Authors: Leslie Charteris
Instantly, and
before Simon could move at all, a new voice
spoke
behind him. It was a voice with a rich bass croak that
Simon seemed to have heard before, very recently.
“Okay,” said the voice. “Hold it. Don’t move anything if
you want to go out of here
breathing.”
The Saint held it. He knew quite well where he had heard
that deep grating voice before.
It spoke again, sounding a little nearer.
“I been
saving this for you, bud,” it said.
After that there was only a fierce jarring agony that crashed
through the Saint’s skull like a bolt of lightning, with a
scorch
ing white light that broke into a
million rainbow stars that
danced
away into a deep engulfing darkness.
3
Coming back to consciousness was a distant brilliance that
hurt his eyes even through his closed
eyelids, a sharp cold wet
monotonous nagging slapping on his cheeks that turned out to
be a sodden towel unsympathetically wielded by Karl Morgen.
“That’s
enough, Karl,” said Walter Devan’s voice.
Simon rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his eyes.
The tall raw-boned man stood over
him, looking as if he would
enjoy repeating both the assault and the remedy.
“Beat it, Karl,” Devan said.
Morgen went out
reluctantly.
Simon
tried to get his bearings in a rather unusual room. It
was small and somewhat bare. The walls and ceiling
were plain
white cement, and they
looked new and clean. There was a
plain new-looking carpet on the floor. There was the plain
heavy unpainted door through which
Karl had gone out, and another identical door in another wall. Near the ceiling
in one
wall was a sort of open
embrasure, but it was too high up to
see out of from where the Saint sat. There was no other win
dow.
The Saint sat on a simple divan with blankets over it, and on
the opposite side of the room was another similar divan.
There
were some low shelves against another
wall on which he saw a
small
radiophone, some records, half a dozen books, a couple of packs of cards, a
bottle of brandy, a bottle of Scotch, a box
of chocolates, half a dozen cans of assorted food, and a package
of paper plates. The air had a slightly damp chill
in it.
“People in stories always ask ‘Where am I?’ ” said the Saint,
“so I will.”
“This is Mr. Quennel’s private air-raid shelter,” replied
Devan. “He had it built about a year ago.”
He
sat in a comfortable chair behind a card table, smoking
a freshly lighted cigar. He wielded
the cigar with his left hand,
because his right
hand held an automatic which the Saint recognized as his own. He didn’t point
the gun. His hand was re
laxed with it on the
table. But he was twelve feet from the
Saint,
and pointing was not necessary.
“Very nice it looks,” Simon murmured. “And handy,”
he
added.
“Cigarette?”
Devan tossed a pack into the Saint’s lap, and followed it with a book of
matches. “Keep ‘em,” he said. “I’m
afraid Karl took everything you had away from you.”
“Naturally.”
Simon
didn’t have to check over his pockets and other hid
ing places. He had no doubt that the search would
have been thorough. An intellectual organization like that wouldn’t have
risked leaving anything that could
conceivably have concealed
some ingenious
means of making unexpected trouble.
He
lighted a cigarette and said reminiscently: “Karl really
owes you something, after Washington. You did a nice job of
looking after him and his pal.”
Devan nodded.
“It was the only thing to do.”
“You took
quite a risk.”
“I
couldn’t expect people to take risks for me if they didn’t
know I’d do the same for them. I took a
bit of a beating, too,
if you haven’t forgotten. That’s why I’m keeping this gun
handy, and I want you to stay sitting
down where you are.”
Simon grinned wryly.
“Have you been saving something for me too?”
Devan shook his head.
“Let’s
forget that. That’s kid stuff. I’m here because Bart
asked me to see if I couldn’t talk you into reconsidering his
proposition, and that’s all I want to do.”
“You’ve been
studying all the best Nazi heavies in the mov
ies,”
said the Saint admiringly. “I see all the delicate touches.
And when 1 go on saying No, you most regretfully
call back
the storm troopers and they
beat the bejesus out of me.”
“I’m not a
Nazi, Templar. Neither is Mr. Quennel.”
“You have some unusual thugs on your staff. I’ll bet you
Karl heils Hitler every time he goes
to the bathroom.”
“I’m not
concerned about that. When Gray fired him and he
came to us, I thought he could be useful. He has been. So long
as
he does what I tell him I don’t have to ask about his politics.
He isn’t going to find out any Quenco secrets. And
I know one
thing—being what he is, no
matter what happens, he can’t
squawk.”
“Now
I really know what Quennel meant about the diplomacy of Big Business,”
said the Saint. “Getting a German spy
to do your dirty work for you ought to be worth some kind of
Oscar.”
“We’ve been lucky to have the use of him. But that’s the
only connection there is. I’m an
American, and I don’t want to
be anything else.”
“I know all about you, Walter. I could tell you your own
life story. I’ve read a very complete
secret dossier on you. Oh,
I know there’s nothing in it that could put you in jail, or you’d
have been there before this. But the indication is quite
definite. You are Quennel’s chief private thug, which means his own personal
Gestapo.”
Devan sat still, with only a slight dull red glow under his
skin.
