The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (20 page)

“You see I’ve still got it on,” she said as he sat down.

“I noticed that the lights seemed rather bright over here,” he admitted. “You’ve been showing it around quite a lot lately, haven’t you? Are you making the most of it while you’ve got it?”

“I want to make sure that you can’t say I didn’t give you plenty of chances.”

“Aren’t you afraid that some ordinary grab artist might get it first ? You know I have my competitors.”

She looked at him with thinly veiled derision.

“I’ll begin to think there is a risk of that, if you don’t do something soon. And the suspense is making me quite jittery. Haven’t you been able to think of a scheme yet?”

Simon’s eyes rested on her steadily for a moment while he drew on his cigarette.

“That dinner and dance you were organizing for Friday—you sent me an invitation,” he said. “Is it too late for me to get a ticket?”

“I’ve got some in my bag. If you’ve got twenty-five dollars–-“

He laid fifty dollars on the table.

“Make it two—I may want someone to help me carry the loot.”

Her eyes went hard and sharp for an instant before a buzz of excited comment from her listening guests shut her off from him. He smiled at them all inscrutably and firmly changed the subject while he finished his coffee and smoked another cigarette. After he had taken his leave, she faced a bombardment of questions with stony preoccupation.

“Come to the dance on Friday,” was all she would say. “You may see some excitement.”

Mr Ullbaum, summoned to the Presence again the next morning, almost tore his hair.

“Now will you tell the police?” he gibbered.

“Don’t be so stupid,” she snapped. “I’m not going to lose anything, and he’s going to look a bigger fool than he has for years. All I want you to do is see that the papers hear that Friday is the day—we may sell a few more tickets.”

Her instinct served her well in that direction at least. The stories already published, vague and contradictory as they were, had boosted the sale of tickets for the Grand Ball in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables beyond her expectations, and the final announcement circulated to the press by the unwilling Mr Ullbaum caused a flurry of last-minute buying that had the private ballroom hired for the occasion jammed to overflowing by eight o’clock on the evening of the twentieth. It was a curious tribute to the legends that had grown up around the name of Simon Templar, who had brought premature grey hairs to more police officers than could easily have been counted. Everyone who could read knew that the Saint had never harmed any innocent person, and there were enough sensation-seekers with clear consciences in New York to fill the spacious suite beyond capacity.

Countess Jannowicz, glittering with diamonds, took her place calmly at the head table beside the chairman. He was the aged and harmlessly doddering bearer of a famous name who served in the same honorary position in several charitable societies and boards of directors without ever knowing much more about them than was entailed in presiding over occasional public meetings convened by energetic organizers like the countess; and he was almost stone deaf, an ailment which was greatly to his advantage in view of the speeches he had to listen to.

“What’s this I read about some fella goin’ to steal your necklace ?” he mumbled, as he shakily spooned his soup.

“It wouldn’t do you any good if I told you, you dithering old buzzard,” said the countess with a gracious smile.

“Oh yes. Hm. Ha. Extraordinary.”

She was immune to the undercurrents of excitement that ebbed and flowed through the room like leakages of static electricity. Her only emotion was a slight anxiety lest the Saint should cheat her, after all, by simply staying away. After all the build-up, that would certainly leave her holding the bag. But it would bring him no profit, and leave him deflated on his own boast at the same time; it was impossible to believe that he would be satisfied with such a cheap anticlimax as that.

What else he could do and hope to get away with, on the other hand, was something that she had flatly given up trying to guess. Unless he had gone sheerly cuckoo, he couldn’t hope to steal so much as a spoon that night, after his intentions had been so widely and openly proclaimed, without convicting himself on his own confession. And yet the Saint had so often achieved things that seemed equally impossible that she had to stifle a reluctant eagerness to see what his uncanny ingenuity would devise. Whatever that might be, the satisfaction of her curiosity could cost her nothing—for one very good reason.

