Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

The Saint had seen weird deaths before, but this was a sight to persist in his memory for many long years. That brilliant dazzling flare was like a photographic flashbulb fixing the image in the mind. In its vivid and garish light, Lebec’s amazed expression was thrown into stark and unforgettable relief. The flare hit him, so to speak, amidships, sank deeply into his torso, and continued to blaze brilliantly as the stricken Lebec emitted a bloodcurdling scream, staggered backward to the rail, and crashed over it and into the sea.

Both Schwarzkopf and the Saint watched Lebec’s final disappearance in frozen fascination for the few seconds it occupied. And then Schwarzkopf, still gripping the signal-pistol, whirled, and disappeared back into the wheelhouse. The Saint had to make an immediate choice, either to conceal himself — playing hide-and-seek with an armed man — or to go forward and try to get to Schwarzkopf before he could reload the pistol.

He went forward.

With one long stride he was at the foot of the companionway, and with two more coordinated thrusts of arms and legs he was at the top and into the wheelhouse doorway.

He had never climbed a companionway faster; but as he reached the doorway he knew he had not been fast enough. Schwarzkopf had just finished thrusting a new flare into the Very pistol. He levelled it at the Saint, and the Saint came to a slow halt in the doorway.

So this was how the game was to end, after all, he thought; and there was a certain inescapable bitterness in the reflection that he had survived, by one of those miracles he had thought impossible, this man’s earlier attempt to kill him, only to find himself now facing death once more at the same hand — the hand of Karl Schwarzkopf, the only survivor of a boat crash which had killed, not “Tatenor” and Tranchier, and not “Tatenor” alone, but Tranchier alone.

For it was “Tatenor”, the man Schwarzkopf, now standing before him and about to pull the trigger of the signal-pistol for the second time, who was the clever one. Why should the relatively stupid Tranchier have been able to worst him and escape to claim the gold for himself? Simon could see it all now; but he could also see why he had been backing the wrong horse as the survivor. Karl Schwarzkopf, whose attention to detail had been impeccable, was the survivor now...

Except that the expected shot had still not come.

Schwarzkopf motioned with the Very pistol.

“So— Templar. Where’s the rest of the gold, old chap?” he said in his measured and hauntingly overprecise English. “What did you do with it, eh?”

So that was it. Only the other man’s avarice had prolonged Simon’s life even that long.

“How do you mean — the rest of the gold?” the Saint queried, apparently in genuine puzzlement.

“Come, come now.” Schwarzkopf-Tate-nor made an impatient movement with the pistol. “You’ve already caused me more than enough trouble with your confounded interference. Let’s not waste time. You may have very little of it remaining. Let’s be sensible. You know I’m not a fool, and I pay you the compliment of acknowledging that you’re not weak in the head either. I’ve seen the tally of the gold on deck, I know how many bars were down there on the sea bed originally, and I know how many I’ve removed over the years. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. Forty-one are left unaccounted for. You must have moved them. I want to know where they are.”

“They’re somewhere you’ll never find them,” the Saint said.

The other smiled mirthlessly.

“I’ll give you a minute or two to reconsider,” he said — and the Saint heard again that note of cunning which he had heard while he listened to Schwarzkopf’s conversation with Lebec. “Perhaps we can come to some arrangement. As matters stand at the moment, those forty-one bars of gold are lost to me. If you will tell me where they are or better, accompany me to recover them I’d be prepared to share them with you. So you would emerge with something for your pains, and also with your life.”

The Saint shook his head sadly.

“Karl, you’re beginning to disappoint me. Just now you were prepared to give me credit for being slightly less than an idiot. Now you’re throwing me a bait no self-respecting half-wit would take. No deal, Karl. You’re much too smart to leave me alive — now that I know you’re alive.”

Schwarzkopf gazed intently at him, but said nothing; and Simon continued.

“Yes, Karl, you always were a clever fellow, weren’t you? Ein geschickter Kerl. Brilliant scholar and linguist, high flyer with the bank in Paris. And when your partners in crime were unclever enough to get caught, you were bright enough to take off with the loot — and to get away with it.”

“Why should I pay for their stupidity?” Schwarzkopf said calmly. “They wanted their champagne, the imbeciles. Well, they had it. And I had the gold.”

“And then,” Simon went on, “you perfected your new identity — the upper-crust sporting Englishman. And you did it brilliantly enough to fool everyone... Until fish-features Tranchier turned up; and he wouldn’t go away, would he? What a pain he must have been to you, Karl! You couldn’t even have bought him off, because Descartes and the others would have been down on you before long. There was only one way out for you; and that was to die, or appear to die. And since Fish-face was sticking so close to you, it had to be done in a way that either convinced him or got rid of him permanently along with ‘Tatenor’.”

Schwarzkopf smiled that curiously mirthless smile again, but there was a hint of pride in his face too.

“It was a brilliant solution, wasn’t it? To kill the man Tatenor — so that the others would cease looking for him — for me.”

“Yes, Karl, it was a great idea,” the Saint agreed. “And who was the other man in the boat — the other body? Some poor down-and-out you clobbered? Or a solitary tourist on the island who wasn’t likely to be missed at home for a week or two? And next, I suppose, you’d have surfaced in France, or back in Switzerland, or somewhere else, with another new identity, leaving your widow with nothing. Yes, it was clever all right. As I said, you’re a brainy fellow.”

“So I’m brainy enough to know when I should make a deal,” Schwarzkopf said in level tones.

“And I know that your name is Schwarzkopf, not Dummkopf. Any deal with me would mean no more than the one you tried to make with Lebec. You had to try something there, because he had a gun on you. With me, you’re trying it on because you think I might be able to tell you where there’s more gold; and you’re greedy for it all. But eventually you’d kill me anyway, like you killed Lebec... By the way, he was the sixth man, I suppose? You called him ‘Gerard’.”

“He was our partner at the Moroccan end of the operation,” Schwarzkopf said. “I expect he joined the Marseille police in order to remain in the area where he presumed the gold might still be hidden. He seems to have been obsessed with it.”

“But he had to die, didn’t he — once he knew what you were up to? And the same applies to me, and the others. You can’t afford to leave anyone alive who knows about the gold. You’ll have to kill me, and you’ll have to kill the coastguard man.” The Saint paused, and then added with an inexorable finality in his voice: “And then, Karl, you’re going to have to kill your own wife. How easy will you find that? Wirdst du selbst deine eigene Frau umbringen konnen?”

Simon could see that the last thrust had gone home. The need to face the problem of Arabella must have been the only thing that could give a pang to Schwarzkopf’s case-hardened conscience. The Saint, as the person who had relentlessly brought him face to face with that last shocking question, became the object and the focus of the anger that now erupted through the surface of Schwarzkopf’s polished self-command; and with the final question fired at him in German, which was after all the language nearest to his own, the man’s linguistic control had been broken down too. He answered in a German rapidly devolving into his own guttural Swiss dialect.