Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"The lights, sir."

A new voice jarred into his divided attention, and he realised that it must be the helmsman speaking. He turned over on his elbow and looked out over the bows. The lights of the shore were very close now; and he saw that two new pairs of lights had appeared on the coast ahead, red and very bright, one pair off the port bow and one pair off the starboard. He guessed that they had been set by Vogel's accomplices on shore to guide the Falkenberg between the tricky reefs and shoals to its anchorage.

"Very well." Vogel was answering; and then he was addressing Loretta: "You will forgive me if I send you below, my dear? I fear you might be tempted to try and swim ashore, and you gave us a lot of trouble to find you last time you did that."

"Not with the Saint?"

There was a sudden pleading tremor of fear in her voice which the Saint had never heard there before, and Simon hung over the edge again to see her as Vogel replied.

"Of course, that would be difficult for you. Suppose you go to your own cabin? I will see that you are not locked in any longer than is necessary."

She nodded without speaking, and walked past the steward who had appeared in the doorway. Before she went, Simon had seen the mute embers of that moment's flare of fear in her eyes, and the veiled smirk which had greased through Vogel's reassurance of her told him the rest. Once again he stood before the open strong-room of the Chalfont Castle, twenty fathoms down under the tide, wondering why the death that he was expecting did not come; and all the questions that had been fermenting in his mind since then were answered. He could no longer shut out belief from what his brain had been telling him. He knew; and his bowels turned to water. He knew; and the understanding made his knuckles whiten where they gripped the edge of the roof, and burned in his mind like molten lead as he crushed his eyes for a moment into his arm. He was bowed down with an unutterable humility and pride.

He half rose, with the only thought of following and finding her. She at least must be free, whatever he did with his own liberty…

And then he realised the madness of the idea. He had no knowledge of where her cabin was, and while he was searching for it he was just as likely to open a cabin occupied by some member of the crew — even if no steward or seaman caught sight of him while he was prowling about below decks. And once he was discovered, whatever hope the gods had given him was gone again. Somehow he must still find the strength to wait, though) his muscles ached with the frightful discipline, until he had a chance to take not one trick alone but the whole grand slam.

"Will you unload the gold to-night?"

It was Arnheim's fat throaty voice; and Simon waited breathlessly for the reply. It came.

"Yes — it will be safer. The devil knows what information this man Templar has given to his friends. He is more dangerous than all the detective agencies in the world, and it would be fatal to underrate him. Fortunately we shall need to do nothing more for a long time… It will be a pity to sink the Falkenberg, but I think it will be wise. We can easily fit out a trawler to recover the gold… As for disposing of it, my dear Otto, that will be your business."

"I made the final arrangements before we left Dinard."

"Then we have very little cause for anxiety."

Vogel's voice came from a different quarter; and the Saint treated himself to another cautious glimpse of the interior set. Vogel had taken over the wheel and was standing up to the open glass panel in the forward bay, a fresh cigar clipped between his teeth and his aquiline black-browed face intent and complacent. He pushed forward the throttle levers, and the note of the engines faded with the rush of the water.

Simon glanced forward and saw that they were very near the shore. The granite cliffs loomed blackly over them, and he could see the white line of foam where they met the sea. The lights of a village were dotted up the slope beyond, and to the left and right the pairs of red lights which he had noticed before were now nearly in line. Closer still, another light danced on the water.

So unexpectedly that it made the Saint flatten himself on the roof like a startled hare, a searchlight mounted close to his head sprang into life, flooding the foredeck and the sea ahead with its blazing beam. As they glided on over the black water, the dancing light which he had observed proved to be a lantern standing on one of the thwarts of a dinghy in which a solitary man was leaning over the gunnel fishing for a cork buoy. The helmsman came forward into the drench of light and took the mooring from him with a boathook, making it fast on one of the forward bollards; and the dinghy bumped along the side until the boatman caught the short gangway and hauled himself dexterously on board, while the Falkenberg's engines roared for a moment in reverse. Then the engines stopped, and the searchlight went out again.

"Ah, mon cher Baudier!" Vogel greeted his visitor at the door of the wheelhouse. "Ça va bien? Entrez, entrez— "

He turned to the helmsman.

"Tell Ivaloff to be ready to go down in a quarter of an hour. And tell Calvieri to have a dress ready for me. I shall be along in a few minutes."

"Sofort."

The seaman moved aft along the deck, and Vogel rejoined Baudier and Arnheim in the wheelhouse. And the Saint drew himself up on his toes and fingertips and shot after the helmsman like a great ghostly crab.

Only the Saint's own guardian angel could have said what was in the Saint's mind at that moment. The Saint himself had no very clear idea. And yet he had made one of the wildest and most desperate decisions of his life in an immeasurable fraction of a second — a decision that he probably would not have dared to make if he had stopped to think about it. He hadn't even got the vaguest idea of the intervening details between the first movement and the final result which he had visioned in that microscopical splinter of time. They could be filled in later. The irresistible surge of inspiration had taken all those petty trivialities in its stride, outdistancing logic and coherent planning… Without knowing very clearly why, the Saint found himself spreadeagled on the roof again in front of the unsuspectingly ambulating seaman; and as the man passed underneath him Simon's arm shot out and grasped him by the throat…

Before the cry which the man might have uttered could gain outlet it was choked back into his gullet by the merciless clutch of those steel fingers, and before he could tear the fingers away the Saint's weight had dropped silently on his shoulders and borne him down to the deck. Staring up with shocked and dilated eyes as he fought, the man saw the cold flash of a knife-blade in the dim light; and then the point of the knife pricked him under the chin.

The Saint's fierce whisper sizzled in his ear.

"Wenn du einen Laut von dir gibst, schneide ich dir den Kopf ab."

The man made no sound, having no wish to feel the hot bite of that vicious blade searing through his neck. He lay still; and the Saint slowly released the grip on his throat and used his freed hand to take the automatic from the man's hip pocket. Then he took his knee out of the man's chest.

"Get up."

The man worked himself slowly to his feet, with the muzzle of the gun grinding into his breastbone and the knife still under his eyes.

"Do you want to live to a ripe old age, Fritz?" asked the Saint gently.

The man nodded dumbly, licking his lips. And the Saint's white teeth flashed in a brief and cheerless smile.

"Then you'd better listen carefully to what I'm saying. You're not going to take all of that message to Ivaloff. You're going to take me along, and tell him that Vogel says I'm to go down. That's all. You won't see this gun any more, because it'll be in my pocket; but it'll be quite close enough to hit you. And if you make the slightest attempt to give me away, or speak one word out of your turn, I'll blow the front out of your stomach and let your dinner out for some air. Do you get my drift or shall I say it again?"