The Saint vs Scotland Yard (21 page)

And for the first time the Saint stood his ground, with his
back to one
wall, holding the negro at bay by the flailing
sweep of the lash alone.

Then Simon pressed forward, and the negro went back… .

The Saint drove him into the opposite corner and beat him
whimpering
to his knees. And then, as the man spilled forward on to his face, Simon leapt
in and got an ankle hold.

“Get your hands right up behind your back,” he rasped
incisively, “or I’ll twist
the leg off you!”

He applied his leverage vigorously, and the man obeyed him
with a
yelp. Simon locked the ankle with his knees and bent his weight over it. With
quick deft fingers he knotted the tail
of the whip round the
negro’s wrists, and passed the stock over
one shoulder, round
the neck, and back over the other shoul
der into a slip-knot.
A draught of air gulped noisily into the
negro’s straining
lungs, and Simon gave the noose a yank.

“One word from you, and you graze in the Green Pastures,”
he stated
pungently, and heard the lungful choke sibilantly
out again. “And
get this,” said the Saint, with no increase of
friendliness:
“if you move the half of an inch in that hog-tie,
you’ll bowstring your
own sweet self. That’s all.”

He fished the key of the door out of the negro’s pocket and stood up,
breathing deeply.

He himself was starting to look as if he had recently taken a
warm
shower-bath in his clothes; and now that the anaesthetic
red mists
were thinning out, a large part of his back was
beginning to stiffen
itself up into an identical acreage of ache;
but he was not yet
ready to sit down and be sorry about such
minor discomforts.
With the key snapping over in the lock, he
brushed the hair back
off his forehead and opened the door;
and the cigar-chewer at the foot of the
steps crawled upright
like a slow-motion picture, with his jaw sagging nervelessly and
his eyes popping from their orbits, gaping at the
Saint as he might have gaped at his own ghost… .

Smiling, and without any haste, Simon walked towards him.

And the man stood there staring at him, watching him come
on, numbed
with a bone-chilling superstitious terror. It was
not until the Saint
was within two yards of him that a sobbing
little wail gurgled
in his throat and he reached feebly round to
his hip pocket.

Of the rest of the entertainment he knew little. He knew
that a
grip about which there was nothing ghostly seized upon
his right wrist
before he had time to draw, while another
metallic clutch
closed round his knees; he knew that the
weight came suddenly
off his feet; and then he seemed to go floating ethereally through space.
Somewhere in the course of that flight an astonishingly hard quantity of
concrete impinged
upon his skull, but it did not seem an important incident.
His
soul went bimbering on, way out into the land of blissful
dreams…
.

And the Saint went on up the steps.

He was half-way up when a bell jangled somewhere over
head, and
he checked involuntarily. And then a tiny skew-eyed
grin skimmed over his lips.

“Claud Eustace for the hell of it,” he murmured, and went
upwards
very softly.

Right up by the door at the top of the stairs he stopped again and
listened. He heard slow and watchful footsteps
going down the hall,
followed by the rattle of a latch and the
cautious whine of
slowly turning hinges. And then he heard
the most perplexing
thing of all, which was nothing more or
less than an expansive
and omnipotent silence.

The Saint put up one hand and gently scratched his ear,
with a
puzzled crease chiselling in between his eyebrows. He
was prepared to hear
almost anything else but that. And he
didn’t. The silence continued for some
time, and then the
front door closed again and the footsteps started back
solo on the return journey.

And then, in the very opposite direction, the creak of a
window-sash sliding up made him
blink.

Someone was wriggling stealthily over the sill. With
his ear
glued to a
panel of the door, he could visualise every move
ment as clearly as if
he could have seen it. He heard the faint
patter of the
intruder’s weight coming on to the floor, and
then the equally
faint sound of footsteps creeping over the
linoleum. They
connected up in his mind with the footsteps of
the man who had gone
to the door like the other part of a
duet. Then the second set of footsteps
died away, and there was only the sound of the man’s returning from the hall.
Another
door opened… . And then a voice uttered a corro
sively quiet
command.

“Keep still!”

Simon almost fell down the steps. And then he windmilled
dazedly back to his balance and
hugged himself.

“Oh, Pat!” he breathed. “Mightn’t I have known it? And
you ring
the bell to draw the fire, and sprint round and come
in the back way… .
Oh, you little treasure!”

Grinning a great wide grin, he listened to the dialogue.

“Put your hands right up… . That’s fine… . And now,
where’s
Kuzela?”

Silence.

“Where is Kuzela?”

A shifting of feet, and then the grudging answer:
“Upstairs.”

“Lead on, sweetheart.”

The sounds of reluctant movement… .

And the whole of Simon Templar’s inside squirmed with
ecstasy at
the pure poetic Saintliness of the technique. Not for
a thousand million
pounds would he have butted in just then
—not one second before Kuzela himself had
also had time to
appreciate the full ripe
beauty of the situation. He heard the
footsteps
travelling again: they came right past his door and
went on into the hall, and the Saint pointed his
toes in a few
movements of an
improvised cachucha.

