The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal (20 page)

“That’s my job,” he said, “and you know it.”

The Saint smiled.

“I know it, Claud,” he murmured. “But it’s also the reason for my own career of crime.”

“That, and the money you make out of it,” said the detective, with a tinge of gloomy cynicism in his voice.

“And, as you say, the boodle,” Simon agreed shamelessly.

Mr. Teal sighed.

In that stolid, methodical, honest, plodding, unimaginative and uninspired mechanism which was his mind, there lingered the memory of many defeats—of the countless times when he had gone up against that blithe and bantering buccaneer, and his long-suffering tail had been mercilessly pulled, stretched, twisted, strung with a pendant of tin cans and fireworks, and finally nailed firmly down between his legs; and it was not a pleasant recollection. Also in his consciousness was the fact that the price of his dinner had undoubtedly been paid out of the boodle of some other buccaneering foray, and the additional disturbing fact that he had enjoyed his dinner immensely from the first moment to the last. It was very hard for him to reconcile those three conflicting emanations from his brain; and his heavy-lidded eyes masked themselves even deeper under their perpetual affectation of weariness as he rolled the underwear of his spearmint ration into a small pink ball and flicked it across the restaurant tablecloth. He might even have been phrasing some suitable reply which should have comprehended all the opalescent facets of his paradox in one masterly sentence; but at that moment a waiter came to the table.

The chronicler, a conscientious and respectable citizen whose income-tax payments are never more than two years in arrears, hesitates over those last ten words. He bounces, like an inexpert matador on the antlers of an Andalusian bull, upon the horns of a dilemma. All his artistic soul, all that luminescent literary genius which has won him the applause and reverence of the reading world, rises in shuddering protest against that scant dismissal. He feels that this waiter, who rejoiced in the name of Bassanio Quinquapotti, should have more space. He is tempted to elaborate at much greater length the origin and obscure beginnings of this harbinger of fate, this dickey-bird of destiny; to expatiate in pages of elegant verbiage upon the psychological motivations which put him into permanent evening dress, upon his feverish sex life, and upon the atrophied talent which made him such a popular performer on the sackbut at informal Soho soirees. For this waiter who came to the table was the herald of five million golden pounds, the augur of one of the Saint’s most satisfactory adventures, and the outrider of yet another of the melancholy journeys of Mr. Teal. With all these things in mind, the sensitive psyche of the historian revolts from that terse unceremonious description —“a waiter came to the table.” And only the bloodthirsty impatience of editors and publishers forces him to press on.

“Excuse me, sir,” said this waiter (whose name, we insist on recording, was Bassanio Quinqua-potti), “but are you Mr. Teal?”

“That’s right,” said the detective.

“You’re wanted on the telephone, sir,” said the waiter (Bassanio Quinquapotti).

Mr. Teal got up and left the table. Ulysses, at some time or another, must have got up and left a table with the same limpid innocence, undreaming of the odyssey which lay before him… . And the Saint lighted a cigarette and watched him go.

It was one of those rare occasions when Simon Templar’s conscience carried no load; when his restless brain was inevitably plotting some fresh audacious mischief, as it always Was, but there was no definite incident in the daily chronicles of London crime which could give Scotland Yard cause to inquire interestedly into his movements; and Chief Inspector Teal was enjoying a brief precarious interlude of peace. At those times the Saint could beguile Mr. Teal into sharing a meal with him, and Mr. Teal would accept it with an air of implacable suspicion; but they would both end their evening with a vague feeling of regret.

On this particular occasion, however, thanks to the egregious Mr. Quinquapotti, the feeling of regret was doomed on one side to be the reverse of vague; but this vision of the future was hidden from Claud Eustace Teal.

He wedged himself into the telephone booth in the foyer of the restaurant with the pathetic trustfulness of a guinea pig trotting into a vivisection-ist’s laboratory and took up the receiver.

“Teal speaking,” he said.

The familiar voice of his assistant at the Yard clacked back at him through the diaphragm. It uttered one sentence. It uttered another.

