IV

The Prince of Cherkessia

Of the grey hairs which bloomed in the thinning thatch of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, there were at least a couple of score which he could attribute directly to an equal number of encounters with the Saint. Mr. Teal did not actually go so far as to call them by name and celebrate their birthdays, for he was not by nature a whimsical man; but he had no doubts about their origin.

The affair of the Prince of Cherkessia gave him the forty-first — or it may have been the forty-second.

His Highness arrived in London without any preliminary publicity; but he permitted a number of reporters to interview him at his hotel after his arrival, and the copy which he provided had a sensation value which no self-respecting news editor could ignore.

It started before the assembled pressmen had drunk more than half the champagne which was provided for them in the Prince's suite, which still stands as a record for any reception of that type; and it was started by a cub reporter, no more ignorant than the rest, but more honest about it, who had not been out on that kind of assignment long enough to learn that the serious business of looking for a story is not supposed to mar the general conviviality while there is anything left to drink.

"Where," asked this revolutionary spirit brazenly, with his mouth full of foie gras, "is Cherkessia?"

The Prince raised his Mephistophelian eyebrows.

"You," he replied, with faint contempt, "would probably know it better as Circassia."

At the sound of his answer a silence spread over the room. The name rang bells, even in journalistic heads. The cub gulped down the rest of his sandwich without tasting it; and one reporter was so far moved as to put down a glass which was only half empty.

"It is a small country between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea," said the Prince. "Once it was larger; but it has been eaten away by many invaders. The Turks and the Russians have robbed us piecemeal of most of our lands — although it was the Tatars themselves who gave my country its name, from their word Cherktkess, which means 'robbers.' That ancient insult was long since turned to glory by my ancestor Schamyl, whose name I bear; and in the paltry lands which are still left to me the proud traditions of our race are carried on to this day."

The head of the reporter who had put down his glass was buzzing with vague memories.

"Do you still have beautiful Circassians?" he asked hungrily.

"Of course," said the Prince. "For a thousand years our women have been famed for their beauty. Even today, we export many hundreds annually to the most distinguished harems in Turkey — a royal tax on these transactions," added the Prince, with engaging simplicity, "has been of great assistance to our national budget."

The reporter swallowed, and retrieved his glass hurriedly; and the cub who had started it all asked, with bulging eyes: "What other traditions do you have, Your Highness?"

"Among other things," said the Prince, "we are probably the only people today among whom the droit de seigneur survives. That is to say that every woman in my country belongs to me, if and when I choose to take her, for as long as I choose keep her in my palace."

"And do you still exercise that right?" asked another journalist, with estatic visions of headlines floating through his mind.

The Prince smiled, as he might have smiled at at naivety of a child.

"If the girl is sufficiently attractive — of course. It is a divine right bestowed upon my family by Mohammed himself. In my country it is considered an honour to be chosen, and the marriageable value of any girl on whom I bestow my right is greatly increased by it."

From that moment the reception was a historic success; and the news that one reason for the Prince's visit was to approve the final details of a new ₤100,000 crown which was being prepared for him by a West End firm of jewellers was almost an anticlimax.

Chief Inspector Teal read the full interview in his morning paper the following day; and he was so impressed with its potentialities that he made a personal call on the Prince that afternoon.

"Is this really the interview you gave, Your Highness?" he asked, when he had introduced himself, "or are you going to repudiate it?"

Prince Schamyl took the paper and read it through. He was a tall well-built man with a pointed black beard and twirled black moustaches like a seventeenth-century Spanish grandee; and when he had finished reading he handed the paper back with a slight bow, and fingered his moustaches in some perplexity.

"Why should I repudiate it?" he inquired. "It is exactly what I said."

Teal chewed for a moment on the spearmint which even in the presence of royalty he could not deny himself; and then he said: "In that case, Your Highness, would you be good enough to let us give you police protection?"

The Prince frowned puzzledly.

"But are not all people in this country protected by the police?"

"Naturally," said Teal. "But this is rather a special case. Have you ever heard of the Saint?"

Prince Schamyl shrugged.

"I have heard of several."

