The Saint and Mr. Teal: Formerly Called "Once More the Saint" (13 page)

“Nothing,” said Teal shortly. “The men had scarves over their faces, as you said. They were both in evening dress, which lets you out.”

Simon sighed.

“That bee in your bonnet buzzes an awful lot,” he protested. “Can’t you think up anything better than that?”

“You’ve been abroad for a week, haven’t you?”

“I have. Drinking good beer and associating with some stout Huns. The Secret Service must have been working overtime.”

“I didn’t suspect you seriously.” Teal stirred three lumps of sugar into his cup. “This wholesale murder isn’t in your line, is it ? A wretched clerk and one of our own uniformed men shot down in a week-and nothing to show for it. It fairly makes your blood boil.”

The detective’s round face was unwontedly hollow in the cheeks. The failures of the last few hectic days were making their mark on his ponderous self-assurance.

“We’ve tried all the regulars,” he said. “The Green Cross boys are the nucleus of it, we know, but so far they’ve been able to work a system of alibis that have left us flat. Most of them have come into a lot of money that they can’t account for since this trouble started, but that isn’t a crime. We had one of their best men in the other day-a fellow named Orping. He was playing the American gangster to the life. Between ourselves, we knocked him about a bit-you know what can be done-but we couldn’t shake a thing out of him. I don’t like that American line that Orping’s got hold of. It looks ugly.”

“Any idea where the stuff’s being fenced?”

“I’m afraid not. I don’t think it’s being fenced in this country at all.”

Simon Templar smiled inwardly, but he forbore to point a moral.

“Who’s the Big Noise?” he asked; and the detective shrugged grimly.

“If we knew that, the trouble would be practically over. There are rumours that it’s some sort of Yank, and all the registered aliens have come under observation, but we haven’t learned much. Whoever he is, he’s got his men right under his thumb. I’ve never met so many oysters before. The story is that Corrigan was one of the bunch who threatened to squeal, and what happened to him has put the fear of God into everyone else who might have talked.”

The Saint pushed his hands into his pockets and gazed at the detective with a faint suggestion of mockery.

” It must have made you wish I was on the road again, Claud. It’s something to think that you may have admitted that my reign of terror wasn’t so bad after all.”

Mr. Teal finished his coffee and unwrapped a wafer of chewing gum. His baby-blue eyes looked the Saint over with a certain seriousness.

“If you only had the sense to keep out of the newspapers and save the assistant commissioner from practising sarcastic remarks on me,” he said, “I shouldn’t be sorry if you were on the road for a while. You can do things that we can’t do officially. We’re trying to get special powers, but you know what that’s likely to mean. It may take us months-and men will be killed every day while we’re helpless. There’s only one way to deal with this sort of thing. You’ve got to fight guns with guns, killing with killing, fear with fear.”

They separated on an arrangement to lunch together in three days’ time, which was the friendliest parting they had had for many months. It rather tickled Simon to think how the advent of a common enemy might make a branded outlaw almost persona grata with the Law, merely because his killings were more discriminate.

Patricia and the Saint drove boldly back to Manson Place in a taxi. There was a man tinkering with a motorcycle at the open end of the cul-de-sac: Simon saw him look up as the taxi passed, and reckoned that Tex Goldman would shortly be receiving some interesting news.

Curiously enough, it did not occur to him that a sharp pair of eyes in the car that had carried the hold-up men away from the Baytree Club might have noticed him where he stood in the street a few doors from the scene of the crime.

He paid off the taxi and mounted the short flight of steps to the front door of his temporary home circumspectly. The man at the corner still tinkered with his motorcycle. Simon slid aside the pivoted metal plate under the knocker and studied the indicator bulb which it concealed to make sure that no one had entered the house in his absence before he called Patricia to join him. He kept his right hand in his pocket while he unlocked the door and let her through, and his eyes never ceased their watchful survey of the street; but his precautions were a matter of routine. He was not expecting trouble immediately.

“It’s rather a pity I let those Green Cross boys know who I was,” he said.

There were several letters waiting for him, and he sat on the table in the sitting room and read them while Patricia Holm went to the kitchen to find him a bottle of beer.

