Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

Almost unconsciously, between their speeches and their silences, he had heard the motor-boat throttle down as it reached the dock. Then, after a short pause, he had heard it start up again, and recede again for a certain distance, and stop again. He realized quickly that Netchideff must have jumped in and told Pavan to take him out at once to the seaplane, to make the repair with the part that Pavan had brought. Then for a long time there had been silence, which was broken at last by the sudden shocking roar of the seaplane’s engine. The seaplane’s engine boomed up in a smooth vibrant prolonged crescendo of power, and died no less smoothly down until a switch cut it off. Then, after a much shorter interval, the stutter of the motor-boat replaced it, plodding stolidly back towards the dock.

The repair had been made and tested: it worked, and the pilot was ready to go.

Pavan entered the cabin first, with Netchideff close behind him. Pavan looked sullen, but the pilot seemed to radiate elemental good spirits. He took the Saint’s automatic from his hip pocket and released the safety.

“Go on, Julius,” he said. “Separate the girl, and handcuff her again.”

“Damn it, you’re a stubborn bastard, Igor,” grumbled Pavan. “Why can’t I make you see how much more complicated this is? You could have given me the stuff you brought while we were out at the plane. Instead of which, I’ll have to go back again with you and—”

“Please,” Netchideff said, grinning — and perhaps only a nervous man would have thought that the gun he held was not too careful about where it pointed. “Do what I ask.”

Pavan took a small key from his pocket and approached the bunk warily. He held one of Marian’s wrists firmly in one hand, staying on the opposite side of her from the Saint, while he unlocked her handcuffs with the other. The instant the hand he was not holding was free, she jerked it around the corner pole and clawed at him like a wildcat, but he was ready for her with strength and leverage. He was extremely skilful, and in only a moment she was handcuffed again, this time behind her back. To escape the still undaunted menace of her wildly kicking feet he flung her bodily at Netchideff. The pilot caught her arm near the shoulder with his left hand alone, holding her at arm’s length and chuckling as she sobbed impotently in his gorilla grasp.

“Now, please, the same for Templar,” Netchideff said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pavan argued. “Why—”

“Please,” Netchideff said.

Pavan approached Simon even more warily, although with the same technique. But instead of pulling away the instant it was released, as Pavan was reasonably anticipating, the Saint’s free hand shot forward. It grasped Pavan by the slack front of his plaid shirt and then recoiled again with incredible violence, jerking Pavan forward to hit the pole crunchingly with his face.

In another blurring whirlwind of movement it was Pavan whose arms were pinioned behind him, and Simon was holding him up like a shield.

“How about it, Igor?” Simon asked grittily. “Shall we talk a trade?”

“I will show you,” Netchideff said genially.

The gun barked in his hand, and Pavan screamed once and then was only a dead weight in more than a mere figure of speech.

Simon let him fall, and waited for the next shot.

“You only shortened his life by a few seconds,” Netchideff said. “I had decided to kill him in any case. Since he had already been noticed by the Canadian police, and was stupid enough to let both of you find this place, he could be no more use to us.”

“A nice way to reward an old comrade,” Simon remarked.

“He was not a comrade. It was only a business arrangement.”

Without a change of expression or any other warning Netchideff jerked the girl towards him and hit her on the head with the butt of the gun in his clubbed fist. As her knees buckled, he kept his hold of her and hoisted her over his left shoulder with a twist of his powerful left arm, exactly as he might have slung a heavy sack. And through all those movements the automatic made adaptations so that it did not lose its aim on the Saint for more than a decimal part of a second.

It was all done in a fragment of the time it takes to recite, and Simon still looked down the barrel of the gun and wondered what blind hope would keep him obedient until the irrevocable bullet crashed into his brain.

“Pick up your rod,” Netchideff ordered. “Before I kill you, you will prove that you have lied.”

The Saint stood on the floating dock in the bright afternoon sun, the fly rod in his hand. Netchideff had dropped the girl from his shoulder into the bottom of the motor-boat, where she lay still mercifully unconscious, and had cast off the mooring lines. He had not started the motor, but the breeze was carrying the boat steadily away over a widening slick of water. The pilot stood up squarely in the boat with his legs spread like a foreshortened Colossus, the gun which he never forgot to control no matter what else he had to do still leveled at the Saint from his lumpy fist.

“Now, show me if you can cast that thing,” Netchideff said.

“Why should I?” Simon snarled.

Yet in a sort of nightmare automatism he was making the motions of stripping line from the reel, gathering it in loose even coils in his left hand.

“Are you afraid to look foolish?” Netchideff jeered. “Or are you afraid I shall steal your secret?”

“You’re damn right you can’t make me this foolish,” said the Saint. “You can go right ahead and shoot me, but you can’t make me give you a lesson in fly casting.”

“It is, perhaps, an American secret weapon?”

“Yes,” Simon said, and the truth awakened in him like a light. “It is. In a way you’ll never understand.”

“Pah!” Netchideff spat. “You are too stupid to know how stupid you are, like any democratic bourgeois. We are symbols, you and I. I with the gun which I have taken from you, which will kill you — you with nothing but your stupid toy, and your talk of what you call sport.”

The boat was drifting away with surprising speed. The Saint had to raise his voice to be sure that he would be heard.

“And we’ll still lick you,” he said, “because you don’t know what that means.”

“You think I do not understand a sporting chance?”

How symptomatic, Simon thought, of the psychosis that is Communism to insist on pounding ideological dialectic even at that impossible moment. And yet his own compulsion forced him to fling defiance back. You went down with your colors flying, or some such traditional gesture.

“Who could interpret it for you?” he retorted. “Karl Marx, or Groucho?”

“I will give you a sporting chance,” Netchideff shouted. “Cast your feathers, catch a fish — at once — and I will not shoot you!”

The boat by then was about fifty-five feet away — little more than the minimum range for any class of pistol marksman. But the fly on the Saint’s line traveled half that distance as he raised and lowered his rod and set the fly floating lazily back and forth.

“And your Uncle Joe Stalin’s mustache,” said the Saint, with the most passionate sincerity he could put into it.

And his rod swept forward once more like a long graceful extension of his arm, and as the line reached forward ahead of it he released the reserve coils in his left hand and let them shoot out through the guides in pursuit of the sailing leader, and the whole line stretched out and straightened like a long living tongue until at the exact extremity of the cast the fly flicked Netchideff’s face.

It did not hit the pilot squarely in the left eye, the improbably miniscule target that Simon Templar had extravagantly chosen to aim for. But less than an inch below it, in the soft skin under the lower lid, the little hook stuck and pricked and then as Netchideff involuntarily flinched dug its barb deep and firm into the tender flesh.