Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“This girl,” the Saint said, “whoever she is, has breeding, grace, and beauty out of this world. She has been brought up under expensive and sheltered surroundings. You can see that in her every gesture, every expression. She was bred to great wealth, perhaps nobility, or even royalty.”

Big Bill leaned forward in almost an agony of concentration. Every word of Simon Templar’s might have been a twenty-dollar gold piece, the way he reached for it with every sense.

The Saint patted his jacket pocket.

“This jewel is the symbol of her position — heiress, princess, queen, or what have you. You and your unsavory companions kidnapped her, and are holding her for ransom. That would be wicked enough, but you’ve done worse. Somewhere in the course of your nasty little scheme, it seemed like a good idea to destroy a part of her beauty that could be dangerous to you and your precious pals. So you destroyed her mind. With drugs, I have no doubt — drugs that have dulled her mind until she has no memory. Your reasons are clear enough — it was just a sound form of insurance. And now your gang has split up, fighting over the spoils. I don’t know who would have come out on top, if you hadn’t happened to run into me. But I know what the end is going to be now — and you aren’t going to like it. Get on your feet!”

The command was like a pistol shot, and Big Bill Holbrook jumped. Then he leaned back again and chuckled in admiration.

“Everything that’s been said about you is true. There’s nobody like you. That’s so much better than Andy Faulks did there’s no comparison. Say, that really would have been something, and look, it’d have explained why she couldn’t remember who she was. Saint, I got to hand it to you. Too bad you’re not in bed in Glendale.”

For once of a very few times in his life, the Saint was taken aback. The words were spoken with such ease, such sincerity, that Simon’s deadly purpose cooled to a feeling of confusion. While it is true that a man who is accustomed to danger, to gambling for high stakes with death as a forfeit, could simulate feelings he did not actually feel, it is seldom that a man of Big Bill Holbrook’s obvious IQ can look annihilation in the face with an admiring grin.

Something was still wrong, but wrong in the same way that everything in the whole episode was wrong — wrong with that same unearthly off-key distortion that defeated logical diagnosis.

The Saint took out a cigarette and lighted it slowly, and over the hiss of the match he heard other sounds which resolved themselves into a blur of footsteps.

Simon glanced at his watch. Jimmy and Mac had been gone less than half an hour. It was impossible for them to be returning from the village four miles away.

What had Holbrook said? Something about everything happening faster in dreams? But that was in the same vein of nonsense. Maybe they’d met the boss at the foot of the hill.

Holbrook said, “What is it? Did you hear something?”

“Only your friends again.”

Fear came once more to Holbrook and Dawn Winter. Their eyes were wide and dark with it, turning instantly toward the bunk beds.

“No,” Simon said. “Not this time. We’ll have this out in the open.”

“But he’ll kill us!” Holbrook began to babble. “It’s awful, the things he’ll do. You don’t know him, Saint. You can’t imagine, you couldn’t—”

“I can imagine anything,” said the Saint coldly. “I’ve been doing that for some time, and I’m tired of it. Now I’d prefer to know.”

He crossed the room as the footsteps outside turned into knuckles at the door.

“Welcome to our study club,” the Saint said.

Trailer Mac and Jimmy preceded an enormous hulk through the door and, when they saw Holbrook and Dawn, charged like lions leaping on paralyzed gazelles.

The Saint moved in a lightning blur. Two sharp cracks of fist on flesh piled Mac in one corner, Jimmy in another. They lay still.

A buttery chuckle caused the Saint to turn. He was looking into a small circular hole. A.38, he computed. He raised his eyes to twins of the barrel, but these were eyes. They lay deep in flesh that swelled in yellowish-brown rolls, flowing fatly downward to describe one of the fattest men the Saint had ever seen. They could only have belonged to a man called Selden Appopoulis.

“Mr Sydney Greenstreet, I presume?” Simon drawled.

The buttery chuckle set a sea of flesh ebbing and flowing.

“A quick action, sir, and an efficient direction of action. I compliment you, and am saddened that you must die.”

The Saint shrugged. He knew that this fat man, though butter-voiced, had a heart of iridium. His eyes were the pale expressionless orbs of a killer. His mouth was thin with determination, his hand steady with purpose. But Simon had faced all those indications before.

“I hate to disappoint you, comrade,” he said lightly, “but that line has a familiar ring. And yet I’m still alive.”

Appopoulis appraised and dismissed the Saint, though his eyes never wavered. He spoke to Holbrook.

“The opal. Quickly!”

The butter of his voice had frozen into oleaginous icicles, and Holbrook quailed under the bite of their sharp edges.

“I haven’t got it, Appopoulis. The Saint has it.”

Simon was astonished at the change in the fat man. It was subtle, admittedly, but it was there nonetheless. Fear came into the pale gray eyes which had been calmly contemplating murder as a climax to unspeakable inquisitions. Fear and respect. The voice melted butter again.

“So,” he said warmly. “Simon Templar, the Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the... ah... devil with dames. I had not anticipated this.”

Once more it struck the Saint that the descriptive phrases were an exact repetition of Holbrook’s. And once more it struck him that the quality of fear in this weird quintet was not strained. And once more he wondered about Holbrook’s fantastic tale...

“You are expecting maybe Little Lord Feigenbaum?” Simon asked. “Or what do you want?”

“The cameo opal, for one thing,” Appopoulis said easily. “For the other, the girl.”

“And what do you intend to do with them?”

“Cherish them, sir. Both of them.”

His voice had encyclopedic lust and greed, and the Saint felt as if small things crawled on him.

Before he could make an answer, stirrings in their respective corners announced the return of Mac and Jimmy to another common plane of existence. Without a word they got groggily to their feet, shook their heads clear of trip hammers, and moved toward the Saint.

“Now, Mr Templar,” said Appopoulis, “you have a choice. Live, and my desires are granted without violence, or die, and they are spiced with emotions at fever heat.”

Mac and Jimmy had halted: one small and thunderstruck, one large and paralyzed.

“Boss,” quavered Jimmy, “did youse say Templar? Da Saint?”

“The same.” Simon bowed.

“Chee!” Mac breathed. “Da Saint. Da Robin Hood of Modern Crime, da—”

“Please,” Simon groaned. “Another record, if you don’t mind.”

“Boss, we ain’t got a chance,” Jimmy said.

Appopoulis turned his eyes on the little man.

“He,” the boss said, “has the opal.”

This news stiffened their gelatinous spines long enough to set them at the Saint in a two-directional charge.

The Saint swerved to meet it. He held Jimmy between himself and the unwavering gun of Appopoulis with one hand. With the other he wrought havoc on the features of Mac.

It was like dancing, like feathers on the breeze, the way the Saint moved. Even to himself it had the kind of exhilaration that a fight may only experience once in a lifetime. He had a sense of power, of supernatural co-ordination, of invincibility beyond anything he had ever known. He cared nothing for the knowledge that Appopoulis was skipping around on the outskirts of the fray, trying to find an angle from which he could terminate it with a well-placed shot. Simon knew that it was no fear of killing Jimmy that stayed the fat man’s finger on the trigger — it was simply the knowledge that it would have wasted a shot, that the Saint could have gone on using Jimmy as a shield, alive or dead. The Saint knew this coolly and detachedly, as if with a mind separate from his own, while he battered Mac’s face into a vari-colored pulp.