She came back with a tray. He heard her put it down, and then he heard a crash.

“Never mind the glass,” he said, without looking round. “We can always burgle Woolworth’s for some more. Break the lot if you feel like it.”

“Simon-I didn’t —”

The Saint took his eyes off the letter he was reading. A motorcycle was roaring away with an open exhaust. He saw the broken window, and the shining metal cylinder that lay on the floor; and he moved like a streak of lightning.

The force of his rush hurled the girl, bruised and shaken, onto the settee, and the next instant the Saint’s weight was flung on the back of it. The heavy piece of leather-upholstered furniture was toppled over by the impact, so that they lay sheltered behind it.

In another split second the thunder of the explosion deafened them, and the air was full of the whine of flying metal.

CHAPTER IV
PATRICIA HOLM looked up from her crossword puzzle.

“Give me a word for ‘sack’ in three letters, boy. M, A, something.”

” ‘Bag,’ ” suggested the Saint.

The girl eyed him sinisterly.

“What d’you mean-‘bag’? I said —”

“Eb, A, G,” insisted the Saint adenoidally. “Bag. With a code id the doze.”

They were having breakfast in the kitchen, for the sitting room was uninhabitable. A representative from a firm of decorators whom the Saint had telephoned came round at eleven and inspected the mess wisely.

“It looks as if there’d been an explosion, sir,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” said the Saint. “A man came in here and sat on a pin after putting baking powder on his gooseberries in mistake for sugar. We’re still looking for him.”

An assurance was given that the firm would set to work to make good the damage as quickly as possible, and Simon bathed and dressed himself with unaltered cheerfulness. Any philosophically minded man in his position could have found something to be cheerful about that morning, for it was a miracle that the Saint was alive. If the pineapple expert had not misjudged the length of his fuse the end of all Saint stories would have been written in a sticky splash.

Chief Inspector Teal himself called in later. He had the report of the explosives man who had been sent down from the Yard to view the damage. The bomb was a home-made affair of the jam-tin type, but it might have been none the less effective for that. The assortment of broken nails and scrap iron with which it had been lined had pocked the walls and ceiling like a burst of shrapnel, and slit to ribbons the upholstery that had saved the Saint’s and Patricia’s lives.

“I’m wondering why they should have bothered about you,” said Teal.

“Passing over the insult to my fame,” drawled the Saint, “maybe someone overheard your suggestion to me last night. Or else there’s someone in the gang with a grudge against me-Basher Tope is a Green Cross boy, and you may remember that I once had words with him. But don’t take it to heart, Claud-I expect your turn will come.”

Teal turned his chewing gum over somnolently.

“You haven’t been interfering already, have you?” he inquired; and the Saint smiled.

“I never interfere, Claud. You know that.”

“All the same, I think I’d change my address if I were you,” said the detective.

Simon stood at the broken window after he had gone, and gazed down the road. The motorcycle man was no longer in sight, and it was unlikely that he would return. The crowd which had filled the road after the explosion the night before had had its eyeful and dispersed, and there were no curious sightseers to replace it that morning. London had taken the attempt on the Saint’s life with considerable sang-froid. There were no suspicious loiterers in the vista on which the Saint looked out, but Simon Templar was not deceived.

“There might be something in Claud’s idea as far as you’re concerned, Pat,” he said. “Ted Orping will be trying again, if none of the others do.”

“How long is this going on for?” she asked.

“Until Tex Goldman is the Big Shot of London, or material for a front-page inquest,” said the Saint. “Tex thinks the first and I think the second.”

She slipped a hand through his arm. He was not utterly surprised at her gaiety.

“Gee, boy, it’s thrilling!”

“You’re a wicked little girl,” said the Saint solemnly, “and if anybody hears you talk like that you’ll find yourself thrown out of the Y.W.C.A. on your ear… . But don’t get the idea that London is going to be like Chicago. There are no gangs coming over here. It’s just a wildcat scheme out of Tex Goldman’s head, but there may be lots of skylarking and song before the swelling goes down.”

