Leslie Charteris - The Saint and Mr. Teal

She kissed him quickly; and then he was gone, with the cavalier wave of his hand that she knew so well. All the old ageless Saint went with him, that fighting troubadour whom he chose to be, who could always find time to turn aside in an adventure to shape one of those wild satires that came from him with such a biting sincerity. In some way he left her happier for that touch of typical bravado.

Her emotion was not shared by Galbraith Stride,

Something had come into the life of that successful man that he felt curiously impotent to fight against, something that had stricken him with a more savage shock because it was the one thing that he had never prepared himself for. It had the inexorable march of a machine. It left him unable to think clearly, with a sense of physical helplessness as if he had been worn down overnight by a fierce fever, struggling with the foreknowledge of defeat against a kind of paralysis of panic. And that thing was the name of the Saint.

He was a silent man at dinner that night. He knew that Abdul Osman had crushed and beaten him with an ease that seemed fantastically ridiculous, and the knowledge hypnotized him into a sort of horrible nightmare. And yet at the same time he knew that he might still have been fighting, calling on all the resources of guile and duplicity that had brought him to the power that was being stripped from him, if it had not been for the words that had stunned his ears early that afternoon. He was that strange psychological freak, a criminal possessed of an imagination that amounted almost to mania; and when Osman had told him that the Saint was still at large an overstrained bulwark on the borders of his reason seemed to have crashed inwards. He was still fighting for all he could hope to save from the disaster, but it was a dumb stubborn fight without vitality.

He sent for Laura Berwick at nine o'clock. Her slender young body looked particularly beautiful in the black evening gown she was wearing; in some way its cool sweetness was framed in that sombre setting with an effect that was pulse-quickeningly radiant from the contrast. To do him justice, Galbraith Stride felt a momentary twinge of remorse as he saw her.

"My dear, I want you to take a note over to Mr. Osman. It's rather important, and I'd feel relieved if you delivered it yourself."

He had been drinking, but the whisky that reeked on his breath had thickened his voice without making him drunk. It served the purpose of nipping that twinge of remorse in the bud, before he had time to forget his own danger.

"Couldn't one of the crew go?" she asked, in some surprise.

"I'm afraid there are reasons why they can't," he said. "They — er — hum — I may be able to explain later. A matter of business. It's vitally important—"

"But what about Mr. Almido?"

"Mr. Almido," said Stride, "is a fool. Between ourselves, I don't trust him. Some funny things been happening to my accounts lately. No, my dear, you must do this for me. I'd go myself, only I–I'm not feeling very well. You can take the motorboat."

He was staring at her with the fixed and glassy eyes of semi-intoxication — she could see that — but there was something besides alcohol in his stare that frightened her. His excuses for requiring her to go over in person seemed absurd; and yet it seemed equally absurd to imagine that there could be anything serious behind them. She was fond of him, in a purely conventional way — chiefly because he was the only relative she had had since she was six years old. She knew nothing of his business; but in his remotely fussy way he had been kind to her.

"All right — I'll go for you. When do you want it done?"

"At once." He pressed a sealed envelope into her hand, and she felt that his own hand was hot and sticky. "Run along right away, will you?"

"Right-ho," she said; and wondered, as she went to the door, why her own words rang in her ears without a trace of the artificial cheerfulness that she had tried to put into them.

She left him sitting at the table, squinting after her with the same glazed stare; and went up on deck to find Toby Halidom.

"Daddy wants me to go over to the Luxor and deliver a note," she said, and he was naturally perplexed.

"Why shouldn't one of the crew go — or that Dago secretary with the Marcel wave?"

"I don't know, Toby." Out under the stars, the vague impressions she had received in the saloon seemed even more absurd. "He was rather funny about it, but he seemed to want it particularly badly, so I said I'd go."

"Probably suffering from an attack of liver," hazarded Toby heartily. "All the same, he ought to know better than to ask you to pay calls on a reptile like that at this hour of the night. I'd better come with you, old thing — I don't like you to go and see that ugly nigger alone"

It was not Toby Halidom's fault that he had been brought up to that inscrutable system of English thought in which all coloured men are niggers unless they happen also to be county cricketers; but on this occasion at least his apprehensions were destined to be fully justified. They had both met Abdul Osman once before during their stay, and Laura knew that her fiance had shared her instinctive revulsion. She felt relieved that he had spontaneously offered to go with her.

"I'd be glad if you would come, Toby."

Galbraith Stride heard the motorboat chugging away from the side, and listened to it till the sound died away. Then he went over and pressed a bell in the panelling. It was answered by the saturnine Mr. Almido.

"We shall be leaving at ten," he said; and his secretary was pardonably surprised.

"Why, sir, I thought—"

"Never mind what you thought," said Stride thickly. "Tell the captain."

Almido retired; and Stride got up and began to pace the saloon. The die was cast. He had abdicated to Abdul Osman. He had saved his liberty — perhaps he could even save himself from the Saint. The reaction was starting to take hold of him like a powerful drug, spurring him with a febrile exhilaration and scouring an unnatural brightness into the glaze of his eyes. He had no compunction about what he had done. Laura Berwick was not his own flesh and blood — that would have been his only excuse, if he had bothered to make any. The thought of her fate had ceased to trouble him. It counted for nothing beside his own safety. For a brief space he even regretted the feebleness of his surrender — wondered if a card like Laura could not have been played to far better effect…

It was only another twist in the imponderable thread that had begun to weave itself when the boom of the Claudette's dinghy had swung over against Laura Berwick's head that morning; but the twist was a short one. For Fate, masking behind the name which Galbraith Stride feared more than any other name in the world, had taken a full hand in the game that night.

There were two doors into the saloon. One of them opened into a microscopic vestibule, from which a broad companion gave access to the deck and an alleyway led out to other cabins and the crew's quarters forward; the other opened into Stride's own stateroom. In his restless pacing of the saloon, Stride had his back turned to the second door when he heard a sharp swish and thud behind him. He jerked round, raw-nerved and startled; and then he saw what had caused the sound, and his heart missed a beat.

Standing straight out from the polished woodwork of the door was a long thin-bladed knife with a hilt of exquisitely carved ivory, still quivering from the force of the impact that had driven it home.

His lungs seemed to freeze achingly against the walls of his chest, and a parching dryness came into his throat that filled him with a presentiment that if he released the scream which was struggling for outlet just below his wishbone it could only have materialized as a thin, croaking whisper. The hand that dragged the automatic from his pocket was shaking so much that he almost dropped it. The sudden appearance of that quivering knife was uncanny, supernatural. The opposite door had been closed all the time, for he had been pacing towards it when the thing happened; the ports and skylight also were fastened. From the angle at which it had driven into the door it should have flashed past his face, barely missing him as he walked; but he had not seen it.