The Saint Around the World (31 page)

“Very likely. It looks like one of their boats.” “When will they wonder why he does not come back?” “Not before dark—and probably not even then.” “Good. Then we do not have to worry all day. I will look after them while you take your boat down the lake and buy the part that will mend the engine of my plane.” Pavan’s heavy brows drew together. “Why me? I don’t know anything about engines.” “It is a very simple part. I will write it down for you. It was invented by Russian engineers, but the spies of Henry Ford stole the design from our trucks which they saw in Europe and they now use it in all their cars. That is what it says in my emergency instructions.”

Simon exchanged fascinated glances with Marian. “I’d probably still have to drive to Duncan for it,” Pavan said. “And that’s another twenty miles.”

“But you know the way, and you will know where to go, and no one will wonder about your accent,” Netchideff insisted jovially. “You need not be afraid for me. I have been listening to them talk, and I am quite sure they are alone and do not expect any friends to come to rescue them very soon. You should be back in three hours, and I shall not be bored. But that is no reason to waste time, Julius. You will start at once, please.”

v

The pilot came back from seeing Pavan off with Simon’s three rainbows dangling on a string. He held them up and admired them.

“This is very nice of you,” he said. “I shall enjoy them for lunch.”

“I hope you choke on a bone,” said the Saint pleasantly.

Netchideff chuckled with great good humor. He could not have made it plainer that he knew that he could afford a robust invulnerability to mere verbiage.

He took the fish to the sink and began to clean them, humming to himself in a rich voice that swallowed up the last receding mutter of the departing motor-boat. He seemed to have forgotten about sex as capriciously as a child might have been distracted from a toy.

Simon tried tentatively to keep it that way.

“I guess it’s a lot better than the lunch you’d get on your submarine,” he remarked.

The pilot stopped humming.

After a moment he said: “The Russian Navy is the best fed in the world. But did you know I came from a submarine, or did you guess?”

“It was a fairly simple deduction,” said the Saint. “Your clothes have a sea-going look. Your seaplane is painted a naval color. But all the insignia and identification marks have been painted out. Therefore you’re on a secret mission. Your seaplane is a type that could be launched from a large submarine. The safest craft to come sneaking close enough to this coast to launch it would be a submarine. So I bet on the submarine.”

“You are most intelligent.”

“The secret mission, of course, isn’t so glorious. The great well-fed Russian Navy is bringing supplies to a common dope peddler. But it isn’t so easy to deduce why.”

“I was told that he had a good organization, and he pays well.”

“Does he pay you?”

“Of course not. I do not know how that is done, but I suppose he pays one of our agents here. Then I am told when to make delivery.”

“And that doesn’t bother you a bit.”

“I am a good officer. I do what I am told.”

“I forgot, I’m sorry. Where you come from, you’re not encouraged to think.”

Netchideff had finished cleaning the fish. He washed his hands under the faucet and came towards the Saint, drying them on a dish towel.

“I think,” he stated complacently. “It is not my business, but I think I know why we supply Pavan. This dope is a popular vice in the bourgeois democracies. It is one of the vices that weakens them. So it is good for us to encourage. Anything that helps to keep you weak is good, because it will be harder for you to make the attack on us that your Wall Street leaders are planning. And the money we get helps to pay our friends and agents who keep us informed of your imperialist plans. So in all ways this is very good for us.”

“I begin to see the advantages,” Simon admitted. “Only you, can’t help getting the aggressive and defensive angles reversed.”

Netchideff frowned.

“I do not quite understand that, but what you say is not important anyhow. Because of your bourgeois education, you cannot think clearly and correctly like a Russian.”

“But you just said I was most intelligent.”

“When you make a correct deduction, you are intelligent. When you repeat capitalist lies, you show that you are too stupid for anything except fishing.”

The pilot’s eyes drifted towards Marian again.

“Now you’re really talking as if you’d been hit on the head with a hammer and sickle,” Simon said desperately. “Maybe you invented everything from Ford cars to fleas, but I’ll bet there isn’t one good fisherman in the whole Soviet Union.”