"I don't mean that kind of saint," the detective told him grimly. "The Saint is the name of a notorious criminal we have here, and something tells me that as soon as he sees this interview he'll be making plans to steal this crown you're buying. If I know anything about him, the story that you make some of your money out of selling girls to harems, and that you exercise this droit de seigneur, whatever that is, would be the very thing to put him on your tracks."

"But, please," said the Prince in ingenuous bewilderment, "what is wrong with our customs? My people have been happy with them for hundreds of years."

"The Saint wouldn't approve of them," said Teal with conviction, and realised the hopelessness of entering upon a discussion of morals with such a person. "Anyhow, sir, I'd be very much obliged if you would let us give you a special guard until you take your crown out of the country."

The Prince shook his head, as if the incomprehensible customs of England baffled him to speechlessness.

"In my country there are no notorious criminals," he said, "because as soon as a criminal is known he is beheaded. However, I shall be glad to help you in any way I can. The crown is to be delivered here tomorrow, and you may place as many guards in my suite as you think necessary."

The news that four special detectives had been detailed to guard the Prince of Cherkessia's crown was published in an evening paper which Simon Templar was reading at a small and exclusive dinner at which the morning paper's interview was also discussed.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist it," said Patricia Holm fatalistically, "directly I saw the headlines. You're that sort of idiot."

Simon looked at her mockingly.

"Idiot?" he queried. "My dear Pat, have you ever known me to be anything but sober and judicious?"

"Often," said his lady candidly. "I've also known you to walk into exactly the same trap. I'll bet you anything you like that Teal made up the whole story just to get a rise out of you, and the Prince 'll turn out to be another detective with a false beard."

"You'd lose your money," said the Saint calmly. "Teal is as worried about it as you are, and if you like to drop in at Vazey's on Bond Street or make discreet inquiries at the Southshire Insurance Company, you'll find that that crown genuinely is costing a hundred thousand quid and is insured for the same amount. It's rather pleasant to think that Southshire will have to stand the racket, because their ninety per cent underwriter is a very scaly reptile named Percy Quiltan, whose morals are even more repulsive than Prince Schamyl's. And the Prince's are bad enough… No, Pat, you can't convince me that that tin hat isn't legitimate boodle; and I'm going to have it."

A certain Peter Quentin, who was also present, sighed, and turned the sigh into a resigned grin.

"But how d'you propose to do it?" he asked.

The Saint's blue eyes turned on him with an impish twinkle.

"I seem to remember that you retired from this business some months ago, Peter," he murmured. "A really respectable citizen wouldn't be asking that question with so much interest. However, since your beautiful wife is away — if you'd like to lend a hand, you could help me a lot."

"But what's the plan?" insisted Patricia.

Simon Templar smiled.

"We are going to dematerialise ourselves," he said blandly. "Covetous but invisible, we shall lift the crown of Cherkessia from under Claud Eustace's very nose, and put it on a shelf in the fourth dimension."

She was no wiser when the party broke up some hours later. Simon informed her that he and Peter Quentin would be moving into Prince Schamyl's hotel to take up residence there for a couple of days; but she knew that they would not be there under their own names, and the rest of his plan remained wrapped in the maddening mystery with which the Saint's sense of the theatrical too often required him to tantalise his confederates.

Chief Inspector Teal would have been glad to know even as little as Patricia; but the evidence which came before him was far less satisfactory. It consisted of a plain postcard, addressed to Prince Schamyl, on which had been drawn a skeleton figure crowned with a rakishly tilted halo. A small arrow pointed to the halo, and at the other end of the arrow was written in neat copperplate the single word: "Thursday."

"If the Saint says he's coming on Thursday, he's coming on Thursday," Teal stated definitely, in a private conference to which he was summoned when the card arrived.

Prince Schamyl elevated his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"I do not attempt to understand your customs, Inspector. In my country, if we require evidence, we beat the criminal with rods until he provides it."

