The Saint Around the World (30 page)

His third cast happened to be the first to fall several inches wide of its mark, but he disciplined himself sternly against the temptation to try just one more. He picked the line up on the reel, secured the fly, and put the rod down with the resigned air of a man who has decided to concede a temporary triumph to the caprices of the finny tribe. He even moulded exactly the right expression on his face, just in case he might be playing to an audience equipped with powerful binoculars.

As a matter of fact the sun had risen high enough by that time to send the fish down to cooler and shadier depths, and the rises had stopped almost as if some piscine curfew had sounded. It was a perfectly normal and convincing time for any angler to pack up until the evening.

Simon hauled up his anchor, moved back to the stern seat, and pulled the starter of his outboard.

It was one of the new silent models which were Just then beginning to reduce the traditional machine-gun racket of outboard motors to little more than a horrible memory. It came to life with no more obtrusive a purr than an expensive automobile, but the skiff shot away as if springs had uncoiled behind it. And because of this epoch-making mechanical improvement, which made it impossible for anyone to trace his course and progress by ear, he was able to turn the skiff in towards the shore and cut the engine the moment he had passed the first promontory that shut off the cabin from his view, with complete assurance that the men in the cabin would hear nothing to suggest what he had done.

He let the skiff glide the last few yards under a steeply sloping bank, and moored it to a tree on which he also swung himself ashore. He climbed the slope at an easy slant and came to the top of a low ridge. From there he could look down to the waters of the cove which he had just left, and the seaplane riding at anchor further out on the lake. The roof of the log cabin was below him, almost hidden among the trees.

The same trees and bushes provided a perfect screen for his approach, and he moved between them as silently and invisibly as any Indian ever crept upon a pioneer’s homestead. He only had to expose himself in the very last eight feet, and those he covered in a low crouching leap that brought him up against the widest span of blank wall on that side and still kept him well under window level. The maneuver seemed even excessively cautious, for he felt quite sure that anyone in the cabin who was keeping a lookout at all would be watching the approach from the lake and not the back of the building.

Rising flat against the wall, he slid along it to the nearest window and with infinite care raised one eye just above the sill in one bottom corner of the opening.

The inside of the cabin was one big room for sleeping, living, and cooking, with the black iron wood-burning range which is standard equipment in the Northwest placed squarely and starkly in one corner. Other amenities, however, had been introduced to alleviate the Spartan simplicity in which the original builder had probably lived. There was a good carpet on the floor, a modern radio-phonograph in another corner, chrome-tube chairs with plastic-covered rubber cushions at the big all-purpose table, and a couple of big luxurious-looking armchairs with gay chintz slip covers. The pilot of the seaplane sat in one of them, gazing out at the lake through the opposite window.

The sleeping accommodation consisted of double-decker bunks built against the wall at one end of the room. Peering around at an acute angle, Simon could see about half the structure. But what he saw was the half where the girl sat.

She would have been no more than twentyfive, he judged, if you discounted the tired pallor that had sabotaged the young contours of her face. She wore blue jeans and a form-fitting cardigan that plainly sculptured youthful curves of hip and waist and breast. Her short hair was midnight black but her eyes were clear blue like mountain lakes. She sat on the lower bunk and leaned against one of the smooth posts that supported the upper berth, with her cheek resting against it and one arm wrapped around it. As she wore it the attitude had an unconsciously pathetic grace, but she could not have changed it much if she had wanted to, for her two wrists were handcuffed together where they met in her lap.

He did not see Julius Pavan.

But he heard Pavan say, behind him: “Put your hands up. Don’t make any other move, or I’ll blow you in half.”

iv

“Well, well, well,” said the Saint. “Now I know what they mean by overpowering hospitality. Did I really look so lonesome, or were you just desperate for someone to make a fourth at bridge?”

He glanced mildly around the cabin with his hands still in the air, and Pavan kicked the door shut behind him without taking his repeating shotgun out of the Saint’s spine.

“Just as I figured,” Pavan said. “He ran his boat around the point and got out and came sneaking over the hill. All I had to do was stand still in the bushes and get the drop on him. when he was jammed up against the house, peeking in.”