Netchideff turned back to him with a sort of irritated incredulity.

“Now you are merely ridiculous. How do you think we make the caviar that even your Wall Street bankers will pay any price for?”

“By catching a poor pregnant sturgeon in a net,” Simon scoffed. “That isn’t what we call fishing. I mean with a rod and line.”

“We have people who catch fish with a rod and a hook too. I have done it myself, often.”

“And what did you use for bait?”

“A piece of bread, or meat, or a worm.”

“That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t even know what to do with a rig like mine.”

Netchideff glared at him in an uncertain way. Then he stomped over and snatched the Saint’s rod out of the corner where Pavan had stood it. He shook it as if it were an inadequate club, then pored over it from end to end like an inquisitive ape.

He unfastened the fly from where it was hooked into a little keeper ring near the butt, and held it up in his huge paw to squint at it.

“This is what you catch fish with?” he demanded.

“That’s right,” said the Saint. “It’s an artificial fly.”

“It is only some little feathers on a hook.”

“That’s all. But you see, the kind of fisherman I’m talking about would be ashamed to catch a fish with anything that a fish could actually eat. You don’t have to be very clever to make a fish take a bite at a good meal. The only time you prove that you’re really smarter than a fish is when you can fool it into taking a bite at a piece of tin, a few feathers, or an old shoelace—anything that no fish would dream of eating if it wasn’t for the way you offered it.”

Netchideff shook his head puzzledly.

“But why do you want to do that when it is much easier with a worm?”

“A Communist couldn’t begin to understand,” answered the Saint. “But the idea is to give even a poor fish a sporting chance.”

The pilot’s glower darkened.

“I do not believe you. It is some kind of bourgeois propaganda.”

“Comrade, you’ve just cleaned three fish that swallowed it.”

“How do you make fish eat these feathers?”

“You cast the fly out on the water, and if you do it right a fish comes and takes it. But as I said, no Russian could ever do it.”

“A Russian can do anything that you can,” Netchideff said violently.

“One ruble will get you fifty dollars that you can’t.”

Netchideff hefted the rod, as if he had a mind to hit Simon across the face with it. Then he looked at it again, and at the little red-bodied fly dancing at the end of the leader. A confused sort of anger twisted his face in a way that was incongruously suggestive of a baby preparing to cry.

“I will show you,” he said. “I will catch more fish than you with this thing. If I do not, it will prove you are lying!”

He flung open the door and went out.

Marian Kent and the Saint looked at each other without daring to speak.

The door opened again and Netchideff stood there.

“I do not want you to think that you have changed anything for yourselves,” he said. “I have to pass the time, that is all. It does not suit me to kill you, Templar, until Julius returns and I am ready to leave. So it is good that you have time to think of your mistakes. As for this pretty and foolish girl”—his yellowish cat’s eyes shifted to her with the naked directness of an animal—“I am not in a hurry for her because I do not need to be. I am going to take her back to my submarine where I can enjoy her better, and when I have enough my comrades will be glad to have their turn, until we get home and give her to other comrades who will ask her questions about the Canadian Police.”

vi

“If I live to be a hundred,” Marian said at last, and giggled a little hysterically, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever listen to a more fantastic argument.”

“It worked, though, didn’t it?” Simon grinned tightly.

“I still can’t believe it. I can’t think why.”

“I gambled on a psychological gimmick. Haven’t you noticed the formula in all the Communist purges, how they can’t be satisfied with just erasing the opposition, as every other dictatorship has been? Their heretics have got to confess, and acknowledge how wrong they’ve been and how richly they deserve their punishment. I don’t know how a psychiatrist would explain it, I just know how it works. So I figured Igor mightn’t be able to resist the chance to make me eat crow before he kills me.”

“How long will he try?”

“An hour—maybe more if he’s stubborn.”

“But as he kindly told us, it won’t make aay difference to what we’ve got coming,” she said. “When Pavan gets back with that part, the liquidation will proceed as scheduled.”

