Send for the Saint (10 page)

And the Captain pulled a revolver from his hip pocket, showing only relief at receiving such a simple order.

But the Saint had long foreseen how desperate his situation might become, and had resolved that if he was destined to end his career down in that cargo hold, trapped like a rat behind a pile of boxes, it would only be after he had given the ungodly a show for their money; after he had gathered up in himself and released every last milligram of furious fighting energy that was to be found in his body. And when the testing moment came, his sinew did not fail him.

Every tight-strung dyne of pent-up alertness and determination went into gauging the arrival of that moment and responding to it with almost supernatural speed so as to avoid the deadly lump of lead that would hurtle out of the gun barrel that was swinging up towards him in the Captain’s hand. And in the fraction of a second before the Captain completed his pressure on the trigger, the Saint dived sideways; and the bullet sang past his left ear and thudded into a crate.

Overlaid on the loud reverberations he heard Patroclos shout: “Fool! Be careful! The ammunition!”

And then in what seemed like a mere fluent continuation of that dive, the Saint swept up the metal-shears he had been using with his right hand and hurled them at the Captain. They smashed point first into the Captain’s right arm, and he dropped the gun with a yelp, and then before any of the seamen could reach him the Saint had snatched up a grenade from one of the broken crates.

He held it aloft in both hands, and there was cold steel in his voice as he spoke.

“If anyone makes a move, I’ll pull out the pin and throw this pineapple without the slightest hesitation. You may succeed in getting me, but this whole lot’ll go up with a bang — and all of you with it.”

Patroclos and the Captain and crew froze. The Saint began to edge towards the ladder.

“Don’t look so worried, Dio,” he mocked. “I’m sure you can buy enough sympathy from the Greek authorities to stay out of serious trouble. Of course, you’ll never be persona grata in America again, but there are still other continents for you to operate in. Any of them must be better than being scattered around Piraeus in small pieces.”

“Wait!” Patroclos said hoarsely. “Let us not be hasty. Why can we not come to an arrangement?”

The Saint shook his head.

“No dice,” he said. “You may find it hard to believe, but I’ve still got a few silly oldfashioned principles propping up my halo. I’m just not on the side of the Commies, even when they call themselves North Koreans, and nothing you can offer would persuade me to help them to anything deadlier than a peashooter.”

He had almost reached the foot of the ladder, his glance constantly shifting from one man to another, alert for the slightest hint of a hostile move. If he had to, he was prepared in the last resort to use the grenade as he had threatened … But only if it positively was the very last resort.

Out of the corner of an eye he saw Patroclos crawling on all fours between two crates towards the Captain’s revolver where it had fallen. Simon leapt across the intervening space and got one foot on the gun just as the mogul, his face a mask of vengeful fury, snatched at it. Then the Saint scooped a steel-fingered hand down to grasp the butt, and jerked it savagely. Patroclos kept his grip, and the gun came up off the floor; somehow in the struggle, the gun went off, and Diogenes Patroclos crumpled and rolled slackly over with a bright red stain slowly spreading across his white linen shirt-front.

Simon straightened up, with the revolver now reinforcing the menace of the grenade he still held in his other hand.

“Anyone else want to try his luck?” he inquired grimly, and saw no takers.

14
Simon Templar refilled Ariadne’s glass and his own from the ouzo bottle, and put his feet on the desk.

“It was about the nearest thing you could have to a perfect impersonation. An amazing idea, if you think about it — a man impersonating himself. What a show! And I was the leading player — in the audience!”

The Patroclos empire was in disarray and confusion; with the consent of the Greek government the American Navy, acting for the United Nations, had intercepted the other five ships and seized all the cargoes. Simon was resigned to staying around for a few days longer in Athens to make further statements to the police; Ariadne was similarly resigned to helping to sort out the loose ends in the office; and both had made up their minds to enjoy the enforced stay.

“That poor girl,” mused Ariadne. “He was her boss, and she stayed loyal to him. I feel sorry for her.”

“So do I,” agreed the Saint. “He exploited her as he exploited everyone else. She played her part magnificently, right down to the tears when the news of the plane crash came in.”

