Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

Peter Quentin got up and refilled his glass. He sat down again and looked at the Saint seriously.

"And she's the only link we've got with what's going on?" he said.

"The one and only. Kennet and Windlay are dead, and we shouldn't get anything out of Luker and Company unless we beat it out of them, which mightn't be so easy as it sounds. Meanwhile we're tied hand and foot. We're just sitting tight and twiddling our thumbs while she's playing her own fool game. What should we do? Use her for bait and wait until something happens, with the risk of finding her as useful as John Kennet at the end of it? Or start again and try to cut in from another angle?"

"You tell us," said Patricia.

There was a pause in the intermittent glugging which had punctuated the conversation from the corner where Mr Uniatz was marooned with his consoling bottle in the midst of the uncharted wilderness of Thought. Mr Uniatz was no longer clear about why his purely sociable contribution to the powwow should have marooned him there, but in his last conscious moment he had been invited to join in thinking about something, and since then he had been submerged in his lonely struggle. Now, corning to the surface like a diver whose mates have suddenly remembered him and pulled him up, the anguished irregularities of his face dissolved into a radiant beam of heaven-sent inspiration.

"I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."

"Before she takes off what?" asked the Saint foggily.

"Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz proudly, "De stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes." Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. "Chees, boss, why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!"

Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.

And at that instant the telephone bell rang.

The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpectedness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.

Simon picked up the phone.

"Hullo," he said.

"Is that you, Simon darling?" it answered. "This is Valerie."

A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an indefinable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.

"Hullo, darling," he said evenly. "And how are you?"

"I'm all right, thanks… Listen, Simon, you remember that cloakroom ticket I asked you to keep for me?"

Simon drew at his cigarette.

"Of course," he said, without hesitation. "It's quite safe."

"That's good," she said. "You see, I'm afraid I've got to have it back at once. I'm awfully sorry to be such a nuisance, but it's frightfully important. I mean, could you bring it round right away? It's all frightfully thrilling, but I'll tell you all about it when you get here. Can you possibly manage it?"

"Easily," he said. "I was just looking for something useful to do."

"You know where I live, don't you?"

"I should think so. I looked it up in the phone book as soon as I got back to town, and I've just been waiting for an invitation."

"Well, you've got one now. And listen. Nobody must know you're coming to see me. I'll tell you why afterwards."

"No one shall even guess where I've gone," said the Saint, with his eyes on Patricia. "I'll be over in ten minutes."

"Thanks so much, darling," she said. "Do hurry."

"I will."

He laid the phone gently back on its bracket, and stood up. The dance of his blue eyes was as if he had been asleep all the evening and had just become awake. He had no more doubts or problems. All the dammed-up, in-turned energy with which he had been straining was crystallized suddenly into the clean sharp leap of action. He was smiling.

"Did you get that, souls?" he said.

"She wants to see you," said Patricia. "Am I supposed to get excited?"

"She wants more than that," he said. "She wants a cloakroom ticket which she gave me to keep for her — which she never gave me. She wants it at once; and nobody's to know where I've gone. And somebody was listening on the wire all the time to make sure she said all the right things. So I don't see how I can refuse the date." The Saint's smile was dazzlingly seraphic. "I told you something was bound to happen, and it's starting now!"

"Excuse me a minute while I get into my shooting clothes," he said.

He vanished out of the nearest door; but the room had hardly had time to adapt itself to his disappearance when he was back again. The Saint could always make a professional quick-change artist look like an elderly dowager dressing for a state ball, and when he was in a hurry he could do things with clothes that bordered on the miraculous. He came back in a gray lounge suit whose sober hue had no counterpart in the way he wore it, which was with all the peculiarly rakish elegance that was subtly infused into anything he put on. His fresh shift was buttoned and his tie was tied, and he was feeding a fully charged magazine into the butt of a shining Luger.

"You're not really going, are you?" asked Patricia hopelessly.

She knew when she said it that it was a waste of words, and the scapegrace slant of his brows was sufficient answer.

"Of course not, darling," he said. "These are my new pajamas."

"But you're doing just what they want you to do!"

"Maybe. But do they know that I know it? I don't think so. That phone call was as straightforward as a baby's prayer — to the guy who was checking up on it. Only Valerie knows that she never gave me a cloakroom ticket, and she knows I know it. She's on the spot in her own flat, and that was the only way she could tip me off and call for help. Do you want me to stay home and knit?"

Patricia stood up. She kissed him.

"Be careful, boy," she said. "You know I look terrible in black."

Peter Quentin finished his drink and rose. He buttoned his coat with a deep sigh.

"I suppose this is the end of our chance of a night's rest," he said pessimistically. "I ought to have stayed in Anford." He saluted Patricia. "Will you excuse Hoppy and me if we trot along to take care of the dragons while your problem child is striking attitudes in front of the heroine? We don't want anything to happen to him — it would make life so horribly quiet and peaceful."

Simon stopped at the door.

"Just a minute," he said. "There may be policemen and other emissaries of the ungodly prowling around outside. We'd better not take chances. Will you call down to Sam Outrell, Pat, and tell him to meet me in the garage?"

As they rode down in the elevator he felt the springy elation of the moment spreading its intoxication through his muscles. The lucid swiftness of his mind ran on, constructing a clear objective framework of action in which he moved with unhurried precision with each step unerringly laid out a fraction of time before he reached it.

Down in the basement garage Sam Outrell, the janitor, was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened, with a look of placid expectancy on his pleasant bucolic face. He fell in at the Saint's side as Simon walked across to where the Hirondel stood waiting in its private bay.