Authors: Leslie Charteris
“I don’t feel like anything, thanks.”
“You eat something,” said the Saint firmly. “There are
going
to be things to do, and
even you can’t keep going on air and good intentions. Bring her a nice light
omelette, Mrs. Cook. Then I’ll hold her mouth open and you can slide it
in.”
Madeline
Gray sat down at the table, and her eyes clung to
the Saint with a kind of hopeless tenacity, as if he
were the only thing that could hold her mind up to the verge of nor
mality.
“My father didn’t come home,” she said flatly.
“No.” The Saint was deliberately as quiet and impersonal
as a doctor reporting on a case.
“And you might as well have
the
rest of it now and get it over with. I called the Algonquin,
which is where Mrs. Cook said he always
stayed, and he wasn’t
there last night either.”
“He
must have stayed with his friend,” Mrs. Cook said.
“Whoever he went to see. Any
minute now he’ll be calling
up——
”
The telephone rang while she was saying it.
Madeline ran.
And
in a few moments she was back again, with the light
out of her eyes.
“It’s for you,” she said tonelessly. “From Washington.”
Simon went into the living-room.
“Hamilton,” said the phone. “I wondered if I’d find you
there. About those dossiers you asked
for. I happen to have a
man
flying to New York this afternoon. If you’re in a hurry
for them, you can meet him there and get
them this evening.”
“When
will he be there?”
“He should get in before five.”
“I’ll
meet him at five o’clock in the men’s bar of the Roosevelt
.”
“All
right. He’ll find you.”
“There
are a couple of other things, while you’re talking,”
said the Saint. “You can add a
little bit to his luggage. I want
one more dossier. On Frank Imberline.”
“That’s easy. I’m a magician. All I have to do is wave a
wand.”
“Imberline
left for New York and points west this morning
—or so he told me. You can check on that. And if he’s
stopping over in New York, find out where he can be located.”
“There
aren’t any other little jobs you want done, by any
chance?”
“Yes. Get me okayed right away with the nearest FBI office
to Stamford. I’ll find out where it is.
I think I’m going to have
to talk to them.”
“You
aren’t telling me you’ve got more on your hands than
you can hold?”
“I’m having so much fun being almost legal,” said the Saint.
“It’s a new experience. You’ll be
hearing from me.”
He
hung up, and went back to face Madeline Gray’s un
spoken questions.
He shook his head.
“Just one of
those things,” he said.
He sat down again; and Mrs. Cook retired reluctantly into
the kitchen.
Simon faced the
girl across the table. He picked up his knife and fork and made a fresh start
on his meal before he said any
more.
“Let’s get
our chins up and take it,” he said. “You have got
something to worry about. But we’re going to try
and do
things about it. So far, the
Ungodly have had practically all
the
initiative. Now we’ve got to have some of our own.”
“But who are the–the Ungodly? If we only knew——
”
That was as much as he needed. He talked, ramblingly and
glibly, while he finished his plate, and then through
coffee and cigarettes while the girl picked at the omelette that Mrs. Cook
brought in to her. He discussed all the dramatis
personae
again, and an assortment of
speculations about them. He said
absolutely
nothing that was new or worth recording here; but
it sounded good at the time. And gradually he saw a
trace of
color creep into her face, and a shade of expression stir in
her
occasional replies, as he forced her
mind to move and coaxed
her with
infinite subtlety out of the supine listlessness that had threatened to lock
her in a stupor of inert despair. She
even
ate most of the omelette.
So that an hour
later she was smoking a cigarette and listen
ing
to him quite actively, while he was saying: “There’s one
thing
you’ll notice about this. Every single person we’ve men
tioned has been a good solid citizen with lots of background—
except perhaps the quaint little Angert body. There
hasn’t
been one grunt of a gutteral
accent, or one hint of the good
old
Gestapo clumping around in its great big boots. And yet
if all these
things have been going on, that’d be the first auto
matic thing to look for. Now if the Awful Aryans have got
any——
”
He
stopped talking at the change in her face. But she was
not looking at him. Her eyes were directed past his shoulder, towards
the window behind him.
“Simon,” she said, “I saw somebody moving out there
among
the trees, towards the laboratory. And it
looked like someone I
know.”
2
The
Saint turned and looked, but he could see nothing now —
-only a fragment of a roof and a glimpse of white walls be
tween layers of leafy branches.
“A friend of yours?” he said sharply.
“No. It
looked like—Karl.”
“And who’s Karl?”
“He
was Daddy’s assistant for a while, until we let him go.”
“Where did
he come from?”
“He
was a refugee from somewhere—Czechoslovakia, I
think. But he speaks perfect English. He was raised
here, and
then he went home after he
was grown up, but he didn’t like it
so much so he came back.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, about a month ago. I mean when he left … But it’s
funny, I was thinking about him last
night.”
The Saint was still watching through the window, but he
had seen no movement.
