Leslie Charteris - Send for the Saint

“Quitter classification, that’s what,” supplied the other member of the training duo in his Bronx twang. “And you know what happens when you’re classified a quitter!”

And on the day after that Ungill wasn’t seen at breakfast.

Nor again.

The Saint, who had advised him to give up and get out, inquired what had happened to him — hoping he had taken the advice and asked to be discharged. But Lembick and Cawber grinned evilly, and Cawber said:

“He decided to take a holiday. A real long one.”

Exit Ungill.

Maybe he had asked for it, as maybe anyone did who joined that organisation without having his eyes tightly closed. But the Saint couldn’t help feeling that this was one recruit who had lacked not only the physical stamina but also the vicious streak that service with The Squad demanded; and he mentally added it to the tally of scores that he heartily hoped he would someday have the pleasure of settling with Lembick and Cawber.

The only relief from their physical persecution was given by the few training sessions that interrupted their sovereignty. Once, Rockham delivered a talk on the organisation — revealing little that Simon didn’t already know. Twice they were given some small-arms instruction, to him superfluous, of the “naming of parts” variety. And there was a short practice stint each day on the shooting-ranges, although that was supervised by that same tyrannical pair.

Even while he was heroically resisting a frequent impulse to reply to some of Lembick’s acts of sneering tyranny with the persuasive retort of a smashing fist, he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to resist indefinitely, and the question was how long he could avoid some kind of showdown.

It happened on that sixth morning. The group had just finished a practice session with Lembick on the judo mat — a session in which Simon had been singled out for the privilege of being hurled repeatedly to the canvas, ostensibly to illustrate a throw from which it just happened to be almost impossible to break-fall painlessly.

And he was still hopping mad from his role as literal fall-guy in that little set-up when Lembick’s eye turned to two black-handled dirks mounted on the wall in a letter-X shape.

Lembick took one of them down. He flipped it in the air and caught it.

“The Scottish dirk. Myself I prefer the Gaelic name, the sgian dubh.” It sounded like “Skee-an due” as he pronounced it. “The black knife. For close combat, one of the finest weapons ever.”

His flinty eyes roamed over the faces of the group, and stopped where he had already decided they would stop — at Simon Templar. He pointed.

“You. Gascott. Now, I want you to come at me. No games, no holding back. Come hard.”

He tossed the knife to Simon. Simon caught it by the handle. Lembick stood on the canvas mat a few yards in front of him, balanced easily on the balls of his feet, waiting.

The Saint said slowly: “There could be a nasty accident.” Lembick’s eyes were like slits of carborundum. “I’m waiting for you, Gascott,” he said intently. Simon. shrugged and edged forward across the mat towards him, aware of the audience.

Suddenly he made an overhand lunge — in less than deadly earnest, and knowing that it was not the attack of an expert knife fighter.

But Lembick wasn’t pulling his own punches. He took a half-pace forward to meet the mock attack; and then the downward looping arc of the Saint’s wrist was terminated abruptly and jarringly by the blocking V of a virtually impenetrable barrier formed by Lembick’s crossed forearms. And then, without an instant’s pause, one of those forearms smashed hard and sickenly into the side of the Saint’s neck.

He dropped the knife and for a moment he saw a fantasia of coloured lights that would have brought tears to the eyes of a firework display organiser. For a longer moment he heard a high-pitched little buzzer singing in his ears like some demented gnat: and then as that sound died away he heard himself say, with an icy inclemency of purpose: “I don’t think I quite got that — laddie. Do you think we might try it once more?”

The challenge was unmistakable. Lembick’s craggy features were impaled on two spear-points of frozen blue that were the Saint’s eyes.

Lembick’s lips curled back in a smile that was also a snarl.

“Pick it up, then.” He indicated the knife. “And let’s have you!”

Simon moved to the knife and bent down to pick it up, but that frosty impaling gaze never left Lembick’s face.

And then the Saint came up off the floor like an uncoiling spring, and Lembick saw the upwards black and silver flash of the knife a fraction of a second too late.

Blood trickled from a gash in his left arm. And Simon Templar had already sprung back out of reach, after making that single well-judged slash.

“Was that closer to what you had in mind?” he queried coolly.

For a few seconds Lembick seemed uncomprehending as he stared at his bare arm with the trickle of blood running off it onto the canvas mat. And then something seemed to snap in him, and his eyes blazed with a sudden rage of realisation.

He flung himself at the wall and snatched down the second dirk, and whirled to face the Saint.

“You just made a bad mistake, Mister Gascott,” he said through clenched teeth. “The sgian dubh is my weapon. I’m on my home ground!”

There was total silence in the drill-hall except for the sound of quickened breathing from the two men circling each other warily, literally at daggers drawn. Another group who had been busy in the hall with a karate workout, chopping rhythmically away at planks of wood supported on bricks, stopped and joined the others as interested onlookers at the prospect of a fight.

At that moment the Saint was only dimly aware of them. For the present everything was blotted from the centre of his consciousness but his opponent and himself, circling grimly, each watching for an opening, a momentary relaxation of the other’s alertness, and weighing the likely instant for a successful feint or lunge or slash with the knife.

The others had seen the tension building up over the past few days between Lembick and the supposed Gascott; and now they were watching it explode in that slow and potentially deadly tarantella, and their attention was riveted.

At some point Simon became peripherally aware that Rockham had come quietly in and was standing behind them.

But then abruptly the pattern changed. Lembick came racing at him in a kind of weaving charge, with the blade of the dirk slicing the air in arcs of flashing silver. But the Saint’s anticipation was faster by a wafer-thin margin of milliseconds that allowed him to keep just a whisker beyond the reach of that blade, as he danced and swayed and bobbed — and waited.

That was the simple detached technique that he coolly and deliberately set out to apply. Lembick came after him, grunting and sweating and stabbing and slashing; and the Saint ducked and danced and sidestepped tirelessly, until there seemed to be an inescapable inevitability about the way that blade cleaved the air time after time, and never found its quicksilver target.

And then Lembick did what Simon was waiting for him to do. He overreached himself by the merest millimetre; but that was enough. Enough to create a momentary break in his balance which magnified the Saint’s advantage in reaction time, to the point where he could bring his left hand down in a sizzling chop that thudded into Lembick’s wrist joint.

The dirk went clattering and skittering off over the wood parquet floor beyond the edge of the mat, and with scarcely a pause Simon Templar sent his own weapon after it, to stick in the floor like a dart, so that both daggers came to rest blade to blade.