A chilly smile lifted the corners of the woman’s mouth.
“Just between ourselves — and since it won’t go any farther, Mr Templar — you win that bet.”
Simon nodded and watched Big Hazel break the neck of an ampule and begin to fill the syringe.
“In the same vein,” he said, “would it be inquisitive to ask what happens to us after I’ve told you that Lieutenant Kearney knows where we are and is on his way after us?” Laura Wingate’s fat face gave no visible response. “An old bluff like that doesn’t frighten me,” she said. “Especially since I shall know the truth in a few minutes. But I’m glad to answer your question. As you may remember, we have a whisky bottle which you were kind enough to open for Big Hazel. I had meant to plant that in Sammy the Leg’s house, to help fix the Cleve Friend killing on you. Now, Miss Varing’s interference has made me change my plans. I shall use it somewhere else to prove that you killed your man Uniatz in a quarrel over some stolen jewels — I think I shall arrange for them to be stolen from me. Shortly afterwards you and Miss Varing will be found in your car, both shot with your gun, with a suitable farewell note which you will write while you are drugged — the victims of a sensational suicide pact... Go ahead, Hazel.”
The room felt colder to Simon Templar when she had ceased to speak. He lost then any compunctions he might have entertained before. Those bleached, cold eyes regarded him dispassionately as Big Hazel advanced on him with the syringe in one hand and an alcohol-sodden scrap of cotton in the other.
“Roll up your sleeve, Saint,” Mrs Wingate said. “Unless, of course, you would prefer Frankie to start shooting now. But I think common sense will tell you that this will be much the most painless way — for all of you.”
It was paralysing to think that this was the same woman speaking whose verbal italics and vapid girlish giggle had once made him think of her a ludicrous caricature of a stock type.
Slowly Simon began to take off his coat. His deliberate calm of a short while ago had congealed to a glacial calculation. He had left a broad enough clue for Kearney, but he had no guarantee that it would click, or click in time. He knew with great clarity what he would have to do, and what split-second timing it would demand of him.
“Hoppy,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ve made a few mistakes. If you’d only kept up with your marksmanship — like a busy bee... bee...”
Hoppy blinked.
“Yuh?”
The Saint resignedly began on his sleeve.
“Forget it. You can’t hit the bull’s eye every time.”
He finished rolling up the sleeve, and from a corner of his eye he saw dawning comprehension break over Hoppy’s face.
Simon said, “An underground chamber and all the props of violent melodrama. This calls for a last-minute rescue by the Marines, Mrs Wingate.”
The woman flickered her icy glance at him. “Put your arm out, Mr Templar.”
Simon sighed, and offered his brown left forearm to Big Hazel. She dabbed the cotton on it, and grasped his wrist with a wrestler’s hand.
One quick glance assured him that Frankie’s tommy gun was almost obstructed by Big Hazel’s huge frame, after that he didn’t look at it. He watched the approach of the syringe, that was all but engulfed in her giant paw, and all his whipcord muscles were relaxed and waiting.
“Now, Hoppy,” he said coolly.
There came a sound he recognised — the indescribable noise, akin to pthoo! that marked the expulsion of a BB shot from between Hoppy Uniatz’s teeth...
For weeks Hoppy had been improving in accuracy, force, and the principles of oral ballistics. Had the interior of his mouth been rifled like a gun-barrel, his aim might have been bettered, but at this close range there was no chance of a miss. The BB, impelled with velocity and violence, completed the last touch of outrageous grotesquerie by hitting Big Hazel Green in the left eye.
“Next to a custard pie,” the Saint reflected, with some irrepressibly cynical part of his mind that sat in judgement with an eyebrow raised, “I couldn’t think of an improvement. Now—”
The balance of the situation tipped with dazzling suddenness. Big Hazel’s instant reaction to the introduction of a foreign particle into her optic apparatus was to bellow like a wounded bull, let go the Saint’s wrist, and clap her free hand to the injured organ. But simultaneously, without even waiting for that release, the Saint’s free right hand was moving.
If he had merely tried to seize Big Hazel, or to hit her on the jaw, the woman would probably have got away. But Simon Templar’s arm flashed down with a speed that almost blurred the vision, and his hand closed with murderous suddenness over hers. And the hand it closed on was holding a hypodermic syringe of brittle glass.
The barrel of the syringe became instantly a non-cohesive assortment of razor-sharp fragments, slicing agonisingly deeper into Big Hazel’s flesh as the Saint’s merciless grip ground tighter. All of her faculties were concentrated, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the immediate, vital, and hysterical necessity of opening her hand before the fingers began falling off. And being thus occupied, she was in no condition to realise that the Saint’s hand had also swung her around until she completely blocked Frankie’s line of fire.
At the same moment, Mr Uniatz moved with an agility that threw a surprising sidelight on his nickname. He dived for the nearest gun on the floor, and fired almost as his paw closed on it. The only sound Frankie Weiss made was a queer sort of choking cough as he went down, and the tommy gun never spoke at all...
“All right,” Kearney’s voice said from the top of the stairs. “Break it up, or I’ll let all of you have it.”
Simon pushed Big Hazel away and smiled up at him... “Good old Alvin,” he said. “Never too late to take a bow.”
Chapter sixteen
Monica Varing turned her head upon the pillow, and her hair moved with it in a shining skein on the bare satin of her shoulder. The robe she wore swooped downward from there in a “V” so deep that Simon Templar, leaning on the high footboard of her hospital bed, was aware of not wholly inexplicable vertigo whenever his eyes wandered that way.
He sighed ostentatiously.
Monica smiled. Her voice was warm temptation.
“Is anything wrong? I thought all your problems were wound up nicely.”
“They are — nearly all.” He grinned rather wryly. “Kearney got a promotion, Elliott cleared his good name, Laura Wingate—” The blue darkened. “Laura Wingate held out a lot longer than I expected, but she’s finally made a confession. Even Fingers Schultz.” The grin came back. “It seems that a gunsel named Fingers Schultz was picked up in the street last night with tyre-marks all over him, apparently the victim of a hit-run driver, but I haven’t asked Sammy the Leg what his car looks like.”
Monica leaned forward, clasping her knees, and smiled at him dazzlingly. The Saint enjoyed his ensuing vertigo.
“Why all the deep sighs, then?”
“Because now we’ll have hardly any excuse for seeing each other. How soon do you expect to get out of this joint?”
“By evening. It was nonsense bringing me in at all, but my manager insisted on a few days’ rest. Tonight I play Nora as usual.”
“And after the show?”
“I was waiting to be asked. What were you thinking of?”
The Saint smiled.
“Exactly the same thing as you,” he said.
Book two
The Masked Angel
Chapter one
At this moment Simon Templar was not quite enjoying the thrill of a lifetime.