Prelude for War (34 page)

“And what are they all
about?”

“I don’t know yet,
but they look rather dull. You see,
I’d only just
started to look at them when you came in. I didn’t like to open them on the
train, because there were
always other people in the
carriage, and I didn’t know if
they might not see
something they shouldn’t see… . You
can
look at them with me if you like. As a matter of fact,
I—I
meant you to have them anyway.”

Simon gazed at her with the
admiration reserved for
very special occasions.

“Darling,” he
said, “how can I ever have managed to
misjudge
you?”

“But I did, really.
You don’t think I’d have let Algy
have them after what
happened last night, do you?”

“Of course not—unless
he paid you a much bigger price
for compensation.”

“Aren’t you a
beast!” she said.

The Saint sighed.

“Do we have to go
into that again?”

She considered him,
pouting.

“But you do really
like me quite a lot, don’t you ?”

“Darling, I adore
you.”

“Well, I hope you do,
because if you don’t I’m going
to scream for help and
bring the whole town in. On the
other hand, provided
you’re reasonable …”

The Saint put his hands in
his pockets. He was patient
to the point of languor,
completely sure of the eventual
outcome. He could afford to
bide his time. These prelimi
naries were incidental
illuminations rather than delays.

“Yes, if I’m
reasonable,” he said. “Go on. I’m inter
ested.”

“What I mean,”
she said, “is this. You can’t get away
from
the fact that I’m just as much entitled to these papers
as you are. If it comes to that, I’m probably more entitled
to them, because after all Johnny gave them to me. So if
I let you see them, I don’t see why we shouldn’t work
together. You suggested it first, anyway, and after all you
do make lots of money, don’t you?”

He smiled.

“I keep body and soul
together. But do you really think
I you’d like being
shot at, and having people putting arsenic
in
your soup and blowing up bombs under your chair and
all
that sort of thing?”

“I might get used to
it.”

“Even to finding
snakes in your bed?”

“Oh, but I’d expect
you to look after me,” she said
solemnly. “You
seem to survive all right, and I expect if
I
was with you most of the time I’d survive, too. You’ve
got to look after me now, anyhow. It stands to reason that
if you got the papers they’ll be bound to know you got them
from me, and you can’t just laugh lightly and walk away
and leave me to be slaughtered.”

“Suppose we decide
about that after we’ve seen what these papers are,” he suggested gently.

She seemed to sit more
tightly in her chair, and her
smile was very bright.

“You mean we are
working together now?”
The Saint left the door. He
was moving over towards he
r, still with his hands in
his pockets, threading his way w
ith
  
easy
  
nonchalance
  
through
  
the
  
narrow
  
footpaths
between the furniture. The glimmer of lazy humour on his
lips and eyes was cool and good natured, but under it was
a quiet ruthlessness that cannons could not have turned
aside.

“Don’t let’s
misunderstand each other again,” he said
pleasantly.
“I came here just to see those papers. Now
I’m
going to look at them. There aren’t any conditions
attached
to it. If you want a wrestling match you can have
one,
but you ought to know that you’ll only be wasting
your
strength. And if you want to scream you can scream, but I don’t think you’ll
get out more than half a beep before
I knock you out.
And then when you wake up you’ll have
a headache and a
pain in your jaw, and I shall be very
sorry for you, but
by that time I shall have finished my
reading. Does that
make everything quite clear?”

Her eyes blazed at him. All
her limbs were tense. She
looked as if she were going
to scream and risk the conse
quences.

The Saint didn’t move. He
had arrived in front of her,
and there he waited. In his
immobility there was a kind of
cynical curiosity. It was
plain that she could do what she
liked: he was only
interested to see what she would choose to do.

And he wasn’t bluffing.
His cynicism was not really
unkind. He would hate
hurting her, but he meant every
word he had said.
Circumstance had put him on to a plane
where
the niceties of conventional chivalry could have no
weight.
And she knew that it was not worth taking up the
challenge.

Her lower lip thrust out
petulantly.

“Damn you,” she
whimpered. “Oh,
damn
you!”

“I’m sorry,” he
said, and meant it.

He bent over her and took
the sheaf of papers out of
her hand, from behind her,
and touched her mouth lightly
with his own as he did so.

She got up and flung herself
away from him as far as
the topography of the room
would let her. He watched
her out of the corner of
his eye, balanced for any action
that might be forced upon
him; but the moment of danger
was past. She stood by the
dressing table glowering at him
and biting her lips in a
way that he remembered. Her ill
temper had something very
childish and almost charming
about it: she was like a
little girl in a pet.

He sat down on the bed with
the sheaf of papers in his
hand.

“Are you going to
Scotland for the grouse?” he inquired
amiably.

