Saint would never have
believed that
such a face could smile if he had not seen it smile once
before.
And it smiled with ghastly urbanity.

“Since Inspector Teal left London,”
said Marius, “he has
never been out of the sight of my agents.
Therefore I have
good reason to be convinced that he still does not know
where
you are. Shall we say, Templar, that this time you will have to
think of
something more tangible than—er—what was the
phrase your friends
used?—than breadcrumbs and breambait?”

Simon nodded.

“A charming phrase,” he murmured.

“So,” said Marius, “you may
choose between surrendering
Vargan or having him taken from you by
force.”

The Saint smiled.

“Heads you win, tails I lose—what? …
But suppose the
coin falls on its blinkin’ edge? Suppose, sweet pet, you
got
pinched yourself? This isn’t Chicago, you know. You can’t run
little wars
of your own all over the English countryside. The farmers might get annoyed and
start throwing broccoli at you. I’m not sure what broccoli is, but they might
throw it.”

Again that ghastly grin flitted across the
giant’s face.

“You have not understood me. My country
requires Vargan
and his invention. In order to obtain that, I will
sacrifice as many lives as I may be forced to sacrifice; and my men will
die here
for their country as readily as they would die on any
other
battlefield.”

“Your country!”

The Saint had been lighting a cigarette with
a cool and
steady hand; and for all that might have been read in the
scene
by an
observer who could not hear the words, they might have
been discussing nothing more than the terms of a not-too-
friendly golf match—instead of a situation in which
the fates
of nations were involved.
…
At
one moment… . And
then the Saint
split the thin crust of calm with those two elec
tric words. The voice that spoke them was no longer the Saint’s
gently mocking drawl. It was a voice of pure steel
and rock
and acid. It took those three
simple syllables, ground and
bonded a
hundred knife-edges around them, fenced them about
with a thousand stinging needle-points, and spoke
them in a
breath that might have
whipped off the North Pole.

“Your country!”

“That is what I said.”

“Has a man like you a country? Is there
one acre of God’s
earth that a man like you loves for no other reason than
that it’s his home? Have you a loyalty to anything—except the
bloated golden spiders whose
webs you weave? Are there any
people you can
call your people—people you wouldn’t sacrifice without a qualm to put thirty
pieces of silver into your
pocket? Do
you care for anything in the world but your own
greasy god of money,
Rayt Marius?”

For the first time Marius’s face changed.

“It is my country,” he said.

The Saint laughed shortly.

“Tell us any lie but that, Marius,”
he said. “Because that
one won’t get by.”

“But it is still my country. And the men
outside lent to me
by
my country for this work—”

“Has it occurred to you,” said the
Saint, “that we also might
be prepared to die for our country—and that
the certainty
of being imprisoned if we were rescued might not influence
us
at all?”

“I have thought of that.”

“And don’t you place too great a reliance
on our honesty?
Is there anything to stop us forgetting the armistice and
hold
ing you as a hostage?”

Marius shook his head.

“What, then,” he said silkily,
“was there to stop my coming
here under a white flag to distract
your attention while my
men occupied the rest of the house from the
other side? When
the fortune of one’s country is at stake one has little
time for conventional honesty. A white flag may be honoured on a
battlefield,
but this is more than a mere battlefield. It is all
the battlefields of
the war.”

Simon was teetering watchfully on his heels,
his cigarette
canted up between his lips. His hands hung loosely at his
sides, but in each of them he held sudden death.

“You’d still be our hostage,
loveliness,” he said. “And if
there’s going to be any treachery——”

“My life is nothing,” said Marius.
“There is a leader out
there”—he gestured towards the
road—“who would not
hesitate to sacrifice me and many
others.”

“Namely?”

“His Highness——”

Simon Templar drew a deep breath.

“His Highness the Crown Prince Rudolf
of——
”

“Hell!” said the Saint.

“A short time ago you saved his
life,” said Marius. “It is for
that reason that His
Highness has directed me to give you this
chance. He also wished me to apologise for
wounding you yes
terday, although it happened
before we knew that you were
the
Saint.”

“Sweetest lamb,” said the Saint,
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t have
obeyed His Highness if you hadn’t needed his
men to do your
dirty work!”