Featuring the Saint (2 page)

This visit to the Calumet Club was definitely “before”; and the Saint was therefore prepared and even expecting to behave himself with all the decorum that the occasion demanded.

He passed to a comer table, ordered a drink, lighted a cigarette, and settled himself comfortably.

It was then barely eleven, and the club would not begin to do real business for about another half-hour. The nucleus of an orchestra was rhythmically, if a trifle unenthusiastically, insisting that it didn’t care how much some lady unspecified made it blue. To the accompaniment of this declaration of an unselfish devotion of which the casual eye, judging the orchestra solely by appearances, would never have believed them capable, four self-appointed ladies, in two pairs, and two other self-appointed ladies paired with an equal number of temporary gentlemen, were travelling in small circles round a minute section of inferior parquet. At other tables round the floor a scattering of other clients, apparently male and female, were absorbing divers brands of alcohol in the lugubrious fashion in which alcohol is ordinarily absorbed in England during the hours in which the absorption is legal. In fact, the Calumet Club was just yawning and stretching itself preparatory to waking up for the night’s festivities.

The Saint sighed, inhaled cigarette smoke luxuriously, tasted the modest glass of beer which the waiter brought him, paid twice the usual retail price for it, added a fifty-percent bonus, and continued to inspect his fellow members with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

One by one he dismissed them. Two men whom he had met there several times before saluted him, and he smiled back as if he loved them like brothers. An unattached damsel at an adjacent table smiled sweetly at him, and the Saint smiled back just as sweetly, for he had a reputation to keep up. And then, in another corner, his gaze came to rest upon a man he had seen before, and a girl he had never seen before, sitting together at a table beside the orchestra.

Simon’s gaze rested upon them thoughtfully, as it had rested upon other people in that room; and it only rested upon them longer than it had rested upon anyone else that night, because at that moment, when his glance fell upon them, something stirred at the back of his brain and opened its in ward intangible eye upon the bare facts of the case as conveyed by the optic nerves. The Saint could not have said what it was. At that moment there was nothing about that corner of the scenery to attract such an attention. They were talking quite ordinarily, to judge by their faces; and, if the face of the girl was remarkably pleasant to look upon, even that was not unprecedented in the Calumet Club and the entourage of Baldy Mossiter. And yet, in spite of these facts rather than because of them, Simon Templar’s queer instinct for the raw material of his trade flicked up a ghostly eyelid in some dim recess of his mind, and forced him to look longer, without quite knowing why he looked. And it was only because of this that the Saint saw what he saw, when the almost imperceptible thing happened in the course of one of Mr. Mossiter’s frequent and expressive gestures.

“Have you got a cigarette?” murmured the unattached damsel at the adjacent table, hopefully; but the sweetness of the smile which illuminated the Saint’s features as she spoke was not for her, and it is doubtful whether he even heard.

He lounged out of his chair and wandered across the room with the long, lazy stride that covered ground with such an inconspicuous speed; and the man and the girl looked up together as he loomed over their table.

“Hullo,” drawled the Saint.

He sat down in a vacant chair between them, without waiting to be invited, and beamed from one to the other in a most Saintly way.

“Beautiful weather we’re having, aren’t we, Baldy?”

“What the devil do you want, Templar?” snarled Mr. Mossiter, with no cordiality. “I’m busy.”

“I know, sweetheart,” said the Saint gently. “I saw you getting busy. That’s why I came over.”

He contemplated Mr. Mossiter with innocent blue eyes; and yet there was something in the very innocence of that stare besides its prolonged steadiness that unaccountably prickled the short hairs on the back of Mossiter’s bull neck. It did not happen at once. The stare had focused on its object for some time before that cold draught of perplexedly dawning comprehension began to lap Mossiter’s spinal column. But the Saint read all that he wanted to read in the sudden darkening of the livid scar that ran down the side of Mossiter’s face from his left temple to his chin; and the Saintly smile became dazzlingly seraphic.

“Exactly,” said the Saint.

His gaze shifted over to the girl. Her hand was still round her glass-she had been raising it when the Saint reached the table, and had put it down again untasted.

