"May I interrupt for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ?" he said.
He spoke quietly but the loud-speakers made his voice audible in every corner of the room. Nobody moved or made any answer. His question was rather superfluous. He had interrupted, and everyone's ears were strained for what he had to say.
"This is a holdup," he went on in the same easy conversational tone. "You've all been expecting it, so none of you should have heart failure. Until I've finished, none of you may leave the room--a friend of mine is at the other end of the hall to help to see that this order is carried out."
A sea of heads screwed round to where a shorter stockier man in evening clothes that seemed too tight for him, stood blocking the far entrance, also masked and also with two guns in his hands.
"So long as you all do exactly what you're told, I promise that nobody will get hurt. You two"--one of his guns flicked towards the countess' bodyguards, who were standing stiff-fingered where they had been caught when they saw him--"come over here. Turn your backs, take out your guns slowly and drop them on the floor."
His voice was still quiet and matter-of-fact but both the men obeyed like automatons.
"Okay. Now turn round again and kick them towards me. . . . That's fine. You can stay where you are, and don't try to be heroes if you want to live to boast about it."
A smile touched his lips under the mask. He pocketed one of his guns and picked up a black gladstone bag from the dais and tossed it out on to the floor. Then he put a cigarette between his lips and lighted it with a match flicked on the thumbnail of the same hand.
"The holdup will now proceed," he remarked affably. "The line forms on the right, and that means everybody except the waiters. Each of you will put a contribution in the bag as you pass by. Lady Instock, that's a nice pair of earrings. . . ."
Amazed, giggling, white-faced, surly, incredulous, according to their different characters, the procession began to file by and drop different articles into the bag under his directions. There was nothing much else that they could do. Each of them felt that gently waving gun centred on his own body, balancing its bark of death against the first sign of resistance. To one red-faced man who started to bluster, a waiter said tremulously: "Better do what he says. Tink of all da ladies. Anybody might get hit if he start shooting." His wife shed a pearl necklace and hustled him by. Most of the gathering had the same idea. Anyone who had tried to be a hero would probably have been mobbed by a dozen others who had no wish to die for his glory. Nobody really thought much beyond that. This wasn't what they had expected, but they couldn't analyze their reactions. Their brains were too numbed to think very much.
Two brains were not numbed. One of them belonged to the chairman who had lost his glasses, adding dim-sightedness to his other failings."From where he stood he couldn't distinguish anything as small as a mask or a gun but somebody seemed to be standing up on the platform and was probably making a speech. The chairman nodded from time to time with an expression of polite interest, thinking busily about the new corn plaster that somebody had recommended to him. The other active brain belonged to the Countess Jannowicz but there seemed to be nothing useful that she could do with it. There was no encouraging feeling of enterprise to be perceived in the guests around her, no warm inducement to believe that they would respond to courageous leadership.
"Can't you see he's bluffing?" she demanded in a hoarse bleat. "He wouldn't dare to shoot!"
"I should be terrified," murmured the Saint imper-turbably, without moving his eyes from the passing line. "Madam, that looks like a very fine emerald ring. . . ."
Something inside the countess seemed to be clutching at her stomach and shaking it up and down. She had taken care to leave her own jewels in a safe place but it hadn't occurred to her to give the same advice to her guests. And now the Saint was robbing them under her nose--almost under her own roof. Social positions had been shattered overnight on slighter grounds.
She grabbed the arm of a waiter who was standing near.
"Send for the police, you fool!" she snarled.
He looked at her and drew down the corners of his mouth in what might have been a smile or a sneer, or both, but he made no movement.
Nobody made any movement except as the Saint directed. The countess felt as if she were in a nightmare. It was amazing to her that the holdup could have continued so long without interruption--without some waiter opening a service door and seeing what was going on, or someone outside in the hotel noticing the curious quietness and giving the alarm. But the ballroom might have been spirited away on to a desert island.
The last of the obedient procession passed by the Saint and left its contribution in the bag and joined the silent staring throng of those who had already contributed. Only the chairman and the countess had not moved--the chairman because he hadn't heard a word and didn't know what was going on.
The Saint looked at her across the room.
"I've been saving Countess Jannowicz to the last," he said, "because she's the star turn that you've all been waiting for. Will you step up now, Countess?"
Fighting a tangle of emotions, but compelled by a fascination that drove her like a machine, she moved towards the platform. And the Saint glanced at the group of almost frantic photographers.
"Go ahead, boys," he said kindly. "Take your pictures. It's the chance of a lifetime. . . . Your necklace, Countess."
She stood still, raised her hands a little way, dropped them, raised them again, slowly, to her neck. Magnesium bulbs winked and splashed like a barrage of artificial lightning as she unfastened the clasp and dropped the necklace on top of the collection in the bag.
"You can't get away with this," she said whitely.
"Let me show you how easy it is," said the Saint calmly. He turned his gun to the nearest man to the platform. "You, sir--would you mind closing the bag, carefully, and taking it down to my friend at the other end of the room? Thank you." He watched the bag on its way down the room until it was in the hands of the stocky man at the far entrance. "Okay, partner," he said crisply. "Scram."
As if the word had been a magical incantation, the man vanished.
A kind of communal gasp like a sigh of wind swept over the assembly, as if the final unarguable physical disappearance of their property had squeezed the last long-held breath out of their bodies. Every eye had been riveted on it in its last journey through their midst, every eye had blinked to the shock of its ultimate vanishment, and then every eye dragged itself dazedly back to the platform from which those catastrophes had been dictated.
Almost to their surprise, the Saint was still standing there. But his other gun had disappeared and he had taken his mask off. In some way, the aura of subtle command that had clung to him before in spite of his easy casualness had gone, leaving the easy casualness alone. He was still smiling.
For an instant the two bodyguards were paralyzed. And then with muffled choking noises they made a concerted dive for their guns.
The Saint made no move except a slight deprecating motion of the hand that held his cigarette.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said into the microphone, "I must now make my apologies, and an explanation."
The bodyguards straightened up, with their guns held ready. And yet something in his quiet voice, unarmed as he was, gripped them in spite of themselves, as it had gripped everyone else in the room. They looked questioningly towards the countess.