Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

"I can prove—"

"You can't. You can't prove anything, except your own daftness. You're doing that now. You ask me what's happened to Sunny Jim's body, with the idea that I must have done some thing with it. But if you can't produce this body, how d'you know it ever was a body? How d'you know it didn't get up and walk out while you were away? How d'you know any crime's been committed at all?" The Saint's lean forefinger shot out and tapped the detective peremptorily on the waistcoat, just above his watch-chain. "You're going to make a prize idiot of yourself again, Claud, if you aren't very careful; and one of these days I shall be very angry with you. I put up with the hell of a lot of persecution from you—"

"Will you stop that?" barked Mr. Teal, jerking his tummy hysterically back from the prodding finger.

The Saint smiled.

"I am stopping it, dear old pumpkin," he pointed out. "I've just told you that my patience is all wore out. I'm not taking any more. Now you go ahead and think out your move. Do you take a chance on running me in for murdering a bloke that nobody can prove was murdered, and stealing a corpse that nobody can prove is a corpse — or do you 'phone for your photographers and finger-print fakers and leave me out of it?"

Glowering at him in a supercharged silence that strained against his ribs, Mr. Teal thought of all the things he would have liked to do, and realised that he could do none of them. He was tied up in a knot which there was no visible way of unravelling. He had seen similar knots wound round him too often to cherish any illusions on that score — had gorged his spleen too often on the maddeningly confident challenges of that debonair picaroon to hope that any amount of thought could make this one more digestible.

It was air-tight and water-tight. It was as smooth as the Saint's languid tantalising voice. It located the one unanswerable loophole in the situation and strolled through it with as much room to spare as an ant going through the Arc de Triomphe. It was exactly the sort of thing that the Saint could always be relied upon to do.

The knowledge soaked down into Mr. Teal's interior like a dose of molten lead. The ancient duel was embarking upon the umpteenth round of a series which seemed capable of going on into eternity; and the prospect seemed as hopeless as it had always seemed. If Mr. Teal had any formulated idea of hell, it was something exactly like that — an endless succession of insoluble riddles that he had to try to solve, while the Saint's impudent forefinger and the Assistant Commissioner's disparaging sniff worked in alternate relays to goad his thoughts away from the last relics of coherence. And there were moments when he wondered if he had already died without knowing it, and was already paying for his long-forgotten sins.

"You can go, for the present," he said smoulderingly. "I'll find you again when I want you."

"I'm afraid you will," said the Saint sadly, and adjusted the brim of his hat to the correct piratical angle. "Well, I'll be seein' ya, Claud Eustace…" He turned his vague, unspeakably mischievous smile on to Junior Inspector Pryke, who had been standing sulkily mute since he was last noticed. "And you too, Sweet Pea," he said hopefully.

Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal watched his departure with malignant gloom. It was discouragingly reminiscent of too many other Saintly exits that Mr. Teal had witnessed, and he had a very apathetic interest in the flashlight photography and finger-print dusting which he had to superintend during the next hour or two.

For those records were made only at the dictation of a system in which Mr. Teal was too congenitally rut-sunk to question. There was a fire escape within easy reach of the bathroom window which had more to tell than any number of photographs of an empty chair from which an unproven corpse had disappeared.

Sunny Jim Fasson had been shot at by somebody who had opened the door of the flatlet while Mr. Teal was interrogating him, the same somebody who had found means of silencing Johnny Anworth on the verge of an identically similar squeak; after which Fasson had vanished off the face of the earth. And Teal had a seething conviction that the only living man who knew every secret of what had happened was walking free in the Saint's custom-built shoes.

The Assistant Commissioner was very polite. "But it has possibly failed to occur to you," he commented, "that this is the sort of thing news editors pray for."

"If you remember, sir," Pryke put in smugly, "I was against the idea from the first."

"Quite," said the Commissioner. "Quite." He was a man who had won his appointment largely on the qualification of a distinguished career of pig-sticking and polo-playing with the Indian Army, and he was inclined to sympathise with the officer whom he regarded as a pukka sahib, like himself. "But you went with Mr. Teal, and you may know why Templar was not at least arrested on suspicion."

"On suspicion of what?" demanded Teal wildly. "The worst you could prove is that he abetted Fasson's escape; and that means nothing, because Fasson hadn't even been arrested."

Pryke nibbled his thumb-nail.

"I believe that if we could account for the Saint, the rest of the mystery would be settled," he said.

"Mr. Teal has been trying to account for the Saint for several years," the Assistant Commissioner reminded him acrimoniously.

What Mr. Teal wanted to say would have reduced Scotland Yard to a small pool of steaming lava.

Simon Templar sauntered around the corners of a couple of blocks, and presently waited by the kerb while a big grey saloon cruised slowly up towards him. As it came level, he stepped neatly on to the running-board, opened the nearest door, and sank into the seat beside the driver. As if the upholstery on which he deposited his weight had had some direct connection with the accelerator, the car picked up speed again and shot away into the traffic with its engine purring so smoothly that the leap of the speedometer needle seemed an absurd exaggeration.

With her small deft hands on the steering wheel nosing a way through the traffic stream where no one else but the Saint himself would have seen a way visible, Patricia Holm took her eyes momentarily from the road to glance at him helplessly.

"What on earth," she inquired, "are we playing at?"

The Saint chuckled.

"Is the game puzzling you, old darling?"

"It's doing its best." She took his cigarette away from be tween his fingers while she thrust the murmuring grey car under the snout of a speeding lorry with the other hand. "You come down this way to see Fasson about some diamonds. You and Hoppy go in to see him. After a while Hoppy comes out with a body; and a long time after that you come out yourself, looking as if you'd just heard the funniest story of your life. Naturally I'm beginning to wonder what we're playing at."

Simon took out his cigarette-case and replaced his stolen smoke.

"I suppose you aren't so wide of the mark, with the funny story angle," he admitted. "But I thought Hoppy would have put you on the trail."

He slewed round to cock an eyebrow at the passenger who rode in the back seat; but the passenger only gazed back at him with troubled blankness and said: "I dunno what de game is, neider, boss."

Hoppy Uniatz had never been really beautiful, even as a child, and the various contacts which his face had had with blunt instruments since then had not improved it. But it has sometimes been known for such faces to be lighted with a radiance of spirituality and intellect in which their battered irregularity of contour is easily forgotten.

The physiognomy of Mr. Uniatz was illuminated by no such light. Reluctant as Simon Templar always was to disparage such a faithful friend, he could never honestly claim for Mr. Uniatz any of those intellectual qualities which might have redeemed his other failings. A man of almost miraculous agility on the draw, of simple and unquestioning loyalties, of heroic appetite, and of a tank-like capacity for absorbing incredible quantities of every conceivable blend of alcohol — yes, Mr. Uniatz possessed all those virtues. But a strenuous pursuit of most of the minor rackets of the Bowery had never left him time to develop the higher faculties of that curious organisation of reactions which can only apologetically be called his brain. Simon Templar perceived that Mr. Uniatz could not have enlightened anybody. He was in painful search of enlightenment himself.