Saint's Getaway (13 page)

“What game? What is this boodle that all
the shindy’s about, anyway? You keep us up all night chasing that wretched
little
box, and I don’t suppose you’ve any more idea what’s inside it than I
have. For all you know, it’s probably a couple of float
ing kidneys.”

Simon sank back in his corner and closed his eyes.

“I can tell you what they were. I’ve seen
‘em. They’re the
larger half of the Montenegrin crown jewels. They disap
peared on
their way to Christie’s six weeks back. I was think
ing of having a dart at
them myself. And we could have had
‘em for the asking!”

“They wouldn’t be any use to me,”
said Monty, unmoved.
“I’ve given up wearing a crown.” He
locked the car round a
corner and drove on. “What you ought to
be doing is thank
ing God you’re sitting here without a bullet in you.”

Simon sighed.

“Oh, well,” he said—“If you
don’t want any boodle, that’s
O. K. with me.”

He twisted his hands round and gazed moodily
upwards at
the
stars.

“You know,” he said meditatively,
“it’s extraordinary what
bloomers people make in moments of crisis.
Take dear old
Rudolf, for example. You’d think he’d have remembered
that
even when you shut a combination lock that’s just been
opened, you
still have to jigger the wheels round to seal it up.
Otherwise the
combination is still set at the key word… .
But he didn’t
remember, which is perhaps as well.”

And Simon Templar took his hands from his
coat pocket;
and the car swerved giddily across the road as Monty
Hayward
stared from the scintillating jumble of stones in the Saint’s
hands to
the laughing face of the Saint.

VI.
    
HOW MONTY
HAYWARD SLEPT UNEASILY,

AND
 
SIMON TEMPLAR
WARBLED ABOUT
WORMS

“NEXT on the left is ours,” said the Saint mildly. “I
don’t
think we’ll take the corner till we get there, if it’s all the same
to
you.”

Monty straightened the car up viciously
within a thumb’s
breadth of the ditch, and slackened the pressure of his
foot on
the accelerator. His eyes turned back to the road and stayed
there
ominously.

“Let me get this clear,” he said.
“Are you telling me that
you’ve still got the whole total of the boodle?”

“Monty, I am.”

“And the Crown Prince is chasing back to
his
schloss
with
an entirely empty box.”

“You said it.”

“So that apart from the police being
after us for assault, bat
tery, murder, and stealing a car, your pal
Rudolf will be turn
ing
round to come after us and slit our throats——”

“And with any luck,” supplemented
the Saint cheerfully,
“Comrade Krauss will also be raising
dust along the warpath.
I left him with a pretty easy getaway in front
of him; and if
he roused up at any time while the complete garrison was
occupied
with the business of hallooing after me, the odds are
that he made it. Which
ought to keep the entertainment from
freezing up.”

This third horn on the dilemma was new to
Monty and Pa
tricia. Simon Templar explained. He gave a vigorously
graphic
account of his movements since he had left them to paddle their own canoes at
the K
ö
nigshof, and threw in a bald
description
of the mediaeval sports and pastimes at the Crown Prince’s castle which sent a
momentary squirm of horror creep
ing over their scalps. It took exactly five
lines of collocution to link up Comrade Krauss with the man who had vanished
from the
fateful Room Twelve above the Saint’s own suite;
and then the whole
tangled structure of the amazing web of
circumstance in which
they were involved became as vividly
apparent to the other two as it was to
the Saint himself. And
the Saint chuckled.

“Boys and girls, my idea of a quiet
holiday is just this!”

“Well, it may be your idea of a quiet
holiday, but it isn’t mine,” said Monty Hayward morosely. “I’ve got a
wife and three kiddies in England, and what are they going to think?”

“Wire ‘em to come out and join you,” said the Saint
dispas
sionately. “We may be wanting
all the help we can get”

Monty glowered along the track of the headlights, holding
the car steadily on its northward course. They
had whizzed
through Maurach while
Simon was talking, and now they were speeding up the eastern shore of the
Achensee. The moon had
come up over the mountains, and its strengthening
light bur
nished the still waters of the
lake with a sheen like polished
jet. Far beyond the lake, behind the
black hump of the nearer
slopes, an
ice-capped peak reared its white head like an enormous beacon, towering in
lonely magnificence against a vivid
gun-metal sky, so brilliant and
luminous that the six forlorn
lights that
burned in Pertisau looked like ridiculous yellow
pin-points beneath it, and their trailing reflections in the water
seemed merely niggling impertinences. The night
had put on
a beauty that was
startling, a splendour that only comes to the
high places of the earth. The Saint was filling his eyes. It was a
night such as he had seen high up in the Andes
above Encantada
, or again on the Plateau d’Alzo in the heart of
Corsica,
where the air may be so clear that
the mountains ten miles
away seem to be leaning over to fall upon you on
the broad
ridge that will bring you
presently to the Grotto des Anges.
The
queer streak of paganism in him that took no count of
time or occasion touched him with its spell.
Patricia was un
locking the handcuffs
from his wrists; as they fell away, she found her hands caught in one of his.

“The crown of the world,” he said.

And, knowing her man, she understood. The
clear blue of
the night was in his eyes, the gorgeous madness that
made him
what he was thrilled in his touch. His words seemed to
hold
nothing absurd, nothing incongruous—only the devil-may-
care
attar of Saintliness that would have stopped to admire a
view on
the way to its own funeral.

She smiled.

“I love you when you say things like
that,” she said.

“I never have loved him,” said
Monty Hayward cold-blood
edly; “but I might dislike him a little
less if he left off gaping
at the scenery and told us where we’re
supposed to be making
for.”

