The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (8 page)

Simon looked at him with distaste. The man
had the sneer
ing manner of a professional sadist. Such types, in the
Saint’s
experience, were always vulnerable. Compensating for their
own physical inadequacy with
another man’s muscle, they
were always aware
of their dependence and made more in
secure
by it.

“I’m not sure,” Simon replied, his
gaze meeting the other’s
steadily. “I could be having a
particularly nasty dream.”

“Perhaps you won’t be quite so fresh, my
friend, when
we’ve finished with you,” said the Rat.

“And what exactly is it you want to
finish?”

The Rat lit a cigarette.

”We want to know what you are doing in
Vienna.”

“I came to see the Zoo,” Simon told
him. “But I didn’t
know the animals were wandering around loose
in the
streets.”

The Gorilla stepped over and kicked the
Saint viciously in
the ribs. Simon could not quite cut off a reflex gasp of
pain,
but managed to turn it into a laugh.

“There’s a good Nazi,” he observed.
“Be sure a man isn’t
only down but has his hands tied before you
kick him.”

The Gorilla’s face was suffused with rage. He
bent down
and deliberately struck the Saint across the face. He
looked as
if it made him feel a little better.

“You must have practised that on your
girlfriend,” said the
Saint. “Or is she a boy?”

The Gorilla reached in his pocket and brought
out a switch
knife. The blade flicked out like a silver snake’s
tongue. He thrust the point to within half an inch of the Saint’s left eye.

“How would you like to have only one
eye?” The blade twitched sideways. “Or no eyes at all?”

“Listen,” said the Rat. “We
know that you did not meet the Countess Malffy or Herr Annellatt before
tonight. But
the
Saint wouldn’t come to Vienna, at this time, just as a
tourist. We want to know what you came to do, if you have
already done it, and all about it.”

“Und ve haf vays off making you
talk,” said the Saint, in
contemptuously exaggerated burlesque.

“You will also tell us exactly where the
Hapsburg Necklace
is hidden.”

So that was part of it. They thought that
Frankie might
have confided her secret to him. That could make things
more
difficult. Ignorance is one thing which is more easily shown up than it is
proved. And this pair looked as if they
would take a lot of
convincing.

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint,
“but I keep my tiara in the
bank and only wear paste. One meets so many
unpleasant
characters around these days. After all, a girl doesn’t
want to
risk losing her most precious souvenirs.”

The Rat sighed dramatically, but moved his head nega
tively in reply to the Gorilla’s expectant glance.

“There are better and more painful ways
to persuade him,”
he said in German. “But not here. And I
see that it will take
time. Blindfold him, while I see if the car
is here.”

He went out, closing the cell door after
him. Simon Tem
plar, whose faculties never stopped working when they
were
not concussed, automatically wondered about the
“not
here.”
A cell such as he was in would have seemed quite
satisfactory
for what is politely called “intensive
interrogation.” A change
of venue could only suggest a lavishly
equipped chamber of horrors which it was not amusing to imagine.

The Saint had no delusions about the power of
painful per
suasion.
Eventually any human being would break: it was
only a question of human willpower against scientifically applied
agony. And in that unequal contest, science had always been ahead.

The Saint wondered what his own threshold of
surrender
would be. And what made the outlook exceptionally gloomy
was that
they would be seeking information which even in the
most abject extreme
he would be totally unable to give them.

It was the kind of situation which eliminated
any rational scruples against the means to combat it.

The Gorilla hauled Simon to his feet like a
rag doll, pulled
out a dirty handkerchief, and twirled him around. He
stood
squarely
behind Simon to tie the folded handkerchief over
the Saint’s eyes.

Simon reached back, at first cautiously and
gently, with his
bound
hands, and located the Gorilla’s crotch and testicles.
He closed one hand on them, in a clamp like a fiercely ac
tivated vise.

The Gorilla shrieked aloud, and released the
cloth he had
been knotting and everything else.

Simon whirled around, keeping his balance as
adeptly as a
dancer. The Gorilla was bent double, clutching his
anguished
organs. This callisthenic exercise brought his head down
to
waist level. The Saint, poised on one foot, kicked it like a football,
with compound interest for the kick which he him
self had received.

The Gorilla instantly stopped screaming, and
crumpled
into blissful anaesthesia.

Simon Templar dropped to his knees, and
somewhat la
boriously,
as it had to be with his hands tied behind him,
located the Gorilla’s switch knife. After that, it took him less than a
minute to cut the cords from his wrists.

So far, so good! The Saint flexed his muscles
and massaged
the circulation back into his arms. All he had to do now
was
to get through the locked door and out of a building whose
plan was
unknown to him, and past any guards who might be
still around. The
thought of these obstacles made him feel
quite pleased with
his situation. He only hoped he would
meet the Rat on his way out. He wanted
to give him an ob
ject-lesson in the perils of arrogance that was not
sustained by personal prowess in the arts of self-defence. It should be possi
ble to get
this into his head, even without surgery, perhaps by
throwing him out of
a convenient window or down a stair
case. Viennese staircases are usually
very long, winding, and
particularly hard, being made of stone.

