“Climb up. Make like a mattress.”
He boosted the big man into the top bunk, and his hands were like striking brown snakes as he packed blankets around him and remade the bed so that it only looked untidily put together.
“Now you,” he said to the girl.
She got into the lower bunk and lay flat on her back, her disturbing head in the far corner. The Saint deposited a swift kiss upon her full red lips. They were cool and soft, and the Saint was adrift for a second.
Then he covered her. He emptied a box of pine cones on the mattresses and arranged the whole to appear as a corner heap of cones.
He was busy cleaning the dishes when the pounding came on the door.
As he examined the pair, Simon Templar was struck by the fact that these men were types, such types as B pictures had imprinted upon the consciousness of the world.
The small one could be a jockey, but one with whom you could make a deal. For a consideration, he would pull a horse in the stretch or slip a Mickey into a rival rider’s sarsaparilla. In the dim light that fanned out from the door, his eyes were small and rat-like, his mouth a slit of cynicism, his nose a quivering button of greed.
His heavier companion was a different but equally familiar type. This man was Butch to a T. He was large, placid, oafish, and an order taker. His not to reason why; his but to do — or cry. He’d be terribly hurt if he failed to do what he was ordered; he’d apologize, he’d curse himself.
It crossed the Saint’s mind that a bank clerk such as Andrew Faulks had been described would dream such characters. “So you lied to us,” the little man snarled. The Saint arched an eyebrow. At the same time he reached out and twisted the little man’s nose, as if he were trying to unscrew it.
“When you address me, Oswald, say ‘sir.’ ” The little man sprang back in outraged fury. He clapped one hand to his injured proboscis, now turned a deeper purple than the night. The other hand slid under his coat.
Simon waited until he had the gun out of the holster, then leaped the intervening six feet and twisted it from the little man’s hand. The Saint let the gun swing from his finger by its trigger guard.
“Take him, Mac!” grated the disarmed man. Mac vented a kind of low growl, but did nothing but fidget as the Saint turned curious blue eyes on him. The tableau hung frozen for a long moment before the little man shattered the silence.
“Well? Ya afraid of ’im?”
“Yup,” Mac said unhappily. “Criminy, Jimmy, ’f he c’n get the best uh you, well, criminy, Jimmy.”
Jimmy moaned, “You mean you’re gonna stand there and let just one guy take my gun away from me? Gripes, he ain’t a army.”
“No,” Mac agreed, growing more unhappy by the second, “but he kind of seems like one, Jimmy. Didja see that jump? Criminy, Jimmy.”
The Saint decided to break it up.
“Now, Oswald—”
“Didn’ja hear, Mac? Name’s Jimmy.”
“Oswald,” the Saint said firmly, “is how I hold you in my heart. Now, Oswald, perhaps you’ll pour oil on these troubled waters, before I take you limb from muscle and throw you away.”
“We don’t want no trouble,” Jimmy said. “We want Big Bill. You got him, but we got to take him back with us.”
“And who is Big Bill, and why do you want him, and why do you think I have him?”
“We know you got him,” Jimmy said. “This here’s Trailer Mac.”
The Saint nodded at Mac.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Mac broke in, “this guy’s a phony.”
“Charmed, I’m sure.” Jimmy blinked.
“Owls,” Mac explained, “can’t swim.”
“What the damblasted hell has owls to do with it?” Jimmy demanded.
“He said pour owls on the something waters. So that,” Mac said in triumph, “proves it.”
This, the Saint thought, wanders. He restrained Jimmy from assaulting Mac, and returned to the subject.
“Why should the revelation of this gent’s identity be regarded as even an intimation that I have — what was the name? — Big Bill?”
“Holbrook,” Jimmy said. “Why, this is Trailer Mac. Ain’t you never heard of him? He follered Loopie Louie for eighteen years and finally caught ’im in the middle of Lake Erie.”
“I never heard of him,” Simon said, and smiled at Mac’s hurt look. “But then there are lots of people I’ve never heard of.”
This, he thought as he said it, was hardly true. He had filed away in the indexes of his amazing memory the dossiers of almost every crook in history. He was certain that he’d have heard of such a chase if it had ever occurred.
“Anyway,” Jimmy went on, “we didn’t go more’n a couple miles till Mac he says Big Bill ain’t here, ’n he ain’t been here, neither. Well, he come this far, ’n he didn’t go no farther. So you got him. He’s inside.”
“The cumulative logic in that series of statements is devastating,” the Saint said. “But logicians veer. History will bear me out. Aristotle was a shining example. Likewise all the boys who gave verisimilitude to idiocy by substituting syllogisms for thought processes, who evaded reality by using unsemantic verbalisms for fact-facing and, God save the mark, fact-finding.”
Mac appealed to the superior intellect in his crowd.
“Whut’n hell’s he talkin’ about, Jimmy?”
“I mean,” the Saint said, “Big Bill ain’t here. Come in and case the joint.”
“Whyn’t cha say so?” Mac snarled, and pushed inside.
They searched nook and cranny, and Mac fingered a knothole hopefully once. They gave the bunk beds a passing glance, and were incurious about the seeming pile of pine cones in the corner. Mac boosted Jimmy up on the big central beam to peer into ceiling shadows, and they scanned the fireplace chimney.
Then they stood and looked at the Saint with resentment.
“Sump’n’s fishy,” Jimmy pronounced. “He’s got to be here. This here” — he pointed — “is Trailer Mac.”
“Maybe we better go get the boss, huh, Jimmy?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “He’ll find Big Bill.”
“Who,” the Saint inquired, “is the boss?”
“You’ll see,” Jimmy promised. “He won’t be scared of you. He’s just down the hill in the town. Stopped off to play a game of billiards. So we’ll be seein’ ya, bub.”
They went off into the night, and the Saint stood quite still for a moment in a little cloud of perplexity.
Never before had he been faced with a situation that was so full of holes.
He added up known data: a man who had a fabulous jewel, who claimed to be the projected dream of his alter ego; a girl of incredible beauty said to be another creation of that dream; and two characters who were after two men and/or the jewel and/or — perhaps — the girl.
Mac and Jimmy had searched the cabin. They professed to have overlooked an object the size of Big Bill Holbrook. Their proof that they had overlooked him: “This here’s Trailer Mac.” They assumed he would remain here while they walked four miles to the settlement and back with their boss who was said to have stopped off to shoot a game of billiards.
But would a man on the trail of that fire opal stop off to play billiards? Would two pseudo-tough guys go away and leave their quarry unguarded?
No, the Saint decided. These were the observable facts, but they were unimportant. They masked a larger, more sinister pattern. Great forces must be underlying the surface trivia. Undeniably, the jewel was a thing to drive men to madness. It could motivate historic bloodshed. The girl, too, possessing the carven features of the gem, could drive men to — anything. But for the life of him, the Saint could not get beneath the surface pattern to what must be the real issues. He could only cling to the conviction that they had to exist, and that they must be deadly.