Send for the Saint (6 page)

“Possibly, sir. Although Mr Patroclos wouldn’t normally be bothered to make that sort of pretence.”

Simon could scarcely have hoped for more from the obliging Bainter, who had now finished the unpacking.

“There we are, sir. I trust we haven’t forgotten anything.”

“Not a thing. We’re very efficient, Bainter.”

“Thank you, sir … I won’t keep you, sir. I expect you’ll be wanting to get some sleep.”

In the doorway the valet turned and added:
“Just one thing, sir. If you should wish to open the window — six inches is the limit, sir. Wider than that, and the alarms start to ring.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” said the Saint to himself after Bainter had gone. “We’ll see about that.”

He undressed and brushed his teeth, but did not change into pyjamas. He lay awake skimming through books from the bedside shelf until three o’clock, when he felt absolutely sure that everyone else in the house would be asleep. Then he got up and dressed again, this time in a sports shirt and slacks, but nothing more. Barefoot, he switched off the light and slipped silently out into the corridor.

It has been easy enough, in the most innocent and casual way, when Bainter was showing him to his room, to learn the exact location of Patroclos’ master suite. A pencil flashlight, its bulb masked with the piece of black insulating tape pierced only with a small hole, provided a needle beam of illumination that was all the Saint needed to show him his way.

Patroclos’ door was not locked. Simon would have been astonished if it had been, even though he could have easily coped with it — such defensiveness, in the man’s own home, would have been almost a symptom of paranoia. And whatever their failings, neither Patroclos had ever impressed him as a neurotic type.

In fact, the millionaire — or his impersonator — was snoring with a steady and assertive resonance which proclaimed with every rhythmic decibel the total relaxation and self-confidence of its source.

The Saint moved in like a wraith, guarding even the reduced ray of his torch from directly touching the huddled shape under the bedclothes. He allowed only enough of a glow to escape from it under his cupped hand to give him bearings, and show him the evening clothes draped over a hanger stand at the foot of the bed; the gold fountain pen, loose change, cigar-clipper, wallet, and diary spread out on the bedside table; and the bunch of keys carelessly dumped among them.

To abstract a bunch of keys from within a yard of the ear of a sleeping man, no matter how profoundly sunk in slumber, without making a single metallic clink that might disturb the sleeper’s dreams, requires a skill and steadiness of hand that would dismay any ordinarily adept pickpocket, but Simon Templar accomplished it without any perceptible effect on his pulse rate. Even so, with the keys in his grasp, he stood for long moments as immobile as the Sphinx, watching the recumbent figure in the bed and listening to the regular stertorous breathing, until he was quite sure that his host was not going to be aroused even by an intuitive alarm.

The next problem was to find the safe that the keys fitted. The Saint did not even waste a moment searching for it behind one of the pictures on the walls — that hackneyed hiding place beloved of fiction writers, which on that account must be the first place where any burglar who ever read a book would look. A man as astute as Patroclos would never permit such a crudely obvious installation. The rich wall-to-wall carpet ruled out any trap-door in the floor. The modernistically papered walls precluded the time-honoured secret panel, and there was no fireplace to embody some device of dummy bricks.

To Simon Templar, there was no call for random groping and ferreting, which could have been noisy as well as ineffectual. It was, rather, an interesting exercise in applied ratiocination, which could be performed in pensive immobility.

Patroclos Two began threshing about restlessly as if he might be on the point of waking up; and Simon froze for perhaps thirty seconds until the man in the bed had settled back into apparent slumber.

The direct and logical solution, if there was no reasonable possibility of complicated concealment, would simply be to rely on the sturdiness of the safe itself, and plant it in the handiest place that would be out of the way and out of obtrusive sight. The kind of solution that would be reached in moments by such an exponent of direct action as Diogenes Patroclos.

When the Saint moved, he went straight into the dressing alcove which led off the bedroom, and silently opened the first of the doors of a row of wardrobe closets. And there it was, arrogantly undisguised — a medium sized but massive steel cube that would have been a major problem to cart away and a total impossibility to break open without considerable uproar.

