The Saint Abroad: The Art Collectors/ the Persistent Patriots (17 page)

“… Please fasten your seat belts
and refrain from smok
ing until after take-off.”

A moment later the tone of the jets changed,
and the
blinding white of the terminal building began to move slowly
across the
plane’s windows. Todd turned to speak to the
Prime Minister.

“It’ll be good to get off the ground—and
better still to get
down again.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not a question of
leaving the frying pan for the fire,” Liskard said good-humoredly.
“From what our
advance group tells me about the greeting we can expect
in
London, that
little business in the waiting room may seem
like
a tea party in comparison.”

3

Prime Minister Liskard’s advance information
about his English reception proved to be unpleasantly accurate. Even as the
jet came
down through the clouds to land at London Airport,
one of Liskard’s aides
pressed his cheek to the window
beside his seat and exclaimed, “Do you
see that? Must be
five hundred of them!”

Simon leaned across Mrs Liskard, who had been
sleeping
off the effects of the first half of the flight during
the second
half with her head resting against the outer wall of the
plane, and caught a glimpse of the dark herd of human figures con
gregated
in an open space among the terminal’s complex of
huge buildings. Then the momentary view
was lost as the
plane with strange slowness
moved down an invisible incline
of air
toward contact with the runway.

“The welcoming committee?” Liskard
asked with amused
irony.

He was sitting across the aisle from the
Saint, and had not
been able to see.

“Your admirers seem to be out in
force,” Simon con
firmed.

“More likely a lynch mob,” Liskard
responded dourly. “At
least somebody cares.”

The wheels of the jet screeched suddenly
against the pave
ment of the runway, and Mrs Liskard woke up.

“Who cares about what?” she asked
blearily.

Half a dozen gin and tonics had not improved
her per
ceptions nor her appearance. Her face was puffy and her lip
stick
smeared at one corner of her mouth. Even so, any man with reasonable tolerance
for human frailty could have spot
ted her as potentially one of the most
attractive women he
was ever likely to meet. All the more pity, Simon
thought,
that she should be torn apart by whatever tensions drove
her
into a
continual desire for semiconsciousness.

“We’re in London,” he told her.
“We were just noticing the
crowd that’s out to meet you.”

She tried to see. The plane was taxiing in
toward the
passenger terminal, but was still some distance away.

“Where?” she asked.

“On the other side of that
building,” the Saint answered.

“Carrying roses, I suppose,” she
said sarcastically.

Stewart turned from his place in front.

“Possibly,” he said, “but what
they were carrying looked
more like pitchforks.”

Anne Liskard’s eyes widened in a gullible
expression which
may or may not have been entirely put on.

“You couldn’t really see that well, could
you?” she asked.

Stewart shook his head, sighed, and faced
front again.

“Were there really so many?”
Lockhart asked. “Five hundred? The opposition must be much worse than we
thought.”

He was the only one of the party who seemed
openly wor
ried, but his statement sent a silent but somehow clearly
perceptible wave of uneasiness through the rest of the group.
The Prime
Minister, who had spent the last two hours of the
trip concentrating on paper work, snapped
down the clasps
of his briefcase.

“Let’s not blow this up out of
proportion,” he said firmly.
“These demonstrators are of no
real importance. Keep that in mind. British public opinion is entirely on our
side, and that’s
what counts. The people in most civilized countries can
still
tell sanity from insanity even if a lot of their politicians can’t.
Those howling monkeys with the placards can sound pretty
bloodcurdling,
but when the government gets down to busi
ness they’ll think of
votes.”

“But these monkeys will get top play in
the headlines,”
one of the aides put in. “When you see
the papers tomorrow
you’ll hardly know we were here.”

The Deputy Prime Minister, Todd, made an
uncompli
mentary and fairly obscene remark about newspapermen and
the bias
of the international press, which almost invariably
took a dim view of
self-assertive activities on the part of
Europeans anywhere in
the world.

“It doesn’t matter,” Liskard
insisted. “I don’t want any
body in this delegation to show any sign of
disturbance, no
matter what kind of demonstration they have in store for
us.
Is that understood? Look pleasant. Keep your dignity. It’s
the best
way to turn one of these situations into a defeat for
the other side.
Remember—if out of a hundred photographs
the editors can find
one that makes us look bad, that’s the one
they’ll print on the
front page.”

“Right,” Foreign Minister Stewart
said. “And the same
goes for statements. I don’t need to remind
you that an un
wise word to some interviewer could ham up the
negotiations completely.”

He was speaking not to Liskard, of course,
but to the
younger aides, and surprisingly, to Todd, who looked
grim
suddenly and avoided the eyes of the other men. Apparently the Deputy
Prime Minister had indiscreetly overstepped the bounds of his authority at some
time in the past while dealing
with the press.

“Excuse me, please,” Anne Liskard
said. “I must go put on
a face to meet the faces that I’ll
meet.”

