Salvage for the Saint (23 page)

For it was “Tatenor”, the man Schwarzkopf, now standing before him and about to pull the trigger of the signal-pistol for the second time, who was the clever one. Why should the relatively stupid Tranchier have been able to worst him and escape to claim the gold for himself? Simon could see it all now; but he could also see why he had been backing the wrong horse as the survivor. Karl Schwarzkopf, whose attention to detail had been impeccable, was the survivor now …

Except that the expected shot had still not come.

Schwarzkopf motioned with the Very pistol.

“So—Templar. Where’s the rest of the gold, old chap?” he said in his measured and hauntingly overprecise English. “What did you do with it, eh?”

So that was it. Only the other man’s avarice had prolonged Simon’s life even that long.

“How do you mean—the rest of the gold?” the Saint queried, apparently in genuine puzzlement.

“Come, come now.” Schwarzkopf-Tate-nor made an impatient movement with the pistol. “You’ve already caused me more than enough trouble with your confounded interference. Let’s not waste time. You may have very little of it remaining. Let’s be sensible. You know I’m not a fool, and I pay you the compliment of acknowledging that you’re not weak in the head either. I’ve seen the tally of the gold on deck, I know how many bars were down there on the sea bed originally, and I know how many I’ve removed over the years. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. Forty-one are left unaccounted for. You must have moved them. I want to know where they are.”

“They’re somewhere you’ll never find them,” the Saint said.

The other smiled mirthlessly.

“I’ll give you a minute or two to reconsider,” he said—and the Saint heard again that note of cunning which he had heard while he listened to Schwarzkopf’s conversation with Lebec. “Perhaps we can come to some arrangement. As matters stand at the moment, those forty-one bars of gold are lost to me. If you will tell me where they are or better, accompany me to recover them I’d be prepared to share them with you. So you would emerge with something for your pains, and also with your life.”

The Saint shook his head sadly.

“Karl, you’re beginning to disappoint me. Just now you were prepared to give me credit for being slightly less than an idiot. Now you’re throwing me a bait no self-respecting half-wit would take. No deal, Karl. You’re much too smart to leave me alive—now that I know you’re alive.”

Schwarzkopf gazed intently at him, but said nothing; and Simon continued.

“Yes, Karl, you always were a clever fellow, weren’t you? Ein geschickter Kerl. Brilliant scholar and linguist, high flyer with the bank in Paris. And when your partners in crime were unclever enough to get caught, you were bright enough to take off with the loot—and to get away with it.”

“Why should I pay for their stupidity?” Schwarzkopf said calmly. “They wanted their champagne, the imbeciles. Well, they had it. And I had the gold.”

“And then,” Simon went on, “you perfected your new identity—the upper-crust sporting Englishman. And you did it brilliantly enough to fool everyone … Until fish-features Tranchier turned up; and he wouldn’t go away, would he? What a pain he must have been to you, Karl! You couldn’t even have bought him off, because Descartes and the others would have been down on you before long. There was only one way out for you; and that was to die, or appear to die. And since Fish-face was sticking so close to you, it had to be done in a way that either convinced him or got rid of him permanently along with ‘Tatenor’.”

Schwarzkopf smiled that curiously mirthless smile again, but there was a hint of pride in his face too.

“It was a brilliant solution, wasn’t it? To kill the man Tatenor—so that the others would cease looking for him—for me.”

“Yes, Karl, it was a great idea,” the Saint agreed. “And who was the other man in the boat—the other body? Some poor down-and-out you clobbered? Or a solitary tourist on the island who wasn’t likely to be missed at home for a week or two? And next, I suppose, you’d have surfaced in France, or back in Switzerland, or somewhere else, with another new identity, leaving your widow with nothing. Yes, it was clever all right. As I said, you’re a brainy fellow.”

“So I’m brainy enough to know when I should make a deal,” Schwarzkopf said in level tones.

“And I know that your name is Schwarzkopf, not Dummkopf. Any deal with me would mean no more than the one you tried to make with Lebec. You had to try something there, because he had a gun on you. With me, you’re trying it on because you think I might be able to tell you where there’s more gold; and you’re greedy for it all. But eventually you’d kill me anyway, like you killed Lebec … By the way, he was the sixth man, I suppose? You called him ‘Gerard’.”

“He was our partner at the Moroccan end of the operation,” Schwarzkopf said. “I expect he joined the Marseille police in order to remain in the area where he presumed the gold might still be hidden. He seems to have been obsessed with it.”

“But he had to die, didn’t he—once he knew what you were up to? And the same applies to me, and the others. You can’t afford to leave anyone alive who knows about the gold. You’ll have to kill me, and you’ll have to kill the coastguard man.” The Saint paused, and then added with an inexorable finality in his voice: “And then, Karl, you’re going to have to kill your own wife. How easy will you find that? Wirdst du selbst deine eigene Frau umbringen konnen?”

Simon could see that the last thrust had gone home. The need to face the problem of Arabella must have been the only thing that could give a pang to Schwarzkopf’s case-hardened conscience. The Saint, as the person who had relentlessly brought him face to face with that last shocking question, became the object and the focus of the anger that now erupted through the surface of Schwarzkopf’s polished self-command; and with the final question fired at him in German, which was after all the language nearest to his own, the man’s linguistic control had been broken down too. He answered in a German rapidly devolving into his own guttural Swiss dialect.

