Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“How long will he try?”

“An hour — maybe more if he’s stubborn.”

“But as he kindly told us, it won’t make any difference to what we’ve got coming,” she said. “When Pavan gets back with that part, the liquidation will proceed as scheduled.”

“We’re still ahead. Any time we can keep him arguing, fishing, or playing charades, is time where he won’t be developing his nastier ideas. And time for the cavalry to come galloping over the hill.”

“We didn’t kid him when he was listening,” she said quietly. “Why kid ourselves? There ain’t goin’ to be no cavalry.”

He met her eyes steadily.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Have you arranged for them?”

“No,” he said. “I’m on my own. But I hoped you might have.”

“Pavan didn’t spring this invitation on me till the last moment, and from then on he didn’t let me any farther away from him than a rest room — where there was no phone. I was afraid to try too hard to get word out, because part of the time I was wondering if the invitation itself was a trap, to see if I’d try to communicate with anyone and how I did it. And at the same time, if I was really getting a break, I didn’t want to risk fumbling it.”

“You must have some regular schedule of contacts. When will the other Mounties miss you?”

“Not before Monday. I only work for Pavan Monday through Friday, and I’d already reported everything okay yesterday afternoon just before Pavan asked me to come up here. My boss will think I’m just spending a nice restful weekend — which I should have been.”

Simon smiled fractionally.

“This could be quite a problem for us, if we can’t find a way to get loose.”

“Doesn’t the Saint always have something up his sleeve?”

“Sometimes I have had a knife. But not today. In any case, it wouldn’t have done any good. That’s one of the various advantages of handcuffs. You can’t cut them off without special tools.” He stared at his wrists. “Of course, you could cut your hands off. They say some animals caught in a trap will do that.”

She shuddered almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t know whether I could do it.”

“Frankly, neither do I. But fortunately we don’t have the gruesome decision to make. No knife.”

“How did Houdini do it?”

“If the handcuffs weren’t fixed in advance, he had a key stashed away somewhere. But I wasn’t told there were going to be handcuffs. No key.”

“And you can’t take them, apart, can you? No screwdriver. No hacksaw. No file.”

“I’ll never be able to look a boy scout in the eye again,” he said, “but I’m not wearing one of those things.”

“Could you pick the lock?”

“Maybe, if you were wearing a bobby pin, or even a hairpin.” He glanced over her short-cut dark hair. “But you aren’t, of course.”

“I haven’t even a safety pin — or any kind of pin.”

He looked down at his waist.

“And out of all the ordinary belts I’ve got,” he said, “I had to pick one with a new-fangled plastic catch instead of a buckle. If I ever get out of here, it goes straight in the ash-can.”

“A bedspring!” she gasped.

It was a forlorn idea, but they went through some strained contortions to explore its far-fetched possibility. This did not take long.

“The hell with Progress,” said the Saint. “And especially foam rubber.”

They sat on their shared corner of the bunk again, linked together around the corner post.

“There’s nothing we could reach, is there?” she said. “I mean with our feet, as far as they could stretch.”

“No,” he said briefly. “If I could get at my tackle box, it might be a different story. But Julius and Igor aren’t dopes, and they knew I couldn’t make my legs twelve feet long.”

He studied the post that their arms were linked around. It was a smooth pole fully five inches in diameter, with the bunk frames fastened solidly to it at their outside corner. Two other corners of the frames were fastened to the log walls, and their fourth corners were in the corner of the cabin itself. The pole went down to some attachment through a snug-fitting hole in the floor planking, and its upper end was notched into a tie beam overhead. It looked and felt as solid as a growing tree, but it was the only possible weak point left to try.

“Let’s see if we can shake this loose,” Simon said grimly.

For several minutes he heaved, pulled, jolted, pushed, and twisted against the pole from a number of carefully selected angles. Because of the way their arms were intertwined, he knew that some of his savage onslaughts must have hurt her cruelly, but she never uttered a sound of protest and added all that she could of her strength to his efforts.

Presently they were both bruised and spent, and the pole had not budged or given any sign of budging.

“We could start a fire and hope the pole would burn faster than it burned us,” Simon said between deep breaths. “But he took my matches and left them over there on the table, and even a boy scout would need another stick to rub against this one.”

“We could start gnawing it like beavers,” she said, “but I think it would last longer than our teeth.”

Then she suddenly sobbed once, and hid her face in his shoulder.

Simon cursed at not having even a cigarette to bolster an illusion of nonchalance.

So this was what it was like, he thought, when your luck finally ran out. He had been within a hair’s breadth of this identical situation a dozen times before, but always there had been some forgotten trump in his hand, some unappreciated weapon up his sleeve, some ultimate implausible contingency that might yet bring rescuing cavalry over the hill. Now every scant possibility had been checked off in remorseless rotation, every prospective mirage had been methodically eliminated.

As a matter of concrete and incontrovertible fact, unless some fairytale trout popped his head out of the water and with a few exceptionally well-chosen words converted Igor Netchideff to Buddhism, they had — as the cliché succinctly says — had it.

It was a curiously hollow and undramatic realization, in the same way that the somber machinery of an execution is an anticlimax to the pageantry and excitement of a murder trial.

“I guess it had to come to this some time,” said the Saint. “But I never really believed it.”

Presently Marian said, “I wonder why women always have to get raped. And why it seems to matter so much.”

“They should especially avoid tangling with Russians,” he said.

“Do you think you could manage to strangle me?” she asked in a small expressionless voice.

He looked at her, and her eyes were unforgettably serious.

“Shut up,” he said roughly. “Igor may still drop dead first.”

There was a crunch of heavy feet outside, and Igor Netchideff stomped back in, very much alive.

He flung the Saint’s rod down with a resounding crash.

“You try to make me a fool,” he thundered. “First, that absurd fly cannot be cast. It is too light, it has no weight, you cannot throw it anywhere. But second, even when I put it out a little way with the rod in the water, no fish, came for it. No fish would be so stupid, even the fish of a capitalist country. Therefore you only pretend you can do things which you cannot, to deceive and frighten other people with nothing, as your leaders would try to do to the Soviets.”

“You’re too easily discouraged.” said the Saint. “I probably wouldn’t do any better the first time I tried fishing in the Volga, until I learned how to handle a Party line.”

The pilot’s face was congested with the frustration of a man who senses that he is being mocked and yet cannot confidently isolate and specify the taunt. After a long moment during which it seemed to be a toss-up whether he would try to rip the Saint to pieces or settle for rupturing one of his own blood-vessels, he turned abruptly and marched himself heavily to the stove.