“Why?” he asked.
“Well, it seems silly, but … One of those men who tried
to kidnap me last night—the tall
one—there was something
about his eyes, and the way he carried himself. It reminded
me of someone. I couldn’t think who it
was, and it was both
ering
me. When I woke up this morning it came to me in a
flash. He reminded me of Karl.”
“That,” said the Saint, “is really interesting.”
He turned and glanced at her again. She was still looking
past him, half frowning, perplexed and
uncertain of herself.
“What was the rest of his name?” he asked.
“Morgen.”
Simon put out his
cigarette.
“I
think,” he said, “it might be fun to talk to Comrade Mor
gen.”
She stood up when
he did and started to go with him, but he checked her with a hand on her arm.
“No,
darling,” he said. “For one thing, I’d rather surprise him. For
another thing, if it really is Karl, and not just Karl
on your mind, there may be a little horseplay when we
meet.
And lastly, I’d rather keep you out of sight as
much as possible
—for all purposes. In fact,
I don’t even want you to answer
the
telephone again. And if anyone does call except your fa
ther, tell Mrs. Cook to say you’re still in
Washington.” He
smiled at her
confusion. “You forget that at this moment the
Ungodly don’t know where you are. And the longer
that lasts,
the longer it’ll be
before I have to worry about your health
again.”
He went out of the house, crossed the driveway, and moved
off among the trees.
The laboratory was on the other side of the house and in
the opposite direction from the way he set off; and he made
a
wide circle to approach it from the far
side—the side from
which no intruder
would be expecting an interruption.
His feet made no
sound on the grass, and he slipped through
shrubbery
and woodland with the phantom stealth of an In
dian scout. He had an
instinct for cover and terrain that was faultless and effortless: not once
after he merged into the landscape was he exposed from any angle from which he
could anticipate being watched for.
And
under the cool efficiency of his movements he could feel a faint tingle along
his veins that was his prescience of
the disintegration of inaction and the promise of pursuit
and
fight. If Madeline Gray
hadn’t imagined what she saw, and
there actually was an uninvited visitor out there, he would
certainly be an interesting character to hold
converse with—
wherever he came from. And if
the visitor really was a man
with the
dubious name and history of Karl Morgen, he might
be the one missing
quantity that Simon had just been idly complaining about. If, wildly and
gorgeously beyond that, he
crowned everything
by proving to be one of the frustrated
kidnapers
of the night before—then indeed there would be
moments of great joy in store. Anything so perfect as that
seemed almost too much to expect; and yet, if even
a fraction
of those exquisite
possibilities came true, it would still be more
than enough to justify the tentative rapture that was stealing along the
Saint’s relaxed and tranquil nerves. He had always
hated fighting in the dark, waiting to be shot at,
the whole
negative and passive
rigamarole of puzzling and guessing and
weighing of abstractions: if there was an end of that now, even for a
little while, it would be a beautiful interlude …
Towards
the end of his excursion, a tall cypress hedge of
fered perfect invisibility. He went along the edge, of
a field
of oat hay for a hundred
yards, and squeezed through another
gap in the
hedge into the concealment of a clump of rhodo
dendron bushes. The laboratory building was so close then
that he could see the roof over the top of his
shelter.
Working around to
the limit of his cover, he was finally able
to
sight one of the windows through the thinning fringe of
leaves.
He
saw more than the window. He saw through it. And all
the inside of him became blissfully quiet as he saw that at least a
part
of his prayers had been granted.
There was a man
in the laboratory.
And more than that, it wasn’t just any man.
Simon couldn’t
see any details clearly in the darker interior,
but he was able to distinguish a rough triangle of solid color
where
the lower part of the man’s face should have been. Per
haps that crude disguise even helped the identification, by re
peating a remembered pattern. The man’s silhouette
was clear
enough. He looked tall, and
the outlines and carriage of his
broad square shoulders were freshly
etched on
the Saint’s mem
ory.
It was one of the
ambitious abductors of Washington.
“So after
all,” said the Saint reverently, to his immortal soul,
“sanctity does have its rewards.”
The man seemed to be searching, methodically and without
haste, as if he felt reasonably
confident that he was not likely
to be disturbed.
Simon drew back,
and circled the other way around the rhododendrons, towards the corner of the
building. The cover
grew very low towards the
corner, but by going flat on his
stomach
he was able to come up against the next wall, which
had no windows in it. A few strides took him to a
second
corner; then he had to travel
on his toes and fingertips again, stretched low like a lizard, to pass well
below the front win
dows. Then he
was at the door.
As he was rising, he paused when his eye reached the level of
the keyhole. He could see through the
tiny hall, and framed
directly beyond
it the man stood at one of the work-benches,
facing
towards him and studying something in a test tube.
Simon waited.
Presently the man put down the test tube and moved away,
passing out of sight into another part of the laboratory.