Salvage for the Saint (22 page)

And then, as he broke surface, the feel of air on his skin must have brought consciousness briefly back to him. At any rate, something told him to tear off his face mask and take two great gulping gasping breaths, as hands reached down from the launch to bring him aboard, before the mist came up in front of his eyes again and became an infinite and engulfing black void.

VII: How there was a Three-way

Reunion, and the Saint saw more Fun Ahead.

-1-

Simon Templar opened his eyes again in tentative incredulity, to regard the back of Inspector Gerard Lebec’s head. Objectively speaking it was nothing remarkable, as the backs of heads went; but to the Saint it was indubitably one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen.

He shifted his glance, and met the blue gaze and concerned expression of Arabella Tatenor. He was lying across two of the seats in the cabin of the launch, with his head resting in her lap; and the Saint had never before felt so utterly amazed and overwhelmed to be alive.

The gold on the deck of the fleeing Phoenix was for that moment a dream forgotten as completely as if it had never been. Even the world that impinged directly on his senses had the lambent quality of a fantasy; and he looked around him with a fresh-eyed wonderment. It was the unbelievable fantasy of a world which he had just given up as irrevocably lost. Never before had life seemed so overflowing with the sensory riches of the moving present that was now, and never before had the seed of that present seemed to hold such an infinite burgeoning of promise for the future. Just to be alive was a fabulous wine of contentment, and at that moment he wanted nothing more than to remain utterly immersed in it.

He hooked an arm up slowly behind Arabella’s red-gold head and drew her down gently for a kiss. And this too was an astonishment and a fantasy—this woman, ripe and beautiful and tender, who gave herself willingly to his kiss, and returned it …

And then abruptly, almost with an audible click, he was fully back in life again. The sky and the sea and Arabella and Lebec and the man at the helm of the launch somersaulted dizzily back into their familiar perspective in the real world; and now it was the last place he had been to, on the murky margins of annihilation that was the fantasy, fading into a blurred and receding memory of life surrendering to death.

Then, with that return of his normal mind, he thought of the man who had locked him up under the sea—the man who had slammed down and secured the hatch and left him down there alone to suffocate and die in the darkness. And if ever iron entered into a man’s soul, it entered into the soul of Simon Templar then.

There was no justice he could imagine subscribing to which would not make the perpetrator of that action pay for it in the very same coin—the coin of life. For the Saint, there could be no other possible price, and no other acceptable executioner but himself; and he knew that, whatever else might happen, he would do everything in his power to carry out the sentence, and that when the time came he would do it unflinchingly and without compunction.

Now he gazed forward across the sea, and saw the Phoenix ahead against the pink glow on the western horizon where the sun had gone down not long before. The Phoenix had perhaps four hundred yards on them, and the launch was closing the gap fast.

Lebec turned to him.

“So you have recovered, Monsieur Templar. Are you able to tell us—who is the diver? Who is that man driving the Phoenix?”

Simon’s eyes were chips of frozen sapphire as he thought of that driver—that man.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But I mean to find out, just as soon as you can catch up and get this tub close enough for me to jump on board.”

While the launch steadily ate up the Phoenix’s lead, Simon sketched in the bare essentials of what had happened in those final few minutes on the sea bed. Lebec listened attentively, his pale green eyes appraising the Saint’s lean and dangerous form; and he must have drawn his own conclusions from what he saw.

Perhaps the hard-set fighting line of the Saint’s mouth and the flinty resolution in his eyes made his intentions only too plain. Not that he had made any special attempt to conceal them. But at any rate, Lebec abruptly drew his automatic with the air of a man who had made up his mind about a point which had been worrying him.

“Monsieur Templar,” he said, “you will not be permitted to step on to the Phoenix until after I have dealt with this man. You will remain here—and Madame also, for her own safety.”

At a word from Lebec the crewman drew his own gun and pointed it at the Saint. And Simon was glumly obliged to admit its controlling power, and to remain where he was while the launch drew level with the Phoenix’s port quarter.

The crewman manoeuvred the launch close in, and Lebec stood up on the rail to make the short jump across the after deck. And in that instant the Saint knew that, come what might, this was one party he couldn’t bear to miss.

