Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

Voyson rubbed his chin with a shaking hand. His gaze was fixed on the Saint with the quivering intensity of a guinea-pig hypnotized by a snake.

“Picked my pocket, eh?” he got out harshly. “I’ll see your editor hears about that. I’ll have you arrested!”

He reached up for the communication cord. Simon tilted his head back and half closed his eyes.

“What a story!” he breathed ecstatically. “Of course it’ll delay you a bit, having to stay on in Germany to make the charge and see it all through. But if you think it’s worth it, I do. It’d be front page stuff!”

Voyson sank down again.

“Will you get out of my compartment?” he grated. “I’ve stood as much from you as I intend to—”

“But you haven’t stood as much from me as I’ve got waiting for you, brother,” said the Saint.

His eyes opened suddenly, very clear and blue and reckless, like sapphires with steel rapier-points behind them. He smiled.

“I’m here on business, Bruce,” he said, in the same gentle voice with the tang of bared sword-blades behind its melting smoothness. “I won’t deceive you any longer — the Herald Tribune only knows me from the comic section. And I don’t like you, brother. I never have cared much for your line of business, anyway, and the way you spoke to that poor old man in the dining car annoyed me. Remember him? He was on the point of chucking himself off this train under another one just now when I happened along. Somehow, my pet, I don’t think it would have distressed me nearly so much if you’d had the same idea.”

“Who are you?” asked Voyson huskily.

“I am the Saint — you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cockeyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across. You come into the category, comrade. You must be carrying quite a tidy bit of boodle along to comfort you in your exile, and I think I could spend it much more amusingly than you—”

Voyson’s lips whitened. His hand slipped behind him, and Simon looked down at the barrel of an automatic, levelled into the center of his chest. Only the Saint’s eyebrows moved.

“You’ve been getting notions from some of these gangster pictures,” he said. “May I go on with my eating?”

He put the sandwich on his knee and lifted off the top slice of bread. Then he felt in his pocket for the pepper-pot. The perforations in the top seemed inadequate, and he unscrewed the cap.

Voyson squinted at him.

“That makes it easier to deal with you,” he said, and then a cloud of pepper struck him squarely in the face.

It came with a crisp upward fling that drove the powder straight up his nostrils and up under the shield of his glasses into his eyes. He choked and gasped, and in the same instant his gun was struck aside and detached skillfully from his fingers.

Minutes of streaming agony passed before his tortured vision returned. While he wept with the stinging pain of it his pockets were rifled again, this time without any attempt at stealth. Once he tried to rise, and was pushed back like a child. He huddled away and waited impotently for the blindness to wear off.

When he looked up the Saint was still there, sitting on the seat opposite him with a handkerchief over his face and a litter of papers sorted out on his lap and overflowing on either side. The window had been lowered so that the draught could clear the air.

“You crook!” Voyson moaned.

“Well, well, well!” murmured the Saint amiably. “So the little man’s come to the surface again. Bad business, that hay fever of yours. Speaking as one crook to another, Bruce, you ought to give up gun play until you’re cured. Sneezing spoils the aim.”

He removed the handkerchief from his face, sniffed the air cautiously, and tucked the silk square back in his pocket. Then he began to gather up the papers he had been investigating.

“I can only find ninety thousand dollars in cash,” he said. “That’s not a lot of booty out of a five-million-dollar swindle. But I see there are notes of two million-dollar transfers to the Asiatic Bank in Batavia, so maybe you didn’t do so badly out of it. I wish we could touch some of that bank account, though.”

He enveloped the documents deliberately in the wallet from which he had taken them, and tossed it back. Voyson’s bloodshot glare steadied itself.

“I’ll see that you don’t get away with this,” he snarled.

“Tell me how,” invited the Saint, but his smile was still a glitter of clean-cut marble.

“Wait till we get to Mainz. There are plenty of people on this train. What are you going to do — walk me out of the station under that gun in broad daylight? I’d like to see you do it. I’ll call your bluff!”

“Still hankering for that publicity?”

“I’ve got to have those tickets,” said Voyson, with his chest laboring. “And my money. I’ve got to get to Batavia. You won’t stop me! I shan’t have to stay behind to make any charges. Your having a gun will be enough — and my money and tickets on you. I know the numbers of all those bills, and the tickets are signed with my name. The police’ll be glad to see you!” Voyson’s hands were clenching and twitching spasmodically. “I think I read about you being in trouble here some time ago, didn’t I?”

Simon said nothing, and Voyson’s voice picked up. It grew louder than it need have done, almost as if the financier was trying to bolster up his own confidence with the sound of it.

“The German police wanted you pretty badly then! You’re the Saint, eh? It’s a good thing you told me.”

“You make things very difficult, brother,” said the Saint.

His quietness was unruffled, almost reflective, yet to any man in his senses that very quietness should have flared with warnings. Voyson was beyond seeing them. He leaned forward with the red pin-point in his stare glittering.

“I want it to,” he raved. “You’ve come to the wrong man with your nonsense. I’ll give you thirty seconds to hand back my tickets—”

“One moment,” said the Saint.

His soft incisiveness floated like a white-hot filament across the other’s babble of speech, and suddenly Voyson saw the coldness of his eyes, and went silent.

“You’re reminding me of things that I haven’t remembered for a long time,” said the Saint soberly.

His cigarette-end dropped beside his heel, and was trodden out. The blue eyes never looked down at it.

“You’re right — the Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn’t hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I’ve become rather sophisticated. Maybe it’s a pity. One loses sight of some simple elementary things that were very good. It wasn’t always like that. Since you know my name so well, you may remember that I once had only one cure for creatures like you. I was judge and executioner.”

The train thundered south, perfected machinery roaring on its unswerving lines through a world of logic and materialism forged into wheels. And in one compartment of it Bruce Voyson sat mute, clutched in an eerie spell that drove like a clammy wind through the logic on which he had based his life.

“Romantic, wasn’t it?” went on that incredible voice. “But the law has so many loopholes. Before it can hang you for murder you’ve got to beat your victim’s brains out with a club. And yet you are a murderer, aren’t you? Just a few minutes ago, a friend of ours would have committed suicide on your account if I hadn’t spotted him in the nick of time. For all I know, others may have done the same thing already. Certainly some of your victims will. And while that’s going on, you’re on your way to Batavia to enjoy at least two million dollars of their money — two million which would do a little towards helping them to a fresh start. And all those dollars would be available for the receivers if you met with an unfortunate accident. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why you should go on living, does there?”