Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"She wanted her beauty sleep," said the Saint. "After you with that barley water, Hoppy."

He stretched out a long arm and retrieved the bottle of scotch from Mr Uniatz' jealous grasp.

"What Hoppy needs is compressed whiskey, so he could get a bottle into a wineglass," he commented.

"Was it your scintillating conversation that made her yawn?" inquired Peter Quentin. "Or did she have the wrong kind of ideas about what sort of sleep would be good for her beauty?"

Simon splashed soda into his glass and drank meditatively.

"She's an attractive wench," he said. "I like her. She's so innocent and disarming, and as harmless as a hungry shark. The trouble is that if she's not careful she's going to wake up one day and find herself left in a dark alley with her throat cut, and that will be a great pity for anyone with a face and figure like hers."

"Say, where do ya get dat stuff?" demanded Mr Uniatz loudly.

He sat forward on the edge of his chair, his hamlike hands practically obliterating his half-empty glass, with a deep frown corrugating the negligible clearance between his eyebrows and his hair, and his paleolithically roughcast face chopped into masses of fearsome challenge.

Simon raised his head to stare at him. A criticism like that coming from Mr Uniatz, a man to whom any form of mental exercise was such excruciating torture that he had always been dumb with worship before the Saint's godlike ability to think, had something awe-inspiring about it that numbed its audience. It was nothing like a rabbit turning round to bare its teeth at a greyhound. It was more like a Storm Trooper turning round and asking Hitler why he didn't stop strutting around and get wise to himself. For one reeling instant the Saint wondered if history had been made that night, and the whiskey which had for years been flowing in gargantuan quantities down Hoppy's asbestos throat had at long last soaked through to some hidden sensitive section of his entrails.

Mr Uniatz reddened bashfully under the stares that impinged upon him. He was unaccustomed to being the focus of so much attention. But he clung valiantly to his point.

"It sounds like a pipe dream to me, boss," he said.

"Let me get this straight," said the Saint carefully. "I gather that you don't think that Valerie Woodchester runs any risk of getting her throat cut. Is that the idea?"

Mr Uniatz looked about him in dazed perplexity. He seemed to think that everyone had gone mad.

"I dunno, boss," he said, refusing to be sidetracked. "What I wanna know is where do ya get dat stuff?"

"What stuff?" asked Peter faintly.

"De compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz.

There was a pregnant silence.

The Saint laid his head slowly back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

"Hoppy," he said solemnly, "I love you. When I die, the word 'Uniatz' will be found written on my heart."

"How about if de goil is selling it, boss?" ventured Mr Uniatz, tiptoeing into the dizzy realms of Theory. "Maybe she's in de racket, too, woikin' for de chemical factory where dey make it."

Simon passed him the whiskey bottle.

"Maybe she is, Hoppy," he said. "It's an idea, anyway. Give yourself some more nourishment while we think it over."

"Didn't you get anything useful out of her?" asked Patricia.

"She held out on me," said the Saint ruefully. "I did my best, but I might have saved myself the trouble. Amazing as it may seem, she wouldn't confide in me. The secrets of her girlish heart are still the secrets of her girlish heart so far as I'm concerned."

Peter clicked his tongue.

"You've met her four times now, and she hasn't confided in you," he said in accents of distress. "You must be losing your touch. They don't usually hold out so long."

"What do you mean by 'they'?" demanded the Saint unblushingly.

"He means your harem candidates," said Patricia. "The wild flowers that droop shyly at you from the hedges as you pass by. This one must be pretty tough if she still hasn't given way to your manly charms."

Simon reached for a cigarette and flicked his thumbnail thoughtfully over a match.

"She's tough, all right," he said. "But I don't know how tough. She'll need all she's got to sit in on this game. She's sitting in, and I'm still wondering whether she really knows what the stakes are. There was one time tonight when I thought we were going to get somewhere, but she closed up again and went home."

"You started to get somewhere, then," said Peter.

The Saint nodded.

"Oh yes, I started. But I didn't finish, so we might just as well forget about it. She knows something, though — I found that out, even if she didn't admit it. But she's going to play her own hand; and so she'll probably get her throat cut, as I was saying. It makes everything very difficult."

He sat up in an access of unruly energy, and his blue eyes went over them with an almost angry light.

"God damn it," he said quietly, "it's a complete and perfect setup — with only the foundation missing. I've worked it all out a dozen times since we talked it over at Anford, and I expect you have, too. We'll run over it again if you like, and get it all in one piece."

"All right," said Peter. "You run over it. We like hearing you listen to yourself."

"Here it is, then. We've got our friend Luker, the arms wangler. He's on a job. In this case he's in on it with a couple of his stooges named Sangore and Fairweather — two highly esteemed gentlemen with complete faith in their own respectability but completely under his thumb for any dirty work he wants to put in. Also vaguely related is Lady Valerie, a sort of spare-time entraоneuse for Fairweather. Okay. On the other side you have well-meaning but not very agile professional pacifists Kennet and Windlay. Somehow or other they dig up inside information about the job Luker is on. This is where their lack of agility shows up. They threaten exposure unless Luker drops it. Okay. Luker has no intention of dropping it. The first move is through Fairweather, to sic Lady Valerie on to Kennet and see if she can seduce him from his irritating ideals. This fails. Lady Valerie is therefore used for the last time to lure Kennet down to Whiteways for a conference, where he meets with a fortunate accident. The coroner, a staunch friend of the aristocracy, is probably persuaded that Kennet was caught in a drunken stupor, and keeps the inquest nicely hamstrung to save scandal. Everything goes off smoothly; and meanwhile Windlay is mysteriously murdered, apparently by some prowling thug. Okay again."

"And so soothing," said Peter. "Especially for the corpses."

"Unfortunately this isn't quite the end of it. The ungodly haven't found Kennet's incriminating evidence. Meanwhile Kennet has been partly overcome by Lady Valerie, at least enough to give her a little information about this evidence — either what it is, or where it is, or something. We now come to Lady Valerie's psychology."

"I thought we should come to that eventually," said Patricia.

Simon threw a cushion at her.

"She's not a bad kid, really," he said. "But she likes having a good time, and she has an almost infantile ability to rationalize anything that helps to get her what she thinks is a good time, to her own entire satisfaction. Nor is she anything like so dumb as she tries to make out. When Kennet meets with a highly suspicious accident and Windlay is just obviously murdered, it wakes her up a bit — possibly with a certain amount of help from my own blundering bluntness. And maybe she even feels a genuine remorse. From the symptoms, I should say she did. She's absent-mindedly gone just a little further than she'd ever have gone if she knew exactly what she was doing, and done something really nasty. She also realizes that it's given her some sort of hold over Fairweather and the others. But she still doesn't want to confide in me. She's paddling her own canoe. And as far as I can see there are only two ways she can be heading. Either she's got some crazy idea of making amends by carrying on Kennet's work on her own, and taking some wild vengeance on the gang that used her for a cat's-paw, or else she simply means to blackmail them. And I may be daft, but it seems to me that her scheme might very well combine the two."