There was no way that he could sit there among the charred cushions in the cabin of the coastguard launch while Lebec followed formal police procedure to bring the man at the helm of the Phoenix into the custody and protection of the law, with all the asininely bureaucratic due processes which that implied. As soon as he saw Lebec on board the Phoenix, with automatic in hand, he realised that he had to take action immediately if he was to have any hope of substituting Saintly retributive justice for those due processes.

There was only one thing to be done, and he did it. It involved elements of risk; but what was that after what he had already come through?

He took the two easy unhurried strides that were needed to bring him within easy range of the crewman at the helm, and he took them as if it had been the most natural thing in the world to approach for a chat; and that was the first risk taken. The crewman might have had a twitchy trigger finger, easily set off by any threatening movement on the Saint’s part; but Simon had studied his lugubrious features and his generally slow and deliberate behaviour, and gambled that the man was the opposite of twitchy; and the gamble had come off.

The next stage of the operation demanded a quick burst of the brilliant acting which the Saint could turn on like a tap when the need arose. As he reached the armed crewman, after those two relaxed strides across the cabin, he began to speak, in French, in a friendly conversational tone that exactly fitted the pace of his casual steps.

“Il a beaucoup de courage, votre chef” he began; but he interrupted himself abruptly by turning his head sharply towards the Phoenix as if he had suddenly seen something that took his breath away.

“Mon Dieu!” he gasped; and the crewman looked off in the same direction.

He would hardly have been human if he had not turned his own head in response to Simon’s totally convincing diversion; and the Saint truly regretted that the exigencies of the situation called for the crewman to suffer a little bodily harm. That regret, however, could not be allowed to weaken his resolve. His left hand shot out like a greased piston, and his fingers closed over the man’s gun wrist; and almost at the same instant his right fist, travelling about eighteen inches through the air in a scorching uppercut, impacted with bone-jarring force under the man’s mournful jaw.

The crewman crumpled with scarcely a sound, and Simon caught him and let him gently down. Then he picked up the gun and toyed with it in momentary hesitation.

“Another old trick?” Arabella enquired; and Simon nodded.

The old light of battle was in his eyes as he handed her the gun. What he had to do, he would do with his bare hands.

“Wave it at him if he wakes up,” he said. “Tell him you’ll shoot if he comes closer than five feet—and sound as if you mean it!”

And then he was gone, his feet taking him noiselessly on to the rail and then across to the Phoenix through the gathering dusk; and Arabella sat looking from the gun in her hand to the unconscious crewman, and back to the gun.

Lebec had perhaps a minute’s start on him; and the Saint had no very clear plan of what to do next. It was one of those situations where, as so often before, he simply followed his impulse and instinct. All he knew was that he was back in the game, with Lebec ahead of him, and the man in the wheelhouse an unknown quantity— though the Saint had his suspicions on that score …

He had been over his speculations about Tranchier’s survival often enough by this time; and he was not unprepared for the sound that reached his ears as he glided along the deck of the Phoenix towards the wheelhouse like a liquid shadow.

He heard two voices speaking in rapid French, one of them Lebec’s; and he flattened himself against a bulkhead where he could not be seen from the door of the wheelhouse or its companionway. And as he listened, his eyes widened with steadily growing comprehension.

“Will you or will you not surrender?” Lebec’s voice demanded from what the Saint judged to be somewhere near the foot of the companionway.

“You’ll have to shoot me first,” said the other man, from higher up.

There was a pause; then Lebec said:

“If I must, I will shoot you. There will be no witnesses. Templar and the woman are on the launch with the coastguard man. I will say it was self-defence, that you resisted arrest. And so after all the gold will be mine alone, and you will have gained nothing by your death.”

“But you will still have the problem of those three—and Finnegan—to deal with, alone.” A faintly crafty note crept into the other voice. “Gerard—why don’t we make a deal? There’s more than enough for two. We could throw the four bodies overboard, set the launch adrift, and get clean away.”

There was another pause; and while Lebec was thinking, so was the Saint. For the dialogue he had overheard gave him all he needed to think about.

