The Saint in Europe (9 page)

“What a story!” he breathed ecstatically. “Of course it’ll delay you a bit, having to stay on in Germany to make the charge and see it all through. But if you think it’s worth it, I do. It’d be front page stuff!”

Voyson sank down again.

“Will you get out of my compartment?” he grated. “I’ve stood as much from you as I intend to-“

“But you haven’t stood as much from me as I’ve got waiting for you, brother,” said the Saint.

His eyes opened suddenly, very clear and blue and reckнless, like sapphires with steel rapier-points behind them. He smiled.

“I’m here on business, Bruce,” he said, in the same gentle voice with the tang of bared sword-blades behind its meltнing smoothness. “I won’t deceive you any longer -the Herald. Tribune only knows me from the comic section. And I don’t like you, brother. I never have cared much for your line of business, anyway, and the way you spoke to that poor old man in the dining car annoyed me. Remember him? He was on the point of chucking himself off this train under another one just now when I happened along. Someнhow, my pet, I don’t think it would have distressed me nearly so much if you’d had the same idea.”

“Who are you?” asked Voyson huskily.

“I am the Saint-you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cockeyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across. You come into the category, comrade. You must be carryнing quite a tidy bit of boodle along to comfort you in your exile, and I think I could spend it much more amusingly than you-“

Voyson’s lips whitened. His hand slipped behind him; and Simon looked down at the barrel of an automatic, levelled into the centre of his chest. Only the Saint’s eyeнbrows moved.

“You’ve been getting notions from some of these gangster pictures,” he said. “May I go on with my eating?”

He put the sandwich on his knee and lifted off the top slice of bread. Then he felt in his pocket for the pepper-pot. The perforations in the top seemed inadequate, and he unscrewed the cap.

Voyson squinted at him.

“That makes it easier to deal with you,” he said; and then a cloud of pepper struck him squarely in the face.

It came with a crisp upward fling that drove the powder straight up his nostrils and up under the shield of his glasses into his eyes. He choked and gasped; and in the same instant his gun was struck aside and detached skillfully from his fingers.

Minutes of streaming agony passed before his tortured vision returned. While he wept with the stinging pain of it his pockets were rifled again, this time without any attempt at stealth. Once he tried to rise, and was pushed back like a child. He huddled away and waited impotently for the blindness to wear off.

When he looked up the Saint was still there, sitting on the seat opposite him with a handkerchief over his face and a litter of papers sorted out on his lap and overflowing on either side. The window had been lowered so that the draught could clear the air.

“You crook!” Voyson moaned.

“Well, well, well!” murmured the Saint amiably. “So the little man’s come to the surface again. Bad business, that hay fever of yours. Speaking as one crook to another, Bruce, you ought to give up gun play until you’re cured. Sneezing spoils the aim.”

He removed the handkerchief from his face, sniffed the air cautiously, and tucked the silk square back in his pocket. Then he began to gather up the papers he had been invesнtigating.

“I can only find ninety thousand dollars in cash,” he said. “That’s not a lot of booty out of a five-million-dollar swinнdle. But I see there are notes of two million-dollar transfers to the Asiatic Bank in Batavia; so maybe you didn’t do so badly out of it. I wish we could touch some of that bank account, though.”

He enveloped the documents deliberately in the wallet from which he had taken them, and tossed it back. Voyson’s bloodshot glare steadied itself.

“I’ll see that you don’t get away with this,” he snarled.

“Tell me how,” invited the Saint; but his smile was still a glitter of clean-cut marble.

“Wait till we get to Mainz. There are plenty of people on this train. What are you going to do-walk me out of the station under that gun in broad daylight? I’d like to see you do it. I’ll call your bluff!”

“Still hankering for that publicity?”

“I’ve got to have those tickets,” said Voyson, with his chest laboring. “And my money. I’ve got to get to Batavia. You won’t stop me! I shan’t have to stay behind to make any charges. Your having a gun will be enough-and my money and tickets on you. I know the numbers of all those bills, and the tickets are signed with my name. The police’ll be glad to see you!” Voyson’s hands were clenching and twitching spasmodically. “I think I read about you being in trouble here some time ago, didn’t I?”

