The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (17 page)

The soldier remained suspicious.

“Your papers, please sir,” he
demanded respectfully but
firmly.

There were some papers in the inner pocket of
the tunic
the Saint was wearing, but Simon felt sure there was no
point
in trying to pass himself off with them: they would undoubt
edly
include a photograph which would not resemble him in
the least. He must
stick to his role of an emissary from Berlin.

“My papers are in my car,” he said
brusquely. “If you will
come along with me to the courtyard I will
show them to
you.”

“To the courtyard?” repeated the
corporal.

“Certainly, to the courtyard. I
was
on
my way to see your
chief. He will be interested to know why my visit has
been
delayed.”

For a moment the soldier looked uncertain.

“You say you come from the Air Marshal
in Berlin, sir?”
he asked. “But he is…”

A curious look came into his eyes and he did
not finish his
sentence.

“Exactly,” said the Saint crisply,
“and therefore my mission
is urgent. I wish to see your superior
officer.”

The man smiled, and the Saint did not like
that smile. It
was the expression of someone who knows something to his
own
advantage and to someone else’s detriment. The some
one else in this case
could only be the Saint. At any rate, that
was the way Simon figured it, and he had a
habit of being
right.

“Very well, sir,” said the soldier,
“then we will go to
gether.”

He motioned with his gun for the Saint and Frankie to
precede him down the stairs.

Simon did not budge.

“I understand this is his office,”
he said coldly.

“It is, sir, but he is not there. I have just been to look
for him myself. We will go to the Kommandant’s office. He is
the man you should be seeing anyway.”

His eyes were cunning and malicious. The
Saint liked him less and less and felt sorry for his wife. But then perhaps her
eyes were cunning and malicious too. The corporal had the
self-satisfied
air of one who could already feel the stripes of a
F
eldwebel
on his
sleeve.

Suddenly, Frankie took off on her own. The
Saint cursed
inwardly. A moment later he did so outwardly. Frankie
dashed for the stairs and the
soldier fired a shot in the air.

Simon had to admire the way the man kept his
head. It
would obviously be awkward for him if he had to report
that
he had killed this prize prisoner, but it would be even more
awkward if he had to announce
that she had escaped. If the
warning shot
failed to halt her, he would have to try to do so by shooting her in the leg.

Frankie kept on going. The soldier aimed his gun at her.

There was nothing for it. The Saint saw what
he must do.
People were always amazed at how quickly such a big man
could move
when he wanted to. Greased lightning wasn’t in
it. Greased time was more like it. One
moment he was stand
ing some feet from the
soldier and the next, without any ap
parent movement, he was astride his
prone body. The soldier would never be able to recall exactly what had
happened, but
for some time his slumber
would be untroubled by that
problem.

Simon grinned rather mirthlessly at Frankie,
who had
halted in her tracks.

“Magnificent,” he said. “Also
magnificently stupid. And for Christ’s sake, will you stop sticking your neck
out and hoping
that I’ll manage to catch the axe.”

He was interrupted from elaborating the
lecture by shouts from above and the clattering of feet on the stairs.

They had no choice but to flee downwards. They
dashed
down the stairs into the front hall. This did not solve their
dilemma.
They could go through one of the doors which led
to other parts of the
castle and try to hide somewhere, but it
was certain that there
would be a thorough search of the
whole premises and that would
inevitably lead to their cap
ture. It looked as if there was nothing for
it but to carry on
into the courtyard and hope somehow to be able to bluff
the sentry at the gate.

The Saint opened the great front door and
they slipped
through. He closed the door instantly behind them, in the
hope that the
pursuit would be left briefly without a clue as
to which way they had gone.

“Take it easy, old girl,” he said
to Frankie. “Pretend we
belong here.”

“But I do,” Frankie said with a
smile.

Simon took her arm and marched her boldly
out from the sheltering archway into the open courtyard.

His first impression was that there was a
Staff car parked in
the shadows on one side of the square, with a chauffeur
in
Luftwaffe uniform industriously polishing the windshield.
This was
corrected when he realised it could not possibly be a
Staff car, since it
was a Delage D8 100 Mouette saloon with
the famous special
body by Henri Chapron—not the sort of
car which an ordinary officer of the
German army, or even the
SS, would have at his disposal. It must
belong to someone
special.

The Saint scanned the courtyard as he walked
towards it.
Aside
from the parading guard by the gate the place was empty. Then suddenly a door
in the side wing on his left
opened and two
men came out.

One was a slim elegant figure in an SS
uniform with a colo
nel’s insignia. Simon guessed he was the Kommandant of
the
Castle. He indicated by his posture and general manner ex
treme
deference towards his companion, a large jolly-looking man in a peaked cap and
a greatcoat with two rows of medals
hung on it in violation of the usual
regulations for the wear
ing of decorations.

There was no mistaking the Prime Minister of
Prussia,
Chief of the Luftwaffe, and, so rumour had it, Director
of the Four Year Plan for War Preparations. And he knew now why
that
officious corporal had become so smug.

