The Saint and the People Importers (10 page)

“We couldn’t,” Mahmud said almost desperately. “There were cars coming. This was all we could do!”

“Tell it to him, not me,” Shortwave replied, indicating the house once again. “It’s your show. I’m just riding shotgun.”

“Loyalty to the end,” commented Simon. “Doesn’t it grab you, Tammy?”

Mahmud opened his door and got out. Shortwave was no longer slouching relaxed in his corner of the back seat as he had been during the ride. He sat up straight and alert, holding the pistol on Tammy with his right hand while he steadied his right forearm with the other.

“There’s just about one spider web between this dame and the Great Beyond,” he said to Simon, “so sit tight and don’t try nothing.”

“Why should I try anything?” the Saint asked languidly. “What more could I ask? Free transportation, fresh country air, brilliant conversation …”

Shortwave grunted, keeping on his guard, his eyes narrowed. Then he began to hum a nervous mournful gipsy tune.

“And thou beside me singing in the wilderness,” Simon added. “Our very own portable radio.”

Tammy Rowan, who was so busy trying to look brave that she could hardly move, glanced at Shortwave, who appeared to have sunk into a state of trance. His thin reedy humming went on. His eyelids drooped, but Simon could see that the dilated black pupils peered out of his skeletal face with undiminished watchfulness.

Tammy spoke very softly and hesitantly, as if she thought Shortwave were asleep and might not hear if she kept her voice down.

“What are we going to do?”

Shortwave, as motionless as a coiled snake, went on with his humming.

“We’ll do just as we’re told,” the Saint replied. “Don’t be fooled by Shortwave’s gentle manner and wholesome demeanour: I have a feeling he can be pretty nasty if he gets riled.”

Shortwave chuckled suddenly.

“You’re damn right.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt the programme,” Simon told him.

“I was gettin’ Radio Luxembourg,” Shortwave informed him in return. “It comes in real clear about this time.”

There had not been any sounds from inside the boat-house, but now a door apparently opened, letting out into the night a babble of at least two excited and irritated non-English voices. Feet crunched along the drive towards the car, and Mahmud opened the door beside Shortwave.

“Bring them into the house,” he ordered. “Hurry!”

“Okay,” Shortwave said. “You guys cool it now and do like I say. I’m gonna back out of here, and you follow me out this door, girlie. Saint, you hold it right where you are till I give you the word to move-unless you want her to get hurt.”

He kept his pistol in thoroughly professional readiness while he slipped out of the car and Mahmud retrieved his rifle from the vacated floor. The Saint had decided as soon as he was captured that unless a really good chance presented itself he would not try to escape or otherwise turn the tables until he had been taken to the group’s headquarters. Mahmud, in deciding to drive him straight to the boathouse, might have been saving him a good bit of work-while a minor slip could have cost Tammy Rowan’s life.

Now one objective seemed to have been reached, and the next few moments could very well give him the best chance to make his move. Mahmud, in his jittery state, had not even thought to search the Saint for weapons, but even if he had made the conventional search, he would quite likely have failed to find Anna, the slim beautifully balanced throwing knife in the sheath strapped to his left forearm. It was a card up the Saint’s sleeve that more professional friskers had overlooked before, and the fingertips of Simon’s right hand casually located the hilt of it while he considered how long he could most effectively wait before bringing it into play.

But then, as Mahmud took a step back and waited for the girl to follow as reluctantly as it would have been natural to expect, the Saint’s carefully cultivated restraint was nullified by another factor over which he had no control. Tammy Rowan, in some excess of reckless bravery, or some frantic irrational panic brought on by the prospect of rapidly approaching doom, hurled herself from her seat and dived for the rifle. The effort might have made more sense if the trigger end had not been in Mahmud’s hands, leaving Tammy in unpromising possession of the barrel.

Even in the first second of the grim tug-of-war Simon knew what the outcome would be, but he felt he had no choice but to go on the offensive himself. Mahmud was shouting, and Shortwave started around the car to try to cut off any escape attempt from the other side. Expecting at any moment to hear the crack of the rifle as it was fired point-blank in the scuffle, Simon shouted at Tammy to let go and give up. Then he vigorously opened his door just in time for it to catch Shortwave full in the face as he came scampering around the front of the car.

