Without an instant’s hesitation, he let the clutch in again and spurred the Delage forward with all the acceleration of which it was capable.
“Hold tight, Leo,” he barked, and flung out his own right arm like a bar across Frankie’s chest to prevent her being hurled through the windscreen when the crash came.
It came, and he was ready for it with his feet braced against the firewall, and his tremendous strength held Frankie back enough to save her from contact with dashboard or windscreen. The Delage had not attained a speed at which no preparedness could have spared them the effects of a collision, but the crunch was still sickeningly loud. The side of a car is infinitely more vulnerable than the front, and the Audi was hit broadside just as the men in it were opening the doors to get out. The Audi was slammed two feet squarely sideways and almost rocked over.
The Saint was out of the Delage the instant he had assured himself that Frankie was unhurt. Of the two shocked Gestapo men left in the Audi, he chose the one who looked liveliest to yank out first, and destroyed that unseemly sprightliness with a left to the solar plexus and a sledgehammer chop to the back of the neck. The second, with a nasty cut over one eye, was moaning dazedly, and Simon compassionately put him out of his pain with a carefully placed uppercut. The third, who had been farthest out of the Audi when the Delage hit it, had probably been caught and crushed by the collapsing door: he lay face up in the road, looking as if he would give no trouble for a long time, if ever.
Within seconds, the menace of the Geheimnisstadtspolizei had been at least temporarily neutralised. But so also had the services of the Reichmarshal’s elegant Delage.
Simon rejoined Frankie and Leopold, who were now standing beside it.
“Have we got anything to tie up some partypoopers?” he asked.
Leopold looked blank. Frankie furrowed her brow in thought.
“I am wearing three petticoats,” she said. “I think I could spare a couple, and there are always my stockings. They’re thick wool and serviceable.”
“The best possible service for them,” Simon approved. “Peasant girls are very well equipped in every sense of the word, apparently. Come on, Leopold, let’s arrange our patients while Frankie takes off her clothes.”
In a minute or two Frankie joined them. She handed Simon her stockings and a fancy petticoat of the kind peasant girls saved for special occasions when they might display them in high-kicking and swinging folk dances. With the help of his knife the Saint swiftly ripped it into strips. The men were soon tied and gagged and arranged in a neat triangle, head to foot. Simon placed the empty brandy bottle in the centre, like a hub.
“I do like to leave things tidy,” he remarked, and even Leopold smiled.
The two interlocked wrecks blocked the road like two grappling dinosaurs that had expired in mortal combat. Simon patted the Delag apologetically on its crumpled bonnet.
“Even if you died on a drunken binge, remember it was a ’14 cognac,” he said.
He was stripping off his SS uniform with the rapidity of a quick-change artiste. It went into the ditch, along with the jackboots, and he put the more comfortable canvas shoes back on his feet.
He set off at such a fast pace that the other two had difficulty in keeping up. Once they were over the brow of a low hill they could see the border station quite clearly. It was the usual type, consisting of a shed and a barrier bar across the road, weighted at one end so that it could be raised or lowered easily. The bar was in its blocking position.
Simon kept going without breaking stride.
“Don’t let it look as if we were a bit concerned,” he said. “The sportsmen we just took out of play must have been the Gestapo detail sent to watch for us at the border. With any luck, the regular border guards will only have been told to look out for a peasant girl and a man in SS uniform. How did you get across, Frankie?”
“My papers say I’m a Hungarian waitress working at a gasthaus near the border in Austria. I was just coming on a visit to my family.”
“Okay. So now you’re going back to work. And no reason why a couple of agricultural-engineer customers that you ran into shouldn’t walk you back.”
The Saint paused and considered the immediate future thoughtfully. “Well,” he said finally, “I think this is going to be a case of brains over brawn. Come on, let’s see if we can talk our way through.”
“I think you’d better let me do the talking,” said Frankie. “After all, I speak Hungarian as my second language.”
“And I speak it as my eighth,” laughed the Saint, “but I’m not going to talk Hungarian. You just wait and see!”
Frankie looked doubtful and worried. Leopold looked doubtful and annoyed. So far the Saint had come through with flying colours, but the young man was always looking for a possible slip-up on the part of the man he both admired and resented. But if the Saint had any misgivings they could only have been perceived by a lie detector.
Arm in arm with Frankie, he marched unhesitatingly up to the border post. It was manned by two men in uniform who regarded them with little interest. One of them held out his hand with a supercilious expression for the Saint’s papers. He did not even bother to ask for them. But the other gave Frankie a slight smile of recognition.
“Was your family well,” he inquired in Hungarian.
“Very well, thank you,” she replied in the same language.
“It was not a long visit.”
“It was only to settle some family business. And my mother was glad I could go back with these friends.”
The barrier was raised, and they were waved on. It was as easy as that.
The Austrian barrier was about twenty yards ahead.
“Keep your fingers crossed, and your eyes too,” said the Saint. “We’re halfway home.”
The Austrian station was manned by two guards who watched their approach across no-man’s-land through a window in their small official building. As Frankie and her companions reached it, one guard stepped out to meet them, holding a rifle in the crook of his arm.
“Ihre Urkunde, bitte.”
Each of them produced the documents that Annellatt had provided.
The guard took them with one hand, glanced at them, and then transferred them to two fingers of the hand which cradled his rifle, so that he could take a notebook from his pocket and consult it.
A very small semblance of an ominous smile came to his thin lips.
“These papers are forgeries,” he stated flatly. “We have been waiting for someone to present them.”
V
How maternity became Frankie, and there were puns and punishment
1
If ever there was a moment when the Saint experienced in all its classic cosmicality the emotion of a man who has literally had a rug pulled from under him, this was it. Perhaps his heart did not actually stop beating, but it would have had to be a mindless mechanical device not to have faltered. Somehow he maintained a superhuman control of his expression, but for a moment he could do nothing about the leaden, numbness which seemed to spread from somewhere around his midriff to threaten his mental resilience.
Of all the possible hazards and difficulties that he had vaguely anticipated and had been in a general way prepared to cope with, this was the last and least considered in his elastic contingency plans.
“That is impossible,” he protested automatically. “There must be some mistake.”
Even as he said it, he knew how hollow his bluster must sound, and how unavailing it must be.
“There is no mistake,” said the guard coldly, and made the slightest motion of his head at the control building.