The Saint Returns (2 page)

Simon Templar stood tall and lean by the
water, his
blue eyes watching the surface for signs of trout within
range of his line. An ambiguous swirl downstream failed
to
distract him. He had chosen this pool because instinct
—sharpened by a
lifetime of hunting human prey, and
not rarely being hunted himself—told him
that in this
widening of the stream would be lurking a prize worthy
of his time and skill.

So he waited, poised and strong, his rod held
ready.

That the man known somewhat incongruously as
the Saint should be found in such peaceful surroundings was
unusual.
(His true character was better described by
another of his
informal appellations, voiced by police
officers and
criminals with equal unease, the Robin Hood
of Modern Crime.) That
such peace should last long,
even in rural Kildare, half an hour’s drive
from Dublin,
was inconceivable, for the Saint could no more escape
adventure than a fish could
escape its brook and stroll off across the fields, and in general he had no
desire to do so.

But even a man whose natural medium is
excitement
occasionally
wants a change of pace, and for the moment
Simon
Templar wanted and had found it—though his
sixth sense, nagging like the faintly expanding sound of
a speeding car in the distance, warned him to
enjoy it
thoroughly now before his
fated propensity for trouble swung the balance back to normal.

The Saint had driven into Dublin on the
previous after
noon with the plan of meeting an old friend, the soldier
of
fortune, Patrick Kelly, at the Gresham Hotel, spending
the night there,
while Kelly enjoyed a reunion with
comrades-at-arms, and then going out to
Kelly’s house
in the country seventy miles west for two or three days
of
fishing.

All had gone as planned up to and including
Kelly’s
enjoyment
of his reunion, in which he had insisted Simon
take part. But Kelly’s enjoyment had been so immense,
and celebrated with such grand libations of porter
and thrice-distilled Gaelic fire, that he had found himself disinclined to go
on with the rest of the schedule when
Simon
wakened him by house phone at noon. He had
found himself unready, in fact, to leave his hotel bed,
and had announced in that brief interval between
pro
longed periods of unconsciousness
that the drive to his
cottage would
have to be delayed at least until evening
—and since they would be paying
for another night in the
hotel anyway,
probably until the next morning.

The Saint, after a one p.m. brunch, had gone
on out into
the
country for two reasons: he was in the mood for fish
ing, and he did not want to spend the afternoon near the
hotel, where he would almost inevitably get
involved in
somebody else’s
problems. Among Pat Kelly’s more exu
berant
activities of the night before, once he got to the
table-pounding stage, had been the repeated proud
bel
lowing of Simon’s name not only in
the Cocktail Bar of
the Gresham, but
also in numerous other places along the
streets of Dublin’s fair city. Such widespread advertising
of the Saint’s presence was a virtual guarantee
that he
would not have been able to
spend an afternoon in town
undisturbed
by some stranger.

Near the center of the stream the surface
swirled, and
a slowly waving tail broke the orange-gold reflections
of
overhanging trees. The Saint made a perfect cast up
stream of
the fish. The brightly colored fly drifted with the current toward the target
of concentric ripples made
by the trout’s rising, and Simon carefully
reeled in just
enough
of the floating line to insure control if the big fish
struck.

The sound of the fast-moving automobile which
a few
moments
before had been almost imperceptible was now
much
closer. Tires squealed less than two hundred yards
away. The only road in the vicinity followed the
stream
where Simon was fishing, and he
was standing within
thirty feet of a
sharp curve in the pavement. He was not
worried about his own safety, however, but about his car,
which was parked on the shoulder between road and
stream and could easily be demolished if the
speeder
overshot the turn.

Irish country roads are not made for fast
travel. Cars
are few, carts and sheep are plentiful, and a normal brisk
driving speed is thirty-five miles per hour. So it was par
ticularly
irritating to Simon that some maniac had chosen
this stretch of
asphalt on which to attempt suicide, and that the aberration had to occur just
when a rising trout
begged for all his concentration.

Once the racing car hit the curve, there was
nothing Simon could do but jerk the fly from the very mouth of
the
expectant fish and prepare to dodge a hurtling ton
of metal. It was a
green Volkswagen, and it skidded with
an anguished howl of scorching rubber, rear end swinging as
the driver narrowly missed Simon’s car by slamming on
brakes and heading for the old stone wall on the opposite
side of the road. Then to avoid smashing into the
wall
the driver made an immediate
sudden turn back toward
the outside
of the curve. The Volkswagen pirouetted
completely around on all four wheels as if it had been on
ice, miraculously failed to turn over, left the
road, and
skidded toward the stream,
its locked rear wheels plowing
up
turf, and came to a halt between two trees without
hitting either.

As Simon strode toward it, his rod still in
hand, the
engine was dead, and the driver, a girl, was slumped for
ward over
the wheel. But, before he had covered half
the distance between
them, she looked up suddenly with
terror in her eyes, and it was obvious
that she had been
shaken rather than knocked unconscious.

She was young—scarcely nineteen, Simon
estimated on
first sight—and the deep brown eyes that were fixed on
him were extraordinarily large. Her chestnut hair was
chopped short, her
mouth was small and provocative, her
nose pert and uptilted.

