The Saint Meets the Tiger (14 page)

He was looking steadily at her, but she did not change colour. But the Saint was never a faker, and this was his call to clean the whole sheet, so that she could take it or leave it as she chose and would never be able to say he hadn’t played square. He rubbed it in with brutal directness:

“That’s the way I’ve lived for years. Pretty well, all things considered, so that if this gamble turns up I’ll be able to retire and settle down as soon as I like, and not have to stint myself anywhere. In those years I’ve committed about half the crimes in the Calendar, at the expense of crooks. It’s a sporting game—man to man, and devil take the mug: and the police, for obvious reasons, aren’t invited to interfere by either side. Bloem’s the first to break that rule; but the Tiger isn’t a sportsman—he’s just a pot hunter. Still, I doubt if your friends would appreciate my success in that career. D’you still want to be a partner in the firm?’

She sighed.

“Saint, you’re an ass,” she said. “And if you exhibit any symptoms of virulent imbecility I shall fire you and become managing director myself.”

“Hell’s bells,” ejaculated Simon, unwontedly moved, and swung away.

Very carefully, so as not to disturb the board, he took another sight at the ship’s masts; and presently he straightened up with a light of triumph breaking on his face.

“We’re in luck,” he said. “She hasn’t shifted a millimetre. Rotten bad navigation. I’d have known the height of my masts to an inch, and the height of the cliffs here ditto, and I’d have figured out my position to six places of decimals…. But the Tiger’s loss is our gain!”

“They’ll start to come in at sunset,” she took him up excitedly. “And—

“And I’ll be there,” said the Saint. “It’s a moonlight swim for me to-night. That’s great—to let the Tiger Cubs themselves lead me to the cache! But the snag is … Holy Habakkuk … they’ll be waiting for me.” She stared. “They know I’ll invite myself, bless it!”

“Why?”

“Because they know I’m wise to this Old House joke. I let on, like a fool. That was a poisonous bad bloomer! I was ragging old Bloem about Fernando, just seeing how much breeze I could put up him, and I mentioned the Old House. They’ll think I knew exactly what and where it was. Oh, crumbs and crutches! D’you mind kicking me as hard as you can?”

She was as distressed as he was. It was in no halfhearted manner that she had enlisted in the army of adventurers. A setback stung her as much as anybody. She bit her lip.

“But they’re coming in,” she insisted.

“Yes—forewarned and forewarmed to the teeth. If I happen to have been a bit slow on the uptake, well and good. If I haven’t, and think I’ll butt in, they’ll be ready for me. Maybe the Tiger’s patting himself on the back right now, bucked to death with his dandy little scheme for getting away with the oof and me too. Well, it’s up to me to hand him the jar of his life. Sit tight a shake while I think.”

He dropped into a chair and lighted a cigarette, his brain reeling and humming to encompass this new twist to the problem. Undoubtedly he had sized it up right—the Tiger was giving himself a double chance. And that move had got to be baulked somehow. But how? The Saint had only to breathe a word to Carn, and the Tiger was dished. But then, so was the Saint. That put that out of bounds.

He was fully prepared to swim out to the Old House that night, with Anna strapped to his arm, and trust to the inspiration of the moment to show him a way of beating the gang, even if they were watching and waiting for him. That was an honest toss-up with sudden death, and Simon took risks of that stamp without turning a hair. But on the other hand he liked to have at least a shadowy loophole for emergencies—there was no point in chucking the game away for lack of a little forethought. And how to provide that loophole? The Tiger’s forces were large: the Saint could reckon on only Orace and the girl, besides himself. And he didn’t want to push a slip of a girl into the front line, however keen she might be to go. How to make three people —or nearer two and a half—do the work of a platoon was a poser worthy of the undivided attention of a great general. Manifestly, it could not be done by any ordinary means. Therefore, there must be subtlety.

And the Tiger had the added advantage of being the attacker. Simon’s cigarette began to smoulder down in his fingers unnoticed. That was a point! The Tiger was sitting high and dry in his den, hatching plots and making raids and forays when the spirit moved him; while the Saint had to sit on the fence with his eyes skinned, just parrying the Tiger’s thrusts. And it became clear to the Saint that there was something unfair about that arrangement. True, the Saint had made one attack— but why let the offensive stop there? The enemy had an idea that he would come lunging in again that night: well, so he might, if it looked like a good tussle and he felt in the mood. But that didn’t imply an armistice until zero hour, by any manner of means. Quite a lot of skirmishing could take place before the big battle—and every blow of it would bother the Tiger and help harass his organization for the last rounds. There really was no earthly reason why the Tiger should have it all his own way.

