How Simon Templar obliged lady Valerie,
and chief inspector Teal refused breakfast
1
The man who had been bending over Lady Valerie straightened up. He was slim and sallow, with black hair plastered down over his head until it looked as if it had been waxed. He had quick darting eyes and a sly slinking manner; his movements were abrupt and silent, like those of a lizard. One could imagine him lurking in dark corners for sinister purposes.
The Saint smiled at Lady Valerie as the lizard-like man withdrew his hand and her face became visible. The first expression on her face was a light of joy and relief; and then when she saw that he kept his hands up and saw the ape-faced man follow him in with the silenced revolver screwed into his back, it changed through stark unbelief to hopeless dejection.
"Hullo, darling," he said. "You do have some nice friends, don't you?"
She didn't respond. She sat there and stared at him reproachfully: she seemed to be deeply disappointed in him. Simon realized that there was some excuse for her, but she would have to endure.her unfounded disappointment for a little while longer.
He transferred his smile to the automatic and the cigarette.
"Nice weather we've been having, haven't we?" he murmured, keeping the conversational ball rolling single-handed.
This other man was bigger, and there was an air of conscious arrogance about him. He had the cold, intolerant eyes and haughty moustache of a Prussian guardsman. He gazed back at Simon with fishlike incuriosity and made a gesture with his cigarette at the sallow man.
"Disarm and search him, Dumaire."
"So your name is Dumaire, is it?" said the Saint politely. "May I compliment you on your coiffure? I've never seen floor polish used on the head before. And while this is going on, won't you introduce me to your uncle?"
Dumaire said nothing; he simply proceeded to do what he was told and run through the Saint's pockets. Keys, cigarette case, lighter, money, handkerchief, wallet, fountain pen — he took out the commonplace articles one by one and laid them on a small table in front of the man who appeared to be in charge. While he was waiting for the collection to be assembled the latter answered Simon's question.
"If it is of any interest to you," he said, "I am Major Bravache, a divisional commander of the Sons of France, about whom I think you said something just now."
He spoke English excellently, with only a trace of native accent.
"How perfectly splendid," said the Saint slowly. "But do you know what bad company you're in? This bird behind me, for instance, with the peashooter boring into my backbone, whatever he may have told you, I happen to know that his real name is Sam Pietri and he has done three sentences for robbery with violence."
He felt the harmless gun quiver involuntarily against his spine and chuckled inwardly over the awful anguish that must have been twinging through the tissues of the ape-faced man, not only compelled to be an impotent accomplice in snaring fresh victims into the net of his own downfall, but suffering the aftermath of a maltreated skull as well. Simon would have given much for a glimpse of his guardian's face, but he hoped that it was not betraying anything to the opposition. Fortunately, no one was paying any attention to Pietri. Dumaire, his job done, was leaning against the wall and watching Lady Valerie with reptilian eyes in which the only discernible expression had a brazen lewdness that quite plainly revealed his chief preoccupation; Bravache had simply ignored the Saint's last remarks as if he had not heard them. He was busily turning over the things on the table before him. He gave his most detailed attention to the wallet, and he had hardly started on it when a gleam of triumph flowed into his cold eyes. He held up a scrap of buff paper with a large number printed on it.
"Ah!" he said, with a deep satisfaction that was exaggerated by his slightly foreign handling of words. "The ticket. That is excellent!"
As a matter of fact, it was a ticket in an impromptu sweepstake organized over the week end in Peter Quentin's favourite pub on the outskirts of Anford; but the Saint had known that it was there, and had left it there with the deliberate object of leading the comedy on as far as it would go in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.
He waited to see how far his hope would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester's eyes were like saucers: they looked at first as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing; and then a veiled half-comprehending, half-perplexed expression passed over them which Simon hoped nobody would see. Bravache folded the ticket carefully and put it in his own wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.
"We are very grateful, my dear lady," he said. "You have done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons of France do not forget services. In future you will be under our protection." He paused, smiling, and there was something wolfish about his smile. "Should anything happen to you — should you, for instance, be murdered by one of our enemies — you will be immediately avenged."
An arpeggio of spooky fingers stroked up the Saint's back into the roots of his hair. In spite of Bravache's stilted phrasing, the almost farcical old-fashioned melodrama in which his tongue rolled itself gloatingly around every word, there was something in his harsh voice that was by no means farcical, something which in combination with that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by the unreality of its enunciation. Simon realized for the first time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a certain type of man — a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse with the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possible for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the mentalities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.
He said lightly: "That'll be fun for you, won't it, Valerie?"
Bravache looked back at him, and again his eyes were cold and fishy.
"You have been attempting to discover the secrets of the Sons of France in order to betray them to our enemies," he said. "The penalty for that, as you know, is death."
"You must have been reading a book," said the Saint admiringly. "Or was that Luker's idea?"
