How Simon Templar Went to a Fire,
and Patricia Holm Heard of a Financier
1
Perhaps the story really began when Simon Templar switched on the radio. At least, before that everything was peaceful; and afterwards, for many memorable days which were to find an unforgettable place in his saga of hairbreadth adventure, there was no peace at all. But Simon Templar's life always seemed to run that way: his interludes of peace seemed to have something inescapably transient about them, some inborn predestined seed of dynamite that was foredoomed to blast him back into another of those amazing episodes which to him were the ever-recurrent breath of life.
He was not thinking of trouble or adventure or anything else exciting. He lounged back comfortably in the long-nosed rakish Hirondel, his finger tips barely seeming to caress the wheel as he nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering sixty; for he was in no hurry. Overhead a bright moon was shining, casting long shadows over the fields and silvering the leaves of passing trees and hedges. His blue eyes probed lazily down the white reach of the headlights; and the unruffled calm of his brown face of a mocking buccaneer might have helped anyone to understand why in many places he was better known as "The Saint" than he was by his own name — without giving any clue to the disturbing fact that a mere mention of the Saint in initiated quarters was capable of reducing detectives and convicted criminals alike to a state of unprintable incoherence. None of the adventures that had left that almost incredible legend in their trail had left a mark on his face or in his mind: he was simply and serenely enjoying his interlude, though he must have known, even then, that it could only be an interlude until the next adventure began, because Fate had ordained him for adventure…
"You know," he remarked idly, "much as I've cursed them in my time, there's something to be said for these kindergarten English licensing laws. Just think — if it wasn't for the way our professional grandmothers smack our bottoms and pack us off to bed when the clock strikes, we might still be swilling inferior champagne and deafening ourselves with saxophones in that revolting roadhouse instead of doing our souls a bit of good with all this."
"When you start getting tolerant I'm always afraid you're sickening for something," said Patricia Holm sleepily.
He turned his head to smile at her. She looked very lovely leaning back at his side, with her blue eyes half closed and her lips softly shaped with humour: he was always discovering her loveliness again with an exciting sense of surprise, as if it had so many facets that it was never twice the same. She was something that was always changing and yet never changed; as much a part of him as his oldest memory, and yet always new; wherever he went and whatever other adventures he found, she was the one unending and exquisite adventure.
He touched the spun gold of her hair.
"All right," he said. "You can have the saxophones."
And that was when he switched on the radio.
The little dial on the dashboard glowed alight out of the darkness, and for a few seconds there was silence while the set warmed up. And then, with an eerie suddenness, there were no saxophones, but a loud brassy voice speaking in French. The set picked it out of the air in the middle of a sentence, flung it gratingly at them as it rose in a snarling crescendo.
"… to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly pacifists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold… Sons of France, I call you to arms. Fling yourselves into the fight with a song on your lips and glory in your hearts, for only in the blood and fire of battle will our nation be purified and find once more her true soul!"
The brassy voice stopped speaking, and there was an instant's stillness. And then, like a thunderclap, another sound burst in — a hoarse, frenzied howl, shrill and hideous as the clamour of ten thousand hungry wolves maddened by the smell of blood, an inarticulate animal roar that scarcely seemed as if it could have come from human throats. Wild, savage, throbbing with a horrible blood lust, it fouled the peaceful night with visions of flame and carnage, of mad mindless mobs, of torture and the crash of guns, of shattered broken buildings and the shattered broken bodies of men and women and children. For a full minute it swelled and pulsed on their ears. And then came the music.
It was not saxophones. It was brass and drums. Brass like the voice that had been speaking, blasting its brazen rhythm of ecstatic sacrifice in rasping fanfares that lashed clean through the filmy gloss of civilization to clog the blood with intolerable tension. Drums thudding the maddening pulse beats of a modern but more potent voodoo, hammering their insensate strum into the brains until the mind was stunned and battered with their merciless insistence. Brass shouting and shrieking its melodic echo of the clash of steel and the scream of human torment. Drums pattering their glib mutter of the rattle of firearms and the rumble of rolling iron. Brass blaring its hypnotic hymn of heroic death. Drums thumping like giant hearts. Brass and drums. Brass and drums. Brass and drums…
"Turn it off," said Patricia sharply, abruptly. "Stop it, Simon. It's horrible!"
He could feel her shiver.
"No," he said. "Listen."
He was tense himself, his nerves drawn to threads of quivering steel. The music had done that to him. The music went on, drowning out the incoherent voices until there were no more voices but only the crystallized blare and beat that was one voice for all. Brass and drums. And now into it, in rime with it, growing with it, swelling above it, came a new sound — the unmistakable monotonous crunch of booted feet. Left, right, left, right, left. The terrible juggernaut tramp of masses of marching men. Legs swinging like synchronized machinery. Heels falling together steadily, heavily, irresistibly, like leaden pile drivers pounding the bruised earth…
The Saint was in one of his queer moments of vision. He went on speaking, his voice curiously low against the background clamour of brass and drums and marching feet:
"Yes, it's horrible; but you ought to listen. We ought to remember what hangs over our peace… I've heard just the same thing before — one night when I was fiddling with the radio and I caught some Nazi anniversary jamboree in Nuremberg… This is the noise of a world gone mad. This is the climax of two thousand years of progress. This is why philosophers have searched for wisdom, and poets have revealed beauty, and martyrs have died for freedom — so that whole nations that call themselves intelligent human beings can exchange their brains for a brass band, and tax themselves to starvation to buy bombs and battleships, and live in a mental slavery that no physical slave in the old days was ever condemned to. And be so carried away by it that most of them really and honestly believe that they're proud crusaders building a new and glorious world… I know you can wipe out two thousand years of education with one generation of censorship and propaganda. But what is this sickness that makes one nation after another in Europe want to wipe them out?"