“There’s nothing Nazi about it. If you know all about us,
you know that we’re working one
hundred per cent for Amer
ica. I work for
Quennel because he has to have a man who can
be
tough and handle tough situations. He told you himself—
an industry like Quenco is like a little empire.
You have to
have your own police and your own laws and your own enforcement.
This is nothing but business.”
“Business, because Calvin Gray’s invention would shift a great big
slice of Government backing away from you, and
you’d be in the hole to the extent of your own
investment.”
“As
Mr. Quennel said, it’s not going to be any use winning
the war if we win it by ruining our own economic
structure.”
“How
catching his phrases are,” drawled the Saint. “I sup
pose it wouldn’t have occurred to you that Mr. Quennel
might have been thinking first of Mr. Quennel’s own economic struc
ture?”
“We aren’t
Nazis,” Devan reiterated stubbornly.
Simon drew a fresh drift of smoke into his lungs.
“No,” he said. “You aren’t Nazis. Or even conscious
fifth
columnists. That’s one of
the things that bothered me for a
while. I couldn’t understand the half-hearted villainy. The
Nazis would have been much
more positive and drastic, and
Calvin
Gray and his invention would probably have been
mopped up long ago.”
“We don’t like violence,” Devan said. “It makes trouble
and
a stink and it’s
dangerous, and we bend over backwards to
avoid it. Only sometimes it’s forced on us, and then
we have
to be able to handle it.
We tried to handle Gray without going
too far.”
“And the hell with what difference it made to the net cost
and efficiency of our war
production?”
“Superficial
savings and efficiences aren’t always the best
thing when you take a broad long view. You learn that
in a
big industry. Mr. Quennel
knows all about that, because that’s
his job.”
“The F
ü
hrer principle,”
Simon observed, almost to himself.
He looked at Devan again, and said: “And now that I’ve
really butted in, and you know you’re stuck with it?”
“The
sky’s the limit.”
Simon
smoked again, and looked at the end of his cigarette.
“You think you can get away with it?”
“I’m
sure we can.”
“There’s a little matter of murder involved, and the police
take such an oldfashioned view of
that.”
“You’re
talking about Angert? That was stupid of Morgen,
but he didn’t mean to kill him. He didn’t know who he
was.
But that’ll be Morgen’s
bad luck, if he gets caught. I’ll try to
see that he doesn’t get caught. But if he did, we
wouldn’t know
anything about him.”
“You
ought to worry about being caught yourself. If you
read the papers, you may have seen something about a
certain
Inspector Fernack, who has
just gotten ambitious about collecting the scalp of the guy who removed a very
dull bureaucrat named Imberline last night—and nearly managed to hang
the job on me.”
Devan looked him straight in the eye.
“I read the papers. But I wasn’t anywhere near the Savoy
Plaza last night. And I thought
Imberline was still in Wash
ington.”
That
was his story. And probably he could prove it. Quen
nel could probably prove the same. It would be very
careless
of them if they couldn’t,
and the Saint didn’t think they were
careless. If they had been addicted to making egregious mistakes,
someone else would have taken care of them before he
ever came along.
It was a rather depressing thought. But he had to finish
covering the ground. He took another
breath through his cigarette.
“A man like Calvin Gray, and his daughter, can’t just dis
appear without any questions being
asked.”
“Calvin
Gray won’t disappear. He’ll be back tomorrow from
a visit to some friends in Tennessee, and he’ll be
very surprised
at the
commotion. His daughter will have gone to New York
with some friends—who have an apartment there, by the
wav—
and he will have reached
her on the telephone there. When
she hears that it’s all a false alarm and he’s quite all right, she
will tell him that she’s going on a
trip to Cuba with some other
friends. From there she’ll probably fly down to Rio. She may
even get married down there and not
come back for a very
long
time.”
The Saint’s eyes were cold and realistic.
“And of course Gray will go along with that.”
“I
think so, after I’ve had another talk with him. I think
he’ll even discover that there was a
flaw in his formula after
all,
and forget about it.”
“You aren’t even interested in it yourselves?”
“Oh,
yes, of course he’ll have to tell us the formula. It may
be valuable one day, if we have one of
our own chemists dis
cover it. But for the present Mr. Quennel is quite satisfied with
our own setup.”
“And Gray will never open his mouth so long as you have
his daughter for a hostage.”
Devan
shrugged.
“I
don’t have to be melodramatic with you. You know what
these things are all about. You know what he’ll
do.”
The Saint knew. There was heroism of a kind for the lone
individual, although even that could
almost always be broken
down eventually under pitiless scientific treatment. He
doubted how much ultimate heroism
there would ever be
against
the peril of a man’s own daughter.
He didn’t doubt that Walter Devan was the man to see the
job through competently and
remorselessly. Devan was no
common thug, or he would not have had the position he held.
He could easily have passed as having
had a college education,
even
if most of it had been spent on the football field. He had
a definite intelligence. He really
belonged in Quennel’s en
tourage.
He had enough intelligence to assimilate Quennel’s intellectual arguments. He
also believed in what he was doing,
and he was just as sure that it was right. And he wouldn’t
make any stupid mistakes. Simon didn’t need to press him for elabo
rate details. Walter Devan would know
just how to finish what he had started.