Still smiling, Simon took the girl’s glass in one hand and Mossiter’s in the other, and changed them over. Then he looked again at Mossiter.

“Drink up,” he said, and suddenly there was cold steel in his voice.

What d’you mean?”

“Drink,” said the Saint. “Open your mouth, and induce the liquid to trickle down the gullet. You must have done it before. But whether you’ll enjoy it so much on this occasion remains to be seen,”

“What the hell are you suggesting?”

“Nothing. That’s just your guilty conscience. Drink it up, Beautiful.”

Mossiter seemed to crouch in his chair.

“Will you leave this table?” he grated.

“No,” said the Saint.

“Then you will have to leave the club altogether… . Waiter!”

The Saint took out his cigarette case and tapped a cigarette meditatively upon it. Then he looked up. He addressed the girl.

“If you had finished that drink,” he said, “the consequences would have been very unpleasant indeed. I think I can assure you of that, though I’m not absolutely certain what our friend put in it. It is quite sufficient that I saw him drop something into your glass while he was talking just now.” He leaned back in his chair, with his back half turned to Mr. Mossiter, and watched the waiter returning across the floor with the porter who had been other things in his time, and added, in the same quiet tone: “On account of the failure of this bright scheme, there will shortly be a slight disturbance of which I shall be the centre. If you think I’m raving mad, you can go to hell. If you’ve got the sense to see that I’m telling the truth, you’ll stand by to make your bolt when I give the word, and meet me outside in a couple of minutes.”

Thus the Saint completed his remarks, quite unhurriedly, quite calmly and conversationally; and then the waiter and the porter were behind his chair.

“Throw this man out,” said Mossiter curtly. “He’s making a nuisance of himself.”

It was the porter who had been other things in his time who laid the first rough hand upon the Saint; and Simon grinned gently. The next moment Simon was on his feet, and the porter was not.

That remark needs little explanation. It would not be profitable to elaborate a description of the pile-driving properties of the left hook that connected with the porter’s jaw as Simon rose from his chair; and, in fact, the porter himself knew little about it at the time. He left the ground momentarily and then he made contact with a lot more ground a little farther on, and then he slept.

The elderly waiter, also, knew little about that particular incident. The best and brightest years of his life were past and over, and it is probable that he was growing a little slow on the uptake in his late middle age. It is, at least, certain that he had not fully digested the significance of the spectacle to which he had just been treated, nor come to any decision about his own attitude to the situation, when he felt himself seized firmly by the collar and the seat of his pants. He seemed to rise astonishingly into the air, and, suspended horizontally in space at the full upward stretch of the Saint’s arms, was for an instant in a position to contemplate the beauties of the low ceiling at close range. And the Saint chuckled.

“How Time flies,” murmured the Saint, and heaved the man bodily into the middle of the orchestra-where, it may be recorded, he damaged beyond repair, in his descent, a tenor saxophone, a guitar, and a device for imitating the moans of a stricken hyena.

Simon straightened his tie and looked about him. Action had been so rapid, during those few seconds, that the rest of the club’s population and personnel had not yet completely awoken to understanding and reprisal. And the most important thing of all was that the sudden sleep of the porter who had been other things in his time had not only demoralized the two other officials who were standing in the middle distance, but had also left the way to the exit temporarily clear.

Simon touched the girl’s shoulder.

“I should push along now, old dear,” he remarked, as if there were all the time in the world and nothing on earth to get excited about. “Stop a taxi outside, if you see one. I’ll be right along.”

She looked at him with a queer expression; and then she left her chair and crossed the floor quickly. To this day she is not quite sure why she obeyed; but it is enough that she did, and the Saint felt a certain relief as he watched her go.

Then he turned, and saw the gun in Mossiter’s hand. He laughed-it was so absurd, so utterly fantastic, even in that place. In London, that sort of thing only happens in sensational fiction. But there it was; and the Saint knew that Baldy Mossiter must have been badly upset to make such a crude break. And he laughed; and his left hand fell on Mossiter’s hand in a grip of steel, but with a movement so easy and natural that Mossiter missed the meaning of it until it was too late. The gun was pointed harmlessly down into the table, and all Mossiter’s strength could not move it.

