The owner of the Golden Crescent had no sooner seen the Saint and his flaxen-haired passenger away from the back door and returned to his kitchen than the prisoner in the cellar began to shout and thump on the subterranean floor. The noise was well-muffled and could not have been heard in the street, but the ears of Abdul Haroon were made hypersensitive by anxiety. He had never been an optimistic man, and now it seemed to him that any revelation of his unwilling involvements with either Kalki or Simon Templar would lead to certain and total ruin.
He listened in anguish for a few minutes to Shortwave’s uproar and then hurried out of the kitchen to the door at the top of the stairs. He rapped sharply on it.
“Stop it down there! Stop it!”
“Lemme out of here!” bawled Shortwave. “They’re gonna kill me!”
Haroon opened the door, and his reply was in the style of a schoolmaster addressing an unruly pupil.
“You are very bad!” he said. “You must be quiet. You have heard what was said here, and I can do nothing.”
The bumping below stopped. With his ear to the door, Haroon could hear the captive’s heavy breathing, and then his moderated vicious voice, which unpleasantly resembled the hiss of a snake.
“Listen, you fat double-crosser, you let me out of here before they come to get me or I’ll kill you!”
“You would try to kill me if I untied you,” Haroon wisely replied. “You are crazy. Nobody is coming to get you because nobody knows you are here.”
Shortwave’s voice betrayed nerves that were as taut as banjo strings.
“They do know!” he exploded. “They know!” He paused for a second. “I know a few things too,” he said in a new sly tone. “I’ve got enough on you to get you in twice as much trouble with the cops as Templar ever could. You hear me? If I do get out of here later I’ll see they send you up for good — unless I get my hands on you first.”
Haroon’s knees felt weaker the more he reflected on the realism of Shortwave’s threats. A little while before, as he was sincerely wishing the Saint well, he had felt that the burden which Kalki and Fowler had loaded on to his shoulders during the past months was at last really going to be lifted. Now all the hopelessness returned, and he began to see himself once more as a great soft brown rat trapped by cats in a maze.
“But if you help me I’ll just let you alone and get out of here,” Shortwave promised. “Come on, what’s it to you?”
“The Saint would get me,” Haroon mumbled.
“If he don’t, Kalki will.”
“No. Templar will take care of it all and come back.” The words alone gave the fat man courage. “You just wait. You will see.”
He left the cellar door and went back to the kitchen.
“Templar won’t be back!” Shortwave screamed after him. “If you don’t d-do something about me quick, it’s gonna be too late, and Kalki’s gonna get you!”
Haroon tried unsuccessfully to shut the words from his mind and turned to the one solace he had found in life of late: food. On the counter by the refrigerator he began assembling the ingredients for a culinary orgy whose very volume would be guaranteed to swamp his whole being and drive every worry from his heart.
But in the background Shortwave kept up his thumping and screaming at a more frenzied pitch than ever. Haroon’s hands were shaking. He almost dropped a bowl of eggs. At some fancied sound behind him his heart stopped thudding for a full two seconds. He sank his unsteady fingers into a cold baked chicken, tore it in half, and imagined the similar fate that awaited him if Kalki or Fowler should find that he was keeping one of their group a prisoner — and that he had collaborated in other ways to help their enemies.
Shortwave’s screeching suddenly became unbearable. Haroon snatched up just such a large iron frying pan as the Saint had suggested to him for maintaining peace in his own house and ran heavily back to the cellar door. He started down the stairs, clutching the banister, with the big skillet raised on high in his free hand. The instant Shortwave saw it he cringed and grew as quiet as a laryngitic giraffe. Haroon brandished the pan.
“Be quiet or I will kill you myself,” he threatened hoarsely.
Shortwave, still bound hand and foot, could only cower and attempt to wring out every last drop of his meagre dramatic ability in what he considered a final attempt to save himself. He had genuinely thought he had tuned in on Kalki and Fowler’s plans to kill him for betraying them. There were other moments when his cacophonous mentality reminded him of the logic of the Saint’s argument that Fowler could not possibly know what had happened over the curry bowl in the dining room of the Golden Crescent. The facts and fantasies were so jumbled in his steel-reinforced head by now that they rang like loose bolts in a metal bucket.
“Would you let this guy Templar cut my throat?” he asked Haroon almost tearfully.
“No!” said Haroon, and meant it.
Shortwave knew he meant it. In his nightmare imagination he saw Kalki flexing his giant hands and coming after him. The only hope was to make amends.
“Look, Abdul,” Shortwave argued. “If they show up here we’ve both had it. We gotta let them know I didn’t mean it. Now go call up Kalki in case he d-d-didn’t leave yet and tell him the Saint got loose last night and he’s on his way after Fowler and I said to warn them. You got that? We get off the hook that way, see? See how easy it is? Come on, Abdul — do me a favour and just call him, right now. Okay?”
Haroon had lowered the frying pan and was listening. The multiplying changes of pace, from menace to supplication, were starting to unhinge the precarious stability of whatever powers of discrimination he might once have possessed.
“Why should I call, you fool? They know nothing now.”
Shortwave decided to humour him.
“Okay, Abdul, so they don’t know. All the more reason to call. Let ’em know how we’re both trying to help out. Just don’t tell Kalki anything, okay? I mean about what either one of us done. Just tell him I said to tell him the Saint knows.”
Abdul Haroon was tempted. His fear of the police was becoming distinctly remote from his reburgeoning fear of Kalki. But he said nothing. He was considering.
Shortwave got panicky again at the possibility of refusal.
“You got to,” he begged. “Think what they’ll do to us. Remember Ali? I mean, man, it won’t be nice! I’d rather do anything — I’d rather go to jail than let Kalki get his hands on me. What can the Saint do? Nothing! He’s just bluffing you. Let me loose, okay?”
“No.”
But Haroon was quivering. His chubby legs had all the sturdiness of wet rice paper.
“Then if you won’t let me loose call up Kalki, but quick! Tell him before it’s too late!”
The fat man’s resolution wilted. He began nodding assent, did not bother to close the cellar door, and trotted away across the dining room, and out on to the pavement. He was running for the telephone in his flat, one of his hands fluttering like a bird and the other still clutching his frying pan. He did not even realise that he was carrying the pan until he started feverishly to dial Kalki’s number.
A moment later the voice of the wrestler answered.
“Good, good!” Abdul Haroon began. “I was afraid you might have gone. This is Haroon. I–I must tell you that the Saint knows about you and Fowler.”
“The Saint is dead,” Kalki said tolerantly.
“No, he is not!” Haroon blurted. “He was here just half an hour ago! With Shortwave!”
Kalki roared like a typhoon. Interspersed in the general detonation were appropriate questions. Haroon melted on to his sofa like warm jelly, fairly blubbering into the mouthpiece.
“It was not my fault! Shortwave told them where Fowler would be tonight. They left him here tied up. I could do nothing but hurry to ring you. You see, I have warned you! I have done all I could!”