The Saint vs Scotland Yard (20 page)

“Naturally, she drove straight to Buckingham Palace,” said
the Saint.

Kuzela continued to smile.

“But you are suspicious. Possibly you think that some harm
might
befall her, and perhaps you would be unwilling to
accept my assurance
that she will be as safe as yourself. Well,
it is a human
suspicion after all, and I can understand it. But
suppose we ask you
another question… . Where is the Duke
of Fortezza?” Kuzela drew a small
memorandum block towards
him, and poised his
pencil with engaging expectancy. “Come,
come! That is not a very difficult question to answer, is it? He is
nothing to you—a man whom you met a few hours ago for
the first time. If, say, you had never met him,
and you had
read in your newspaper
that some fatal accident had overtaken
him,
you would not have been in the least disturbed. And if it is a decision between
his temporary inconvenience and your
own
promising young life …” Kuzela shrugged. “I have no
wish to use threats. But you, with your experience
and imag
ination, must know that
death does not always come easily.
And
very recently you did something which has mortally
offended the invaluable Ngano. It would distress
me to have to
deliver you into his
keeping… . Now, now, let us make up
our minds quickly. What have you done with the Duke?”

Simon dropped his chin and looked upwards across the desk.

“Nothing that I should be ashamed to tell my mother,” he
said
winningly; and the other’s eyes narrowed slowly.

“Do I, after all, understand you to refuse to tell me?”

The Saint crossed his left ankle over to his right knee.

“You know, laddie,” he remarked, “you should be on the
movies,
really you should. As the strong silent man you’d be
simply great, if you
were a bit stronger and didn’t talk so
much.”

For some
seconds Kuzela looked at him.

Then he threw down his pencil and pushed away the pad.

“Very
well, then,” he said.

He snapped his fingers without turning his head, and one of
the two
bruisers came to his side. Kuzela spoke without giving
the man a glance.

“Yelver, you will bring round the car. We shall require it
very
shortly.”

The man nodded and went out; and Kuzela clasped his
hands again
on the desk before him.

“And you, Templar, will tell us where we are going,” he
said, and
Simon raised his head.

His eyes gazed full and clear into Kuzela’s face, bright with
the
reckless light of their indomitable mockery, and a sardoni
cally Saintly smile curved the
corners of his mouth.

“You’re going to hell, old dear,” he said coolly; and then the
negro dragged him up out of his chair.

Simon went meekly down the stairs, with the negro gripping
his arm and
the second bruiser following behind; and his
brain was weighing up
the exterior circumstances with light
ning accuracy.

Patricia had got away—that was the first and greatest thing.
He praised
the Lord who had inspired her with the sober far
sightedness and
clearness of head not to attempt any futile
heroism. There was
nothing she could have done, and merci
fully she’d had the
sense to see it.
…
But having got away,
what would be her
next move?

“Claud Eustace, presumably,” thought the Saint; and a wry
little
twist roved across his lips, for he had always been the
most
incorrigible optimist in the world.

So he reached the hall, and there he was turned round, and
hustled
along towards the back of the house. As he went, he
stole a glance at his
wrist-watch… . Patricia must have been
gone for the best
part of an hour, and that would have been
more than long enough
for Teal to get busy. Half of that time
would have been
sufficient to get Teal on the phone from the
nearest call box and
have the house surrounded by enough
men to wipe up a brigade—if anything of
that sort were going
to be done. And not a sign of any such
developments had
interrupted the playing of the piece… .

Down from the kitchen a flight of steps ran to the cellar;
and as the
Saint was led down them he had a vivid apprecia
tion of another
similarity between that adventure and a con
cluding episode in the
history of the late Mr. Garniman. The
subterranean prospects in each case
had been decidedly unin
viting; and now the Saint held his fire and
wondered what
treat was going to be offered him this time.

The cigar-chewing escort stopped at the foot of the steps, and the Saint
was led on alone into a small bare room. From
the threshold, the
negro flung him forward into a far corner,
and turned to lock
the door behind him. He put the key in his
pocket, took off his
coat, and rolled up his sleeves; and all the
time his dark blazing
eyes were riveted upon the Saint.

And then he picked up a great leather whip from the floor,
and his
thick lips curled back from his teeth in a ghastly grin.

“You
will not talk, no?” he said.

He swung his arm; and the long lash whistled and crackled
through the
air, and snaked over the Saint’s shoulders like the
recoiling snap of an
overstrained hawser.

Chapter VIII

Simon reeled away in a slash of agony that ate into his
chest as
if a thin jet of boiling acid had been sprayed across
his back.

And he went mad.

Never, otherwise, could he have accomplished what he did.
For one
blinding instant, which branded itself on his optic
nerves with such an
eye-aching clarity that it might have stood
for an eternity of
frozen stillness, he saw everything there was to see in that little room. He
saw the stained grey walls and
ceiling and the dusty paving underfoot; he
saw the locked door; he saw the towering figure of the gigantic hate-vengeful
negro
before him, and the cyclopean muscles swelling and rippling
under the
thin texture of the lavender silk shirt; and he saw
himself. Just for that
instant he saw those things as he had
never seen anything before, with every
thought of everything
else and every other living soul in the world
wiped from his
mind like chalk marks smeared from a smooth board… .