Simon lighted a cigarette and inspected his
watch under the
shielded
bulb on the dash. He leaned forward, with his face
chiselled out in lines of gay alertness, and his mouth curved
to a smile.

“The frontier, of course,” he
said. “That’s the first move, any
way; and praise the Lord there’s only a
few miles to go. Be
sides, it might have the
practical advantage of keeping the cops
a little way behind. You wouldn’t believe how I’m devoted to the
police, but I don’t think we want to get intimate with them
to-day.”

He had begun to work away on the jewels
while he talked.
With the blade of his pocketknife he was prising the
stones
loose from their settings and spilling them into a handkerchief spread
out on his lap. Under his swift fingers, rubies, pearls, sapphires, and
diamonds cascaded down like drops of frozen fire, carelessly heaping themselves
into a coruscating little
molehill of multicoloured crystals which the
Saint’s expert eye
valued at something in the neighbourhood of a cool quarter
of a million. The Maloresco emeralds flopped solidly onto the
pile,
ruthlessly ripped from their pendant of gold filigree—
five flawless,
perfectly matched green lozenges the size of pig
eons’ eggs. A couple
of dozen miscellaneous brilliants and
three fifty-carat sapphires trickled
down on top of them. The
Ullsteinbach blue diamond, wedding gift of the
Emperor
Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc, slumped into the cluster
with a shimmer of azure flame. It went on until the
handkerchief was
sagging under the weight of a scintillating
pyramid of relucent
wealth that made even Simon Templar
blink his eyes. Shorn of their
settings, the stones seemed to take on a lustre that was dazzling—the sheer
lambent effulgence of
their own naked beauty.

But these things he appreciated only
transitorily, much as a
surgeon can only transitorily appreciate the
beauty of a woman
on
whom he has been called to perform an urgent operation.
And the same unswerving professional thoroughness was vis
ible in
the way he wielded his knife, deftly twisting and cut
ting away the priceless metal-work and flicking it nonchalantly
over the side of the car. Every setting was a work
of art, but
that very quality made
each one too distinctive to be trusted.
The size and perfection of the jewels themselves were more
than hall mark enough for the Saint’s unobtrusive
taste in
articles of vertu; and,
besides, the settings were three times as
bulky as the gems they carried. With the frontier only a few
minutes distant, Simon Templar felt in his most
unobtrusive
mood. The speed and skill
with which he worked were amazing
: he
had scarcely finished his cigarette when the last scrap of fretted gold
vanished into the darkness, and the accumula
tion was complete.

He looked up to find Patricia staring at the
stones over his
shoulder.

“What are they worth, boy?” she
whispered.

The Saint laughed.

“Enough to buy you a new pair of
elastic-sided boots and
an embroidered nightcap for Monty,” he
said. “And then you
could write two cheques for six figures, and
still have enough
change left to stand yourself two steam yachts and a
Rolls.
That is, if you could sell the loot in the open market. As things
are, Van
Roeper’ll probably beat me down to a lousy couple
of million guilders,
which means we shall have to pass up one
of those cheques and
Monty’s nightcap. But all the same, lass, it’s Boodle with the peach of a
B!”

He knotted the corners of his handkerchief
diagonally over
the spoils, tested the firmness of the bundle, and tossed
it effervescently
into the air. Then it vanished into his pocket, and
he helped
himself to another cigarette and settled down in his
corner to enjoy the
drive.

Monty Hayward was the only one who seemed to
have es
caped the Saint’s own contagious exhilaration. He concen
trated his
eyes on the task of guiding the car and thought that
it was all a pretty bad show. He said so.

“If you’d only left that jewellery as it
was, you chump,” he
said—having only just thought of it
himself—“we might have
been able to tell the police we’d found it on
the road and were on our way to return it.”

Simon shook his head.

“We couldn’t have told them that,
Monty.”

“Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t have been
true,” answered the Saint,
with awful solemnity.

“You owl!” snarled Monty Hayward;
and relapsed into his
nightmare.

It was a nightmare in which he had been
groping about for
so long that he had lost the power of protesting
effectively
against anything that it required him to do. Presently,
at the
Saint’s bidding, he stopped the car for a moment while he re
moved his police uniform, which
went into the nearest clump of bushes. Then he suffered himself to be told to
drive unhes
itatingly up to the frontier post
which showed up in the glare
of their
headlights a few minutes later, where he obediently applied his brakes and
waited in a kind of numb resignation
while
the guards stepped up and made their formal inquisi
tions. Every instinct that he possessed urged him
to turn tail
and fly—to leap out of
the car and make a desperate attempt
to
plunge unseen into Germany through the darkness of the
woods on their
left—even, in one frantic moment, to let in the
clutch again and smash recklessly through the flimsy barrier
across
the road into what looked like unassailable security be
yond. That he remained ungalvanized by all these natural impulses was
due solely to the paralytic inertia of the nightmare
which had him
inextricably in its grip. His, it appeared, not to
reason why; his but to sit still and wait for somebody to clout
him over the bean—and a more depressing fate for
anyone who
had passed unscathed
through the entire excitement of the
last
war he found it difficult to imagine. He sat mute behind
the wheel, endeavouring to make himself as
invisible as pos
sible, while the
Saint exhibited passports and answered the
usual questions. The Saint was as cool as a cucumber. He chat
tered affably throughout the delay, with an
impermeable ab
sence of
self-consciousness, and smiled benignly into the light
that was flashed
over them. The eternity of prickling suspense
which
Monty Hayward endured passed over the Saint’s
unruffled head like a soothing zephyr; and when at last the
signal was given and they moved on, and the Saint
leaned
back with a gentle exhalation
of breath and searched for his
cigarette case, his immutable serenity
seemed little less than a
deliberate
affront.