The girl toyed with her glass reflectively. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that they had shared a need to recapitulate and review some of the complications of the extraordinary conspiracy which the late Diogenes Patroclos had developed without sharing any of its threads completely with anyone.

“I’m still puzzled about the codebook,” she said. “I don’t see why he pretended not to know you’d taken it.”

Simon lounged back in his chair.

“The codebook was a very interesting, not to say a crucial part of the whole set-up. And of course, it was partly the codebook, in the end, that gave the game away. Remember that what he had in mind when he first briefed me was to get me into contact with his supposed impersonator for just long enough to convince me that there was a double. My main job was to get the codebook back. That gave me a specific goal — and it gave him the perfect pretext for hauling me off the job before I got too nosey. Once I’d delivered it, he could tell me to quit — “

“Of course,” broke in the girl. “And that’s why he faked the telegram from Athens — or I suppose he had my namesake send it — and made sure you saw it.”

Simon nodded.

“Exactly.”

” But why did he commission you anyway — I mean the second time, in London — and then insist you stayed in the house?”

“That was an absolute master-stroke. It was a plausible enough move anyway, ‘in the interests of security’ as he put it, but his real reason was simply to make it easy for me to pinch the codebook. And he knew I’d bite.”

“So where did he go wrong?”

“Apart from the weak basic premise, and my scepticism, there was something else. His own vanity — and a kind of melodramatic cloak-and-dagger streak. He did keep just one copy of the codebook as I figure it — “

“Yes, as far as I know. He always took it with him when he went away or out of the house for more than a few hours.”

“Well,” Simon continued, “When I stole it from his safe, he wanted me to think I’d succeeded in getting it to Athens. But he also wanted it there in London — because he was stuck without it. He could have had it sent back, of course, but he preferred to play games by following me at a distance and bringing it back the same night. But I spotted the car behind, and that was when I really started putting the picture together.”

“But what about the photos? A’lucky accident, you said?”

He nodded.

“That was one piece of circumstantial evidence he didn’t manufacture himself. There were two photos — press photos, remember? — with the dates stamped on the back. Both the tenth of June. Dio, presenting a yachting trophy in the Bahamas — that was late afternoon — and Dio at a party in Lisbon that same night, maybe six or eight hours later. Or at least, I assumed it was that same night. And with the time difference, he’d have had to travel almost instantaneously to get there. And it’s three thousand miles.”

“So how can the photos be explained?” she asked.

” By the fact that the Lisbon one was taken first. I saw the photos at the Daily Express office, and as the agency names were stamped on the backs along with the dates, I was able to phone diem and check. As I’d suspected, the Lisbon agency always date their prints the day they’re processed. Normally that’s almost at once. But a picture taken during the night — say, at a party — is pretty certain to carry the next day’s date.”

“I think I’m beginning to see. He went to the party in Lisbon on the night of the ninth — “

“Or you might say, the night of the ninth-tenth. So let’s suppose the picture was taken at midnight. He might easily have left for the Bahamas at, say, three in the morning, on the tenth. By my reckoning, he could have got there in eighteen or twenty hours without much sweat. Let’s say he landed at twentytwo hundred hours. But remember the time-zone change. In Nassau it wasn’t ten o’clock at night — it was only four in the afternoon. So he was in time to wave to the out-island yachtsmen.”

The Saint stood up and looked at his watch.

“And now I think it’s time for that lunch I promised you.”

“Just one last question,” Ariadne said. “What are you getting out of this?”

He looked at her with imps of mischief dancing in his clear blue eyes. “The excitement of the chase — the satisfaction of a day’s work well done — “

” I mean, you were supposed to be paid, weren’t you ?”

“And what makes you think I haven’t been ?” he asked with as straight a face as he could muster. “I’ll let you into a secret. There are occasions, I’m sorry to say, when I steal more than codebooks. Though it was from the codebook that I copied down an interesting-looking series of figures.” He turned his most innocent gaze on her and added, “And do you know what those figures turned out to be?”

