Leslie Charteris - The Saint Steps In

"What would?" Simon asked. Quennel turned his cigar again.

"Well, frankly, I've read a lot about you and I've often thought that you weren't doing yourself justice, even before the war. Not that I haven't enjoyed your exploits. But it's always seemed to me that a man with your mind and your abilities could have achieved so much more… You know, sometimes I've wondered whether a man like you mayn't have been suffering from some mistaken ideas about business. I don't mean selling things over the counter in a hardware store. I mean the kind of business that I do."

"Perhaps I don't know enough about it."

"I assure you it can be just as great an adventure, in its own way, as anything you've ever done. A great corporation is like a little empire. Its relations with other corporations and industries are like the relations between empires. You have diplomacy, alliances, feuds, espionage, and wars. Quite often you have to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. That's one of the things I meant by the necessity for a strong executive class. I think if you go into it you'll find that they are really only paralleling your own attitude. There have to be a great many petty general regulations for the conduct of the majority of people, just as there have to be for children. It's just as necessary for there to be parents, and people who can step above the ordinary regulations. I think you'd find yourself quite at home in that class. I think that Business could employ all your brilliance, all your charm, all your audacity, all your generalship, all your — shall I say — ruthlessness."

"You could be right," said the Saint, with a smile that barely touched the edges of his mouth. "But who would give me a job?"

"I would," said Quennel.

The Saint gazed at him.

"You would?"

"Yes," Quennel said deliberately. "To be quite truthful, when I told Andrea to ask you over, I was thinking about that much more than about the Gray business. Let's say it was one of my crazy ideas, or one of my hunches. You don't get very far in business without having those ideas. I believe right now a man like you could be worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to me."

Simon drew his glass closer to him and cupped it in his hand, the stem between his second and third fingers, making gentle movements that swirled the golden spirit softly around and warmed it in the curve of the bowl.

This, then, was all of it, and all the answers and explanations were there. And he knew quite certainly now, as his intuition had always told him, that there was no ordinary way to fight it. As Quennel had said, there were times when you had to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. There was a world outside the orderly lawful world of average people, and to fight anyone there you had to move completely into his world, or else he was as untouchable and invulnerable as if he were in another dimension.

The Saint smiled a little, very sardonically and deep inside himself, at the passing thought of how far he would have been likely to get if he had tried to fight Hobart Quennel from any footing on the commonplace world. Even without his own peculiar reputation by commonplace legal standards, he knew how ridiculous the accusations he would have had to make would have seemed when thrown against such a man as Quennel. It wouldn't be merely because of Quennel's wealth. It would be because his standing, his respect, his utterly genuine confidence and authority and rightness and integrity would throw off anything the Saint could say like armor would throw off spitballs.

It was a good thing, Simon thought, that he also could move in dimensions where such considerations were only words.

He finished his brandy, enjoying the full savor of the last sip, and put the glass down, and said pleasantly: "That's very flattering. But I have another idea."

"What is that?"

Unhurriedly, almost idly, the Saint put his right hand under his coat, under his left arm, and brought out the automatic that rode there. He leveled it diagonally across the table, letting the aim of its dark blunt sleek muzzle touch Quennel and Devan in turn.

"This is what I was talking about before," he said. "About the war being close to home. The war is here with you now, Quennel. I came here for Calvin Gray and his daughter, and unless I get them I promise you some of us are going to die most unexpectedly."

The only trouble was, as the Saint reckoned it afterwards, that even then he still hadn't realized deeply enough how closely Quennel's — or at least Devan's — fourth-dimensional mentality might coincide with his own.

He looked at their rigid immobility, at Quennel's face still bland and bony and Walter Devan's face heavy and grim, both of them staring at him soberly and calculatingly but without any abrupt panic; and then he saw Devan's eyes flick fractionally upwards to a point in space just above his head.

Instantly, and before Simon could move at all, a new voice spoke behind him. It was a voice with a rich bass croak that Simon seemed to have heard before, very recently.

"Okay," said the voice. "Hold it. Don't move anything if you want to go out of here breathing."

The Saint held it. He knew quite well where he had heard that deep grating voice before.

It spoke again, sounding a little nearer.

"I been saving this for you, bud," it said.

After that there was only a fierce jarring agony that crashed through the Saint's skull like a bolt of lightning, with a scorching white light that broke into a million rainbow stars that danced away into a deep engulfing darkness.

Coming back to consciousness was a distant brilliance that hurt his eyes even through his closed eyelids, a sharp cold wet monotonous nagging slapping on his cheeks that turned out to be a sodden towel unsympathetically wielded by Karl Morgen.

"That's enough, Karl," said Walter Devan's voice.

Simon rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his eyes. The tall raw-boned man stood over him, looking as if he would enjoy repeating both the assault and the remedy.

"Beat it, Karl," Devan said.

Morgen went out reluctantly.

Simon tried to get his bearings in a rather unusual room. It was small and somewhat bare. The walls and ceiling were plain white cement, and they looked new and clean. There was a plain new-looking carpet on the floor. There was the plain heavy unpainted door through which Karl had gone out, and another identical door in another wall. Near the ceiling in one wall was a sort of open embrasure, but it was too high up to see out of from where the Saint sat. There was no other window.

The Saint sat on a simple divan with blankets over it, and on the opposite side of the room was another similar divan. There were some low shelves against another wall on which he saw a small radiophone, some records, half a dozen books, a couple of packs of cards, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of Scotch, a box of chocolates, half a dozen cans of assorted food, and a package of paper plates. The air had a slightly damp chill in it.

"People in stories always ask 'Where am I?' " said the Saint, "so I will."

"This is Mr. Quennel's private air-raid shelter," replied Devan. "He had it built about a year ago."

He sat in a comfortable chair behind a card table, smoking a freshly lighted cigar. He wielded the cigar with his left hand, because his right hand held an automatic which the Saint recognized as his own. He didn't point the gun. His hand was relaxed with it on the table. But he was twelve feet from the Saint, and pointing was not necessary.

"Very nice it looks," Simon murmured. "And handy," he added.

"Cigarette?" Devan tossed a pack into the Saint's lap, and followed it with a book of matches. "Keep 'em," he said. "I'm afraid Karl took everything you had away from you."