Simon said nothing; and Voyson’s voice picked up. It grew louder than it need have done, almost as if the finanнcier was trying to bolster up his own confidence with the sound of it.

“The German police wanted you pretty badly then! You’re the Saint, eh? It’s a good thing you told me.”

“You make things very difficult, brother,” said the Saint. His quietness was unruffled, almost reflective; yet to any man in his senses that very quietness should have flared with warnings. Voyson was beyond seeing them. He leaned forward with the red pin-point in his stare glittering.

“I want it to,” he raved. “You’ve come to the wrong man with your nonsense. I’ll give you thirty seconds to hand back my tickets-“

“One moment,” said the Saint.

His soft incisiveness floated like a white-hot filament across the other’s babble of speech; and suddenly Voyson saw the coldness of his eyes, and went silent.

“You’re reminding me of things that I haven’t rememнbered for a long time,” said the Saint soberly.

His cigarette-end dropped beside his heel, and was trodнden out. The blue eyes never looked down at it.

“You’re right-the Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn’t hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I’ve become rather sophisнticated. Maybe it’s a pity. One loses sight of some simple elementary things that were very good. It wasn’t always like that. Since you know my name so well, you may remember that I once had only one cure for creatures like you. I was judge and executioner.”

The train thundered south, perfected machinery roaring on its unswerving lines through a world of logic and mateнrialism forged into wheels. And in one compartment of it Bruce Voyson sat mute, clutched in an eerie spell that drove like a clammy wind through the logic on which he had based his life.

“Romantic, wasn’t it?” went on that incredible voice.“But the law has so many loopholes. Before it can hang you for murder you’ve got to beat your victim’s brains out with a club. And yet you are a murderer, aren’t you? Just a few minutes ago, a friend of ours would have committed suicide on your account if I hadn’t spotted him in the nick of time. For all I know, others may have done the same thing already. Certainly some of your victims will. And while that’s going on, you’re on your way to Batavia to enjoy at least two million dollars of their money-two milнlion which would do a little towards helping them to a fresh start. And all those dollars would be available for the receivнers if you met with an unfortunate accident. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why you should go on living, does there?”

Simon Templar put his hand in his pocket and took out the folder of tickets. Deliberately, he tore it across twice and scattered the pieces out of the window. Voyson started forward with a strangled gasp, and looked into the muzzle of his own gun.

“You’ve reminded me of days that I like to remember,” said the Saint. “There is a justice above the law; and it seems just that a man like you should die.”

Voyson’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed; and then he flung himself across the short space.

4

Simon took out a handkerchief and wiped the gun careнfully all over. It was a small-caliber weapon, and the single crack of it should not have alarmed anyone who heard it among the other noises of the train.

Still holding it in his handkerchief, he folded Voyson’s fingers around the butt, taking care to impress their prints on the shiny surface. Voyson slumped in the corner, with the bullet puncture in his right temple showing in the centre of a shaded circle of burnt cordite. Working with dispassionate speed, the Saint dropped his sandwich and pepper-pot out of the window, picked up a couple of crumbs, and erased his fingerprints from the handle. He wiped the inside catch of the door in the same way, slid it back, and brushed his handkerchief over the outside as he closed it again. There was no flaw in the scene: nothing could have seemed more natural than that a man in Voyson’s position should have lost his nerve and taken the easy way out. Simon was withнout pity or regret.

But as he went back to his own compartment he felt happy. He had always known that the old days were good; and the return had its own emotion.

He saw his fellow-travellers again with a sense of surнprise and unreality. For a while he had almost forgotten them. But the old German caught his hand as he sat down, holding it in a kind of tremulous eagerness, with a pathetic brilliance awake in his dulled eyes.

“I vant to thank you,” he said. “You safe me from doing something very foolish. I vas a coward-a traitor. I run away.”