“Jal Du hesch rdcht!” he snarled, holding the pistol pointed rigidly. “Meine Frau muss ich glekhfalls umbringen. Aber jetzt, Templar, itz Idngts mit dr Imischig. Itz lani di abe, du Soueheib!”

Simon Templar did not understand every word Tatenor had said in that peculiar honkingly guttural accent; but the sense was as clear as day, and more urgent. And now, as Schwarzkopf’s finger tightened visibly on the trigger of the Very pistol, Simon knew that evasive action was his only slim hope of escaping the spectacular fate of Lebec.

The timing had to be perfect, and the flare not too low; and all the Saint could do was to concentrate his profound and undeviating attention on the former, watching that trigger-knuckle as it whitened, for the fraction of a second during which it moved. He judged the distance, and then …

To say that he ducked would be absurdly inadequate. He dropped. Or perhaps he half-dropped and half-dived down on to the companionway; and the flare swooshed over his head and out to sea.

And then he felt an urgent tug at his ankle; and he looked down and saw Arabella, holding the crewman’s automatic out to him in mute and terrible decision.

He dropped vertically the remaining few feet down the side of the companionway. Their eyes met briefly in silence, and he took the gun. They could hear the sounds of reloading in the wheelhouse, and a second or two later Schwarzkopf reappeared in the doorway.

And before he could fire the signal-pistol for the third time, Simon Templar shot him through the heart.

-3-

“And then,” said the Saint the next morning, “there was a nice touch of detail, a little bit of special care on his part, that had me fooled and sniffing off on the wrong scent. You remember I said I’d made some enquiries at the station? Well, the sharp-eyed little stationmaster said the stranger who’d travelled without bags had a French accent. I was already thinking of Tranchier, and that about clinched it in my mind. But Charles—Karl—was so smart he’d anticipated the possibility that someone might be suspicious about the boat crash, and nosey enough to make enquiries—and he prepared the ground so that, if anyone was suspected of having survived it, that someone would be Tranchier. He was certainly thorough, your Charles.”

Arabella turned over on her towel and looked around at the gold that still lay stacked on the deck of the Phoenix.

“Thorough enough to have killed me too.” She turned to face Simon: “It’s lucky I heard him say so—lucky I could understand enough German for that. Otherwise I could never have given you the gun—you know that?”

“Yes,” said the Saint. “I know. And you know now that I wasn’t the sixth man. Lebec was. All those years in the police, he must have been waiting, and wondering if he’d ever hear of that gold. He must have known about Descartes and the others, of course. He’d probably been watching them since they first arrived in the village. And then we turned up, and led him straight to the hoard—and to his old accomplice Karl.”

“And it was Charles—Karl—who tried to kill you in the night club, and who drove the van. And later, he must have been hiding on the Phoenix all the time.”

Simon nodded.

“Except when Lebec and I searched the ship.”

“And where was he then?”

“He could have been underwater, lurking on the blind side of the launch. But my guess is that he headed for the shore at the nearest point. It was only about a hundred yards from where we were, and there are some big rocks there. He’d have kept behind them out of sight until it was time to move. He could probably hear what I shouted to Lebec from the water, or anyway enough of it to know when I was getting near the end of the job.”

Arabella pondered for a while longer. Then she said:

“What about all this gold, Simon?”

“We’re returning it to the authorities, of course,” he said virtuously. “And claiming the reward.”

The coastguard cutter was keeping level with the Phoenix, about fifty yards off the starboard beam, escorting them watchfully back to Marseille.

“And how about the coastguard—won’t he make a fuss about being slugged?”

Simon stretched lazily in the sun.

“I squared it with him. I apologised handsomely—and sincerely. I explained that Lebec was a rotten egg. The crewman’ll get a tenth of our ten percent—I mean a fifth of my five percent.”

“And if the Marseilles police aren’t satisfied about Lebec’s death?” she persisted.

“They will be—once they dig into his past in Morocco and find the connections with the bullion job.”

Arabella pondered a while longer.

“And Finnegan? He was always just what he seemed, then?” she said finally.

“Innocent as a tipsy lamb,” Simon agreed. “And he’s back in top form.” He indicated the ship’s wake stretching away to the southeast behind them in a series of broad zigzags. “However, if I were you, I’d think twice about keeping him on as captain.”

Something else occurred to Arabella.

“Simon,” she said slowly, as she traced the line of his tanned shoulder with a finger. “It looks as though you’re not going to be left with so much out of all this. Four percent. Isn’t that an awfully small commission—for the Saint?”

He grinned, and ruffled her hair where the sun glinted on the red and gold of it.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I did manage to keep a bit of the gold back. Forty-one bars, to be precise. Somehow I just forgot to send them up.”

Arabella gazed at him in wonder, and then she threw back her head and chuckled with abandoned delight.

“So you’ve left half a million dollars down there! … But wait a minute. We pulled up part of the boat, remember? The whole thing may have been moved, dragged along the sea bed. Will you be able to find it again?”

“I think so,” said the Saint. “At any rate, I’m going to have a lot of fun trying.”

“We certainly are,” said Arabella.

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