Leslie Charteris - The Saint Closes the Case

"What do you mean?" she pleaded.

The light in Norman Kent's eyes had in it something like a magnificent laughter.

"We're all fanatics," he said. "And perhaps I'm the most fanatical of us all. . . . Do you remember, Pat, how it was I who first said that Simon was a man born with the sound of trumpets in his ears? . . . That was the truest thing I ever said. And he'll go on in the sound of the trumpet. I know, be­cause to-day I heard the trumpet myself. . . . God bless you, Pat."

Before she knew what was happening, he had bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he walked quickly to the door, and it was closing behind him when she found her voice. She had been left with no idea of what he meant by half the things he had said, and she could not let him go so mysteriously.

She called him—an imperative Patricia.

"Norman!"

He was back in a moment, almost before she had spoken his name. Something had changed in his face.

His finger signed her to silence.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"The last battle," said Norman Kent quietly. "Only a little sooner than we expected. Take this!"

He jerked back the jacket of a small automatic, and thrust it into her hands. An instant later he was rapidly loading a larger gun which he took from his hip pocket.

Then he opened the window noiselessly, and looked out. He beckoned her over. The Hirondel stood waiting on the drive, less than a dozen yards away. He pointed.

"Hide behind the curtains," he ordered. "When you hear three shots in quick succession, it's your cue to run for the car. Shoot down anyone who tries to stop you."

"But where are you going?"

"To collect the troops." He laughed soundlessly. "Good­bye, dear!"

He put his hand to his lips, and was gone, closing the door softly behind him.

It was when he had left the room for the first time that he had heard, through the open door of the sitting-room, the terse command, "Put up your hands!" in a voice that was certainly neither Roger's nor Simon's. Now he stood still for a moment outside Patricia's door, listening, and heard the in­imitably cheerful accents of Simon Templar in a tight corner.

"You're welcome—as the actress said to the bishop on a particularly auspicious occasion. But why haven't you brought Angel Face with you, sweetheart?"

Norman Kent heard the last sentence as he was opening the door of the kitchen.

He passed through the kitchen and opened another door. A flight of steps showed before him in the light which he switched on. He went down, and a third door faced him—a ponderous door of three-inch oak, secured by two heavy bars of iron. He lifted the bars and went in, closing that third door behind him as carefully as he had closed the first two. The three doors between them should be enough to deaden any sound. . . .

Vargan was sitting huddled up in a chair, scribbling with a stump of pencil in a tattered notebook.

He raised his head at the sound of Norman's entrance. His white hair was dishevelled, and his stained and shabby clothes hung loosely on his bones. The eyes seemed the only vital things in a lined face like a creased old parchment, eyes with the full fire of his madness stirring in them like the pale flick­ering flame that simmers over the crust of an awakening volcano.

Norman felt a stab of absurd pity for this pitifully crazy figure. And yet he knew that his business was not with the man, but with the madness of the man—the madness that could, and would, let loose upon the world a greater horror than anything that the murderous madness of other men had not conceived.

And the face of Norman Kent was like a face graven in dark stone.

"I have come for your answer, Professor Vargan," he said.

The scientist sat deep in his chair, peering aslant at the stern dark figure framed against the door. His face twitched spasmodically, and his yellow hands clutched his notebook clumsily into his coat; he made no other movement. And he did not speak.

"I am waiting," said Norman Kent presently.

Vargan passed a shaky hand through his hair.

"I've given you my answer," he said harshly.

"Think," said Norman.

Vargan looked down the muzzle of the automatic, and his lips curled back from his teeth in an animal snarl.

"You are a friend of my persecutors," he croaked, and his voice rose to a shrill sobbing scream as he saw Norman Kent's knuckle whiten over the trigger.

"We were expecting Angel Face," remarked the Saint. "But not quite so soon. The brass band's ordered, the Movietone cameramen are streaming down, the reporters are sharpen­ing their pencils as they run, and we were just going out to unroll the red carpet. In fact, if you hadn't been so sudden, there'd have been a full civic reception waiting for you. All except the mayor. The mayor was going to present you with an illuminated address, but he got lit up himself while he was preparing it, so I'm afraid he's out of the frolic, anyway. How­ever . . ."

He stood beside Roger Conway, his hands prudently held high in the air.

He'd been caught on the bend—as neatly as he'd ever been caught in the whole of his perilous career. Well and truly bending, he'd been. Bending in a bend which, if he could have repeated it regularly and with the necessary adornments of showmanship, would undoubtedly have made his fortune in a Coney Island booth as The Man with the Plasticene Spine. In fact, when he reviewed that bend with a skinned eye, he could see that nothing short of the miracle which is tradi­tionally supposed to save fools from the consequences of their folly could have saved him from hearing that imponderable inward ping! which informs a man supple on the uptake that one of his psychological suspender-buttons has come unstuck.

It struck the Saint that this last adventure wasn't altogether his most brilliant effort. It didn't occur to him to blame any­one else for the various leaks it had sprung. He might, if he had been that sort of man, have put the blame on Roger Conway, for Roger's two brilliant contributions, in the shape of dropping the brick about Maidenhead and then letting Marius escape, could certainly be made out to have something to do with the present trouble; but the Saint just wasn't that sort of man. He could only visualise the adventure, and those tak­ing part in it, as one coherent whole, including himself; and, since he was the leader, he had to take an equal share of blame for the mistakes of his lieutenants, like any other general. Ex­cept that, unlike any other general, he kept the blame to him­self, and declined to pass on the kick to those under him. Any bricks that were dropped must, in the nature of things, flop on everybody's toes simultaneously and with the same sicken­ing thud: therefore the only intelligent and helpful thing to do was to consider the bricks as bricks, and deal with the bricks as bricks simple and absolute, without wasting time over the irrelevant question of who dropped the brick and why.

And here, truly, was an admirable example of the species brick, a brick colossal and catastrophic, a very apotheosis of Brick, in the shape of this fresh-faced youngster in plus eights, who'd coolly walked in through the French window half a minute after Norman Kent had walked out of the door.

It had been done so calmly and impudently that neither Simon nor Roger had had a chance to do anything about it. That was when they had been so blithely on the bend. At one moment they had been looking through the window at a gar­den; at the next moment they had been looking through the window at a gun. They hadn't been given a break.

And what had happened to Norman Kent? By rights, he should have been back by that time. He should have been cantering blindfold into the hold-up—and Patricia with him, as like as not. Unless one of them had heard the conversation. Simon had noticed that Norman hadn't closed the door behind him, and for that reason deliberately raised his voice. Now, if Norman and Patricia received their cue before the hold-up merchant heard them coming . . .