The bugles blared again and the feet marched against the tapping of the drums, in mocking denial of an answer. And then he touched the switch and the noise ceased.
Peace came back into the night with a strange softness, as if on tiptoe, fearful of a fresh intrusion. Once more there was only the murmuring hiss of the smooth-running engine and the rustle of the passing air, not even loud enough to blanket the hoot of an indignant owl scared from its perch on an overhanging bough; but it was a peace like waking from an ugly dream, with their ears still haunted by what they had heard before. It was some time before Patricia spoke though Simon knew she was wide awake now.
"What was it?" she asked at last, in a voice too even to be wholly natural.
"That was the Sons of France — Colonel Marteau's blue-shirt gang. You remember, they grew out of the breakup of the old Croix de Feu, only about ten times worse. They've been holding a midnight jamboree outside Paris, with torches and bonfires and flags and bands and everything. What we cut in on must have been the grand finale — Colonel Marteau's pep talk to the assembled cannon fodder."
He paused.
"First Russia, then Italy, then Germany, then Spain," he said soberly. "And now France is next. There, but for the grace of God, goes the next tin-pot dictator, on his way to make the world a little less fit to live in… There are almost enough of them now — marching mobs of idiots backwards and forwards and building guns and armies because they can't build anything else, and because it's the perfect solution to all economic problems so long as it lasts. How can you have peace and progress when fighting is the only gospel they've got to preach?… If you wanted to be pessimistic, you could feel that Nature had got the whole idea of progress licked from the start; because as soon as even the dumbest mass of people had just got educated. to the futility of modern warfare and the stupidity of patriotism, she could turn round and come back with some strutting monomaniac to sell the old stock all over again under a new trade mark and put the whole show back where it started from."
"But why?"
He shrugged.
"As far as the Sons of France are concerned, you could be pretty cynical if you wanted to. The present French socialist government is rather unpopular with some of our leading bloodsuckers because it's introducing a new set of laws on the same lines Roosevelt started in America, to take all the profit out of war by nationalizing all major industries directly it starts. The whole idea, of course, is too utterly communistic and disgusting for words. Hence the Sons of France. All this blood-and-fire business tonight was probably part of the graft to get the Socialists chucked out and leave honest businessmen safe to make their fortunes out of murder. It's a lovely idea." "Are they going to get away with it?" "Who is to stop it?" asked the Saint bitterly. And when he asked the question he could imagine no answer. But afterwards he would remember it. This was, as has been said, one of his precarious interludes of peace. Twice already in his lawless career he had helped to snatch away the threat of war and destruction from over the heads of an unsuspecting world, but this time the chance that the history of Europe could be altered by anything he did seemed too remote to be given thought. But in the same mood of grim clairvoyance into which the interruption had thrown him he gazed sombrely down the track of the headlights, still busy with his thoughts, and seeing the fulfilment of his half-spoken prophecy. He saw the streets swarming with arrogant strangely uniformed militia, the applauding headlines of a disciplined press, the new breed of sycophantic spies, the beginnings of fear, men who had once been free learning to look over their shoulders before they spoke their thoughts, neighbour betraying neighbour, the midnight arrests, the third degree, the secret tribunals, the fantastic confessions, the farcical trials, the concentration camps and firing squads. He saw the hysterical ranting of yet another neurotic megalomaniac adding itself to the rising clamour of the crazy discords of Europe, the coming generations reared to believe in terrorism at home and war abroad as the apotheosis of a heroic destiny, children marching with toy guns as soon as they could walk, merging easily into the long crawling lines of new legions more pitiless than Caesar's. He saw the peaceful countryside before him gouged into swamps and craters where torn flesh rotted faster than the scavenging rats could eat; the long red tongues of the guns licking upwards into the dark as they thundered their dreadful litany; the first rose-pink glow of fire, deepening to crimson as it leaped up, flickering, spreading its red aura fanwise across the sky until the black silhouettes of trees could be seen clearly stamped against it… until with an odd sense of shock, as if he were coming out of another dream, the Saint realized that that at least was no vision — that his eyes really were seeing the scarlet reflection of swelling flame beyond the distant trees.
He pointed.
"Look."
Patricia sat up.
"Anyone would say it was a fire," she said interestedly.
Simon Templar grinned. His own reverie was swept away as quickly as it had begun — for that moment.
"I'll bet it's a fire," he said. "And in this neck of the woods the chances are that the nearest fire brigade is miles away. We'd better drift along and look it over."
He would never forget that fire. It was the beginning of the adventure.