Saint Overboard (18 page)

“This is the most perfect thing I’ve
ever seen.” Vogel was
positively purring by then: his waxen skin
shone with a queer
gloss, as if it had been polished. “You should have
made this
your profession—I should have been one of your first
clients… And that door at the end?”

Simon glanced up the alleyway.

“The fo’c’sle? That’s only Orace’s
quarters——
”

And at the same time he knew that he might
just as well save
his breath. Vogel had already declared himself, at the
bathroom
door and since then, as a sightseer who intended to see
every
sight there
was; and it would have been asking a miracle for him
to have allowed himself to be headed off on the threshold of the last
door of all.

The Saint shrugged.

At any rate, the gloves would be off. The
nibbling and niggling
would be finished, and the issue would be
joined in open battle;
and the Saint liked to fight best that way.
Behind that door lay
the showdown. He knew it, as surely as if he could have seen
through the partition, and he faced it without
illusion. Even at that transcendental moment the irrepressible devil in him
came
to his aid, and he was capable of feeling a deep and unholy glee
of anticipation at the thought of the conflicting
emotions that
would shortly be chasing each other across Vogel’s
up-ended
universe.

He opened the door and stood aside, with a
sense of peace in
the present and a sublime faith in the exciting future.

Vogel went in.

Perhaps after all, Simon reflected, his gun
could stay where it
was. A clean sharp blow with the edge of his hand across
the
back of the other’s neck might achieve the same immediate effect
with less
commotion
,
and with less risk of letting him in for the expenses of a
high-class funeral later. Of course, that would still
leave the loyal
mariner outside, but he would have had to be
dealt with anyhow … And then what? The
Saint’s brain raced through a hectic sequence of results and possibilities…

And then he heard Vogel’s voice again,
through a kind of
giddy haze that swept over him at the sound of it.

“Excellent … excellent … Why,
I’ve seen a good many
boats in which the owner’s accommodation was
not half so good.
And
this is all, is it?”

If a choir of angels had suddenly
materialised in front of him
and started to sing a syncopated version of
Christmas
Day in
the Workhouse,
Simon Templar could
hardly have had a more
devastating reason to mistrust his ears. If
the
Corsair
had sud
denly started to spin round and round like a
top, his insides
couldn’t have suffered a more cataclysmic bouncing on
their
moorings. With a resolute effort he swallowed his stomach, which
was
trying to cake-walk up into his mouth, and looked into the
fo’c’sle.

Vogel was coming out; and his cordial smile
was unchanged. If
he had just suffered the crowning disappointment of his
unfortu
nate evening, there was no sign of it on his face. And behind
him, quite plainly visible to
every corner, Orace’s modest cabin was as naked of any other human occupancy as
the icebound fastnesses of the North Pole.

The Saint steadied his reeling brain, and
took the cigarette
from between his lips.

“Yes, that’s all,” he answered
mechanically. “You can’t get
much more into a fifty-footer.”

“And that?” Vogel pointed upwards.

“Oh, just a hatchway on to the deck.”

Forestalling any persuasion, he caught the
ladder rungs
screwed to the bulkhead, drew himself up, and opened it.
After
all he had been through already, his heart was too exhausted to turn any
more somersaults; but the daze deepened round him as
he hoisted himself
out on to the deck and found no unconscious
body laid neatly out in the lee of the
coaming. They had been
through the ship from
stern to stem, and that hatchway was the
last most desperate door through which Murdoch’s not inconsid
erable bulk could have been pushed away. If Orace
hadn’t
dumped the man out there, he
must have melted him and poured
him
down the sink, or ordered a fiery chariot from Heaven to
take him away: the Saint was reaching a stage of
blissful delir
ium in which any
miracle would have seemed less fantastic than
the facts.

He stretched down a hand and helped Vogel to
follow him out.
They stood together under the dimly luminous canopy of
the
masthead light, and Vogel extended his cigarette-case. There
were only
the ordinary shadows on the deck, and the one seaman
sat patiently smoking his pipe in the
cockpit of the speed tender tied up astern.

“I’m afraid my enthusiasm ran away with
me,” said Vogel. “I
should never have asked you to show me round
at this hour. But
I assure you it’s been worth it to me—in every
way.”

He laid the faintest and most innocent
emphasis on the last
three words.

Simon leaned on the mast, with one arm curled
round it, as if
it had been a giant’s lance. The stub of his old cigarette
fizzed
into the
water.

“It’s been no trouble at all,” he murmured courteously.
“What
about one for the road?”

“Many thanks. But I’ve kept you up too
late already.”

“You haven’t.”

“Then I’ll leave before I do.”
Vogel waved a hand to his mar
ine chauffeur. “Ivaloff!” He
smiled, and held out his hand. “We’ll
look out for you,
then, at St Peter Port?”

“I’ll be there by tea-time, if we have
any wind.”

The Saint sauntered aft beside his guest.
Beyond all doubt, the
stars in their courses fought for him. If he could have given vent
to his feelings, he would have serenaded
them with crazy carols.
He thought
about the munificent rewards which might suitably
be heaped on the inspired head of Orace, when that
incompara
ble henchman could be made
to reveal the secrets of his wiz
ardry.