He was not daunted by the unknown quantity of other
Gestapo cohorts whom he might encounter. At that
hour,
there were likely to be very
few on duty, and a free and un
trammelled
Saint would certainly be able to cope with a cou
ple of Nazi-type thugs, especially as he would have the advan
tage of the element of surprise. To paraphrase
the poet, his strength was as the strength of ten, not for the reason that his
heart was all that pure, but just because it was.
Even though
he was no Sir Galahad, he
was never awed by being to some
extent
outnumbered. And now, thanks to the Gorilla’s knife,
he was not even unarmed.

His ears had told him that the Rat had not
locked the cell
door when he left, and in fact there would have been no
reason to
do so. Simon opened it cautiously, and stepped out
into a dimly lit
grey-walled corridor.

He had hardly stepped out when he recognised
it.

It was the passage through which Annellatt
had led him from the courtyard of the apartment building to the garage. The
“cell” which he had escaped from lay behind one of the
unpainted
doors which he had seen in passing, and must have been some kind of former
store-room.

The Rat and the Gorilla must have thrown him
in there
simply for temporary storage. And this explained why
they
could not use it for a prolonged “interrogation,” and the
Rat’s
reference to a car which had apparently been sent for.

It also disposed of Annellatt’s rash
statement that they
would not have discovered the connection between the
garage
and the residential building.

Having found his bearings, the Saint was
faced with an im
mediate decision: to continue his escape through the garage,
or to return to the flat and warn the others—if it wasn’t al
ready too
late for that…

It took him exactly two seconds to choose the
latter. What
ever the risk, he couldn’t make good his own getaway
without
knowing what had happened to Frankie.

He retraced the passage through the door to
the central
courtyard. Its baroque splendour was silent and deserted.

The door to Annellatt’s principal stairway
was locked. Be
fore ringing the bell beside it, he tried to recall the
position of
the other door by which Annellatt had brought him out.
This was a little more difficult, but he thought he located it cor
rectly,
and tried the handle.

Either by accident or design, it was not
locked.

But he had barely moved the door the
necessary minimum
of
millimetres to discover this when there was a creak of
hinges from the building’s main entrance. Turning his head,
he saw the inset door starting to open. It might
only be another perfectly innocent tenant coming home, but the
Saint could not take a chance on it. With the
silent stealth of
a bashful ghost,
he backed off so that one of the courtyard’s massive marble columns was between
him and the incomer.

Pressing himself tight against the pillar,
and tracking the
other’s progress by the echoing sound of his footsteps,
Simon
kept himself
completely hidden until his ears told him that
the man had passed and was moving away from him. Only
then did he come from behind his cover and see the
back of a
short figure in a raincoat
and hat which he felt sure of
recognising.

He stepped out of cover, caught up in three
soundless
strides,
and collared the man around the throat in the crook
of his left arm. In a simultaneous movement, he brought the
Gorilla’s knife, in his right hand, into full view
before his cap
tive’s face.

“Halb so wild,”
he
advised gently. “Didn’t you just say we had something to finish?”

The man’s hat, at first knocked over his
eyes by the stran
glehold, fell off completely, and the Saint found
himself look
ing down at the unmistakable, even from that awkward
angle, snub-nosed pudding features of Max Annellatt.

4

“Pardon me,” said the Saint
politely, releasing him. “But for
a moment I thought
you were someone else. Is Frankie up
stairs?”

“No, I sent her off with Leopold soon
after you left, in his car. To the Malffy Palais, to pack a bag and go straight
on to
my country place. I promised her we would join them there.”

“Why weren’t you in the garage to meet
me?”

“I went with them to the Palais, to be
sure it was not under
surveillance. I don’t think Leopold would
have known what
to do if it had been. Then it took me an infernal time to
get a
taxi to bring me back. I apologise for being late—but how did
you get
in?”

“Those lads from the Gestapo let me in,
and coshed me
before I could find out they weren’t you.”

Max’s eyes widened.

“Then they have found out about the
garage! But it must
have been since we left.” He glanced apprehensively
across the courtyard at the door to the passageway. “But you—”

“I managed to get away, by a trick which would have
horrified the Marquis of Queensbury. If not his
son. But even
if one of them isn’t in top form at the moment, we’d
better
not spend any more time nattering
here.”

“I saw you had left my car up the
street, as I came in the
taxi,” Annellatt said. “And now you have explained to me
why no one was watching the front of the building. Let us take advantage of it
before they realise that two people can
be
in two places at once.”

“You took the words out of my
mouth,” said the Saint.

They crossed quickly to the front door, which
Max opened and pre-empted the first step out—“As a resident here, I have
every right to come and go as I please.” But the street outside
was
deserted.