As Shortwave crashed to a standstill, Simon rolled out and grabbed him. Mahmud was screeching at Tammy in his native tongue, and a thudding of heavy footsteps from the boathouse hinted that reinforcements were on the way. Either Mahmud had orders to keep Tammy alive, or he did not want to put holes in his car, or his rifle had jammed: for some reason the shot Simon kept expecting still did not come. On his own battle-front he disarmed Shortwave by chopping his wrist with the edge of one hand and knocking the pistol to the ground. Shortwave yowled and kicked and flailed like a human buzzsaw, trying to counter the Saint’s superior strength and skill with sheer wild motion. The Saint calculated carefully for a split second and then sent his fist shooting into the human blur at just the proper instant to crack him hard on the point of his jaw.

Shortwave sagged against the side of the car. And then the Saint had a peculiar dreamlike sensation experienced, it is almost certain, by few people besides Elijah and a handful of other mortals thought worthy by the Higher Powers of being borne bodily away to heaven without suffering the usual preliminaries. He felt himself lifted straight into the air, where he dangled for a moment before the less inspiring portion of his journey began. Then whatever had elevated him put him down. Threw him down would be a more accurate way of saying what was done to him-and what followed was even more unpleasant. He had just been jarred to the earth flat on his back when he got his first glimpse of the human colossus to whom he owed his experience, and whose gallon-capacity left shoe which introduced itself by crunching into his side between his ribs and his pelvis. At the same instant he heard the rifle finally fire.

4

For a few seconds of blinding pain he was completely incapacitated, and when he began to suck in breath again his hands were already being tied behind him. In the process, Anna was discovered and snatched from her sheath.

His first full awareness was the sight of Mahmud hurling Tammy to the ground with a whip-jerk of her arm. He was not sure whether she had been shot or not. The waiter’s rifle lay in the dust, and for a second Simon thought the Pakistani was stooping to retrieve it. But when Mahmud pivoted and turned to Tammy again it was a supple green branch torn from a nearby shrub that he held in his hand. Apparently unwounded, she tried to scramble to her feet to get away but he slashed the three-foot switch down across her shoulders. She screamed and fell back to the ground.

“Simon! Please! Do something!”

The Saint could only curse his helplessness. His wrists were now tightly bound, and he was hauled to his feet by the giant who had lifted him into the air and thrown him down again. He knew without looking who that was -and how completely useless it would be to put up any struggle at this point. Tammy screamed as Mahmud raised his slender stick again and swept it in a whistling arc across the girl’s back. She screamed again and writhed, face down, her skirt twisted up around her legs, trying to protect her head with both arms. Mahmud’s next lash was aimed at the bare legs.

“Stop!” commanded the huge wrestler who was holding the Saint. “Somebody might hear. Get her in the house, idiot!”

Mahmud looked furiously confused and frustrated as he hesitated, and then tossed his stick aside. Simon felt that Mahmud’s violence was not so much due to sadism or even loss of temper as it was to the feeling that he had lost face in front of Shortwave and Kalki and had taken the only way he could think of to reassert his masculinity.

“Stupid woman!” he spat at Tammy as he dragged her sobbing to her feet.

Shortwave had been sitting on the ground with his back propped against one of the car’s front wheels without evincing any interest in anything that was happening.

“Come on!” Kalki yelled at him in a voice which was strangely lacking in depth considering the vast dimensions of the man who produced it. He looked like a bull fiddle and sounded like a scratchy viola. “Get up and get in the ruddy house!”

Shortwave looked up at him with glazed eyes, comprehended, and pulled himself to his feet. He was still too fuzzy from the Saint’s punch to do anything more ambitious than perform a wobbling march behind Mahmud and Tammy to a side door of the boathouse. Simon brought up the rear, pushed by his Gargantuan captor.

The ground level of the building, into which medium-sized boats might have been hauled out from the river through full-width roller doors, was apparently being converted to additional living accommodation. A newly built brick unpainted wall in it closed off a large part of it, and another wall had been started where a stairway led to the floor above. Kalki kicked aside a cement-encrusted hoe as he shoved the Saint towards a bare trestle table with a number of cheap wooden chairs around it.