“It’ll be a little easier after the plane stops,” said
the Saint

She gave him a crisply cool smile as she
stood up. She had by no means forgiven him for refusing to respond to her pub
lic
displays of affection at the beginning of the trip, and then
for
devoting himself almost entirely to conversation with her
husband
during the middle hours of the flight.

“Thank you for the warning,” she
said in clipped tones.

“I’m quite capable of lurching down the
aisle to the ladies’
room without any advice from Robin
Hood.”

Simon let her lurch and sat back down to
have a look out
the drizzle-beaded window. It was late in the day, and
the
brightness of the sky far above the earth had been abruptly
exchanged,
when the plane descended below the sea of clouds
that had been like a solid surface beneath
it, for the fading
gray light of a rainy
winter afternoon. The pavement glistened
clammily, and east was merged with west, and north with
south, in the congested sky that seemed to press
down and
smother the whole country as
night came on.

A hundred yards away, beside one of the wings of the
terminal building, he saw the wheeled stairway
which would
be put up to the jet’s
door. Near it was a black limousine
and
a handful of men. It was not a very spectacular reception,
considering Liskard’s status, and Simon regretted
it. Whatever reservations he had felt about being with the Prime
Minister’s party at the beginning of the flight,
when he had
realized what sort of
woman Mrs Liskard was, he had grown
much more pleased with the situation
during his long chat with Thomas Liskard. His intuition about the man—based
only on reading—had proved right. The Prime
Minister was a
straight, honest, and
intelligent man who shared nothing of
the
barren lust for power or the dependence on cloudy and
utterly impractical social theories with which so
many of his
counterparts in other
countries were leading their people in
the
direction of hypothetical Utopias which in reality prove to
be nothing more, at their noisiest, than
maelstroms of dis
order, or, at their
dullest, stagnant backwaters of living death. More than ever, the Saint saw
Liskard as a bulwark—even if not a very powerful one—against the denial of
truths about human instinct and the strange guilty deference to mediocrity,
indolence and weakness which sometimes seemed to
be threat
ening to emasculate the
whole western world.

One of the stewardesses who had been serving
the party
throughout the flight came into the curtained compartment
as the plane stopped and cut its engines.

“We’ll hold the other passengers in
their places until your
party is off, Mr Prime Minister,” she
said.

Liskard turned in his seat and shook his head.
“
I think it would be best if the others left first,” he told her.
“w
e might delay things at the foot of the gangway for quite a
while.”

The stewardess leaned down and peered out of
one of the
windows.

“I don’t see any band or anything,”
she said.

Liskard laughed.

“You’re probably remembering the
reception you got when
you flew some murderous little tribal dictator through here on
his way to bawl out the United Nations. There’ll be
no brass
band for the likes of us. We
can count ourselves lucky that
they
haven’t laid on a firing squad.”

“Assuming they haven’t,” said
Stewart with a wry grin.

Lockhart stood up as the plane’s personnel
set about opening the door and shepherding the ordinary passengers out. He
pointed suddenly toward the
open deck on the upper floor of
the terminal
building.

“Look at that!”

On the terrace, where friends of passengers
were able to
stand and wave to arriving and departing passengers, there
was a violent commotion. Apparently a dozen or so anti-
Liskard demonstrators
had gone up there individually without
attracting any special
attention from the police. Now the
demonstrators—who were of the shorn and shod variety, and
were able to avoid arousing suspicion until they
were ready
to act—pulled rolls of
paper from under their coats and un
furled
them into banners with brief but clearly legible mes
sages printed in large red letters.

“DEATH TO FASCIST LISKARD!”

“FREEDOM TODAY-NOT TOMORROW!”

“ONE MAN-ONE VOTE!”

The police obviously had been instructed to
allow no demonstrations in the terminal building, an instruction with which
the
demonstrators disagreed with open vehemence when
they were informed
of it. The policemen tried to take their
signs away, and
there was a scuffle. One of the demonstrators
sat down. Another
clung to the pedestal of a coin-slot telescope with arms and legs. All began
to chant so loudly that
their words could be heard inside the plane
as the passengers
disembarked.

“Liskard out! Freedom in! Liskard out! Freedom in!”

Lockhart shook his head.

“Ugly-looking lot, aren’t they?”

Liskard pretended he was referring to the
very correctly dressed gentlemen grouped to meet him by the rolling stair
way.

“You’re speaking of the flower of the
lower branches of the
diplomatic corps,” he said.

Lockhart’s youthful face turned crimson.

“I mean the demonstrators, sir,” he
said stiffly.

Liskard, who was standing next to his
secretary, clapped
him on the shoulder.

“You take things much too seriously,
Lockhart. You’ve
got to laugh sometimes or you’ll go loony. That’s
especially
true when you look at types like that out there with the
signs.
They screech for peace, but they’d as soon kill you for dis
agreeing
with them as not.”

Todd grunted.