Leslie Charteris - Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

After all, if an adventurer couldn't have a sense of humor about the palpitations of the ungodly at his time of life—then he might as well hock his artillery forthwith and blow the proceeds on a permanent wave. In any case, the ungodly would have to see the night through. The ship of which Marius had spoken would be stealing in under cover of dark; and the ungodly, unless they were prepared to heave in their hand, would blinkin' well have to wait for it—dealing with any in­terference meanwhile as best they could.

"That little old watering-place is surely going to hum to-night," figured the Saint.

The taxi pulled in to the curb beside him; and, as he opened the door, he glimpsed a mountain of sleepy-looking flesh sauntering along the opposite pavement. The jaws of the perambulating mountain oscillated rhythmically, to the obvious torment of a portion of the sweetmeat which has made the sapodilla tree God's especial favour to Mr. Wrigley. Chief Inspector Teal seemed to be enjoying his walk ....

"Liverpool Street Station," directed the Saint, and climbed into his cab, vividly appreciating another factor in the equation which was liable to make the algebra of the near future a thing of beauty and a joy for Einstein.

HE HAD PLENTY of time to slaughter a sandwich and smoke a quartet of meditative cigarettes at the station before he caught Sunday's second and last train to Saxmundham, which was the nearest effective railhead for Saltham. He would have had time to call in at the Waldorf for Roger's wire on his way if he had chosen, but he did not choose. Simon Templar had a very finely calibrated judgment in the matter of unnecessary risks. At Liverpool Street he felt pretty safe: in the past he had always worked by car, and he fully expected that all the roads out of London were well picketed, but he was anticipating no special vigilance at the railway stations—except, perhaps, on the Continental departure platform at Victoria. He may have been right or wrong; it is only a matter of history that he made the grade and boarded the 4:35 unchallenged.

It was half-past seven when the train decanted him at Saxmundham; and in the three hours of his journey, having a compartment to himself, he had effected a rejuvenation that would have made Dr. Voronoff's best experiment look like Methuselah before breakfast. He even contrived to brush and batter a genuine jauntiness into his ancient hat; and he swung off the train with his beard and glasses in his pocket, and an absurdly boyish glitter in his eyes.

He had lost nothing by not bothering to collect Roger Conway's telegram, for he knew his man. In the first bar he entered he discovered his lieutenant attached by the mouth to the open end of a large tankard of ale. A moment later, lowering the tankard in order to draw breath, Roger perceived the Saint smiling down at him, and goggled.

"Hold me up, someone," he muttered. "And get ready to shoo the pink elephants away when I start to gibber. . . . And to think I've been complaining that I couldn't see the point of paying seven-pence a pint for brown water with a taste!"

Simon laughed.

"Bear up, old dear," he said cheerfully. "It hasn't come to that yet."

"But how did you get here?"

"Didn't you send for me?" asked the Saint innocently.

"I did not," said Roger. "I looked out the last train, and I knew my message wouldn't reach you in time for you to catch it. I wired you to phone me here, and for the last three hours I've been on the verge of heart failure every time the door opened. I thought Teal must have got after you somehow, and every minute I was expecting the local cop to walk in and invite me outside."

Simon grinned and sank into a chair. A waiter was hovering in the background, and the Saint hailed him and ordered a fresh consignment of ale.

"I suppose you pinched the first car you saw," Roger was saying. "That'll mean another six months on our sentences. But you might have warned me. "

The Saint shook his head.

"As a matter of fact, I never went to the Waldorf. Marius himself put me onto Saltham, and I came right along."

"Good lord—how?"

"He talked, and I listened. It was dead easy."

"At the Ritz?"

Simon nodded. Briefly he ran over the story of the reunion, with its sequel in the bathroom, and the conversation he had overheard; and Conway stared.

"You picked up all that?"

"I did so. . . . That man Marius is the three-star brain of this cockeyed age—I'll say. And by the same token, Roger, you and I are going to have to tune up our gray matters to an extra couple of thousand revs. per if we want to keep Angel Face's tail skid in sight over this course. . . . But what's your end of the story?"

"Three of 'em turned up—one in a police-inspector's uniform. When the bell wasn't an­swered in about thirty seconds they whipped out a jemmy and bust it in. As they marched in, an ambulance pulled into the mews and stopped outside the door. It was a wonderful bit of team work. There were ambulance men in correct uniforms and all. They carried her out on a stretcher, with a sheet over her. All in broad daylight. And slick! It was under five minutes by my watch from the moment they forced the door to the moment when they were all piling into the wagon, and they pulled out before anything like a crowd had collected. They'd doped Sonia, of course . . . the swine ..."

"Gosh!" said the Saint softly. "She's just great—that girl!"

Roger gazed thoughtfully at the pewter can which the waiter had placed before him.

"She is—just great. ..."

"Sweet on her, son?"

Conway raised his eyes.

"Are you?"

The Saint fished out his cigarette case and selected a smoke. He tapped it on his thumbnail abstractedly; and there was a silence. . . .

Then he said quietly: "That ambulance gag is big stuff. Note it down, Roger, for our own use one day. . . . And what's the battlefield like at Saltham?"

"A sizeable house standing in its own grounds on the cliffs, away from the village. They're not much, as cliffs go — not more than about fifty feet around there. There are big iron gates at the end of the drive. The ambulance turned in; and I went right on past without looking round — I guessed they were there for keeps. Then I had to come back here to send you that wire. By the way, there was a bird we've met before in that ambulance outfit — your little friend Hermann. "

Simon stroked his chin.

"I bust his jaw one time, didn't I?"

"Something like that. And he did his best to bust my ribs and stave my head in . "

"It will be pleasant," said the Saint gently, "to meet Hermann again. "

He took a pull at his ale and frowned at the table.

Roger said: "It seems to me that-all we've got to do now is to get on the phone to Claud Eustace and fetch him along. There's Sonia in that house — we couldn't have the gang more red-handed."

"And we troop along to the pen with them, and take our sentences like little heroes?"

"Not necessarily. We could watch the show from a safe distance."

"And Marius?"

"He's stung again."

The Saint sighed.

"Roger, old dear, if you'd got no roof to your mouth, you'd raise your hat every time you hic­coughed," he remarked disparagingly. "Are we going to be content with simply jarring Marius off his trolley and leaving it at that—leaving him to get busy again as soon as he likes? There's no evidence in the wide world to connect him up with Saltham. All that bright scheme of yours would mean would be that his game would be temporarily on the blink. And there's money in it. Big money. We don't know how much, but we'd be safe enough putting it in the seven-figure bracket. D'you think he'd give the gate to all that capital and preliminary carving and prospective gravy just because we'd trodden on his toes?"