“You had better know me,” said Simon quietly. “I’m called the Saint.”

Baldy Mossiter heard him, staring, and went white.

“And you must not try to drug little girls,” said the Saint
A lot of things of no permanent importance have been mentioned in this episode; but the permanently important point of it is that Baldy Mossiter’s beautiful front teeth are now designed to his measure by a gentleman in a white coat with a collection of antediluvian magazines in his waiting room.

3
A few moments later, the Saint strolled up into the street. A taxi was drawn up by the curb, and the Saint briefly spoke an address to the driver and stepped in.

The girl was sitting in the far corner. Simon gave her a smile and cheerfully inspected a set of grazed knuckles. It stands to the credit of his happy disposition that he really felt at peace with the world, although the evening’s amusement represented a distinct setback to certain schemes that had been maturing in his fertile brain. As a rough-house it had had its virtues; but the truth was that the Saint had marked down the Calumet Club for something more drastic and profitable than a mere rough-house, and that idea, if it was ever to be materialized now, would have to be tackled all over again from the very beginning and a totally different angle. A couple of months of shrewd and patient reconnaissance work had gone west that night along with Baldy Mossiter’s dental apparatus, but Simon Templar was incapable of weeping over potential poultry annihilated in the egg.

“Have a cigarette,” he suggested, producing his case, “and tell me your name.”

“Stella Dornford.” She accepted a light, and he affected not to notice the unsteadiness of her hand. “Did you-have much trouble?”

The Saint grinned over his match.

“Well-hardly! I seemed to get a bit popular all at once- that was all. Nobody seemed to want me to go. There was a short argument-nothing to speak of.”

He blew out the match and slewed round, looking through the window at the back. There was another taxi close behind, which is not extraordinary in a London street; and, hanging out of the window of the taxi behind, was a man-or the head and shoulders of one-which, to Saint’s suspicious mind, was quite extraordinary enough. But he was not particularly bothered about it at the moment, for he had directed his own driver to the Criterion, and nothing would happen there.

“Where are we going?” asked the girl.

“Towards coffee,” said the Saint. “Or, if you prefer it, something with more kick. Praise be to the blessed laws of England, we can drink for another half-hour yet, if we hire a sandwich to put on the table. And you can tell me the story of your life.”

In the better light of the restaurant, and at leisure which he had not had before, he was confirmed in the impression which he had formed at the Calumet. She was undeniably pretty, in a rather childish way, with a neat fair head and china-blue eyes. A certain grace of carriage saved her from mere fluffiness.

“You haven’t told me your name,” she remarked, when he had ordered refreshment.

“I thought you heard Mossiter address me. Templar-Simon Templar.”

“You seem to be rather a remarkable man.”

The Saint smiled. He had been told that before, but he had no objection to hearing it again. He really had very simple tastes, in some ways.

“It’s rather lucky for you that I am,” he answered. “And now, tell me, what were you doing at the Calumet with Baldy?”

He had some difficulty in extracting her story-in fact, it required all his ingenuity to avoid making the extraction look too much like a cross-examination, for it was evident that she had not yet made up her mind about him.

He learned, after a time, that she was twenty-one years old, that she was the only daughter of a retired bank manager, that she had run away from the dull suburban circle of her family to try to find fortune on the wrong side of the footlights. He might have guessed that much, but he liked to know. It took some much more astute questioning to elicit a fact in which he was really much more interested.

“… He’s a junior clerk in the branch that used to be Daddy’s. He came to the house once or twice, and we saw each other occasionally afterwards. It was all rather sweet and silly. We used to go to the pictures together, and once we met at a dance.”

“Of course, you couldn’t possibly have married him,” said the Saint cunningly, and waited thoughtfully on her reply.

“It would have meant that I’d never have got away from all the mildewed things that I most wanted to run away from. I wanted to see Life… . But he really was a nice boy.”