Leslie Charteris - Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

And then, before Roger could think of an ade­quate retort to such an arrogance, he had lost any audience he might have had. For the Saint was speaking to the man he hated more than anyone else in the world.

"Is that you, Marius, my little lamb?" Genially, almost caressingly, the Saint spoke. "And how's Heinrich? . . . Yes, I thought you'd have heard I was back. I'd have rung you up before, only I've been so busy. As a medical man, I can't call my time my own. Only last night I had an extraordi­nary case. Did Heinrich tell you? . . . Yes, I expected he would. I think he was very struck with my methods. Quiet—er—dazzled, in fact. . . . No, nothing in particular. It just occurred to me to soothe my ears with the sound of your sweet voice. It's such a long time since we had our last heart-to-heart talk. . . . The invalid? . . . Oh, getting on as well as can be expected. She ought to be fit to go back to the Embassy to-morrow. . . . No, not to­day. That dope you used on her seems to have a pretty potent follow-through, and I never send my patients home till they've got a bounce on them that's a free advertisement for the cure. . . . Well, you can remember me to Rudolf. I may drop in at the Ritz and have a cocktail with him before lunch. Bye-bye, Angel Face. ..."

He hung up the receiver.

"Beautiful," he murmured ecstatically. "Too, too beautiful! When it comes to low cunning, I guess that little cameo makes Machiavelli look like Little Red Riding Hood. Angel Face was great—he kept his end up right through the round—but I heard him take the bait. Distinctly. It fairly whis­tled through his epiglottis. . . . D'you get the idea, my Roger?"

"I don't," Conway admitted.

Simon looked at the girl.

"Do you, Sonia?"

She also shook her head; and the Saint laughed and helped himself to another cigarette.

"Marius knows I've got you," he said. "He thinks he knows that you're still laid out by his dope. And he knows that I wouldn't tell the world I've got you—things being as they are. On that reckoning, then, he's got a new lease of life. He's got a day in which to find me and take you away.

And he thinks I haven't realized that—and he's wrong!"

"Very lucid," observed Roger sarcastically. "But I gather he's supposed to find out where we are."

"I've told him."

"How?"

"At this moment, he's finding out my telephone number from the exchange."

"What good will that do him? The exchange won't give him your address."

The Saint grinned.

"Roger," he remarked dispassionately, "you have fully half as much brain as a small boll-weevil. A very small boll-weevil. Your genius for intrigue would probably make you one of the most successful glue-boilers that ever lived."

"Possibly. But if you'd condescend to ex­plain—"

"But it's so easy!" cried the Saint. "I had to do it tactfully, of course. I couldn't say anything that would let him smell the hook. Thanks to our recent encounter, he knows we're not solid bone from the gargle upwards; and if I'd dropped a truckload of bricks on his Waukeezis, he'd've stopped and thought for a long time before he picked one up. But I didn't. I only dropped that one little bricklet—just big enough for him to feel the im­pact, and just small enough for him to be able to believe I hadn't seen it go. And Angel Face is so clever. . . . What d'you think he's doing now?"

"Boiling glue," suggested Roger.

"He's got his whole general staff skidding through the telephone directory like so many hun­gry stockbrokers humming down the latest Wall Street prices during a slump. The exchange will have told him that the call didn't come from a public call box, and that alone will have made him shift his ears back two inches. The only other thing that could put salt horse in his soufflé would be if the call turned out to have been put through from a hotel or a restaurant; but he'd have to take his chance on that. And he'd know there was a shade of odds in his favour. No, Roger—you can bet your last set of Aertex that the entire personnel of the ungodly is at this moment engaged in whiffling through every telephone number in the book as they've never whiffled before; and in anything from one to thirty minutes from now, according to how they split up the comic annuaire between them, one of them will be letting out a shrill squawk of triumph and starting to improvise a carol about 7, Upper Berkeley Mews."

"And how does that help us?" asked Roger.

"Like this," said the Saint, and proceeded to ex­plain thus and thus.

TO WALK from Upper Berkeley Mews to the Ritz Hotel should ordinarily have taken a man with the Saint's stride and the Saint's energy about four minutes. Simon Templar in motion, his friends used to say, was the most violent man that ever fumed through London; all his physical movements were made as if they were tremendously important. Buccaneer he was in fact, and buccaneer of life he always looked — most of all when he strode through London on his strange errands, with his incredibly vivid stride, and a piratical anachronism of a hat canted cavalierly aslant over the face of a fighting troubadour.

But there was nothing of that about the aged graybeard who emerged inconspicuously from a converted garage in Upper Berkeley Mews at half-past eleven that Sunday morning. He did not look as if he had ever been anything in the least like a buccaneer, even fifty years ago; and, if in those decorously wild young days he had once cherished lawless aspirations, he must long since have decently buried all such disturbing thoughts. He walked very slowly, almost apologetically, as if he doubted his own right to be at large; and when he came to Piccadilly he stopped at the edge of the sidewalk and blinked miserably through his dark glasses at the scanty traffic, looking so forlorn and helpless that a plain-clothes man who had been searching for him for hours was moved to offer to help him across the road—an offer which was accepted with plaintive gratitude, and acknowledged with pathetic effusiveness. So an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department did his day's good deed; and the pottering patri­arch shuffled into the Green Park by the gate at the side of the Ritz Hotel, found a seat in the shade, sat there, folded his arms, and presently ap­peared to sleep. ...

He slept for an hour; and then he climbed stiffly to his feet and shambled out of the park by the way he had entered it, turning under the shadow of the Ritz. He pushed through the revolving doors with­out hesitation; and it says much for the utter re­spectability of his antique appearance that the flunkey who met him within made no attempt to eject him, but greeted him deferentially, hoping that he would prove to be a millionaire, and certain that he could not turn out to be less than an earl.

"I wish to see Prince Rudolf," said the Saint; and he said it in such a way that the lackey almost grovelled.

"What name, sir?"

"You may send up my card."

The Saint fumbled in his waistcoat pocket; he had a very fine selection of visiting cards, and the ones he had brought with him on this expedition bore the name of Lord Craithness. On the back of one, he wrote: "Maidenhead, June 28."

It was the day on which he had last seen the prince—the day on which Norman Kent had died. "Will you take a seat, your lordship?" His lordship would take a seat. And he waited there only five minutes, a grave and patient old aristocrat, before the man returned to say that the prince would see him—as Simon had known he would say.

It was a perfect little character study, that per­formance—the Saint's slow and sober progress down the first-floor corridor, his entrance into the prince's suite, the austere dignity of his poise in the moment that he waited for the servant to announce him.