Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

The Saint drew up a chair, stood on it, and looked down on to the upper surface of the armoire. There his search ended. Another envelope, larger and much fatter than the first one, lay waiting for his attention. He took it, stepped down, and pulled out the folded pages. There were nine in all, closely written by hand, and sections had been cut out of two of them.

Darling Vicky, he read. What I am going to tell you can make you a multimillionaire, but it may also lead you into great danger. Others will be after the same prize, and they aren’t playing for fun ...

Certain that he had found what he was looking for, Simon decided that there was no need to push his good fortune by lounging there while he waded through the whole long missive. Even if there was very little chance of Vicky Kinian herself returning so soon, a maid might come in to turn down the bed. He could continue reading in his own room. He moved towards the door and turned out the lights.

And behind him — without his ever having been aware of it — an angled combination of mirrors was quietly withdrawn from Vicky Kinian’s balcony...

There had seemed to be no need to sneak furtively into the hotel’s public corridor, and Simon stepped boldly out, intending to cross straight over to his own room. Then he quickly changed his plans, for coming down the hall towards him, and looking momentarily surprised when they saw him, were two of the most unsavory-looking beings ever to scuff the carpets of a respectable inn. One was small and scrawny, with moustaches like black stilettoes and a nose like the operational end of a poleaxe. His crony was bigger and more unwieldy, with overhanging brows and an under-slung lower lip giving the middle portion of his countenance a positively recessive look, as if an impatient parent had once reprimanded him with a well-aimed billiard ball.

Neither of them said anything to the other as they approached, and Simon did not think that they recognized him, but at the same time he was sure that his appearance had startled them. They trooped on past him, looking dourly unconcerned, perhaps intent on some petty knavery which — so long as it did not involve him — the Saint did not have the time or inclination to worry himself about. But just in case they did have some special interest in him or in Vicky Kinian, he decided not to open his own door, which would have marked him as an obvious room-hopper, but instead to continue down the hall and downstairs into the lobby. If the two creeps he had just encountered had other business to attend to, they would assume that he had been just another guest leaving his own quarters.

He became aware even as he walked from the stairs into the lobby that he was being followed. Reflected in the glass door which led on to the street, he could see the same two worthies keeping what they must have considered a discreet distance behind him.

Simon went ahead out the door. He would walk around the block and see just how persistent his escort was.

Outside it was dark except for an occasional street light, and the sidewalks glinted with a sprinkling of rain just beginning to fall. There was thunder not far away out over the estuary, and a fresh breeze accompanied the summer shower. Sticking close beneath awnings and architectural outcroppings, the Saint could stroll casually without getting too wet. Then when he reached the corner the rain started to build towards its climax. He stood under a stone archway in deep shadow, watching the drops dance on the pavement. Half a block away, two other men, a small one and a bulkier one, stopped and waited in the shelter of a doorway. There was a five-minute pause, a silence relieved by rumbles of thunder and the occasional hiss of the tires of a passing car, and then the shower was over as abruptly as it had begun. Simon sauntered on his way, turning into a darker side street. In the strip of sky which showed overhead between rows of tiled eaves, the stars were already appearing between patches of scudding cloud.

Behind the Saint there was a distinct sound of footsteps.

“If those characters are just out for an innocent stroll, I’ll give them a chance for a little more privacy,” he mused.

He turned under an archway which led into a short alley which opened at its opposite end on to another dimly lit street. About halfway along the deserted arcade, he paused to listen.

After a few seconds’ silence, a single pair of footsteps came quickly along behind him.

Without showing any visible indication, the Saint’s body and mind went on combat alert. His muscles were relaxed and ready for swift movement in any direction, to meet any threat — including the rather clumsy threat that immediately became an actuality.

The man with the hypodermic-needle moustache and the Hallowe’en nose was holding the point of a knife in the immediate vicinity of his jugular vein.

“At once, senhor!” the little man ordered hoarsely. “Give me what you have in your pockets!”

The Saint, wishing to keep his blood to himself, thought it wise to eliminate the threat of the knife-tip before proceeding to deal with the comedian who was aiming it. He pretended to acquiesce, reached into one of his jacket pockets, and brought out the letter he had taken from the top of Vicky Kinian’s wardrobe. With a sudden dramatic gesture he flung the white envelope aside into the shadows.

“Is that what you were after?” he asked mildly.

In the first instant that this enemy’s attention was distracted, Simon struck like a snake. The rigid edge of one of his hands smashed the knife arm of the other man aside, and then with a twisting swinging combination of movements he flipped his opponent into the air, yanked him through a completely graceful somersault, and helped him to as ungentle a landing as possible flat on his face on the cobblestones.

As might have been predicted, the second attack wave lumbered on to the field as soon as the first had crunched to a temporary standstill. Arms flying, the bigger of the two strangers — obviously bringing into play all the subtle chivalric skills learned in a lifetime of a dockyard brawls — hurled himself into the combat. Hoping to achieve an outflanking triumph he lunged to whip a thick arm around the Saint’s throat from behind. But the Saint caught the arm before its trap-like action was completed, brought the elbow joint against the fulcrum of his shoulder, and all in one magnificently flowing gesture levered his huge assailant up and over and dropped all two hundred pounds of him flat on the pavement not far from the site of his colleague’s plunge.

The said colleague, in the meantime, was dazedly scrambling to his feet, clawing at the Saint’s coat. The bigger thug gasping for breath, grabbed for Simon’s ankle. The battle, though now distinctly onesided in favor of the outnumbered force, was far from over, and it swayed and thudded along the whole length of the dark arcade.

There was a fourth, unseen, participant in the episode, who then moved in to take advantage of the confusion for his own purposes. Only a single element in the drama interested him at all, and that was the white envelope which now lay abandoned in the deep shadows where the fight had begun. He waited his chance, then sidled swiftly along the stone wall, snatched the letter off the ground, and darted away again with an agility amazing in a man of his stout build.

He emerged into one of the side streets on which the alley opened, and the faint rays of a street lamp fell across the whiteness of his Vandyke beard. At the opposite end of the alley he could see the combatants silhouetted in an archway. One of them fell heavily and cried out, and in a moment of sudden alarm the plump man with the beard was afraid he had been seen. He turned and ran, and was still running when he rounded the corner leading on to the main street and ran almost directly into the unsuspecting arms of a pair of damp-shouldered policemen whose minds, until that moment, had been on nothing more violent than the latest international football match.