"You can't do that in this country," said Teal, as if he wished you could. "That postcard wouldn't be worth tuppence in a court of law — not with the sort of lawyers the Saint could afford to engage. We couldn't prove that he sent it. We know it's his trade-mark, but the very fact that everybody in England knows the same thing would be the weakest point in our case. The prosecutor could never make the jury believe that a crook as clever as the Saint is supposed to be would sent out a warning that could be traced back to him so easily. The Saint knows it, and he's been trading on it for years — it's the strongest card in his hand. If we arrested him on evidence like that, he'd only have to swear that the card was a fake — that some other crook had sent it out as a blind — and he could make a fool of anyone who tried to prove it wasn't. Our only chance is to catch him more or less red-handed. One of these days he'll go too far, and I'm only hoping it'll be on Thursday."

Teal thumbed the pages of a cheap pocket diary, although he had no need to remind himself of dates.

"This is Wednesday," he said. "You can say that Thursday begins any time after midnight. I'll be here at twelve o'clock myself, and I'll stay here till midnight tomorrow."

Mr. Teal was worried more than he would have cared to admit. The idea that even such a satanic ingenuity as he knew the Saint to possess could contrive a way of stealing anything from under the eyes of a police guard who had been forewarned that he was coming for it was obviously fantastic. It belonged to sensational fiction, to the improbable world of Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin would have disguised himself as Chief Inspector Teal or the Chief Commissioner, and walked out with the crown under his arm; but Teal knew that such miracles of impersonation only happened in the romances of unscrupulous and reader-cheating authors. Yet he knew the Saint too well, he had crossed swords too often with that amazing brigand of the twentieth century, to derive any solid consolation from that thought.

When he came back to the hotel that night, he checked over his defences as seriously as if he had been guarding the emperor of a great European power from threatened assassination. There were men posted at the entrances of the hotel, and one at a strategic point in the lobby which covered the stairs and elevators. A Flying Squad car stood outside. Every member of the hotel staff who would be serving the Prince during the next twenty-four hours had been investigated. A burly detective paced the corridor outside the Prince's suite, and two more equally efficient men were posted inside. Teal added himself to the last number. The ₤100,000 crown of Cherkessia reposed in a velvet-lined box on a table in the sitting-room of the suite — Teal had unsuccessfully attempted more than once to induce Prince Schamyl to authorise its removal to a safe-deposit or even to Scotland Yard itself.

"Where is the necessity?" inquired the Prince blankly. "You have your detectives everywhere. Are you afraid that they will be unable to cope with this absurd criminal?"

Teal had no answer. He was afraid — there was a gloomy premonition creeping around his brain that the Saint could not have helped foreseeing all his precautions, and therefore must have discovered a loophole long in advance. That was the reason why he had studiously withheld even a rumour of the Saint's threat from the Press, for he had his own stolid vanity. But he could not tell the Prince that. He glowered morosely at the private detective who had been added to the contingent by the Southshire Insurance Company, a brawny broken-nosed individual with a moustache like the handlebars of a bicycle, who was pruning his nails with a penknife in the corner. He began to ask himself whether those battered and belligerently whiskered features could by any feat of make-up have been imposed with putty and spirit gum on the face of the Saint or any of his known associates; and then the detective looked up and encountered his devouring stare with symptoms of such pardonable alarm that Teal hastily averted his eyes.

"Surely," said the Prince, who still appeared to be striving to get his bearings, "if you are really anticipating an attack from this criminal, and he is so well known to you, his movements are being watched?"

"I wish I could say they were," said Teal glumly. "As soon as that postcard arrived I went after him myself, but he appears to have left the country. Anyhow, he went down to Hanworth last night, where he keeps an aeroplane, and went off in it; and he hasn't been back since. Probably he's only fixing up an alibi—"

Even as he uttered the theory, the vision of a helicopter flashed into his mind. The hotel was a large tall building, with the latest type of autogiro it might have been possible to land and take off there. Teal had a sudden wild desire to post more detectives on the roof — even to ask for special aeroplanes to patrol the skies over the hotel. He laughed himself out of the aeroplanes, but he went downstairs and picked up one of the men he had posted in the lobby.

"Go up and watch the roof," he ordered. "I'll send some-one to relieve you at eight o'clock."