First, there was Lebec’s clear and unpolicemanlike desire to grab the gold for himself. Second, there was the fact that the other man had called him “Gerard” in a way that implied an intimate acquaintance. Thirdly, there was the man’s voice.

Simon had never, that he could remember, heard Tranchier-Fournier speak; and yet there was something in the tone of that other Frenchman in the Phoenix’s wheel-house, a confidence and authority, even an arrogance, which didn’t fit the impression he had formed of Tranchier.

Then it hit him like a sudden blast of arctic air; and in that instant of amazed realisation, as the pieces of the puzzle began to click into precise place, he stepped out from behind the bulkhead and into view.

He saw Inspector Gerard Lebec, standing only part-way up the companionway, swinging around in alarm. And in the doorway at the top, facing him, he saw the other man— a man with a big square head, grey-white hair, and suntanned features.

It could only be Karl Schwarzkopf, also known as Charles Tatenor.

-2-

“Salut Karl!” said the Saint in a voice of steel-lined velvet.

Even though he had come out into the open without premeditation, simply because he had had to confirm Schwarzkopf as the owner of the second voice as soon as the fantastic conviction had come to him, Simon’s reflexes were immediately balanced on a razor edge. He was acutely aware of being unarmed, and that the reaction of Lebec, with his automatic, was unpredictable.

Lebec was certainly taken by surprise; and his adjustment to the Saint’s abrupt arrival on the scene was perhaps half a second slower than Schwarzkopf’s.

Which was unfortunate for Lebec.

As the French detective swung his head, followed by his gun arm, away from Schwarzkopf and towards Simon, Schwarzkopf moved—and with amazing speed. He launched himself down the companionway at Lebec feet-first, with a force that should have sent him cannoning into the Saint. But Simon’s reactions were also fast, and he sidestepped. Lebec made the close and violent acquaintance of a bulkhead, and sank to the deck with all the wind knocked out of him. Somehow he managed to hold on to the automatic, but it was two or three seconds before he could collect his breath and his wits to use it.

Two or three seconds was all Schwarzkopf needed. He must have summed up the situation to himself—including Simon’s own lack of a visible weapon—in the instant of launching himself at Lebec; and now, as Lebec lay gasping on the deck, Schwarzkopf leapt back up the companionway, snatched up a Very pistol in the wheelhouse, and reappeared in the doorway.

And as Lebec brought his automatic up again, Schwarzkopf fired.

The Saint had seen weird deaths before, but this was a sight to persist in his memory for many long years. That brilliant dazzling flare was like a photographic flashbulb fixing the image in the mind. In its vivid and garish light, Lebec’s amazed expression was thrown into stark and unforgettable relief. The flare hit him, so to speak, amidships, sank deeply into his torso, and continued to blaze brilliantly as the stricken Lebec emitted a bloodcurdling scream, staggered backward to the rail, and crashed over it and into the sea.

Both Schwarzkopf and the Saint watched Lebec’s final disappearance in frozen fascination for the few seconds it occupied. And then Schwarzkopf, still gripping the signal-pistol, whirled, and disappeared back into the wheelhouse. The Saint had to make an immediate choice, either to conceal himself—playing hide-and-seek with an armed man—or to go forward and try to get to Schwarzkopf before he could reload the pistol.

He went forward.

With one long stride he was at the foot of the companionway, and with two more coordinated thrusts of arms and legs he was at the top and into the wheelhouse doorway.

He had never climbed a companionway faster; but as he reached the doorway he knew he had not been fast enough. Schwarzkopf had just finished thrusting a new flare into the Very pistol. He levelled it at the Saint, and the Saint came to a slow halt in the doorway.

So this was how the game was to end, after all, he thought; and there was a certain inescapable bitterness in the reflection that he had survived, by one of those miracles he had thought impossible, this man’s earlier attempt to kill him, only to find himself now facing death once more at the same hand—the hand of Karl Schwarzkopf, the only survivor of a boat crash which had killed, not “Tatenor” and Tranchier, and not “Tatenor” alone, but Tranchier alone.