Leslie Charteris - Catch the Saint

He continued pounding on the door. Just before the bouncer reached him, the barrier swung partially open. A surly crinkly-haired head appeared, and a voice said, “What’s going on out here?”

The Saint sensed the bouncer behind him, about to grasp his arms if necessary, and he decided that the moment for crossing this particular Rubicon had come. With a strength given added force by swiftness and surprise, he shoved the door farther open, stepped inside the private room, slammed the door again and turned the metal knob that threw the bolt. He did it so quickly that the three men behind him were left standing flat-footed in the dining room, excluded entirely from even the sound of the ensuing proceedings.

In front of Simon was the temporarily flustered man who had opened the door. Three other men sat on sofas or chairs, while another came to his feet behind a desk at the rear of the room. Within two seconds, two pistols had appeared.

Simon carefully showed the nature of his intentions by keeping his hands away from his body.

“Sorry to bust in like this,” he murmured, “but I’ve got important business that can’t wait.” Then he verbally lit the fuse of his private brand of dynamite and tossed it hissing into the centre of the room. “I want to see the Supremo.”

A naked belly dancer erupting from a nine-layer cake at a conclave of the College of Cardinals could not have produced more of a sensation than Simon Templar did when he presented himself in the private room of the club Pear Tree. The hefty characters who had been decorating the furniture were all at attention, but their vocal cords were temporarily out of contact with their brains.

Although the Saint was now looking down the steel throats of four pistols, he relaxed. The character he was portraying never smiled, as Simon himself might have done under similar circumstances. Instead he swept his gaze from one side of the room to the other, taking in everyone and everything, while his lips held an arrogant sneer.

It was a very expensively furnished room, but designed for business, not for guests. There were as many telephones as there were pistols. There were two radios, two television sets, several filing cabinets, and a stock ticker, along with other knobbed and dialed devices which the Saint did not have time to identify. His new friends obviously liked to keep up with what was going on in the world. The place, on the face of it, looked more like a communications centre than a restaurant manager’s office, and that was exactly what Simon had expected.

The man behind the desk finally got his tongue back in touch with his cerebrum.

“Who the hell are you?” he snapped.

A couple of the men in the room, the two who had been fastest with their pistols, looked fairly brutish. This one had blond hair and an Ivy League accent. His blue silk tie was enviable; in more normal times, the Saint would have cheerfully complimented him on it.

“You’re not the Supremo,” Simon said roughly.

“I know what I’m not,” the other answered. He realised that he was clutching the edge of his desk, and eased his hands away. “I asked you who you are.”

“I’m somebody who wants to see the Supremo.”

The blond man jerked a half smile at one of his colleagues.

“What’s a Supremo — a cigar? You’ll find them in the lobby. By God, I’m going to have Ansel’s ears for letting drunks wander all over this building.” He focussed cold turquoise eyes on the Saint again. “This is a business meeting, and you’ve got no business here.”

“Funny,” Simon remarked, “it looks more like a shooting gallery. Or what are you scared of?”

The man at the desk drew back his shoulders.

“I’m not going to explain our security measures to you. I suggest you walk out of here right now, or else take your choice of being thrown out on your head or being arrested.”

“I’ve come too far to walk out,” Simon said flatly. “You say this is a business meeting. Well, I got business. But it’s got to be with the Supremo or nobody.”

“I’d put my money on nobody,” one of the other men said. “Are you walking out or getting carried out?”

“I guess you guys have heard of West Coast Kelly,” Simon said. “That’s who I’m talking for.”

He was expecting the announcement to have an interesting impact, and his disappointment was catastrophic. For at the same moment as it should have been registering, a door at the back of the room opened, and in walked the fat seal-like man Simon had met the night before.

He blinked exactly three times as his mouth formed a large O and his dewlaps dropped to his collarbones.

“That’s him!” he squealed. “That’s him — the sonovabitch I told you about, from Sammy’s!”

It was one of those disastrous sneaky backhanders with which a malicious Fate delights in upsetting applecarts, which a pessimist might have predicted but an optimist had no way to guard against. The Saint tried his best to cope with it, but even his inventiveness had been caught flat-footed.

“Sure, I stopped you and your meat-head pal from killing a cop who’d been playing you for suckers. I figured it was worth more to sell myself to him as a good guy, and get an ‘in’ that we could all use.”

“You didn’t need to play-act as hard as that!”

The seal, mindful of the juggernaut that had smitten him and his comrade in the rain-swept alley, was not about to calm down. He kept shouting, machine-gunning blasts of accusation round the room, urging the others to do something. As on the previous night, he did not place himself physically in the forefront of the battle, but the situation was still going his way.

Simon took a step back towards the door.

“Maybe I’d better drop round later, when you’ve all calmed down,” he said diplomatically.

“Don’t let him get out!” the seal howled.

The man behind the desk confirmed the order, and four thugs reached the Saint at the same instant. Simon’s hands, elbows, knees, and feet became deadly weapons. One of his attackers dropped to the floor, squirming in agony. A second staggered back, half blinded by a blow to his face that sent a cascade of blood streaming down over his lips and chin. But a fist caught Simon hard on his own jaw, slamming him back against the wall. Two apes were on him like one four-armed monster, and a knee in his stomach knocked the wind momentarily out of him. The seal was hopping up and down, trying to see the centre of the melee. Simon braced himself against the wall and managed to ram the toe of his right shoe into the solar plexus of one of his attackers, sending the man backwards into the seal. The two of them bounced across the carpet like bowling pins.

It was a satisfying sight, but the last that Simon saw for several hours. He was bashed on the head with something very hard. The room seemed to fill with black water, which rose very rapidly from floor to ceiling. The shouts and grunts and heavy breaths faded to silence.

There was no more of anything until after a timeless time he became strangely and vaguely aware of his own existence. He seemed to be floating in nowhere, unable to see or hear. His mind was not functioning at a level that would allow him even to wonder who or where he was. His being was a small unstable ball of pain. He felt his arm being manipulated, and a momentary new pinpoint of pain, and then nothingness again.

Carole Angelworth waited for his promised call until eleven-thirty. Her phone rang twice during the evening, but neither of those calls was the one she wanted.

She couldn’t really believe that he would stand her up deliberately. It wouldn’t be like him to lie. He would just have told her when he had left her at the end of the afternoon that he couldn’t possibly make it that night.