Leslie Charteris: Send for the Saint

“Have you still got the codebook?” asked the Saint.

“Of course I—” Patroclos Two broke off. “Unless — unless he has already... But surely he could not! Even he—” Suddenly his agitation found a focus. “Ariadne!” he snapped at the girl who appeared almost on telepathic cue at his elbow. “Quickly, go to the bedroom safe and fetch my codebook!”

Ariadne Two hurried off, taking a key that Patroclos Two gave her from a bunch he took from his pocket. A minute or two later she returned holding a small black book. Patroclos Two grabbed it from her impatiently and flicked through its pages.

“Thank goodness. The codebook is intact. But tomorrow I will begin work on new codes.” He handed the book back to Ariadne. “Put it back in the safe — and return the key to me at once.”

Bainter reappeared and said: “I have the car outside, sir.”

Simon Templar thought his own thoughts: another patch of mist in the Patroclos landscape was beginning to clear.

“I suppose, Bainter,” said the Saint conversationally, “you’ve been with Mr Patroclos a long time.”

“Fourteen years, sir,” replied the valet, continuing to unpack and hang up Simon’s clothes with deft efficiency.

“You travel with him?”

“No, sir. I just work here.”

Simon lounged on the bed and reflected.

“I should think it’s quite a problem for a valet, sometimes — keeping track of his employer’s changing moods, or tastes.”

“I don’t quite follow you, sir.”

“Well, for example,” Simon explained, “just at the moment I’m going through what you might call a discreet-necktie phase. Next month I shall probably get fed up with so much sobriety and break out in jazzed-up jobs that look like chintz chair covers.”

Bainter turned from the wardrobe.

“Funny you should say that, sir. Colours, now — well, Mr Patroclos usually wears whatever I lay out for him. A very conservative dresser. But just recently, he brought home some shirts in what I would call quite startling stripes...” Bainter tailed off, as if he felt he had been indiscreet.

“Not at all the sort of thing you would approve, Bainter?”

“Well,” the valet conceded reluctantly, “I expect I’m a bit old-fashioned. But I think it must have been only a momentary aberration on his part, if I may use the expression. At any rate, the next time he came back from Athens, and I laid out one of those new shirts, he was quite shocked, and asked me where I’d found it.”

“He’d forgotten that he bought it himself?”

“It was hardly a shirt that one would forget so quickly.”

“Perhaps he was regretting his — aberration — and was trying to save face.”

“Possibly, sir. Although Mr Patroclos wouldn’t normally be bothered to make that sort of pretence.”

Simon could scarcely have hoped for more from the obliging Bainter, who had now finished the unpacking.

“There we are, sir. I trust we haven’t forgotten anything.”

“Not a thing. We’re very efficient, Bainter.”

“Thank you, sir... I won’t keep you, sir. I expect you’ll be wanting to get some sleep.”

In the doorway the valet turned and added:

“Just one thing, sir. If you should wish to open the window — six inches is the limit, sir. Wider than that, and the alarms start to ring.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” said the Saint to himself after Bainter had gone. “We’ll see about that.”

He undressed and brushed his teeth, but did not change into pyjamas. He lay awake skimming through books from the bedside shelf until three o’clock, when he felt absolutely sure that everyone else in the house would be asleep. Then he got up and dressed again, this time in a sports shirt and slacks, but nothing more. Barefoot, he switched off the light and slipped silently out into the corridor.

It has been easy enough, in the most innocent and casual way, when Bainter was showing him to his room, to learn the exact location of Patroclos’ master suite. A pencil flashlight, its bulb masked with the piece of black insulating tape pierced only with a small hole, provided a needle beam of illumination that was all the Saint needed to show him his way.

Patroclos’ door was not locked. Simon would have been astonished if it had been, even though he could have easily coped with it — such defensiveness, in the man’s own home, would have been almost a symptom of paranoia. And whatever their failings, neither Patroclos had ever impressed him as a neurotic type.

In fact, the millionaire — or his impersonator — was snoring with a steady and assertive resonance which proclaimed with every rhythmic decibel the total relaxation and self-confidence of its source.

The Saint moved in like a wraith, guarding even the reduced ray of his torch from directly touching the huddled shape under the bedclothes. He allowed only enough of a glow to escape from it under his cupped hand to give him bearings, and show him the evening clothes draped over a hanger stand at the foot of the bed; the gold fountain pen, loose change, cigar-clipper, wallet, and diary spread out on the bedside table; and the bunch of keys carelessly dumped among them.

To abstract a bunch of keys from within a yard of the ear of a sleeping man, no matter how profoundly sunk in slumber, without making a single metallic clink that might disturb the sleeper’s dreams, requires a skill and steadiness of hand that would dismay any ordinarily adept pickpocket, but Simon Templar accomplished it without any perceptible effect on his pulse rate. Even so, with the keys in his grasp, he stood for long moments as immobile as the Sphinx, watching the recumbent figure in the bed and listening to the regular stertorous breathing, until he was quite sure that his host was not going to be aroused even by an intuitive alarm.

The next problem was to find the safe that the keys fitted. The Saint did not even waste a moment searching for it behind one of the pictures on the walls — that hackneyed hiding place beloved of fiction writers, which on that account must be the first place where any burglar who ever read a book would look. A man as astute as Patroclos would never permit such a crudely obvious installation. The rich wall-to-wall carpet ruled out any trap-door in the floor. The modernistically papered walls precluded the time-honoured secret panel, and there was no fireplace to embody some device of dummy bricks.

To Simon Templar, there was no call for random groping and ferreting, which could have been noisy as well as ineffectual. It was, rather, an interesting exercise in applied ratiocination, which could be performed in pensive immobility.

Patroclos Two began threshing about restlessly as if he might be on the point of waking up; and Simon froze for perhaps thirty seconds until the man in the bed had settled back into apparent slumber.

The direct and logical solution, if there was no reasonable possibility of complicated concealment, would simply be to rely on the sturdiness of the safe itself, and plant it in the handiest place that would be out of the way and out of obtrusive sight. The kind of solution that would be reached in moments by such an exponent of direct action as Diogenes Patroclos.

When the Saint moved, he went straight into the dressing alcove which led off the bedroom, and silently opened the first of the doors of a row of wardrobe closets. And there it was, arrogantly undisguised — a medium sized but massive steel cube that would have been a major problem to cart away and a total impossibility to break open without considerable uproar.

The Saint had encountered — not to say opened — a good many safes in his time; but in this case he had secured what a purist might have called an unfair advantage. He examined the lock and the bunch of keys in his hand, selected one to try, reached forward... and hesitated.