Send for the Saint (9 page)

“Look. Some kind of instruction leaflet. With diagrams. But it’s printed in Chinese.”

Simon took the paper from her and studied it, frowning.

“Not Chinese … My knowledge of oriental scripts isn’t all it might be,” he confessed. “But I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like this before. It’s like ancient Sanskrit characters, only there’s a difference in the way they’re arranged on the page.” He spread out the paper on a crate in front of her. “Look — if you turn it so that the diagrams are the right way up, you can see which way the text goes. See — it’s in vertical lines — like Chinese. Sanskrit characters, Chinese arrangement. And the only script I know of like that is Korean! So that’s the game!”

“The guns are going to Korea?” “North Korea,” said the Saint quietly. “American weapons, being exported for use against the Americans themselves in the war. And, of course, against the South Koreans.”

“Couldn’t they be going to the South?” He shook his head.

“There’d be no reason to hide them if they were. No, this little lot’s bound for North Korea all right, you could bet your life on that. And so are those other five ships, no doubt. Mystery solved.” He paused thoughtfully and then added: “But not the immediate problem.” “What is that?” “How to stop this shipment.”

“We will tell Mr Patroclos, and he will tell the police.”

“There’s no law against exporting arms. And the crew
would swear that they knew nothing about it, anyhow —
whether they did or not. Besides, there are the five ships
that’ve already sailed. They’ve got to be stopped.”

“Mr Patroclos could radio them and order them to turn back.”

“Could — but would he?” Simon’s expression was sardonic. “Dio may not be as unscrupulous as some people say he is, but I never heard of him having a reputation as a great philanthropist. Having those ships turned back and unloaded now, and maybe tied up for months in some official investigation, would cost him a small fortune in overheads and lost time and freights. No, I’m afraid that with his impostor disposed of he’d be liable to think it more practical to just let this operation take its course.”

Ariadne looked troubled and uncertain. “Those other five ships have got to be intercepted, by force if necessary.” The Saint was frowning as he virtually went on thinking aloud. “But that’s a major naval operation, and nobody’s going to launch it just on our say-so. Someone pretty big has got to verify what we’ve seen here. Like, someone from the American Embassy.” He gripped the girl suddenly by the shoulders.

“Ariadne, will you help me?”

“How?”

“Go and phone the Ambassador. Say it’s a red-alert United Nations emergency. Give my name. It may not shine like a bishop’s, but I think it’s got enough clout to make him listen. Have him send someone responsible down here, preferably his naval attach�, at flank speed. You meet him, and bring him aboard.”

She stared up at him searchingly, hesitating, and finally nodded.

“Yes, I will do it. But what about you?”

He smiled a reckless smile, and the blue eyes danced.

“I’ll stay here and make sure, somehow, that they don’t sail before he gets here. Also, my curiosity’s killing me, and I want to see what other little surprises they’ve got stashed away in these boxes.”

He climbed to the top of the hatchway stepladder, peered cautiously over the coaming and around the deck, and was back almost instantly, dropping lightly to the floor.

“All clear,” he whispered; and then he gripped her shoulders lightly again and kissed her on the cheek. “Good luck, Ariadne.”

“And you … Simon. And when Mr Patroclos finds out what I have done, I hope you can find me another job.”

Then she was gone.

And the Saint soon became so absorbed in his discoveries that he failed altogether to notice that a pair of dark eyes had begun to watch him from the hatchway above.

It was only when three burly Greek seamen had already begun to descend the stepladder that the slight scuffing sound of their bare feet alerted him, and he whirled around just in time to see the first one launching himself off the ladder towards him.

In the circumstances it was a reasonably promising move on the seaman’s part, since any ordinary man would have reacted too slowly to avoid the approximately two hundred pounds of foot-first Greek that hurtled towards Simon Templar’s head. But the Saint was no ordinary man; which was unfortunate for the Greek seaman, who like many before him could never afterwards fully fathom how it was that when he reached the area of space occupied by his target, there was nothing but emptiness where Simon Templar ought by all ordinary laws to have been. The sailor’s heels hit the side of one crate, splitting it open and shunting it a couple of feet along the floor of the hold; and the crate that was stacked on top of it lost just enough of its support to topple over on to the man’s prone body before he could move. There was a sharp painful omph as the breath was knocked out of him, and what sounded like the cracking of a few ribs.