“Don’t we all?” said the Saint.

The old man shook his head.

“Dot vould have been a wicked thing to do. But I am not like dot now. Perhaps it isn’t so bad. I am used to vork, und at my age I have so much experience, I am a better vorkman than any young man. So I say, I go back und vork again. Does a few more years matter so much?”

“And I’m going to work too,” said the girl. “Between us, we’ll get it all back twice as quickly.”

Simon looked at them both for a long time.

There were ninety thousand dollars in his pocket, which was money in any man’s life. He could have enjoyed every cent of it. He didn’t want to see what he was seeing.

And yet, half against his will, against the resentful primiнtive selfishness which is rooted in every man, adventurer or not, he found himself looking at something grand and indestructible. Even the enigma of the Rhine Maiden bafнfled him no longer. He saw it only as the riddle of the ultiнmate woman waiting for life in the fearless faith of the enchanted castle, waiting for the knight in shining armour who must come riding down the hills of the morning with her name on his shield. And he did not want to see the magic dimmed.

“I don’t think you’ll have to do that,” he said.

He smiled, and held out the thin folds of bills he had taken. Life was still rich; he could take plenty more. And some things were cheap at any price.

“I had a word with Voyson myself. I think I made him see that he couldn’t get away with what he was doing. Anyway, he changed his mind. He asked me to give you this.”

The train was slowing up; and a guard came down the corridor shouting “Hier Mainz, alles umsteigen!” Simon stood up and took down his valise. Being human, he was aware that the girl’s eyes were fixed on him with an odd breathlessness; and he thought that she could carry with her many worse ideals.

IV. TIROL:
The Golden Journey

Probably if Belinda Deane hadn’t been born with such liquid brown eyes, such a small straight nose, such a delicious mouth, and such a delightful chin, she would never have been spoiled. And if she hadn’t been spoiled, Simon Templar would never have felt called upon to interfere: And if he hadn’t interfered … But the course of far more important histories has been changed by the curve of an eyebrow before now.

Belinda Deane knocked on the door of his hotel bedroom in Munich at half-past twelve, which was less than a hour after his breakfast; and he put down his razor and went cheerfully to let her in.

“I-I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw him.

“Why?” Simon asked. “Don’t you approve of this dressнing gown?”

He returned to the mirror and calmly resumed the scrapнing of his face. The girl stood with her back to the door, twisting a scrap of handkerchief in her fingers.

“Mr Templar,” she said, “my bag’s been stolen.”

“How did that happen?”

“It was in my room. I-I left it for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone!”

“Too bad,” murmured the Saint gravely.

He turned the angle of his jawbone with care, stretching his head sideways. His unruffled accents held a sublime and seraphic saintliness of innocence which in itself was a volume of explanation for his nickname. It took the girl’s breath away for a moment; and then she froze over.

“Too bad,” she said coldly, “is putting it mildly. It had all my money in it, and my letter of credit, and my passport -everything. I’ve never been in such a mess in my life. What am I going to do?”

“Have you told the hotel about it?”

“Of course. I’ve had managers and clerks and detectives prowling about my room for the last half-hour.”

Simon shrugged.

“It seems a pity you didn’t go on to Garmisch yesterday with Jack.”

She gazed at him glacially; but his back was turned to her and he was imperturbably intent on his shave. A glacial gaze inevitably loses much of its effect when it has to be reflected by a mirror and the recipient is merely paying the polite minimum of attention anyhow. The disadvantage made her furious, and she controlled herself with an effort. Simon’s amused blue eyes decided that Jack Easton had certainly picked a Tartar; but he admitted that wrath and hauteur sat very well on her small imperious face.

“If you remember,” she said with unnatural restraint, “I told my fiance that tramping about with him over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in filthy village inns without any sanitation was not included in the terms of our engagement, and just wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m a civilized woman, not a farm hand. Also that happens to be my own business. Why don’t you try to suggest something helpful?”

“You haven’t any friends here?”

“None at all.”

The Saint raised one eyebrow.