The Saint had encountered — not to say opened — a good many safes in his time; but in this case he had secured what a purist might have called an unfair advantage. He examined the lock and the bunch of keys in his hand, selected one to try, reached forward … and hesitated.

Could the safe be connected to the alarm system? Simon was mentally kicking himself for having neglected to put it out of action before he started on the burglary expedition. But having got that far, it was not in his temperament to turn back. He steeled himself for the jangling of alarm bells, held his breath, and opened the safe.

There was no sound from the machined and well-oiled hinges as the heavy door swung open; and the Saint’s long and controlled exhalation of breath that followed was less audible still.

He reached inside the safe and quickly found and extracted the codebook. He flicked through its pages by the fine beam of the pencil torch, only enough to be sure that’ it was what he wanted, and then in an amazingly short space of seconds he had relocked the safe, shut the wardrobe, put the keys back on Patroclos’ bedside table and crept out as silently as he had arrived.

8
Back in his own room, the Saint stopped only long enough to seal the codebook in one of the envelopes thoughtfully provided by the secretaire for the convenience of guests who might be seized by an urge to communicate with the outside world, and to pull on his socks. His shoes, for the time being, he preferred to carry, as he found his way down to the ground floor.

Burglar alarms, as a safe general rule, are designed to detect or deter the unwelcome would-be guest who is outside and trying to get in. To anyone who is inside and wanting to get out they constitute only the most minor of nuisances.

Simon stood on a chair to reach the alarm mechanism,
which was prominently in view above the front door, and took die simple course of switching it off. Then he replaced the chair and let himself quietly out, leaving the front door on the latch.

The Hirondel was still parked around the corner in Bruton Street, where he had left it the night before. He headed west, and stopped at his mews house to make a phone call to Athens, where he left a brief message. Then he drove out on Cromwell Road, making for the airport.

He was somewhere near Hounslow when his keenly tuned antennae for such matters told him that the big headlights in his rear-view mirror were showing rather more than chance persistence. Few drivers cared to keep pace for long with Simon Templar just for the hell of it; and yet he had no doubt that the same headlights had maintained their position behind him for at least five miles. The Saint had registered their presence from the first; or rather, some idle circuit in his subconscious mind, part of the automatic pilot that was so indispensable to a modern buccaneer, had registered them and had then monitored them moment by moment as he drove until their continued presence began to seem noteworthy, whereupon the appropriate signal had surfaced. Only then did he become conscious of the phenomenon and begin to consider what it might imply.

He slowed abruptly, stepping hard on the brake, and watched in the mirror as the car behind bore down rapidly for a few seconds and then dropped back to its original distance. He speeded up again, and the other car kept pace. And the Saint smiled, hearing the battle trumpets begin to sing in his ears as of old.

Even at its closest the car had been too far behind for him to identify the model. But he guessed that it must be a big car, perhaps a Rolls — or a Bentley.

The Saint’s mouth tightened into the fighting lines which had heralded defeat for so many of his adversaries in the past. There were many questions still to be answered, but he knew now with an ice-crisp certainty that there was more to this particular game than he had supposed. The option was there, he knew, to leave it gracefully, but because the Saint was what he was, he knew he could never have done anything but play it out move by move to the final checkmate, or thrust by thrust to the last clash of steel against steel.

He drove on in a mood of fresh thoughtfulness, with the light of battle in his eyes mingling with an amazed conjecture. And before he reached the airport he had laughed aloud, slapped the steering-wheel with both hands, and shaken his head in sheer helpless disbelief.

At the airport he went to the Parnassian Airways desk and handed the sleepy girl on night duty a small manilla envelope addressed FOR THE PERSONAL ATTENTION OF D. PATROCLOS, ATHENS.

“This is very urgent,” he stressed. “I’ve telephoned for it to be collected from Athens airport.”

The girl examined the envelope.

“Of course. Mr Patroclos. A very important man. Our own — our own big boss-man. I will see that it goes by the next plane.”