Simon ducked behind a taller pile of crates, and waited with every nerve fibre taut like piano wire as the other two seamen dropped off the ladder and began cautiously circling towards him from opposite directions. One of them shouted loudly in Greek, presumably to summon reinforcements; and then suddenly he began a rush. But the Saint toppled a crate over in his path, and then whirled to face the other man’s charge. He took a heavy but clumsy blow to the chest, and countered with a long hard straight left which he planted with immediately visible effect square in the centre of the seaman’s already bulbous nose. The man sat down hard on his tail-bone, clutching his injured proboscis with tender fingers through which a stream of blood instantly began to flow.

Meanwhile his shipmate had scrambled around the obstructing crate, and threw himself on to Simon’s back. But to Simon’s judo training this was about as effective as a novice equestrian leaping on to the back of a skittish bronco, and the man found himself sailing through the air on to the top of a crate.

“Stop, you fools! It’s Templar!” Suddenly the voice of Diogenes Patroclos cut raspingly across the hold. “He works for me. Stop it!”

The crewmen pulled themselves awkwardly together and backed sullenly off as Patroclos and another man in the uniform of a snip’s captain descended the ladder.

“Well, if it isn’t good old Dio Two — or is it One?” murmured the Saint. “Do you realise that you’re breaking up the best workout I’ve had for about four days?”

“Templar, I’m sorry. Those idiots didn’t realise — “

“They realised, all right. Just look around.”

Simon indicated the open crates, then casually reached inside one, took out a rifle, and threw it down with a clatter at Patroclos’ feet. Patroclos seemed utterly astonished. He picked up the rifle and examined it, peered into the open cases, and then turned to the ship’s captain.

“What is the meaning of this?” he snapped.

The captain shrugged sullenly and said nothing. Simon rested one foot on a crate, folded his arms, and slowly shook his head in wonderment. And he laughed.

“I’ll be happy to explain on the Captain’s behalf, Dio” he began. “Singapore was just a paper destination — to satisfy the authorities. All that nonsense about the ships being diverted! They weren’t diverted at all. From the outset they were bound for North Korea.”

Patroclos swore fluently in Greek.

“American arms for North Korea? … If this is true, then it must be that impostor who — “

“There is no impostor,” said the Saint coolly. “And there never has been. You manufactured him. It was you all the time.”

13
In the ensuing silence all the muscles of Patroclos’ face and neck seemed to be working; the black musketball eyes burned with anger; and for the first time, the shadow of something like fear flitted across the strong swarthy face. Patroclos flicked a nervous tongue over his lips, which had suddenly turned pale. At last he found his voice.

“Then why would I hire you?” he demanded harshly.

“You needed an impartial witness to prove that this other man — this scapegoat-to-be — existed.”

“Which you are.”

“I might have been,” Simon conceded. “I’ll admit you had me flummoxed at first. Your planning was tremendous — and your psychology was pretty good too … The girl at the airport … The heavies at the hotel to warn me off — you knew that was the one sure way to get me on the hook … The quick dash to London — in your private plane, you were probably there before I was … The slightly altered appearance and voice … The briefing of your staff at this end … The invented detail — “

“And how did I make you come to Athens in the first place ?” Patroclos scoffed.

“You didn’t. That was sheer opportunism. Oh, you’d planned to set someone up before long, of course — I just happened along at the ideal time. I haven’t always been an upright citizen, but I do have a reputation, though I say so myself, for being nobody’s patsy, and I daresay the challenge appealed to your vanity. If you could fool me — and you very nearly did — you could fool anybody. Anyhow, you seized the chance when you saw my name on a passenger list. And then you exploited it for all it was worth.”

“You are beginning to sound like some kind of
lunatic.”

