The Saint vs Scotland Yard (22 page)

“You
heard?” he asked.

Kuzela nodded. His mouth went up at one corner. “But I
still see
no reason for alarm, my friend,” he said, in that
wheedling voice of
slow malevolence. “After all, there is still
time for much to
happen. Before your friend Mr. Teal ar
rives——
”

“Before my friend Chief Inspector Teal arrives with a squad of
policemen in a plain van, I shall be a long way from here,”
said the
Saint.

Kuzela
started.

“So you have invoked the police?” he snapped. And then
again he
recovered himself. “But that is your affair. By the
time they
arrive, as you say, you will have left here. But where
do you think you will
have gone?”

“Home, James,” said the Saint.

He took one hand out of his pocket to straighten his coat,
and smiled
without mirth.

“Fortunately, the argument between us can be settled to
night,”
he said, “which will save me having to stage any re
unions.
Your black torturer has been dealt with. I have given
him a dose of his own
medicine which will, I think, put him in
hospital for several
weeks. But you remain. You are, after all, the man who gave Ngano his orders. I
have seen what you did
to the Duke of Fortezza, and I know what you
wanted to have
done to me.
…
I hope you will get
on well with Wilfred.”

“And what do you think you are going to do to me?” asked
Kuzela throatily; and Simon held him with his eyes.

“I’m going to kill you, Kuzela,” he said simply.

“Ah! And how will you do that?”

Simon’s fingers dipped into his pocket. They came out with
an ordinary
match-box, and he laid it on the desk.

“That is the answer to all questions,” he said.

Kuzela stared down at the box. It sat there in the middle of
his clean
white blotter, yellow and oblong and angular, as
commonplace a thing as
any man could see on his desk—and
the mystery of it seemed to leer up at
him malignantly. He
picked it up and shook it: it weighed light in his hand,
and his
mind balked at the idea that it should conceal any engine of
destruction.
And the Saint’s manner of presenting it had been
void of the most
minute scintilla of excitement—and still was.

He eyed Kuzela quizzically.

“Why not open it?” he suggested.

Kuzela looked at him blankly. And then, with a sudden im
patience,
he jabbed his thumb at the little sliding drawer… .

In a dead silence, the box fell through the air and flopped
half-open
on the desk.

“What does this mean?” asked Kuzela, almost in a whisper.

“It means that you have four minutes to live,” said the
Saint.

Kuzela held up his hand and stared at it.

In the centre of the ball of his right thumb a little globule
of blood
was swelling up in the pinky-white of the surround
ing skin. He gazed
stupidly from it to the match-box and back
again. In
imagination, he felt a second time the asp-like prick
that had bitten into
his thumb as he moved the drawer of the box—and understood. “The answer to
all questions… .”

He stood there as powerless to move as a man in a night
mare, and
watched the infinitely slow distention of the tiny
crimson sphere under
his eyes, his face going ashen with the
knowledge of
inescapable doom. The drop of blood hypno
tised him, filled his vision till he could
see nothing else but the
microscopic
reflections glistening over the surface of it—until
all at once it seemed to grow magically into a
coruscating red
vesicle of enormous
size, thrusting in upon him, bearing him
down, filling the whole universe with the menace of its
smothering scarlet magnitude. A roaring of mighty
waters seethed up about his ears… .

The others saw him brace himself on his feet as if to resist
falling;
and he remained quite still, with his eyes fixing and
going dim. And then he took one step
sideways, swayed, and
crumpled down on to
the floor with his limbs twitching convul
sively and his chest labouring… .

Quite calmly and casually the Saint put out a hand and
clasped it
on the gun wrist of the man who stood beside him.

The man seemed to come alive out of a dream. And without
any
noticeable interregnum of full consciousness, he seemed to
pass right
on into another kind of dream—the transition being
effected by the
contingence upon the point of his jaw of a
tearing uppercut that
started well below the Saint’s waistline and consummated every erg of its
weight and velocity at the
most vital angle of the victim’s face. With the results aforementioned.
He went down in a heap and lay very still, even as his
companion had done a little earlier; and Simon picked up the
gun.

“Which finishes that,” said the Saint, and found Patricia
looking
down again at Kuzela.

“What happened to him?” she asked, a trifle unsteadily.

“More or less what he tried to make happen to me. Ever
come across
those trick match-boxes that shoot a needle into you when you try to open them?
I bought one last afternoon, and replaced the needle with something that was
sent to me
along with the message you know about. And I don’t know
that we
shall want it again.”

He took the little box of death over to the fireplace,
dropped it
in the grate, and raked the glowing embers over it.
Then he took up his
hat and stick, which he saw lying in a chair, and glanced around for the last
time. Only Kuzela’s fingers were twitching now, and a wet froth gleamed on his
lips and
dribbled down one cheek… . Simon put an arm
round the girl’s
shoulders.

“I guess we can be going,” he said, and led her out of the
room.

It was in the hall that the expression on the face of a clock caught his
eye and pulled him up with a jerk.