Ariadne shook her head, and Simon grinned.

“The combination to a safe — the one right behind you, in fact.”

He patted his breast pocket meaningly, and the girl’s eyes widened.

“You helped yourself?”

“Shamelessly,” replied the Saint. “To forty thousand pounds in conveniently large-denomination Swiss franc notes.”

“Forty thousand! But … you said your fee was to be twenty thousand!”

Simon Templar looked aggrieved.

“But I was commissioned for that sum twice,” he pointed out. “Twenty thousand from Patroclos One, twenty thousand from Patroclos Two. Wasn’t it lucky that they turned out to share a safe ?”

And he smiled his incorrigible mocking smile.

“Come on — let’s go and get that lunch,” said the Saint.

II
THE PAWN GAMBIT
On a certain grey afternoon in November of that year — traditionally a month when depression and despair sink to the nadir — a short balding man with an exclusive legal right to the name of Albert Nobbins was walking dejectedly by the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park.

There was rain in the air, and no one else was visible in the park except a few dutiful dog-walkers dotted about way over beyond the far side of the lake. Nobbins walked with an aimless and plodding gait, faltering frequently like a man with scarcely more incentive to move forward than to go back, or to stand still. His purposeless steps took him along the lakeside path because that was the way he always went; and he was walking there in the park, not because he had anywhere in particular to go, nor even with the object of exercising his small flabby body, but because it was his habit, and because there was nothing else he could think of to do.

He neither saw nor heard the black car that slowed to a crawl on the road some fifty yards obliquely behind him. But even if he had seen or heard it, he was too deeply sunk in melancholy thought to pay it any special attention, and too far away from it to see the heavy revolver which the man in the back seat was toying with, almost affectionately …

Some men are Winners, gifted with every advantage in the scramble of life that nature and nurture with their most munificent combined efforts can supply. The Winner is that rare man who seems to lead a charmed life right from the beginning. As an infant, he never knows what it is to be short of a lollipop. His schoolboy marbles invariably conquer and multiply, and he attacks a ball with various conventional implements with seemingly innate dexterity. Later, his girlfriends are abundantly plural and pulchritudinous; he reaps sporting or academic honours, or both, by the dozen; and plum jobs drop into his lap even when he hasn’t exerted himself beyond the effort of sitting under the tree.

Success, recognition, popularity, money, affection: all through his life the Winner seems to attract them with nonchalant ease. He enjoys a distinguished and rewarding career, leading a blamelessly honourable existence and in due season breeding tribes of children and grandchildren — themselves doubtless including a goodly proportion of Winners.

Now to someone whose outlook as a respectable dutiful citizen has been perverted by exposure to some heretical scepticism about the Establishment, this picture of fulfilled felicity will undeniably seem tinged with dullness around at least some of its edges. Albert Nobbins, however, as he plodded along by the Serpentine on that damp grey November day, could contemplate it only with envy.

Nobbins was a Loser — an insignificant little man whose failures seemed to him as congenital as a Winner’s successes. As if it were not enough to have inherited such a risible cognomen as Nobbins, his parents had compounded his misfortune by linking it with one of the most unglamorous of Christian names. And from that depressing start, his fortune was apparently foredoomed. Lollipops, marbles, girls, success in sport or studies or career, were all one to Albert Nobbins: they had all evaded him as if by some inexorable magnetic repulsion. And despite his most desperate endeavours, his attempts to wield a bat or club or racquet had infallibly wobbled themselves into a shape so ineffectually awkward, so far removed from any semblance of style, that onlookers were invariably reduced to helpless howls of laughter.

He could hear that cruel laughter still, more than forty years on.

He stopped and stared glumly at the water: half a dozen ducks scudded hopefully towards him and converged on a spot a few yards from the bank, the distance which they knew from experience to be the average crust-tossing range of the general public. But Albert Nobbins shook his head at them abstractedly, and they dispersed as he plodded on with the same short, somehow inefficient steps. An insignificant little man, plump and balding and bespectacled, who every morning shaved his face to the same pink well-scrubbed shininess.