Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“And put it in your pocket,” Big Bill said.

The Saint felt in his jacket.

“So I did.” He pulled out the chamois bag with its precious contents and made as if to toss it. “Here.”

Big Bill stopped him with flared hands.

“Please keep it for me, Mr Templar. Things will get rather bad around here soon. I don’t want Appopoulis to get his fat hands on it.”

“Soon? Surely not for a couple of hours.”

Big Bill frowned.

“Things happen so quickly in dreams. This may seem real, but it’ll still hold the screwy pattern you’d expect.”

The Saint made a gesture of annoyance.

“Still sticking to your story? Well, maybe you’re screwy or maybe you just think I am. But I’d rather face facts. As a matter of fact, I insist on it.” He turned back to the girl. “For instance, darling, I know that you exist. I’ve kissed you.”

Big Bill growled, glared, but did nothing as the Saint waited calmly.

Simon continued, “I have the evidence of my hands, lips, and eyes that you have all the common things in common with other women. In addition you have this incredible, unbelievable loveliness. When I look at you, I find it hard to believe that you’re real. But that’s only a figure of speech. My senses convince me. Yet you say you don’t remember certain things that all people remember. Why?”

She repeated her gesture of confusion.

“I... don’t know. I can’t remember any past.”

“It would be a great privilege and a rare pleasure,” the Saint said gently, “to provide you with a past to remember.”

Another low growl rumbled in Big Bill’s chest, and the Saint waited again for developments. None came, and it struck the Saint that all the characters in this muddled melodrama had one characteristic in common — a certain cowardice in the clutch. Even Dawn Winter showed signs of fear, and nobody had yet made a move to harm her. It was only another of the preposterous paradoxes that blended into the indefinable unreality of the whole.

Simon gave it up. If he couldn’t get what he thought was truth from either of these two, he could watch and wait and divine the truth. Conflict hung on the wind, and conflict drags truth out of her hiding place and casts her naked before watching eyes.

“Well, souls,” he said, “what now? The unholy three will be back sometime. You could go now. There is the wide black night to wander in.”

“No,” Big Bill said. “Now that you’re in this, give us your help, Saint. We need you.”

“Just what, then,” Simon asked, “are we trying to prevent, or accomplish?”

“Selden Appopoulis must not get his hands on the opal or Dawn. He wants both. He’ll stop at nothing to get them.”

“I believe you mentioned a curse breathed on this gewgaw by some Oriental character.”

Dawn Winter’s voice once more tangled itself in Simon’s heart. As long as he could remember that quality — of far-off bells at dusk, of cellos on a midnight hill — time would never again pass slowly enough.

“Death shall swoop on him,” she chanted, “who holds this ancient gem from its true possessor, but all manner of things shall plague him before that dark dread angel shall come to rest at his shoulder. His nights shall be sleepless with terror, and hurts shall dog his accursed steps by day. Beauty shall bring an end to the vandal.”

The mood of her strange incantation, far more than the actual words, seemed to linger on the air after she had finished, so that in spite of all rationality the Saint felt spectral fingers on his spine. He shook off the spell with conscious resolution.

“It sounds very impressive,” he murmured, “in a gruesome sort of way. Reminds me of one of those zombie pictures. But where, may I ask, does this place me in the scheme of dire events? I have the jewel.”

“You,” Big Bill Holbrook said, “will die, as I must, and as Trailer Mac and Jimmy must. They stole it from Dawn; I stole it from them.”

The Saint smiled.

“Well, if that’s settled, let’s pass on to more entertaining subjects bordering on the carnal. Miss Winter, my car is just down the hill. If Bill is resigned to his fate, suppose we leave him and his playmates to their own fantastic devices and drift off into the night.”

Her face haloed with pleasure.

“I’d like it,” she said. “But I... I just can’t.”

“Why not? You’re over three years old. Nobody is sitting on your chest.”

“I can’t do what I like, somehow,” she said. “I can only do what I must. It’s always that way.”

“This,” the Saint said to nobody in particular, “sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write. And what’s the matter with you?” he demanded of Holbrook. “A little earlier you were eager to get rough with me because I admired the lady. Now you sit listening with disgusting indifference to my indecent proposal. I assure you it was indecent, from your viewpoint.”

Big Bill grinned.

“It just occurred to me. She can’t go with you. She must do what she must. She can’t get out of my sight. Good old Andy,” he added.

The Saint turned his eyes away and stared into space, wondering. His wandering gaze focused on a small wall mirror that reflected Dawn Winter. Her features were blurred, run together, an amorphous mass. Simon wondered what could have happened to that mirror.

He swung back to face Bill Holbrook.

“I’m afraid,” he said softly, but with the iron will showing through his velvet tones, “that we must have some truth in our little séance. Like the walrus, I feel the time has come to speak of many things. From this moment, you are my prisoners. The length of your durance vile depends on you. Who are you, Miss Winter?”

The look she turned on him made his hands tingle. Hers was a face for cupping between tender palms. Dark and troubled, her eyes pleaded for understanding, for sympathy.

“I told you all I know,” she pleaded. “I’ve tried and tried, ever since I could remember anything, to think of — well, all those things you think of at times.”

Again she passed a hand across her face, as if wiping away veils.

“I don’t ever remember snagging a stocking on the way to an important appointment,” she said. “And I know that girls do. I never had to fight for my” — she colored — “my honor, whatever that is. And I know that girls like me have fought for this something I don’t understand, by the time they’ve reached my age. Whatever that is,” she added pensively. “I don’t even know how old I am, or where I’ve been.”

A pattern suddenly clicked into place in the Saint’s brain, a pattern so monstrous, so inhuman as to arouse his destructive instincts to the point of homicidal mania. The look he turned on Big Bill Holbrook was ice and flame.

His voice was pitched at conversational level, but each word fell from his lips like a shining sword.

“Do you know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get some new ideas. Not very nice ideas, chum. And if I’m guessing right about what you and your fellow scum have done to this innocent girl, you are liable to cost your insurance company money.”

He moved toward Holbrook with a liquid grace that had all the co-ordination of a panther’s movement — and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.

“Stop acting the knight in armor,” he protested. “What in hell you talking about?”

“It should have been obvious before,” Simon Templar said. “Up on your feet, Holbrook.”

Holbrook remained at ease.

“If you’ve got an explanation for all this that doesn’t agree with mine, I want to know it.”

The Saint paused. There was honest curiosity in the man’s voice — and no fear. That cowardice which had characterized him before was replaced with what seemed an honest desire to hear the Saint’s idea.