Leslie Charteris - Prelude for War

"Did I say that?" asked Mr Teal.

It was quite a moment for Mr Teal. For the first time that he could remember he stopped the Saint short.

The Saint looked at him in wary surmise. A hundred disjointed ideas rocketed through his head, but they all arrived by devious paths at the same mark. And that was something compared with which a seven-headed dragon pirouetting on its tail would have been a perfectly commonplace phenomenon.

"Do you mean," he said foggily, "that you didn't come here to arrest me?"

"You ought to know enough about the law to know that I can't do anything if these men won't make a complaint."

Simon felt a trifle lightheaded.

"You didn't come here to congratulate me by any chance?"

"No."

"And you didn't come here for breakfast."

"No."

"Well, what the devil did you come for?"

"I thought you might like to tell me something about it," Teal said woodenly. "What is all this about, and what has Luker got to do with it?"

The Saint reached for a cigarette.

"Quite apart from the fact that I don't see why I should be supposed to know, haven't you thought of asking him?"

"I have asked him. He said he'd never seen these men before; and they say they've never heard of him."

The Saint lighted his cigarette. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs under the table.

"Then it certainly does look very mysterious," he said, but his blue eyes were quiet and searching.

Chief Inspector Teal turned his venerable bowler on his blue-serge knees. He had got his spearmint nicely into condition now — a plastic nugget, malleable and yet resistant, still flavorous, crisp without being crumbly, glutinous without adhesion, obedient to the capricious patterning of his mobile tongue working in conjunction with the clockwork reciprocation of his teeth, polymorphous, ductile. It was a great comfort to him. He would have been lost without it. What he had to do was not easy.

"I know," he said. "That's why I came to see you. I thought you might be able to give me a lead."

The Saint stared at him for several moments in a silence of gull-winged eyebrows and wide absorbent eyes, while that cataclysmic statement sank through the diverse layers of his comprehension.

"Well, I will be a cynocephalic mandrill scratching my blue bottom on the ramparts of Timbuctoo," he said finally. "Or am I one already? I thought I'd seen every kind and sample of human nerve in my time, but this is the last immortal syllable. You treat me as a suspicious character; you habitually accuse me of every crime that's committed in England that you're too thickheaded to solve; you threaten me three times a week with penal servitude and bodily violence; you persecute me at every conceivable opportunity; you disturb my slumbers and hound me at my own breakfast table; and then you have the unmitigated gall to sit there, with your great waistcoat full of stomach, and ask me to help you!"

It was a bitter draught for Mr Teal to get past his uvula, but he managed it, even though his gorge threatened to suffocate him. Perhaps it was one of the most prodigious victories of self-discipline that he had ever achieved in his life.

"That's what I want," he said, with a superhuman effort of carelessness that made him look as if he was about to lapse into an apoplectic coma. "Why should we go on fighting each other? We're both really out for the same thing, and this is a case where we could work together and you could save yourself getting into trouble as well. I'll be quite frank with you. I remembered everything you said at Windlay's place, and I made some inquiries on my own responsibility. I've seen a verbatim report of the Kennet inquest, and I've talked with one of the reporters who was there. I agree with you that it was conducted in a very unsatisfactory way. I put it to the chief commissioner that we ought to consider reopening the case. He agreed with me then, but yesterday evening he told me I'd better drop it. I'm pretty sure there's pressure being put on him to leave well alone — the kind of pressure he can't afford to ignore. But I don't like dropping cases. If there's anything fishy about this it ought to come out. Now, you said something to me about the Sons of France, didn't you?"

"I may have mentioned them," Simon admitted cautiously. "But—"

Chief Inspector Teal suddenly opened his baby-blue eyes and they were not bored or comatose or stupid, but unexpectedly clear and penetrating in the round placidity of his face.

"Well, that's why I came to see you. You may have something that puts the whole puzzle together. Bravache and Dumaire are Frenchmen." Mr Teal paused. He fashioned his gum once into the shape of a spindle, and then clamped his teeth destructively down on it. "And I happen to have found out that John Kennet was a member of the Sons of France," he said.

"Kennet was a member of the Sons of France?" Simon repeated. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. His mother was French, and he was brought up with French as a second language. He spoke it perfectly. I told you I'd been making inquiries. I've established the fact that he joined the Sons of France six months ago under the name of Jean de la Paix. Incidentally, he was also a member of the French Communist party." Teal went on watching the Saint searchingly and with a glint of malice. "I thought you'd have known that."

The Saint blew a geometrically faultless smoke ring across the table. His face was tranquilly uncommunicative, relieved from blankness only by a faint inscrutable smile; but behind the mask his brain was running like a dynamo.

"I might have guessed," he said.

"Did you?"

"I'm a good guesser. 'Jean de la Paix,' too — he had a sense of humour, after all. And guts. For a registered member of the French Communist party to join the Sons of France at all was guts, and he must have got further than just joining. That would only be another reason why he had to be cremated."

"What was the first reason?"

Simon looked down at his fingernails.

"You want to know a good deal," he said, and looked up again.

"Of course I do."

"Well, so do I." The Saint thought for a while, and made up his mind. "All right, Claud. You asked for it, and you can have it. For about the first time in my life I'll be perfectly frank with you. It'd be worth while if it only meant that I could get on with my job without having to cope with all your suspicions and persecutions as well as my own troubles. But I don't suppose it'll do any good, because as usual you probably won't believe me… You see, Claud, the fact is that I don't know any more than you do."

Teal's face darkened.

"I didn't come here to waste my time—"

"And I don't want you to waste mine. I told you you wouldn't believe me. But there it is. I don't know any more than you do. The only difference is that not being a policeman I haven't got so many great open spaces in my brain to start with, so I don't need to know so much."

Mr Teal's spearmint, under the systematic massage of his molars, became in turn a sphere, an hourglass and something like a short-handled frying pan.

"Go on," he said lethargically. "Make allowances for my stupidity, and tell me how much I know."

"As you like. Let's start with Comrade Luker. As you know, he is the current top tycoon of the arms racket."

"I suppose so."

"Comrades Fairweather and Sangore are his stooges in a couple of British armaments firms which he controls."

"I don't—"

"Call them what you like, and they're still his stooges. Between them, those three are running a combine that practically constitutes a monopoly of the arms industry in this country. Their only job is manufacturing engines and instruments and gadgets that kill people, and the only way they can make good money is in having a good demand for their products. I shall also ask you to grasp the idea that one customer's money will buy as much champagne and caviar as another's, whoever he wants to kill. But under the laws we suffer from there's nothing criminal in any of that — nothing that you could take any professional interest in. If a man gets drunk and kills somebody with his car, it's your job to put him in jail; but if he organizes the killing of several thousand people they make him an earl, and it's your job to stop the traffic when he wants to cross the street. The technical name for that is civilization. Correct?"