His right hand trailed idly along the boom.
And suddenly his
whole body prickled with an almost hysterical
effervescence, as if the two halves of some supernal seidlitz powder had been
incon
tinently fused under his belt.

“Goodnight,” said Vogel. “And
many thanks.”

“Au revoir,”
responded
the Saint dreamily.

He watched the other step down into the tender and touch the
starter. The seaman cast off; and the speedboat
drew away,
swung round in a wide arc,
and went creaming away up the dark estuary.

Simon stood there until the blaze of its
spotlight had faded
into
a brilliant blur, and then he put his hands on the companion
rail and slid down below. First of all he poured
himself out a
large drink, and proceeded to absorb it with profound
deliberation. Then he grasped Orace firmly by the front of his shirt and
drew him forward.

“You god-damned old son of a
walrus,” he said, with his voice
torn between wrath and laughter. “Men have been shot
for less.”

“I couldn’t think of nothink else, sir,
sudding like,” said Orace
humbly.
   

“But it makes the ship look so
untidy.” O
race scratched his head.

“Yessir. But it was a bit untidy ter
start wiv. Jremember the
mains’l started to tear comin’ dahn from St
Helier? Well, when
yer went orf to-night I thought I might swell do somefink
abaht
it. I sewed a patch on it while yer was awy, but I ‘adn’t ‘ad time ter
furl it agyne when yer came back. So when yer chucked that
detective bloke at me——
”

“You took him along to the hatch——
”

“An” dreckly I sore yer go below, I
‘auled ‘im aht an’ laid ‘im
on the boom an’ folded the mains’l over ‘im. I
couldn’t think of
nothink else, sir,” said Orace, clinging to his
original defence.

Words failed the Saint for a while. And then,
with a slow help-
less
grin dragging at his mouth, he brought up his fist and pushed O
race’s chin back.

“Go up and fetch him in again, you old
humbug,” he said.
“And don’t play any more tricks like
that on me, or I’ll wring
your blessed neck.”

He threw himself down on the settee and began
to think again.
Murdoch still remained to be dealt with: and the Saint
feared
that he might not have been made any more amenable to reason
by the
sock on the jaw which had unfortunately been obliged to
interrupt
their conversation. Not that Murdoch could have been
called an unduly
sympathetic listener before that … Probably
it made very little difference; but the
original problem remained.
There was also
the question arising in his mind of whether Orace’s
manoeuvres with the mainsail had passed unnoticed
by the
seaman who had stayed in the speedboat—which would be even
more difficult to determine. And the Saint’s
attention was busily
divided between these two salient queries when he
looked up and
discovered that Orace had
returned to the saloon and was gaping
at
him with a peculiarly fish-like expression in his eyes.

Simon Templar regarded the spectacle
thoughtfully for one or
two palpitating seconds. Orace’s rounded eyes
goggled back at
him with the same trout-like intensity. The fringes of
Orace’s
moustache
waved in the draught of his breathing like the ciliated epithelium of a
rabbit’s oviduct. It became increasingly apparent
to the Saint that Orace had something on his mind.
“Are you laying an egg?” he inquired at
length.
“E’s—e’s
gorn,
sir!”
said Orace weakly.

4

Simon got up slowly. Of all the spectacular
things he had done
that evening, he was inclined to estimate that restrained
and
dignified uprising as the supreme achievement. It was a crowning
triumph of
mind over matter for which he felt justly entitled to
take off his hat to
himself, afterwards, and when wearing a hat.

“He’s gorn, has he?” he repeated.

“Yessir,” said Orace hollowly.

Simon moved him aside and went up on to the
deck. The dis
ordered mainsail, draped sloppily away from the boom,
offered its own pregnant testimony to the truth of Orace’s conjecture.
Simon
strolled round it and prodded it with his toe. There was
no deception. The lump that had
been Steve Murdoch, which he
had felt under
his hand as he walked by with Vogel, hadn’t sim
ply slipped off its insecure perch and buried itself under the folds
of
canvas. Murdoch had taken it on the hoof.

” ‘E must ‘ve woke up while yer was
talkin’ to me an’ ‘opped overboard,” said Orace gloomily.

The Saint nodded. He scanned the surrounding
circle of black shining water, his hands in his pockets, listening with
abstracted
concentration. He could hear dance music still coming
from one
of the casinos, a waif of melody riding over the liquid
under
tones of the harbour; that was all. There was no sight or sound
to tell
him where Murdoch had gone.

“You have the most penetrating
inspirations, Orace,” he mur
mured admiringly. “I suppose
that’s what must have happened.
But we shan’t get him back. It’s nearly low
tide, and he’s had
time to reach the shore by now. I hope he catches his
death of
cold.”

He smoked his cigarette down with remarkable
serenity, while O
race
fidgeted uncomfortably round him. Certainly the problem
of what to do with Steve Murdoch was effectively disposed of.
The problem of what Steve Murdoch would now be
doing with himself took its place, and the question marks round the problem
were
even more complicated and more disturbing. But the doubt
of how much Kurt Vogel knew stayed where it
was—intensified,
perhaps, by the
other complication.