Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

The crushing grasp of Mr Uniatz fingers slackened just sufficiently to allow a saving infiltration of air. The delicately judged blow of the rubber blackjack had deadened the ape-faced man's brain for just long enough to allow the subsequent manoeuvres to take place without stunning him permanently. Now he stared at the Saint with squeezed-out eyes in which there was a pallor of voiceless fear.

"Talk very quietly," said the Saint, in that ghostly intonation which barely travelled a hands breadth beyond the ears of its intended audience. "What was supposed to happen next?"

"I was to take you in there — there's two chaps want to see you."

Simon's glance had already covered the tiny hall. The three doors that opened off it were all closed; the ape-faced man had indicated the centre one.

"Good enough," said the Saint. "Let's carry on as if nothing had happened."

He passed his own automatic to Peter, took away the silenced revolver, spilled the shells out into his palm and dropped them into Hoppy's pocket, then thrust the empty weapon back into the hand of its owner.

"Cover me with it and carry on," he ordered. "When we go in there, leave the door open. And remember this: my friends will be watching you from outside. If you breathe a word or bat an eyelid to let your reception committee know that everything isn't going according to plan, and any bother starts — you'll be the first dead hero of the evening." The Saint's voice was as caressing as velvet, but it was as cold and unsentimental as a polar sea. "Let's go."

He turned his back and sauntered over to the middle door; and the ape-faced man, urged on by a last remembrancing prod from the muzzle of the murderous gun which Mr Uniatz had by that time added to the displayed collection of artillery, lurched helplessly after him.

Simon turned the handle and entered the room with his arms raised. On one side Lady Valerie Woodchester was roughly tied to a chair, and one of the two men there was bending over her with a hand clamped over her mouth. The other man stood on the opposite side of the room with a cigarette loosely held in one hand and a small automatic levelled in the other.

The Saint's eyes rambled interestedly over the scene.

"What ho, souls," he drawled. "And how are all the illegitimate sons of France tonight?".

The man who had been bending over Lady Valerie straightened up. He was slim and sallow, with black hair plastered down over his head until it looked as if it had been waxed. He had quick darting eyes and a sly slinking manner; his movements were abrupt and silent, like those of a lizard. One could imagine him lurking in dark corners for sinister purposes.

The Saint smiled at Lady Valerie as the lizard-like man withdrew his hand and her face became visible. The first expression on her face was a light of joy and relief; and then when she saw that he kept his hands up and saw the ape-faced man follow him in with the silenced revolver screwed into his back, it changed through stark unbelief to hopeless dejection.

"Hullo, darling," he said. "You do have some nice friends, don't you?"

She didn't respond. She sat there and stared at him reproachfully: she seemed to be deeply disappointed in him. Simon realized that there was some excuse for her, but she would have to endure.her unfounded disappointment for a little while longer.

He transferred his smile to the automatic and the cigarette.

"Nice weather we've been having, haven't we?" he murmured, keeping the conversational ball rolling single-handed.

This other man was bigger, and there was an air of conscious arrogance about him. He had the cold, intolerant eyes and haughty moustache of a Prussian guardsman. He gazed back at Simon with fishlike incuriosity and made a gesture with his cigarette at the sallow man.

"Disarm and search him, Dumaire."

"So your name is Dumaire, is it?" said the Saint politely. "May I compliment you on your coiffure? I've never seen floor polish used on the head before. And while this is going on, won't you introduce me to your uncle?"

Dumaire said nothing; he simply proceeded to do what he was told and run through the Saint's pockets. Keys, cigarette case, lighter, money, handkerchief, wallet, fountain pen — he took out the commonplace articles one by one and laid them on a small table in front of the man who appeared to be in charge. While he was waiting for the collection to be assembled the latter answered Simon's question.

"If it is of any interest to you," he said, "I am Major Bravache, a divisional commander of the Sons of France, about whom I think you said something just now."

He spoke English excellently, with only a trace of native accent.

"How perfectly splendid," said the Saint slowly. "But do you know what bad company you're in? This bird behind me, for instance, with the peashooter boring into my backbone, whatever he may have told you, I happen to know that his real name is Sam Pietri and he has done three sentences for robbery with violence."

He felt the harmless gun quiver involuntarily against his spine and chuckled inwardly over the awful anguish that must have been twinging through the tissues of the ape-faced man, not only compelled to be an impotent accomplice in snaring fresh victims into the net of his own downfall, but suffering the aftermath of a maltreated skull as well. Simon would have given much for a glimpse of his guardian's face, but he hoped that it was not betraying anything to the opposition. Fortunately, no one was paying any attention to Pietri. Dumaire, his job done, was leaning against the wall and watching Lady Valerie with reptilian eyes in which the only discernible expression had a brazen lewdness that quite plainly revealed his chief preoccupation; Bravache had simply ignored the Saint's last remarks as if he had not heard them. He was busily turning over the things on the table before him. He gave his most detailed attention to the wallet, and he had hardly started on it when a gleam of triumph flowed into his cold eyes. He held up a scrap of buff paper with a large number printed on it.

"Ah!" he said, with a deep satisfaction that was exaggerated by his slightly foreign handling of words. "The ticket. That is excellent!"

As a matter of fact, it was a ticket in an impromptu sweepstake organized over the week end in Peter Quentin's favourite pub on the outskirts of Anford; but the Saint had known that it was there, and had left it there with the deliberate object of leading the comedy on as far as it would go in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.

He waited to see how far his hope would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester's eyes were like saucers: they looked at first as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing; and then a veiled half-comprehending, half-perplexed expression passed over them which Simon hoped nobody would see. Bravache folded the ticket carefully and put it in his own wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.

"We are very grateful, my dear lady," he said. "You have done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons of France do not forget services. In future you will be under our protection." He paused, smiling, and there was something wolfish about his smile. "Should anything happen to you — should you, for instance, be murdered by one of our enemies — you will be immediately avenged."

An arpeggio of spooky fingers stroked up the Saint's back into the roots of his hair. In spite of Bravache's stilted phrasing, the almost farcical old-fashioned melodrama in which his tongue rolled itself gloatingly around every word, there was something in his harsh voice that was by no means farcical, something which in combination with that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by the unreality of its enunciation. Simon realized for the first time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a certain type of man — a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse with the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possible for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the mentalities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.