Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

He chunked fat from a can into the skillet and began to fry the trout which he had cleaned earlier.

The simple activity of watching and turning them, perhaps combined with the savory aromas that began to permeate the air, seemed to alleviate his temper. After a while he began crooning musically to himself as he had done when he was cleaning the fish. But for the baritone register of his voice, it would have been exactly reminiscent of an easily distracted infant burbling obliviously over a newly invented pastime.

Simon and Marian began to experience a sharpening ache of hunger added to their weariness and cramping limbs and other discomforts. But not for anything would they have spoken of it — or, for that matter, said anything at all that might have regained Netchideff’s attention. Any intriguing new line of conversation or argument that might have occurred to them was to be treasured for the moment when Netchideff might need another distraction; for the present he was completely occupied, and that was all that mattered. It was like keeping motionless in the same room with an escaped tiger, hoping in that immobility not to be noticed. But as Simon had said, every minute of precarious survival was still a minute stolen from eternity.

But Netchideff hadn’t forgotten them. He was only letting them wait while he attended to something else. When the trout were done to his satisfaction, he brought the pan to the table and sat down and started to eat the fish from it, holding the head in one hand and the tail in the other and taking bites from the fish until it broke apart and he had one piece in each hand to finish in alternate mouthfuls. But in between bites he looked at Simon and Marian with the thoughtfulness of a tiger that is content to deal with one bone at a time.

When he had finished, he licked his fingers, belched resonantly, and continued to sit there looking at them inscrutably, like a conquering Mongol khan considering what to do with his captives. And as he sat, the lids drooped over his eyes, his head nodded, and his breathing became more audible. He fell asleep.

Simon and Marian sat in still more incredulous stillness as the sound of breathing thickened into an unmistakable snore. They let it go on for several minutes before they ventured even to whisper.

“We’re still getting reprieves,” Simon said.

“Yes, but for what?”

“Time to think of something, maybe.”

“We’re not outsmarting him. He’s just playing cat and mouse. I know it now. This is his way of trying to break us down.”

“So long as we don’t break down, we can use the time.”

“I know. I’ll be quiet. I know you’re trying to think.” But for the first time he heard weariness in her voice, the kind of weariness which is the foreshadow of despair.

And he was trying to think, too. He had never stopped. But no thought led to a way out. And only instinctive obstinacy refused to admit that that might very simply be because there was none. But he went on trying.

They talked very little more. It was easier not to. But whenever one of them moved to revive a numbed muscle, the other could feel it, and it was like an intimate reassurance in the strange closeness which had been forced on them.

Time, which seemed so precious for the miracles it might have to find room for, nevertheless seemed to crawl in slow motion through the revelation of the miracles it was not going to produce…

Until, creeping imperceptibly into dominance against the reverberating counterpoint of the pilot’s snores, the puttering approach of an identifiable motor-boat forced itself into the Saint’s ears, and he looked down at his wrist watch and was stunned to discover how treacherously three hours had melted away.

A moment later the rhythm of Netchideff’s snoring ended in a single grunt. His eyes opened, without any other movement of his body, and he also listened.

He looked out of the window, for a minute or two, while the chugging drew closer. Then he stood up without haste, yawned and stretched mightily, and went to the door. With a brief glance at his prisoners to satisfy himself that they were still helpless, he went out, and they heard his footsteps clumping down towards the lake.

“Well,” she said. “Have you thought of anything?”

He shook his head.

“No.” It was too late for any more pretending. “I’m sorry, Marian.”

“I’m sorry too,” she said with a little sigh. “I always knew I’d meet you some day, but I imagined it very differently from this.”

“You did?” Any conversation would have seemed trivial now, but any triviality was good if it kept worse things out of her mind for a few moments longer. “How?”

“Didn’t my name mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid not. Should it?”

“Do you remember anyone else named Kent?”

“Oh. Yes.” Two little lines notched in between his brows. “One of my very best friends, a long time ago, was named Kent.”

“Norman Kent.”

His eyes were frozen on her face.

“How did you know?”

“He was an uncle of mine. I hardly remembered him at all as a person, of course — I was still in kindergarten when he died. But I heard about it later, what little anybody ever knew. He was killed doing something with you, wasn’t he?”

“He gave his life,” said the Saint. “For me, and a few others — or perhaps millions. He did one of the bravest things a man ever did for his friends, and maybe for the world too. But I never knew—”

“Why should you? He wouldn’t be likely to talk about a brat like me.”

He was still staring at her half unbelievingly. And through his memory flooded the faces and the voices and the movements of the band of reckless young men that he had led back in those crusading days that were sometimes almost forgotten, the days that Major Vernon Ascony had uncomfortably reminded him of in Singapore to spark the train that had led halfway around the world to this moment. And most vividly of all he recalled a cottage in England, by the Thames, with the shadows of a peaceful summer evening lengthening over the garden, and the dark serious face of Norman Kent as he signed his own death-warrant and managed to hide from all of them what he had done. [1] See “The Last Hero.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked.

“Would it have made any difference? There were other things that seemed a bit more urgent. Anyway, I was hoping for a better occasion, when I could ask you to tell me the whole story.”

“And now there’s no time,” he said bitterly. “But I will tell you. You should be prouder than a princess to have Norman Kent for an uncle.”

“If I were the least bit superstitious,” she said, “I’d have to believe there was some thread of Fate binding the Kent wagon to your star.”

His face had hardened into planes and grooves of bronze.

“It’s a coincidence,” he said flatly. “But I wish to hell you’d kept it to yourself.”

Hurt flicked her face like an invisible whip.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “But in any good corny story, this would be where I repaid a debt and gave you the life that Norman gave me. But I don’t even see a chance of that. I think that’s what’s hardest to take.”

Her arm moved and pressed against his.

“If either of us gets the chance to do the ungodly any damage, right up to the last moment, we’ll do it,” she said. “And, please, I’d like to be kissed just once more by a man who wouldn’t have to force me.”

He turned to her and their lips met, firmly and tenderly, yet without passion, in a kiss such as few men can have known.

But not for an instant had Netchideff slipped out of his awareness altogether.