Holding Frankie by the arm, Simon hurried her across the courtyard to meet the approaching officials by the Delage. The chauffeur looked startled. The SS colonel was obviously completely flummoxed. His jaw fell open and the monocle dropped out of his eye. The Minister alone remained apparently unmoved by this sudden and extraordinary encounter.
“Ach, mein lieber Freund!” cried the Saint, with genial familiarity. “How nice to see you again! And how is dear Emma and all the children? Are they all at Schloss Harinhall?”
“Who are you?” asked the Minister guardedly.
His smile was broad and tolerant, but his eyes, with their pin-prick pupils, were as cold as dry ice.
“Oh, don’t pay any attention to this uniform,” replied the Saint jovially, as he opened the door for Frankie to get in. “I won it off a chap at strip poker. Surely you remember me? I’m Cardinal Spaghetti, Chief of the Vatican Plumbing Department. This is my wife.”
As he spoke he swung himself into the driving seat of the Delage, having already seen that the key was in the ignition. A car of this kind and in such a guarded place would be considered safe. After all, it was inconceivable that anyone would try to steal such an important vehicle in such a stronghold. Anyone but the Saint...
The Kommandant swore and lunged for the door. The chauffeur stood there with a look of complete astonishment on his face. From his point of view the fact that a member of the SS and a woman had taken over his master’s car was obviously quite beyond his comprehension. As the car shot away, Simon looked in the driving mirror and saw that Göring was actually convulsed with laughter, and he realised why this man was such a formidable figure in the political hierarchy of his country. The aristocratic detachment which allowed a sense of humour to operate in a situation of this sort was something not even Hitler possessed, let alone the rest of the vulgar and common men who headed the Nazis and the Third Reich.
The car roared through the outer gateway. The startled sentry saluted it and Simon’s uniform smartly. The SS officer shouted at him to stop the car, but by that time it was rounding the corner of the Castle wall and a moment later it was out of sight.
The Saint slowed down a little for the next bend.
“No point in killing ourselves,” he murmured. “Besides, we have to pick up Leopold.”
“Where is he?”
“Sitting on a sharp stone farther down the hill meditating. He’s finally decided to get down to fundamentals.”
Simon stopped the car beside the rock slide and got out and stood beside it. He waved and called, “Come out and play, Leopold. It’s me, Simon. Hurry up, or you’ll miss the bus and there isn’t another one.”
A moment later Leopold emerged from behind a rock and scrambled up the avalanche towards them. He was carrying the two satchels.
“What does this mean?” he panted. “And that uniform—”
“Explanations later,” said the Saint curtly. “We’ve got half the German army on our tail. Pile in and let’s get going.”
Leopold climbed into the back seat and stowed the bags on the floor at his feet. The Saint got back in the car and launched it off again.
“Gott Sei Dank, Frankie!” chattered Leopold from the back seat. “How did you escape?”
“Simon got me out, of course,” Frankie told him impatiently. “But we are still escaping. They are bound to come after us.”
“And the Necklace?”
“Is still safe.”
Leopold’s snort of exasperation with Frankie’s dictatorial and dismissive manner could be heard over the noise of engine, tyres, and the wind of their passage.
“How far are they behind you, Simon?” he wanted to know.
“Still a fair way, I should think,” answered the Saint calmly. “It’d have to take them a few minutes to turn out a posse and get it carborne, and I shouldn’t think their transportation department’s got anything that has the legs of this job. Our problem is that I still can’t drive as fast as words can go through a telephone wire.”
“I know a back road that will avoid the next town,” Frankie said. “Probably they don’t know it — it’s not much more than a cart track—”
“But first, darling,” Simon reminded her, “we’ve got to get past the guards at the entrance to this verboten area.”
They zoomed through the hamlet of Este, scattering geese and peasant children from their path. As they left the village behind, Leopold said: “We should have gone back through the drain, as we came in.”
“We couldn’t,” said the Saint. “The hut we hid in is in full view of the Castle, and by this time the battlements are crawling with characters on the lookout. Some sniper would have earned himself an Iron Cross before we got near it. Anyway, Frankie wouldn’t like the drain. There’s no class to it.”
Frankie smiled at him.
“I think you just like this car.”
“It’s a beauty,” he admitted. “And was lent to me by a very distinguished owner.”
“But how do we get out of the camp? They’ll be waiting for us at the gate and we can’t just climb over the barbed wire.”
The Saint shrugged.
“I won’t know till I see what the set-up is when we get to the gate.”
“We’re there now,” she said, pointing ahead.
The gate was closed. Four soldiers crouched in front of it. What was more important was that they were crouching over machine-guns. The phone call which he had anticipated had reached them in time enough. If ever there was a situation where he had to improvise, it was there.
His genius did not let him down. As it neared the boundary fence, the road ran beside a grassy field. The Saint drove a little nearer to the gate and then swung the car off into the field, so that it was at right angles to the road with its back towards the machine-gun squad, who were scrambling to turn the guns through a ninety-degree realignment. But they had not yet opened fire, perhaps because they had been ordered to take live prisoners if possible.
“Get down on the floor,” he ordered Leopold and Frankie.
Then he crouched down low over the wheel and reversed full tilt towards the machine-guns and their attendants.
He knew that there was a good chance that he might be dead in the course of the next few seconds, but the chances of death were paradoxically all that they had to live for. He had to gamble on the unexpectedness of his manoeuvre, the awkwardness of the machine-gun mounts, the probability that Göring’s car would have been equipped with some non-standard bullet-proofing, and the fact that the rear-wheel transmission was much less liable to disablement by impact than the front-wheel steering.
The astonished soldiers did not have time to get their guns properly trained and only managed a few wild bursts of sporadic fire before the Delage was upon them. There was a succession of splintering crashes as the car knocked their machine-guns for six. There was a nasty lurch as one of the wheels went over a soldier who failed to get out of its way. Simon spun the wheel full lock, and there came a tremendous crash as the car hurtled backwards through the gates.
On the other side of them the Saint wrenched it through another three-point turn and sent it barrelling away down the highway towards potential freedom. A few scattered shots reached his ears from behind, but he heard only two or three bullets hit the coachwork.
“You can come out now,” he told Frankie and Leopold. “The storm is past and there will be thé dansant in the lounge.”
“Mein Gott,” said Leopold, climbing back on to his seat. “Sometimes I think you must be a maniac.”