Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

“Wait!” Patroclos said hoarsely. “Let us not be hasty. Why can we not come to an arrangement?”

The Saint shook his head.

“No dice,” he said. “You may find it hard to believe, but I’ve still got a few silly old-fashioned principles propping up my halo. I’m just not on the side of the Commies, even when they call themselves North Koreans, and nothing you can offer would persuade me to help them to anything deadlier than a peashooter.”

He had almost reached the foot of the ladder, his glance constantly shifting from one man to another, alert for the slightest hint of a hostile move. If he had to, he was prepared in the last resort to use the grenade as he had threatened... But only if it positively was the very last resort.

Out of the corner of an eye he saw Patroclos crawling on all fours between two crates towards the Captain’s revolver where it had fallen. Simon leapt across the intervening space and got one foot on the gun just as the mogul, his face a mask of vengeful fury, snatched at it. Then the Saint scooped a steel-fingered hand down to grasp the butt, and jerked it savagely. Patroclos kept his grip, and the gun came up off the floor; somehow in the struggle, the gun went off, and Diogenes Patroclos crumpled and rolled slackly over with a bright red stain slowly spreading across his white linen shirt-front.

Simon straightened up, with the revolver now reinforcing the menace of the grenade he still held in his other hand.

“Anyone else want to try his luck?” he inquired grimly, and saw no takers.

Simon Templar refilled Ariadne’s glass and his own from the ouzo bottle, and put his feet on the desk.

“It was about the nearest thing you could have to a perfect impersonation. An amazing idea, if you think about it — a man impersonating himself. What a show! And I was the leading player — in the audience!”

The Patroclos empire was in disarray and confusion; with the consent of the Greek government the American Navy, acting for the United Nations, had intercepted the other five ships and seized all the cargoes. Simon was resigned to staying around for a few days longer in Athens to make further statements to the police; Ariadne was similarly resigned to helping to sort out the loose ends in the office; and both had made up their minds to enjoy the enforced stay.

“That poor girl,” mused Ariadne. “He was her boss, and she stayed loyal to him. I feel sorry for her.”

“So do I,” agreed the Saint. “He exploited her as he exploited everyone else. She played her part magnificently, right down to the tears when the news of the plane crash came in.”

The girl toyed with her glass reflectively. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that they had shared a need to recapitulate and review some of the complications of the extraordinary conspiracy which the late Diogenes Patroclos had developed without sharing any of its threads completely with anyone.

“I’m still puzzled about the codebook,” she said. “I don’t see why he pretended not to know you’d taken it.”

Simon lounged back in his chair.

“The codebook was a very interesting, not to say a crucial part of the whole set-up. And of course, it was partly the codebook, in the end, that gave the game away. Remember that what he had in mind when he first briefed me was to get me into contact with his supposed impersonator for just long enough to convince me that there was a double. My main job was to get the codebook back. That gave me a specific goal — and it gave him the perfect pretext for hauling me off the job before I got too nosey. Once I’d delivered it, he could tell me to quit—”

“Of course,” broke in the girl. “And that’s why he faked the telegram from Athens — or I suppose he had my namesake send it — and made sure you saw it.”

Simon nodded.

“Exactly.”

“But why did he commission you anyway — I mean the second time, in London — and then insist you stayed in the house?”

“That was an absolute master-stroke. It was a plausible enough move anyway, ‘in the interests of security’ as he put it, but his real reason was simply to make it easy for me to pinch the codebook. And he knew I’d bite.”

“So where did he go wrong?”

“Apart from the weak basic premise, and my scepticism, there was something else. His own vanity — and a kind of melodramatic cloak-and-dagger streak. He did keep just one copy of the codebook as I figure it—”

“Yes, as far as I know. He always took it with him when he went away or out of the house for more than a few hours.”

“Well,” Simon continued, “When I stole it from his safe, he wanted me to think I’d succeeded in getting it to Athens. But he also wanted it there in London — because he was stuck without it. He could have had it sent back, of course, but he preferred to play games by following me at a distance and bringing it back the same night. But I spotted the car behind, and that was when I really started putting the picture together.”

“But what about the photos? A lucky accident, you said?”

He nodded.

“That was one piece of circumstantial evidence he didn’t manufacture himself. There were two photos — press photos, remember? — with the dates stamped on the back. Both the tenth of June. Dio, presenting a yachting trophy in the Bahamas — that was late afternoon — and Dio at a party in Lisbon that same night, maybe six or eight hours later. Or at least, I assumed it was that same night. And with the time difference, he’d have had to travel almost instantaneously to get there. And it’s three thousand miles.”

“So how can the photos be explained?” she asked.

“By the fact that the Lisbon one was taken first. I saw the photos at the Daily Express office, and as the agency names were stamped on the backs along with the dates, I was able to phone diem and check. As I’d suspected, the Lisbon agency always date their prints the day they’re processed. Normally that’s almost at once. But a picture taken during the night — say, at a party — is pretty certain to carry the next day’s date.”

“I think I’m beginning to see. He went to the party in Lisbon on the night of the ninth—”

“Or you might say, the night of the ninth-tenth. So let’s suppose the picture was taken at midnight. He might easily have left for the Bahamas at, say, three in the morning, on the tenth. By my reckoning, he could have got there in eighteen or twenty hours without much sweat. Let’s say he landed at twenty-two hundred hours. But remember the time-zone change. In Nassau it wasn’t ten o’clock at night — it was only four in the afternoon. So he was in time to wave to the out-island yachtsmen.”

The Saint stood up and looked at his watch.

“And now I think it’s time for that lunch I promised you.”

“Just one last question,” Ariadne said. “What are you getting out of this?”

He looked at her with imps of mischief dancing in his clear blue eyes. “The excitement of the chase — the satisfaction of a day’s work well done—”

“I mean, you were supposed to be paid, weren’t you?”

“And what makes you think I haven’t been?” he asked with as straight a face as he could muster. “I’ll let you into a secret. There are occasions, I’m sorry to say, when I steal more than codebooks. Though it was from the codebook that I copied down an interesting-looking series of figures.” He turned his most innocent gaze on her and added, “And do you know what those figures turned out to be?”

Ariadne shook her head, and Simon grinned.

“The combination to a safe — the one right behind you, in fact.”