Leslie Charteris - Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

LONDON, MAY, 1930

THE SAINT SANG:

" 'Ere," said an arm of the Law. "Not so much noise!"

The Saint stopped, facing round, tall and smiling and debonair.

"Good-evening—or morning—as the case may be," said the Saint politely.

"And what d'you think you're doing?" demanded the Law.

"Riding on a camel in the desert," said the Saint happily.

The Law peered at him suspiciously. But the Saint looked very respectable. The Saint always looked so respectable that he could at any time have walked into an ecclesiastical conference without even being asked for his ticket. Dressed in rags, he could have made a bishop look like two cents at a bad rate of exchange. And in the costume that he had donned for the night's oc­casion his air of virtue was overpowering. His shirtfront was of a pure and beautiful white that should have argued a pure and beautiful soul. His tuxedo, even under the poor illumination of a street lamp, was cut with such a dazzling per­fection, and worn moreover with such a staggering elegance, that no tailor with a pride in his profession could have gazed unmoved upon such a stupendous apotheosis of his art. The Saint, as he stood there, might have been taken for an unem­ployed archangel—if he had remembered to wear his soft black felt a little less rakishly, and to lean a little less rakishly on his gold-mounted stick. As it was, he looked like a modern pugilist, the heir to a dukedom, a successful confidence man, or an advertisement for Wuggo. And the odour of sanctity about him could have been scented a hundred yards up-wind by a man with a severe cold in the head and no sense of smell.

The Law, slightly dazed by its scrutiny, pulled it­self together with a visible effort.

"You can't," said the Law, "go bawling about the streets like that at two o'clock in the morn­ing."

"I wasn't bawling," said the Saint aggrievedly. "I was singing."

"Bawling, I call it," said the Law obstinately.

The Saint took out his cigarette case. It was a very special case; and the Saint was very proud of it, and would as soon have thought of travelling without it as he would have thought of walking down Piccadilly in his pajamas. Into that cigarette case had been concentrated an enthusiastic ingenuity that was typical of the Saint's flair for detail—a flair that had already enabled him to live about twenty-nine years longer than a good many people thought he ought to have. There was much more in that case than met the eye. Much more. But it wasn't in action at that particular moment. The cigarette which the Law was prevailed upon to accept was innocent of deception, as also was the one which the Saint selected for himself.

"Anyway," said the Saint, "wouldn't you bawl, as you call it, if you knew that a man with a name like Heinrich Dussel had recently received into his house an invalid who wasn't ill?''

The Law blinked, bovinely meditative.

"Sounds fishy to me,'' conceded the Law.

"And to me," said the Saint. "And queer fish are my hobby. I'd travel a thousand miles any day to investigate a kipper that was the least bit queer on the kip—and it woudn't be for the first time. There was a smear of bloater paste, once, that fetched me from the Malay Peninsula via Chicago to a very wild bit of Devonshire. . . . But this is more than bloater paste. This is real red herring."

"Are you drunk?" inquired the Law, kindly.

"No," said the Saint. "British Constitution. Truly rural. The Leith police dismisseth us. ... No, I'm not drunk. But I'm thinking of pos­sible accidents. So would you just note that I'm going into that house up there—number 90— perfectly sound and sane? And I shan't stay more than half an hour at the outside—voluntarily. So if I'm not out here again at two-thirty, you can walk right in and demand the body. Au revoir, sweet­heart. ..."

And the Saint smiled beatifically, hitched himself off his gold-mounted stick, adjusted the rakish tilt of his hat, and calmly resumed his stroll and his song, while the Law stared blankly after him.

"Blimey," said the Law, blankly.

But the Saint neither heard nor cared what the Law said. He passed on, swinging his stick, into his adventure.

MEET THE SAINT.

His godfathers and his godmothers, at his baptism, had bestowed upon him the name of Simon Templar; but that coincidence of initials was not the only reason for the nickname by which he was far more widely known. One day, the story of how he came by that nickname may be told: it is a good story, in its way, though it goes back to the days when the Saint was nineteen, and almost as respectable as he looked. But the name had stuck. It was inevitable that it should stick, for obviously it had been destined to him from the beginning. And in the ten years that had followed his second and less godly baptism, he had done his very best to live up to that second name—according to his lights. But you may have heard the story of the very big man whose friends called him Tiny.

He looked very Saintly indeed as he sauntered up Park Lane that night.

Saintly . . . you understand . . . with the capital S. That was how Roger Conway always liked to spell the adjective, and that pleasant conceit may very well be carried on here. There was something about the way Simon wore the name, as there was about the way he wore his clothes, that naturally suggested capital letters in every context.

Of course, he was all wrong. He ought never to have been let loose upon this twentieth century. He was upsetting. Far too often, when he spoke, his voice struck disturbing chords in the mind. When you saw him, you looked, instinctively and exasperatedly, for a sword at his side, a feather in his hat, and spurs at his heels. There was a queer keenness in the chiselling of his tanned face, seen in profile—something that can only be described as a swiftness of line about the nose and lips and chin, a swiftness as well set off by the slick sweep of patent-leather hair as by the brim of a filibustering felt hat—a laughing dancing devil of mischief that was never far from the very clear blue eyes, a magnificently medieval flamboyance of manner, an extraordinary vividness and vital challenge about every movement he made, that too clearly had no place in the organization of the century that was afflicted with him. If he had been anyone else, you would have felt that the organization was likely to make life very difficult for him. But he was Simon Templar, the Saint, and so you could only feel that he was likely to make life very difficult for the organization. Wherefore, as a respectable member of the organization, you were liable to object....

And, in fact, objections had been made in due season—to such effect that, if anything were needed to complete the Saint's own private en­tertainment at that moment, it could have been provided by the reflection that he had no business to be in England at all that night.