Saint's Getaway (33 page)

He gave the Crown Prince a broadside of his most
seraphic
smile.

“Dear old Gaffer Rudolf!” he
drawled. “So that’s the simple
end of an awful lot of fuss. Well,
well, well! We none of us
grow younger, do we?—as we’ve been telling
each other sev
eral
times to-day.”

The prince gazed at him passionlessly.

“Would it be in order to congratulate
you?” he murmured;
and the Saint laughed.

“Perhaps—when we’ve finished.”

Simon turned to Monty.

“If you’d like something more to do, old
dear,” he said,
“you might try and find some more
handcuffs. We shall want
six pairs—if the station’ll run to it. Hands
only for Rudolf and
Marcovitch—they’ve got to walk. Hands and feet for the
Law
—we don’t want them at all. And mind how you go around
that
sergeant. He looks as if he might burst at any moment,
and you wouldn’t want to
get splashed with his supper.”

Monty searched around. After a few moments he
discov
ered a locker that was plentifully stocked with both hand and leg irons;
he came back trailing the chains behind him. Under
the Saint’s directions the two police
officers were efficiently
manacled together;
and finally an extra pair of handcuffs fast
ened them to a ringbolt set in the wall, which had apparently
been used before for the restraint of refractory
prisoners.

The prince smoked tranquilly until his turn
came; and then
he detached the cigarette end from the long jade holder,
placed the
holder leisurely in an inside pocket, and extended
his own hands for the
bracelets.

“This is a unique experience,” he
remarked, as Monty locked
the cuffs on his wrists. “May I ask where
we are to go?”

“Upstairs,” said the Saint coolly.
“We’ve got a little talk
coming, and the air’s better up there.”

The prince raised his sensitive eyebrows, but
he made no
reply.

They went up the stairs in a strange
procession: Patricia
and Nina Walden leading, the Saint going up
backwards after
them and covering the cortege, Prince Rudolf and
Marcovitch
following him, and Monty Hayward bringing up the rear.
The
prince’s face remained impassive. Simon knew that that
impassivity belied
the workings of that quiet ruthless brain; but the prince and Marcovitch were
firmly sandwiched be
tween two fires, and they could do nothing—at
the moment.
And the Saint didn’t care. The prince must have known it—
even as the two men in the room above must have known. It
was
significant that Rudolf had been very silent, ever since
that
playful s
é
ance in the charge room had
received its stag
gering interruption.

“This way, boys.”

Simon opened the door of the police chief’s
office and let
the caravan file past him. He went in last—closed the
door and
leaned back on it.

“Sit down.”

Prince Rudolf sank into a chair. Monty
prodded Marco
vitch into another with the nose of his Luger. And the
Saint
cleared a space on the desk and sat there, dumping the two
knotted
handkerchiefs beside him. He put away his gun and
opened the bundles,
pouring the contents of both onto a sin
gle handkerchief in a
shimmer of rainbow flames that seemed
to light up the whole dingy room.

“The time has come, Rudolf, for us to
have a little reckoning,” he said; and once again, for no reason that the
others
could think of, he was speaking in German. And yet to Monty Hayward there
was no difference, for the man who spoke was
still the Saint,
making even that stodgy language as vivid and
pliable as his own
native tongue. “We have a few things to
learn—and you can
tell us about them. And we’ll have all the
jewels out to
encourage you. Fill your eyes with them, Rudolf.
You used to be a rich
man. But just for this quarter of a mil
lion pounds’ worth of
stones you were ready to kill men and
torture them; you were ready to run up
a list of murders
that’d get anyone hanged three times—and frame them onto
Monty and
me. Which was very unkind of you, Rudy, after
all the fun we had
together in the old days. But you aren’t
denying any of it, are you?”

The prince shrugged.

“Why should I? It was unfortunate that
you personally
should be the victim, but——
”

“Highness!”

Marcovitch sprang up from his chair. And at
the same in
stant the Saint came off the desk like a streak of
lightning.
His fist smashed into the Russian’s mouth and sent him
reel
ing back.

“I never have liked your voice,
Uglyvitch,” said the Saint
evenly. “And it’s rude to butt in like
that. Gag him, Monty.”

Simon lighted another cigarette while the
order was being carried out. It had been a close call, that; but his face
showed
no sign of it. He had been watching Marcovitch from the
start. It
was odd how an inferior mentality might sometimes
feel brute suspicions
before they came to the more highly
geared intelligence.

He sat down in the police chief’s chair
behind the desk
and laid his automatic on the papers in front of him.

“As you say, it was unfortunate that I
should have been the
victim,” he murmured, as if nothing had
happened. “I’ve
never been a very successful victim, and I
suppose habits are
hard to break. But there were others who weren’t so
lucky.
It was all
the same to you.”