“What did you do that for?” the pilot asked Simon with curious gentleness.

He was under six feet tall, but immensely broad, with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler. His bullet head was covered with blond hair cropped so close that at first sight it looked shaved. He wore blue trousers and a gray turtle-neck sweater that somehow combined to give him a faintly nautical appearance. His age might have been anywhere in the thirties; the hardness of his features made it difficult to guess more accurately. His eyes were yellowish and very pale.

“I thought it would give an opening to anyone who wanted to ask silly questions,” said the Saint.

“Search him, Igor,” Pavan said impatiently. “I don’t want to have to hold this gun on him all day.”

The pilot ambled closer and passed his big hands competently over the Saint’s body. He showed no surprise at the automatic which he felt under the Saint’s armpit and pulled out from the shoulder holster under Simon’s shirt. He checked the action matter-of-factly and stuck the gun in his own hip pocket.

Beyond that, the Saint’s pockets yielded only a small amount of money and some cigarettes and matches, which the pilot put on the table, and a wallet, which the pilot opened and began to browse through.

Pavan’s shotgun muzzle prodded the Saint viciously in the kidneys.

“Get over to the bed. Hook your arm around the post, like the girl’s is, and put your wrists together.”

Simon obeyed. To get his arm around the post he had to put it around the girl’s arm as well, and he had to sit on the end of the bunk with his body half turned away from her.

Pavan produced another pair of handcuffs and snapped them deftly on the Saint’s wrists. Simon looked down at them with reluctant approval.

“So much faster and safer than tying people up,” he murmured. “I’ve often wondered why you crooks didn’t make more use of them.”

Pavan stared at him broodingly. Pavan was middle-aged and a little paunchy where the plaid shirt was tucked into his pants. He had lank black hair thinning back from his forehead, a long swarthy clean-shaven face, and thin lips clamped around an unlighted cigar. His black eyes measured the Saint for a retort, but debated at unhurried length whether it should be verbal or physical.

“His name is Simon Templar,” the pilot announced, from his study of the identification cards in the Saint’s wallet.

The name did not seem to mean anything to him; but Simon felt the girl recognize it, without looking at her, in the involuntary tensing of her shoulder where it rested against his, and he saw the reaction that first widened Pavan’s eyes for a moment and then started something smoldering in them like hot slag.

Pavan uttered it.

“The Saint!”

“What is that?” asked the pilot.

“He’s no cop,” Pavan said. His eyes were fastened on the Saint with the unblinking malevolence of a snake’s. “He’s worse. He’s a guy who set out to be the cop and the judge too. He gives out that he hates crime—so that gives him an excuse to commit crimes himself against anyone with a racket. According to some people, this makes him a Robin Hood. According to me, he’s just a robber and a hood.”

“So now that I’ve been so elegantly introduced,” Simon said to the pilot, “what’s the rest of your name, Igor?”

“Igor Netchideff,” said the pilot amiably.

Simon nodded, and turned his head to the girl.

“Since we’re all getting so chummy,” he said, “won’t you tell me who you are?”

“Marian Kent,” she said.

Her voice was low but steady, and he liked the candid appraisal of her gaze.

“Are you trying to pretend you don’t know each other?” Pavan snarled.

Simon looked at him and then down to the shotgun, and drawled: “Pappy, I’d be proud to marry her, but I am not the father of her child.”

Pavan moved the gun abruptly and hit Simon across the ear with the barrel. Pain and shock stabbed a kaleidoscope of fire through the Saint’s brain and for an instant almost dissolved into blackness. As he fought to clear his vision, he heard Netchideff laughing.

“You are upset, Julius,” the pilot said. “Two of such people on your trail, so close together—it is upsetting. But if what you say about Templar is right, obviously they would not be friends. Now go and bring back Templar’s boat, before it may be noticed by some other fisherman.”

Pavan put the shotgun down in a corner by the door and went out.

Slowly the sharp agony in the Saint’s ear died down to a dull throbbing, and the sequins stopped dancing in front of his eyes.

