Leslie Charteris - Follow the Saint

The Saint's survey slid off him on to the man who sat in front of the fireplace. This was someone whom the Saint did not recognize, and he knew he was not Mr Hogsbotham. He was a man with thin sandy hair and a soft plump face that would have fitted very nicely on somebody's pet rabbit. At the moment it was a very frightened rabbit. The man sat in a stiff-backed chair placed on the hearthrug, and pieces of clothesline had been used to keep him there. His arms had been stretched round behind him and tied at the back of the chair so that his shoulders were hunched slightly forward by the strain. His shirt had been ripped open to the waist, so that his chest was bare; and his skin was very white and insipid, as if it had never seen daylight since he was born. It was so white that two irregular patches of inflammation on it stood out like blotches of dull red paint. His lips were trembling, and his eyes bulged in wild orbs of dread.

"I don't know!" he blubbered. "I tell you, you're making a mistake. I don't know anything about it. I haven't got it. Don't burn me again!"

Morris Dolf might not have heard. He stood leaning boredly against the radiogram and didn't move.

Someone else did. It was a third man, whose back was turned to the door. The back was broad and fitted tightly into his coat, so that the material wrinkled at the armpits, and the neck above it was short and thick and reddish, running quickly into close-cropped wiry black hair. The whole rear view had a hard coarse physical ruthlessness that made it unnecessary to see its owner's face to make an immediate summary of his character. It belonged without a shadow of doubt to the thick brutal voice that Simon had heard first — and equally without doubt, it could not possibly have belonged to Mr Ebenezer Hogsbotham.

The same voice spoke again. It said: "Okay, Verdean. But you're the one who made the mistake. You made it when you thought you'd be smart and try to doublecross us. You made it worse when you tried to turn us in to the cops, so we could take the rap for you and leave you nothing to worry about. Now you're going to wish you hadn't been so damn smart."

The broad back moved forward and bent towards the fireplace. The gas fire was burning in the grate, although the evening was warm; and all at once the Saint understood why he had heard through the music those screechy ululations which no orchestral instrument could have produced. The man with the broad back straightened up again, and his powerful hand was holding an ordinary kitchen ladle of which the bowl glowed bright crimson.

"You have it just how you like, rat," he said. "I don't mind how long you hold out. I'm going to enjoy working on you. We're going to burn your body a bit more for a start, and then we'll take your shoes and socks off and put your feet in the fire and see how you like that. You can scream your head off if you want to, but nobody 'll hear you over the gramophone… Let's have some more of that loud stuff, Morrie."

Morris Dolf turned back to the radiogram, without a flicker of expression, and moved the pick-up arm. The 'Ride of the Valkyries' crashed out again with a fearful vigour that would have drowned anything less than the howl of a hurricane; and the broad back shifted towards the man in the chair.

The man in the chair stared in delirious horror from the glowing ladle to the face of the man who held it. His eyes bulged until there were white rims all round the pupils. His quivering lips fluttered into absurd jerky patterns, pouring out frantic pleas and protestations that the music swamped into inaudibility.

Simon Templar removed his eye from the keyhole and loosened the gun under his arm. He had no fanciful ideas about rushing to the rescue of a hapless victim of persecution. In fact, all the more subtle aspects of the victim looked as guilty as hell to him — if not of the actual doublecrossing that seemed to be under discussion, at least of plenty of other reprehensible things. No entirely innocent householder would behave in exactly that way if he were being tortured by a couple of invading thugs. And the whole argument as Simon had overheard it smelled ripely with the rich fragrance of dishonour and dissension among thieves. Which was an odour that had perfumed some of the most joyous hours of the Saint's rapscallion life. By all the portents, he was still a puzzlingly long way from getting within kicking distance of the elusive Mr Hogsbotham; but here under his very nose was a proposition that looked no less diverting and a lot more mysterious; and the Saint had a sublimely happy-go-lucky adaptability to the generous vagaries of Fate. He took his gun clear out of the spring harness where he carried it, and opened the door.

He went in without any stealth, which would have been entirely superfluous. The operatic pandemonium would have made his entrance mouselike if he had ridden in on a capering elephant. He walked almost nonchalantly across the room; and its occupants were so taken up with their own business that he was within a couple of yards of them before any of them noticed that he was there.

Morris Dolf saw him first. His beady eyes swivelled incuriously towards the movement that must have finally caught the fringes of their range of vision, and became petrified into glassy blankness as they fastened on the Saint's tall figure. His jaw dropped so that the cigarette would have fallen out of his mouth if the adhesive dampness of the paper hadn't kept it hanging from his lower lip. He stood as horripilantly still as if a long icy needle had shot up out of the floor and impaled him from sacrum to occiput.

That glazed paralysis lasted for about a breath and a half. And then his right hand whipped towards his pocket.

It was nothing but an involuntary piece of sheer stupidity born out of shock, and the Saint was benevolent enough to treat it that way. He simply lifted the gun in his hand a little, bringing it more prominently into view; and Dolf stopped himself in time.

The man with the beefy neck, in his turn, must have caught some queer impression from Dolf's peculiar movements out of the corner of his eye. He turned and looked at his companion's face, froze for an instant, and then went on turning more quickly, straightening as he did so. He let go the red-hot ladle, and his right hand started to make the same instinctive grab that Dolf had started — and stopped in mid-air for the same reason. His heavy florid features seemed to bunch into knots of strangulated viciousness as he stood glowering numbly at the Saint's masked face.

Simon stepped sideways, towards the blaring radiogram, and lifted the needle off the record. The nerve-rasping bombardment of sound broke off into blissful silence.

"That's better," he murmured relievedly. "Now we can all talk to each other without giving ourselves laryngitis. When did you discover this passion for expensive music, Morrie?"

Morris Dolf's eyes blinked once at the jar of being addressed by name, but he seemed to find it hard to work up an enthusiasm for discussing his cultural development. His tongue slid over his dry lips without forming an answering syllable.

Simon turned to the big florid man. Now that he had seen his face, he had identified him as well.

"Judd Kaskin, I believe?" he drawled, with the delicate suavity of an ambassador of the old regime. "Do you know that you're burning the carpet?"

Kaskin looked at the fallen ladle. He bent and picked it up, rubbing the sole of his shoe over the smouldering patch of rug. Then, as if he suddenly realized that he had done all that in mechanical obedience to a command that the Saint hadn't even troubled to utter directly, he threw it clattering into the fireplace and turned his savage scowl back to the Saint.

"What the hell do you want?" he snarled.

"You know, I was just going to ask you the same question," Simon remarked mildly. "It seemed to me that you were feeling your oats a bit, Judd. I suppose you get that way after doing five years on the Moor. But you haven't been out much more than three months, have you? You shouldn't be in such a hurry to go back."