The man nodded obediently and went off, but he gave Teal a queer look in parting which made the detective realise how deeply the Saint superstition had got into his system. The realisation did not make Mr. Teal any better pleased with himself, and his manner when he returned to the royal suite was almost surly.

"We'd better watch in turns," he said. "There are twenty-four hours to go, and the Saint may be banking on waiting until near the end of the time when we're all tired and thinking of giving it up."

Schamyl yawned.

"I am going to bed," he said. "If anything happens, you may inform me."

Teal watched the departure of the lean black-hawk figure, and wished he could have shared the Prince's tolerant boredom with the whole business. One of the detectives who watched the crown, at a sign from Teal, curled up on the settee and closed his eyes. The private watchdog of the Southshire Insurance lolled back in his chair; very soon his mouth fell open, and a soporific buzzing emanated from his throat and caused his handlebar moustaches to vibrate in unison.

Chief Inspector Teal paced up and down the room, fashioning a wodge of chewing gum into endless intricate shapes with his teeth and tongue. The exercise did not fully succeed in soothing his nerves. His brain was haunted by memories of the buccaneer whom he knew only too well — the rakish carving of the brown handsome face, the mockery of astonishingly clear blue eyes, the gay smile that came so easily to the lips, the satirical humour of the gentle dangerous voice. He had seen all those things too often ever to forget them — had been deceived, maddened, dared, defied, and outwitted by them in too many adventures to believe that their owner would ever be guilty of an empty hoax. And the thought that the Saint was roving at large that night was not comforting. The air above Middlesex had literally swallowed him up, and he might have been anywhere between Berlin and that very room.

When the dawn came Teal was still awake. The private detective's handlebars ceased vibrating with a final snort; the officer on the couch woke up, and the one who had kept the night watch took his place. Teal himself was far too wrought up to think of seizing his own chance to rest. Ten o'clock arrived before the Prince's breakfast, and Schamyl came through from his bedroom as the waiter was laying the table.

He peered into the box where the crown was packed, and stroked his beard with an ironical glint in his eyes.

"This is very strange, Inspector," he remarked. "The crown has not been stolen! Can it be that your criminal has broken his promise?"

With some effort, Teal kept his retort to himself. While the Prince attacked his eggs with a healthy appetite, Teal sipped a cup of coffee and munched on a slice of toast. For the hundredth time he surveyed the potentialities of the apartment. The bedroom and the sitting-room opened on either side of a tiny private hall, with the bathroom in between. The hall had a door into the corridor, outside which another detective was posted; there was no other entrance or exit except the open windows overlooking Hyde Park, through which the morning sun was streaming. The possibility of secret panels or passages was absurd. The furniture was modernistically plain, expensive, and comfortable. There was a chesterfield, three armchairs, a couple of smaller chairs, a writing desk, the centre table on which breakfast was laid, and a small side table on which stood the box containing the crown of Cherkessia. Not even a very small thief could have secreted himself in or behind any of the articles. Nor could he plausibly slip through the guards outside. Therefore, if he was to make good his boast, it seemed as if he must be inside already; and Teal's eyes turned again to the moustached representative of the Southshire Insurance Company. He would have given much for a legitimate excuse to seize the handlebars of that battle-scarred sleuth, one in each hand, and haul heftily on them; and he was malevolently deliberating whether such a manoeuvre could be justified in the emergency when the interruption came.

It was provided by Peter Quentin, who stood at another window of the hotel vertically above the Prince's suite, dangling a curious egg-shaped object at the end of a length of cotton. When it hung just an inch above Schamyl's window, he took up a yard of slack and swung the egg-shaped object cautiously outwards. As it started to swing back, he dropped the slack, and the egg plunged through the Prince's open window and broke the cotton in the jerk that ended its trajectory.

Chief Inspector Teal did not know this. He only heard the crash behind him, and swung around to see a pool of milky fluid spreading around a scattering of broken glass on the floor. Without stopping to think he made a dive towards it, and a gush of dense black smoke burst from the milky pool like a flame and struck him full in the face.