The Saint might have been able to accomplish the apparently impossible before, but he would literally have to perform a miracle if he was to open the vaults of the Vandrick National Bank. For that was where her diamond necklace lay that night and where it had lain ever since he paid his first call on her. The string she had been wearing ever since was a first-class imitation, worth about fifty dollars. That was her answer to all the fanfaronading and commotion—a precaution so obvious and elementary that no one else in the world seemed to have thought of it, so flawless and unassailable that the Saint’s boast was exploded before he even began, so supremely ridiculously simple that it would make the whole earth quake with laughter when the story broke.

Even so, ratcheted notch after notch by the lurking fear of a fiasco, tension crept up on her as the time went by without a sign of the Saint’s elegant slender figure and tantalizing blue eyes. He was not there for the dinner or the following speeches, nor did he show up during the interval while some of the tables were being whisked away from the main ballroom to make room for the dancing. The dancing started without him, went on through long-drawn expectancy while impatient questions leapt at the countess spasmodically from time to time like shots from ambush.

“He’ll come,” she insisted monotonously, while news photographers roamed restively about with their fingers aching on the triggers of their flashlights.

At midnight the Saint arrived.

No one knew how he got in; no one had seen him before; but suddenly he was there.

The only announcement of his arrival was when the music stopped abruptly in the middle of a bar. Not all at once, but gradually, in little groups, the dancers shuffled to stillness, became frozen to the floor as the first instinctive turning of eyes towards the orchestra platform steered other eyes in the same direction.

He stood in the centre of the dais, in front of the microphone. No one had a moment’s doubt that it was the Saint, although his face was masked. The easy poise of his athletic figure in the faultlessly tailored evening clothes was enough introduction, combined with the careless confidence with which he stood there, as if he had been a polished master of ceremonies preparing to make a routine announcement. The two guns he held, one in each hand, their muzzles shifting slightly over the crowd, seemed a perfectly natural part of his costume.

“May I interrupt for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ?” he said.

He spoke quietly but the loud-speakers made his voice audible in every corner of the room. Nobody moved or made any answer. His question was rather superfluous. He had interrupted, and everyone’s ears were strained for what he had to say.

“This is a holdup,” he went on in the same easy conversational tone. “You’ve all been expecting it, so none of you should have heart failure. Until I’ve finished, none of you may leave the room—a friend of mine is at the other end of the hall to help to see that this order is carried out.”

A sea of heads screwed round to where a shorter stockier man in evening clothes that seemed too tight for him, stood blocking the far entrance, also masked and also with two guns in his hands.

“So long as you all do exactly what you’re told, I promise that nobody will get hurt. You two”—one of his guns flicked towards the countess’ bodyguards, who were standing stiff-fingered where they had been caught when they saw him—“come over here. Turn your backs, take out your guns slowly and drop them on the floor.”

His voice was still quiet and matter-of-fact but both the men obeyed like automatons.

“Okay. Now turn round again and kick them towards me… . That’s fine. You can stay where you are, and don’t try to be heroes if you want to live to boast about it.”

A smile touched his lips under the mask. He pocketed one of his guns and picked up a black gladstone bag from the dais and tossed it out on to the floor. Then he put a cigarette between his lips and lighted it with a match flicked on the thumbnail of the same hand.

“The holdup will now proceed,” he remarked affably. “The line forms on the right, and that means everybody except the waiters. Each of you will put a contribution in the bag as you pass by. Lady Instock, that’s a nice pair of earrings… .”

Amazed, giggling, white-faced, surly, incredulous, according to their different characters, the procession began to file by and drop different articles into the bag under his directions. There was nothing much else that they could do. Each of them felt that gently waving gun centred on his own body, balancing its bark of death against the first sign of resistance. To one red-faced man who started to bluster, a waiter said tremulously: “Better do what he says. Tink of all da ladies. Anybody might get hit if he start shooting.” His wife shed a pearl necklace and hustled him by. Most of the gathering had the same idea. Anyone who had tried to be a hero would probably have been mobbed by a dozen others who had no wish to die for his glory. Nobody really thought much beyond that. This wasn’t what they had expected, but they couldn’t analyze their reactions. Their brains were too numbed to think very much.