The general public’s interest in Simon Templar’s fate was demonstrated more enthusiastically in newsprint than in person. Harassed editors in search of new headlines connected with the gang menace to London seized on the bombing incident joyfully, with an unspoken prayer of thanksgiving for the fact that it happened in time for them to find a position of suitable prominence for it before the country editions went to bed. Morning newspapers work under a tragic disadvantage compared with their brethren of the evening, for they are unable to rush out special editions at any hour of the day in order to scoop an exclusive story. This was the kind of event that they lived for.

The pashas of Fleet Street shared the Saint’s knowledge that no seriously Chicagoesque wave of lawlessness was on its way, but it takes more than that to stop an experienced news editor. Fleet Street grabbed at the temporary orgy of violent crime, as it appeared to the public at the moment, with both hands. The Saint’s escape was featured on the front page of every national daily; and in it, naturally, was mentioned the essential point that Simon Templar had survived the attack.

This fact was the subject of a short-tempered conference in the neighbourhood of Baker Street.

“Let me go after him with a gun, boss,” said Ted Orping. “I’ll get him for you.”

“Yeah-you’d get him like you got him last time,” replied Tex Goldman sourly. “You’re just a beginner, and from what I hear that guy was toting a gun before you were weaned. You ain’t much to look at, but you’re more use alive than dead.”

Orping scowled. He had almost thought out a fittingly belligerent retort when Goldman put away his cigar and waved him to silence.

“‘Back in St. Louis, when a guy had to be bumped off we had a way of doing it. I’ll tell you what it was. We found an empty apartment, or a room, or sump’n, that had a window fixed so’s you could see his door. Then a coupla choppers, or maybe sometimes just one, would sit up in that window and watch till he came out. They had a machine gun, and they didn’t care how long they waited. Some time he had to come out, and then he got his.”

“How could we get a machine gun?” asked Orping skeptically.

“We couldn’t-not yet,” said Goldman. “But we can get a rifle, can’t we ? And half the houses in that street are boarding houses or apartments, ain’t they? We’ll get him-maybe tomorrow.”

The simple feasibility of the idea impressed itself gradually on Ted Orping. He nodded.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“You won’t,” said Tex Goldman, without emotion. “With a rifle, it wants a guy who can shoot. Tope can shoot, and I’ll be wanting you for another job.”

Extraordinarily enough, this was no less than the truth. During the Great War, Basher Tope had found himself pressed into the army with the coming of conscription, and had actually contrived to spend nearly six months of his service outside the military prisons which opened their doors to him as automatically as had the civil prisons with which he was so familiar. The only good mark on his military record was that he had passed his musketry courses with flying colours. It was a rather unexpected accomplishment to find in a man like that, but good shots are born a thousand times more often than they are made. Basher Tope had the gift, and Tex Goldman selected him uncompromisingly for the second assault.

He appeared in Manson Place that afternoon, wearing a stained black suit and hat and an impressive beard. In the fourth house which he tried he secured a front bed-sitting-room on the ground floor from which he had a perfect view of Simon .Templar’s front door. He called himself Schwarz, a traveller for a Leipzig firm of publishers, and spoke English so badly that his Hoxton accent was indetectable among the dense clutter of other accents with which- his guttural speech was interspersed. He said he required a room only for two days, and could not stand hotels.

Unfortunately for him, he discarded his beard in the privacy of his room before he went to bed that night. Simon Templar, scanning the street from behind drawn curtains through a pair of field glasses, saw him through the window, and knew what to expect.

“Tex isn’t wasting any time,” he said.

His reply to the threat called for two curious articles of which at least one is not an ordinarily purchasable commodity; but a closed car had been standing near his back door in the mews all day, and he knew it would not be easy to go out and do his shopping.

He telephoned to a hotel, and to a firm of removers; and at half-past four a motor van drew up outside his front door, and two men in green baize aprons disembarked and rang the bell. They were admitted; and a few minutes later they came out again with a large wardrobe trunk. It was loaded into the van and delivered half an hour later to the hotel. Simon stepped out of it in his room, went unnoticed down the stairs, and in due course was shown up to his room again.