She took her bag off the
dressing table, jerked out a
packet of cigarettes,
lighted one and moved further away.
She stood with her
back to him, smoking furiously, tapping
one
foot on the threadbare carpet, the whole dorsal view
of
her expressive of raging contempt; but he observed that
she was covertly watching him in the long mirror on the
wardrobe.

The Saint lighted a
cigarette himself and turned the
pages of the dossier that
had disordered so many lives and
ended at least two of
them.

At once he seemed to have
forgotten her existence. He
read more and more
intently, with a frown of concentration deepening on his face. His intentness
shut out everything
beyond the information he was
assimilating. For a long
time there was no sound in
the room except the irritating
tattoo of Lady Valerie’s
toe beating on the floor, the rustle
of paper and the
creaking of rusty bedsprings as he stirred
to
turn a page.

And as he read on, a curious
empty chill crept over him.

Lady Valerie fidgeted with
the catch on the wardrobe
door. She breathed on the
mirror and drew silly faces with
her forefinger in the cloud
deposited by her breath, and
went on stealing furtive
glances at him. At last she turned
round in a final
fling of exasperation and stubbed out her
cigarette
in a saucer on the dressing table.

“Well,” she said
peevishly, “at least you might tell me
what
it’s all about. Is it very interesting?”

“Wait a minute,”
he said, without looking up.

She pushed the saucer off the dressing table
with an exas
perated sweep of her hand.
Instead of providing a satis
factory
smash, it landed on the carpet with a thick plunk
and rolled hollowly away over the linoleum under
the
washstand.

The Saint went on reading.

And as he came towards the
end of the manuscript that
dry deflated chill seemed
to freeze the fire out of him and
leave him numb with
helpless bafflement.

For there was nothing in
that bulky collection of docu
ments that seemed to be
worth much more than the paper
it was written on in the
way of powder and shot. There
were the usual notes on the
organization of the arms ring,
principally taken from the
British end, but none of it was
very new. Much of it could have been found in
such detailed
surveys as
Merchants of
Death.
There were notes on Luker’s
background,
the puppet directors of his various companies, the ramifications of their many
subsidiaries, their international affiliations, their political connections,
their methods
of business, together
with well-authenticated samples of
certain
notable iniquities. It was all very interesting and
highly scandalous,
but it would cause no revolutions. Such exposes had been made before, but they
had never done more
than superficially
ruffle the apathy of the great dumb popu
lace which might have risen up in its wrath and destroyed
them. And under the laws made by governments
themselves
financially interested and
practically concerned in the suc
cess
of the racket, if not actually subsidized by it, there
were not even grounds for a criminal prosecution.
It was
only the kind of oft-repeated
indictment that caused a tem
porary
furore, during which the racketeers simply laid low
and waited for nature to take its course and the
birth of
sextuplets in Kalamazoo to
repossess the front pages of an
indifferent
press.

The latter part of the
dossier was devoted to the Sons
of France considered as
part of a sales-promotion campaign
backed by Luther
and his associates. There was an educative
outline of the machinery of the organization, some eye-
opening
copies of secret orders issued to members, specimens
of
its propaganda and declared objectives, in the usual
Fascist
jargon—“to eradicate Communism, Pacifism, and
all
such Jewish-inspired undermining of the heroic spirit of
France.
…
To institute state control, for the benefit of
 
the people, over
literature, art, motion pictures, radio and
 
all
 
other means
 
of disseminating culture.
…
To
build
up the military, naval and air strength of France so
that
French honour may be prepared to answer the insolence of
the Hun.” There was good evidence of financial support g
iven to the organization by Luker and certain directors
of the
Fabrique Siebel des Armes de Guerre
—but that, as
Simon had pointed out to Teal, was probably not an offence
under the law. There were a number of detailed records
mostly made up from newspaper cuttings of certain rather
revolting
 
acts
 
of
 
violence
  
and
 
terrorism
 
committed
 
by
alleged members of the Sons of France, but there was no
evidence by which Luker and his associates could have been
brought to book as their direct instigators. Certainly there
was enough material to have brought down on Luker’s
head the moral indignation of the whole world, if the world
had had any moral sense; but in the way of legal evidence
of recognized crimes there wasn’t enough to get him as much
punishment as he would have earned by driving his car
down Piccadilly at thirty-five miles an hour.

The last page of all was a
sheet torn from a cheap memo
randum block, on which
someone seemed to have made a
note of three functions or
events, with their dates. The first
and last were so heavily scored out as
to be practically unde
cipherable, but the
middle one was left plain and untouched
in the centre of a frame of doodling arabesques such as a
man draws on a pad during a conference. It read: