Saint Errant (23 page)

“And put it in your pocket,” big Bill said.

The Saint felt in his jacket.

“So I did.” He pulled out the chamois bag with its precious contents and made as if to toss it. “Here.”

Big Bill stopped him with flared hands.

“Please keep it for me, Mr Templar. Things will get rather bad around here soon. I don’t want Appopoulis to get his fat hands on it.”

“Soon? Surely not for a couple of hours.”

Big Bill frowned.

“Things happen so quickly in dreams. This may seem real, but it’ll still hold the screwy pattern you’d expect.”

The Saint made a gesture of annoyance.

“Still sticking to your story? Well, maybe you’re screwy or maybe you just think I am. But I’d rather face facts. As a matter of fact, I insist on it.” He turned back to the girl. “For instance, darling, I know that you exist. I’ve kissed you.”

Big Bill growled, glared, but did nothing as the Saint waited calmly.

Simon continued: “I have the evidence of my hands, lips, and eyes that you have all the common things in common with other women. In addition you have this incredible, unbelievable loveliness. When I look at you, I find it hard to believe that you’re real. But that’s only a figure of speech. My senses convince me. Yet you say you don’t remember certain things that all people remember. Why?”

She repeated her gesture of confusion.

“I-don’t know. I can’t remember any past.”

“It would be a great privilege and a rare pleasure,” the Saint said gently, “to provide you with a past to remember.”

Another low growl rumbled in Big Bill’s chest, and the Saint waited again for developments. None came, and it struck the Saint that all the characters in this muddled melodrama had one characteristic in common-a certain cowardice in the clutch. Even Dawn Winter showed signs of fear, and nobody had yet made a move to harm her. It was only another of the preposterous paradoxes that blended into the indefinable unreality of the whole.

Simon gave it up. If he couldn’t get what he thought was truth from either of these two, he could watch and wait and divine the truth. Conflict hung on the wind, and conflict drags truth out of her hiding place and casts her naked before watching eyes.

“Well, souls,” he said, “what now? The unholy three will be back sometime. You could go now. There is the wide black night to wander in.”

“No,” Big Bill said. “Now that you’re in this, give us your help, Saint. We need you.”

“Just what, then,” Simon asked, “are we trying to prevent, or accomplish?”

“Selden Appopoulis must not get his hands on the opal or Dawn. He wants both. He’ll stop at nothing to get them.”

“I believe you mentioned a curse breathed on this gewgaw by some Oriental character.”

Dawn Winter’s voice once more tangled itself in Simon’s heart. As long as he could remember that quality-of far-off bells at dusk, of cellos on a midnight hill-time would never again pass slowly enough.

“Death shall swoop on him,” she chanted, “who holds this ancient gem from its true possessor, but all manner of things shall plague him before that dark dread angel shall come to rest at his shoulder. His nights shall be sleepless with terror, and hurts shall dog his accursed steps by day. Beauty shall bring an end to the vandal.”

The mood of her strange incantation, far more than the actual words, seemed to linger on the air after she had finished, so that in spite of all rationality the Saint felt spectral fingers on his spine. He shook off the spell with conscious resolution.

“It sounds very impressive,” he murmured, “in a gruesome sort of way. Reminds me of one of those zombie pictures. But where, may I ask, does this place me in the scheme of dire events? I have the jewel.”

“You,” Big Bill Holbrook said, “will die, as I must, and as Trailer Mac and Jimmy must. They stole it from Dawn; I stole it from them.”

The Saint smiled.

“Well, if that’s settled, let’s pass on to more entertaining subjects bordering on the carnal. Miss Winter, my car is just down the hill. If Bill is resigned to his fate, suppose we leave him and his playmates to their own fantastic devices and drift off into the night.”

Her face haloed with pleasure.

“I’d like it,” she said. “But I-I just can’t.”

“Why not? You’re over three years old. Nobody is sitting on your chest.”

“I can’t do what I like, somehow,” she said. “I can only do what I must. It’s always that way.”

“This,” the Saint said to nobody in particular, “sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write. And what’s the matter with you?” he demanded of Holbrook. “A little earlier you were eager to get rough with me because I admired the lady. Now you sit listening with disgusting indifference to my indecent proposal. I assure you it was indecent, from your viewpoint.”

Big Bill grinned.

“It just occurred to me. She can’t go with you. She must do what she must. She can’t get out of my sight. Good old Andy,” he added.

The Saint turned his eyes away and stared into space, wondering. His wandering gaze focused on a small wall mirror that reflected Dawn Winter. Her features were blurred, run together, an amorphous mass. Simon wondered what could have happened to that mirror.

He swung back to face Bill Holbrook.

“I’m afraid,” he said softly, but with the iron will showing through his velvet tones, “that we must have some truth in our little seance. Like the walrus, I feel the time has come to speak of many things. From this moment, you are my prisoners. The length of your durance vile depends on you. Who are you, Miss Winter?”

The look she turned on him made his hands tingle. Hers was a face for cupping between tender palms. Dark and troubled, her eyes pleaded for understanding, for sympathy.

“I told you all I know,” she pleaded. “I’ve tried and tried, ever since I could remember anything, to think of-well, all those things you think of at times.”

Again she passed a hand across her face, as if wiping away veils.

“I don’t ever remember snagging a stocking on the way to an important appointment,” she said. “And I know that girls do. I never had to fight for my”-she colored-“my honor, whatever that is. And I know that girls like me have fought for this something I don’t understand, by the time they’ve reached my age. Whatever that is,” she added pensively. “I don’t even know how old I am, or where I’ve been.”

A pattern suddenly clicked into place in the Saint’s brain, a pattern so monstrous, so inhuman as to arouse his destructive instincts to the point of homicidal mania. The look he turned on Big Bill Holbrook was ice and flame.

His voice was pitched at conversational level, but each word fell from his lips like a shining sword.

“Do you know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get some new ideas. Not very nice ideas, chum. And if I’m guessing right about what you and your fellow scum have done to this innocent girl, you are liable to cost your insurance company money.”

He moved toward Holbrook with a liquid grace that had all the co-ordination of a panther’s movement-and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.

“Stop acting the knight in armor,” he protested. “What in hell you talking about?”

“It should have been obvious before,” Simon Templar said. “Up on your feet, Holbrook.”

Holbrook remained at ease.

“If you’ve got an explanation for all this that doesn’t agree with mine, I want to know it.”

The Saint paused. There was honest curiosity in the man’s voice-and no fear. That cowardice which had characterized him before was replaced with what seemed ah honest desire to hear the Saint’s idea.

“This girl,” the Saint said, “whoever she is, has breeding, grace, and beauty out of this world. She has been brought up under expensive and sheltered surroundings. You can see that in her every gesture, every expression. She was bred to great wealth, perhaps nobility, or even royalty.”

Big Bill leaned forward in almost an agony of concentration. Every word of Simon Templar’s might have been a twenty-dollar gold piece, the way he reached for it with every sense.

The Saint patted his jacket pocket.

“This jewel is the symbol of her position-heiress, princess, queen, or what have you. You and your unsavory companions kidnapped her, and are holding her for ransom. That would be wicked enough; but you’ve done worse. Somewhere in the course of your nasty little scheme, it seemed like a good idea to destroy a part of her beauty that could be dangerous to you and your precious pals. So you destroyed her mind. With drugs, I have no doubt-drugs that have dulled her mind until she has no memory. Your reasons are clear enough-it was just a sound form of insurance. And now your gang has split up, fighting over the spoils. I don’t know who would have come out on top, if you hadn’t happened to run into me. But I know what the end is going to be now-and you aren’t going to like it. Get on your feet!”

The command was like a pistol shot, and Big Bill Holbrook jumped. Then he leaned back again and chuckled in admiration.

“Everything that’s been said about you is true. There’s no body like you. That’s so much better than Andy Faulks did there’s no comparison. Say, that really would have been something, and look, it’d have explained why she couldn’t remember who she was. Saint, I got to hand it to you. Too bad you’re not in bed in Glendale.”

For once of a very few times in his life, the Saint was taken aback. The words were spoken with such ease, such sincerity, that Simon’s deadly purpose cooled to a feeling of confusion. While it is true that a man who is accustomed to danger, to gambling for high stakes with death as a forfeit, could simulate feelings he did not actually feel, it is seldom that a man of Big Bill Holbrook’s obvious I Q can look annihilation in the face with an admiring grin.