“Thanks. And would you see that your people at the other end notify Mr Patroclos’ office as soon as the package arrives there?” It didn’t surprise the Saint to see that the car which had been following was no longer in evidence during the drive back to Patroclos’ house in Berkeley Square. He let himself in through the front door, making no particular attempt at silence, and reset the alarm more from neatness than a sense of necessity.

From his room he could see the street at the front of the house; and after a few minutes, as he had expected a silver Bentley glided to a halt. Out of it stepped Patroclos Two.

Simon heard him enter almost soundlessly by the front door, presumably after somehow disconnecting the alarm from outside. He had only been in view for a few seconds, but that was long enough for Simon to see the confirmation he was looking for.

Patroclos Two was carrying a small manilla envelope.

9
“What do you mean — how do I know?” snapped Patroclos Two down the telephone. “It is here in the newspaper. What for do I pay you thousands when I can buy a paper for pennies, hah ?”

Patroclos Two was surrounded by newspapers, mail, and breakfast things; Ariadne Two sat nearby taking shorthand notes. They both looked up as the Saint, fresh and relaxed but poised for trouble, was ushered in by Bainter the valet.

Ariadne Two nodded a preoccupied greeting. Patroclos Two held the phone receiver briefly aside and bared his teeth in a mechanical smile.

“Good morning, Templar. I trust you slept well. Help yourself from the sideboard. And pour me some more coffee.”

And Patroclos Two returned to the phone.

The Saint murmured an equally casual greeting and attended to the coffee. The tycoon or his substitute’s manner gave no hint that anything at all untoward had taken place during the night, and for one instant Simon wondered half-seriously if he could have dreamt the entire episode. And yet he knew that it had happened — that he had seen clearly, with his own two eyes, Patroclos Two returning about half-past four in the morning with what could only have been the codebook.

Obviously he must have recovered it from the Parnassian Airways girl at the airport — an undertaking that would have been easy enough for the man who, certainly as far as she knew or could tell, was ultimately her employer, and to whom the package was addressed. Simon could well imagine how the scene might have gone: unseen eyes had almost certainly watched as he handed in the envelope; and after that Patroclos Two need only have happened to walk by the Parnassian desk and the girl would be sure to recognise him and mention the package, which he would promptly have claimed there and then, with perhaps a remark to the effect that his presence in London was being kept quiet for business reasons.

Therefore Patroclos Two’s strenuous snoring the night before had been as phoney as anything else in this tangle of fakes: he must have been lying awake, fully dressed, waiting for the visit that he guessed the Saint would make. And when Simon left the house, Patroclos Two had followed, taken the car which he had waiting in the square, and settled down on an easy trail.

But why had he chosen, first, to allow the theft of his codebook, next to recover it secretly, and finally to behave as if the whole incident had simply never happened? Simon still had only one answer that would fit, fantastic though it was; and again he went over the reasoning that had led him to it.

If Patroclos Two were the real Patroclos and not the impostor, he would hardly have stood or lain idle while the Saint strolled out with his codebook. Or if he had — perhaps in the hope that the Saint would lead him to the other Patroclos, the impostor — he would certainly have had no need to continue the play-acting once the Saint had parted with the book at the airport. Ergo, this was not the real Patroclos. But on the other hand, if he were the fake, again why should he employ Simon Templar and turn a blind eye to his treachery ?

Enjoying his eggs and bacon with an appetite undiminished by such perplexities, the Saint realised that there was a third branch to the maze; and that was the path along which he had travelled some way during the events of the night.

He sipped his coffee reflectively. As a background to his thoughts he had automatically taken in what Patroclos Two was saying on the telephone, and if he had considered it relevant he could easily have recalled every salient point. But now, at the tail-end of the conversation, he switched back to full attention.

“Well, check again! Call me back.” Patroclos Two slammed down the phone and made a gesture of despair. “They bleed me, those people. Advance Information Limited. Hah! Should read the limited in front.” He turned to Ariadne. “Today you will go over all the schedules with Templar. But first, take a note. Corinthian Tankers …”