“What time did you say Beppo was going to get in touch
with
Teal?” he inquired.

“Four o’clock.” Patricia followed his gaze and then looked at
her wrist.
“That clock must be fast ——
”

“Or else you’ve stopped,” said the Saint pithily. He turned
back his
sleeve and inspected his own watch. “And stopped
you have, old
darling. It’s thirty-three minutes after four now—
and to give Claud
Eustace even a chance to think that he’d
pulled me out of a
mess would break my heart. Not to include
another reason why he
mustn’t find us here. Where did you
leave the car?”

“Just one block away.”

“This is where we make greyhounds look lazy,” said the
Saint, and
opened the front door.

They were at the gate when Simon saw the lights of a car
slowing up
and swinging in to the kerb on his left. Right in
front of him,
Kuzela’s car was parked; and the Saint knew clairvoyantly that that was their
only chance.

He caught Patricia’s arm and flipped up the collar of her
coat.

“Jump to it,” he crisped.

He scudded round to the driving-seat, and the girl tumbled
in beside
him as he let in the clutch. He shot right past the
police car with his
head well down and his shoulders hunched.
A tattered shout
reached him as he went by; and then he was
bucking off down a
side street with the car heeling over on
two wheels as he
crammed it round the corner. The police car
would have to be turned
right round in a narrow road before it could get after him, and he knew he was
well away. He dodged hectically south-east, and kept hard at it till he was
sure he
had left any pursuit far behind.

Somewhere in the northern hinterlands of the Tottenham
Court Road
he stopped the car and made some hurried repairs
to his appearance with
the aid of the driving-mirror, and ended up looking distinctly more presentable
than he had been when they left Hampstead. He looked so presentable,
in fact,
that they abandoned the car on that spot, and walked
boldly on until they
met a taxi, which took them to Berkeley
Square.

“For the night isn’t nearly over yet,” said the Saint, as they
walked
down Upper Berkeley Mews together after the taxi had
chugged off out of sight.

It was one
of those fool-proof prophecies which always de
lighted his sense of the slickness of things by the brisk prompt
ness
with which they fulfilled themselves. He had hardly closed
the door of his house when the telephone bell
began to ring,
and he went to answer
the call with a feeling of large and
unalloyed
contentment.

“Hullo-o? … Speaking… . That’s which? … Teal?
… Well,
blow me, Claud Eustace, this is very late for you
to be out! Does your
grandmother allow you——
? What? …

What have I been doing tonight? I’ve been drinking beer
with Beppo.
…
No, not a leper—BEPPO. B for bdellium, E
for
eiderdown, P for psychology, P for pneumonia, O for a
muse of fire that
would ascend the brightest heaven of
…
I beg your pardon? .
. . You were called up and told I was in trouble? … Someone’s been pulling
your leg, Claud. I’m at
peace with the world… . Whassat? …
Why, sure. I was
just going to bed, but I guess I can stay up a few
minutes
longer. Will you be bringing your own gum? … Right-ho… .”

He listened for a moment longer; and then he hung up the receiver and
turned to Pat.

“Claud’s coming right along,” he said gleefully, and the
laughter
was lifting in his voice. “We’re not to try to get away,
because
he’ll have an armed guard at every sea and air port in
the British Isles ten
minutes after he gets here and finds we’ve
done a bunk. Which
will be tremendous fun for all concerned.
… And now, get
through to Beppo as fast as you can spin
the dial, old
sweetheart, while I sprint upstairs and change my
shirt—for there’s
going to be a great day!”

Chapter X

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal fixed his pudgy
hands in
the belt of his overcoat, and levelled his unfriendly
gaze on the superbly
elegant young man who lounged against
the table in front of him.

“So
that message I had was a fake, was it?” he snarled.

“It must have been, Claud.”
 
Teal nodded fatly.

“Perhaps it was,” he said. “But I went to the address it
gave
me—and what do you think I found?”

“The Shah of Persia playing ludo,” hazarded Simon Templar
intelligently; and the detective glowered.

“In the cellar I found a nigger tied up with the whip that
had beaten
half the hide off his back. Outside, there was a
white man with a
fractured skull—he’s gone to hospital as well.
In a room upstairs
there was another man laid out with a
broken jaw, and a fourth man in the
same room—dead.”

The Saint
raised his eyebrows.

“But, my dear old sturgeon!” he protested reasonably; “what
on earth do you think I am? A sort of human earthquake?”

“Both the nigger and the man with the broken jaw,” Teal
continued
stonily, “gave me a description of the man re
sponsible, and it fits
you like a glove. The man with the
broken jaw also added the description
of the woman who
couldn’t be distinguished apart from Miss Holm.”

“Then we obviously have doubles, Claud.”

“He also heard the woman say: “Where is the Saint?’ “

Simon frowned.

“That’s certainly odd,” he admitted. “Where did you say
this
was?”

“You
know darned well where it was! And I’ll tell you some
more. Just as I got there in the police car, a man and a woman
dashed out of the house and got away. And who do
you
suppose they looked like?”