“My dear young friend, we are not
playing a game for chil
dren——
”

“No. We’re playing a game for savages.
We’ve come down
in the world. Once upon a time it was a game for
soldiers—in
the old days. I liked you because you were a patriot—and
a
sportsman—even though we were fighting on opposite sides.
Now it’s
only a game of hunting for sacrifices to put on the
altar of your bank
account.” The Saint’s eyes were cold splin
ters of blue light
across the table. “Two men died because they stood between you and these
jewels. An agent of yours—didn’t
you refer to him as ‘the egregious Emilio?’—murdered
Heinrich
Weissmann in my hotel bedroom in Innsbruck after I
rescued him
from three detectives whom we mistook for ban
dits. He was taking
the jewels to Josef Krauss, whom you had
allowed to pull the
chestnuts out of the fire for you. You tor
tured Krauss last
night; and today, when he had escaped,
Marcovitch murdered
him on the train between Munich and
here. And Marcovitch would also have
murdered all three of
us if we’d given him the chance.”

“My dear Mr. Templar——
”

“I haven’t quite finished yet,”
said the Saint quietly. “Marcovitch
was the man who
raided the brake van on that train,
with four more of your hired thugs, to
regain those jewels
after I’d taken them off you. And when we had to jump off
to save our lives, he told the officials that it was
I
who stole the
mail. That also meant nothing to you. You were ready to have
all your
crimes charged against us—just as you were ready to
have them actually
committed by your dirty hirelings. You
hadn’t even the
courage to do any of the work yourself, be
fore it was framed
onto me. But only a few minutes ago you were ready to apply your torturing
methods to a girl, to make
certain that there would be more blood on
those jewels be
fore you’d done with them. The methods of a patriot and a
gentleman!”

For the first time Simon saw a flush of
passion come into
the pale face opposite him. The taunt had gone to its
mark like
a barbed arrow.

“My dear Mr. Templar!” The prince
still controlled his
voice, but a little of the suavity had gone
from it “Since
when have your own methods been above reproach?”

“I’m not thinking of only myself,”
answered the Saint
coldly. “I’m only alleged to have robbed a train.
Monty Hay-
ward here is accused of murdering Weissmann as well, and
he’s the most innocent one of us all. The only thing he ever
did was to
help me rescue Weissmann in the first place,
through a mistake
which anyone might have made. And since
then, of course, he’s
helped me to hold up this police station
in order to see
justice done, for which no one could blame
him. But you know as
well as I do that he isn’t a criminal.”

“His character fails to interest
me.”

“But you know that what I’ve said is the
truth.”

“Have I denied it?”

The Saint leaned forward over the desk.

“Will you deny that Weissmann was
murdered by an agent
of yours and by your orders; that Josef
Krauss died in the same way; and that it was Marcovitch and other agents of
yours who
robbed the mail?”

The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was
recovering his self-
control
again. His face was calm and satirical.

“I believe you once headed an
organization which pur
ported to administer a justice above the
law,” he said. “Do I
understand that I am assisting at its
renaissance?”

“Do you deny the charge?”

“And supposing I admit it?”

“I’m asking a question,” said the
Saint, with a face of stone.
“Do you deny the charge?”

A long, tense silence came down on the room.
Marcovitch
moved again, and Monty’s hand caught him round the neck.
The
significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward’s under
standing, but the
drama of the scene held him spellbound. He
also had begun to fall
into the error that was deluding the
Crown Prince. The Saint’s face was as
inexorable as a judge’s.
The humour and humanity had frozen out of it,
leaving the
rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the
eyes
were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the
depths of
the prince’s soul, holding him impaled on their
merciless gaze like a
butterfly on a pin. The tension piled up between them till the very air seemed
to grow hot and heavy
with it.

“Do you deny the charge?’

Again those five words dropped through the
room like sepa
rate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after
another
with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince’s brain.
They had
about them the adamantine patience of doom itself.
And the prince must
have known that that question was going
to receive a direct
answer if it waited till the end of the world.
He had come up
against a force that he could no more fight
against than he could
fight against the changing of the tides,
a force that would
wear through his resistance as the continual
dripping of water
wears through a rock.

And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly
picked up
his gun.

“Do you deny the charge?”

The prince stirred slightly.

“No.”

He answered unemotionally, without turning
his eyes a
fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into
them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin
in the
almost imperceptible lift of his head.

“Does your worship propose to pronounce
sentence?” he in
quired mockingly,

The Saint’s mouth relaxed in a hard little
smile.

Every word had been registered on the ears
of the two cap
tive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner
cabinet.
The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown
Prince
had fallen
at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could
never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Marcovitch
was silenced, and now he had gone white and still.
The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward
was free.
…