The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (19 page)

“Hold tight, Leo,” he barked, and
flung out his own right
arm like a bar across Frankie’s chest to
prevent her being
hurled
through the windscreen when the crash came.

It came, and he was ready for it with his
feet braced against
the
firewall, and his tremendous strength held Frankie back
enough to save her from contact with dashboard or wind
screen.
The Delage had not attained a speed at which no
preparedness could have spared them the effects of a collision,
but
the crunch was still sickeningly loud. The side of a car is
infinitely more vulnerable than the front, and the
Audi was
hit broadside just as the men
in it were opening the doors to get out. The Audi was slammed two feet squarely
sideways
and almost rocked over.

The Saint was out of the Delage the instant he
had assured
himself that Frankie was unhurt. Of the two shocked Ge
stapo men
left in the Audi, he chose the one who looked
liveliest to yank out first, and destroyed
that unseemly sprightliness
with a left to
the solar plexus and a sledgehammer chop to the back of the neck. The second,
with a nasty cut over one
eye, was
moaning dazedly, and Simon compassionately put
him out of his pain with a carefully placed uppercut. The
third, who had been farthest out of the Audi when
the
Delage hit it, had probably been
caught and crushed by the collapsing door: he lay face up in the road, looking
as if he
would give no trouble for a
long time, if ever.

Within seconds, the menace of the
Geheimnisstadtspolizei
had been at
least temporarily neutralised. But so also had the
services of the Reichmarshal’s elegant Delage.

Simon rejoined Frankie and Leopold, who were
now stand
ing
beside it.

“Have we got anything to tie up some
partypoopers?” he
asked.

Leopold looked blank. Frankie furrowed her
brow in
thought.

“I am wearing three petticoats,”
she said. “I think I could
spare a couple, and there are always my
stockings. They’re
thick wool and serviceable.”

“The best possible service for
them,” Simon approved. “Peasant girls are very well equipped in every
sense of the
word, apparently. Come on, Leopold, let’s arrange our pa
tients
while Frankie takes off her clothes.”

In a minute or two Frankie joined them. She
handed
Simon her stockings and a fancy petticoat of the kind peasant
girls
saved for special occasions when they might display them
in
high-kicking and swinging folk dances. With the help of
his knife
the Saint swiftly ripped it into strips. The men were
soon tied and gagged
and arranged in a neat triangle, head to
foot. Simon placed
the empty brandy bottle in the centre, like
a hub.

“I do like to leave things tidy,”
he remarked, and even
Leopold smiled.

The two interlocked wrecks blocked the road
like two
grappling dinosaurs that had expired in mortal combat.
Simon
patted the Delag apologetically on its crumpled bon
net.

“Even if you died on a drunken binge,
remember it was a
‘14 cognac,” he said.

He was stripping off his SS uniform with the
rapidity of a
quick-change artiste. It went into the ditch, along with
the
jackboots, and he put the more comfortable canvas shoes
back on
his feet.

He set off at such a fast pace that the other
two had
difficulty in keeping up. Once they were over the brow of a
low hill
they could see the border station quite clearly. It was
the usual
type, consisting of a shed and a barrier bar across the road, weighted at one
end so that it could be raised or
lowered easily. The bar was in its
blocking position.

Simon kept going without breaking stride.

“Don’t let it look as if we were a bit
concerned,” he said.
“The sportsmen we just took out of play
must have been the
Gestapo detail sent to watch for us at the border. With
any
luck, the regular border guards will only have been told to
look out
for a peasant girl and a man in SS uniform. How did
you get across,
Frankie?”

“My papers say I’m a Hungarian waitress
working at a
gasthaus
near the border in Austria. I was just coming on a
visit to my family.”

“Okay. So now you’re going back to work.
And no reason why a couple of agricultural-engineer customers that you ran
into
shouldn’t walk you back.”

The Saint paused and considered the immediate
future thoughtfully. “Well,” he said finally, “I think this is
going to be a case of brains over brawn. Come on, let’s see if we can
talk our
way through.”

“I think you’d better let me do the
talking,” said Frankie.
“After all, I speak Hungarian as my
second language.”

“And I speak it as my eighth,”
laughed the Saint, “but I’m
not going to talk Hungarian. You just wait
and see!”

Frankie looked doubtful and worried. Leopold
looked
doubtful and annoyed. So far the Saint had come through
with
flying colours, but the young man was always looking for
a possible
slip-up on the part of the man he both admired and resented. But if the Saint
had any misgivings they could only
have been perceived by a lie
detector.

Arm in arm with Frankie, he marched
unhesitatingly up to
the border post. It was manned by two men in
uniform who regarded them with little interest. One of them held out his
hand with
a supercilious expression for the Saint’s papers. He
did not even bother to
ask for them. But the other gave
Frankie a slight smile of recognition.

“Was your family well,” he inquired
in Hungarian.

“Very well, thank you,” she
replied in the same language.

“It was not a long visit.”