He choked and gasped, and groped around in a moment of utter blindness. In another instant the whole room was filled with a jet-black fog. The shouts and stumblings of the other men in the room came to him as if through a film of cotton-wool as he lumbered sightlessly towards the table where the crown had stood. He cannoned into it and ran over its surface with frantic hands. The box was not standing there any longer. In a sudden panic of fear he dropped to his knees and began to feel all over the floor around the table…

He had already made sure that the box had not been knocked over on to the floor in the confusion, when the smoke in his lungs forced him to stagger coughing and retching to the door. The corridor outside was black with the same smoke, and in the distance he could hear the tinkling of fire alarms. A man collided with him in the blackness, and Teal grabbed him in a vicious grip.

"Tell me your name," he snarled.

"Mason, sir," came the reply; and Teal recognised the voice of the detective he had posted in the corridor.

His chest heaved painfully.

"What happened?"

"I don't know, sir. The door — opened from the inside — one of those damn smoke-bombs thrown out — started all this. Couldn't see — any more, sir."

"Let's get some air," gasped Teal.

They reeled along the corridor for what seemed to be miles before the smoke thinned out, and after a while they reached a haven where an open corridor window reduced it to no more than a thin grey mist. Red-eyed and panting, they stared at one another.

"He's done it," said Teal huskily.

That was the bitter fact he had to face; and he knew without further investigation, even without the futile routine search that had to follow, that he would never see the crown of Cherkessia again.

The other members of the party were blundering down towards them through the fog. The first figure to loom up was that of Prince Schamyl himself, cursing fluently in an incomprehensible tongue; and after him came the form of the Southshire Insurance Company's private bloodhound. Teal's bloodshot eyes glared at that second apparition insanely through the murk. Mr. Teal had suffered much; he was not feeling himself, and in the last analysis he was only human. That is the only explanation this chronicle can offer for what he did. For with a kind of strangled grunt, Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal lurched forward and took hold of the offensive handlebar moustaches, one in each determined hand…

"Perhaps now you'll tell me how you did it," said Patricia Holm.

The Saint smiled. He had arrived only twenty minutes, before, fresh as a daisy, at the hotel in Paris where he had arranged to meet her; and he was unpacking.

From a large suitcase he had taken a small table, which was a remarkable thing for him to have even in his frequently eccentric luggage. He set it up before her, and placed on it a velvet-lined wooden box. The table was somewhat thicker in the top than most tables of that size, as if it might have contained a drawer; but she could not see any drawer.

"Watch," he said.

He touched a concealed spring somewhere in the side of the table — and the box vanished. Because she was watching it closely, she saw it go: it simply fell through a trapdoor into the hollow thickness of the top, and a perfectly fitted panel sprang up to fill the gap again. But it was all done in a split second; and even when she examined the top of the table closely it was hard to see the edges of the trapdoor. She shook the table, but nothing rattled. For all that any ordinary examination could reveal, the top might have been a solid block of mahogany.

"It was just as easy as that," said the Saint, with the air of a conjuror revealing a treasured illusion. "The crown never even left the room until I was ready to take it away. Fortunately the Prince hadn't actually paid for the crown. It was still insured by Vazey's themselves, so the Southshire Insurance Company's cheque will go direct to them — which saves me a certain amount of extra work. All I've got to do now is to finish off my alibi, and the job's done."

"But Simon," pleaded the girl, "when Teal grabbed your moustaches —"

"Teal didn't grab my moustaches," said the Saint with dignity. "Claud Eustace would never had dreamed of doing such a thing. I shall never forget the look on that bird's face when the moustaches were grabbed, though. It was a sight I hope to treasure to my dying day."

He had unpacked more of the contents of his large bag while he was talking; and at that moment he was laying out a pair of imperially curled moustachios with which was connected an impressively pointed black beard. Patricia's eyes suddenly opened wide.

"Good Lord!" she gasped. "You don't mean to say you kidnapped the Prince and pretended to be him?"

Simon Templar shook his head.

"I always was the Prince of Cherkessia — didn't you know?" he said innocently; and all at once Particia began to laugh.