Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

There was no way that he could sit there among the charred cushions in the cabin of the coastguard launch while Lebec followed formal police procedure to bring the man at the helm of the Phoenix into the custody and protection of the law, with all the asininely bureaucratic due processes which that implied. As soon as he saw Lebec on board the Phoenix, with automatic in hand, he realised that he had to take action immediately if he was to have any hope of substituting Saintly retributive justice for those due processes.

There was only one thing to be done, and he did it. It involved elements of risk; but what was that after what he had already come through?

He took the two easy unhurried strides that were needed to bring him within easy range of the crewman at the helm, and he took them as if it had been the most natural thing in the world to approach for a chat; and that was the first risk taken. The crewman might have had a twitchy trigger finger, easily set off by any threatening movement on the Saint’s part; but Simon had studied his lugubrious features and his generally slow and deliberate behaviour, and gambled that the man was the opposite of twitchy; and the gamble had come off.

The next stage of the operation demanded a quick burst of the brilliant acting which the Saint could turn on like a tap when the need arose. As he reached the armed crewman, after those two relaxed strides across the cabin, he began to speak, in French, in a friendly conversational tone that exactly fitted the pace of his casual steps.

“Il a beaucoup de courage, votre chef,” he began; but he interrupted himself abruptly by turning his head sharply towards the Phoenix as if he had suddenly seen something that took his breath away.

“Mon Dieu!” he gasped; and the crewman looked off in the same direction.

He would hardly have been human if he had not turned his own head in response to Simon’s totally convincing diversion; and the Saint truly regretted that the exigencies of the situation called for the crewman to suffer a little bodily harm. That regret, however, could not be allowed to weaken his resolve. His left hand shot out like a greased piston, and his fingers closed over the man’s gun wrist; and almost at the same instant his right fist, travelling about eighteen inches through the air in a scorching uppercut, impacted with bone-jarring force under the man’s mournful jaw.

The crewman crumpled with scarcely a sound, and Simon caught him and let him gently down. Then he picked up the gun and toyed with it in momentary hesitation.

“Another old trick?” Arabella enquired; and Simon nodded.

The old light of battle was in his eyes as he handed her the gun. What he had to do, he would do with his bare hands.

“Wave it at him if he wakes up,” he said. “Tell him you’ll shoot if he comes closer than five feet — and sound as if you mean it!”

And then he was gone, his feet taking him noiselessly on to the rail and then across to the Phoenix through the gathering dusk; and Arabella sat looking from the gun in her hand to the unconscious crewman, and back to the gun.

Lebec had perhaps a minute’s start on him; and the Saint had no very clear plan of what to do next. It was one of those situations where, as so often before, he simply followed his impulse and instinct. All he knew was that he was back in the game, with Lebec ahead of him, and the man in the wheelhouse an unknown quantity — though the Saint had his suspicions on that score...

He had been over his speculations about Tranchier’s survival often enough by this time; and he was not unprepared for the sound that reached his ears as he glided along the deck of the Phoenix towards the wheelhouse like a liquid shadow.

He heard two voices speaking in rapid French, one of them Lebec’s; and he flattened himself against a bulkhead where he could not be seen from the door of the wheelhouse or its companionway. And as he listened, his eyes widened with steadily growing comprehension.

“Will you or will you not surrender?” Lebec’s voice demanded from what the Saint judged to be somewhere near the foot of the companionway.

“You’ll have to shoot me first,” said the other man, from higher up.

There was a pause; then Lebec said:

“If I must, I will shoot you. There will be no witnesses. Templar and the woman are on the launch with the coastguard man. I will say it was self-defence, that you resisted arrest. And so after all the gold will be mine alone, and you will have gained nothing by your death.”

“But you will still have the problem of those three — and Finnegan — to deal with, alone.” A faintly crafty note crept into the other voice. “Gerard — why don’t we make a deal? There’s more than enough for two. We could throw the four bodies overboard, set the launch adrift, and get clean away.”

There was another pause; and while Lebec was thinking, so was the Saint. For the dialogue he had overheard gave him all he needed to think about.

First, there was Lebec’s clear and unpolicemanlike desire to grab the gold for himself. Second, there was the fact that the other man had called him “Gerard” in a way that implied an intimate acquaintance. Thirdly, there was the man’s voice.

Simon had never, that he could remember, heard Tranchier-Fournier speak; and yet there was something in the tone of that other Frenchman in the Phoenix’s wheel-house, a confidence and authority, even an arrogance, which didn’t fit the impression he had formed of Tranchier.

Then it hit him like a sudden blast of arctic air; and in that instant of amazed realisation, as the pieces of the puzzle began to click into precise place, he stepped out from behind the bulkhead and into view.

He saw Inspector Gerard Lebec, standing only part-way up the companionway, swinging around in alarm. And in the doorway at the top, facing him, he saw the other man — a man with a big square head, grey-white hair, and suntanned features.

It could only be Karl Schwarzkopf, also known as Charles Tatenor.

“Salut Karl!” said the Saint in a voice of steel-lined velvet.

Even though he had come out into the open without premeditation, simply because he had had to confirm Schwarzkopf as the owner of the second voice as soon as the fantastic conviction had come to him, Simon’s reflexes were immediately balanced on a razor edge. He was acutely aware of being unarmed, and that the reaction of Lebec, with his automatic, was unpredictable.

Lebec was certainly taken by surprise; and his adjustment to the Saint’s abrupt arrival on the scene was perhaps half a second slower than Schwarzkopf’s.

Which was unfortunate for Lebec.

As the French detective swung his head, followed by his gun arm, away from Schwarzkopf and towards Simon, Schwarzkopf moved — and with amazing speed. He launched himself down the companionway at Lebec feet-first, with a force that should have sent him cannoning into the Saint. But Simon’s reactions were also fast, and he sidestepped. Lebec made the close and violent acquaintance of a bulkhead, and sank to the deck with all the wind knocked out of him. Somehow he managed to hold on to the automatic, but it was two or three seconds before he could collect his breath and his wits to use it.

Two or three seconds was all Schwarzkopf needed. He must have summed up the situation to himself — including Simon’s own lack of a visible weapon — in the instant of launching himself at Lebec; and now, as Lebec lay gasping on the deck, Schwarzkopf leapt back up the companionway, snatched up a Very pistol in the wheelhouse, and reappeared in the doorway.

And as Lebec brought his automatic up again, Schwarzkopf fired.