For Simon Templar it was suddenly spring. It
was a lovely
day
and everything was happening just right. There was noth
ing that would lend more zest to that moment than an en
counter with one of the most formidable chiefs of
the Nazi
Reich. It struck him that the
Air Marshal’s presence in the
Castle could even be connected with the
Hapsburg Necklace. Simon’s earlier improvisations might have hit the nail on
the
head. The Nazi leader might want to find
the Necklace for
the benefit of the Third Reich, but he was also known
to be a
greedy and insatiable collector of
art and antiques. The Neck
lace might
well end up round his wife’s neck—or perhaps
even his own, in view of his well-known liking for decorations.
Unless
they knew what it was, nobody would ask any ques
tions. Even if anyone did, this man’s power and influence
were sufficient to ensure that such questions were
not asked
out loud.

Holding Frankie by the arm, Simon hurried her across the
courtyard to meet the approaching officials by the
Delage.
The chauffeur looked startled. The SS colonel was obviously
completely flummoxed. His jaw fell open and the monocle
dropped out of his eye. The Minister alone remained ap
parently unmoved by this sudden and extraordinary
en
counter.

“Ach, mein lieber Freund!”
cried the Saint, with genial fa
miliarity. “How nice to see you again! And
how is dear Emma
and all the
children? Are they all at Schloss Harinhall?”

“Who are you?” asked the Minister
guardedly.

His smile was broad and tolerant, but his eyes, with their
pin-prick pupils, were as cold as dry ice.

“Oh, don’t pay any attention to this
uniform,” replied the
Saint jovially, as he opened the door for Frankie to get in.
“I
won it off a chap at strip poker.
Surely you remember me?
I’m Cardinal
Spaghetti, Chief of the Vatican Plumbing Department. This is my wife.”

As he spoke he swung himself into the
driving seat of the
Delage, having already seen that the key was in the
ignition.
A car of this kind and in such a guarded place would be
con
sidered safe. After all, it was inconceivable that anyone would
try to
steal such an important vehicle in such a stronghold.
Anyone but the Saint…

The Kommandant swore and lunged for the door.
The
chauffeur stood there with a look of complete astonishment
on his
face. From his point of view the fact that a member of the SS and a woman had
taken over his master’s car was ob
viously quite beyond his
comprehension. As the car shot
away, Simon looked in the driving mirror and
saw that Göring
was actually convulsed with laughter, and he realised why
this
man was such a formidable figure in the political hierarchy of
his country. The aristocratic
detachment which allowed a
sense of humour
to operate in a situation of this sort was
something not even Hitler possessed, let alone the rest of the
vulgar and common men who headed the Nazis and the
Third Reich.

The car roared through the outer gateway. The startled
sentry saluted it and Simon’s uniform smartly. The
SS officer
shouted at him to stop
the car, but by that time it was round
ing the corner of the Castle wall
and a moment later it was
out of sight.

The Saint slowed down a little for the next
bend.

“No point in killing ourselves,” he
murmured. “Besides, we
have to pick up Leopold.”

“Where is he?”

“Sitting on a sharp stone farther down
the hill meditating.
He’s finally decided to get down to
fundamentals.”

Simon stopped the car beside the rock slide
and got out and stood beside it. He waved and called, “Come out and
play, Leopold. It’s me, Simon.
Hurry up, or you’ll miss the
bus and there
isn’t another one.”

A moment later Leopold emerged from behind a
rock and
scrambled up the avalanche towards them. He was carrying
the two
satchels.

“What does this mean?” he panted.
“And that uniform—”

“Explanations later,” said the
Saint curtly. “We’ve got half
the German army on our tail. Pile in
and let’s get going.”

Leopold climbed into the back seat and
stowed the bags on
the floor at his feet. The Saint got back in the car and
launched
it off again.

“Gott Sei Dank,
Frankie!”
chattered Leopold from the
back seat. “How did you escape?”

“Simon got me out, of course,”
Frankie told him impa
tiently. “But we are still escaping.
They are bound to come
after us.”

“And the Necklace?”

“Is still safe.”

Leopold’s snort of exasperation with
Frankie’s dictatorial
and dismissive manner could be heard over
the noise of en
gine, tyres, and the wind of their passage.

“How far are they behind you,
Simon?” he wanted to
know.

“Still a fair way, I should think,”
answered the Saint
calmly. “It’d have to take them a few minutes to
turn out a
posse and get it carborne, and I shouldn’t think their
trans
portation department’s got anything that has the legs of this
job. Our
problem is that I still can’t drive as fast as words can go through a telephone
wire.”

“I know a back road that will avoid the
next town,”
Frankie
said. “Probably they don’t know it—it’s not much
more than a cart track—”

“But first, darling,” Simon
reminded her, “we’ve got to get past the guards at the entrance to this
verboten
area.”

They zoomed through the hamlet of Este,
scattering geese
and peasant children from their path. As they left the
village
behind, Leopold said: “We should have gone back through
the drain,
as we came in.”