“Some of my ancestors,” the Saint reassured him, “were homing pigeons.”
“Then you should be back here within ninety minutes. Tap on this door and I shall be waiting for you.”
Simon had only slightly exaggerated his sense of direction and his talent for noting and memorising routes. He found his way unerringly back to the Hotel Hofer, where it took him only a few minutes to pack the minimal travel bag which was all he had with him.
A bored night clerk seemed unsurprised at his checking out at such an hour, which might not have been so extraordinary for a commercial hotel, and gave him vague directions to the main roads towards Italy. It was not until much later that he noticed that “Mr Taylor” had filled in his forwarding address on the conventional form as “The Vatican, Rome.”
He found his way just as efficiently back to the building which housed Annellatt’s apartment, but parked the Mercedes short of the back alley and walked in to the sliding garage door. It was a few minutes less than the ninety that Max allowed him, and there was no response when he tapped on the door.
After a brief wait, he tried pulling the door aside, and it moved with no more resistance than its own ponderous suspension. But all was now darkness in the garage.
Simon stepped inside, reaching into a pocket for the pencil flashlight that he carried as automatically as a fountain pen. There had to be a light switch somewhere near by, if he could find it, to turn on the illuminations for late-homing tenants, otherwise some benighted elderly reveller returning from his favourite Weinstube might trip over a Volkswagen and get hurt.
Simon Templar was not exactly an elderly reveller, but he still got hurt. His whole world suddenly exploded and left him falling into blackness.
3
When he came to, he was in pitch darkness. For a few moments because of the discomforts of his accommodation he thought he was in his hotel bed until he realised that he was lying on a cold bare floor with his wrists tightly bound behind him. “No,” he said to himself, as cheerfully as he could in the circumstances, “I never tie myself up before going to bed. Someone’s been a bit naughty.”
He tried to loosen his bonds, but they were tied firmly enough to tell him that it would take even his escapologist’s skill quite some time to get out of them.
Then that attempt had to be deferred as a key turned in a lock, a door was opened, and the room was flooded with harsh light from a naked bulb switched on overhead.
It was a small grey room about the size of a prison cell, which it depressingly resembled, and as he rolled over he saw that it was devoid of furniture.
Two men entered. Both wore raincoats and turned-down Trilby hats. The Saint recognised them at once. They were the Rat and the Gorilla. The names of convenience that he had given them could not have fitted more neatly. They were two perfect stereotypes from a C-grade film.
The Rat spoke in English. He had a heavy and rather guttural accent blended with that of the American locality where he had learned it, which sounded rather like Yonkers. And Simon had no doubt that in the same school he had acquired some of the less attractive characteristics of the American culture.
“So you are awake already?” he said.
As a remark it was superfluous, but it helpfully told the Saint that he could not have been knocked out for long.
Simon looked at him with distaste. The man had the sneering manner of a professional sadist. Such types, in the Saint’s experience, were always vulnerable. Compensating for their own physical inadequacy with another man’s muscle, they were always aware of their dependence and made more insecure by it.
“I’m not sure,” Simon replied, his gaze meeting the other’s steadily. “I could be having a particularly nasty dream.”
“Perhaps you won’t be quite so fresh, my friend, when we’ve finished with you,” said the Rat.
“And what exactly is it you want to finish?”
The Rat lit a cigarette.
“We want to know what you are doing in Vienna.”
“I came to see the Zoo,” Simon told him. “But I didn’t know the animals were wandering around loose in the streets.”
The Gorilla stepped over and kicked the Saint viciously in the ribs. Simon could not quite cut off a reflex gasp of pain, but managed to turn it into a laugh.
“There’s a good Nazi,” he observed. “Be sure a man isn’t only down but has his hands tied before you kick him.”
The Gorilla’s face was suffused with rage. He bent down and deliberately struck the Saint across the face. He looked as if it made him feel a little better.
“You must have practised that on your girlfriend,” said the Saint. “Or is she a boy?”
The Gorilla reached in his pocket and brought out a switch knife. The blade flicked out like a silver snake’s tongue. He thrust the point to within half an inch of the Saint’s left eye.
“How would you like to have only one eye?” The blade twitched sideways. “Or no eyes at all?”
“Listen,” said the Rat. “We know that you did not meet the Countess Malffy or Herr Annellatt before tonight. But the Saint wouldn’t come to Vienna, at this time, just as a tourist. We want to know what you came to do, if you have already done it, and all about it.”
“Und ve haf vays off making you talk,” said the Saint, in contemptuously exaggerated burlesque.
“You will also tell us exactly where the Hapsburg Necklace is hidden.”
So that was part of it. They thought that Frankie might have confided her secret to him. That could make things more difficult. Ignorance is one thing which is more easily shown up than it is proved. And this pair looked as if they would take a lot of convincing.
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but I keep my tiara in the bank and only wear paste. One meets so many unpleasant characters around these days. After all, a girl doesn’t want to risk losing her most precious souvenirs.”
The Rat sighed dramatically, but moved his head negatively in reply to the Gorilla’s expectant glance.
“There are better and more painful ways to persuade him,” he said in German. “But not here. And I see that it will take time. Blindfold him, while I see if the car is here.”
He went out, closing the cell door after him. Simon Templar, whose faculties never stopped working when they were not concussed, automatically wondered about the “not here.” A cell such as he was in would have seemed quite satisfactory for what is politely called “intensive interrogation.” A change of venue could only suggest a lavishly equipped chamber of horrors which it was not amusing to imagine.
The Saint had no delusions about the power of painful persuasion. Eventually any human being would break: it was only a question of human willpower against scientifically applied agony. And in that unequal contest, science had always been ahead.
The Saint wondered what his own threshold of surrender would be. And what made the outlook exceptionally gloomy was that they would be seeking information which even in the most abject extreme he would be totally unable to give them.
It was the kind of situation which eliminated any rational scruples against the means to combat it.
The Gorilla hauled Simon to his feet like a rag doll, pulled out a dirty handkerchief, and twirled him around. He stood squarely behind Simon to tie the folded handkerchief over the Saint’s eyes.
Simon reached back, at first cautiously and gently, with his bound hands, and located the Gorilla’s crotch and testicles. He closed one hand on them, in a clamp like a fiercely activated vise.