Two brains were not numbed. One of them belonged to the chairman who had lost his glasses, adding dim-sightedness to his other failings.“From where he stood he couldn’t distinguish anything as small as a mask or a gun but somebody seemed to be standing up on the platform and was probably making a speech. The chairman nodded from time to time with an expression of polite interest, thinking busily about the new corn plaster that somebody had recommended to him. The other active brain belonged to the Countess Jannowicz but there seemed to be nothing useful that she could do with it. There was no encouraging feeling of enterprise to be perceived in the guests around her, no warm inducement to believe that they would respond to courageous leadership.

“Can’t you see he’s bluffing?” she demanded in a hoarse bleat. “He wouldn’t dare to shoot!”

“I should be terrified,” murmured the Saint imper-turbably, without moving his eyes from the passing line. “Madam, that looks like a very fine emerald ring… .”

Something inside the countess seemed to be clutching at her stomach and shaking it up and down. She had taken care to leave her own jewels in a safe place but it hadn’t occurred to her to give the same advice to her guests. And now the Saint was robbing them under her nose—almost under her own roof. Social positions had been shattered overnight on slighter grounds.

She grabbed the arm of a waiter who was standing near.

“Send for the police, you fool!” she snarled.

He looked at her and drew down the corners of his mouth in what might have been a smile or a sneer, or both, but he made no movement.

Nobody made any movement except as the Saint directed. The countess felt as if she were in a nightmare. It was amazing to her that the holdup could have continued so long without interruption—without some waiter opening a service door and seeing what was going on, or someone outside in the hotel noticing the curious quietness and giving the alarm. But the ballroom might have been spirited away on to a desert island.

The last of the obedient procession passed by the Saint and left its contribution in the bag and joined the silent staring throng of those who had already contributed. Only the chairman and the countess had not moved—the chairman because he hadn’t heard a word and didn’t know what was going on.

The Saint looked at her across the room.

“I’ve been saving Countess Jannowicz to the last,” he said, “because she’s the star turn that you’ve all been waiting for. Will you step up now, Countess?”

Fighting a tangle of emotions, but compelled by a fascination that drove her like a machine, she moved towards the platform. And the Saint glanced at the group of almost frantic photographers.

“Go ahead, boys,” he said kindly. “Take your pictures. It’s the chance of a lifetime… . Your necklace, Countess.”

She stood still, raised her hands a little way, dropped them, raised them again, slowly, to her neck. Magnesium bulbs winked and splashed like a barrage of artificial lightning as she unfastened the clasp and dropped the necklace on top of the collection in the bag.

“You can’t get away with this,” she said whitely.

“Let me show you how easy it is,” said the Saint calmly. He turned his gun to the nearest man to the platform. “You, sir—would you mind closing the bag, carefully, and taking it down to my friend at the other end of the room? Thank you.” He watched the bag on its way down the room until it was in the hands of the stocky man at the far entrance. “Okay, partner,” he said crisply. “Scram.”

As if the word had been a magical incantation, the man vanished.

A kind of communal gasp like a sigh of wind swept over the assembly, as if the final unarguable physical disappearance of their property had squeezed the last long-held breath out of their bodies. Every eye had been riveted on it in its last journey through their midst, every eye had blinked to the shock of its ultimate vanishment, and then every eye dragged itself dazedly back to the platform from which those catastrophes had been dictated.

Almost to their surprise, the Saint was still standing there. But his other gun had disappeared and he had taken his mask off. In some way, the aura of subtle command that had clung to him before in spite of his easy casualness had gone, leaving the easy casualness alone. He was still smiling.

For an instant the two bodyguards were paralyzed. And then with muffled choking noises they made a concerted dive for their guns.

The Saint made no move except a slight deprecating motion of the hand that held his cigarette.