Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On

The car threaded its way more slowly through the clotted congestion of trucks, omnibuses, vans, and drays with which the King's Road is permanently constipated, and turned off abruptly into a narrow side street composed of cottage hovels with freshly painted and utterly dilapidated fronts in approximately equal proportions. It was one of those Chelsea backwaters which are undergoing a gloomy degradation from honest slumdom to synthetic Bohemianism, and the external symptoms of its decay gave it an air of almost pathetic indecision, like a suburban bank manager on a spree in the high spots, who is trying to make up his mind whether to be thoroughly folksy or very dignified, but who is quite certain that he is as sober and important as any of his co-revellers. But in spite of this uninviting aspect, it contained a comfortable studio which the Saint had found useful before; and Simon roused himself cheerfully to open the door beside him as the car stopped.

"I think it's a case for the wheel-chair and blanket," he said, after a judicial survey of Sunny Jim.

The transportation of an unconscious captive across a London pavement is not quite such an easy and automatic affair as the credulous reader of fiction may have been deluded to believe; but Simon Templar had had such problems to solve before. On one of the rare occasions on which Mr. Uniatz did not find it necessary to delay the proceedings with unnecessary questions, he hopped intelligently out of the car and opened the door of the studio with a key which the Saint threw at him. After a brief absence, he returned with an invalid chair. Simon took the folded blanket from the seat, and between them they wrapped the limp figure of Sunny Jim Fasson tenderly up in it — so tenderly that there was not enough of him left protruding for any stray passer-by to recognise. In this woolly cocoon they carried him to the chair, and in the chair wheeled him up the steps and into the house, with all the hushed solicitude of two expectant nephews handling a rich and moribund uncle. And, really, that was all about it.

"There is beer in the pantry," said the Saint, subsiding into a chair in the studio. "But don't let Hoppy see it, or I never shall. Hoppy, you get a sponge of cold water and see if you can bring the patient round."

"He does wake up, once," said Mr. Uniatz reminiscently. "In de car. But I club him wit' de end of my Betsy and he goes to sleep again."

Simon gazed after him resignedly, and sipped the glass of Carlsberg which Patricia brought to him. A sense of tact and diplomacy could well be added to the other virtues in which Mr. Uniatz was so unfortunately deficient. Hoping to extract information from a man by presenting oneself to him as his saviour and honorary guardian angel, one endeavours to calm the aching brain. One tends the wounds. One murmurs consolation and soothing comfort. One does not, intelligently, greet him on his first return to consciousness by clubbing him with the blunt end of a Betsy. It rather ruled out the potentialities of guile and cunning; but the Saint was equally prepared for the alternative.

He finished his cigarette at leisure while Mr. Uniatz applied his belated ministrations; and presently an inaugural groan from the invalid chair brought him up to take over the management of the interview.

"Welcome, stranger," he said genially.

Sunny Jim Fasson did not seem happy. It is not overstimulating for any man with less solid bone in his head than a Mr. Uniatz to first have his skull grazed by a bullet, and then at the first sign of recovery from that ordeal to be slugged over the ear with a gun-butt; and certainly much of the sunshine from which Sunny Jim had once taken his nickname was missing from his countenance. With the damp traces of Hoppy's first-aid practice trickling down his nose and chin, he looked more like a picture of November Day than one of Hail, Smiling Morn .

It was perhaps discouraging that the first person he saw when he blinked open his eyes was Hoppy Uniatz. He stared at him hazily for a moment, while his memory worked painfully back to its last association with that homely face; and then, remembering all, he half rose from the chair and lashed out with his fist. That also was discouraging, for Mr. Uniatz had won his scars in a vocation where the various arts of violence are systematised to the ultimate degree: he hopped aside from the blow with an agility that gave an unexpected meaning to his name, and in another split second he had caught Sunny Jim's wrist and twisted it firmly up behind his back.

He looked round at the Saint with a beam of justifiable pride, like a puppy that has performed its latest trick. If he had had a tail, he would have wagged it.

"Okay, boss?" he queried. "Or do I give him de heat?"

"That remains to be seen," said the Saint imperturbably. He picked up the sponge and weighed it meditatively in his hand. "Is your brain working again, Sunny, or would you like another refresher?"

Fasson glowered at him sullenly, with a hint of fear in his eyes.

"What do you want?" he snarled.

"Personally, I only want a little talk." Simon weighed the sponge again, and dropped it back in the basin. "But Hoppy seems to have other ideas. By the way, have you met Hoppy? This is Mr. Uniatz, Jim — a one hundred per cent. American from Poland."

"I know him," said Fasson viciously. "He hit me over the head with his gun."

"So he tells me," agreed the Saint, with some regret. "Otherwise this little chat of ours might have been much more amicable. But he's quite a tough guy in his way, is Hoppy; and he's got a kind of natural habit of hitting people with his gun — either with one end or the other. Do you know what he means when he talks about giving you the heat?"

Sunny Jim did not answer. Studying that suspicious surly face from which all the artificial sunshine had been removed, Simon realised that the friendly conversation which he had had in mind at the beginning would have wanted a lot of organising, even without Hoppy's intervening indiscretion.

"Well, he might mean one of two things, Sunny. He might mean taking you for a ride — ferrying you out to some nice secluded spot and dropping you in a ditch with a tummy-full of liver pills. Or he might mean just making himself sort of unpleasant — twisting your arm off, or burning your feet, or some jolly little romp like that. I never know, with Hoppy. He gets such fascinating ideas. Only the other day, he got hold of a fellow he didn't care for and tied him out on an iron bedstead and burnt candles under the springs — the bloke was awfully annoyed about it."

"Who are you?" rasped Fasson shakily.

The Saint smiled.

"Templar is the name, dear old bird. Simon Templar. Of course, there are all sorts of funny rumours about my having another name — people seem to think I'm some sort of desperado called… let me see, what is it?"

The fear in Sunny Jim's eyes brightened into a sudden spark of panic.

"I know who you are," he said. "You're the Saint!"

Simon raised his eyebrows innocently.

"The very name I was trying to remember. People think—"

"You're the High Fence!"

Simon shook his head.

"Oh, no. You're wrong about that."

"You're the swine who tried to shoot me just now."

"Wrong again, brother. When I try to shoot people, they don't usually have a chance to be rude to me afterwards. But don't let's talk about unpleasant things like that." The Saint flipped out his cigarette-case and put a smoke between his lips. "Let's be friendly as long as we can. I didn't shoot you, but I happened into your place just after the shooting. I sort of felt that you couldn't be feeling too happy about the way things were going, so I shifted you out of there. But I still think we ought to have a talk."