“You played me like a fish on a line. For a long time, I had an uneasy feeling I was being manipulated, but I couldn’t quite see how. But that’s your forte — manipulation. Dio, there’s no doubt the plan was brilliant. There was just one serious flaw …”

Diogenes Patroclos stared at him impassively.

“Which was …?”

“The whole basic premise,” continued the Saint. “As I said right at the start, the idea of a perfect impersonation is a lot of baloney.”

“And yet that impostor has still deceived you.” Patroclos persisted. “You saw with your own eyes — “

” — just what you meant me to see,” Simon completed with inexorable calm. “You did it so well you almost had me believing in this darned impersonator — and to begin with I was about as sceptical as anyone could be. Appearance, voice, mannerisms, knowledge, habits — a human being’s just too complicated a thing to be mimicked that closely. My whole instinct was against it. But I’ll admit you played your hand cleverly enough to get me seriously wondering if I could have been wrong after all. Starting when I saw you and the other Ariadne in London.”

“But I suppose I was sure that you would see us?” Patroclos argued sarcastically.

“You’d given me the address as a starting point. You knew I’d go there and watch the house — and before long I’d be bound to see you. And you guessed that as soon as I did, the first thing I’d do would be to check by phoning Athens and asking to speak to you there. You even had something pretty good worked out for that. A simple trick, but good enough.”

“What was that?”

“A dictaphone recording for your Ariadne here to turn on, with the kind of answer that would be sure to fit in well enough with the kind of thing I could be expected to say.”

“You should be writing detective stories,” Patroclos said, but his confidence was beginning to have a hollow ring.

“My friend Charteris has often said the same thing,” Simon agreed good-humouredly. “I must have a go at it one day. But when I do, I’ll have to give you credit for some beautiful touches, like for instance pretending some time back to have forgotten about some startling shirts you’d ordered before your last trip away. You figured I’d be sure to find an opportunity to question Bainter — as I did.”

Diogenes Patroclos was no quitter. His innumerable worst enemies had never said that of him, and it would have been a ludicrous assertion in any case. A man who gives up before the ultimate sanction simply does not get into the millionaire bracket. Even now, Simon felt, in allowing the argument to go on to the almost absurd lengths of the time-honoured detective-story cliche in which the stereotype sleuth spends endless minutes of the last act explaining with clairvoyant precision just what everybody else was plotting and pretending, Patroclos was in fact treating himself to a complete preview of the case against himself, probing it for any weak points, and assessing every possibility of brazening out his own defence.

“If you had been clever enough to catch that impostor,” Patroclos said, “his confession would have proved what nonsense you are talking. But now I think you are only making these absurd accusations to cover up your own failure.”

“Yes, that was a grand finale,” mused the Saint. “The dash after your Rolls with no one in it but the driver — and the plane with no one but the pilot. I suppose he did parachute out while the plane was still over land, after setting the automatic pilot to make it crash in the sea ? Or was there a time bomb in the briefcase .that went on board? … Anyhow, conveniently complete end of impersonator, leaving it theoretically impossible to prove that he never existed. Except that you’re still stuck with at least one accomplice too many.”

“Who?”

“That chauffeur, who knows that no double of yours got on the plane. And whatever you’re paying him, or unless you’ve already disposed of him, I bet he’ll talk under pressure. And the pressure will certainly be applied when I tell my story, and back it up with that dictaphone record which you so carelessly didn’t erase.”

The Saint’s remorseless prosecution came to this conclusion with such relaxed assurance that he might have commanded three times the muscle of Patroclos’ minions, instead of being in a lonely minority of one. And the shipping Midas, almost physically impaled on the Saint’s sapphire gaze, could only have known that the last hope of bluff and bluster was gone.

“You can’t win ‘em all,” Simon told him, with hypnotic softness. “Give up, Dio.”

Patroclos scowled at him for a long moment.

“So,” he said finally. “So much work for nothing … But if you will not be a witness for me” — he spat out the words — “you will never be one against me!”

He turned to the Captain, who obviously spoke little if any English, and who had been listening uncomprehendingly to this lengthy dialogue while his crew men waited for a lead for him.

“Kill him!” he commanded, in Greek. “Skotosetanl”