Leslie Charteris - Call for the Saint

“De Elliott Hotel?” he said. “But we just come from dere—”

“And we didn’t search it,” Simon said. “That was only the place where I started thinking about secret passages. So naturally I was too dumb to start there... Wait a minute!” He came to his feet suddenly, and his eyes were alight. “Sammy — did he say ‘Elliott’s’ or ‘the Elliott Hotel’?”

Sammy stared at him.

“He said ‘Elliott’s,’ ” he stated positively. “I never heard of an Elliott Hotel.”

“Of course, he did,” said the Saint, with a lilt in his quiet voice like muted trumpets. “Of course he did. Anyone who meant the Elliott Hotel would say so, or call it ‘the Hotel’ or ‘the Elliott.’ They wouldn’t call it ‘Elliott’s.’... Hoppy, we’re on our way!”

Hoppy struggled obediently but foggily to his feet.

“Okay, boss.”

“That’ll be five bucks for the bourbon,” Sammy said. He closed his hairy fist on the bill that Simon placed in it, and added, “Just one thing. Try to leave Fingers for me, will you? I sort of feel I ought to get him myself, for the looks of things.”

“We’ll try,” Simon promised.

He drove back into Chicago with the speedometer needle exactly on the legal limit, for this was one time when he did not want to be stopped. His first destination was his own hotel: he was gambling that that might well be the last place where Kearney would expect him to show up again, but in any case he was riding a hunch that justified the chance.

And the piece fell into place as if it had been machined to fit, with the uncanny smoothness that so often seemed to lubricate the gears of Simon Templar’s destiny.

There was a letter in his box at the desk, a product of the last delivery. It was addressed to Hoppy, but Simon opened it as soon as he saw the name of the firm of realtors it came from.

“Dear Mr Uniatz,

We have finally been able to trace the ownership of the Property in which you are interested at 7204 Kelly Drive. The owner is a Mr Stephen Elliott, and we understand he would consider an offer—”

Simon read no more. He stuffed the letter into his pocket, and sapphires danced in his eyes. “Let’s go, Hoppy,” he said, “and arrange an abdication.”

The telephone at the clerk’s elbow buzzed. He picked it up and said, “Night clerk speaking...” His eyes went to the Saint and he said, “Yes, he just came in—”

Then his eyes bulged while they still rested on the Saint. Simon watched them grow wider and rounder before the man backed away from the counter and turned his head.

The Saint deliberately dawdled over lighting a cigarette, but even his supersensitive ears could pick nothing up, for all the rest of the conversation came from the other end of the line, until the clerk muttered, “Okay, I’ll do my best.”

Simon started to move away.

“Er... Mr Templar...”

He turned.

“Yes?”

The clerk was sweating. His face had a slightly glazed surface from the strain of trying to look natural.

“The manager just called, Mr Templar, and wanted to speak to you about... about an overcharge on your bill.”

“I’ll be glad to speak to him in the morning,” said the Saint co-operatively. “We should have lots to talk about — everything on my bill looks like an overcharge to me.”

“He’s on his way here now, sir,” said the clerk from his tonsils. If you could wait a few minutes—”

The Saintly smile would have glowed ethereally in a stained-glass window.

“I’m afraid I haven’t time,” he said. “But when Lieutenant Kearney gets here, do congratulate him for me on his new job. Oh, and give him this letter, will you?”

He laid the communication from the real-estate agents on the desk, and hurried Hoppy out of the lobby before the clerk could reassemble his wits for another attempt to delay him.

Again his car snaked through the traffic at the maximum speed that would still leave it immune from legal interference.

The Saint’s hands were light and steady on the wheel, his keen tanned profile implacably calm against the passing street lights. And while he drove like a precision machine he thought about Monica. Monica drugged, her velvet voice incoherent, her enigmatic eyes blank, her proud body listless and helpless... He thought of worse things than that, and a black coldness lanced through him with an aching intensity that froze his eyes as they stared ahead.

“I’m the dope, Hoppy,” he said in a dead toneless level. “I should have known better than to think I could push her off the stage... She put on that beggar woman’s outfit again, of course. She went back to the Elliott Hotel. But on account of what Junior had spilled, she didn’t last a minute. They were probably taking care of her last night while I was lying there wondering why they didn’t do anything about me.” His voice had a bitterness beyond emotion. “By this time they’ve given her a treatment and they know all the rest about me. Except where I am now. This is the showdown.”

“Who’d’a t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott — de old goat!”

Simon said nothing.

The house on Kelly Drive was as dark as the last time they had seen it, an unimaginative two-storey pile of brick with drawn blinds that made the windows look like sightless eyes.

Simon went to the back door, with Hoppy at his heels. Having picked the lock once before, he took a mere few seconds to open it again.

They stepped into darkness and silence broken only by the monotonous slow pulse of a dripping tap. This was the kitchen. On the other side of the room was the door at the head of the stairs that led down to the basement where initiations into the brotherhood of the beggars were performed. As Simon touched it, it gave way a fraction: it was not quite closed, but the darkness was blacker still beyond the slight opening. He stopped and listened again, and heard nothing. The darkness of the house had not seemed to indicate that there was a guard, but he was jumping to no rash conclusions.

He balanced the gun in his hand and pushed the door wider.

Then he heard it — a faint but clear rustle of movement that threw a momentary uncontrollable syncopation into his heartbeats and sent a flying column of eskimo beetles skirmishing up into his scalp. And with the rustle, a low, sleepy, inarticulate moan.

“What’s dat?” breathed Mr Uniatz hoarsely.

The Saint hardly bothered to whisper. After the first instant’s shock, he understood the rustle and the moan so vividly that the needlessness of further stealth seemed to be established.

“That’s Monica,” he said, and went down the steps.

His pencil flashlight broke the darkness as he reached the bottom, and in the round splash where the beam struck, he saw her.

She lay on a canvas cot in one corner of the cellar. Her wrists were strapped to the side members. As he had expected, she was dressed in the grimy shapeless rags in which he had first met her, but most of the beggar-woman make-up had been roughly wiped from her face. Her eyes were closed, but as the light fell on them her eyelids lifted a little as if with an infinite effort.

“No,” she mouthed huskily. “No...”

“Monica,” he said.

He checked the eagerness of his stride as he reached the cot, to come up to her gently.

“It’s me,” he said. “Simon. Simon Templar.”

Her eyes sought for him as he touched her, and he could see the pin-point contraction of the pupils. He turned the flashlight on his own face, then back to her.

She knew him — the sound of his voice and the glimpse of him. Even through the mists of the drug he saw the awareness of him struggle into her mind, and saw the tiny smile that lighted her whole face for an instant. She tried to raise her head, and her lips formed his name: “Simon...”