Netchideff stood at the window gazing out, rubbing his square jaw on his clenched fist, apparently deep in thought.

“How did you get into this?” Simon asked the girl quietly. “Don’t answer if it’s any help to the enemy.”

“They know,” she said. “I’m in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

“What—with no horse? No red coat?”

His flippancy was as cool as if they had been making conversation at a cocktail party. Tired and desperate as she must have been, it still managed to bring the wraith of a smile to her lips.

“These days, we’re also a Canadian FBI,” she said. “And they haven’t advertised it, but they’ve let a few women in. There are cases sometimes when they can do more than men.”

“And they tried you on Julius.”

“I got a job as his secretary.”

“So he’d already been tabbed as the main dope source that everyone’s been looking for?”

“Oh, no. It was much more like a wild suspicion. Until I had a couple of lucky breaks, that is. But I guess this unlucky one wipes them out.”

“I followed you up from Nanaimo last night,” Simon said. “I’d been watching you and wondering about the set-up before that, of course. I saw the two of you pile into his motor-boat and push off from the dock where he keeps it, and somehow I felt that something was wrong and that you were scared deep inside. But it was only a feeling, and there were too many facts against trying to get a boat and follow you in the dark. I stopped at a motel and figured I wouldn’t have too much trouble locating you after daybreak, but I’ll admit I didn’t sleep too well.”

“Were you after the same thing that I was?”

He nodded.

“Ever since a bloke in Singapore reminded me how long it was since I last did anything really valuable and altruistic for the human race.”

“I was damned scared,” she said. There seemed to be so much that they had to tell each other, even though a strange understanding had grown from nowhere between them that made the most skeletal explanations full and sufficient. “I had a sixth sense telling me that something had gone wrong and Pavan was on to me, but I tried to tell myself it was only nerves. This was my first important assignment, and I wanted to be a hero. I figured that if I wasn’t being brought here to be murdered, this might be the big break. I just had to take the gamble.”

“What was the reason he gave for bringing you up here?”

“To work on the prospectus of a housing development he’s interested in.”

“You couldn’t possibly have believed that that was all he meant to work on, at least.”

“I wasn’t afraid of what you’re thinking,” she said. “This was one of those jobs I mentioned where it was an advantage to be a woman. I have news for you. He’s queer.”

“That’s a switch,” said the Saint. “Now you may have to protect me.”

They had been ignoring the pilot unconsciously—it didn’t seem that anything he heard now could do any more harm, and indeed he had appeared to be completely immersed in his own cogitations. But now they saw him looking at them again with sphinx-like intensity, and became aware that he had never stopped listening.

Suddenly he thumped his chest.

“I am not queer,” he proclaimed proudly.

“Well, congratulations,” said the Saint.

Netchideff stalked closer, with an almost feral compactness of movement for a few steps.

His course tended towards the girl. He stood looking down at her, studying separate details with his pale eyes. Then, as if to confirm his observation, he cupped a hand over one of her breasts.

Marian Kent kicked at him savagely, but he turned skilfully and her foot only struck him in the thigh.

Netchideff slapped her face hard, but by no means with his full strength. Then he put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter.

“You son of a bitch,” said the Saint.

He couldn’t kick Netchideff effectively himself because of his position around the corner of the bunk, but hoped that the pilot might be tempted into a move that would remedy that.

Netchideff regarded him thoughtfully; but then the door opened again and Pavan returned.

Pavan carried the Saint’s fly rod and tackle box. He put the tackle box down by the wall and waved the end of the rod up and down, feeling the action of it, before he stood it up in the corner.

“Nice rod,” he said. “That’s all he had in the boat. He must have rented it from a camp down the lake.” His dark eyes shifted from one direction to another, and made certain deductions. “Were they giving you trouble?”

“No.” Netchideff laughed again. He moved back to the table, took a cigarette from the Saint’s package and lighted it, then looked a second time at the match booklet he had used. “Lake Cowichan Auto Court,” he read from it. “That is where he stayed last night.”