Where to launch the attack? The other Old House sprang to his mind at once. They might be expecting him to turn up there, but they would hardly anticipate his arrival in broad daylight. Which was just the way he might catch them on the hop. Or the dilapidated inn might be a false scent— in which case there was nothing but the state of his own nerves to stop him paying a call on Bloem. The prospects began to look brighter, and suddenly the Saint sat up with a broad grin illuminating his face.

“I’ve very nearly got it,” he announced.

“Do let’s hear!”

She was flushed and eager, eyes sparkling, lips slightly parted, like a splendid young Diana. She made a picture that in the abstract would have delighted the pagan Saint, but in the concrete it brought him up with a jerk. Next thing he knew she’d be demanding to be allowed to accompany him on the whole tour.

“Simply the germ of an idea to wallop the Tiger Cubs when they come in for the spondulicks,” he lied, thinking furiously. “You see, gold’s shocking weighty stuff, so they’ll have to ferry it to the ship in small doses. That’ll mean they’ll have about three of the ship’s boats running in relays—if they tried to take too big a load at once it’d simply drop through the bottom. And the crew’ll be pretty small. A motor ship doesn’t take much running, and they’d want to keep the numbers down in any case, because the seaman who can be relied on not to gossip in port is a rare bird. If we’re lucky, the skipper’ll be ashore getting his orders from the Tiger, and that’ll make one less to tackle. Otherwise, the Tiger‘11 go aboard himself, and that’ll be one more to pip—though the fish’ll be worth the extra trouble of landing. In any event, the general idea is this: we’re going to have a stab at pinching that hooker!”

The Saint was capable of surprising himself. That plan of campaign, rigged out on the spur of the moment to put the girl off the main trail, caught hold of his imagination even as he improvised it. He ended on a note of genuine enthusiasm, and found that she was wringing his hands joyfully. “

“That’s really brilliant,” she bubbled. “Oh, Saint, it’s going to be the most fearfully thrilling thing that ever happened—if we can only bring it off!”

He gazed sadly down at her. There it was–a tank of mulligatawny big enough to drown a brontosaurus, and he’d fallen right in before he knew what was happening. He shook his head.

“Kid,” he said, “piracy on the low seas isn’t part of the curriculum at Mayfield, is it?” “

“I can swim a couple of miles any day of the week.”

“Can you climb eighteen feet of anchor chain at the end of it?” objected the Saint. “Can you back yourself to put a man to sleep before he can loose a yell? Can you make yourself unpleasant with a belaying pin if it comes to a riot? I hate to have to damp your ardour. Pat, but a woman can’t be expected to play that game.”

She was up in arms at once.

“Saint, you’re trying to elbow me out again!” she accused. “Possibly you’ve never met anybody like me before–I flatter myself I’m a bit out of the ruck in some ways. And I won’t be packed up in cotton wool! Whatever you go into, I’m going with you.”

Then he let her have it from the shoulder.

“Finally,” he said in a level voice, “how d’you fancy yourself as a prisoner on that tub, at the mercy of a bunch like the Tiger’s, if we happen to lose? We might, you know. Think it over.”

“You needn’t worry,” she said. “I shall carry a gun—and save one cartridge.”

The Saint’s fists clenched. His mouth had set in a hard line, and his eyes were blazing. The Saintly pose had dropped from him like the flimsy mask it was, and for the first and last-but-one time she saw Simon Templar in a savage fury.

“And—you think—you, my girl, you—“The words dropped from his tense lips like chips of white-hot steel. “You think I shall let you—take— that chance?”

“Is there any logical reason, my man, why you shouldn’t?”

“Yes, there is!” he stormed. “And if you aren’t damned careful .you’ll hear it—and I don’t care how you take it!”

She tossed her head.

“Well, what is it?”

“This,” said Simon deliberately—“I love you.”

“But, you dear priceless idiot,” said Patricia, “hasn’t it occurred to you that the only reason I’m in this at all is because I love you?”

