Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"No! No!"

"My dear Loretta!"

He had straightened up, was looking down at her with his hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She became aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from a great distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs like a deliriously wielded hammer, that there must have been a wild stupidity in her gaze. And she realised at the same time that the winch had stopped again.

"Why have you done that?" she gasped.

"Done what?"

She was shaking his arm unconsciously.

"Stopped bringing them up."

"My dear girl!" His tone was bland and patronising. "That is the normal process. When a man has been working for three quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been, his blood becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up quickly and the pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas would form bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is drawn. He would get a painful attack of diver's paralysis. The pressure has to be relieved gradually — there is a regular timetable for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They will rest there for five minutes; then for ten minutes at twenty feet; then for fifteen minutes—"

She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she was too sure of her knowledge to care.

"That's not all you were doing," she said.

"What else?"

"You were going to take one of those airlines off the pump."

"My dear—"

"Weren't you?"

He looked at her impassively, as if he was playing with the possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their probable effect on her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.

"Oh, I know. You don't need to lie. You were going to kill him."

A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of passionless calculating cruelty which she had seen before, passed over his face.

"And if I was? How deeply will his death hurt you?"

"I should be hurt in a way you couldn't understand."

He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling feeling that he was not sane — that he was giving rein to the solitary sadistic megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing with her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her agony. Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found them devouring her with a weird rigidity that struck her cold. She found herself speaking disjointedly, breathlessly again, trying to drown the new horror in a babble of words that she would never be able to utter unless she let them pour blindly out.

"I know why he went down. I know why he opened that strong-room for you. He wouldn't have done that to save his life — not his own life. He wouldn't have believed you. He tried to tell me that that was why he was going to do it, but couldn't make me believe it. He knew you meant to kill him as soon as it was done. He wasn't afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered him something that he could believe. You made him do it for me!"

"Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes the perfect gentle knight, dying to save a lady's honour—"

"Yes. I told you that you wouldn't understand."

He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath that could not have been called a laugh.

"You little fool! He never did anything of the kind."

Then she remembered.

"No. But I told him that I should like to live. He did it to save my life."

"The perfect knight again!"

"Something that you could never understand. I know now. That's the truth, isn't it? You made that bargain with him. My life against his — and a little work. Didn't you?"

He sighed.

"It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical chivalry its chance," he said.

The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks. She felt a disgust that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn since she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth imperturbability of his face was no longer the veneer of impenetrable self-possession — it was the fixed grimace of a demon gloating over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes…

"He never had any right to bargain for me," she said, and tried not to let her voice tremble. "I didn't ask him for any sacrifice — I wouldn't take any. I'm here, and I can make my own bargain. The Saint's done all you wanted him to. Why not let him go?"

"To come back presently and interfere with me again?"

"You could make it a condition that he said nothing — that he forgot everything he knew. He'd keep his word."

"Of course — the perfect knight… How ridiculous you are!"

"Did you always think that?"

He stopped short, with his head on one side. Then his cold reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.

"You know what I think of you, my dear. I told you, once. You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me with your beauty, but you would have given me nothing. And yet for you I took risks — I placed myself in fantastic danger — I gambled everything — to keep you beside me and see how treacherous you could be. But!" — his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a grasp so brutal that she almost cried out — "I had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you would make amends for it later."

He dragged her up against him and ravished her mouth, briefly, cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death until he thrust her away.

"Now," he said, "you are not in a position to make bargains."

He stooped over the air-line again. She tore at his hand, and he stood up.

"If you are going to be a nuisance," he said in his supercilious expiring voice, "I shall have you taken away."

"You can't do it!" she panted. "You haven't everything you want yet. If you kill him, you could never have it."

"I have you."

"Only as a prisoner. You can do what you like with me, I suppose. What you want, you can take by force. If that's all you want—"

"It will be enough."

"But I could give…"

"What?"

He was staring at her, seized with a new stillness. There was a thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the high glaze on his cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes squinted slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy hands gripped her shoulders.

"What?" he repeated.

She could not look at him, or her courage would not be enough. Already she felt denied, shuddering at the dank chill of his touch. She closed her eyes.

"If you let him go I will stay with you willingly — I will be to you anything that you like."

Altogether they took over forty minutes to come up — nearly as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a wearisome business going through the gradual decompression, hanging suspended in the green void through the lengthening pauses, rising a little further and halting for another interregnum of blank inactivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long submersion other than a growing fatigue, which had become almost overpowering in the last ten minutes when they had been breaking through the glass dome above the stairway. He had never realised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome with every smallest movement could eat up so much strength; fit and strong as he was, he had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in all his muscles which made the exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the millions which he had uncovered down there for a cigarette, but even that solace was unattainable.

He realised at the same time that he was lucky to be able to experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open door of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work into the microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the quick blotting out of all sensation. He did not know exactly how it would come, but he believed that it would be swift and certain. He had done all that Vogel required of him; and, beyond that, he survived only as a potential menace, to be logically obliterated as soon as possible, before he could do any further damage. Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark, with none of the drunken exaltation of battle to give it a persuasive glory; but that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.