Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

He said lightly: "That'll be fun for you, won't it, Valerie?"

Bravache looked back at him, and again his eyes were cold and fishy.

"You have been attempting to discover the secrets of the Sons of France in order to betray them to our enemies," he said. "The penalty for that, as you know, is death."

"You must have been reading a book," said the Saint admiringly. "Or was that Luker's idea?"

The vulpine twist that was meant to be a smile remained on the other man's thin lips.

"I am acquainted with Mr Luker only as a sympathizer and supporter of our ideals to whom I have the honour to be attached as personal aide," he replied. "Your crime has been committed against an organization of patriots known as the Sons of France, of which I am an officer. You are now the prisoner of the Sons of France. We have been informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary employed by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon and betray our organization. Of that I have sufficient proof." He tapped the pocket where he had replaced his wallet with the sweepstake ticket in it. "It also appears that you have threatened Lady Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore if you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her."

Simon's arms were beginning to ache and stiffen from being held up so long. But inside he felt timelessly relaxed, and his mind was a cold pattern of crystalline understanding.

"You mean," he said unemotionally, "that the idea is to kill both of us, and arrange it so that you can try to spread the story that I murdered Lady Valerie and that the Sons of France killed me to avenge her."

"I am sure that the theory will find wide acceptance," answered Bravache complacently. "Lady Valerie is young and beautiful, whereas you are a notorious criminal. I think that a great many people will applaud our action, and that even the British police themselves will feel a secret relief which will tend to handicap their inquiries."

The Saint glanced at Lady Valerie. Her face had been blank with stupefaction; now it was drawn and frightened. Her big brown eyes were fixed on him in mute and hypnotized entreaty.

"I told you you had charming friends, darling," Simon remarked.

He studied Bravache with cold-blooded interest. He felt that in the space of a few minutes he had come to know the man intimately, that he could take his soul apart and lay out all its components. How much of what Bravache had said was genuine fanaticism, or genuine self-deception, however wilful, he could not judge; in that kind of neurotic, the blend of idealism and conscienceless rationalization became so homogeneous that it was practically impossible to draw a sharp cleavage. But he was not so much interested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mould. Now he was finding the imprint of the same die on a Frenchman, the chilling prototypical hallmark of the breed from which secret police and authorized persecutors are recruited; and it gave him a grimmer measure of the thing he had set out to fight than anything else hitherto had done. If the Sons of France had progressed far enough to develop officers like Major Bravache, the wheels must be turning with nightmare speed…

"It all sounds very neat and jolly, my dear Major Cochon," he admitted. "Do we start right away?"

"I think we had better do so," said Bravache, still smiling with a face of marble. "We have already wasted enough time." He turned his head. "Dumaire, you know what to do. We will leave you to do it." He looked at the Saint again, with his lips drawn back from his white even teeth. "You, Mr Templar, will accompany Pietri and myself. If you resist or try to obstruct us you will be shot at once. I advise you to come quietly. I am hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately. Besides" — the gleam of the white teeth was feline — "as a gentleman, you will not wish to deprive me of the opportunity to answer some of your remarks which I have not had time to deal with here."

The Saint smiled.

"By no manner of means," he said. "Only I should rather like to take charge of the interview myself at this point — if you don't mind."

He stepped aside and backwards, and took hold of Pietri by the ear. The movement was so improbable and unexpected that it was completed before either Bravache or Dumaire could reorient their wits sufficiently to do anything about it. And by that time Pietri was securely held, like a writhing urchin in the grip of an old-fashioned schoolmarm, so that his body was between the Saint and Bravache, who was still trying to make up his mind whether to grab for the automatic which he had confidently left lying on the table a yard away.

Bravache's poise broke for a moment.

"Use your gun, you fool!" he thundered.

"He can't," said the Saint. "You tell them why, Sam."

An extra turn on the piece of gristle he was holding made his victim squeak like a mouse.

"There's nothing in it," wailed Pietri, with the revolver quivering futilely in his grasp. "They caught me outside — him and two other fellows—"

Bravache started to move then, and Simon's voice ripped out like a lash.

"I wouldn't," he said. "Really I wouldn't. It's dangerous."

And as he spoke Peter and Hoppy came through the doorway.

Bravache stood very still. His face was cold and unmoved, but the veins on the backs of his clenched hands stood out in knotty blue cords. Dumaire, caught with one hand at the edge of his coat pocket, prudently let it fall back to his side. He flattened himself against the wall like a cornered rat, with his shoulders hunched up to the jaw level of his small ebony-capped head.

Simon released Pietri and strolled over to pick up Bravache's automatic and retrieve his cigarette case and lighter from among his strewn belongings on the table. With a cigarette between his lips and the lighter wick burning steadily, he looked at Bravache with cerulean mockery in his eyes.

"I'm hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to. the certainty of death immediately," he said in a voice of satin. "Go on, Major, I don't want anything to interrupt our little chat."

The chat appeared to have been interrupted already so far as Major Bravache was concerned. At any rate, he seemed disinclined to accept the Saint's invitation to proceed with his discourse. Or else the founts of eloquence had dried up within him. His lips closed down over his teeth until there was only a straight line to show where his mouth had been.

The Saint left him with a quizzically regretful shrug and turned to untie Lady Valerie. She stood up and stretched herself, rather like a cat by the fire, and rubbed her chafed wrists. Then she went over to the table where her bag was, in search of the ineluctable restoratives of feminine sangfroid.

"You gave me some bad moments," she said, with an attempted nonchalance in which he could still see the signs of strain like carefully darned edges on a poor man's cuffs. "For a long time I was thinking you'd let me down, but of course I ought to have remembered that you never let anyone down."

"What happened?" he asked.

She appeared from behind a card-sized mirror to point with the scarlet tip of a lipstick.

"He rang the bell and said you'd sent him round with something special to give me. I thought it was a bit funny, since we'd only said good-bye a little while ago, and he was a rather funny-looking person, but after all I thought a lot of funny things must go on in this life of crime, and I was quite intrigued. I mean, I just didn't think enough about how funny it was. So I started to let him in, and then these other two followed him in very quickly and there wasn't anything I could do. They tied me up and searched everywhere. This one was very nasty — he thought I might have the ticket on me, and he didn't miss anything."