Once upon a time there was a small non-Aryan happily making mud pies in Palestine with a party of pals. Looking up from his harmless play, this urchin happened to behold the prophet Elisha hiking up towards Bethel, and in a spirit of pure camaraderie heaved a brick at him and encouraged him after the fashion of healthy urchins of all time, saying, “Go up, thou baldhead.” Whereupon, to his vast and historic surprise, a brace of she-bears came out of a wood and used him for a quick-lunch bar, along with forty-one of his playmates.

Chief Inspector Teal, it must be confessed, had outgrown the instinct to heave bricks at bald-headed prophets many years ago. In the course of his professional career, indeed, he had even learned to regard them with some reverence, and had, since the supply of kind-hearted she-bears in London is somewhat limited, been detailed at times to protect them from similar affronts. But he was still capable of experiencing some of the emotions that must have assailed that ancient Hebrew guttersnipe as he felt himself, out of a clear sky, being sucked down the gullet of a bear. The voice of Mr. Teal’s assistant went on uttering, and the mouth of Mr. Teal opened wider as the recital went on. The milk of human kindness, always an unstable element in Mr. Teal’s sorely tried cosmogony, curdled while he listened. By the time his assistant had finished, it would, if Laid aside in a cool place, have turned itself gradually into a piece of cheese.

“All right,” he said thickly, at the end. “I’ll call you back.”

He hung up the receiver and levered himself out of the cabinet. Squeezing his way between the tables on his way back across the restaurant, he was grimly conscious of the Saint’s face watching his approach. It was a face that inevitably stood out among the groups of commonplace diners, a lean and darkly handsome face which would have arrested any wandering glance; but it was no less inevitably the face of an Elizabethan buccaneer, lacking only the beard. The lean relaxed figure struck the imagination like a sword laid down among puddings; and for the same reason it was indescribably dangerous. The very clear and humorous blue eyes had a mocking recklessness which could never have stood in awe of man or devil; and Mr. Teal knew that that also was true. The detective’s mind went back once again over the times when he had confronted that face, that debonair immaculate figure, those gay piratical blue eyes; and the remembrance was no more comforting than it had been before. But he went back to the table and sat down.

“Thanks for the dinner, Saint,” he said.

Simon blew a smoke ring.

“I enjoyed it, too,” he remarked. “Call it a small compensation for the other times when everything hasn’t been so rosy. I often feel that if only our twin souls, freed from the contagion of this detectivitis which comes over you sometimes––”

“It’s a pity you didn’t complete the party,” Teal said with a certain curious shortness.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“How?”

“That American gunman you’ve been going about with, for instance—what’s his name?”

“Hoppy Uniatz? He’s gone to the Ring to have a look at some wrestling. Ran into some Yankee grunter he knew over on the other side, who’s doing a tour over here; so Hoppy felt he’d better go and root for him.”

“Yes?” Teal was jerkily unwrapping a fresh slice of gum, although the wad in his mouth was still putting forth flavour in a brave endeavour to live up to its advertising department. “He wouldn’t have gone there alone, of course.”

“I think he went with this wriggler’s manager and a couple of his clutching partners,” said the Saint.

Mr. Teal nodded. Something was happening to his blood pressure—something which had begun its deadly work while he was listening to the voice of his assistant on the telephone. He knew all the symptoms. The movements with which he folded his wafer of naked spearmint and stuffed it into his mouth had a stupendous slothfulness which cost him a frightful effort to maintain.

“Or your girl friend, perhaps—Patricia Holm,” Teal articulated slowly. “What’s happened to her?”

“She came over all evening dress and went to a party—one of these Mayfair orgies. Apart from that she’s quite normal.”

“She’d have a good time at a party, wouldn’t she?” Teal said ruminatively.

The Saint swilled liqueur brandy around in the bowl of a pear-shaped glass.

“I believe lots of young men do get trampled to death in the stampede when she turns up,” he admitted.

“But there’d be enough survivors left to be able to swear she’d been dancing or sitting out with one or other of ‘em from the time she arrived till well after midnight—wouldn’t there?” Teal insisted.

Simon sat up. For one or two minutes past he had been aware that a change had come over the detective since he returned to the table, and there had been a sudden grittiness in the way that last question mark had been tagged on which he couldn’t have missed if he had been stone deaf. He looked Teal over with thoughtful blue eyes.

