“Wave it at him if he wakes up,” he said. “Tell him you’ll shoot if he comes closer than five feet — and sound as if you mean it!”
And then he was gone, his feet taking him noiselessly on to the rail and then across to the Phoenix through the gathering dusk; and Arabella sat looking from the gun in her hand to the unconscious crewman, and back to the gun.
Lebec had perhaps a minute’s start on him; and the Saint had no very clear plan of what to do next. It was one of those situations where, as so often before, he simply followed his impulse and instinct. All he knew was that he was back in the game, with Lebec ahead of him, and the man in the wheelhouse an unknown quantity — though the Saint had his suspicions on that score...
He had been over his speculations about Tranchier’s survival often enough by this time; and he was not unprepared for the sound that reached his ears as he glided along the deck of the Phoenix towards the wheelhouse like a liquid shadow.
He heard two voices speaking in rapid French, one of them Lebec’s; and he flattened himself against a bulkhead where he could not be seen from the door of the wheelhouse or its companionway. And as he listened, his eyes widened with steadily growing comprehension.
“Will you or will you not surrender?” Lebec’s voice demanded from what the Saint judged to be somewhere near the foot of the companionway.
“You’ll have to shoot me first,” said the other man, from higher up.
There was a pause; then Lebec said:
“If I must, I will shoot you. There will be no witnesses. Templar and the woman are on the launch with the coastguard man. I will say it was self-defence, that you resisted arrest. And so after all the gold will be mine alone, and you will have gained nothing by your death.”
“But you will still have the problem of those three — and Finnegan — to deal with, alone.” A faintly crafty note crept into the other voice. “Gerard — why don’t we make a deal? There’s more than enough for two. We could throw the four bodies overboard, set the launch adrift, and get clean away.”
There was another pause; and while Lebec was thinking, so was the Saint. For the dialogue he had overheard gave him all he needed to think about.
First, there was Lebec’s clear and unpolicemanlike desire to grab the gold for himself. Second, there was the fact that the other man had called him “Gerard” in a way that implied an intimate acquaintance. Thirdly, there was the man’s voice.
Simon had never, that he could remember, heard Tranchier-Fournier speak; and yet there was something in the tone of that other Frenchman in the Phoenix’s wheel-house, a confidence and authority, even an arrogance, which didn’t fit the impression he had formed of Tranchier.
Then it hit him like a sudden blast of arctic air; and in that instant of amazed realisation, as the pieces of the puzzle began to click into precise place, he stepped out from behind the bulkhead and into view.
He saw Inspector Gerard Lebec, standing only part-way up the companionway, swinging around in alarm. And in the doorway at the top, facing him, he saw the other man — a man with a big square head, grey-white hair, and suntanned features.
It could only be Karl Schwarzkopf, also known as Charles Tatenor.
2
“Salut Karl!” said the Saint in a voice of steel-lined velvet.
Even though he had come out into the open without premeditation, simply because he had had to confirm Schwarzkopf as the owner of the second voice as soon as the fantastic conviction had come to him, Simon’s reflexes were immediately balanced on a razor edge. He was acutely aware of being unarmed, and that the reaction of Lebec, with his automatic, was unpredictable.
Lebec was certainly taken by surprise; and his adjustment to the Saint’s abrupt arrival on the scene was perhaps half a second slower than Schwarzkopf’s.
Which was unfortunate for Lebec.
As the French detective swung his head, followed by his gun arm, away from Schwarzkopf and towards Simon, Schwarzkopf moved — and with amazing speed. He launched himself down the companionway at Lebec feet-first, with a force that should have sent him cannoning into the Saint. But Simon’s reactions were also fast, and he sidestepped. Lebec made the close and violent acquaintance of a bulkhead, and sank to the deck with all the wind knocked out of him. Somehow he managed to hold on to the automatic, but it was two or three seconds before he could collect his breath and his wits to use it.
Two or three seconds was all Schwarzkopf needed. He must have summed up the situation to himself — including Simon’s own lack of a visible weapon — in the instant of launching himself at Lebec; and now, as Lebec lay gasping on the deck, Schwarzkopf leapt back up the companionway, snatched up a Very pistol in the wheelhouse, and reappeared in the doorway.
And as Lebec brought his automatic up again, Schwarzkopf fired.
The Saint had seen weird deaths before, but this was a sight to persist in his memory for many long years. That brilliant dazzling flare was like a photographic flashbulb fixing the image in the mind. In its vivid and garish light, Lebec’s amazed expression was thrown into stark and unforgettable relief. The flare hit him, so to speak, amidships, sank deeply into his torso, and continued to blaze brilliantly as the stricken Lebec emitted a bloodcurdling scream, staggered backward to the rail, and crashed over it and into the sea.
Both Schwarzkopf and the Saint watched Lebec’s final disappearance in frozen fascination for the few seconds it occupied. And then Schwarzkopf, still gripping the signal-pistol, whirled, and disappeared back into the wheelhouse. The Saint had to make an immediate choice, either to conceal himself — playing hide-and-seek with an armed man — or to go forward and try to get to Schwarzkopf before he could reload the pistol.
He went forward.
With one long stride he was at the foot of the companionway, and with two more coordinated thrusts of arms and legs he was at the top and into the wheelhouse doorway.
He had never climbed a companionway faster; but as he reached the doorway he knew he had not been fast enough. Schwarzkopf had just finished thrusting a new flare into the Very pistol. He levelled it at the Saint, and the Saint came to a slow halt in the doorway.
So this was how the game was to end, after all, he thought; and there was a certain inescapable bitterness in the reflection that he had survived, by one of those miracles he had thought impossible, this man’s earlier attempt to kill him, only to find himself now facing death once more at the same hand — the hand of Karl Schwarzkopf, the only survivor of a boat crash which had killed, not “Tatenor” and Tranchier, and not “Tatenor” alone, but Tranchier alone.
For it was “Tatenor”, the man Schwarzkopf, now standing before him and about to pull the trigger of the signal-pistol for the second time, who was the clever one. Why should the relatively stupid Tranchier have been able to worst him and escape to claim the gold for himself? Simon could see it all now; but he could also see why he had been backing the wrong horse as the survivor. Karl Schwarzkopf, whose attention to detail had been impeccable, was the survivor now...
Except that the expected shot had still not come.
Schwarzkopf motioned with the Very pistol.
“So— Templar. Where’s the rest of the gold, old chap?” he said in his measured and hauntingly overprecise English. “What did you do with it, eh?”
So that was it. Only the other man’s avarice had prolonged Simon’s life even that long.
“How do you mean — the rest of the gold?” the Saint queried, apparently in genuine puzzlement.