The Saint realized instantly that neither the
acrobatics
of her car nor his own appearance—which considering his
frame of
mind probably had a rather threatening aspect
—was the cause of the stark fear on her
pretty face. After
the initial moment of
staring at him, she looked up the
road
in the direction from which she had come, grabbed
at the door handle, and scrambled out of her car.

It was then that Simon heard the second car
rushing
nearer, with the same screech of tires on curves which
had
preceded the arrival of the girl, and realized that
it was the apparent
cause of her panic.

“Le Mans is that way,” he said helpfully, gesturing with
his fishing rod. “You must have missed
a turn somewhere.”

“Please!” she cried. “Help
me!”

She was hurrying toward him, the short tight
skirt of
her stylish suit restricting her legs, her stiletto heels
stab
bing into the damp earth of the stream’s bank.

“Help you do what?” he asked.
“Change tires for the
next stretch? I’m sorry, but I don’t have
much sympathy
for anybody who …”

“They’ll get me,” she gasped,
stumbling up to him and clutching his arms. “Hide me. Do something.”

She was a foot shorter than the Saint, and had
to look almost straight up to meet his skeptical blue eyes at that
close
range.

“This reminds me of a movie I saw
once,” he said blandly. “Except there the girl kissed the stranger
and
said, ‘Please don’t look up—hold me!’ and then along
came…”

The girl interrupted him with a despairing
wail as a
second automobile—this one a black Mercedes—came
around the
curve at a slightly saner rate than her Volks
wagen had done, put
on its brakes, and skidded to a stop
on the road. Then it backed up with a
roar and a spinning
of
wheels on to the shoulder between her car and Simon’s.

“Do something!” she begged, putting the Saint between
her and the emerging occupants of the Mercedes, and
grasping his arms more tightly than ever.

“I’d have a better chance if my hands
were free,” he
told her.

As she let him go and cowered by the water,
the two
men who had been in the black car sized up the situation and began moving
slowly forward, separating to divide
Simon’s attention and cut down
possible routes for his
and the girl’s escape. One of the quietly
methodical and
confident-seeming
pursuers was rather overweight for his
job,
and his tautly stretched trench coat looked as if it
had seen better days on a slenderer version of
him. His bald dome gleamed red in the setting sun.

The second man was considerably smaller, and
his
trench coat was more rumpled than stretched. Graying
sandy hair
was closely cropped on his narrow head, and
veins showed large
around his temples. His tongue, like a snake’s, continuously darted out to
touch his thin lips.

Since they did not speak, Simon saw no need
to initiate
a conversation. He waited, relaxed and alert, and almost
imperceptibly
stripped line from his reel. Finally, when
the men were within
ten feet of him, he flicked the fly
into the air, dropped it over the fat
man’s shoulder, and
deftly sank the hook into his neck.

As the fat one yowled and groped with both
hands
behind him, his companion, thinking he was catching the
Saint off guard, made an
ill-considered move. He charged
forward as
Simon bent the fishing rod nearly double and
let go the tip just in time to catch the attacker across the
throat with the full force of the hissing whiplash
of sup
ple fiberglas.

The thin man went down on his knees, choking,
and
Simon simply shoved him with one strong hand into the
deep
stream. The obese member of the partnership, tak
ing advantage of
momentary slackness in the line,
seemed about to free himself, but Simon
reeled in,
tugged, and brought the man wincing and stumbling for
ward. It
was an easy matter to step out of his plump
victim’s path and add
to the man’s momentum with a
swift boot to his ample rear. The splash of
his belly-flop
into the stream drenched the bank for yards around.

“Run!” the girl cried.

“It doesn’t really seem necessary,”
said the Saint, plac
idly winding in his freed line as he watched
the men
struggle in the water as the current carried them slowly downstream.
“Do you think they can swim?”

The girl glared at the sputtering pair with
remarkable
ferocity on her pixy face.

“I hope not!”

Simon gave her an inquiring look.

“They’re
killers,”
she said.

“Not very good at it, are they?”
       

The girl was all but jumping up and down in
her
agitation.

“How can you stand there?” she
whimpered. “They’re
getting out. They’ll murder me. Please get me
away from
here.”

The two men, safely out of range of Simon’s
fly rod,
were clawing at the bank, trying to haul themselves out.
The Saint
was more than ready to take them on again,
but he began to feel
that the girl was actually going to
collapse in hysterics if he did not
humor her.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s
go.”

From the passenger seat of his car she
pleaded with
him to hurry as he snatched the key from the ignition of
the
Mercedes, and threw it out into the stream, bringing
to an abrupt halt the
efforts of the swimmers to get out
of the water. They went splashing
toward the spot where
the key had gone down. Simon leisurely
clamped his rod
on the roof rack of his car. (He had carried no creel,
since he
had no way of using fish at the moment, and
had released the ones
he had caught.) Then he plucked a
burr from his trouser leg, slipped into
the driver’s seat,
and started the engine, much to the relief of his
passenger.