“Sit!” Kalki said to Simon, pushing him into one of the chairs in the middle of the room. “Tie his feet!” he ordered Shortwave.

For the first time Simon could take a good look at the wrestler at close range, and in these cramped quarters he seemed, even more impressive than he had in the alley or on television. His costume was more impressive, too. He had changed his workman’s outfit for a charcoal-grey Edwardian suit with orange waistcoat and burgundy silk tie. His shoes were brightly polished and he smelled of Yardley’s. The suit was too small for him, and a good deal of thick wrist dangled below the jacket cuffs, but the effect he created was no less awe-inspiring because of a few sartorial defects. He looked a bit like a gorilla in formal dress.

“I can’t say I’m pleased to meet you, but I am surprised,” Simon remarked. “We were just watching you smash up somebody on television. How did you get dressed and down here so quickly?”

Kalki’s reaction immediately made it plain that he had at least one weakness commensurate with his size. He puffed up visibly with pride, glanced at Tammy to make sure that she was paying attention, and looked back down at the Saint.

“It was me you saw on the television,” he said self-importantly. “On tape. I made that show last week.”

“How about that?” Simon commented to Tammy. “We’re house guests of a celebrity. Look where ambition and hard work will get you.”

“It’s gonna get you a fancy funeral,” Shortwave said viciously. He planted himself in front of the Saint with a piece of rope in his hand. “When I get through with you, you’ll wish you’d never seen me except on television.”

“Talking of television,” Simon said with impeccable good humour, “how does that come through on your chromium plate? Do you receive the picture as well, or only the sound effects?”

Shortwave glared at him with red eyes and raised the rope, but Kalki stopped him magisterially, taking pride in his own massive self-control.

“Not now,” he said magnanimously. “I do not like the lady to see you hit a man who cannot fight back. Wait until Fowler comes, and if he says so, you can do what you like-for as long as you like.”

The fairly efficient trussing to which Simon had been subjected was not enough to suppress the raising of an eyebrow.

“Fowler?” he echoed. “Who he?-if I may use the idiom.”

“You will find out,” Mahmud said, pushing Tammy into another chair.

“Let me do some more guessing,” Simon said. “He’s the great White Wizard who’s doing so much for you poor benighted victims of race prejudice-and making a nice profit for himself, of course. He also has a useful-sized pleasure boat registered with the Thames Conservancy, but also perfectly capable of running downriver and out to sea to make pick-ups. There can only be two or three locks between here and tidewater … And this is where the immigrant cargo can be landed and wait to be tidily dispersed. Not exactly Ritz accommodation, but I can see you’re working on that … I didn’t notice the boat, though. Could it be somewhere down the Thames Estuary right now, picking up more passengers?”

Mahmud impassively finished tying Tammy’s hands together in front of her. Stubbornly pretending not to listen, he betrayed his tortured anxiety about what he was hearing.

“Not like that,” Shortwave said irritably. “Behind her.”

Kalki intervened, happy to display his authority again.

“Do as you are,” he said to Mahmud. “The lady will be very well.”

“Oh yes, the lady will be very well,” Tammy sighed. She looked utterly defeated, too disheartened even to be frightened any more. “What are you going to do with us?”

“You wanna hear?” Shortwave asked as he got up from tying the Saint’s feet. “It might take me a couple of hours to tell you.”

Kalki gave a leviathan shrug.

“Do not worry about it,” he pontificated to Tammy. “You were expected to be dead now, so no matter what happens this is all extra time. Enjoy it.”

“Thanks so much,” Tammy sighed. Then she suddenly stared at Simon. “They wouldn’t really do it, would they?” she asked in a tone of horrified realisation. “I mean kill us? I didn’t mean anything like that. I just wanted a story.”

“You wanted to see us in prison,” Kalki said without any overt hostility. “You wrote bad things. We warned you.” He twitched his jaw to one side in a c’est-la-vie mannerism that produced a quivering of his black whiskers and a sound of lightly grating teeth. “So.”

The abrupt, formally regretful “so” was self-explanatory enough for Tammy, who shivered as if she had suddenly been touched by a ghost, and dropped her gaze to the floor. For the first time she looked desperately, hopelessly terrified. Then, without any pause for a transition of mood, Kalki wheeled around and moved on Mahmud like a towering thunderstorm.