“It was only to settle some family
business. And my mother was glad I could go back with these friends.”

The barrier was raised, and they were waved
on. It was as
easy as that.

The Austrian barrier was about twenty yards
ahead.

“Keep your fingers crossed, and your
eyes too,” said the
Saint. “We’re halfway home.”

The Austrian station was manned by two guards
who
watched their approach across no-man’s-land through a win
dow in
their small official building. As Frankie and her com
panions reached it,
one guard stepped out to meet them,
holding a rifle in the crook of his
arm.

“Ihre Urkunde, bitte.”

Each of them produced the documents that
Annellatt had
provided.

The guard took them with one hand, glanced at
them, and then transferred them to two fingers of the hand which cra
dled his
rifle, so that he could take a notebook from his
pocket and consult
it.

A very small semblance of an ominous smile
came to his
thin lips.

“These papers are forgeries,” he stated flatly. “We
have
been waiting for someone to present
them.”

V

How maternity became Frankie,

and
there were puns and
punishment

1

If ever there was a moment when the Saint
experienced in all its classic cosmicality the emotion of a man who has
literally
had a rug pulled from under him, this was it. Perhaps his
heart did not actually stop beating, but it would have had to
be a
mindless mechanical device not to have faltered. Some
how he maintained a
superhuman control of his expression,
but for a moment he could do nothing about the leaden,
numbness which seemed to spread from somewhere
around
his midriff to threaten his
mental resilience.

Of all the possible hazards and difficulties that he had
vaguely anticipated and had been in a general way
prepared
to cope with, this was the
last and least considered in his elastic contingency plans.

“That is impossible,” he protested
automatically. “There
must be some mistake.”

Even as he said it, he knew how hollow his
bluster must sound, and how unavailing it must be.

“There is no mistake,” said the
guard coldly, and made the
slightest motion of his head at the control
building.

His certainty was granite-like. No histrionic bluff could
have ever scratched it. He had been tipped off
beyond range
of peradventure.

Someone in Herr Annellatt’s “organisation” had spilled
the
beans, and the spillage had been
efficiently broadcast. But it w
ould do
no good, then and there, to speculate on the iden
tity of the spiller.

The other guard was coming out of the control building in
response to the first guard’s nod. He had an
automatic pistol
holster on his belt, and his right hand rested on the
open flap.

The Saint recovered as a professional boxer does after tak
ing a near-knockout punch. Though it had seemed
like an eternity to him, the duration of his paralysis would have had
to be measured in fractioned seconds. And while
his brain
told him that there was no
intellectual way out of this situa
tion,
his physical reflexes, like those of any professional, made
him come back fighting.

The guard with the rifle was still tucking his notebook back
in his pocket, and the hand he had near the
trigger was still encumbered by the papers he was holding. Simon grabbed the
barrel of the rifle and yanked it towards him while
he drove
one knee into the guard’s groin. The rifle came loose, and the
Saint added his right hand to another grip on it
with which
he whirled it like an airplane propeller to slam the butt
stunningly against the side of the man’s head.

The other guard’s hand had barely touched the
butt of his
holstered pistol when the Saint had him almost impaled at
the stomach on the muzzle of the captured rifle. The man
froze in
instant terror, but the Saint was not quite ruthless enough to touch the
trigger. On the other hand, he could see
no asset value in
such a prisoner. So he reconciled humani
tarian scruples and
practical considerations by merely driving
the muzzle in harder and then bringing the
rifle butt over in
another propeller spin
that ended on the guard’s left temple
with
a clout that could not fail to discount his participation
for at least
an hour.

“I just don’t understand it,” Simon
mourned, looking
down at the two uninterested guards. “Everywhere I
go, I
seem to run
into violence. What is the world coming to?”

Frankie and Leopold were staring at him as
if they were
still trying to wake up.

Simon threw down the rifle and took Frankie’s
arm again.

“Come on,” he said. “These
little interruptions are a nuisance, but we shouldn’t let them spoil our
trip.”

There was no vehicle of any kind parked
around the border
post, from which he concluded that the guards were
relieved
at intervals by some circulating vehicle which deposited
a
fresh detail and carted the previous couple off to their well or
un-earned rest.

With a cheery wave of his hand to the gaping
Hungarians on the other side of the neutral zone, he hustled Frankie and
Leopold
past the barrier and down the road at an easy jog
trot. Within a
hundred yards a curve took both frontier posts
out of sight.

“How long before we have a chance of
being picked up by
some friendly soul who hasn’t come through the border
crossings and been warned about us?” he asked Frankie.

“Very soon we join a main road which is
all Austrian,” she
answered. “This road is just a branch
from it to the frontier.”

In fact it was less than a quarter of a mile
till they connected with the highway. Frankie pointed in the direction
which a
signpost indicated as leading to G
ä
nserndt,
Bad Altenberg
, the Neusiedler See, Rust, and points south, and Simon
slackened
the pace he was setting to a brisk walk.