The vulpine twist that was meant to be a smile remained on the other man's thin lips.
"I am acquainted with Mr Luker only as a sympathizer and supporter of our ideals to whom I have the honour to be attached as personal aide," he replied. "Your crime has been committed against an organization of patriots known as the Sons of France, of which I am an officer. You are now the prisoner of the Sons of France. We have been informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary employed by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon and betray our organization. Of that I have sufficient proof." He tapped the pocket where he had replaced his wallet with the sweepstake ticket in it. "It also appears that you have threatened Lady Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore if you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her."
Simon's arms were beginning to ache and stiffen from being held up so long. But inside he felt timelessly relaxed, and his mind was a cold pattern of crystalline understanding.
"You mean," he said unemotionally, "that the idea is to kill both of us, and arrange it so that you can try to spread the story that I murdered Lady Valerie and that the Sons of France killed me to avenge her."
"I am sure that the theory will find wide acceptance," answered Bravache complacently. "Lady Valerie is young and beautiful, whereas you are a notorious criminal. I think that a great many people will applaud our action, and that even the British police themselves will feel a secret relief which will tend to handicap their inquiries."
The Saint glanced at Lady Valerie. Her face had been blank with stupefaction; now it was drawn and frightened. Her big brown eyes were fixed on him in mute and hypnotized entreaty.
"I told you you had charming friends, darling," Simon remarked.
He studied Bravache with cold-blooded interest. He felt that in the space of a few minutes he had come to know the man intimately, that he could take his soul apart and lay out all its components. How much of what Bravache had said was genuine fanaticism, or genuine self-deception, however wilful, he could not judge; in that kind of neurotic, the blend of idealism and conscienceless rationalization became so homogeneous that it was practically impossible to draw a sharp cleavage. But he was not so much interested in the man individually as in the type, the matrix in which all the petty satraps of tyranny are cast. He had known it in Red Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and had known the imaginative horror of conceiving of life under a dynasty in which liberty and life itself lay at the caprice of men from that mould. Now he was finding the imprint of the same die on a Frenchman, the chilling prototypical hallmark of the breed from which secret police and authorized persecutors are recruited; and it gave him a grimmer measure of the thing he had set out to fight than anything else hitherto had done. If the Sons of France had progressed far enough to develop officers like Major Bravache, the wheels must be turning with nightmare speed…
"It all sounds very neat and jolly, my dear Major Cochon," he admitted. "Do we start right away?"
"I think we had better do so," said Bravache, still smiling with a face of marble. "We have already wasted enough time." He turned his head. "Dumaire, you know what to do. We will leave you to do it." He looked at the Saint again, with his lips drawn back from his white even teeth. "You, Mr Templar, will accompany Pietri and myself. If you resist or try to obstruct us you will be shot at once. I advise you to come quietly. I am hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to the certainty of death immediately. Besides" — the gleam of the white teeth was feline — "as a gentleman, you will not wish to deprive me of the opportunity to answer some of your remarks which I have not had time to deal with here."
The Saint smiled.
"By no manner of means," he said. "Only I should rather like to take charge of the interview myself at this point — if you don't mind."
He stepped aside and backwards, and took hold of Pietri by the ear. The movement was so improbable and unexpected that it was completed before either Bravache or Dumaire could reorient their wits sufficiently to do anything about it. And by that time Pietri was securely held, like a writhing urchin in the grip of an old-fashioned schoolmarm, so that his body was between the Saint and Bravache, who was still trying to make up his mind whether to grab for the automatic which he had confidently left lying on the table a yard away.
Bravache's poise broke for a moment.
"Use your gun, you fool!" he thundered.
"He can't," said the Saint. "You tell them why, Sam."
An extra turn on the piece of gristle he was holding made his victim squeak like a mouse.
"There's nothing in it," wailed Pietri, with the revolver quivering futilely in his grasp. "They caught me outside — him and two other fellows—"
Bravache started to move then, and Simon's voice ripped out like a lash.
"I wouldn't," he said. "Really I wouldn't. It's dangerous."
And as he spoke Peter and Hoppy came through the doorway.
Bravache stood very still. His face was cold and unmoved, but the veins on the backs of his clenched hands stood out in knotty blue cords. Dumaire, caught with one hand at the edge of his coat pocket, prudently let it fall back to his side. He flattened himself against the wall like a cornered rat, with his shoulders hunched up to the jaw level of his small ebony-capped head.
Simon released Pietri and strolled over to pick up Bravache's automatic and retrieve his cigarette case and lighter from among his strewn belongings on the table. With a cigarette between his lips and the lighter wick burning steadily, he looked at Bravache with cerulean mockery in his eyes.
"I'm hoping that as a reasonable man you will agree that the prospect of death in a number of hours is preferable to. the certainty of death immediately," he said in a voice of satin. "Go on, Major, I don't want anything to interrupt our little chat."