And then, after a due pause, he opened the door and fol
lowed on.

He gave the others time to reach the upper landing, and
then he
went whisking up the first flight. Peeking round the banisters, he was just in
time to get a sight of Patricia disap
pearing into Kuzela’s study. Then the
door slammed behind
her, and the Saint raced on up and halted outside it.

While after the answering of the dud front-door call there
had
certainly been a silence. the stillness to which he listened
now made
all previous efforts in noiselessness sound like an artillery barrage. Against
that background of devastating blank-ness, the clatter of a distant passing
truck seemed to shake the
earth, and the hoot of its klaxon sounded
like the Last
Trump.

And then Patricia spoke again, quite calmly, but with a
lethal
clearness that was hedged around on every side with the menace of every manner
of murder.

“Where
is the Saint?” she asked.

And upon those words Simon Templar figured that he had
his cue.

He turned the handle soundlessly and pushed the door wide
open.

Patricia’s back was towards him. A little farther on to one
side the
second bruiser stood by with his hands high in the air.
And behind the desk sat Kuzela,
with his face still frozen in an
expression
of dumb, incredulous stupefaction… . And as the
door swung back, and the Saint advanced gracefully
into the
limelight, the eyes of the
two men revolved and centred on
him,
and dilated slowly into petrified staring orbs of some
thing near to panic.

“Good morning,” said the Saint.

Patricia half turned. She could not help herself—the expres
sions on the faces of the two
men in front of her were far too
transparently
heartfelt to leave her with any mistrust that they were part of a ruse to put
her off her guard.

But the result of her movement was the same; for as she
turned her
eyes away, the smallest part in the cast had his
moment. He awoke out
of his groping comatosity, saw his
chance, and grabbed it with both
fists.

The automatic was wrested violently out of the girl’s hands,
and she was
thrown stumbling back into the Saint’s arms. And
the Saint’s gentle
smile never altered.

He passed Patricia to one side, and cocked a derisive eye at
the gun
that was turned against him. And with no more heed
for it than that, he
continued on towards the desk.

“So
nice to see you again,” he said.

Chapter IX

Kuzela rose
lingeringly to his feet.

There was a perceptible pause before he gained control of the faculty of
speech. The two consecutive smacks that had
been jolted into the
very roots of his being within the space of
the last forty seconds
would have tottered the equilibrium of
any man—of any man
except, perhaps, the Saint himself… .
But the Saint was not
at all disturbed. He waited in genteel
silence, while the
other schooled the flabby startlement out of
his face and dragged
up his mouth into an answering smile.

“My dear young friend!”

The voice, when Kuzela found it, had the same svelte tim
bre as
before, and Simon bowed a mocking compliment to the other’s nerve.

“My dear old comrade!” he murmured, open-armed.

“You have saved us the trouble of fetching you, Templar,”
Kuzela
said blandly. “But where is Ngano?”

“The Negro Spiritual?” The Saint aligned his eyebrows banteringly.
“I’m afraid he—er—met with a slight accident.”

“Ah!”

“No—not exactly. I don’t think he’s quite dead yet, though
he may
easily have strangled himself by this time. But he
hasn’t enjoyed
himself. I think if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have
talked,” said the Saint, with a glacial
inclemency of quietness.

Kuzela
stroked his chin.

“That is unfortunate,” he said.

And then he smiled.

“But it is not fatal, my friend,” he purred. “The lady
has
already solved one problem for us herself. And now that she is
here, I am
sure you would do anything rather than expose her
to the slightest
danger. So let us return to our previous con
versation at once.
Perhaps the lady will tell us herself where
she went to when she drove away from
here?”

Simon put his hands in his pockets.

“Why, yes,” he said good-humouredly. “I should think she
would.”

The girl looked at him as if she could not quite believe her
ears. And
Simon met her puzzled gaze with blue eyes of such a
blinding Saintly
innocence that even she could read no enticement to deception in them.

“Do
you mean that?” she asked.

“Of course,” said the Saint. “There are one or two things
I
shouldn’t mind knowing myself.”

Patricia put a hand to her head.

“If you want to know—when I left here I drove straight
to—”

“Buckingham Palace,” drawled the Saint. “And then?”

“I had the bags taken up to Beppo’s room, and I saw him
myself. He
was quite wide awake and sensible. I told him I
was coming back here
to get you out, and said that if I wasn’t
back by four o’clock,
or one of us hadn’t rung him up, he was
to get in touch with
Teal. I gave him Teal’s private number. He didn’t want me to go at all, but I
insisted. That’s all there
is to tell. I picked up a puncture on the
second trip out here,
and that held me up a bit ——
”

“But who cares about that?” said the Saint.

He turned back to the desk.

The man with the gun stood less than a yard away on his
right
front; but the Saint, ignoring his very existence, leaned a
little
forward and looked from the distance of another yard
into the face of Kuzela. The loose poise
of his body somehow
centred attention even
while it disarmed suspicion. But the
mockery had gone out of his eyes.