“We’re still ahead, Any time we can keep him arguing, fishing, or playing charades, is time where he won’t be developing his nastier ideas. And time for the cavalry to come galloping over the hill.”

“We didn’t kid him when he was” listening,” she said quietly. “Why kid ourselves? There ain’t goin’ to be no cavalry.”

He met her eyes steadily.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Have you arranged for them?”

“No,” he said. “I’m on my own. But I hoped you might have.”

“Pavan didn’t spring this invitation on me till the last moment, and from then on he didn’t let me any farther away from him than a rest room—where there was no phone. I was afraid to try too hard to get word out, because part of the time I was wondering if the invitation itself was a trap, to see if I’d try to communicate with anyone and how I did it. And at the same time, if I was really getting a break. I didn’t want to risk fumbling it.”

“You must have some regular schedule of contacts. When will the other Mounties miss you?”

“Not before Monday. I only work for Pavan Monday through Friday, and I’d already reported everything okay yesterday afternoon just before Pavan asked me to come up here. My boss will think I’m just spending a nice restful weekend—which I should have been.”

Simon smiled fractionally.

“This could be quite a problem for us, if we can’t find a way to get loose.”

“Doesn’t the Saint always have something up his sleeve?”

“Sometimes I have had a knife. But not today. In any case, it wouldn’t have done any good. That’s one of the various advantages of handcuffs. You can’t cut them off without special tools.” He stared at his wrists. “Of course, you could cut your hands off. They say some animals caught in a trap will do that.”

She shuddered almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t know whether I could do it.”

“Frankly, neither do I. But fortunately we don’t have the gruesome decision to make. No knife.”

“How did Houdini do it?”

“If the handcuffs weren’t fixed in advance, he had a key stashed away somewhere. But I wasn’t told there were going to be handcuffs. No key.”

“And you can’t take them apart, can you? No screwdriver. No hacksaw. No file.”

“I’ll never be able to look a boy scout in the eye again,” he said, “but I’m not wearing one of those things.”

“Could you pick the lock?”

“Maybe, if you were wearing a bobby pin, or even a hairpin.” He glanced over her short-cut dark hair. “But you aren’t, of course.”

“I haven’t even a safety pin—or any kind of pin.”

He looked down at his waist.

“And out of all the ordinary belts I’ve got,” he said, “I had to pick one with a new-fangled plastic catch instead of a buckle. If I ever get out of here, it goes straight in the ash-can.”

“A bedspring!” she gasped.

It was a forlorn idea, but they went through some strained contortions to explore its far-fetched possibility. This did not take long.

“The hell with Progress,” said the Saint. “And especially foam rubber.”

They sat on their shared corner of the bunk again, linked together around the corner post.

“There’s nothing we could reach, is there?” she said. “I mean with our feet, as far as they could stretch.”

“No,” he said briefly. “If I could get at my tackle box, it might be a different story. But Julius and Igor aren’t dopes, and they knew I couldn’t make my legs twelve feet long.”

He studied the post that their arms were linked around. It was a smooth pole fully five inches in diameter, with the bunk frames fastened solidly to it at their outside corner. Two other corners of the frames were fastened to the log walls, and their fourth corners were in the corner of the cabin itself. The pole went down to some attachment through a snug-fitting hole in the floor planking, and its upper end was notched into a tie beam overhead. It looked and felt as solid as a growing tree, but it was the only possible weak point left to try.

“Let’s see if we can shake this loose,” Simon said grimly.

For several minutes he heaved, pulled, jolted, pushed, and twisted against the pole from a number of carefully selected angles. Because of the way their arms were intertwined, he knew that some of his savage onslaughts must have hurt her cruelly, but she never uttered a sound of protest and added all that she could of her strength to his efforts.

Presently they were both bruised and spent; and the pole had not budged or given any sign of budging.

“We could start a fire and hope the pole would burn faster than it burned us,” Simon said between deep breaths. “But he took my matches and left them over there on the table, and even a boy scout would need another stick to rub against this one.”

“We could start gnawing it like beavers,” she said, “but I think it would last longer than our teeth.”