Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“Northwade helped him, of course,” he said.

“Uncle Burt lent him five thousand dollars. On a nominal security — purely nominal. And with a few legal documents — just as a matter of form. I expect you can guess what that means.”

“I could try.”

“The plans of the gear are in Uncle Burt’s safe, over in Westmount — all the results of Dad’s work up till now. And there’s a paper with them which says that all rights in them belong to Burt Northwade — with no time limit specified. It was supposed to be until the loan was repaid, but the contract doesn’t say so. Dad hasn’t any mind for legal trickeries, and he signed the papers while I was away. I didn’t know about it till it was too late.”

“One gathers,” said the Saint composedly, “that this is the house you propose to burgle.”

She gazed at him without flinching, gray eyes frank and resolute, even with that strain of wistful loneliness in them.

“Listen, stranger,” she said softly. “This is still the game of Let’s Pretend, isn’t it? Pretending that this evening is right outside the world. Because that’s the only reason why I’m telling you all this. I’m going to burgle Uncle Burt’s house, if I can. I’m going to try and get hold of his keys and open his safe and take those papers away, including the contract Dad signed. Dad hasn’t any hope of paying back that five thousand dollars. And Uncle Burt knows it. He’s practically completed arrangements to sell the gear to Ford. There’s no legal way of stopping him. It’s one of those cases where possession is nine points of the law. If we had that contract back, as well as the plans, Uncle Burt would never have the face to go into a court and publish the terms of it, which he’d have to do if he wanted to make any claim. Do you think I’m quite mad?”

“Only a little.”

She turned the stem of her wineglass between her fingers, looking at him quietly.

“Maybe I am. But have you ever heard of the Saint?”

“The Robin Hood of Modern Crime?” murmured Simon, with only the faintest lift of an eyebrow for expression.

“I think it’s the sort of thing he’d do,” she said. “It’s justice, even if it’s against the law. I wish I could meet him. He’d understand. I think he’d say it was worth taking a chance on. You’re very understanding, too, stranger. You’ve listened to me awfully patiently, and it’s helped a lot. And now you shall talk about anything else you like, and will you please forget it all?”

Simon Templar smiled.

He poured out the last of the wine, and took up his glass. Over the rim of it his clear blue eyes raked the girl with a cavalier challenge that matched his devil-may-care smile and the mocking slant of his brows. His face was alight suddenly.

“I don’t propose to forget, Judith,” he said. “I am the Saint, and the safe hasn’t been made that I can’t open. Nor has anything else been thought of that I can’t do. We’ll go to Westmount together!”

“This is the place,” said the girl.

Simon switched off the engine and let the car coast to a stop under the lee of the hedge. It was her car — she had been prepared for that. She had telephoned from the restaurant and it had been fueled and waiting for them at the garage.

Burt Northwade’s home, an unwieldy mansion in the Napoleonic style, stood on a slight rise of ground some distance back from the road, in the center of its extensive and pleasant grounds.

Rising to sit on the door of the convertible, with one foot on the seat, Simon could see the solid rectangle of its upper part painted in dull black on a smudged gray-blue sky. He felt that he knew every corner of it as if he had lived there for years, from the descriptions she had given him and the rough plans she had drawn on the back of the menu, familiarizing him with the configurations of rooms and corridors while their coffee grew cold and neither of them cared. That had been a time of delight shared in adventure which he would always like to remember, but now it was over, and the adventure went on.

It was a night without moon or stars, and yet not utterly dark; perfect for the purpose. She saw the clean-cut lines of his face, recklessly etched in the burst of light as he kindled a cigarette.

“I still don’t know why you should do this for me,” she said.

“Because it’s a game after my own heart,” he answered. “Northwade is a bird I’ve had ideas of my own about for some time. And as for our present object — well, no one could have thought of a story that would have been more likely to fetch me a thousand miles to see it through.”

“I feel I ought to be coming with you.”

He drew smoke into his lungs, and with it the sweet smell of green leaves.

“This sort of thing is my job, and I’ve had more practice than you.”

“But suppose Uncle Burt wakes up.”

“I shall immediately hypnotize him so that he falls into a deep sleep again.”

“Or suppose the servants catch you.”

“I shall tie them up in bundles of three and heave them into the outer darkness.”

“But suppose you are caught?”

He laughed.

“It’ll be a sign that the end of the world is at hand. But don’t worry. Even if that happens it’ll cause a certain amount of commotion, and if you hear it I shall expect you to drive rapidly away and await the end in some other province. I shall tell them I came out here on roller skates. It’s not your burglary any more — it’s mine.”

He swung his immaculately tailored legs over the side and dropped lightly to the road, and without another word he was gone, melting into the obscurity like a ghost.

He walked up the turf path beside the drive with the quick confidence of a cat. No lights showed in any of the front windows as he approached, but he made a careful circle of the house for complete certainty. His eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom with the ease of long habit, and he moved without rustling a blade of grass under his feet.

The ground floor was a rugged facade of raised arches and pilasters broken by tall gaunt windows, with a pair of carved oak doors in the middle that would have given way to nothing short of a battering-ram, but it is an axiom of housebreaking that those buildings whose fronts look most like fortresses are most likely to defend their postern gates with a card saying “No Admittance.” In this case, there was an open pantry window six feet above the ground. Simon squeezed up through the aperture, and lowered himself gently over the shelves of viands on the inside.

He passed through into the kitchen. With the help of a tiny pocket flashlight he located the main switchboard and removed all the fuses, burying them in a sack of potatoes. If by any chance there should be an accident, the garrison of the house would be more handicapped by a lack of lights than he would. Then he made his way down the main hall and unbarred, unbolted, unchained, and unlocked the great oak portals. Simon Templar owed much of his freedom to a trained eye for emergency exits, and he carried on the good work by opening a pair of windows in the library before he gave a thought to the safe.

The girl had described its location accurately. It was built into one wall, behind a small bookcase which opened away from it like a door, and Simon held his flashlight on it for just three seconds before he decided that it was one of those situations in which neither a bent hairpin nor a can opener would be adequate.

He slid cheerfully back into the hall and stepped soundlessly up the broad staircase. A large selection of burglarious tools was not part of his usual traveling equipment, but that shortcoming had rarely troubled him. It was another axiom of his philosophy that non-combination safes have keys, that most keys are in the possession of the owners of the safes, and, therefore, that the plodding felon who finds it necessary to pack nitroglycerin and oxyacetylene blowpipes in his overnight bag is usually deficient in strategic genius. Burt Northwade was sleeping soundly enough, with his mouth open, and a reassuring drone issuing from the region of his adenoids, but even if he had been awake it is doubtful whether he would have heard the opening of his bedroom door, or sensed one movement of the sensitive hands that lifted a bunch of keys from his dressing table and detached an even more probable one from the chain around his neck.