Something was still wrong, but wrong in the same way that everything in the whole episode was wrong-wrong with that same unearthly off-key distortion that defeated logical diagnosis.

The Saint took out a cigarette and lighted it, slowly; and over themselves into a blur of footsteps.

Simon glanced at his watch. Jimmy and Mac had been gone less than half an hour. It was impossible for them to be returning from the village four miles away.

What had Holbrook said? Something about everything happening faster in dreams? But that was in the same vein of nonsense. Maybe they’d met the boss at the foot of the hill.

Holbrook said: “What is it? Did you hear something?”

“Only your friends again.”

Fear came once more to Holbrook and Dawn Winter. Their eyes were wide and dark with it, turning instantly toward the bunk beds.

“No,” Simon said. “Not this time. We’ll have this out in the open.”

“But he’ll kill us!” Holbrook began to babble. “It’s awful, the things he’ll do. You don’t know him, Saint. You can’t imagine, you couldn’t-“

“I can imagine anything,” said the Saint coldly. “I’ve been doing that for some time, and I’m tired of it. Now I’d prefer to know.”

He crossed the room as the footsteps outside turned into knuckles at the door.

“Welcome to our study club,” the Saint said.

Trailer Mac and Jimmy preceded an enormous hulk through the door and, when they saw Holbrook and Dawn, charged like lions leaping on paralyzed gazelles.

The Saint moved in a lightning blur. Two sharp cracks of fist on flesh piled Mac in one corner, Jimmy in another. They lay still.

A buttery chuckle caused the Saint to turn. He was looking into a small circular hole. A .38, he computed. He raised his eyes to twins of the barrel, but these were eyes. They lay deep in flesh that swelled in yellowish-brown rolls, flowing fatly down ward to describe one of the fattest men the Saint had ever seen. They could only have belonged to a man called Selden Appopoulis.

“Mr Sydney Greenstreet, I presume?” Simon drawled.

The buttery chuckle set a sea of flesh ebbing and flowing.

“A quick action, sir, and an efficient direction of action. I compliment you, and am saddened that you must die.”

The Saint shrugged. He knew that this fat man, though butter-voiced, had a heart of indium. His eyes were the pale expressionless orbs of a killer. His mouth was thin with determination, his hand steady with purpose. But Simon had faced all those indications before.

“I hate to disappoint you, comrade,” he said lightly, “but that line has a familiar ring. And yet I’m still alive.”

Appopulis appraised and dismissed the Saint, though his eyes never wavered. He spoke to Holbrook.

“The opal. Quickly!”

The butter of his voice had frozen into oleaginous icicles; and Holbrook quailed under the bite of their sharp edges.

“I haven’t got it, Appopoulis. The Saint has it.”

Simon was astonished at the change in the fat man. It was subtle, admittedly, but it was there nonetheless. Fear came into the pale gray eyes which had been calmly contemplating murder as a climax to unspeakable inquisitions. Fear and respect. The voice melted butter again.

“So,” he said warmly. “Simon Templar, the Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the-ah-devil with dames. I had not anticipated this.”

Once more it struck the Saint that the descriptive phrases were an exact repetition of Holbrook’s. And once more it struck him that the quality of fear in this weird quintet was not strained. And once more he wondered about Holbrook’s fantastic tale….

“You are expecting maybe Little Lord Feigenbaum?” Simon asked. “Or what do you want?”

“The cameo opal, for one thing,” Appopulis said easily. “For the other, the girl.”

“And what do you intend to do with them?”

“Cherish them, sir. Both of them.”

His voice had encyclopedic lust and greed, and the Saint felt as if small things crawled on him.

Before he could make an answer, stirrings in their respective corners announced the return of Mac and Jimmy to another common plane of existence. Without a word they got groggily to their feet, shook their heads clear of trip hammers, and moved toward the Saint.

“Now, Mr Templar,” said Appopoulis, “you have a choice. Live, and my desires are granted without violence, or die, and they are spiced with emotions at fever heat.”