For a space he stared. Then—

“Burn it,” said the Saint shakily, “why couldn’t you say so before

But after that there was only one thing to do. For a man so unversed in the ways of women he did it exceedingly well.

Chapter X

THE OLD HOUSE

It was Orace, that stern disciplinarian, who ruthlessly interrupted the seance in order to lay the table for lunch. That was half an hour later, though Simon and Pat would both have sworn that the interlude had lasted no more than a short half-minute. The Saint moved away to an embrasure and gazed out at the rippling blue sea, self-conscious for the first time in his life. The girl began to tidy her hair. But Orace, after one disapproving glance round, brazenly continued with his task, as though no amount of objections to his intrusion could stop him enforcing punctuality.

“Lunch narf a minnit,” warned Orace, and returned to the kitchen.

The Saint continued to admire the horizon with mixed feelings. He was sufficiently hardener in his lawless career to appreciate the practical disadvantages of Romance with a big R horning in at that stage of the proceedings. Why in the name of Noah couldn’t the love and kisses have waited their turn and popped up at the conventional time, when the ungodly had been duly routed and the scene was all set for a fade-out on the inevitable embrace? But they hadn’t, and there it was. The Saint was ready to sing and curse simultaneously. That the too marvellous Patricia should be in love with him was all but too good to be true—but the fact that she was, and that he knew it, quadrupled his responsibility and his anxieties.

It was not until Orace had served lunch arid departed again that they could speak naturally, and by then a difficult obstacle of shyness had grown up between them to impose a fresh restraint.

“So you see,” remarked Patricia at last, “you can’t leave me out of it now.”

“If you cared anything about my feelings,” returned the Saint, somewhat brusquely, “you’d respect them—and give way.”

She shook her head.

“In anything else in the world,” she said, “but not in this.”

So that was that. Simon had used up all his arguments, and further effort to combat her resolution would only be tedious. She won. Short of an appeal to brute strength, he hadn’t a thing left to do except grin and bear it and do his best to make the going as safe as ingenuity could. And like many strong men the Saint shrank from applying cave-man measures.

At that moment he would even have considered throwing up the sponge, tipping the wink to Carn, and sliding out of the picture. What stopped him from taking that desperate way out was a shrewd understanding of the girl’s character. Somehow, out of a normal education and a simple life in a forgotten country village, she had acquired the standards of a qualified adventuress—in the clean sense. And she had a ramrod will to back her up. She felt that it was only the game to stand by her man in any and every kind of trouble, and she meant to play the game according to her lights. She would only despise him if he refused to carry on on her account: she was determined to prove to him by deeds as well as words that she wasn’t a clinging vine who was going to cramp his style either before or after the wedding bells. And it was quite hopeless for the Saint to try and point out to her that she would only hamper him—as hopeless as it would have been ungracious, bearing in mind the uniqueness of a girl of her caliber.

But for one thing Simon could and did thank his stars: he had successfully put her off the track of the first string on his bow—the disused inn behind the village. He would be able to tackle the proposition from that angle without her knowledge before t nightfall, and if the Fates played into his hands he might manage to get a stranglehold on the Tiger before it was her turn to bat.

“If the mountain won’t budge, Mahomet’ll have to leave it where it is,” said the Saint disarmingly. “But there are one or two knots that ought to be untied in the course of the afternoon, and that’s where you can help. One—it might be a sound plot to see if we can’t get this Aunt Aggie palaver cleared up a bit.”

“She wouldn’t tell me anything last night.”

“You were hardly on form then, with me loose in the menagerie. This afternoon you can go back full of beans, with a parting hug from me to pep you up, and lam into Auntie two-fisted. If you can only carry it, you’ve got her cold. After all, she admits having tapped your treasure chest to save herself. It isn’t too stiff a return to ask her to get a bit off her own chest for your satisfaction. I know she’s a hefty handful, but she isn’t half the size of some of the things you’ll have to wire into during the next twenty-four hours, and it’ll limber you up. If she tries to bully you, remember that there isn’t a bully swaggering the earth that can’t be bullied himself by someone with the guts to take on the job. And if she finds she can’t treat you highhanded, and bursts into tears—don’t let ‘em dissolve you. I can’t take her on myself, so I’ve got to rely on you.”