And then a red fog bellied up before his eyes, and the
stillness
seemed to burst inwards like the smithereening of a
great glass vacuum bulb.

He felt nothing more—in that white heat of berserk fury,
the sense
of pain was simply blotted out. He dodged round the
room by instinct,
ducking and swerving mechanically, and
scarcely knew when he
succeeded and when he failed.

And at his wrists he felt nothing at all.

The buckle of the strap there was out of reach of his teeth, but he
twisted his hands inwards, one over the other, tighten
ing up the leather
with all his strength, till his muscles ached
with the strain. He
saw the edges of the strap biting into his
skin, and the flesh
swelling whitely up on either side; the pain
of that alone should
have stopped him, but there was no such
thing. And he stood
still and twisted once again, with a concen
trated passion of
power that writhed over the whole of his
upper body like the
stirring of a volcano; and the leather
broke before his eyes
like a strip of tissue paper… .

And the Saint laughed:

The whip sang around again, and he leapt in underneath it
and caught
it as it fell. And what he had intuitively expected happened. The negro jerked
at it savagely—and Simon did not
resist. But he kept his hold fast, and allowed
all the vicious
energy of that jerk to merge flowingly into his own
unchecked
rush; and it catapulted him to his mark like a stone from
a
sling. His right fist sogged full and square into the negro’s
throat with
a force that jarred the Saint’s own shoulder, and
Simon found the whip
hanging free in his hand.

He stepped back and watched the grin melting out of the
contorted
black face. The negro’s chest heaved up to the en
compassing of a great
groaning breath, but the shattering mule-power of that pent-up super-auxiliated
swipe in the gul
let had stunned his thyro-arytenoids as effectively as if
a bullet
had gone through them. His mouth worked wildly, but he
could
produce nothing more than an inaudible whisper. And
the Saint laughed
again, gathering up the whip.

“The boys will be expecting some music,” he said, very
gently.
“And you are going to provide it.”

Then the negro sprang at him like a tiger.

That one single punch which had reversed the situation
would have
sent any living European swooning off into hours
of tortured
helplessness, but in this case the Saint had never
expected any such
result from it. It had done all that he had
ever hoped that it
would do—obliterated the negro’s speaking voice, and given the Saint himself
the advantage of the one
unwieldy weapon in the room. And with the red
mists of
unholy rage still swilling across his vision, Simon
Templar
went grimly into the fight of his life.

He sidestepped the negro’s first maniac charge as smoothly and easily as
a practised pedestrian evading a two-horse dray,
and as he swerved he
brought the whip cracking round in a
stroke that split the lavender silk
shirt as crisply as if a razor
had been scored across it.

The negro fetched up against the far wall with an animal scream, spun
round, and sprang at him again. And again the
Saint swayed lightly
aside, and made the whip lick venomously
home with a report
like a gunshot… .

He knew that that was the only earthly hope he had—to
keep his
opponent tearing blindly through a hazing madness
of pain and fury that
would scatter every idea of scientific
fighting to the four
winds. There were six feet eight inches of
the negro, most of
three hundred pounds of pitiless, clawing, blood-mad primitive malignity caged
up with Simon Templar
within those blank damp-blotched walls; and
Simon knew,
with a quiet cold certainty, that if once those six feet
eight
inches, those three hundred-odd pounds of bone and muscle resolved
themselves into the same weight and size of logical, crafty, fighting
precision, there was no man in the world who
could have stood two
minutes against them. And the Saint
quietly and relentlessly crimped down
his own strength and
speed and fighting madness into the one narrow
channel that
would
give it a fighting chance.

It was a duel between brute strength and animal ferocity on the one
hand, and on the other hand the lithe swiftness and
lightning eye of the
trickiest fighting man alive—a duel with no referee, in which no foul was
barred. Tirelessly the Saint
went round the room, flitting airily beyond,
around, even
under the massive arms that grappled for him, bobbing and
swooping
and turning, up on his toes and supple as a dancer,
as elusive as a drop
of quicksilver on a plate; and always the
tapered leather thong
in his hand was whirling and hissing
like an angry fer-de-lance, striking
and coiling and striking
again with a bitter deadliness of aim. Once the
negro grabbed
at the whip and found it, and the Saint broke his hold
with a
kick to the elbow that opened the man’s fingers as if the
tendons had
been cut; once the Saint’s foot slipped, and he
battered his way out of a closing trap in
a desperate flurry of rib-creaking body blows that made even the negro stagger
for a
sufficient moment; and the fight went
on.

It went on till the negro’s half-naked torso shone with a
streaming
lather of sweat and blood, and a sudden kicking
lurch in his step shot
into Simon’s taut-strung brain the wild
knowledge that the
fight was won.