“Claud!” he exclaimed accusingly. “I believe there’s something on your mind!”

For a moment Teal’s windpipe tied itself into a knot of indignation which threatened to strangle him. And then, with a kind of dogged resolution, he untied it and waded on.

“There’s plenty on my mind,” he said crunchily. “And you know what it is. I suppose you’ve been laughing yourself sick ever since you sat down at the table. I suppose you’ve been wondering if there were any limits on earth to what you could make me swallow. Well, I’ve bought it. I’ve given you your rope. And now suppose you tell me why you think it isn’t going to hang you?”

“Claud!” The Saint’s voice was wicked. “Are you sure you haven’t had too much of this brandy? I feel that your bile is running away with you. Is this––”

“Never mind my bile!” Teal got out through his teeth. “I’m waiting for you to talk about something else. And before you start, let me tell you that I’m going to tear this alibi to pieces if it takes me the rest of my life!”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Alibi?” he repeated gently.

“That’s what I said.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No?” Teal meant to be derisive, but the word plopped out of his mouth like a cork out of a bottle. “I’m talking about this precious alibi of yours which accounts for everything that fellow Uniatz and that girl Patricia Holm have been doing all the evening—and probably accounts for all your other friends as well. I mean this alibi you think you’ve framed me into giving you–-“

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked the Saint patiently; and Teal drew another laboured breath.

“I mean,” he said, and all the cumulative rancour of five years of that unequal duel was rasping through his voice like a red-hot file—“I mean that you must be thinking it was damned clever of you to get me to have dinner with you on this night of all nights, and keep me here with you from seven o’clock till now, when a dead man was picked up on the Brighton road half an hour ago with your mark on him!”

II

SIMON stared at him blankly. And even while he did so, he realized that he was letting the opportunity of a lifetime of Teal-baiting dawdle past him and raise its hat as it went by, without so much as lifting a hand to grab it. To be accused for once of a crime of which he was as innocent as an unborn Eskimo, and to have a made-to-measure alibi presented to him on a plate at the same time, should have presented vistas of gorgeous possibility to warm the heart. But he didn’t even see them. He was too genuinely interested. \

“Say that again,” he suggested.

”You’ve heard me already,” retorted the detective gratingly. “It’s your turn now. Well, I’m waiting for it. I like your fairy tales. What is it this time? Did he commit suicide and tie your mark round his neck for a joke? Did the Emperor of Abyssinia do it for you, or was it arranged by the Sultan of Turkey? Whatever your story is, I’ll hear it!”

It has been urged by some captious critics of these records that Chief Inspector Teal has rarely been observed in them to behave like a normal detective. This charge the scribe is forced to admit. But he points out that there are very few of these chronicles in which Chief Inspector Teal has had any chance to be a normal detective. Confronted with the slow smile and bantering blue eyes of the Saint, something went haywire inside Mr. Teal. He was not himself. He was overwrought. He gave way. He behaved, in fact, exactly as a man who had been burned many times might have been expected to behave in the presence of fire. But it wasn’t his fault; and the Saint knew it.

“Now wait a minute, you prize fathead,” Simon answered quite pleasantly. “I didn’t kill this bloke––”

“I know you didn’t,” said Teal, in an ecstasy of elephantine sarcasm. “You’ve been sitting here talking to me all the time. This fellow just died. He drew your picture on a piece of paper and had heart failure when he looked at it.”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Claud,” drawled the Saint lazily. “But personally I should say that some low crook is trying to frame me.”

“You would, eh? Well, if I were looking for this low crook––”

“You’d come to my address.” Simon pushed his cigarette into an ashtray, finished his drink, and spread money on the table to pay the bill. “Well, here I am. You gave me the murder and you gave me the alibi. You thought of this game. Why don’t you get on with it? Am I arrested?”

Teal gulped and swallowed a piece of gum.

“You’ll be arrested as soon as I know some more about this murder. I know where to find you––—”

The Saint smiled.

“I seem to have heard words to that effect before,” he said. “But it hasn’t always worked out quite that way. My movements are so erratic. Why take a chance? Let me arrest myself. My car’s just round the corner, and the night is before us. Let’s go and find out some more about this murder of mine.”